‘He would know what to do.’
‘Or how to escalate things. Besides, you haven’t talked to Shepherd in years.’
Except for the Couch Mother, Annabel was the only one who ever referred to Shep by his full name. Mike used to think it stemmed from her discomfort with Mike’s past, not wanting to use the abbreviated name from the stories. But he’d figured out it was more of a maternal nod to the given name, to the boy – a mother’s sympathy for that thin-necked kid who didn’t jump when someone dropped a lunch tray six inches from his nose.
‘And the way you left things,’ she continued. ‘What makes you think he’d be there?’
‘Shep would be there,’ Mike said firmly.
‘We have other friends. Terrance next door. Barry and Kay-’
‘What’s Barry gonna do, portfolio-manage them into submission? This isn’t the kind of problem you call people like our friends for.’
‘Then why don’t you talk to that private investigator, Hank? I mean, isn’t that what a PI’s supposed to do? Find out information on people? Look – just think about it. I don’t think we want to release the bull into the china shop. Yet.’
‘Hank’s sick. I told you.’
‘Hank never struck me as big on pity. You don’t think it might help him to have something to do?’ She pulled free a hairpin, shook out her mane. ‘I’ll go in to school tomorrow with Kat and update the contact and pickup lists, make sure they keep a close eye on her, all that.’
‘And talk to her-’
‘Of course. We’ve had the stranger-danger talk a million times, but I’ll go over it again. Now, come here. Unzip me.’
She held up her hair, exposing the light down of her nape. He drew the zipper south, admiring the slash of flesh, and she shrugged out of the dress and draped it over the upholstered chair in the corner. They took the duvet off together as they had every night for years – fold, step, fold, step – a marital square dance. And then she went into the bathroom and emerged with her toothbrush poking out of her mouth and his sporting a bead of paste. Leaning over to tug off his socks, he paused, and she popped his toothbrush into his mouth before returning to the bathroom, wearing a clown mouth of foam. The everyday physics of intimacy.
Brushing his teeth, he walked down the hall to Kat’s room. She was out cold, the curtain drawn, the locks secure.
He finished up in the bathroom, slid into bed next to Annabel, turned up the monitor, and exhaled. She had leaned his award plaque against the wall by the closet, no doubt unsure what to do with the thing. His name, etched in the bluish mirror beneath the seal of California. When he turned back, Annabel was studying him.
He said, ‘What an asshole I was standing up there accepting that award.’
‘And what an asshole I was sitting there playing the dutiful wife, clapping along.’ She rolled over, her face soft, and rested a hand on his cheek. ‘It’s less lonely being assholes together.’
He caught her wrist, lifted her arm gently so he could see the broken capillaries from when he’d grabbed her in the parking lot. ‘Did I do that?’
‘Brute.’ She twisted lazily in his grasp so the back of her wrist grazed his lips. ‘All protective like that, leaving your handprints on me. It was such a turnoff.’ Beneath the covers her foot found his calf.
Her touch brought a jolt of gratitude – even after stumbling through the past few days, he still got to spend the night in this bed with this woman.
He kissed the inner curve of her arm, delicately, where it was red. Her mouth found his, and they pushed up a little, propped on elbows, their lips joined. He shifted on top of her, stomach to stomach, both of them moving slowly, their exhaustion lending every touch and movement a dreamlike aspect. He moved into her, but she clenched with her arms and legs, held him still. Crossing her wrists behind his neck, her head hoisted a few inches off the mattress, she fixed her gaze on him and tilted her hips slowly, slowly, and he slid deeper until he stopped. She held him still again, perfectly still. He was up on his knees and hands, bearing his weight and most of hers, his arms trembling slightly.
‘I want you to look at me,’ she said. ‘All the way through.’
And he did.
After, she lay as she always did, on her back, one arm thrown across her sweaty bangs, her stomach pale in the alarm clock’s glow. He loved the faint ridge of scar tissue from her C-section, how it traced the pan of her hips, dividing erotic from merely sexy, a warrior’s mark of a body well used.
She held up her hand, the dull diamond of her engagement ring managing a sparkle. The new one had disappeared into the jewelry box as soon as they’d gotten home. ‘We’ve been married a decade, Wingate.’ Her teeth pinched a bite of swollen lip. ‘It doesn’t feel like ten years in any of the bad ways. But it feels like it in all the good ways.’
She curled into him, slinging a leg across his stomach, and he stroked her back, her skin still fever-hot. He pressed his lips to her damp forehead and held her until she was asleep.
Lying on his back, cooling beneath the overhead fan, he couldn’t linger in the aftermath. His mind kept returning to the confrontation at the Braemar Country Club, his shame at losing control that way, how his temper had ignited, how it had been right there like an old friend, like something atavistic. And the cold-sweat horror of Dodge’s mouth shaping a single word: Soon.
He got up, padded down the hall, and carried Kat, limp and dead-heavy in his arms, back to their bed. He tucked her in in his place and paused, surveying mother and daughter in idyllic calm. Something glinted over by the closet. His award.
He crossed and turned the plaque around so it faced the wall.
Then he killed the baby monitor, walked down to Kat’s room, and took up his post on the glider in the corner.
Soon, Dodge had promised.
Soon.
Chapter 16
Mike’s office, a modular-classroom-style prefab dropped in the middle of a dirt lot, had all the basics. Phone, fax, high-speed Internet. Aggressively competent gum-smacking ‘front-office girl,’ rounded out with high hair and bosom. Fire-sale desks shoved up against corkboard-covered walls, onto which were pinned various blueprints, permits, geological surveys, and Sears photos of family members. It was a humming little operation, twenty-five by thirty-eight feet of efficiency, the nuts and bolts behind the facades they constructed elsewhere.
Mike sat at his desk, massaging away an incipient migraine and pretending to review a bid for an insurance job. He’d been preoccupied all morning, adrift on sour thoughts. He couldn’t stop imagining William’s black-flecked lips, the reek of his gut breath, the way his face had appeared in the back window of the van, a disembodied head floating between the curtains. Then there was the image of that oil-stained polar bear, rocking in slow motion on the parking lot’s asphalt between Dodge’s massive feet.
He rose abruptly and headed for fresh air. Pacing the weeds of the yard, he tried Hank for the third time, and at last the PI picked up.
‘Want a distraction?’ Mike asked.
‘From dying?’ Hank said. ‘Whaddaya got?’
Mike told him about his run-in with Dodge and William and how oddly the sheriff’s deputies had acted back at the station.
‘Not much to go on,’ Hank said, ‘but I’ll nose around, see what I come up with.’
Unsatisfied, Mike headed back inside. Andrés was at the copy machine, frustrated and pushing buttons indiscriminately. He came over, sat sideways at the edge of Mike’s desk, and gazed across the office at Sheila’s cleavage as she argued an insurance adjuster into telephonic submission. Andrés clicked down on Mike’s desktop stapler with the heel of his hand a few times, just for fun. ‘A guy come by the site, asking about you.’