“The length of the leash you offered isn’t exactly a selling point, Becky.”
She groaned, the wind yanking the sound toward shore. “I know. God. A fucking leash.”
For a second, she looked confused. It was an expression he hardly could remember seeing on her. But in that moment, Jim saw for the first time — truly saw and understood — that Becky wasn’t young anymore, that she was no longer the girl he had known, the teenager he had lusted after, the young woman he had come to love and almost married. It seemed a wholly intimate finding. She looked like what she was now: a thirty-seven-year-old woman with no husband and no family and the dictates of biology pulsing away inside, a woman whose primary fear in life is that she is smack-dab in the middle of missing it all.
He told her she was beautiful.
Becky studied him, then squinted out to sea. “I know I could have just stuck by you a little more. But Jim, you’re so... so touchy. You never tell me what you want or what you’re feeling. You’re worse than a Sicilian when it comes to holding a grudge.”
“Guilty, with an explanation.”
“Proceed.”
“Unavoidable genetic defects. Plus, I loved you.”
She smiled, settled closer against his side, and sighed. Jim wasn’t sure whether it was exasperation or something akin to contentment. There was always in Becky an elusive center; she was a moving target. She had turned her face into him and he could feel the softness of her cheek in the crook of his neck. The top of Becky’s head always had been one of his favorite smells. Jim partook.
He leaned his head against hers, closed his eyes for a moment, then gazed through windblown strands of her hair to the horizon. The swells rolled under them, not actually water, but the invisible energy that moves the water.
“Why don’t you find us a reef, Weir?”
He hesitated, weighing the consequences. “I think I will.”
The cabin was musty and cool. Becky opened the curtains over the portholes and locked the door behind them. She looked at Jim with solemn brown eyes and sat on the edge of the narrow berth, hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl’s. The coat was still pulled up close around her neck, and her hair was a windblown nest.
“You okay?” she asked. “You’re moving funny and you’re carrying.”
“I ran into some irate police last night,” he said. He told her the story.
She listened intently, as Becky was good at doing. Weir almost could see the legal pad in her mind. She deduced that “Dispatch” was someone’s girlfriend, now guilty of impersonating a police officer. She counseled him to bring suit and, in the near future, cover his ass.
“Can we drop it?” he said. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”
She patted the mattress beside her and Jim sat down. He had scarcely settled when her mouth found his and her hand moved up between his thighs. In this, as in all things, he thought, Becky was a fast starter. Through the layers of coat and silk, hose and underwear, Jim prospected, finally stiffening two homesick fingers onto which Becky slid with expressed ease. “Ooohhh Weir, you’re wicked.” Then he found himself disengaged, guided gently onto his back, looking up at her as she got rid of his pants, unfastened a few key buttons and straps, wriggled away her underwear and climbed on.
“Oh, God, what they did to you.”
“I asked you to drop it.”
“Dropped. Dropped forever.”
In the chilly cabin, with the sea air damp around them, their connection formed a warm center, a literal home fire burning. She rested her hands on his stomach and settled. His back was killing him.
For Weir, it was like being shot from a cannon into yesterday. He could anticipate every movement and every pleasure that branched up through him. He was as dead center as a man can get. To Jim, this act suggested a closure around what had happened since they had fallen out, seemed to set aside those years of numb detente as a containable unit, a stage that they had to go through, something to be endured and learned from, as if being apart had been a simple component of coming back together. Beyond all that was the touch of Becky’s fingers on his scrotum, this upward, milking motion of hers. He looked up and saw her in profile, eyes closed, mouth open, her hair sagging in the heavy salt air, still wrapped in the old coat with the dress unbuttoned to reveal beneath the dark layer of silk her pale, smooth body, exposed like a new pearl, working upon him, breasts heavy and round, sweat glistening low on her neck where an artery throbbed fast with blood beneath the shining skin. When Becky came, she balled her free hand into a fist and clenched it beside her straining face like a singer hitting a high note. Jim joined her, a rigid, quaking arc that left nothing of them touching the mattress but the back of Weir’s head, his outstretched palms, the bottoms of his feet, and Becky’s trembling knees.
A few minutes later, Jim was looking at Becky beside him, bathed in the minor sunlight that came through the porthole and landed upon her face. He had forgotten how intimate, how secret, a boat can be. She spoke without opening her eyes, from what he had thought was a deep and satisfied sleep.
“Are you going to find Dave Smith at Cheverton Sewer and Septic, or am I going to have to get someone else?”
“You know the answer to that.”
A small smile crossed her lips. “Two hundred a day is what I told Emmett and Edith.”
Jim considered. “That’ll break them. I’ll take expenses for a week and see what I come up with. And I’ll tell you right now, I haven’t forgotten Horton’s pictures of Ann, or the fact that his physicals match up, or what he did back in Ohio. I call my own shots.”
“No leashes ever again, Weir.”
“Then do me a favor, keep me out of the headlines you’ll be getting.”
She squeezed his hand. “I’m going to hog those. Starting with a press conference tomorrow morning at ten.”
“That sounds like you.”
“Please be there.”
“Okay.”
“I still love you, Jim. I loved you even when I didn’t. I’ve got an idea where we’re going, and I know where I’d like to end up. My heart’s coming back alive, Jim. I want you to stay with me. Stay here in Newport, with me.”
Jim, in the afterglow of love, imagined himself a knight errant, questing for the grail — in this case a man named Dave Smith. He told himself as Sea Urchin rocked under him that he would pursue the matter with all his might, that somehow, solving the larger problem of Ann would set this and all things right.
Voices outside jolted him out of reverie, off the berth and to the porthole. Becky sidled up against the hull, bringing her dress to her breast.
Through the glass, Jim could see the sportfisher, forty feet of glistening white with a swordfish plank, a cabin with blacked-out windows, and the name Enforcer II written in blue script beneath the bow. There were three men on the deck, one on the plank, another two sitting casually in fighting chairs. He recognized Tillis, Hoch, and Oswitz; the others he knew by face but not by name. Six again, he thought, my lucky number.
“Who are they, Jim?”
“Newport cops.”
“Shit.”
Weir climbed into his pants, pulled on his shirt, pulled Poon’s .45 from its holster. He slapped out the clip, checked the six shells waiting like missies in their silos, then shoved it back and slipped the gun into the front waistband of his pants.
By the time he got above decks, Enforcer II had nosed closer. The man on the swordfish plank popped a cigarette into the water, then drew deeply on a bottle. The three men on the deck were all leaning against the gunwale and looking down at him like tourists spotting a whale. They all had drinks in foam cups. The boat’s exhaust puffed white from the stern, billowing against the water. She was thirty feet close before anyone said anything.