Майкл Коннелли - Tampa Bay Noir

At first Dale can’t be sure it’s Chum standing outside the bar, but as his eyes adjust, the old man turns from a fuzzy outline into a solid figure. He’s leaning there against the barrel that hasn’t moved in twenty years.

“It’s all gone, Chum,” Dale says. “That girl, the new girl, Elise, she took it all.”

The air blowing across his face is what wakes Dale. At first he thinks it’s the overhead fan in his bedroom and that Elise is lying next to him, naked, her slender legs tangled in his. But there’s a noise too and he’s bouncing. He’s on a boat. Warm saltwater sprays across his face, warm like bathwater. And the boat is slowing down.

The sun is low in the sky now. He must have been out a long time because it’s nearly dusk. His head is pounding and muffled voices come from nearby. He closes his eyes when everything comes back to him. The computer Elise used, the log-in information she stole, the money that’s gone. Hell, he’d even told her when the money was supposed to clear the bank, and while that was happening, she’d been leading him to his bedroom. Elise in bed with him. That meant someone else had to have been using the stolen log-in to clear out the account. His eyes fly open and he struggles to push himself up, not because he’s strapped down in any way, but because he’s dizzy and the motion of the boat is making his stomach swirl.

“She didn’t do it alone,” Dale says, but no one hears. Again, louder this time: “She didn’t do it alone. Donna. It had to be Donna.”

It’s the one with stringy hair. He tells Dale to shut the hell up and turns back to his work. He’s throwing something overboard. It splashes and then he throws something else. Dale has done enough fishing to recognize the smell. The guy is throwing buckets of fish guts into the water. He’s chumming.

“Did you hear?” Dale says. “The two of them, together. They stole everything.”

Someone cuts the motor but the boat continues to roll with the waves. Dale wraps one hand around the side that’s still aching.

“That’s a damn fool way to try to save your hide,” Chum says, stepping up to Dale and blocking the last bit of sun bouncing off the boat’s white deck. “I was betting you’d blame your wife.”

Dale shakes his head. “No,” he says, his chin puckering. Sweet Patty with the silky brown hair that fell past her shoulders and the hands that were always soft and warm. Patty who cooked yellow cornbread just the way he liked and was always there when he stumbled home from Smugglers. It had been her idea for Dale to sell the house to pay Chum back. She took what was in their savings and left the house to Dale and now she’s never coming back.

“She’d never hurt me like that,” Dale says, his voice breaking before he can say anything else.

Stretching out a hand, Chum helps Dale to his feet, but instead of letting go, Chum keeps hold of that hand and nudges the guy with the sunken chest.

“I’m telling you,” Dale says, “it was both of them. Donna, she told me the girl did bookkeeping. She knew I needed someone. Jesus, they played me. And Donna knew about my house being sold. She did it. Had to have. Both of them played me.”

The sunken-chest guy takes Dale’s wrist from Chum. He pulls so Dale’s arm is good and straight, and with a small knife and one smooth motion, he cuts Dale from wrist to elbow. Crying out, Dale tries to pull away, but the man holds tight. As if afraid his shoes will get stained, Chum steps back. Blood begins to drip onto the boat’s white deck.

“Not too deep,” Chum says, steadying himself with a hand to the railing. “Don’t want him bleeding out first.”

The same man grabs Dale’s other arm, cuts it in the same way, and then folds Dale’s arms to stem the bleeding.

“Legs too?” the man asks.

Chum nods, and as the man squats down, Dale stumbles backward but something stops him. It’s the stringy-haired guy. He wraps his arms around Dale’s chest and yells at him to stop moving.

“Go easier if you stay still,” the sunken-chest man says, and one at a time, he slices the inside of each of Dale’s thighs.

“We’re good to go!” Chum hollers, and sticks a cigar in his mouth.

Dale is kicking and punching as they lift him. They swing him twice and let go. Chum is laughing. That’s the last thing Dale hears when he hits the water. Coughing and choking, he pops back to the surface. Before he sees them, he feels them. First it’s a bump to his leg, a glancing blow that could have been an undercurrent. But then he feels another. And then another. Like chum in the water.

Davis Islands

They moved into the house in September. The last time they’d been there, following behind a real estate agent’s clicking heels, the rooms had seemed open and friendly. Now the walls were marked by tree shadows, an uneasy flickering of light off the canal. Eva told her husband it wasn’t the same and he said it was too late, and gave her that look: part caution, part dismay. Didn’t he always want to please her, and was she never happy? Eva crossed the terrazzo floor and opened the doors to the patio and let the breeze move through the rooms. Small insects came in, bobbing off the kitchen counter, hovering slow and dazed like bits of dark ash.

Her husband left for work, agreeing to drop the children at their new school. It was better if she didn’t take them at first — her littlest would cling to her and make a scene at the drop-off line. The doorbell signaled a delivery or another neighbor stopping to introduce herself bearing a willow basket of muffins or a box of locally confected toffee. They all said the same thing: “You didn’t tear it down!” Eva wasn’t sure whether they were pleased or disgruntled — the exclamation kept vague, waiting for her response. “Not yet,” she might say. Or, “Never!”

She opened the door to a man she knew she should remember. He stood on the front walkway bewildered, blinking, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets.

“Eva Langford?” he said.

Eva laughed, and his expression dulled. “Dr. Harcourt?”

Her old college professor. He was gray now, his same eyes peeking out of an aged face, the same clothing — jeans, corduroy jacket, Converse sneakers. He took a step back, as if finding her there was a trick of some sort. “What are you doing here?” he said.

They went back and forth this way, an awkward reunion. She explained they’d moved in last week, that her husband’s company had reassigned him to Tampa.

“Of all places,” she said. “It’s Eva Kinsey now.”

“This was my mother’s house,” Jim Harcourt said.

And Eva remembered a day she spent with him — sex at his condo and then the drive around town in his Alfa Romeo with the top down, drinking beer, winding through a suburban neighborhood — had it been this very Davis Islands neighborhood?

They’d driven curving roads under oaks and magnolias, seed pods fluttering into her hair, into her lap, and he’d pointed out houses of horrors.

A low-slung ranch, its lawn a swath of dead grass: “This is where my friend was run over and killed by his brother. High on cocaine. Family station wagon.”

A Spanish Mediterranean with green-striped awnings like a candy shop: “Allan Tinker, decapitated in a waterskiing accident.”

A two-story contemporary, its stucco crumbling: “There’s a plexiglass floor upstairs above the pool. One or two ODs at parties. Heard they took the bodies somewhere it would look like suicide. One of them even survived.”

A 1960s mid-century modern, all windows and architecturally sharp landscaping: “Speaking of suicide. Woman was found by the neighbor boy in the kitchen. Former beauty queen. Tampa’s Valley of the Dolls .”