“You’re distant. You don’t want me there. In fact, I’m not sure you want me at all,” she said. “Hang on.”
He heard Kate put down the phone and say something to Kara, then walk back to the phone. “How is she?”
“Fine. She misses you,” she said.
“I miss her too,” Pilate said, “both of you.”
“Really?” she said, her voice breaking. She inhaled and guffawed. “Oh my God! When did I become a damn wimp about a guy?”
“About the same time I fell in love with you,” he said. “Kate, the semester is over in what, two weeks? Can you hold out that long?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to, but I can.”
“Well, I should have the book draft wrapped by then, and we can just play when you get here.”
“John, leave the Jack Lindstrom thing alone, okay?” Her tone became tougher, more like the old Kate.
“Kate, it’s part of the story now, and I have to look into it.”
“Have you?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I checked into it, and as far as I can tell, he’s dead—though the circumstances are a wee bit sketchy.”
“No kidding,” she said. “Even Trevathan thinks it’s odd. A guy he knows who works for the state police said Jack’s résumé doesn’t quite meet the smell test. Apparently, he truly was a bit of a con artist. Nevertheless, he’s dead, and I want you to just keep your nose out of it. Just make it an addendum to the book and let it go. Can you do that? For me?”
Pilate looked at his empty shot glass, then held it up for the waiter, signaling his need of a refill. “Yes, Kate, I can,” he said. “Listen, there’ve been some other things happening here.”
Kate’s voice tightened. “Such as?”
Pilate sighed. He wanted to tell her everything. He loved her and didn’t want anything—the things he did and the things he did not do—to ruin everything. “Samantha showed up down here, for one.”
“Oh, well that’s just freaking great. What the hell did she want?” Kate roared so loudly that Pilate had to hold the phone away from his ear. “How the hell did she know where you are?”
“I-I might have told her when she first called, but I never dreamt she would show up.”
“Why wouldn’t she? She smells money, and you tell her you’re hanging out on the beach.”
He heard her slap her thigh—or perhaps the arm of a chair or a wall.
“That’s great. Is that why you haven’t had any time for me? Been getting to know your ex again?”
“No, Kate. No way. She showed up completely unexpectedly,” he said. “I was just as shocked as anyone would be to see my pregnant ex-wife at my—” Pilate almost physically tried to grab the words from the air and squeeze them back into the phone, but he was interrupted before he had a chance.
“Pregnant? Samantha—your ex-wife, the terror herself—is pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“How could you tell? I mean really—”
“She showed me her belly. She’s giving birth in a couple of weeks.”
“And she flew on a goddamn airplane? What a piece of…” Kate trailed off, clearly entering the China Syndrome phase of anger.
The waiter placed the shot glass of tequila in front of Pilate.
“John, while you’re at it, don’t forget to tell Kate about the cute little bicycle cop you’ve been banging,” Simon said, his face smiling up from the amber liquid in the shot glass. “And that you’re involved in some business that will probably get you well and truly dead this time.”
“Kate, please calm down,” Pilate coaxed. “Yes, she’s an idiot. She showed up here and tried to tell me the baby is mine. It’s all bullshit of course.”
Silence.
“Kate?”
“Is it?”
“Is what?”
“Is the baby yours?” Kate said.
“No!” Pilate exclaimed. “There’s no way in hell. It’s her man Dave’s.”
“So she flew halfway across the country to show you her belly?”
“She’s trying to convince me that it’s mine,” he said, sighing. He fingered the shot glass but refrained from taking a sip.
“You’ll need that drink after the call ends,” Simon said.
“Oh my God!” Kate said. “The nerve. Well, John, you need to be really honest with me here. Is there any—I mean any—possibility that baby is yours?”
Pilate sat in silence; the acoustic strains of Michael Penn’s “No Myth” were all Kate heard over the line.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “Well, the logistics of that aren’t terribly important to me right now, since it obviously happened before we met. The question I have for you is, what are you going to do?”
“I told her to fuck off and that I’ll get a DNA test after it’s born,” he said.
“Well, that’s the first smart thing you’ve said during this whole phone call,” Kate said.
“She sounds like a wife already,” Simon teased.
“So, when were you going to tell me about this?” Kate said.
“When you got here. I assumed by then, I’d know if there was anything to tell. Like I said, she’s pretty far along.”
“So you’re saying that if the baby popped out and the tests revealed it wasn’t yours, you’d just forgo telling me anything at all?” she said, her voice raising yet another octave.
“Well, you make it sound so—”
“Dishonest?” she said.
“I am so sorry, Kate.”
“John, you need to come back here now,” she said. “We need to work things out. We can go back to Key West after semester.”
“Kate, I have a book to—”
“You can write a book anywhere, John—including here,” she said.
“She’s trying to keep you out of trouble,” Simon coached, “and in her control.”
“Kate, I can’t do that,” he said. “I have to finish this here. I can’t do it in Cross.”
“Why? The damn book is about what happened right here in Cross!” she said.
“I just can’t,” he said. “I love you and want to be with you, but I have to take care of this from here.”
