Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

“I guess I do. But there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“All I know about you is you like your rib eye cooked black and blue. That was a new one on Cindy, and she was impressed.”

“Cindy? Oh, the blonde.”

“I guess you must have been in the mood for a steak, but that’s not why you came, is it? You wanted a look at me.”

“I did.”

“Oh, there’s another old friend of mine. His name’s Waylon.”

He nodded. “Somebody played the song earlier, right after I got here.”

“I like that the jukebox is all oldies. I don’t think they planned it that way. I think they just can’t be bothered to buy any new records. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Who the hell are you? Some kind of a cop, but what kind? And why would you wait for me to take the bait and then let me off the hook?”

He was considering his response when she added, “Or maybe I’m not off the hook yet.”

“I don’t really know much about fishing,” he said. “The house I bought has a dock you could hitch a boat to, except that I don’t own a boat and don’t want one. But you can just fish right off the dock, and I bought a rod and reel, your basic beginner’s outfit, and I gave it a try, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it wasn’t likely to turn into a lifelong passion.”

“You never went fishing before?”

“Years ago, with a friend who kept a boat at City Island. Four of us out on the water for three hours, drinking beer and eating pizza, and nobody caught a thing.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“City Island? It’s up in the Bronx.”

“New York.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s what I thought in the car, from the accent. But it was stronger then.”

“Part of the act.”

“Oh.”

“The sheriff says my accent’s slipping, that I’m starting to sound Southern. I don’t know if he’s right.”

“Florida, this part of it, is all different accents. You’ve got people in Belle Vista who moved here from all over the country, and you’ve got others who’re still living on roads that were named for their great-grandfathers.”

“That’d be me, if my grandpa’s name was Osprey.”

“That’s where you live? Osprey Drive? I know where that is.”

“So do I, but then I’d have to or I’d never find my way home. Is your accent Minnesota? There was that movie, Fargo , but you don’t sound like that.”

“We moved too much for me to have an accent. Or if I do, it’s just a blend. Standard American, I think they call it. Doak.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I was just saying your name. We’ve got to talk and we can’t, can we?”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“No, there’s a conversation we need to have and we’re just dancing around it. When I first noticed this place, Kimberley’s Kove, and the tattooed dude behind the bar can’t be Kimberley, can he?”

“Probably not.”

“Maybe Kimberley got sent home because she failed her spelling exam. K-O-V-E is just so fucking K-Y-O-O-T, you know?”

“When you first noticed the place...”

“Right. I also noticed, maybe half a mile south of here, a place called Tourist Court. Oddly enough, they spelled Court with a C.”

“On the left,” he remembered.

“A twelve-unit strip motel, plus four cabins. It’s about what you’d expect for twenty dollars a night, but the linen’s clean.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Half an hour ago,” she said. “That’s why I was late. I took one of the cabins, and I checked it just to make sure there wasn’t a porcupine sitting on the bed. There could have been, but there wasn’t.”

A lot of things went through his mind. He picked one of them and said, “You didn’t use a credit card.”

“Of course not.”

“Good.”

His hand was on the table, next to the unfinished bottle of beer, and her hand settled on top of his.

“Afterwards,” she said, “we’ll be able to talk.”

He was sprawled out on his back, feeling like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were closed, and he had the sense that he could just float away, like a leaf on a stream.

She lay her hand on him, brushed her fingertips across the hair on his chest. She said, “We worked up a sweat, didn’t we? I could put the air on.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“Well, I’m dripping, but that’s your doing. You don’t suppose we just got me pregnant, do you?”

“I never even thought.”

“Now wouldn’t that win the prize for ironic,” she said, “after what George and I went through.”

“He wanted a child?”

“Desperately, and if you ever met his kids, you’d have to wonder why. Two girls and a boy, and the older girl’s the same age as I am.”

“I know.”

“The girls are bitches who hated me before they even met me, and Alden wouldn’t know which to do first, fuck me or kill me. Both, if possible, and I don’t think he’d much care about the order. You know about his kids?”

“Just that there are three of them, and the one girl’s your age.”

“You know a whole lot about me, don’t you?” She moved her hand lower, curled her fingers around his penis. “It’s so soft and small and harmless now,” she said. “Just to lull a girl into feeling safe. Who are you, Doak?”

“A New York cop who figured his pension would go further in the Sunshine State.”

“And it didn’t go as far as you hoped, so you got sworn in as a deputy sheriff?”

He shook his head. “Got a private investigator’s license, got to know the sheriff, and when he needed somebody with no local ties to play a part and wear a wire, I got the job.”

“And that was when, a couple of days ago?”

“There was a job before that,” he said, and started to tell her about the auto dealer. She remembered him, how he’d tried to get his partner killed and wound up going away for it, but hadn’t known about the way the evidence was gathered to lock down the case.

“And that was you? Same as this morning, he got in the car with you and you got him to talk?”

“But he got to make up his own lines,” he said. “They weren’t all written down for him on a legal pad.”

“Then you turned in the recording and collected your fee and he went off to prison. Was it a substantial fee?”

“Not especially.”

“How about for me? Will they pay you even though I didn’t say anything useful?”

“They’d pay for my time. I told them not to bother, that I was happy to do a favor for Gallatin County.”

“And if it was all the same to them, you’d just as soon get paid in pussy. Oh, come on . Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting this.”

“I suppose I was.”

“I’d have to be grateful, wouldn’t I? I was this close to getting locked up.”

“You could have had a change of heart,” he pointed out. “The lines I printed out for you? You could have come up with them on your own, and meant them.”

“But that’s not what would have happened.”

“How can you know that for sure? We’ll never know, because I didn’t give you the chance to change your mind.”

“And a good thing, Doak, because that wasn’t gonna happen. What was it you said, when you pretended to try to talk me back into it? ‘I bet you’ve got the thousand dollars in your purse.’ Well, you’re damn right I did, and that wasn’t all I had. There was another envelope, a thicker one, with twenty thousand in it, because I knew you’d want half the money before you did the work, and I wanted to move right on to the next step.”

“Who told you the price was going to be forty thousand?”