Under Cover of Daylight

by James W. Hall

  “She never splashed,” Sarah said. “You think that wasn’t hard for her? You think she could step into that water knowing what had happened there without feeling ...” She gripped the shift lever. “She didn’t splash.”

  “OK, so she didn’t splash. She swam without splashing. But the mood was all wrong. Maybe, and this is just coming to me now, maybe she was starting to worry. Maybe she didn’t want to hear him admit it after all, and so she pretended she was all light and upbeat and smartass so that this guy wouldn’t spill his guts.”

  “Maybe she was,” Sarah said. “Maybe that’s exactly how she felt.”

  Thorn took Sarah’s hand from the shifter and held it lightly in both of his.

  “Now why would she not want to hear the truth? Now why would she have spent so many years searching for this fellow, and then, when she senses the asshole is finally going to expose himself, she backs off, makes jokes, takes her clothes off, and swims? Why would this woman do this?”

  Sarah said, “Maybe she’s confused. Maybe she’s desperate and worried and confused.”

  “Well,” Thorn said, “then I know how she feels.”

  They went into the house, and while Sarah used the bathroom, Thorn located a bottle of wine in Kate’s pantry. Nothing great, a New York grocery wine. He poured some into fragile cognac glasses and took them into the living room.

  Sarah appeared out of the darkness of the back of the house. She came into the living room and sank into the couch opposite Thorn. She picked up the glass of wine, held it aloft.

  She said, “To well-told stories.”

  Thorn said, “To swimming without splashing.”

  They drank, and Thorn smelled the faint sweetening of air from the approaching storm. The light drained away, and neither of them rose to turn on a light. Thorn leaned forward and refilled her glass and his own.

  As the first breezes of the storm stirred through the room, Thorn stood and came across to her. Her lips parted slightly, and she made room for him beside her. He sat. She lowered her eyes and leaned her head against his chest. He held her. She nuzzled in, holding him now. His breath in her hair, breathing in the herbal scent of her shampoo, her own odor, a richer, darker, heavier thing. He lingered there, kissing the part in her hair. She gripped his ribs tightly.

  The wind had begun to keen in the Australian pines. The odor of electricity, the white curtains stirring. Thorn rested his chin on her head and watched the pages of Kate’s files flutter off her desk. Sarah burrowed deeper into their embrace.

  She stood beside his boyhood bed, and Thorn unbuttoned her blouse. He slipped it off of her and let it fall and reached around her to unfasten her bra. The rain was coming now. The wind trembling at the windows, the gusts probably ripping away loose petals, carrying them off into the dark.

  He shaped her breasts, molding his hands around one, then the other. Then brushing them lightly with his open hands, each nipple tickling a palm, tracing with the puckered tips of her nipples the edges of his outspread fingers.

  “You don’t trust me, do you?” Sarah said, her eyes closed.

  Thorn brushed his fingertips down to her upper ribs, the roots of her breasts.

  “I trust you more,” Thorn said, “now that I know your real name.”

  His hands were slipping down her ribs, his thumbs brushing the sides of her breasts, sliding in under them, the hot fold. Down her narrowing waist, thumbs against her hip points. At the brim of her shorts.

  Sarah said, a hoarse whisper, “I’m afraid of what may happen.

  They unsnapped each other’s pants in unison. And Thorn dragged her shorts and panties together down past the swell of her hips, her very full bush. Sarah unzipping him.

  “You’re afraid you’re going to kill me,” Thorn said.

  Sarah stepped to the side and, with her toe, tossed her shorts aside. She gripped the tails of Thorn’s cowboy shirt and in one sudden opening of her arms unsnapped all the pearl buttons. She pulled his jeans down, and Thorn stepped out of them.

  “It’s crossed my mind,” she said.

  She held his shirt by the yoke and slid it off him.

  Thorn said, with sudden laryngitis, “I don’t recommend it.”

  “I’ve fantasized about it,” Sarah said, “for such a long time.”

  She pulled his Jockey shorts down, forcing his erection to ride down with them. It sprang back, and she gripped it.