“What is so enchanting about Key freaking West?” she said. “Oh my God, John. Are you having some kind of fling or something?”
“No, Kate,” he lied, injecting as much cold reason into his voice as he could, “but I need some space, and if you love me, you’ll respect that for another two weeks.”
Another silence, spoiled only by the guitarist energetically mangling his cover of Jimmy Buffett’s cover of “Weather with You” by Crowded House.
“John?”
“Yes?”
“Fuck you.”
Click.
Pilate heard only the first syllable of a smart-ass remark from Simon before he promptly drowned it with the shot of tequila.
Kate paced in her kitchen. After the call, she went outside on her back porch, uttered a guttural scream, then went back inside.
“Mommy?” Kara asked, standing in the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh nothing, kiddo,” she said. “I stubbed my toe.”
“Oh,” she said. “Can I have some milk?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Chocolate?”
Kate sat with Kara as she finished her chocolate milk.
“I miss Mr. Pilate,” she said.
“Me too.”
“And Grandpa.”
“Well, we will see Mr. Pilate soon,” she said, leaning her head on her hand and putting her elbows on the table. “As for Grandpa, well, we’ll see him in a few more months,” she said. Her father-in-law, Grif Nathaniel, would be in minimum security another year for his part in the incident at Cross College.
Kate put Kara to bed. She went downstairs, sat on the sofa, and covered herself with a blanket; the corn kernel stove blasted aromatic heat into the room.
Angry as she was, she knew Pilate wasn’t going to
go back to Samantha. If he was getting drunk, slipping on banana peels, and falling into strange beds in Key West, she could even live with that—to a degree. He’d been through a lot in the past year, and she was sure that his having a chance to blow off a little steam would make things better between them. His love of mystery and his reckless inability to just leave well enough alone concerned her, but he was who he was, and she had fallen for him just that way. John Pilate was a man consumed by mysteries and harboring secrets. What hurt was that she never expected him to harbor those secrets from her, of all people.
Pilate drank tequila until he was denied service and asked to leave the bar. He refused until a pair of cops appeared. “Ossifers, I’ll go. Don’t want any trouble,” he slurred.
“A little late for that, sir,” said a young officer sporting a crew cut and massive biceps. “Let’s go for a little ride.”
“I’m friends of Kay Righetti,” Pilate said, leaning on the bar wall outside.
“Yeah, you wish,” said the other officer. He was slightly older than Pilate, sporting a bushy mustache and deep tan. “Everybody wants to be on that list—and I do mean everybody, male or female.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Pilate said, indignant.
“It means she’s a hottie, and an old drunken geezer like you wouldn’t get the time of day from her,” the younger cop said, walking Pilate away from the restaurant toward a waiting patrol car. “Hell, I’m gay, and I wouldn’t mind getting to know her better.”
“Geezer? My God, man! When did a guy my age become old?” Pilate said.
“When the cops started being ten years younger than you,” Simon said from the depths of Pilate’s cloudy mind.
“Wait a minute…you’re gay?”
The younger cop rolled his eyes and helped Pilate move toward the patrol car. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No. Look…just call her, will ya? She’s on duty,” Pilate said.
“God, just humor him,” the other officer said, stopping. “Kay’ll probably get a laugh out of it.”
The officer walked a few feet away and called Kay on his cell. Pilate watched the young cop’s face morph from mirth to surprise.
“Okay, sir, uh, you’re to wait here with us,” he said, shaking his head at his partner.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope,” the young officer said. “No accounting for taste, I guess.”
“Just what the hell does that mean?” Pilate said.
“Sir, just shut up,” the officer said, folding his huge biceps and leaning against the patrol car.
“Kate, I’m so sorry,” Pilate said. “Kate, please forgive me.”
Kay looked at Pilate for a hard moment. “Get in bed, and I swear to God, if you puke all over my place, you’re getting a nightstick up your ass.”
“Did you know those cops are gay?”
“You idiot. A ton of the cops in this town are gay,” she said. “John, the freaking chief is gay.”
“You’re right, Kate,” he said, feeling the blackness creeping up behind him. “I am an idiot.”
Pilate fell into her bed, fully clothed in his tacky t-shirt and bathing suit, his flip-flops tossed on the floor far away from one another. The bed spun for a moment and then mercifully disappeared.
Pilate awoke to the smell of coffee brewing. He moved, and boulders fell in his head. “Unnnhhh,” he moaned. He managed to sit up, then dragged himself to the bathroom. Into the toilet he threw up conch chowder, tequila, and other stomach debris that he couldn’t quite identify.
“Feel better?” Kay said, leaning on the doorframe with a mug of coffee in her hand.
Pilate looked from the toilet bowl to her; she wasn’t smiling. He flushed and pulled himself to his feet. He turned on the faucet, leaned down, and filled his mouth with water. He swirled it around his putrid maw and spat it into the sink. “Yes,” he said.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, Kay. That would be great,” he said, splashing his face with water.
“Well, it’s good to hear you get my name right this time,” she said, sipping from her mug. “Why don’t you take a shower, and I’ll see you in the kitchen?” she said.
