Over Exposure Part 7

"With a woman."

"Okay, okay. I had a date. It was important to me. I was in love with this woman."

"Not anymore though."

Chalmers shook his head. Watched a little of the end of "Friends." Everyone laughing their heads off about the f.u.c.ked up recipe. Poor air headed blonde.

"Jules," Chalmers spoke softly, watching the TV show. "He followed me that night. He waited till I was gone from Sheila's condo, and he broke in and raped her."

"Yeah, okay. But there's a topper. Something worse."

"How do you know that?"

"There's a topper. What is it?"

"Sheila had a security video. She runs it to make sure her Nanny isn't abusing her kid while she's off at work."

"Okay," Mason said. "So she's got the whole rape thing on tape. Now she's blackmailing you. Or she goes to the police and there goes your career."

Chalmers stared at Mason.

"Jesus, where do you get this stuff?"

"I'm an old man. There's only so many ways people can treat each other badly."

"I been sending her ten thousand a month."

Mason nodded.

"Ten thousand's a bargain."

"It's pinching me. That and everything else. The alimony. All of it, the market dipping, it's making life difficult."

"So killing Jules, how does that fix anything?"

He rocked forward, settled his elbows on his knees, giving Mason an earnest look. Salesman's eyes, man to man.

"I thought if Jules turns up dead, clearly a murder, it would scare her off. Show her what I'm capable of."

Mason shrugged, picked up the remote and cut to CNN. People starving somewhere in Africa. Their bellies swollen, flies all around their eyes. Little kids who looked two hundred years old. Bones showing through.

"Yeah, I guess, a certain woman, that could work."

"It's to scare her away, but it's also because I'm worried what that boy'll do next. I don't see any other choice."

"So two hundred bucks, that's a bargain. Saves you a fortune."

"It's not the money."

"It's never the money."

The little brat, his grandson, came screeching one more time at Mason's door, swung it open, stuck his blocky head through, closed his beady eyes and wailed for five seconds, then slammed the door and ran off to the big house where the anorexic and Mason's sad, unhappy son were burying themselves alive.

Chalmers looked over his shoulder at the wall.

"I don't want to die."

Mason said, "I'm not trying to convince you of anything."

"I got things I want to do, places I want to see. I've got appet.i.tes. I'm not suicidal."

"That's good. Everyone needs something to live for."

The starving kids in Africa were living in camps behind barbed wire. Their mothers pressed them to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Dying faster themselves so their kids could live a few more days. No men anywhere. All of them had been macheted or machine-gunned by another tribe. One tribe versus another tribe. Women nursing kids. People starving. Babies dying. Flies everywhere.

"You can put Jesus back on the wall."

Chalmers' frown relaxed and his eyes lingered on Mason.

Chalmers rose and hung the Jesus picture on the wall. Covering up the gashes and b.l.o.o.d.y streaks.

He adjusted the angle of the painting, stepping back to make sure he'd gotten it lined up.

"You're a religious man?" Chalmers said.

"Water to wine. People coming back to life? Yeah, right."

Chalmers looked away from Christ and stared at the empty birdcage.

"Your bird died."

"I hated that bird. It was a f.u.c.king nuisance. The old woman liked it. I was glad to see it fall off its perch."

Mason watched Chalmers draw a hard breath. A quick glance at the painting to see if he had it straight.

"If you hate a bird," Chalmers said, "it's simple to break its neck, be done with it."

"I look like a guy who murders parakeets?"

Chalmers turned and eyed Mason. He drew a long breath.

Then he clenched his face into a tight scrunch like he'd stepped on a tack. When his features relaxed, he looked different. Not any smarter, not any richer or happier, but his suit fit better. His eyes were a quieter shade of blue.

One more slow look around Mason's pathetic pool house apartment, then Chalmers dug out his wallet and fingered through the bills and came out with two more fifties and set them on the television.

Mason was quiet. Some did it this way. You never knew how it would play out. It was what kept him interested, these conversations, these surprises at the end.

"Keep it," Chalmers said. "You earned it."

"I didn't kill anybody."

"That's what I mean."

"Two hundred for an hour of talk," Mason said. "They'll bust me for practicing without a license."

The commercial was on. That dark-haired woman with the pouty lips, lounging in a doorway making eyes at her husband who has finally taken the right drug and gotten his p.e.c.k.e.r working again. Modern science. Too bad they couldn't find a pill for those starving babies with the flies all over them.

"Hey, listen," Chalmers said. "How would it be if I brought Jules over sometime? Just for some talk, nothing more than that."

Chalmers heard his own words, then shook his head. A preposterous idea. Sorry he'd mentioned it.

He headed for the door.

Was halfway out when Mason said, "Sure, why not? Bring the kid over. Let's hear his side."

TIGHT LINES.

"A handgun on a fishing trip?"

"For protection," I said.

