One of the sucky things about life is that your problems always begin with choices you make. Even worse, you usually know a bad choice when you make it, but you barrel on with it anyway. I had one of those moments when I came to a bricked driveway and saw a small guardhouse set well back from the street. We don’t have many private guardhouses on Siesta Key, so I knew this one was there to preserve the seclusion of somebody who was either very wealthy or very famous or both. I didn’t know the owner of that place. I didn’t know the guard working in the guardhouse, and private guardhouses aren’t known for being refuges for people caught in rainstorms. I knew all that. Nevertheless, I pedaled toward it. With luck, there would be a guard who would let me come inside and wait out the storm. If not, I thought I could at least huddle under its roof overhang until the rain stopped.
Bad choice number one. Or maybe it was number two or three. It’s always hard to trace back to the true start of things.
As I drew closer, I could see the square window in the side of the guardhouse was open. Good. That meant a living person was inside, not a voice box manned from some other location.
The main house was beyond a tall areca palm hedge, and that was good too, because if a kind guard befriended me, his employers wouldn’t be able to see.
With my mouth half open to charm the guard into helping me, I rode under the roof’s overhang and looked through the open window. Then my mouth snapped shut and I jerked my bike to make a U-turn back to the street.
No way was I getting involved in what I saw. No way was I going to have anything to do with it. The last time I’d seen something like that, I had ended up killing somebody before he killed me. Uh-uh, no way. I wasn’t doing it again.
I think I may have actually spoken out loud to the rain. I think I may have actually said, “I don’t care! Somebody else can handle this! Not me!”
The guard was sprawled in his chair with an ugly red welt running up his cheek and a contact bullet hole in his left temple. It could have been a suicide, but I had a bad feeling that somebody had pressed the barrel of a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.
No matter how it had happened, the man was dead, dead, dead, and it didn’t make any difference how soon his death was reported, he was still going to be dead.
At the end of the driveway, my conscience made me come to a guilty stop. Inside the hidden house, somebody might be looking down the barrel of a gun held by the person who’d shot the guard. Somebody’s life might be saved if I called 911 and reported what I’d seen.
While I teetered between conscience and cowardice, a dark blue panel truck pulled into the driveway and sped toward the guardhouse. Within two nanoseconds, I was on Midnight Pass Road and pedaling like hell toward home, not minding the cold rain at all now, just glad that somebody else would see the murdered guard and call 911.
As if to let me know that my decision to stop at the guardhouse had been not only stupid but unnecessary, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. By the time I got home, the sun was shining and all the clouds were moving toward the southeast. My brother was out on his deck, wiping water off the plank table. As I started up the stairs to my apartment he turned and yelled.
“Anybody ever tell you not to play in the rain?”
I gave him the finger and kept slogging up the stairs in my wet Keds.
My brother is Michael. He’s two years older than me, which makes him thirty-four, and he’s been feeding me and taking care of me since I was two and our mother decided that the demands of motherhood—like putting food on the table and staying with her children—weren’t her favorite way to spend a life.
Michael is a blond, blue-eyed firefighter with the Sarasota Fire Department, so good-looking that women tend to arch their backs like cats in heat in his presence. Fat lot of good it does them. He’s been with Paco for over twelve years, and they’re as committed to each other as the pope is to celibacy.
Paco is also thirty-four, also a dreamboat that women vainly drool over. As dark and slim as Michael is broad and blond, he’s with the Sarasota County Special Forces Unit, which means he does undercover work, often in disguises that even I don’t recognize. Michael and Paco live next door in the frame house where Michael and I grew up with our grandparents after our parents left us. They’re my closest friends in the whole world. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m not sure I would have survived without them after Todd and Christy were killed.
Using the remote to raise the hurricane shutters, I unlocked the French doors to my minuscule living room, left my wet Keds on the porch, and padded barefoot over the Mexican tile to the bathroom, shedding clothes as I went. My apartment is small—living roomkitchen with a one-person eating bar, bedroom barely big enough for a single bed and dresser, tiny bathroom next to a narrow laundry room with stacked appliances. But I have a large closet with a desk on one side and my T-shirts and shorts stacked on shelves on the other side. I like the fact that my living space is spare and utilitarian without any unnecessary color or life. It suits me just fine.
Or at least it used to. Lately I’d been feeling a tad cramped.
I stood in a hot shower until my skin was rosy all over, but it didn’t make me feel normal. Instead, I felt more and more disappointed in myself. I might not be a deputy anymore, but I was a human being, and it had been wrong to run from the scene of a murder. Maybe the driver of the panel truck had done the same thing. Maybe he had cut and run too, and the guard was still sprawled in his chair with that strange angry weal on his cheek and a bullet hole in his temple.
Avoiding my eyes in the bathroom mirror, I screwed my damp hair into a ponytail. Then I padded to the kitchen and put on water to make tea. While I waited for the kettle to boil, I put a Patsy Cline CD on the player. Sometimes I listen to Roy Orbison and sometimes to Ella, but mostly I listen to Patsy because she never lets me down. I can feel like buzzards are roosting in my brain, and Patsy’s straight-at-you, tell-it-like-it-is, love-wasted transparency makes me feel like the world isn’t such a bad place after all.
I carried my tea to my combination office-closet, where I pulled on clean underwear, a pair of faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and fresh Keds. Then I sat down at the desk and pretended to be businesslike. I checked the answering machine, but it was still too early in the morning for business calls. I squared up some pieces of paper. Then I went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth again, even though I’d done it earlier at four o’clock. It didn’t sweeten the nasty taste of guilt in my mouth. Even with Patsy Cline belting out lyrics designed to make life seem simple, right now mine seemed more complicated than I could handle.
In my head, I heard a voice quoting the Bible—or maybe it was Shakespeare—“Let the dead bury the dead,” which doesn’t make any sense at all when you think of it, but then nothing was making much sense right then, least of all me.
I still had a couple of cats and the iguana to take care of, so I grabbed my backpack, went out the French doors, and clattered down the stairs while the remote lowered the storm shutters behind me.
Michael stuck his head out his kitchen door and yelled, “Want some breakfast?”
Michael cooks the way other people breathe; it’s a necessary rhythm to his life. If the world were poised for a direct hit from a meteor, Michael would probably ladle out soup. Since he’s one of the world’s best chefs, a lot of doomed people would line up to get it and feel a lot more cheerful about their prospects.
Ordinarily, I would have jumped at the chance to have one of Michael’s breakfasts, but I didn’t want him scrutinizing me this morning. He had been almost as traumatized as I was by the things that happened after I found the last dead man. If he learned I’d found another one, he was liable to insist that I get another line of work. One that didn’t have so many corpses in it.