He nodded, turned on the tap, and dropped his fetid clothes on the floor. After taking what seemed an hour and using the final drops of Kay’s Pantene shampoo on his hair, pits, crotch, and ass, he rinsed, turned off the water, and stood there, dripping.
“John, I think you have some splainin’ to do,” Simon said, doing his best Ricky Ricardo.
“Don’t I always?” he said.
Pilate walked back into the bedroom, with a towel around his waist; he caught sight of himself in Kay’s full-length mirror. It occurred to him that he had dropped at least fifteen pounds since he’d been shot in Cross. He was not quite as skeletal as he had been after his throat surgery all those months ago, but thin.
“You should eat more and avoid throwing up,” Simon said.
“Ya think?” Pilate said. On the bed was a folded Key West Police Department t-shirt and some shorts, both men’s. Pilate slipped into the outfit and padded into the kitchen.
Kay was at the small breakfast nook, eating scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. “Sit,” she ordered.
Pilate complied with law enforcement.
Kay stood and took a plate of eggs and bacon out of the oven. She dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. “Coffee pot’s on the table,” she said over her shoulder. She was dressed in a faded red t-shirt and jogging shorts. “Help yourself.” Kay buttered the toast as Pilate sipped his coffee. She finished and slid the plate in front of him. “Eat.”
“Kay, I’m very sorry—”
“You said that last night,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Just eat something, will you?” she said. “I’m not pissed…well, not much.” She smirked and sipped more coffee.
Pilate ate the bacon, toast, and eggs in less than five minutes while Kay watched. Then he wiped his face with a paper towel like a good little hangover patient, drank more coffee, and looked at her, dreading the looming conversation. “Called you Kate last night, didn’t I?”
Kay nodded, still holding her coffee mug an inch or so from her lips.
“Well, you have very similar names,” he said, trying to smile.
“And you’ve had sex with both of us, so there you go,” Kay said, putting her mug down.
“Do you have any aspirin?”
Kay jerked her head in the general direction. “Cabinet by the fridge.”
Pilate eased out of the nook, took his plate, and put it in the sink. He opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of acetaminophen. He shook three out of the bottle and washed them down with coffee. Then he sat down ever so carefully, as if he were made of glass.
“Kay, I was drunk last night…” he started.
“No shit,” she said. “Parker and Louie didn’t even need a breathalyzer.”
“Well, all I can do is apologize,” he said.
She looked at him as if he had forgotten her birthday. “That’s it?”
“Well, what else can I say?” he said, running a hand through his hair.
“You know, Pantene really makes your hair soft, John,” Simon said.
“You can start by telling me what set you off,” she said. “As far as I can tell, you’re not a drunk, so what were you doing sitting at the Wharf Bar by yourself getting hammered?”
He sighed. “There’s a lot going on for me, Kay.” Pilate looked around the small apartment and noticed the dull gray light invading the windows; it was going to storm.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“Kay, I thought we agreed that you already know about Kate,” he said.
She nodded. “So you had a fight with your Iowa girlfriend?”
“Close enough,” he said.
“You had a fight with her and got drunk? Aren’t you a little old for that after-school special high school puppy love bullshit
?” She poured the last of the coffee into her cup.
“Not exactly,” he said. “See, my ex-wife came into town the other day, and—”
“What?” Her blue eyes grew wide, as if he had lit his Pantene-soft hair on fire.
Pilate looked at his hands, then back at the beautiful young cop drinking coffee across the table. “My ex showed up. I think she’s looking for a handout because she heard about the book deal.”
Kay nodded. “Gold-digger, eh? I get it. Did you tell her where to go and how to get there?”
“I did,” he said. “I told her she had no business flying here in the first place, as far along as she is—”
“Far along? She’s pregnant?” Kay shouted.
“Yes.” The word leaked out of Pilate’s lips like the last bit of air from a punctured tire.
“Yours?” She had flattened both hands on the table, as if willing them not to reach across it and smack him.
“She says so, but I’m dubious,” he said.
“Oh my God!” she said. “All right, here’s the thing, John. You’re a hot guy, a great lay, and for a minute there, you were a lot of fun,” she said. “I didn’t care about the girlfriend or the book stuff.”
“This is what’s known as lowering the boom,” Simon volunteered.
Pilate nodded, clenching his jaw and bracing himself.
“But I don’t need any drama,” she said. “Maybe you should just get your own clothes on and we say adios.” Kay slid out of the nook and gestured toward the bedroom, where his stinking clothes were piled on the floor.
Pilate rose from the nook and walked past her. “Okay. I understand.” He dropped out of Kay’s man clothes and put his back on.
She was at the front door when he came out. “John, it’s nothing personal, but you really embarrassed me last night. I could forgive that if I thought it wouldn’t happen again, but this is too much.”
“Never take a lover whose troubles are worse than your own,” he said.
“What?” she said, hands on her hips and cocking her head. “You make that up?”
“No,” he said, “and actually, according to Algren, it’s ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own’.”
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