Debris Line (Gibson Vaughn)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Gibson ran on, winding his way through the narrow streets of Old Town. Past shops and stalls that sold all the same trinkets at all the same prices. The approaching dawn warmed the rooftops. Hating to miss the sunrise, he coaxed himself into a sprint. His lungs burned while the quitting part of his brain offered compelling excuses for walking the rest of the way. He did his best to tune out everything but his feet, focusing instead on picking them up and laying them down, as his drill instructor on Parris Island had commanded in the South Carolina heat.

  Gibson rounded a bend onto a cobblestone side street. Built in a time before automobiles, it was no wider than an alley, and a row of cars parked tight against a tall brick wall took up nearly half the roadway. Animal masks decorated with plastic jewels and gaudy feathers littered the cobblestones. As if a Mardi Gras parade had passed this way and spontaneously decided to reveal its true face. More likely, one of the nightclubs had thrown a theme night. The street sparkled, and the masks crunched beneath Gibson’s feet. He glanced down to avoid stepping on too many of them.

  Maybe that was why he didn’t see the car lurch out of the parking spot. Gibson heard it and looked up, expecting the car to slow, but instead it leapt forward crazily. It accelerated toward him, hugging the row of cars on one side and the closed shops on the other. With nowhere else to go, Gibson flung himself onto the hood of a parked car. He felt an impact, felt himself spin in the air, bounce off the hood of the car, clatter off the brick wall and back onto the hood. He sat up on the car in a daze. His foot throbbed. He was missing a shoe. His sock was bloody, which didn’t bode well for his ankle. He’d skinned his elbow, and his forehead hurt. Otherwise, he couldn’t complain.

  He slid off the car, testing to see if his ankle could take the weight. It hurt, but nothing seemed broken. Had the driver and passenger been wearing Mardi Gras masks too? He’d only caught a glimpse through the windshield, but he remembered an elephant and a rhinoceros, like two themed henchmen working for a zookeeper supervillain. Gibson sighed. After everything he had been through, it would be fitting somehow if he got himself killed by some raver wacked-out on ecstasy. His missing shoe wasn’t anywhere in sight. He knelt to look under the parked cars.

  “Senhor?” a woman called to him. She had his shoe in one hand, a broom in the other. One of the street cleaners. She looked him up and down with a shake of her head. He crossed over to her.

  “Crazy tourists,” she said.

  Gibson couldn’t tell if she meant him or the driver.

  “Obrigada,” he said.

  The woman smiled. He’d already spoken more Portuguese than most tourists to the Algarve bothered to learn. She seemed to appreciate the effort and handed him the shoe.

  “Obrigad-o, senhor. Only the ladies say obrigada. You don’t look like a lady to me.”

  “Obrigado,” Gibson said sheepishly. He’d learned one word of Portuguese since he’d been here and had been saying it wrong all this time. That was what going soft looked like. Not bothering to learn enough of the local language to hold even a basic conversation. What if the car had hit him? What if the doctor didn’t speak English? Of course, if he were taken to a regular hospital and they ran his information, he’d have bigger problems than a language barrier. It would be like shooting off a flare for anyone hunting them to see.

  It reinforced how tenuous their position here was. They weren’t on vacation and needed to stop acting like it. They’d gotten away with it up until now, but they were one slipup—one car accident—from being blown. Jenn might not want to hear it, but too bad. She was going to listen. Not thinking about the future didn’t stop the future from thinking about you.

  It was time.

  He winced as he pulled on his shoe, then limped down the hill toward the ocean. After his morning runs, he liked to finish with push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups while the sun came up. He wasn’t that hurt, he told himself again. But after a hundred yards, he downgraded his optimism. His ankle could use a day off. And if he was being honest, his shoulder felt a little hinky too. He soldiered on anyway. He could still watch the sunrise.

