Duma Key(43)

I looked at him standing naked in the doorway, looking at my wife on the bed, and remembered him helping me move my stuff out to Lake Phalen. Remembered him saying You don't give up the house, that's like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.

Then catching him with tears in his eyes. Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way.

Had he been f**king her then? I thought not. But -

I'm going to give you an offer to take back to her, I'd said. And he had. Only maybe he'd done more than make my offer.

I limped to the big window, not using my crutch. Sunset was still hours off, but the light was westering strongly, beating a reflection off the water. I made myself look directly into that glaring track, wiping my eyes repeatedly.

I tried to tell myself the picture might be no more than a figment of a mind that was still trying to heal itself. It wouldn't wash. All my voices were speaking clearly and coherently to one another, and I knew what I knew. Pam had f**ked Max out there in Palm Desert, and when he had suggested a longer, deeper commitment, she had refused. Pam had also f**ked my oldest friend and business associate, and might still be f**king him. The only unanswered question was which guy had talked her into the rose on her tit.

"I need to let this go," I said, and leaned my throbbing forehead against the glass. Beyond me, the sun burned on the Gulf of Mexico. "I really need to let this go."

Then snap your fingers, I thought.

I snapped the fingers of my right hand and heard the sound - a brisk little click. "All right, over-done with-gone!" I said brightly. But then I closed my eyes and saw Pam sitting on the bed - some bed - in her panties, with a bra-strap lying across her leg like a dead snake.

Friends with benefits.

Fucking friends, with f**king benefits.

vii

That evening I didn't watch the sunset from Little Pink. I left my crutch leaning against the corner of the house, limped down the beach, and walked into the water until I was up to my knees. The water was cold, the way it gets a couple of months after hurricane season has blown itself out, but I hardly noticed. Now the track beating across the water was bitter orange, and that was what I was looking at.

"Experiment, my ass," I said, and the water surged around me. I rocked unsteadily on my feet, holding my arm out for balance. "My f**king ass."

Overhead a heron glided across the darkening sky, a silent long-neck projectile.

"Snooping is what it was, snooping is all it was, and I paid the price."

True. If I sort of felt like strangling her all over again, it was nobody's fault but my own. Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed, my dear old mother used to say. I peeked, I was vexed, end of story. It was her life now, and what she did in it was her business. My business was to drop it. My question was whether or not I could. It was harder than snapping your fingers; even than snapping the fingers of a hand that wasn't there.

A wave surged in, one big enough to knock me down. For a moment I was under, and breathing water. I came up spluttering. The backrun tried to pull me out with the sand and shells. I pushed shoreward with my good foot, even kicking feebly with my bad one, and managed to get some purchase. I might be confused about some things, but I didn't want to drown in the Gulf of Mexico. I wasn't confused about that. I crawled out of the water with my hair hanging in my eyes, spitting and coughing, dragging my right leg behind me like so much soaked luggage.

When I finally got to dry sand, I rolled over and stared up into the sky. A fat crescent moon sailed the deepening velvet above Big Pink's roofpeak. It looked very serene up there. Down here was a man who felt the opposite of serene: shaking and sad and angry. I turned my head to look at the stump of my arm, then up at the moon again.

"No more peeking," I said. "The new deal starts tonight. No more peeking and no more experiments."

I meant it, too. But as I've said (and Wireman was there before me), we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

Chapter 5 Wireman

i

The first time Wireman and I actually met he laughed so hard he broke the chair he was sitting in, and I laughed so hard I almost fainted - did in fact go into that half-swooning state that's called "a gray-out." That was the last thing I would have expected a day after finding out that Tom Riley was having an affair with my ex-wife (not that my evidence would have stood up in any court of law), but it was an augury of things to come. It wasn't the only time we laughed together. Wireman was many things to me - not least of all my fate - but most of all, he was my friend.

ii

"So," he said, when I finally reached his table with the striped umbrella shading it and the empty chair across from his own. "The limping stranger arriveth, bearing a bread-bag filled with shells. Sit down, limping stranger. Wet thy whistle. That glass has been waiting for some days now."

I put my plastic bag - it was indeed a bread-bag - on the table and reached across to him. "Edgar Freemantle."

His hand was short, the fingers blunt, the grip strong. "Jerome Wireman. I go by Wireman, mostly."

I looked at the beach chair meant for me. It was the kind with a high back and a low fanny-sling, like the bucket seat in a Porsche.

"Something wrong with that, muchacho?" Wireman asked, raising an eyebrow. He had a lot of eyebrow to raise, tufted and half-gray.

"Not as long as you don't laugh when I have to get out of it," I said.