It only made sense that I call him, but I had settled into a comfortable cocoon of solitude, focused laserlike on finding the girl. For me, that cocoon is a place rarely enjoyed when I’m Florida and I didn’t want to leave it.
It had to do with my shadow life. Solitude is what I enjoy most about it. I travel alone to Third World countries, to Everglades-dark places, and I find people. I then track those people. I become familiar with their schedules, their habits.
For the period of a week-sometimes two, depending on the importance of the assignment-I charted the subtle movements and interactions of a stranger’s life. I did it invisibly, with a laboratory precision that in the end allowed me to segregate that person from his surroundings as effectively as using tweezers to remove a bee, undetected, from its colony.
That was my specialty-my genius, Tomlinson might have called it, had he ever learned the truth. What I do, however, doesn’t demand genius. I have no illusions about my own gifts, other than to acknowledge that, since I was very young, I have had an obsessive need to identify, then define, orderly patterns in what most would dismiss as chaos.
We all have our quirks.
That’s my job when out of the country: to discern order in the chaos. To create a precision target. As creator, I am also tasked with finding the most effective method of displacing that target from his surroundings.
I am good at it.
After wrestling with the decision for a mile, I decided I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation with Tomlinson. Instead, I pulled over long enough to send a text:
Tula and Squires to arrive at Red Citrus by midnight, cops waiting. Let me know. If you’re drinking, stop now. Don’t piss off cops!
After a moment of thought, I added, Is Emily safe? then sent the text with a slow Whoosh! that told me reception was getting worse.
I got out of the truck long enough to urinate, then got back in, but left the dome light on. Out of long habit-or, perhaps, just to reestablish my focus-I took inventory of my equipment bag. First, I popped the magazines of both pistols to make certain they were loaded, although I knew they were.
I am not a gun fancier or collector, but the precision tolerances of fine machinery appeals to the same sensibilities that cause me to linger over a fine microscope. It was true of my Sig Sauer P226 pistol. The Sig was one of the first issued after the Joint Service Small Arms test trials of 1985, and I have trusted my life to it since that time. I had recently purchased a new magazine that held fifteen rounds instead of only ten. I had also added Tritium night sights, which I had yet to try on a range.
I held the Sig’s magazine in my hand, testing the mobility of the rounds with my thumb, the odor of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun solvent spreading a lingering sweetness through the cab of my truck. It reminded me of Tomlinson’s crack about smelling gun oil in the lab whenever I felt restless. An inside joke? Or was it a veiled reminder that, one way or another, my relationship with Emily was doomed as long as I continued to live my shadow life.
Whether a dig or a warning, what he’d said was true: When I get restless, it shows. After a month or two without a new mission, I find myself studying maps. I find myself at night sitting within easy reach of my Trans-Oceanic Radio, recleaning my weapons as if that private ceremony was an incantation that would bring a call from my handler.
After inspecting the Sig Sauer, I took the much smaller, lighter Kahr pistol in hand. It was black-matte stainless, comfortable to hold. After so many years trusting the Sig, it was tough to admit that this was now my weapon of choice. It wasn’t as tiny as another favorite-a Seecamp. 380-but the Kahr slipped just as easily out of the pocket. And it could be hidden almost as completely in the palm of my hand. Firing the Kahr, though, was a pleasure, and it had more stopping power than the Seecamp.
Like the Sig, the Kahr was loaded with federal Hydra-Shok hollow points. But the Kahr had the added advantage of a built-in laser sight that was activated whenever I gripped the thing to fire.
Unlike the high-tech Dazer Guardian, also in the bag, the laser sight was red, not green.
It was unlikely that I would use any of these weapons, just as I knew there was very little chance now that I would stumble onto Harris Squires and the Guatemalan girl. He and Tula were on their way to Red Citrus while I was out here wasting time on back roads east of Immokalee.
It didn’t matter. I was in a certain mood. To rationalize wasting time, I told myself this was training, a way to stay sharp.
I leaned to roll down the passenger window, and drove on.
Tomlinson is right. I’m not a fast driver. I slowed even more whenever I switched on the dome light and checked the satellite aerial. My pal had used a highlighter to square off the boundaries of Squires’s property, but it still wasn’t easy to pick out landmarks. I was driving through a shadowed mesa of cypress that I guessed was Owl Hammock. It meant I had at least fifteen miles to go.
Thus far, I hadn’t passed a car. Not one.
Alternately squinting at the aerial, then accelerating, my headlights tunneled through a starry silence, toward a horizon abloom with the nuclear glow of Fort Lauderdale, eighty miles to the east.
I passed through the precise geometrics of tomato fields and citrus orchards. Then more cypress domes that exited into plains of myrtle and saw grass. My eyes moved from the road, to the satellite aerial, then to my watch.
11:45 p.m.
Training exercise or not, my mind wandered back to Emily. My reaction to her had been a surprise. A shock, in fact, and now it was a new source of restlessness that was pleasure mixed with angst.
I had left Tomlinson alone with Emily for a reason-a deceit that Tomlinson had guessed correctly. It was a test. He suspected it, I knew it. I was subjecting myself, my new lover and my old friend to yet another of my relentless personal evaluations.
“Why do you set traps for people you care about when you’re the one who is inevitably hurt?” a smart but troubled woman had once asked me.
I had no answer then. I had no answer now.
It was a uncomfortable truth to admit, but that was balanced by something I believed with equal honesty: Emily Marston could be trusted. There was no rational explanation for why I trusted her, but I did. Attraction is commonplace. A visceral, indefinable unity is not. The chemistry that links two people is comprised of elements too subtle to survive dissection, too complex to permit inspection.
It was unlike me to ponder the exigencies of romance, but that’s exactly what I was doing as the miles clicked by. My mind returned to the bedroom, where I had used every gentleness to follow Emily’s physical signals, then fine-tuned what I was doing to match her respiratory and moaning guidance. Our rhythms escalated until, finally, she had tumbled over a sheer apex, crying out, then sobbing, a woman so disoriented even minutes later that she seemed as vulnerable as a creature newly born.
I’d like to believe I am a competent lover, but I knew my skills did not account for an eruption of such magnitude. It was Emily, uniquely Emily, her physical release so explosive that it was as unmistakably visual as it was audible-a jettisoning fact that only made her sob harder, and voice her embarrassment.
“That’s why I’ve always been so careful about men,” she had whispered. “I can’t help how my body reacts, and it’s goddamn embarrassing. It creeped Paul out, I think, so I almost never really let myself go. Tonight, Christ! I got carried away, I guess. I’m so sorry.”
Sorry? I had just experienced one of the most sensual couplings of my life. I did my best to reassure her and succeeded, apparently, because half an hour later it happened again.
To equate sexual release with trust was as irrational-or as sensible-as any other aspect of love play between male and female. But there it was. It was the way I felt.