“Oh, Dave what?”
“Just oh, Dave.”
I got out of the truck and walked around the front of it. I opened her door. When she stepped out, I pulled her against me and kissed her shoulder and neck and hair and eyes. Then we walked up the steps inside, closing the door behind us, going straight down the hallway into the bedroom, leaving the light off. It felt strange being in an intimate situation with a woman other than my wife. I turned my back while she undressed.
“Dave?” she said.
The back of my neck was burning. “You have to excuse me. I’m awkward about a lot of things.”
“Turn around,” she said.
The moonlight fell on her through the side window. Her body had the smoothness and radiance of a Renaissance painting. “Are you going to make me feel really dumb?”
“No,” I said. I took off my shirt, trousers, and socks, and we got into bed, each on a side and reaching for the other. Then I pressed her back on the pillow and kissed her on the mouth and on her eyes and on the tops of her breasts. I kissed her thighs and stomach and put her nipples into my mouth and felt her nails in my hair and her breath on my forehead and her legs widening to receive me, then I was deep inside her, the welcoming grace of her thighs embracing mine, her moans and the wet cadence of her body like the iambic beat of a rhyming couplet.
Behind the redness in my eyelids I saw a pink cave filled with gossamer fans, a wave rotating through it, sliding over heart-shaped coral covered with underwater moss that was as soft as felt, deeper and deeper, as though I were dropping through the center of the earth, then I felt my loins dissolve and the light go out of my eyes and my heart twist with such violence that I thought it would burst.
Then I was standing in a place I had seen at a distance but never stood upon. I was at the entrance of a canyon that had turned pink and then magenta, streaked with shadows as the evening sun moved across it. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, as though I were standing on the lip of Creation or its terminus. A woman was standing next to me. She stepped closer and enveloped me in her cloak and lay back on a bare rug atop a pine bough, and I laid my head on her breast and the two of us rose into the sun, and I closed my eyes and felt my seed go deep inside her, and I put my face between her breasts and kissed the salt on her skin and heard her heart pumping as though it were about to break.
I rose sweaty and hot from Bailey, already longing to enter her again, and for the first time in my life saw what it all meant and realized that I would never allow death to hold claim on me again, and that Bailey Ribbons had perhaps saved me from myself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I WENT HOME THAT night and left at sunrise and drove down to Cypremort Point, where Desmond Cormier maintained his beautiful home on the tip of the peninsula, where all of this started with the body of Lucinda Arceneaux floating on a wood cross, the chop sliding across her sightless blue eyes.
Why dwell upon the image? Answer: Any homicide cop can deal with sadism or bestiality or wholesale murder when the victims are part of the culture that took their lives. But when the victims are female teenage hitchhikers on their way to New Orleans to see a concert, a young couple forced into the trunk of their own car that was set on fire by two Oklahoma psychopaths, a little boy who was anally raped before he was killed, a mother with her two daughters who trusted a boatman on vacation and were raped and tied to cinder blocks and dropped one at a time into the ocean with their mouths taped, each having to watch the fate of the other, when you see these things up close and personal, you never free yourself from them, and that’s why cops pop pills and spend a lot of time at the watercooler in the morning.
These things are not generic in nature or manufactured incidents found in lurid crime novels. They all happened, and they were all the work of evil men. You can drink, smoke weed, melt your brains with downers or whites on the half-shell, or transfer to vice and become a sex addict and flush your self-respect down the drain. None of it helps. You’re stuck unto the grave, in your sleep and during the waking day. And that’s when you start having thoughts about summary justice—more specifically, thoughts about loading up with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks and painting the walls.
The wind was blowing hard, straightening the palm fronds on the sides of the road, driving the waves against the blocks of broken concrete that had been dropped into the shallows to prevent the erosion of the bank. Up ahead I saw Antoine Butterworth jogging along the road in a sweatshirt and orange running shorts, his skin the metallic tone of a new penny. A cabin cruiser close in to the shore seemed to be pacing him. A man in shades and the blue coat and white trousers and white hat of a yachtsman was standing on the bow. He yelled something to Butterworth through his cupped hands, then waved goodbye.
The cabin cruiser motored away, twin exhaust pipes gurgling. I pulled abreast of Butterworth and rolled down the passenger window. “Want a lift?”
“I’m pretty sweaty,” he replied, not slowing.
“Suit yourself.”
I drove on to Desmond’s place and parked by his porte cochere and got out. My coat was whipping in the wind, sand and seaweed rilling in waves that burst against the shore and filled the air with spray and the smell of salt. Butterworth ran up the drive and picked up a towel that hung on an outdoor shower, then wiped his armpits and the insides of his thighs. “Where’s your lovely lass?”
?
?I didn’t get that,” I said. “Must be the wind.”
“I said ‘lass.’ Detective Ribbons.”
“I’ll tell her you asked about her.”
“I hope you’re not here for me.”
“Is Desmond home?”
“Fixing breakfast. Will you join us?”
“Who was the guy on the boat?”
“A tarpon fisherman out of Tampa. Why?”
“No reason. A fine-looking boat.”