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166 / DENNIS LEHANE
“Feline?”
“Like a cat’s,” he said and leaned over her.
“You like cats?”
“Love ’em.” He smiled.
“Then you should probably go to a pet store and buy one,”
she said. “Because I get the feeling that’s the only pussy
you’re going to get tonight.” She picked up the case file and
opened it on her lap. “Know what I mean?”
I stepped off the path onto the pool patio as Orange
Speedo took a step back and cocked his head and his hand
tightened around the Corona bottle neck until his knuckles
grew red.
“Hard to come up with a comeback to that one, ain’t it?”
I smiled brightly.
“Hey, partner!” Angie said. “You braved the sun to join
me. I’m touched. And you’re even wearing shorts.”
“Crack the case yet?” I squatted by her chaise.
“Nope. But I’m close. I can feel it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay. You’re right.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
“You know…”
I looked up. It was Orange Speedo and he was shaking in
rage, pointing his finger at Angie.
“You’re still here?” I said.
“You know,” he repeated.
“Yes?” Angie said.
His pectorals pulsed and rippled and he held the beer
bottle up by his shoulder. “If you weren’t a woman, I’d—”
“Be in surgery about now,” I said. “Even as it is, you’re
pushing it.”
SACRED / 167
Angie pushed herself up on the chaise and looked at him.
He breathed heavily through his nostrils and suddenly
spun on his heel and walked back to his buddy. They
whispered to each other, then took turns glaring at us.
“You get the feeling my temperament just isn’t right for
this place?” Angie said.
We drove over to the Crab Shack for lunch. Again.
In three days, it had become our home away from home.
Rita, a waitress in her mid-forties who wore a weathered
black cowboy hat, fishnet stockings under cutoff jeans, and
smoked cheeroots, had become our first pal in the area. Gene,
her boss and the chief cook at the Crab Shack, was fast be-
coming our second. And the egret from the first day—her
name was Sandra, and she was well behaved as long as you
didn’t serve her beer.
We sat out on the dock and watched another late afternoon
sky gradually turn deep orange and smelled the salt off the
marsh and the gas too, unfortunately, and a warm breeze
fingered its way through our hair and shook the bells on the
pilings and threatened to toss our case file folder into the
milky water.
At the other end of the dock, four Canadians with pink
lemonade skin and ugly floral shirts scarfed platters of fried
food and talked loudly about what a dangerous state they’d
chosen in which to park their RV.
“First those drugs on the beach. Eh?” one of them said.
“Now this poor girl.”
The “drugs on the beach” and the “poor girl” had been all
over the local news the last two days.
“Oh, yuh. Oh, yuh,” one of the women in the group
clucked. “We might as well be in Miami, and that is the truth,
yuh.”
168 / DENNIS LEHANE
The morning after we arrived, a few members of a Meth-
odist widows’ support group on vacation from Michigan
were walking the beach in Dunedin when they noticed sev-
eral small plastic bags littering the shoreline. The bags were
small and thick and, as it turned out, filled with heroin. By
noon, several more had washed up on beaches in Clearwater
and St. Petersburg, and unconfirmed reports even placed
some as far north as Homosassa and as far south as Marco
Island. The Coast Guard surmised that a storm that had been
battering Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas may have sunk a
ship carrying the heroin, but as yet they hadn’t been able to
sight the wreckage.
The “poor girl” story had been reported yesterday. An
unidentified woman had been shot to death in a Clearwater
motel room. The murder weapon was believed to have been
a shotgun, the blast fired at point-blank range into the wo-
man’s face, making identification difficult. A police spokes-
man reported that the woman’s body had also been “mutil-
ated” but refused to specify how. The woman’s age was es-
timated at anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and
Clearwater police were trying to identify her through dental
records.
My first thought upon reading about her was, Shit. Desiree.
But after checking into the section of Clearwater where the
body was found and hearing the coded language used on
last night’s six o’clock news, it became apparent that the
victim had probably been a prostitute.
“Sure,” one of the Canadians said, “it’s like the Wild West
down here. That is for sure.”
“You are right there, Bob,” his wife said and dipped her
entire batter-fried grouper finger in a cup of tartar sauce.
SACRED / 169
It was a strange state, I’d been noticing, but in ways it was
growing on me. Well, actually, the Crab Shack was growing
on me. I liked Sandra and Rita and Gene and the two signs
behind the bar that said, “If You Like the Way They Do
Things in New York So Much, Take I-95 North,” and “When
I Get Old I’m Going to Move to Canada and Drive Real
Slow.”
I was wearing a tank top and shorts and my normally
chalk-white skin had reached a happy shade of beige. Angie
wore her black bikini top and a multicolored sarong and her
dark hair was twisted and curled and the chestnut highlights
were turning almost blond.
I’d enjoyed my time in the sun, but these past three days
had been a godsend to her. When she forgot her frustration
over the case, or once we’d reached the end of yet another
fruitless day, she seemed to stretch and blossom and unwind
into the heat, the mangroves, the deep blue sea and salty air.
She stopped wearing shoes unless we were actively on the
chase for Desiree or Jeff Price, drove to the beach at night
to sit on the hood of the car and listen to the waves, even
eschewed the bed in her suite at night for the white rope
hammock on her balcony.
I met her eyes and she gave me a smile that was part sad
knowledge and part intense curiosity.
We sat awhile like that, smiles fading, eyes locked,
searching each other’s faces for answers to questions that
had never been vocalized.
“It’s been Phil,” she said and reached across the table to
take my hand. “It felt like sacrilege for us two to, you know…”
I nodded.
Her sandy foot curled up over mine. “I’m sorry if it’s been
causing you pain.”
170 / DENNIS LEHANE
“Not pain,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Not real pain,” I said. “Aches. Here and there. I’ve been
worried.”
She brought my hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.
“Thought you two were partners, not lovers,” a voice cried.
“That,” Angie said, eyes still closed, “would be Rita.”
And it was. Rita, in her ten-gallon hat, her fishnet stockings
red today, bringing us our plates of crawfish and shrimp and
Dungeness crab. Rita loved that we were detectives. Wanted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]