Jim guided him up to one hundred feet, then stopped and timed the decompression rest. Ray floated there, staring down the wall as if he had left something precious behind.
At seventy feet, they used the anchor fine to steady themselves. By the time Jim threw his mask and fins into the Whaler and climbed over the starboard stern, he was chilled and shaking.
He took Ray’s equipment and helped him up the ladder. He already had the engine running and was cranking up the anchor by the time Ray got his weight belt off.
Ray set down the belt, lost his balance in the swell, and plopped down onto the bench. “You pissed?”
“That was stupid. You’re supposed to be there for me.” He drew up the anchor and settled it into the box behind the breast hook. “You want to fuck with somebody’s life, fuck with your own.”
Jim regretted his words as soon as he heard them. That’s what you get for diving with an amateur. What he hadn’t understood was how desperate Raymond was, how his despair was pushing him toward closure, toward anything that would end it. Now Jim was angry at himself for not knowing. Had Raymond let him down, or the other way around?
“I didn’t mean that,” he said.
“You’re right.”
“You scared me, goddamn it.”
“I scared myself. The deeper I got, the better idea it seemed just to keep going. For a while, nothing hurt and everything was okay. It was like washing it all away.”
Jim pushed the throttle forward and headed north for Newport. The Whaler bounced hard against the chop and the shoreline lights inched past them. He shivered, wrapped his jacket tight.
“But I realized something,” said Raymond. “I realized where Ann would keep the journal. It hit me at a hundred and twenty feet — clear as a vision.”
Jim looked at him and waited.
“Stop at the Sweetheart Deal on the way in. That’s where we’ll find it. That’s where we’ll find out who was... who her lover was.”
Chapter 24
Jim could see the outline of Sweetheart Deal fifty yards ahead of them. She slouched at her mooring, the mast angled skyward in an empty crucifix, the gull nest atop it an unmanned crown of thorns. Easy to see why the cops had overlooked it, Weir thought: All it looked good for was a fire hazard and a wildlife refuge. Raymond has got this wrong. Balboa Island lay at the far shore, then the mainland and Coast Highway; beyond them, the mirrored glass of the PacifiCo Tower presided from a near-distant hill, dotted like an i by the moon.
Raymond sat in front of him in the dinghy, his face pale against the night. He had not spoken the whole trip back; now he let it all out in a rush of words that seemed almost beyond his control. “I waited for it,” he said. “I knew it was coming, as soon as we found that garage-door opener. I think I knew, down somewhere, that I wasn’t enough for her. Sometimes, it struck me as okay — it seemed like she was... under appreciated. I forgave her, in advance. Annie would surprise me when I came home from work. One night not long ago, she wasn’t there to greet me as usual. I went into the bedroom and she was spread out on the bed, nothing on but a flimsy robe that was open most of the way, and a garter belt thing, and a lacy top. She was made up heavy, red lipstick, and her hair was pulled back the way I like it. There was a bottle of white wine on the nightstand, mostly gone, and she was holding a glass, resting it between her legs. Her fingernails were red, like her lips. She didn’t say anything at all — she just pulled me down. Those were the times I wanted her the most and it wouldn’t happen. I wanted her because she wanted me, but there was a short in the wiring somewhere and the whole thing got turned into fear. Mr. Night is someone who doesn’t have that problem.
“That night, I got to thinking about myself. Annie finished the bottle, got sick, passed out. I saw myself from the outside for a while, and what I saw was a good guy. A good cop. A man who married his high school sweetheart and tried hard to make a good life for her. A man learning the law. A guy who didn’t drink much or smoke. And you know what I wondered? I wondered if I might be better off — if we both might — if I wasn’t such a goddamned Boy Scout.”
Jim pulled on the oars, said nothing.
“You know something, Jim? I’ve had this feeling ever since I saw Annie down at the Back Bay, that when I kill the guy who did it, I’ll be... complete. That I’ll be worthy of her. That all the times I couldn’t do what she wanted won’t matter anymore. That when I kill him, I’ll kill that thing inside me that failed. That somehow, she ended up that way so I could become the man I always thought she wanted. Dumb, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to tell you something else,” said Raymond. “As soon as I read that letter about Annie and him, there was a voice inside my head. The voice says that Annie got what she deserved. I hate myself for thinking that, but it just happens on its own.”
“Some things aren’t worth thinking,” said Jim. “I’m not sure how you tune them out.”
Raymond’s face was beveled in moonlight and darkness. “Are you with me on this? If you’re not, it would help me to know.”
Weir wondered whether Francisco Cruz had asked the same of his men, the men who had finally abandoned him to the bullets of Joaquin La Perla. For awhile, at least, the answer must have been yes. “I’m with you, Ray.”
“Because you want to kill him?”
“Because I don’t want him to kill you.”
“When we get way out on the edge, I hope you keep your footing.”
“I do, too, Ray.”
He eased up to Sweetheart Deal and tossed the line. Raymond climbed out, the Whaler shifting with the loss of weight, the beam of his flashlight crossing the rust stains on the hull. Jim took the lantern and followed him, feeling himself drawn into Raymond’s net of logic regarding this ship: Ann protesting her sale after Poon’s death, Ann cleaning her up once a year to beat the city dereliction notices, Ann clinging to this rotting vestige as if it was a direct link to Poon himself. In a sense, he realized, it was. He could see Ann in his mind’s eye, reaching from the dinghy to steady herself against Sweetheart Deal, fingers touching the rough deck, knowing that the sea in which the old boat rocked was the same Pacific that had accepted Poon’s scattered ashes, perhaps seeing herself as an agent afloat upon this great separating river, as a connection between Poon’s underworld and the world of which she was still a citizen. Touch the ocean, touch the ship, touch the Father, a finger from above meets the finger from below, each outstretched and yearning. Ann, daddy’s girl. Ann, like Poon, the unfettered, the ulterior, the unloyal.
Jim realized as he climbed aboard that he hadn’t been on Sweetheart Deal since his father died, a decade ago. The deck was pliant under his feet. She smelled of mildew and the acid of bird waste that had piled up behind the mast, blown in flight just slightly astern by the prevailing onshore breezes. Raymond’s light led them through a squeaking door on which hung a lock too rusted to fasten anymore, and into the cabin. Jim, still shivering, lit the lantern. As the mantles glowed and the light gathered, he saw nothing that he was expecting.