Cooler Than Blood

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by Robert Lane


  CHAPTER 43

  “Any bleeding today?” Kathleen asked.

  “I can swim. I can run. I swim and I run. And nothing leaks out of me.”

  “I see. The only lasting effect is that Dr. Seuss has taken over your speech pattern.”

  We sat on the screen porch. The stiff sea breeze that had kicked up during the night—a common summer pattern that’s the result of air heating up over land—showed little sign of relenting. Whitecaps bristled the surface of the bay. Usually by midafternoon, the anger would dissipate. I leaned over and gave Kathleen a quick kiss. I started to pull away, changed my mind, cupped her head in my hand, and kissed her again. She wore a low-cut beige top with a thin gold chain around her neck. There wasn’t an inch of that neck that I wasn’t intimate with. My rehabilitation had served as an excellent excuse to spend long hours in bed with her. I should let Jenny wield a hatchet at me more often.

  “You’re fine, right?” she asked.

  “Not if you keep bugging me.”

  Jenny’s rescue was the first litmus test, and we passed. Kathleen wasn’t upset that I’d launched myself into a fireball for a person I didn’t know. However, one can never be certain of such things, for no matter how you conduct your life, or how well you know your counterparty, there’s always a song you take to the grave, one no one ever hears.

  “When are they due?” she asked.

  “Hold that thought for a second.” I started for my phone but changed direction and ended up at the Magnavox. I put on Bennett’s 1965 theme album, Songs for the Jet Set. Music and machine reunited. I went to the kitchen, popped a bottle of Taittinger, and took it to the porch along with two champagne flutes. A sleek red sailboat with a tan Bimini top skimmed the choppy waters no more than a hundred feet off the end of my dock. Its spinnaker billowed toward the blue sky, pulling the boat behind it. Two couples sat in the cockpit, and a woman laughed. It was a fine sound. Behind me, Tony Bennett declared what it would be like if he ruled the world.

  “Oh, my,” Kathleen, said as I handed her a bubbling glass. “We’re starting early.”

  “And going late.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to avoid alcohol when you’re on your meds?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Pretty sure you are. They all say the same thing—‘Take with eight ounces of water and avoid alcohol.’”

  “No kidding.” I took a healthy sip of champagne. “I thought it was, ‘Drink eight ounces of alcohol with each pill. Three pills a day, and…’ Well, you can do the math.”

  “I can see how you would misinterpret that.” She took a short sip, as if testing the waters, then reconsidered and went for more. “Susan and Jenny?”

  “Around six,” I said. “You have time to set a personal best, sleep it off, and do it again. A real doubleheader.”

  “Um…I think I’ll pass. Aren’t Garrett and Morgan due about the same time?”

  “Little earlier. Not exactly sure.”

  “Say that again.”

  “What?”

  “The part where you’re not exactly sure.”

  “Must be those pills.”

  Hadley III jumped through the cat door I’d installed for her. She had a gecko in her mouth and dropped it at the base of my chair. It wasn’t dead, although I wished it was.

  “I actually like the little guys,” Kathleen said, looking at the butchered lizard, whose left side was doing considerably better than its right. “Too bad she hunts and kills them all the time.”

  “She can’t help it. It’s in her genes.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” She smiled, held my gaze, and then took a relaxed sip without breaking eye contact. I wondered which song of hers I would never know. I picked up the creature, opened the door, and tossed it into my untrimmed hibiscus bush.

  I fixed a light breakfast. Lack of exercise was having a disastrous effect on my goal of eating fatty foods. It was a dangerous thing to experience soft mornings, as I was starting to appreciate their appeal as well as question why I insisted on ringing death’s doorbell every morning. I wanted—needed—to resume my morning workouts. If one is to stay committed, it’s best not to question one’s routines, for only obsession, which allows no compromising incisions, forges true commitment.

  After we ate, Kathleen drove off in her newly waxed Lexus. She planned to return before Garrett and Morgan arrived. They were kitesurfing at the tip of East Beach at Fort De Soto Park. They’d taken off early, thrilled with the unwavering breeze. I reclaimed my seat, took a sip of the Taittinger, and recalled the phone conversation I had had yesterday with Susan.

