“That’s right.”
“Perfect. Bloody wonderful! Case is good as solved!”
“Come on, Nicky,” I said, taking him by the elbow and dragging him towards the door.
“The only thing worse than a police state—is an incompetent police state!” he shouted, and I got him outside.
Outside the station Nicky deflated again. We got home without saying more than three words. Unfortunately, it was the same three words, over and over. Nicky would smack his fist into his hands as though just discovering something and mutter, “Forget it! Christ!” and then grind his teeth together silently until he needed to say it again.
He wanted to do something about this. The small part of me that still thinks like a cop wanted to kid him about it. But the rest of me was a citizen now. I let him work it out for himself. Besides, I was afraid he might tear into me like he had the sergeant.
He left me at his door, still quietly smoldering.
Just before he closed the door, though, he turned back and looked me in the eye. “This hasn’t ended, Billy,” he said in a strange, I-Have-Been-There-And-Seen-It tone of voice. “This goes on.”
I didn’t have a clue what
he meant. “Okay, Nicky.”
“I mean it, mate. There will be more to this. Fair dinkum. See if there ain’t.”
“I think you better have a nice hot cup of tea, Nicky.”
He rubbed his eyes, dwindling with each breath. “Yeah. And then a nice lie-down.”
“I’ll see you later.”
“Ta, Billy.”
He closed his door and I headed home.
It wasn’t hard to realize in a general way what he was going through. He had found a corpse. He’d been expecting fireworks, commotion, wheels set in motion, shouting and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The cops hadn’t obliged, and he was realizing that they wanted this to trail off into a few forms to fill out and maybe two lines in the paper. And then, no matter how much indignation Nicky summoned, it would be over. Life would go on. The cops wouldn’t even think about it anymore.
That can be tough to accept. In a funny, finders-keepers way this was Nicky’s body, and he wanted what was best for it. And when most people encounter death they feel like it should mean something. Death is impressive, and if you don’t see it every day—the way I had when I was a cop—then it seems more significant than it really is and you want it to add up to something important, noble and meaningful.
It doesn’t. Death makes us all a little smaller and a little cheaper. There is so much of it, more of it than of anything else, and it is all that is guaranteed to us in life. You can have your nose rubbed in that a few times and get used to the idea, go on with waiting for it.
But if you’re a small Australian New Age astrologer and aromatic oil salesman, the idea takes some getting used to.
Chapter Six
Life goes on. That’s not always good news, but it’s always true. Life. Goes. On. Terrible things happen and we wonder why the sun doesn’t stop dead in the sky, but it never does. At the same time that we’re staring at the broken pieces of our life, somebody else is wondering whether to have another slice of bacon or go right for the cheesecake.
Life goes on. And a big part of my life was Nancy. Or it had been. Now I wasn’t sure, and I needed to be. Nicky would come to terms with his dead body, one way or another, without me.
I realized how sour that seemed. I knew I should feel some concern, try to talk to Nicky and get him straightened away, feeling better about what had happened. But I was so used to having him try to cheer me up, it didn’t seem right the other way around. I wouldn’t know where to start. Besides, after being cooped up with him on the sailboat, I was ready for a vacation from manic energy, beer, handguns, and cries of, “EE-hah!”
I went into my house and turned on the huge, ancient, window-mounted air conditioner. The roar of it was like being on the flight line when a wing of B-25s takes off, but after a few minutes the room was cooler and I could turn the thing down to a level that didn’t threaten to rupture ear drums on Duval Street.
When I left town all I could think of was trying to call Nancy. All that had changed. I had been out of town, in the clean air and salty water, long enough for my head to clear and for my brain to organize all my thoughts. I waited for all the thoughts to look organized—it didn’t happen. All I could think about was trying to call Nancy.
So I called Nancy. There was no answer at her place, and her answering machine wasn’t turned on. That wasn’t like her.
Now I was worried. Key West was no longer the sleepy fishing village it had been when I was a kid. Bad things happened here. It could have happened to her. She could be lying on her floor, helpless, slowly dying, wondering why I didn’t come find her.
I had to do something, anything. Either that or turn into a permanent couch cover.
I went outside and looked at my car, a two-year-old Ford Explorer. I hadn’t started it since April. No, wait; I had gone to that wedding in Marathon—late June?