I said, “What’s going on?”
“Michael’s having them install a remote so you can control the shutters from the outside. It’ll work like a garage door remote.”
“Cool.”
“They wanted to put bars on your kitchen window, but Michael doesn’t like the idea. He wants you to be able to get out quickly in case of a fire.”
My mind veered crazily away from a scene of a firebomb lobbed through my kitchen window.
Paco said, “What’s wrong?”
I tilted my head on his chest, and he patted my shoulder.
“Dixie?”
“Stevie Ferrelli has been murdered. I found her body.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to get through this, you and me and Michael. It’ll be okay, Dixie.”
“I know. I’m just a little shaken up.”
Paco steered me to the deck and lowered me to a cushioned chaise in the shade of a giant oak. He said, “I think they’re about through upstairs. I’ll get rid of them, and then we can all talk.”
Suddenly overcome with great weariness, I closed my eyes. In seconds, I was asleep, the sound of men’s voices and seagulls’ squawks and birdsong and the sighing surf all forming a blessed current to sweep me away from everything that had happened.
When I woke up, I lay with my eyes closed for a while and took stock of myself. So far as I could tell, I was sane. I wasn’t running amok or anything, and I wasn’t in a fetal position with my thumb in my mouth. Considering that three years ago I’d been more or less in a fugue state, and considering that in the last three days I’d found two murdered people, been chased by a killer truck, and had poisonous snakes put in my apartment, I thought my present sanity was a huge step forward.
Except for squawking gulls and the swishing slap of the surf, everything was quiet. I opened my eyes partway and looked up at my porch. Nobody was there, and my storm shutters were firmly closed. With my eyes partially open like this, I could see heat waves rising from the baked ground between my apartment and the deck. I turned my head and opened my eyes all the way to look around the shaded deck. Michael was floating in the pool beyond the deck, laid out like a walrus on an inflated raft. His eyes were closed, but every now and then he flapped his hands in the water, so I knew he was awake.
I got up and jumped feet first into the pool, sinking like a rock into the cool water. I frog-kicked under Michael’s raft and popped my streaming head up next to his. We looked somberly at one another for a moment, assessing each other as only two people who’ve been together for a lifetime can.
I said, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself. You okay?”
“I think I am, actually.”
“Your apartment is clean as an operating room. The crime-scene cleanup guys went over every inch: drains, cracks, pipes, the works. Paco and I took everything out of your drawers and cupboards. We put in new shelf liners. We went through your closet and washed everything washable. You need new underwear.”
I said, “Thanks, hon.” But I knew him too well. There was something he wasn’t telling me.
He tried to sit up on the raft and turned the thing over, churning up a tidal wave getting himself erect.
Cautiously, as if he were afraid he might push me over the edge, he said, “About that floor safe—”
“I know what you’re going to say. I’ll get a safe-deposit box.”
“Did you have a newspaper clipping in the safe?”
The water seemed suddenly cold, and I shivered. “Just Gram’s ring and my will.”
“You remember the—ah, incident at the funeral? With that freak reporter? I don’t know if you ever saw it, but the picture of your reaction made some newspapers.”
“Oh, my God.”
Terror curled in my stomach as I realized what Michael was talking about. It had happened as I left Todd and Christy’s funeral. A mob had been outside, some to show sympathy, some to wave placards demanding the death penalty for the old man responsible for the accident, some to get a story. Still stunned by the enormity of loss, I’d let Michael and Paco push a path through the throng. A TV reporter had suddenly jumped in front of me and shoved a microphone in my face.
With a vapid red smile, she chirped, “What’s it like to lose your husband and child at the same time?”
That’s when I’d lost it. That’s when all the rage I’d been holding came out. Pure and simple, I’d wanted to kill the stupid bitch. I let out a howl of pure hatred and lunged for her throat. Every camera present caught the moment. The scene played on TV news shows all over the country. Every newspaper in Florida had it on their front page. It even made The New York Times. I hadn’t kept a copy, but the photograph was indelibly printed in my memory: my face contorted in primitive fury, my hands reaching for the frightened woman’s jugular, while Michael and Paco grabbed for my arms, their faces registering shock and pain and compassion.
Somebody had known enough about me to leave a photograph that would recall an excruciatingly painful moment in my life.
Michael was watching me closely, probably remembering the moment outside the funeral with as much pain as it caused me.
He said, “Paco called Guidry, and he came and got it.”
“Guidry was here?”
“Yeah. We didn’t want to wake you.”
Well, that was just too fucking great. Impeccable Guidry had been there while I slept. While I’d been laid out all scraped and sweaty and cat-hairy, he’d stood in his sophisticated linen and watched me drool while I slept. And he had the picture showing me going bonkers in front of the entire world.
I pulled myself through the water and climbed out of the pool. “You say my shower is clean?”
“Spotless. They poured stuff down the drain that would kill anything. The new remote for your storm door is on the table.”
I squished across the deck, water pouring off my clothes and sloshing out of my Keds, and got the remote. As I crossed to the stairs to my apartment, I could feel Michael watching me from the pool, no doubt wondering if I was going to crack up in the shower.
20
The remote control sent my storm shutters folding into a slim line that disappeared in the cornice above the French doors. I wondered why I’d never had them set up so I could close them from the outside before. Inside, my apartment was so clean and shiny it amazed the eyes. It also had the peculiar ozone odor left by crime-scene cleanup.
I went into my fumigated and sterilized bathroom and took a long shower, then padded wearily down the hall wrapped in a towel. In my office-closet, where my shorts and Ts had all been washed, dried, folded, and stacked on the shelves with military precision, the message light was blinking on the answering machine.
One call was from clients who had planned to return tomorrow but had changed their plans and were staying over the weekend. I took their number to call and confirm. One was a hard-voiced man wanting to know my rates and grinching that I didn’t have a Web site with my rates posted. I didn’t take his number. I don’t want a Web site. I don’t even want a computer. I can’t type worth shit, and I’m so technologically retarded that I forget to charge my cell phone. I sure as heck wouldn’t be able to handle a Web site.
The third was Birdlegs Stephenson. “Dixie, I asked around about that truck and I have a name for you to check out. But you didn’t hear it from me, okay? Two different people said look into a guy named Gabe Marks. Has a little place in the country near the Myakka River. From what they said, he’s one mean sumbitch, not somebody you should tangle with by yourself. Like I said, if you talk to the cops about him, you didn’t get his name from me.”
I sat with my pen poised over my notepad staring at the machine. I’d never heard of anybody named Gabe Marks. Whoever he was, Gabe Marks had no reason to want me dead. Unless somebody had hired him to kill me.