  The small fitness park was deserted at this hour. So, for the most part, was the street that overlooked Fisherman’s Beach. In the old days, before being displaced by tourists, this was where the boats had brought in the haul. Down below, Gibson saw signs of last night’s storm. The debris line cut a jagged path across the beach, the high-water mark of the storm surge.

  His father had spent his childhood summers on the Outer Banks and had always loved the ocean. Sometimes he would take Gibson on long walks along the beach near Pamsrest, Virginia. Duke had liked beachcombing the debris line after storms to see what had been tossed ashore. Said it helped to clear his head. Mostly all they found were shells, seaweed, and broken branches. But every so often they’d stumble across a treasure. Gibson remembered finding a Peruvian license plate half buried in the sand. He’d spent hours studying his father’s atlas, imagining its improbable journey around the southern tip of South America to the ledge above his bedroom door. Duke told him that nothing was ever lost forever. That it was the nature of lost things to be found. Just not always when and not always by whom you hoped or expected.

  Gibson powered on his phone and looked at the most recent photograph of Ellie. Nicole, his ex-wife, had pleaded with him to stay away. One of Gibson’s enemies had burned her house to the ground to send him a message, so as much as Gibson hated it, he accepted the necessity. For now. It helped that Nicole e-mailed him pictures of their daughter now and again. Ellie had apparently given up on soccer and was now a green belt in aikido. The idea of Ellie standing still long enough to learn martial arts brought a huge smile to Gibson’s face. He was working up the nerve to ask Nicole for a video. More than a little afraid to push his luck. He scrolled through her pictures from the past few months. His little girl wasn’t so little anymore and looked more and more like her mother. Lucky girl.

  His phone vibrated. He’d missed a call from Fernando Alves, the only son of Baltasar Alves. What could he possibly want at this hour? Gibson didn’t have any interest in finding out. He wanted a quiet breakfast. But when he looked up at the row of restaurants overlooking the beach, he saw Fernando sitting alone on a bench waiting for him. Not that Fernando paid him any mind. Instead, he studied the ocean and sipped a coffee. His legs, stretched out before him, were crossed at the ankle. He sat with the languid confidence of a man aware he was wearing a tuxedo and you weren’t. His shirt’s top two buttons were undone and might well have begun that way. He was the kind of man who would go to the trouble of putting on a tuxedo and draping an untied bowtie around his neck simply because he liked the look. For Fernando, it was always the end of the evening.

  Behind Fernando rose the Hotel Mariana, which he operated on behalf of his father. The hotel had been named for Fernando’s mother, who died when he was a boy. It was also his home. He lived in an enormous suite overlooking the Atlantic. Fernando liked to joke that it was his life’s ambition to live on room service. As far as Gibson could tell, Fernando had already achieved it.

  “What on earth happened to you?” Fernando inquired. Baltasar had sent him away to England for school, first to Eton and then to Cambridge, and his English carried an aristocratic inflection.

  “I got hit by a car.”

  Fernando looked him up and down. “Are you sure? You don’t look like someone who was hit by a car.”

  Nonchalance wasn’t recognized as a world religion, but if it were, Fernando would have been its messiah. He never offered any hint about whether he was serious or joking. It made for awkward pauses that Fernando seemed to relish. Gibson was glad he didn’t work for him. But they’d gotten to know each other over the last six months, and Gibson could appreciate Fernando’s dry sense of humor and the sly smile that played on his face when he thought no one was watching.

  “My foot,” Gibson said by way of explanation.

  Fernando stared at Gibson’s bloody sock, one eyebrow arched slightly.
“Was it a very small car?”

  “I don’t remember, but a rhinoceros was driving.”

  Fernando chewed on the implications of a rhinoceros being involved in an early-morning accident. “Did it have insurance?”

  “It didn’t stop.”

  “They are very territorial animals. Perhaps you startled it.” Fernando held out a bottle of water beaded with perspiration. “You look thirsty.”

  Gibson drank it gratefully.

  “What are you doing up so early?”

  “Late, not early,” Fernando corrected. “My father is looking for you. You weren’t at home or answering your phone. I told him I knew where to find you.”