  “In your story,” she said, “you were wrong about something.” Her hand trickled up and down him there, and she said, “It was always more than truth serum.”

  “Thank God for that.” Thorn, his eyes closing involuntarily, hardly able to speak, said, “If you kill me, we can’t do this anymore.”

  Her eyes were cagey and lustrous when she leaned forward and kissed him hard. Teeth clicking. He sucked her tongue in deeper. Hurting it with the pressure. She drew it back slowly, and he skimmed it with his incisors.

  They both let go at once. Stood apart, breathing. Both of them slick with sweat. Thorn reached out and touched his fingertip to her hardened left nipple, circled it. Let his nail rake across the wrinkled flesh.

  “If you don’t kill me,” Thorn said in a whisper, “is it because you might love me?”

  “The official statute of limitations has run out on you, Thorn,” she said. “But mine, it’s still running.”

  They lay on their sides on the bed. Thorn reaching to her knees, stroking, and sliding his hand back up to her thigh, running a finger around the rim of her vagina, tangling in her long black secret hair. She cocked her left leg up to give him access, and Thorn continued a moist, slow circuit.

  “Did you steal my pistol?”

  She said yes.

  “That’s perfect,” he said. “Perfect.”

  “You asked me,” Sarah said, eyes drowsy, “where the cash was.”

  “The cash?” Thorn’s finger slipped briefly into the dark quick. “Oh, the cash.”

  Sarah patted the mattress behind her, her legs spreading more. “Kate put it inside here.”

  “We’re making love on a million dollars.”

  “Nine hundred thousand.” Sarah’s voice husky, her eyes tight, head digging back into the pillow as Thorn’s fingers found a gentle pressure. “One trip left to go.”

  Thorn tried to hold on as the orgasm took her, gradually at first, then whipping through her, electrocuting her, his finger driving her. Watching her grimace.

  When it was finished, Sarah lay still for a few minutes.

  “This’s the most money I’ve ever made love on,” Thorn said.

  “You’re catching on to it,” she said.

  They lay and listened to the rain lashing the tin roof, a shutter tapping an SOS against the kitchen window. Her hand coating and recoating his erection with sweat.

  She rolled up and swung a leg across him and eased herself down onto him. She raised herself and came down again, settling her stickiness against his, a small twitch, a subtle grind, and then she went back up.

  He took two handfuls of sheet and mattress cover. Crucified. Her breasts shimmying, sweat trails running between them.

  He dragged her down, still inside her. And from the side they cooperated, found a rhythm and stayed with it, nudged it gradually faster. She rolled back on top, and another roll brought him there. Thorn couldn’t tell who was the bandleader here, who wanted to be on top, who on bottom.

  She broke the connection, rolled onto her stomach, and tipped her bottom up at him. Edging forward on his knees, he entered her and held to her hipbones as she wriggled and gasped and shook him. He leaned across her back, finding her breasts again. She reached back around and gripped his buttocks and pulled him tighter against her.

  And as he felt the burn rise inside him, she clamped her vagina tight, a fist, locking the sperm in its corridor. Thorn shook his head, and a high groan, then a howl, broke from his throat. She seized tighter, shaking her head again, the last remnants of her chignon come loose.

  “Le
t go!”

  “I am, I am, I am.”

  Thorn yelled at her now, bruising her with his grip on her waist. “Let go, goddamm it!”

  “I am!”

  She shivered, shook her bottom, and dropped flat onto her stomach, bringing him down hard onto her back, and Thorn released, the sap flooding now. A lancing pain firing through him.

  They woke several times, and each time it was still raining. Thorn mounting her, or Sarah mounting him. Top, rear, side, on the floor, bent across his desk, where he’d solved geometry problems, but nothing like this. The rain coming listlessly all the time. They lay holding each other for the times in between, alternating fetal curls.

  No more conversation. She spoke only in the growls of hunger. And he tried to answer her. As the darkness dwindled and Thorn looked groggily at the drizzling dawn, he knew he was free of something. He felt it as a lightness in his chest. A cavity in there where there had been thickness and weight. A clearing, a lessening of swelling.

