Jeff Abbott - Black Joint Point

‘Con artist. That’s good coming from you. You’re better at working the cocktail party crowd than you are the canvas. It’s the only way to explain why anyone would buy your shit.’

She stood. ‘My paintings hang in the houses of lots of really, really good lawyers around here, Whit. Tell Lucy I won’t contest the will if you withdraw from the case and she’s willing to share, oh, let’s say thirty percent. I won’t be greedy.’

‘You sure as hell won’t be, because you’re not getting one red cent.’

‘Now that’s up to Lucy to decide,’ Suzanne said. ‘Isn’t it?’

The people Claudia Salazar had known in her life hovered around her, as though they could step on the waves and not dampen their feet. Her abuelitas, one stern, the other smiling. Her parents, her mother chiding her as though the boat she leapt from was the same as a good man: Why would you leave a perfectly good boat, silly girl? David reaching a hand down toward her, then vanishing. Whit, with his bad-boy smile he didn’t know he had. Ben, sweet, folding his arms around her, letting her rest her head against his shoulder. She knew she was hallucinating, hunger and exhaustion and the salt water she couldn’t keep from her mouth in the rolling waves working their toll. Her skin felt like it might slide off her organs, her bones. She had wearied long ago of alternating between treading water, swimming, and waving the electric-red pillow, of riding the waves up and then down again into the swells. The jeans – tied into knots of air pockets – didn’t float and she finally let them sink into the emptiness below her. If she thought too long about the water beneath her – its depths, with bull sharks and jellyfish and the dissolved bones of sailors lost long ago – her breath caught in panic. She forced herself to stare at the sky, the vastness above, more comforting than the vastness below. The clouds could not hurt you.

She had tried to swim toward the coast, maintaining a steady pace, but it seemed to grow no closer. She wondered if the distant smudge of coast really was coast, or maybe a trick of the light and the water put there to tease her.

She swam, waved the red pillow, swam some more. She thought she saw a sailboat briefly in the distance but it seemed to vanish in the haze.

You can quit now, a voice she didn’t recognize piped up. It’s okay. Just stop. Give up. Sink.

‘Shut up,’ she croaked through cracked lips.

No shame in lying down. The water is only cold for a while.

Some instinct made her stop for a moment in the chop, wave the little red pillow with leaden arms.

There are things worse than being dead. Better drown yourself before the sharks get ahold of you.

‘I won’t taste good,’ Claudia said. She swam again toward the smudge she thought was coast and wondered about Danny. About Ben, if Ben were alive or dead. The sky had been empty of planes and choppers and a cold ripple of grief in her belly, and between her shoulder blades, said, No one is looking for you. They don’t know where to look.

She figured it was now past noon, and she used the sun as a guide to find west, to swim toward land. She wondered if this was the last time she’d see the sun, felt the hollowing sting in her eyes of having looked at it too much in trying to check her bearings. Maybe the next time the sun rose she would be lost for ever under the waves. Bones never found, her flesh broken apart by the salt water, her atoms scattered by the tides over the next century or so. She’d get to Thailand, Australia, India, Sweden, all the places she’d dreamed of traveling, a little bit of her in the grains of sand, in the foaming curl of the surf. Just let go. Let go. Let…

‘No!’ Claudia screamed.

Between her and the ever-distant smudge was a dot, moving, with a crescent of sail. Getting bigger.

She screamed with all her might, rose up out of the water, waving the tattered, sodden red pillow. Waving, waving, waving and screaming her throat raw.

Lucy was getting ready to leave Patch’s house, purse in hand, dressed in jeans, a plain white T-shirt, fat-lensed sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Whit pulled up, parked his Explorer to the side so she could move her Chevy out. She opened the car door, tossed in her purse, stood by the car, waiting.

‘How was afternoon court?’

‘Slow. Glad to finish a little early. Where you going?’ he asked.

‘A few errands,’ she said. ‘I haven’t gotten a thing done since Patch died.’

‘I can do that for you.’

She forced a smile. ‘It’s okay. I’d rather go myself. I need to stay busy.’

He told her about the conversation with Suzanne. Behind the sunglasses she gave no sign of emotion, but she crossed her arms, tapped her feet in anger.

‘Well. What do you want to do?’ she said.

‘If I recuse myself, the press might make an issue of it. Think that you’re more of a suspect than you are. But this is really your decision, Lucy. At least about the will.’

‘Mine. You mean ours.’ She gave him a smile, the thin kind that is barely meant. ‘We’re a team, aren’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then forget Suzanne. Spoiled little bitch. She crossed a line she’s never going to be able to step back over.’

‘Okay.’

She gave a sick little laugh. ‘I have no family left, Whit. Patch and Suzanne were it, and now… I’m not going to be able to forgive her.’

‘Never say never. She’s upset. So are you.’

‘She’s greedy. I hate greed in people. It’s corrosive. Did you know that most of the callers at the psychic hotline want to know if they’re going to get rich? Or win the lottery?’ She shook her head. ‘They never ask if they’re just going to be happy. Find love. That’s not enough for people anymore.’

‘Forget the errands. Let’s go inside, just be alone.’

‘No. It’ll be good for me to get out. A little alone time.’

‘Okay, Lucy. I’ll cook us some dinner.’

‘No need. The church ladies and Patch’s friends brought a ton of food. Heat yourself up some dinner. There’s salad, too. Open wine if you want. Don’t wait on me. I may be out for a while.’

He watched her pull out of the driveway. I have no family left, she’d said. I’ll be your family, Lucy, and he nearly laughed, the odd way love kept sneaking up on you.

The fishing cottage was small, on a couple of private acres on the south edge of Laurel Point, fifteen minutes away from Port Leo. It was owned by one of Stoney’s widowed clients who lived in San Antonio and rarely bothered with fishing. She’d given him a key a few months ago, asked him to get the real estate appraised, and he’d made and kept a copy for himself.

It was empty, of course, neat as a pin, decorated badly with nautical motifs: starfish light-switch plates, a mobile of crustaceans, fake compasses mounted on the walls like clocks. But very comfortable, a television in the corner, old bourbons and whiskeys in the bar.

‘What the fuck good is a compass mounted on the wall?’ Alex said.

‘It’s decorative,’ Stoney said.

‘It must be nice to have a house you don’t even need.’

The old woman who owns it, her husband invented an important valve on oil pumps. She’s so rich she doesn’t have to wipe her own ass if she doesn’t want to.’

Alex had inspected the cottage, took a deep breath, said, ‘It’ll do.’ The cottage was isolated, quiet, not a place anyone would look for Stoney. Earlier, he’d outlined the plan.

‘Sooner or later your brother and his girlfriend are going to be missed. People come looking for them, they want to talk to you. But you’re gone. So’s your boat. So you’re presumed missing, too.’

‘Like I’ve been kidnapped?’ Stoney said slowly.