A Sudden Silence by Eve Bunting

toddlers and parents, jumping the sprawled bodies in the park. Jeez! Was I crazy? I'd be lucky if they didn't impound Dad's car and take Chloe to the slammer. Nobody parks on red in Laguna Beach.
    The narrow path up the bluff was bright with geraniums and purple ice plant. I ran till my heart hurt. The parking lot was filled with cars now. I stopped suddenly when I saw him, leaning against the rear brick wall, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing the black nylon jacket, black pants, and white tennis shoes. On duty in the parking lot. No wonder he hadn't been at the surfing contest! He'd been working.
    He spotted me when I was about fifty feet away and heading toward him. Immediately he dropped the cigarette and began running.
    "Hold it right there," I yelled, but he cut around me and galloped down the path with big, hungry strides. He ran diagonally across the grass.
    The volleyball game had stopped. I sensed the sudden interest as I raced after him, still yelling. A girl was making giant soap bubbles with some kind of wire loop thing. I knocked over her bucket of detergent, saw for a second her startled, angry face.
    He was in the soft sand now, weaving between the sunbathers, bumbling through a little kid's sand castle, heading on down to where the tall apartment buildings front the beach. I wasn't gaining on him. The wooden steps here are private and most of them have a gate. He'd spotted an open one and he was racing up the steps, three at a time. He'd be out on the sidewalk then, in the crowds. He could dodge into one of the shops and be gone and I'd have lost him again. Unless he went back to the Windmill. He wouldn't, though; he'd be gone. A dog came barking excitedly at my heels, slowing me more. I was at the bottom step; he was halfway up.
    If the woman hadn't decided at that second to come out of her apartment and start down to soak up a few rays I'd have lost him for sure.
    She was a big woman in a yellow sundress and she carried a beach chair and a fringed umbrella. She blocked the steps all the way across and when he tried to push past her there wasn't an inch to spare unless she chose to turn sideways for him. She didn't. "What's going on here?" she demanded. "These steps are private. Are you a tenant?"
    The guy tried again to shove her aside, but it was like pushing past Mount Rushmore. He turned, looked at me, at the few steps that divided us, then leaped over the stair railing into the bank of ice plant and sand below. I heard the thud as he landed one half second before I jumped on top of him. We lay there, the wind knocked out of both of us. It felt as if the struggle had been knocked out of him, too.
    Above us the woman hung over the wooden bar. "I've a good mind to go back to my apartment and call the police. We don't need this kind of hooliganism."
    "It's all right," I called. "Nothing to worry about."
    I got the guy's arm twisted behind him as he lay on his stomach. He didn't resist.
    She came down the rest of the steps, muttering as she struggled through the soft sand. I moved then so I was straddling his back, still keeping my tight grip on his forearm. No way was I going to lose him now.
    "It's not a bad idea to call the police," I said, "unless you'd rather talk to me."
    "I'll talk to you," he said. "And you can let go of me. I'm not going anyplace. Sooner or later I knew you were going to find me."
    I still held him, though, as he staggered up, wriggling his arm and shoulder, stomping his right foot on the sand. There was something beaten about him. But I kept alert anyway.
    "You killed my brother, didn't you?" Unbelievable how even and reasonable my voice was. I could have been talking about the weather.
    "I don't know." His breath smelled foul. Old, stale beer and tobacco.
    "You don't
know?
" I dragged him across to the bottorn step and pushed him down. "Sit! How can you not
know?"
    "I just can't remember, man. I might have. I don't know."
    "You wouldn't forget a thing like that! God, we're talking