  “It was off. What does he want?” Gibson asked, wary of what their Portuguese benefactor might want at this hour. He’d had an audience with Baltasar Alves when he’d first arrived, but this was the first time Alves had ever wanted to see him. Instinctively, Gibson didn’t like it. He didn’t like being beholden or coming when called like a dog. It felt like the penny was about to drop.

  Fernando shrugged. “As if he would tell me.”

  While Fernando was in England, Baltasar had decided that his only son would play no part in his criminal concerns. Fernando had told Gibson the story once between dirty martinis, his words gin slurred and eyes like unpaved roads.

  He could see the devil in me, Fernando had said with a wink.

  The arrangement had worked for a time, but eventually Fernando graduated and returned home, a well-educated, aimless delinquent. He’d kicked around the Algarve for months, getting into trouble and making a nuisance of himself. One night, he’d found himself in a nightclub owned by his father.

  A real toilet, Fernando had called it.

  Over the course of his career, Baltasar had amassed an array of legitimate businesses and real estate through which to launder his money. The crime boss, however, had no interest in overseeing businesses he considered little more than fronts. As a consequence, they’d been poorly run and left to rot. Fernando had called his father from the nightclub and offered to run it for him. Out of desperation, Baltasar had agreed, hoping it would keep his son out of trouble. The next day, Fernando had fired the entire staff. Within six months, the club had turned its first profit. Now, seven years later, Fernando oversaw his father’s entire real-estate portfolio. He had knitted it together into a thriving operation, completely segregated from Baltasar’s other interests.

  “Come, I’ll drive you.” Fernando stood and buttoned one button of his tuxedo jacket.

  “I can call a cab.”

  “It’s better if I take you. My car’s just there.”

  Ordinarily Fernando would have been happy to accept Gibson’s out. “Errand boy” didn’t suit his disposition. That he hadn’t taken it made Gibson nervous all over again, but he played it off. “Well, you’re the best-dressed cabbie in the Algarve.”

  “Am I?” Fernando asked, looking down at himself with interest. “How do cabbies dress?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sun woke Jenn long before she would have liked. They’d forgotten to close the curtains last night as they’d stumbled into bed. The giant remote on Sebastião’s side of the bed controlled everything in the room, including the curtains, but it might as well have been in Indiana. She slapped feebly at the bedding in Sebastião’s general direction and asked him to shut the curtains. No response. Lifting her head, Jenn confirmed that she was talking to herself. She’d never slept in a bed large enough to lose track of who was in it. It had to be almost twice as large as a king. Custom built like everything else in this house, it had a Marie Antoinette level of decadence. Jenn had lived in apartments smaller than this behemoth.

  It was dangerously comfortable, though. She dragged a pillow over her face and tried to fall back to sleep. Nothing doing. Her head ached. Her mouth was brittle and dry. And despite the air-conditioning, it seemed about a hundred degrees in the bedroom. She kicked back the covers and lay there like a sponge left to die on a rock in the hot sun. She ran her tongue over her front teeth and considered the glass of flat champagne on her bedside table. How bad could it be? Best not to find out. Besides, she really needed to pee.

  Jenn rolled over, and rolled over again, until she found the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the side. Sitting up seemed an important beachhead, and she sat there for a full minute contemplating the bathroom door, angry at the sunlight. Last night she understood, but it ticked her off that Sebastião hadn’t shut the curtains when he’d left this morning. Not that it surprised her. That was vintage Sebastião. His needs were a full-time job. Even with two assistants, an agent, a personal trainer, a chef, a maid, a valet, and a platoon of lawyers, he couldn’t be expected to think of anyone but himself. At least it made it impossible to misinterpret the nature of their relationship. That was what appealed to her most about him. Well, that and his body.

