The cigarette boat drove onto the shore, and the engine died, and that’s when the Russians, at arms and poised to engage the reinforcements on board, looked at one another and realized that there were no reinforcements aboard, that this go-fast boat was a forty-two-foot explosive device, a ticking bomb, remote-controlled, most likely, maybe by that chopper circling at sea, and so did we realize it, and we scrambled through the sea grapes toward the beach road. The blast threw us to the ground. My ears were blocked and ringing. We got back up and made it out of the sea grapes and ran south down the beach road away from the disaster. Bay said, “Run and don’t ever stop.” The sea grapes and beach were to our left and in a few blocks some houses and condos on our right. No traffic on this one-lane, one-way road so early in the morning. We were gasping for air. My knees hurt, my feet hurt, my lungs burned. We passed below a man standing on his third-floor balcony holding a cup of coffee. He waved as we passed. He pointed back toward the beach. A woman out walking her Yorkie wished us a happy Easter, and a man heading for the beach with his metal detector and his headphones asked us where the fire was. Finally we were spent. Patience said she couldn’t go on. We stopped. She vomited. Bay fell to the ground and lay on his back. I saw a redheaded vulture drift in the wind, letting the breeze carry him over the sea grapes to the beach, picking up speed as he went. My old exhilarated friend, I thought.
Bay said, “I think we’re okay.”
We heard sirens in the distance.
I said, “I need a drink.”
“We should call a cab,” Patience said.
The sirens were louder now. Just then an ESO squad car turned onto the beach road and headed toward us. Bay said, “Oh, fuck!” We decided we couldn’t outrun the cops, so we just pretended to be three early marchers in the Easter parade. The officer drove by. We smiled at each other. But then, a few blocks away, she hit the brakes. Bay said, “We need to get out of here.”
Patience said she couldn’t possibly. But she could. The squad car began to back up. We walked to the corner of Aviles Street, turned, and took off. Bay tried the door of several cars. One, an older-model Lincoln Town Car, was open. We hopped in. Patience and I got down in the backseat, Bay in the front. We heard the squad car squeal its way around the corner and speed by us.
I sat up and peeked out the back window and saw the lady with the Yorkie waving, running, yelling something about her car. She seemed unwilling to come any closer than ten feet. Bay opened the passenger door and told her to hop in. She did. The little Yorkie was barking furiously. “Can you shut him up?” Bay said.
“This is my car,” she said.
Bay asked her politely for the keys. I recognized her as the woman I’d often seen walking her dog in a baby stroller on the Boardwalk.
Patience leaned forward, touched the woman’s shoulder, and said, “It’s not what it looks like, hon.”
The woman turned to look us over and said, “You all are in trouble, aren’t you?”
I said, “I’m not going to lie to you …”
“Charlotte,” she said. She held up the Yorkie. “And this is Henry.”
“Charlotte,” I said, “yes, we’re all in trouble.”
She said, “I am, too?”
Bay held up his tarnished Eden Police Department badge for her inspection. She handed him the keys. He drove the one block to Ocean Avenue and turned south. The police had closed the Cypress Avenue Bridge.
Charlotte soothed the very agitated Henry. “Oh, dear,” she said. She kissed his black nose and said, “This is about Mr. Kurlansky, isn’t it?”
“Go on,” Bay said.
“He was not the man he said he was.” Charlotte leaned her head against the window and shut her eyes. She tapped her forehead with a fist. “It happened so long ago,” she said.
Bay turned right on Dixie Boulevard and drove west. Henry sat up on Charlotte’s lap and whined. He sensed her agitation and may have felt distraught at being unable to relieve it.
I said, “He hurt you, didn’t he?”
She nodded and took a deep breath.
“He punched you.”
“How did you know?”
Patience handed Charlotte a tissue. Henry whimpered and licked Charlotte’s hand. Bay caught my eye in the rearview, raised his brow, shook his head like, What’s going on?
“Always in the stomach,” I said.
“Sometimes in the back. And he would pinch me until I bruised. Here,” she said, and held her breasts.
It takes a toll, Carlos had said, dealing with depravity day after day.
“I thought I was safe.” Charlotte sniffled. “I thought I was far enough away.”
I thought about Cerise’s recitation of John of the Cross. O delightful wound … in killing you changed death to life. There is life after a death, I wanted to tell Charlotte. Here. In Melancholy.
