Lisa Unger - Smoke

“Dylan.” There was no love lost between the two men. “Why would he want to help me?”

“I think he wants to help me .”

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Just do me a favor. Watch your back, Jesamyn. If they can get to me, they can get to you.”

Her mind immediately went to Benjamin and she felt a pulse of fear. He started to say something else, but there was a heavy click on the line and an electronic voice told them that their time was up. The line went dead in her hand. The wind was whipping around her, pulling at her coat and flipping her blonde hair around.

She turned to see the two homicide detectives and Evelyn huddled around the covered bodies of Rosario Mendez and her child, whose life probably ended before it began at the bottom of the East River. She found herself thinking about Baby Boy Mendez and how he’d wavered between the past and present tense when referring to his sister. She thought about something Mount had said about Rosario practically being Baby Boy’s mother. About how his mother hadn’t cared enough about him to give him a proper name. Then she thought about Mount, accused of murdering a woman, beating her to death with his fists… a prostitute he might have loved or thought he loved. It was up to Jesamyn to prove he didn’t kill her. And suddenly, it all just felt like too much. She walked toward the road, turning away from anyone who might see that tears she couldn’t stop had welled in her eyes, threatened to spill down her face.

Florida didn’t seem like a real place with its pink birds and orange groves, mobile homes and hurricanes, the endless Jimmy Buffet soundtrack that played from the speakers of every restaurant and beachside souvenir shop. It seemed like someone’s idea of a place. And not a very good idea at that. Furthermore, it was uncomfortable to wear black in Florida. And why would anyone want to go somewhere where it was difficult to wear black?

“And don’t even get me started on Disney,” Lydia said, peeling off her leather jacket and looking at the paper white skin on her arms.

Jeff and Dax both rolled their eyes. They’d heard the Florida rant before. They both knew after a couple of days down here, she’d shed all her clothes and turn into a total beach babe. You had to force her to put a tee-shirt on over her sunburn like a kid.

“If you ask me, this place is black at its core,” she went on, not noticing as Jeffrey and Dax exchanged a look in the rearview mirror. “Anything this shiny and pretty and plastic has to have a rotten center. Pure evil.”

In front of them, the gleaming white Gulf beach and the crystalline blue water beyond looked like an oasis between the heat waves that rose off the black concrete of the road. Of course, their last visit to Florida had been pretty frightening.

“You know, when we travel, we tend to see only the very worst a place has to offer… men with guns, back alleys,” said Jeffrey. “Maybe you should give it a chance.”

An ice cream truck jingled around the roundabout they were waiting to enter.

“They should outlaw those things,” said Lydia.

“They should,” said Dax. “That stupid goddamn music makes me want to pull out my rocket launcher.”

“Man, this is a tough crowd,” said Jeff. “You can’t take New York anywhere. I kind of like it here. It’s peaceful.”

They pulled past a strip of outdoor bars and restaurants, tacky souvenir shops and real estate offices. To the right, white-capped water lapped lazily against a sugar-white beach. A median lined with tall, full palm trees that looked like giant pineapples divided the north- and south-heading lanes of the road. They stopped at a crosswalk and let a dumpy tourist family wearing tacky beach cover-ups and painful-looking sunburns cross in front of them. Dax ogled two bikini-clad rollerbladers with matching heads of bottle-blonde hair, huge fake tits, and impossibly slim bodies.

“Maybe it’s not so bad down here after all, eh?” he observed absently.

They passed a row of gleaming high-rise hotels and crested a causeway that looked out over a marina lined with hundreds of boats in a canal that led to the Gulf. High cumulous clouds towered full and dramatic in a cerulean sky. Lydia rolled down the window to breathe in the salt and they all felt the swath of hot, humid air as it saturated the cool interior of the car.

The causeway ended in a lush explosion of green. The temperature dropped as they passed beneath a glade of trees that seemed to shelter the island in a dark canopy. From the road, they could no longer see the ocean because of the high walls that edged the magnificent homes lining the beaches. A thick cover of palms, oleander, and hibiscus bushes, fanning birds-of-paradise, and loblolly pine allowed only glimpses of tile roofs.

“I think this is it. Up here on the right,” said Dax, scrolling down on his portable global positioning device.

They slowed as they passed a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates, the metal twisted and shaped to resemble thorned branches. Lydia saw the New Day logo on an unmarked plaque above an intercom speaker box. She felt the familiar buzz, an agitation to get behind those gates made her fidget in her seat. When she thought of Lily now, all she could see was that image, those sharp shoulder blades, the shaved head.

“Maybe we should call the police,” said Lydia.

“Tell them what?” asked Jeffrey.

“That we think a missing girl is locked inside those gates,” she said.

“And what do you think they’ll do? Take a report and investigate, announcing to Trevor Rhames and company that we’re here in Florida.”

“And who knows?” added Dax. “They’re as powerful in this town as the FBI seems to think, who’s to say the chief of police is not a New Day devotee.”

“Jeez, it was just a thought. Take it easy.”

“We’ll wait till dark,” said Jeffrey, his eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. “Then we’ll try to find our way in.”

“Since that’s been working so well for us,” she said, looking at him.

She heard Dax in the back tapping on the keys of his BlackBerry.

“What are you doing?” she asked, turning to watch as he typed furiously with his thumbs.

He looked up at her. “None of your beeswax,” he said, sticking the device in his pocket. Lydia had a wave of technology lust and felt jealous.

“I need one of those,” she said sullenly as she turned to watch the property pass. She could see the cupola on the roof peeking out through the trees and her thoughts turned, for some reason, to Shawna Fox, a girl she’d been far too late to help. She remembered the green eyes that stared out at her from a photograph handed to her by Shawna’s desperate, sad boyfriend, Greg.

Lydia was a different person then, as sad and desperate as Greg, haunted by an unresolved grief for her mother that had become so much a part of her she barely even realized it. Old photos of people who were gone had angered Lydia then. They were cold, eerie reminders of how easily life was lost, of how vividly alive people remained in the memories of those who loved them, and how grief was the slick-walled, bottomless abyss between those places.

Her experiences since that time had taught her something about the nature of love and what it meant to lose it. She’d come to understand that though we may lose the people we love, the gift of their love remains. In the throes of grief, that was little comfort. But in time, that knowledge could bring a kind of peace, a tentative healing. She thought then of her father, whom she’d lost before she ever knew him, who she now realized had been trying to reach out to her for most of her life. She thought of the woman, the stranger, who might be her sister. She felt a wash of anxiety mingling with a strange feeling of hope. Shawna. Tatiana. Lily. The lost, grief-mangled girl Lydia herself had been once.