  Jenny had gained admission to several state universities. She had applied months ago. Susan planned to pick up the considerable first year out-of-state tab not covered by scholarships that Jenny had been awarded. Susan informed me that she’d been stashing away college money for her ever since they’d first met years ago. According to Susan, Jenny showed no sign of PTSD. To the contrary, Susan indicated, she tackled each day with a vengeance, as if she were making up for lost time. Like the rejuvenation you feel when a fierce cold is finally gone. She started each day with a barefoot stroll on the beach. That was followed with long hours at Susan’s bars, although Susan said she had cut her own hours to spend more time with Jenny. I wondered whether Susan had been working Herculean hours to fill a hole in her life. Once, while strolling the beach, they’d found themselves where Billy Ray Colman had attacked Jenny.

  “What was her reaction?” I had asked Susan during our phone conversation.

  “None,” she replied. “But when we started to leave, she wandered over to some mangrove that surrounded the area. She pointed toward a thicket of them and said, ‘That’s where he came from.’”

  “Who came from?” I had asked. “Was someone else there that night?” I had first considered that possibility when sitting in Susan’s house and hearing McGlashan describe the scene: “Mulched him over three square yards.” Jenny had reinforced that possibility during her interview with Rutledge when she claimed she lost track of her thoughts.

  “No…not really,” Susan cut off my thoughts.

  “But you just—”

  She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Maybe she can tell you.”

  I decided not to press her, but I was convinced that someone else had shown up or something else had happened on the beach that night. I remembered Jenny’s voice on the tape as we’d listened in Susan’s office: “Then I saw…and then.” Rutledge: “Saw what?” Jenny: “Oh…nothing. I just lost track of where we were.” I didn’t buy it then and wasn’t paying for it now, especially after Susan’s remarks. What did Jenny see? I made a mental note to ask her if the opportunity arose. I made another note to ensure that the opportunity did arise.

  I killed some time puttering around in the garage. The neon martini sign from the Winking Lizard looked nice on the wall. In the corner, by the water heater, stood a four-foot-tall wood carving of a hawk perched on a log. It had arrived by UPS yesterday from the man outside of Greenwood. I wasn’t sure where the flying carnivore eventually would end up, but for now he was fine.

  I oiled my rods then headed to the end of the dock to wash down the interior of Impulse and give her a light wax. I’d neglected her for too long. Her rear drain was cluttered with seeds left from bird droppings. The osprey had taken advantage of my preoccupation and settled in permanently on my hardtop. His life was about to change big time. I cranked up my boat’s stereo. It felt good to work, to get some rhythm back in my life, but I was soon out of time. I had a meeting to attend. I showered and put on a silk short-sleeve shirt. It had a stain on it, so I changed into another one that had a smaller stain.

  I drove to the pink hotel.

  CHAPTER 44

  The pink Moorish hotel was built in the 1920s by an Irishman from Virginia, named after a character in a play from a French dramatist that was turned into an English opera, and is set in a city named for its Russian counterpart.

  I still hav
e no idea what all that means.

  I hadn’t been spending my usual time there. It was like coming home to a crowded place where you know virtually no one, yet that anonymity renders it so comfortable, so familiar, so reassuring.

  Sheri had a beer and a glass of water on the bar before I settled into a high bar chair that faced the Gulf. I tossed my ball cap onto the white chair next to me to reserve it for my guest. I took the envelope out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the bar.

  Sheri inquired, “Walk into a telephone pole?”

  “Banged my head pretty good,” I replied, and drained half the beer. A headband that PC had given me partially covered a white gauze pad.

  “But I should see the pole, right?”

  “Yeah…” I came up for air. “I taught it a real lesson.”

  She moved on, correctly accessing my nonconfessional mood. The pools on both sides of me clattered with the staccato voices of children that mixed incongruously with the music floating out of hidden speakers. I thought of the young girl in Fort Myers Beach who had barked before diving for her bone. I don’t think much about little people. They rarely enter my circumference. But something about that little girl’s barking, her diving to the bottom. What a little ball of energy. A real spitfire. “Hey, mister. Can you get my bone?”

