I was surprised by the revelation. “You scuba dive?”
After a brief warning look, the eyes closed again. “They have this beer, Belikin, that comes in these really heavy, recyclable bottles—I did my part.” Her head cocked to one side. “There was a little place about a quarter mile down the beach in San Pedro, The Sandbar—best pizza south of South Street . . . I’d go down there in the evenings and eat and drink. Sometimes I’d have mai tais, but mostly I drank the beer.” Her eyes opened, and she reached down, gathering our plates and stacking them at the end of the table where Haji could retrieve them. “I’d get toasted, and then Brittney and David, the owners, would drive me back up to the hotel in a golf cart and carry me up the steps.”
“Sounds pretty nice.”
“Yeah, I only had one rough spot.”
I reached out and enclosed one of her hands, but her eyes remained closed. “What was that?”
“Well, like I said, they’d drive me home most nights, but they warned me that I needed to be careful walking home that late because there were a few bad characters around.”
I squeezed the hand. “What happened?”
“Oh, they had a wedding at the restaurant, so I stumbled up the beach on my own; some guy got fresh and I told him to buzz off, but he got physical . . .” The eyes opened again, and she pulled her hand away as she slumped back into the bench seat. “I told you how thick those beer bottles were, didn’t I?” She shrugged. “Turns out he was the police chief’s nephew.”
I nodded and then waited a permissible amount of time before bringing the subject up. “I’ll ask again, how are you feeling?”
“I figure I’m just a hair’s width away from having syndrome attached to the end of my name.” Her eyes came back to me, and she cocked her head. “Now, huh?”
“Now what?”
“We’re going to have this conversation now?”
I shrugged, thinking about the actions that had led us to the now—a very bad man, a knife, revenge, the loss of a child she may or may not know that I was aware of, her inability to ever have children, and a tsunami load of water under the bridge. “Why not?”
Her voice took on an authoritarian tone as it had with Lucian. “Question.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me Tomás Bidarte is dead as Kelsey’s nuts.”
The very bad man.
I reached in the inside pocket of my sheepskin coat and tossed a long horn-handled switchblade knife that I’d been carrying for months with a clatter onto the table between the plates and us.
The knife.
She looked at it for a moment and then picked it up, sliding back the safety and pushing the button, the eight-inch blade slapping open with a deadly snik. “Tell me he’s dead.”
Revenge.
I said nothing.
She put a fingertip at the point, something she was wont to do in any circumstance. “If this is when we’re going to have this conversation, you’re going to have to do more in holding up your end.”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone as in to the hereafter and buried by you and Henry in a shallow grave for a coyote buffet and then carried away in tiny, antlike bites, or simply gone?”
“Simply gone.”
She stared at me, incredulous. “Henry Standing Bear couldn’t find him?”
“No.”
She smiled and shook her head. “There’s no way I missed that son of a bitch with that many rounds.”
“No.”
She looked back out the window and set her jaw. “Maybe he is a ghost.” She took a deep breath, and the eyes returned to mine. “So, where do you think he is?”
“Far, far from here.” I waited a moment before adding, “Isn’t that where you’d be?”
She laughed a laugh with no joy in it. “I’d like one more shot at him.”
“Personally, I hope that never happens.”
She sat forward and placed her hands between her knees, her voice suddenly low. “The doc says I can’t have kids, not that I was looking to have any anyway.” She stared at the leftovers on Lucian’s plate. “I’ve got four brothers, so it’s not like the Moretti name is at stake . . .” Her face came up, and her eyes were washed with salt water. “I just would have liked to have a say in the thing, you know?”
I slid out and moved around the table to sit beside her. “I know.”
She wiped her eyes and laughed. “So much for hearth and home, huh?”
I gently placed an arm over her shoulders and pulled her into me where she pushed the lapel of my jacket away and stuffed her nose into my chest, and we stayed like that for a long time, her muffled voice finally rising up to my ears. “You smell good.”
“That’s because I smell like you.”
She laughed.
“You could always adopt.”
She laughed again, thank God, and then snorted and hiccupped as she tried to stop, even going so far as to playfully pound my chest with a fist.
“Heck, seems like you adopted me years ago.”
She pulled me in closer, and we stayed like that, but nothing more was said about the very bad man, the knife, revenge, her inability to ever have children, the tsunami load of water under the bridge—or the losing of a child I was now sure she thought I knew nothing about.
—
She nudged the blue plastic bag at her feet as I pulled from the parking lot. “Tell me again why we went to Kmart?”
I glanced down at the bundle I’d put on the floor in front of her seat as she held out a wrist for Dog to lick. “I needed a chess set to distract Lucian so that he stops driving me crazy, and I can’t count on you because he might take you up on one of your offers.”
“To coin one of your phrases, a dime’s worth of me and a Fresca would kill him.” She slid the files from the center console and began perusing them.
I cocked my head to one side. “He’d die happy.”
She propped her boots up onto my dash, and I felt a surge in my heart at having her there. “So, what are we working on?”
I told her about Gerald Holman, the missing women, and about the sheriff of Campbell County not being particularly informed about the situation, resulting in a predictable summation.
“Fuck me.” She thought about it. “What’s the Clod Case replacement investigator’s name?”
“Did you just call it Clod Case?”
She brushed my question away with a flap of the Dog wrist. “A Philadelphiaism.”
“Inspector Richard Harvey.”
“What’s he like?”
I lowered my voice. “A dick.”
She seemed preoccupied by the files. “A what?”
“A dick.”
Her eyes widened in mock horror as she turned to look at me. “Oh my, Sheriff . . . Did you just call someone a dick?” She placed her chin in her palm. “A dick.” She marveled, pretending to adjust a pair of make-believe glasses. “A dick by your reserved standards means he is some kind of colossal prick of proportions unlike we’ve ever encountered.”
I shrugged and drove, trying to keep from smiling.
She glanced through the windshield and postulated in a pseudoscientific voice like some film you watched on a projector in high school. “Perhaps at one time he was a normal cock, but through contact with radioactive material in the deserts of New Mexico—”
“One of those blue-line guys.”
Her hands flew up and out, measuring. “He grew to colossal magnitudes of dickdom!”
Dog barked, and I sighed. “I just think that he’s more concerned with making sure that Holman’s name goes unsullied than finding out why the man might’ve killed himself.”
“Dickdom of a scale noticeable even to the demure sheriff of Absaroka County.”
I mumbled, “Oh, good grief.” But she ignored me.
“Dickzilla!” She shook her head, grinning as her attention, thankfully, returned to the files. “I gotta meet Dickzilla.”