Though I could hardly spare it, I stopped and gave her a dollar, praying that I wouldn’t be her pretty soon.
I took the Vespa back over to Flagler Street and stopped at my favorite bodega for lunch. I ate my cubano slowly as the sun crested almost directly overhead.
I figured it would take until probably midnight for Peter to come looking for me. If I was lucky, he might even wait until morning.
After I finished lunch, I drove back to Smathers Beach, which ran along the southeast side of the island. Near its most deserted end, by the airport, I pulled over and got off the bike and stepped across the sandy path to the dunes.
I walked along the beach to where the beach grass grew about chest high and hunkered down.
There was no one on the beach, no one in the water.
It was time.
The first thing I did was upend my fanny pack, which contained my keys and wallet. Then with a pair of scissors that I’d bought, I cut a length of the paracord and dropped it on top of my CD Walkman.
The next part of the plan was the one I’d been dreading. It was also the most crucial. I took a small package out of the CVS bag and opened it.
It contained razor blades. They flashed like mirror shards in the bright light as I retrieved one and looked down at myself, debating. I swallowed as I finally decided on the back of my left calf.
I bit my lip as I lowered the blade down and sliced myself open. I hissed as I started the incision a little down from the back of my knee. Then teared up as I dug in harder with the blade, parting my skin.
At first, only a little blood dribbled out of the wound, but after I began to flex my calf over and over again, more came until I had a nice red stream going. It began to drip down my leg and off my heel, darkening the sand. I hopped around on one foot, flicking the blood on my fanny pack, the sand, the sea grass, the piece of paracord.
After about ten minutes, the area looked perfect, a total bloody mess.
Why not? Peter had shot himself to make his crime scene look good. The least I could come up with was a bit of self-mutilation.
I hopped back a few feet and sat down in the sand. I cleaned and bandaged myself carefully with peroxide and gauze and bandages that I’d bought at the pharmacy. I was even more careful to retrieve every scrap of trash.
After I was bandaged, I went over and kicked some more sand over everything. Then I stared at the scene for a minute, resting my chin on my thumb like a painter before a canvas.
Finally I stood.
It would have to do.
I crossed my fingers as I turned and walked away.
Chapter 40
IT WAS AS DIM as a cave. The concrete floor was littered with cigarette butts and some wriggly-looking thing I didn’t even want to think about. The smell of urine made my eyes water.
Perfect, I thought, locking the door of the public beach bathroom a ways from my fabricated crime scene.
It was skeevy and scary, but the most important things were that the women’s side had a lock on the door and the sink worked. I turned on the sink’s rusty tap as I opened the CVS bag.
Twenty minutes later, I looked at myself in the mirror.
My reflection provided some much-needed comic relief.
My still wet, self-cut, bleached hair was already turning platinum, and I had more black around my eyes than a raccoon. In the Catholic-school plaid skirt, black Social Distortion concert T, and Doc Martens boots that I scored from the secondhand store, I now looked like a cross between Courtney Love and a homeless fortune-teller.
My disguise was complete. I could have been any of the punk-rock girl runaways who hung around Duval asking for handouts. Time to go.
There was a city bus to Marathon, but that would be the first place Peter would check if he wasn’t convinced by the crime scene. My plan was to hitchhike out, find some tourist passing by who would never link sweet young cop wife, Jeanine Fournier’s, disappearance to my new punk-rock persona.
The wind was picking up as I came back out onto the beach, the first gold shadows stretching over the sand. There was a roar, and I looked up at a small “puddle jumper” passenger prop plane coming in. Happy tourists about to touch down in paradise.
“One piece of advice. Take a pass on the Jell-O shots,” I called up to it.
I shook my head as I gazed at the ocean, at the curvature of the world that I was about to enter practically penniless, definitely friendless, with a baby inside of me.
My Doc Martens clopped loudly on the concrete jogging path as I pointed myself toward the first bridge and whatever the hell would come next.
Chapter 41
THE SPEEDING STINGRAY rose and dipped like a skipping stone as Peter opened up its three-hundred-horsepower engine full throttle on their way back in. This was Key West at its finest, he thought, looking through the spray at the red-gold sunset. Wind in your hair, cold beer in your hand, cooler bursting with amberjack.
The pink clouds starboard reminded him of the blood in the water when they’d fed Teo’s body to the sharks that afternoon.
The product that Peter had bought from him and Elena was supposed to have been pure. He’d paid for pure. But it had been cut. Not a lot. Just enough to get them both killed.
Peter took another icy hit of his Corona and placed it back into the drink holder, his blue eyes glued to the horizon. He thought what he always thought when push came to shove and someone had to go.
Goddamn fucking shame.
It was twilight as they turned into the bay. Killing the engine, Peter expertly drew up along the seawall and saw that all the lights were off in the house. He hopped out of the boat and went inside as Morley tied up and unloaded.
“Jeanine?” he called.
He noticed that her sneakers were missing from the closet when he walked through the bedroom. A glance out the front door showed her Vespa wasn’t in the carport either.
He went back into the bedroom and made a phone call. The phone kept ringing. He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed, thinking. He looked in the closet again. All their bags were still there. All of her clothes.
Finally, he looked at their wedding portrait on the shelf beside the bed.
“Fuck,” he said.
Morley was at the picnic table, dividing up the catch into freezer bags, when Peter arrived beside him.
“What is it?” Morley said.
“Jeanine,” Peter said. “Something’s wrong.”
Chapter 42
IN THE RISING ENGINE WHINE of an approaching truck, I scrambled up onto the tiny concrete ledge on the highway bridge’s shoulder just in time. Blinded by headlights, road grit biting at the side of my face, I easily could have reached out and touched the side of the rattling, creaking, speeding eighteen-wheeler flashing by.
Or ended up underneath it.
My knees buckled as its swooshing waft of air came close to knocking me over the bridge’s shin-high railing and into the water. At least he was kind enough not to hit his eardrum-puncturing air horn as he clattered past like the truck before.
I hopped down off the ledge and soldiered on after the truck’s red taillights, swinging my CVS bag up on my shoulder. There wasn’t much left in it, half a package of Combos and a dwindling bottle of water. Supplies were definitely running low. My legs were OK, but my feet were killing me, starting to blister now in the Doc Martens after nearly four hours of walking.