“It was dark on that cliff,” she said. “This was in Mendocino. A moonless night. We were near the edge. The surf was pounding below us. He misstepped and fell. One minute he was squeezing my shoulders, shaking me, threatening me, and the next he was gone.” Charlotte put her face in her hands. Patience rubbed Charlotte’s neck.
I said, “We believe you. It’s okay. You’re not in trouble. Bay’s no deputy.”
Bay flourished the badge and made it disappear.
I said, “Accidents happen. And sometimes they happen to people who deserve them.”
“If you talk about it,” Patience said, “maybe it will help.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I can’t.”
I said, “How do you feel right now, Charlotte?”
“Like I’m going to explode.”
I said, “Try to remember what you’ve been trying so hard to forget.”
Charlotte turned and looked me in the eye. “He would accuse me of being with other men. He would touch me to see if I was wet.”
I now felt certain that she had been waiting—waiting for too long, even if she didn’t know it—to tell someone other than Henry what had happened to her, someone who would listen and not judge. And who better than strangers? Mr. Kurlansky might be gone, but Charlotte was not yet free of him.
“Sometimes, when he choked me, I just wished he’d get it over with.” She patted Henry’s head. “Most of the time I felt numb and stupid.”
Patience said, “My man Wylie here is a therapist.”
Charlotte loosened her seat belt and set her back against the door so she could see us all. She said, “You don’t look like a Wylie.”
“Why don’t you begin with the day you met Mr. Kurlansky,” I said.
“It starts before that. Way before. First you need to understand the foulness I was coming from.” Charlotte shook her head and dried her eyes. “I thought he was my savior.” She took a restorative breath. She cleared her throat. And as Bay drove on deep into the Everglades, and with Henry curled in her lap, Charlotte stared ahead at her past, just a foot or two in front of her face, and told us the unexpurgated story, and in the telling she was carried away, and gradually, as she spoke, and as we sighed, nodded, exclaimed, and lamented, the heaviness in her heart was lifted and she heard, as if for the first time, the story of her triumph over the misery and squalor, the treachery and cruelty to which she had been subjected and which she had survived.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Florida International University, and the Florida International University Faculty Senate for their kind and generous support of my work. And thanks to my colleagues who make my teaching so pleasurable and my life so rich: Lynne Barrett, James W. Hall, Campbell McGrath, Denise Duhamel, Debra Dean, Julie Wade, Maddie Blais, and Les Standiford, who gave me the opportunity to first write about Wylie Melville in Miami Noir. Thanks to Jamie Sutton who has steadfastly supported and promoted the Creative Writing Program here. Thanks to David Beaty, an early reader of the novel, and to Mitchell Kaplan who makes Miami a safe and exhilarating place for writers and who
se bookstore, Books & Books, is every local writer’s second home. As always, my greatest love and thanks to my wife, Cindy Chinelly, who makes everything possible. To our friends Bruce Harvey, Liz Kortlander, Jeremy Rowan, and Kimberly Harrison and to our invigorating weekly moveable feast. Thanks to Debra Monroe, who keeps reminding me how important this writing business really is. Thanks to another Texan, Joe Young, out there in Cheese, who helps me with his esoteric research. Without my friend and agent Richard McDonough, who has been a tireless champion from the start, I would have had no writing career. Thanks, Dick. To Dave Cole, sculptor, poet, and copy editor, who once again saved me from potential lexical embarrassment. Thanks to Jill Bialosky for whipping an unruly manuscript into shape. She always does. Thanks to Don Bullens for a lifetime of friendship, encouragement, and stories. Thanks to my friend and writing workshop co-conspirator Kim Bradley. Special thanks to my young friends who don’t yet read my books, but do let me try to entertain them: Phoebe Barzo, Charlie DeMarchi, and Theodore David Harrison-Rowan. Thanks to my parents, Lefty and Doris, my sisters Cyndi and Paula, my brother Mark. And to Tristan, of course. This book is dedicated to the memory of Steve Street, Jeffrey Knapp, and Jack Roberts, friends, writers, and provocateurs, who left us too soon.
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by John Dufresne
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunfresne, John
No regrets, Coyote / John Dunfresne.— First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-07053-8 (hardcover)
1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.U325.N6 2013
813’.54—dc23
2013013903
ISBN 978-0-393-07053-8
ISBN 978-0-393-24069-6 (e-book)
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ALSO BY JOHN DUFRESNE
Requiem, Mass.
Johnny Too Bad
Deep in the Shade of Paradise
Love Warps the Mind a Little
Louisiana Power & Light
The Way That Water Enters Stone
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Also by John Dufresne
No Regrets, Coyote Page 30