  I didn’t need that in my head.

  I shifted my gaze to the left. A few seats farther toward the Gulf sat a young girl, maybe ten. Or eight. Or twelve. How do you know? Four years doesn’t mean much in your thirties, but eight to twelve is a fifty percent jump. Her father ordered a beer and a drink “with an umbrella in it” for his daughter. She was absorbed in passionately coloring a placemat and never raised her head. What’s with the father-daughter sightings? Usually it’s the flesh parade. Are they always here, or am I just seeing them for the first time? I glanced toward a man who was berating the woman next to him—I assumed she was his wife—with an endless barrage of sports talk as he kept his eyes riveted to the TV screen. She sat erect and fanned herself with the plastic bar menu. She wore a stylish cover-up over her swimsuit. Her eyes wandered, but not far. Her drink was half gone, and her free hand rested on the bar. I felt like telling weeble brain that his wife didn’t give two shits about what was happening on the screen.

  Joseph Dangelo picked up my cap and placed it on the counter. “I like your office,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was my office.” I kept my eyes on the weeble. Who thinks a woman wants to come to a beach bar on the Gulf of Mexico and watch TV? I turned my attention to Dangelo. “I said it was where I conduct my business.” He wore a soft, white, short-sleeve shirt and deep-beige slacks. Neither had a wrinkle nor, as far as I could tell, a stain. “Buy you a drink?”

  “I’ll take what you’re having.”

  I caught Sheri’s eye and held up two fingers. I needed a second round. I turned back to Dangelo. “How’s business, Joe?”

  “I doubled my money on my last deal.”

  “You withheld vital information from me.”

  He looked away then came back to me. He started slow, like he was processing each word. “Wallace—that’s how we knew him—Rutledge might have engaged in…creative means of paying off his debt. Certainly you understand that the nature of such things is not to be discussed. I divulged with you, at our last meeting at the restaurant, what I could. I’m sure by now you’ve reached the same conclusion.”

  My instinct was to contend his statement, but he was correct, so I let it go. “I hope the doubling of your profit, coupled with the convenient exit of a potentially embarrassing associate, solidified your leadership position.”

  He nodded. “I’m quite the hero, although as I told you, I’m rarely referenced as a leader. I think of myself more as a facilitator.”

  “I understand Chuck Duke’s buddy has a slight limp.”

  I was glad he was a hero in his own house; I wanted Joseph Dangelo to wield untouchable power. Sheri placed a beer in front of each of us. Dangelo touched it curiously. Guess he wasn’t one to drink from plastic. “No grudges,” he told me. “I assure you, if anything, we are in your debt. We owe you.”

  “No one owes anyone anything. That would imply that we’ll see each other again, and that’s not going to happen.”

  He took a sip of his beer, paused, and took another one. He turned back to me. “As I said, we may have overreacted regarding what a certain woman—a deceased woman—might have known.” He let that hang, but I didn’t grab it, so he continued. “We are more than even, Jacob. You had a chance to take things in a different direction that night at Rutledge’s sister’s house. You—and I certainly don’t want to come off even close to condescending here—chose wisely. You and Mr. Duke performed flawlessly.”

  “Nor do I desire to condescend, but had I not been in such a benevolent mood, you’d be missing two hundred eighty-four grand and placing a want ad for two new associates.”

  Dangelo tilted his head away from me and shook it side to side in disapproval, as if he’d finally given up. His hand flipped off his beer as if it were an involuntary act then settled back around it. “Do you always slip so…effortlessly into violence? Is there no middle ground for you?”

  I thought of Hadley III gifting dead chameleons to me. She was a cat. She had no choice. No excuses.

  “This is my middle ground.” I said it because it was an easy thing to say, and as a general rule, I tackle the big issues tomorrow. I cut a look to my right and saw a little girl wrapped in a white towel. As she walked, it swept the paver bricks behind her like a royal robe. Her father trailed her, holding sand toys in his hand. Bright red and yellow. What did they do today? Give a discount to father-daughter combos?