  Sarah was awake beside him.

  “It’s still raining.”

  “I can see that,” she said. She sat up, puffed up the pillow at her back.

  He debated it a moment and said, “Who was the guy the other night?”

  “Who are they all?”

  He rolled up on an elbow to see her.

  “Me, too?” he asked. “I’m your daddy, too?”

  She looked for a moment at the rain smearing the window, then turned to him.

  “You more than anyone.”

  He nodded, waited a moment, and asked quietly, “Who was he?”

  “Nobody special.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just your sleeping pill?”

  “We’re each other’s sleeping pill.”

  “Well,” Thorn said. “You weren’t asleep when I came by.”

  “It’s not working anymore,” she said.

  When Thorn was asleep again, his breathing deep and raspy, Sarah inched to the edge of the bed. She set her feet on the wood floor and stood. As she crossed the room, she looked back at Thorn’s motionless sleep.

  She’d left the Colt Python in her straw bag beside the living room couch. She padded out there, the thick rush of rain covering the creaking wood floors. The revolver was wrapped in a black camisole. Sarah unwrapped it and opened the cylinder quietly to make sure it was loaded. She carefully clicked the cylinder closed.

  Thorn was on his stomach, his face mushed into the pillow. Sarah came back into the bedroom, crossed to the bed, and stood beside him. His left arm was draped over the edge of the bed, his fingertips touching the floor.

  She stood beside him, looking down at him silently. She cradled the revolver against her chest. Her face was lax; her breath came slowly.

  “Who’s going to save the wood rats,” Thorn said, his voice muffled in the pillow, “if I’m dead and you’re in jail?” He had one eye barely open as he turned his head to peer back at her. “Anyway, it’s not your style to shoot in the back.”

  “I can wait till you turn over,” Sarah said.

  Thorn was measuring a roll to his left, hit her in the knees, grab the wrist the way you grabbed a rattler behind the head.

  “Was I that bad in bed?” Thorn said, lifting his head for a better look at her. Poised for the grab.

  “You’re not going to try to stop me, are you? Not taking this seriously.”

  “I tried all last night, best I knew how. If that doesn’t work, what can I do?”

  “You could do me before I do you.”

  “No,” Thorn said. “I have a thing about killing people I love.”

  Sarah’s eyes were fogging, her forehead beginning to clench. “You don’t love me,” she said. “You love somebody we cooked up between us.”

  “Close enough,” Thorn said.

  Sarah said, “No. You’re right.” She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. Thorn feeling his muscles unknot. “Wood rats come first. Our debt to Kate.”

  Turning over onto his back, Thorn released a long breath. Sarah brushed a strand of his blond hair off his forehead with her free hand. Her eyes in long focus, staring out the bedroom window, her hand absently combed through his hair.

  25

  SARAH WAS SPRAWLED on a towel, on the front deck of Thorn’s bonefish skiff, across the live-bait wells and the icebox. She was covered up against the sun, in one of his long-sleeved work shirts, Kate’s fishing hat, white jeans, and tennis shoes. Thorn glanced at her off and on, wondering what it signified, her having to hide from the sun like that.

  She’d called in to work that morning, told someone she had to take some emergency annual leave. Back in two weeks. Have Stanley take over her cases. Got some static, gave some back, and hung up.

  Thorn cast a weighted fly out to the reef patch, using one of his ultralight spinning rods, the reel no bigger than the fist of a baby. The fly had just enough weight to carry about twenty feet, maybe twenty-five with the wind at his back. Five feet of water, a mile off Kate’s place. Sunday morning, the sun just easing up out of the Atlantic.

  “How’d you figure it out?” she asked.

  “I have powers,” he said. “I can hear what’s happening inside you.

  “Can you hear this?” She gave him a look.

  “It’s not that simple. I have to be enjoying an intimate connection with the subject for it to work.”

  “When we’re like that, I don’t have any thoughts.”

