The phone buzzed. The man in charge picked it up, spoke briefly. He hung up. “Winkler won’t confirm anything. He just died without ever being in any shape to answer questions.”
“I had to shoot quickly.”
“Don’t apologize. I guess he had a certain cleverness. He had sense enough not to bring in regular diving equipment.”
“And clever enough,” Paul said, “to ruin Valerie’s life.”
“I don’t think you want to hear what Walto had to say about that, Captain. It’s pretty clinical. Pain as a persuasive. Once they convinced him at the hospital that he’ll have to be carried to his execution, he was willing to answer any question. He’s got no more interest in his own future, protection, or welfare. By the way, I suggest you get your lawyer to start an action to get that property sale set aside on the grounds of duress. We’ll be glad to cooperate. Title should revert to you without too much difficulty.”
On the way down the Keys, Linda reverted again to the somber silence that had worried him since those moments of violence on the boat. The last of the day was nearly gone as they approached Cove’s End. With a bitter impulse, he braked the car hard and turned into the road that led down to the abandoned fishing camp, the battered sea wall.
She sat up. “What are you doing?”
“I’d like to sit on the wall for a little while. Do you mind?”
“Well, for a little while.”
He parked, and they went down, and as before, he helped her up onto the wall. The sea looked deep purple, and the first faint stars were out. He gave her a cigarette, lit hers and his own.
“Linda, what is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the best way to say it is: Where have you gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something happened to you.”
“I know that. Maybe all this is something I didn’t want in my life. All I wanted was the good things, the warm and safe things. Not murder, and the way blood looks, and knowing that there’s some dark, violent thing in me that can come out and use my arm and hand and a knife.”
“A good thing you did.”
“I thought it was over, Paul. We were done, you and I. They were going to finish us. So all I wanted to do was hurt him. What kind of a person does that make me?”
“Normal, I’d say.”
“Normal?”
“It’s something you learn. Some people never learn it. A form of self-knowledge. We’ve got a veneer. A neon, TV, asphalt, cocktail-lounge veneer. But scratch any of us hard enough and deep enough, and out comes the jungle.”
“You seemed to topple off that hatch cover and have the gun in your hand and fire in the same instant.”
“I couldn’t do it again that fast unless there was just as much hate and fear and anger. The jungle quickness. In you, in me, when the chips are down.”
She turned her head sharply and said with surprising bitterness, “I don’t want to think. Why can’t you let me alone?”
Before he could answer, she dropped off the wall, landed lightly, walked slowly up the beach. He was angry until he remembered another time. When he had walked away. He followed her slowly. She stopped. When he spoke her name, she started violently, yet as he took her shoulders, turned her around gently, he had the feeling that she had stopped there to wait for him. And there was a fire at sea where the moon would soon appear.
