Jeff Abbott - Black Joint Point

‘Maybe Lucy came here, waited for you to come home, wanted to tell you the whole truth. Then she lost her nerve, left.’

‘It’s nice to think that,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

When Claudia got home David was waiting there in shorts and a T-shirt. He sat on the stairs leading to her apartment with a cold twelve-pack of Shiner Bock.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘I think we should get drunk,’ David said. ‘I’m more likely to apologize when I’m drunk.’

‘That’s a good reason.’

‘Someone finally put you through more hell than I did,’ David said. ‘Jesus, that sucks. I’m sorry, Claudia.’

She let him in and they drank the beer, her sitting on the couch, him on the floor. She drank the first one fast, too fast, and made herself promise to take longer for the second.

‘So Ben was in it with Alex Black from the beginning?’

‘I wasn’t the only seduction in Ben’s life,’ Claudia said.

David raised an eyebrow.

‘Ben got seduced himself. Living with a wealthy brother who was living on the edge of the law in more ways than one and wasn’t paying a price for it. Of course Ben is not talking and he’s using Stoney’s money to hire some fancy defense lawyer from Houston.’ She sipped her beer. ‘I won’t get a chance to say this on the stand at Ben’s trial unless we find evidence, but I think Ben found out about Stoney’s plan to steal treasure from Patch Gilbert’s land and fake an archaeological dig on Lucy’s land. And if he’d gotten to know Alex Black through Stoney, he would have seen that Alex was more interested in the treasure’s financial value than in the fame of discovery. Ben didn’t have Stoney’s blind spot for glory. So he must have cut a separate deal with Alex. They would have grabbed the treasure and then Alex would have eliminated Stoney. But then they didn’t plan on Patch and Thuy Tran showing up and having a double murder complicate their whole deal. And they sure didn’t count on Danny Laffite coming after them with a gang and a vengeance.’

She finished her beer. David handed her another. ‘You know what pisses me off?’ she asked.

‘What, honey?’

‘That fucker,’ she said. ‘He abandoned me with Danny and Gar, maybe he even cut a deal with Zack Simard to get him to leave us behind on the other boat. He knew Gar would kill me, kill Danny. I’m sure he killed Zack Simard at some point, dumped the body, ran the boat aground. He looked like the poor little victim. The whole time he was in with Alex Black. I’m pretty sure Stoney never called Ben that night, apologizing and asking him to come to the warehouse. That was Alex and Ben’s plan: get rid of Stoney, get rid of me since I was pushing on Ben to help the cops, leave the country with the treasure.’

‘He should have stuck with teaching.’

‘Ben molding young minds – I may puke.’ She downed more beer, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I don’t think it would surprise me if he and Alex had planned on getting rid of each other, in the end. Greedy bastards.’

‘Claudia, it’s not your fault.’ David rested his chin on his knees, gave her a sad smile.

‘What?’

‘I know you. You’re pissed at yourself for not having seen through this guy. Listen, his own brother didn’t see through him.’

‘I’m smarter than Stoney Vaughn ever was, please.’ She shook her head. ‘I think my career at the PD just flat-lined. Jesus, he’s ruined a couple of major league pleasant high school memories for me.’

‘Memories?’

‘He was my first, David, back when we were in high school.’

He opened another beer. ‘You mean I wasn’t?’

‘I never told you you were. You were my second.’

‘Well,’ said David, ‘you weren’t my first either.’

‘I think I’ll wear a red dress to Ben’s trial,’ she said, a little drunk. ‘That asshole.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘For you. For Whit.’

‘You can’t stand him.’

‘I’m gonna try to stand him, Claud.’

She smiled for the first time. ‘Now you’re drunk.’

They drank too much, both of them, and they ended up kissing but she wasn’t drunk enough to sleep with him. She wouldn’t let him drive, so David slept on her couch and at one point in the night, dehydrated and hungover, she got up for water and she watched him sleep and to her surprise a little part of her missed him.

Then she went back to bed, hoping it was just the beer.

Lucy was buried next to Patch, in Port Leo’s big, grand Catholic cemetery. Afterward, Whit felt as hollow as though his bones had been plucked from beneath his skin. He took a month off from court, got a retired county judge to fill in for him. He did not have to rule on Lucy’s cause of death or see the autopsy papers. He let Gooch take him out on the waters each day after the funeral, the summer roaring into its hottest days, sat and stared at the flat of the bay, watching the waves live and die in their brief existence.

The third week Gooch invited Claudia and she sat with Whit on the stern of the boat, in chairs designed for deep-sea fishing. Gooch stood on the flying bridge, steering out into the Gulf. Helen Dupuy had gotten work in Port Leo, cleaning at a bed-and-breakfast, and could not join them. Whit drank a Coke, not talking much, only saying how the Astros were bound to disappoint again this summer.

‘Lucy enjoyed baseball, didn’t she?’ Claudia said.

Whit didn’t look at her. ‘Yeah.’

She touched his hand. ‘I didn’t love Ben – I hadn’t quite gotten past the infatuation point. We hadn’t been together very long. But you loved Lucy.’

‘Yes, Dr Claudia, I did.’ Sounding a little irritated with her now.

‘But you haven’t grieved for her.’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Tell me, did killing Alex make you feel better, Whit?’

He stared at her, turned away. ‘This is going to be a damn long day fishing.’

‘It was self-defense. But you killed him. You even told me to let him die. Not that anything could have saved him then.’ Her words – unsaid in the long quiet of the past weeks – came in a rush.

‘Claudia, let it go.’

‘Are you worried you’re like him in some way? He killed Lucy, you killed him – you think you’re on his level?’

‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘I don’t feel anything about killing him yet. That bothers me.’ He looked away. ‘But Lucy. I… yelled at her. I ended it with her. I said terrible things to her.’

‘You had every right to be mad at her, at what she’d done. You can be mad at someone you love.’

‘That only works if you get to say you’re sorry, Claud.’

‘She knows, Whit. She knows.’ She laced her fingers with his.

Gooch stopped the boat, dropped anchor, called down that it was time to fish.

‘Let’s go swimming first,’ she said.

‘You want to get in the water? After you nearly died out here?’

‘Not the water’s fault. What am I supposed to do, avoid the Gulf for the rest of my life?’ Claudia stood, took off her T-shirt, dropped her shorts. She had a swim-suit underneath, a navy two-piece, not cut too brief.

‘Is that a police-issue bikini?’ Gooch called.

She shot him the finger, dove over the edge. She surfaced. ‘Come on, it feels great,’ she called to Whit, who stood at the rail.

He didn’t move.

‘Whit, come on.’

Whit shucked off his shirt, cannonballed over the railing like he thought he’d better before he changed his mind. Broke to the surface, let the gentle wave swell pick him up, settle him back down. Claudia kicked away from him, giving him space.

‘It feels okay,’ he said.

She watched him dive down, surface, again and again, swimming through the waves, and if there were any tears on his face she could not tell.