"Oh, come on, Logan. Don't do this."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm taking a gun, that's all. And Dad's ashes."

She glanced at the door to my study as if she were considering barricading it. Anything to prevent me from going off with a pistol.

"Remember Deliverance," I said. "All they had was bows and arrows. Twenty miles down river, stalked by maniacs, they wished like h.e.l.l they'd brought firearms."

"Don't joke about this, Logan. "

"I'm trying to be light-hearted. I'm trying to be upbeat."

"Look, you can't fake your way through this. You're depressed, walking around in a black funk, now you're heading off into the middle of nowhere, and you're taking a G.o.dd.a.m.n gun? That's crazy, Logan. Crazy."

"I'm fine. Really, I'm a lot better."

"No, you're not. You're not sleeping, you're skipping work. You're a zombie."

"So I'm still grieving. I'm allowed to grieve, right?"

"He's been gone for two months. It's time to move on."

"That's exactly what I'm doing, Nadine. I'm going fishing. I'm going to the Lost Lagoon. That's getting on with my life. Right? I'm trying."

"Going back to where you found his body. You ready to face that?"

"That's why I'm doing it," I said. "To answer that question."

My dad's suicide had shocked everyone. Most of all me. And I should have been the one to have seen it coming. I was, after all, closer to the old man than anybody in his family or his wide circle of friends. I was a partner in his cardiology practice, his only child, his duplicate in matters of temperament and personality. But Dad had hidden his state of mind from even me. He'd fooled me completely. A week after my mother, his wife of fifty-three years died of a heart attack, Dad was back at work, acting perfectly normal, making his rounds, seeing patients, playing golf with his same buddies, mowing his gra.s.s, preparing his own meals.

Then in January, only a month after Mother died, the old man vanished. No note of explanation, no warning. No one had an idea where he'd gone or why. The police merely went through the motions. After four days with no word, I decided to check our secret fishing hole.

Dad had discovered the Lost Lagoon as a boy. It was out in the far reaches of the southern Everglades. He and I had camped and fished there since I was a boy. It was our golden secret. Only Dad and I knew its location. If there was one place Dad might go to revive his spirits, it would be the Lost Lagoon.

Across the room Nadine paced back and forth, giving the Smith and Wesson in my hand dark looks while she combed a hand through her long red hair.

"Think of the gun, this way," I said. "It's for whatever invasive species have arrived lately. Pythons, monitor lizards. The Everglades, you never know what's out there. It just makes me feel safer. That's all it is, Nadine. I swear to you."

She walked over to me, got her face inches from mine, spoke in a whisper.

"You've chosen him over me," she said. "One more time, even when he's gone. He's more important to you."

"That's not true, Nadine."

But it was true, and we both knew it. My lie hung sour in the air.

She couldn't bear to look at me.

"Just promise me one thing," she said.

"All right."

"You won't do what your dad did."

Nadine was never one for small talk.

I tucked the .357 into the waterproof pouch. Nadine looked away, and squinted out the bedroom window at the palms tossing in a dawn breeze.

"I'm fine, Nadine, really. I'm going to sprinkle his ashes, sob for an hour or two, catch some fish, commune with the stars, and come home. That's all."

Nadine shook her head slowly. Resigned to losing this argument, perhaps even resigned to losing me.

For the two decades we'd been married, she'd heard hundreds of stories about my fishing trips with Dad. Most of them hammed up by the old mana"the drinking games, the close calls with gators and sharks, the swamped canoes, violent thunderstorms, and stories about all the glorious fish we'd caught and cooked out there in the wilderness.

He and I were pals, best friends, far closer than any father and son I'd ever met. We had a bond that made some people nervous, as if it were somehow unnatural that two men, even father and son, could be such kindred spirits.

We had our fishing expeditions down to a ritual. A pair of canoes launched from Flamingo National Park, just me and Dad paddling for hours across bays, up and down twisting rivers into the remote northern fringes of the Everglades, then paddling another hour through the claw and snag of mangrove branches, cramming through narrow breaks in the foliage, places so tight even the canoes got hung up sometimes, and finally, five, six hours from the docks, an hour or two beyond all the known fishing grounds, we glided into a lagoon Dad had discovered more than a half century earlier. The lagoon bent like a beckoning finger, north then west, and was no more than thirty yards wide at any point.

Because the spot was isolated and virginal, it was primo fishing groundsa"tarpon over fifty pounds, bada.s.s snook, reds, even some freshwater ba.s.s cruising the brackish water. The lagoon was all but invisible from the air, did not appear on any chart or GPS and was surrounded by flats too shallow for anything but canoes or kayaks. A place so hidden even the bugs and birds had a hard time zeroing in.

While Nadine watched in grim silence, I finished packing. I wedged a coil of heavy braided rope into my duffel. Repairs to the platform usually were necessary. A loose board, a broken branch.