Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

“I know, it’s a real problem. Women are after me all the time. My house is on a creek, but with a little digging I could extend it so that I had a moat around it.”

“You’ve got a girlfriend, don’t you?”

“There’s one woman I see three or four times a month.”

“Married, right? And she’s the only one?”

“Sometimes I go out for a drink and I get lucky. But not all that often.”

“And you don’t look all that hard for it, either.”

“No, I guess I don’t. And no, I didn’t write out a script for you last night because it was the best way I could think of to get laid.”

“God, I hope not. Printing everything out by hand in big block capitals. I just know you’ve got a computer. You’d need it or how could you Google people like Doak Walker? Haven’t you got a little old ink-jet printer to keep it company?”

“There’s a record of everything you do on a computer.”

“Even if you erase it?”

“I don’t trust any of that. It gets on your hard drive and you think you’ve deleted it and it stores copies of itself in six different places. And some kid who drove his teachers nuts until they kicked his ass out of school, he sits down with the computer you scrubbed, and he can tell you what you had for breakfast and where you got your shoes.”

“So you decided to be careful,” she said. “I get it. I’m not used to thinking that way. I’ve never had to be careful before.”

“You weren’t very careful talking to Richard Gonson.”

“No.”

“You asked me a question, and I keep not answering it. I suppose I’m afraid of sounding like a moron. Well, too bad if I do. I’m going to tell you a fantasy I’ve had for over twenty years.”

It was still full dark during the drive home, but the sky was starting to lighten up by the time he pulled into his driveway. He needed a shower, he’d driven all the way home smelling himself and smelling her on him, but when he got his clothes off he stretched out on the bed, just for a minute, and when he finally opened his eyes it was past noon.

He spent a long time in the shower, decided he didn’t need to shave, but looked at himself in the mirror for a long moment. A little more gray at the temples, and he didn’t mind it there, but knew it was the thin edge of the wedge. There’d be more gray coming.

He checked his phone. There was a call he had to return, from an insurance office in Perry that used him now and again for background checks. It didn’t pay all that much, but he could generally get the job done without leaving his house, just noodling around a little on his computer.

Funny how computers had scared the crap out of him when they first started showing up at the station house. He’d thought of himself as an old-school cop, getting out in the city streets and knocking on doors, burning rubber, wearing out shoe leather. But the fear went away over time, and it turned out he had a natural affinity for the machine. The department would pay if you wanted to take a course on your own time, so he went to a third-floor room at John Jay three nights a week and let a young woman with a nose ring and a Hello Kitty tattoo turn him into an expert, though he didn’t kid himself. He knew he was still nowhere near the proficiency level of the average twelve-year-old.

He returned the call, and the agent agreed to email him the applicant’s name and vitals. The agent, Bob Newhouser, had played sports at Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, and now spent as much time as he could on the golf course. He liked golf jokes as much as he liked golf, and had a new one this morning, and Doak didn’t have to force his laugh.

He booted up his computer, checked his email, deleted most of it. He stood up, realized he was hungry, and remembered emptying the milk carton over the last of the cereal. Was there anything in the refrigerator? Nothing but beer, and that wasn’t how the day ought to start.

He checked his other phone. The new one.

Nothing.

He went out for breakfast.

They’d taken both cars from Kimberley’s to the motel. She led in the Lexus and he followed her along the stretch of empty road, parked in the back near the cabin she’d rented.

And when it was time to go he’d stood in the cabin’s doorway and watched her taillights disappear in the distance.

First, though, he’d given her a cell phone. He’d bought two of them for $39.99 apiece in a 7-Eleven on 41, paying cash and waving away the receipt. He’d tossed the packaging and instructions and programmed each with the phone number of the other. And in the little Tourist Court cabin he’d given her one of them and showed her how it worked. “It’s prepaid,” he said, “with more message units than we’re likely to use. You use it only to call me, and only on the number that it’s already set to dial. Never call me on any other phone, and never call any other number from this phone, and—”

“I get it. It’ll be in my purse, and I won’t leave home without it. But I think I’ll keep it turned off and just check it from time to time.”

“That’s what I intend to do.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it? I like your fantasy better. We just get in the car and disappear. But it wouldn’t work, would it?”

“For days, maybe weeks. Even as a fantasy that was about as much mileage as I could get out of it. You know the first thing you said to me at Kimberley’s?”

“I forget what it was.”

“ ‘Now what?’ ”

“Was that what I said? Yes, I guess it was.”

“A couple of days, a couple of weeks at the outside, and that’s the question we’d both be asking, and neither one of us would be able to come up with an answer.”

“You did make it sound good, though.”

“Riding off into the sunset.”

“I was about ready to do it. Not even go back to pack a bag.”

“That’s an important part of it, not wasting a minute. The clothes on our backs and nothing else.”

“Not bad. How many years did you run that tape?”

“Maybe twenty. Maybe more. You’re the only person who ever got to hear it.”

“I think I knew that. And now—”

“Now it’s gone,” he said.

“Did I do something to spoil it?”

He shook his head. “What killed it was hearing myself say the words. See, it’s a fantasy about running, about a new start in a new place. The partner’s just a reason to run and start over.”

“In other words, a geographical solution.”

“Which is how the West was won, you know. A whole swarm of malcontents telling themselves that the next place would be better.”

“Makes me think of my mama and the losers she kept hooking up with. And me, for Christ’s sake, playing hopscotch with a map of America.”

“I came to Florida for a new start. And found it, fair enough, but I took myself along.”

“Hard not to, isn’t it? I make that little mistake every time. Doak, if your fantasy’s dead, where do we go from here?”

“ ‘Now what.’ ”

“Yeah, that’s still the question, isn’t it? More than ever.” She tilted her head, showed him the blue of her eyes. “I guess we’ll have to look for the answer.”

He drove to the Denny’s on the motel strip outside of Perry, because they served breakfast around the clock, but when he looked at the menu he decided what he really wanted was a patty melt and an order of onion rings.

There was a 7-Eleven next door, but it was the one where he’d paid cash for the two cell phones. There’d be a different clerk at this hour, and nobody would bother to look at him twice, but it was just as easy to drive to the next convenience store on the strip for a box of cereal and a quart of milk and the couple of other things he’d run low on. He found enough items to get over the store’s credit card minimum, and used his Visa, because another thing he was running low on was cash.