“Bullshit.”
“Okay. You’re right.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
“You know…”
I looked up. It was Orange Speedo and he was shaking in rage, pointing his finger at Angie.
“You’re still here?” I said.
“You know,” he repeated.
“Yes?” Angie said.
His pectorals pulsed and rippled and he held the beer bottle up by his shoulder. “If you weren’t a woman, I’d—”
“Be in surgery about now,” I said. “Even as it is, you’re pushing it.”
Angie pushed herself up on the chaise and looked at him.
He breathed heavily through his nostrils and suddenly spun on his heel and walked back to his buddy. They whispered to each other, then took turns glaring at us.
“You get the feeling my temperament just isn’t right for this place?” Angie said.
We drove over to the Crab Shack for lunch. Again.
In three days, it had become our home away from home. Rita, a waitress in her mid-forties who wore a weathered black cowboy hat, fishnet stockings under cutoff jeans, and smoked cheeroots, had become our first pal in the area. Gene, her boss and the chief cook at the Crab Shack, was fast becoming our second. And the egret from the first day—her name was Sandra, and she was well behaved as long as you didn’t serve her beer.
We sat out on the dock and watched another late afternoon sky gradually turn deep orange and smelled the salt off the marsh and the gas too, unfortunately, and a warm breeze fingered its way through our hair and shook the bells on the pilings and threatened to toss our case file folder into the milky water.
At the other end of the dock, four Canadians with pink lemonade skin and ugly floral shirts scarfed platters of fried food and talked loudly about what a dangerous state they’d chosen in which to park their RV.
“First those drugs on the beach. Eh?” one of them said. “Now this poor girl.”
The “drugs on the beach” and the “poor girl” had been all over the local news the last two days.
“Oh, yuh. Oh, yuh,” one of the women in the group clucked. “We might as well be in Miami, and that is the truth, yuh.”
The morning after we arrived, a few members of a Methodist widows’ support group on vacation from Michigan were walking the beach in Dunedin when they noticed several small plastic bags littering the shoreline. The bags were small and thick and, as it turned out, filled with heroin. By noon, several more had washed up on beaches in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, and unconfirmed reports even placed some as far north as Homosassa and as far south as Marco Island. The Coast Guard surmised that a storm that had been battering Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas may have sunk a ship carrying the heroin, but as yet they hadn’t been able to sight the wreckage.
The “poor girl” story had been reported yesterday. An unidentified woman had been shot to death in a Clearwater motel room. The murder weapon was believed to have been a shotgun, the blast fired at point-blank range into the woman’s face, making identification difficult. A police spokesman reported that the woman’s body had also been “mutilated” but refused to specify how. The woman’s age was estimated at anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and Clearwater police were trying to identify her through dental records.
My first thought upon reading about her was, Shit. Desiree. But after checking into the section of Clearwater where the body was found and hearing the coded language used on last night’s six o’clock news, it became apparent that the victim had probably been a prostitute.
“Sure,” one of the Canadians said, “it’s like the Wild West down here. That is for sure.”
“You are right there, Bob,” his wife said and dipped her entire batter-fried grouper finger in a cup of tartar sauce.
It was a strange state, I’d been noticing, but in ways it was growing on me. Well, actually, the Crab Shack was growing on me. I liked Sandra and Rita and Gene and the two signs behind the bar that said, “If You Like the Way They Do Things in New York So Much, Take I-95 North,” and “When I Get Old I’m Going to Move to Canada and Drive Real Slow.”
I was wearing a tank top and shorts and my normally chalk-white skin had reached a happy shade of beige. Angie wore her black bikini top and a multicolored sarong and her dark hair was twisted and curled and the chestnut highlights were turning almost blond.
I’d enjoyed my time in the sun, but these past three days had been a godsend to her. When she forgot her frustration over the case, or once we’d reached the end of yet another fruitless day, she seemed to stretch and blossom and unwind into the heat, the mangroves, the deep blue sea and salty air. She stopped wearing shoes unless we were actively on the chase for Desiree or Jeff Price, drove to the beach at night to sit on the hood of the car and listen to the waves, even eschewed the bed in her suite at night for the white rope hammock on her balcony.
I met her eyes and she gave me a smile that was part sad knowledge and part intense curiosity.
We sat awhile like that, smiles fading, eyes locked, searching each other’s faces for answers to questions that had never been vocalized.
“It’s been Phil,” she said and reached across the table to take my hand. “It felt like sacrilege for us two to, you know…”
I nodded.
Her sandy foot curled up over mine. “I’m sorry if it’s been causing you pain.”
“Not pain,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Not real pain,” I said. “Aches. Here and there. I’ve been worried.”
She brought my hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.
“Thought you two were partners, not lovers,” a voice cried.
“That,” Angie said, eyes still closed, “would be Rita.”
And it was. Rita, in her ten-gallon hat, her fishnet stockings red today, bringing us our plates of crawfish and shrimp and Dungeness crab. Rita loved that we were detectives. Wanted to know how many shoot-outs we’d had, how many car chases we’d been on, how many bad guys we’d killed.
She placed our plates on the table and moved the pitcher of beer off the case file to put our plastic utensils somewhere, and the warm wind picked up the folder and the plastic sporks and tossed them to the deck.
“Oh, dear,” she said.
I got up to help her but she was quick. She scooped up the folder and closed it, caught the one stray photo between her thumb and index finger just as it had lifted off the deck and headed over the railing in a gust. She turned to us and smiled, her left leg still up in a half pirouette from when she’d lunged for the photo.