  “Any particular reason you wanted to see me?” Dangelo asked. His eyes dropped down to the envelope I’d placed on the bar then back to me.

  Inside the envelope were pictures of Theresa Ann Howell, his daughter. My Excalibur. The original plan was to trade Dangelo’s daughter for Jenny. It didn’t work that way. No surprise. I’ve never known an original plan that went the distance. I wonder why we even bother. Then Dangelo had hinted—he’d never expressively stated as much, but my foolish reaction that night in his condo was all he needed—that he knew Kathleen’s prior identity. Plan B: if anything happened to Kathleen, he’d never see the young woman in the picture again. A simple plan. A clean plan. An everybody-acts-in-his-best-interest plan.

  The classics never go out of style.

  But I couldn’t find any reason Dangelo, or his organization, should feel threatened by Kathleen, and more important, I found no evidence that they seriously believed she was a threat. Or had been a threat. It was a fabrication, and it was over. Both sides knew it. Dangelo had told me as much when we’d last met at the restaurant. Fight no more forever. But I’d rather have blackmail over a man like Dangelo than his word.

  I placed my hand on the envelope.

  “I asked you a question, Jacob.”

  Something else had been gnawing inside me. I realized my zealousness for saving Jenny had been fueled by more than my desire to help Susan, protect Kathleen, and rescue a girl I didn’t know—as if all that were not enough. A week of pills and booze had stripped me of several layers and found the hard wood underneath.

  I’d done it for a man I never knew. Whose gravesite I’d visited on a hot summer day in Ohio, before I’d camped out and the temperature and the sun had fallen in harmony. Before the bugs ate me, the birds woke me, and the water froze me. A man whose grave held the same insignia I’d worn for five years. A man in my foxhole. At his gravesite, I’d made a promise to a man that I would represent him. I would stand in for him. I would fight his most important battle. When I was airborne and about to crash the barn door with my feet, I wanted to save Larry Spencer’s daughter.

  How does a man feel about his daughter? I haven’t a clue. I don’t know if I ever will. I hope I did right.

  “Jacob?”

  “Hey, mister. Can you get my bone?”
She wore a yellow bathing suit with pink straps. Her face was wet. Drops of water beaded on her skin like rain on a freshly waxed car hood. A pencil-dot mole was on her right cheek, as if God had placed an inspection tag on her when she’d rolled off the assembly line. Approved by God. It don’t get any better than that, baby. What does a man do to protect that? What kind of beast threatens that?

  Kathleen’s voice now in my head. “What kind of man would that be—a man who holds another man’s daughter as a hostage?”

  “Mr. Travis?”

  I’d put the questions off for too long, pretending they were in a different language, one I didn’t know. But now they cloaked me, and I needed to shake them off like a dog throwing off water.

  By protecting Kathleen, would I become someone, something, she could never love? Did I need to sacrifice my love to save her life? No. No, that’s not it. Not my love for her, but her love for me. Does it work like that? Can you turn your heart, or someone else’s, off? Let me know how that works out.

  Think.

  I was at a crossroads, yet my mind was dormant. I needed it to fire up and to bring forth with clarity those answers that I sought. I didn’t want the heat from my blood to control my thoughts. I sought to be calm. Be cool. Cooler than blood.

  I picked up the envelope from the bar and placed it in my shirt pocket. I looked at Dangelo and found his eyes waiting for me.

  “Joseph?”

  “Yes?”

  “Care for some hummus and pita bread?”

  “You’re not going to share that envelope with me?”

  “No.”

  “But you have an envelope.”

  “I do.”

  “May I ask?”

  “Monthly bar bill.”

  Joseph Dangelo’s eyes drifted to my shirt pocket then came back to me. “Okay,” he said in a nonchalant voice. “Let us break some bread.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Kathleen, Susan, and Jenny—in that order—sat at the end of my dock.

  Kathleen and Susan. What was I thinking? Maybe you’re not supposed to wash pain-killers down with booze.

 

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