  Standing shakily, Jenn stretched until her back cracked like someone forcing open a stubborn dead bolt. She padded naked into the bathroom, flipped down the toilet seat, and sat, staring sleepily at the ornate Portuguese tile between her feet. She had intended to meet Gibson for a run this morning. Actually, she’d been meaning to do that every morning for the last two weeks, but evenings with Sebastião usually took a blowtorch to her good intentions. Not for Sebastião, of course, who had the metabolism of a gazelle. He could party all night and still be up before sunrise, bright-eyed and raring to go. The drawback of sleeping with younger men. One of them anyway.

  She washed her face in one of the bathroom vanity’s three sinks. That had always struck her as profoundly arrogant. Sebastião would only wink and say, “Sometimes you need three.” Smug son of a bitch, but she had no doubt that sometimes he did. Sebastião Coval lived a three-sink kind of life. She bent and drank right from the faucet, which had all the effect of pouring water into sand. She fumbled open a bottle of painkillers and spilled half of them on the counter. She picked out five—it was going to be a five-pill hangover, she could feel it—and swept the rest into the sink. She winked in the mirror.

  “Sometimes you need five,” she told her reflection.

  Jenn scouted the bedroom for her clothes, then remembered she’d left them out by the pool along with her judgment. Sebastião’s bathrobe wasn’t hanging from its usual hook, so she borrowed one of his sports coats and went down the wide marble staircase. The staff wouldn’t arrive until eight, so at least she’d be spared that awkwardness. In the kitchen, she found a note from Sebastião saying he’d driven up to Lisbon for the day. He hadn’t mentioned anything about it last night, but she knew why he’d gone. His team and many of his doctors were there. His right knee had more doctors than a pediatric ward.

  Sebastião was superstitious about discussing his rehabilitation with anyone. As if acknowledging it was a sign of weakness. It had been a gruesome injury—“a horror-show tackle,” the commentator had called it on YouTube—and she’d only watched it once out of morbid curiosity. Knees were not supposed to bend in that direction. Sebastião’s recovery had been slow going, but the doctors estimated he was 90 percent of the way back. He’d been cleared to begin running again. She’d never seen anyone so joyful in her life, or more beautiful. Sebastião was made to run. Scheduled to rejoin the club next month, he was like a child at the prospect. But she also knew that he secretly feared that he would never be the same player again. Sometimes after a few drinks, he would smile ruefully, rub his knee, and say to her affectionately, “Meu bem, I am become an old man.” He was twenty-nine years old. It was those tiny glimpses of humility that helped her not to throttle him when he was in a more Sebastião frame of mind.

  When he did rejoin his team, that would be the end of whatever this was. No doubt Sebastião had a woman tucked away in every corner of Lisbon. Jenn was his flavor of the month. Part of his rehabilitation. That was all right, he was part of hers too. She’d miss him, but it was time. Gibson was right about that much—this wasn’t her world. Jenn looked at a framed
photograph of Sebastião kissing an enormous silver trophy, surrounded by teammates in the throes of celebration. From what she could tell, he had kissed a lot of trophies in his time. The entire house was a shrine to his storied career. Jenn found it all a little over the top, but she also knew that he needed it. Needed to be surrounded by reminders that he was Sebastião Coval and that he would make it back. She envied him his certainty and wished she had a house full of mementoes to help her remember who she had once been.

  On the counter beside the note lay a rose. Before leaving, he’d gone out to the garden and cut her a flower. That was Sebastião to a tee—nailing the romantic gesture, flunking at closing the curtains. At least he’d left her some coffee. She poured herself a cup and topped it off with whiskey. Glad to be alone so she didn’t have to sneak it. Besides, it was only a splash to even her out. The painkillers weren’t making much of an impression on her headache.

  She took her coffee and her rose and went outside, hoping some fresh air would help. Evidence of last night’s festivities lay scattered around the pool like a crime scene. How had two people made such a mess? She started to tidy up the empty bottles of champagne, but her head reeled the first time she knelt, killing any impulse toward housekeeping. The chaise lounges beckoned invitingly. She curled up on one, stared out at the dawn, and sipped her coffee.