  Thorn told her about finding the newspaper photograph.

  When he’d finished, she was quiet, watching as Thorn climbed up on the observation stand mounted above his outboard. He cast out the port side, glancing back at her.

  “You think Kate knew who I was?”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “But I doubt it.” He squinted at the shadows a few yards inside his lure, maybe bones, maybe jack, maybe just a school of mullet. “If she’d suspected, she would’ve mentioned it to me.”

  “Not unless she suspected what you’d done,” Sarah said.

  “Maybe she knew everything,” Thorn said, “but didn’t tell anybody anything ’cause she saw how you felt about me, knew you and I would work it out.”

  “If she knew how I felt about you, she was better than clairvoyant. ’Cause I don’t know.”

  Retrieving his bait now, nudging it in front of those shadows, he said, “She’d been suspicious, she would’ve confronted you, something. She didn’t like liars.”

  “I never lied to her. Or you.”

  “Hell of a difference between nothing-but-the-truth and the whole truth.”

  The leading shadow surged forward and hit his lure. The reel whirred. Whistling, Thorn held his tip down, pointing toward where the jack was running, out to sea, darker water.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a jack,” Thorn said as he reeled back some line. It took him about five minutes, but he brought the jack next to the boat. A jack crevalle, went about four pounds.

  “You just release it?” Sarah was standing, watching the dazed fish drifting unhooked beside the boat. Its grogginess passed, and it flicked out of sight.

  “Yeah, torture and release.”

  “Noble sport,” she said. “I can see why you gave it up.”

  “I’m rekindling my enthusiasm. It sure tunes up the reflexes.”

  “Cranking in a fish, that tunes your reflexes? I can’t see it. Maybe if you’re going to eat them.”

  “Why don’t you try a nap, take a load off your puritanism,” Thorn said.

  He cast as far as he could, not a shadow in sight, and began a slow retrieve, jigging it every now and then. He said, “I think our relationship is better off when our feet are waving around in the air. We get in trouble when we try to compare the lengths of our morals.”

  Sarah stood up and came around to the swivel seat. She sat and revolved it so she was looking at Thorn.

  “Do you feel remorse, Thorn? Any remorse?”

  H
e looked at her, back out to the water.

  “I do,” he said. “And I don’t.”

  “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “You know. I got two-pound test line on this. I have to special order the stuff. You use this thread to tie buttons onto shirts. It breaks if you think about it too hard. That’s where the sport is.”

  Sarah said, “Giving them a chance. Making it hard on yourself.”

  “You can’t lift a soggy slice of bread out of the water with this line. I’d say it gives them a damn good chance.”

  “You’d give them more of a chance if you didn’t use anything, just wait out here and see if they’ll jump in the boat.”

  “They give me something, I give them something back.” He finished reeling in the line and cast it immediately. He’d spotted something. A ghost, hovering, moving ahead, hovering again. He twitched the line.

  “What could you give them?”

  “Knowledge,” Thorn said. “I’m improving the gene pool, making them more wary.”

  The bonefish smacked the lure. Thorn lurched, caught himself, watched the line sizzle off the reel. He had wound four hundred yards of that narrow-gauge thread on his reel, four hundred yards of monofilament dragging through the salt water, resisting the powerhouse fish. But that was all that would tire it, because Thorn had taken the drag off. If the line didn’t slow him, it’d be free in a few more yards, roaming for a week or two with a rusting hook in its lip.

  There was only a turn or two of line left on the reel when the run stopped. Thorn won back a few yards of it, delicately cranking. Alert. Holding his breath, that fragile line taut. Even the slightest twitch of the bonefish while he was reeling in would snap it. Thorn tried to send his mind out to the creature, anticipate its reviving energy, its next spurt.

  He cranked, paused. Cranked a few more turns, paused longer. Even a puff of wind, rocking the boat against the tension of the line, would rupture the connection.

  Sarah said, “I wonder if it knows what’s happening, that it’s being sacrificed for the higher good? Satisfying the spiritual needs of the ruling species, all that.”