Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

When I woke the warm ocean breeze had kicked up but my arms were covered in goose flesh and Billy's patio felt chilled in the wind. I rubbed my hands over my face and I was out of the dream but could remember every part of that rescue nearly a decade ago.

Sergeant Stowe and Scott and I were wrapped in emergency thermal blankets and watched as the paramedics loaded the woman into a rescue basket and carried her up the embankment to the ambulance. A freelance photographer caught the scene, the three of us, hair plastered and tinged with ice, all soaked and shivering and looking up the hill. The photo ran on the front page of the Daily News the next day with a headline: PHILLY'S FINEST BRAVE FROZEN SCHUYLKILL TO SAVE PENN STUDENT.

A cutline gave our names and a brief description of the time and location of the incident. The woman was described only as an eighteen-year-old freshman at the university. There was no story since it was the newspaper's policy not to do stories on suicide attempts. Their rationale was that publicity might encourage others to make such attempts. It always seemed to me a naive logic, that someone would look at a story of suicide and say, "Hey, there's an idea." But it also seemed an incomprehensible world where an eighteen-year-old would decide there was nothing left in it for her.

Of the three heroes that day, the sergeant was soon promoted, Scott left the force for engineering school, and I went on to the detective unit where I fell on my face.

The girl lived but we never heard from her. Maybe she resented our interference. Maybe she went back home, recovered, turned her life around. I didn't think of the incident often, but more than once on the edge of my dreams I have tasted her cold lips, blown air into a dark throat and felt my own warm breath come back to me.

The sound of water pulled me all the way back into the world. The surf below was so clean and uniform, each wave crested and then ripped down the sand with a sound like paper tearing. I listened for a few minutes and then got up and went to bed. There were no sounds from the other rooms and I lay on top of the covers in the guest room for a long time, staring at a dark ceiling and thinking about the taste of Richards' kiss, and thinking about Megan Turner and how I'd let her go without a fight. Sometime late in the night, my memories let me sleep.

Billy's girlfriend was gone by the time I got up and made my way to the coffee pot. Billy was out on the patio, the sliding doors opened wide to the ocean and the rising heat. The AC was kicked up to accommodate the fine paintings and fabrics. It was Billy's way of enjoying both worlds and to hell with the cost of electricity. He was sitting in the morning sun, a laptop popped open on the glass-topped table. He was holding the Wall Street Journal folded lengthwise once and then halved again, reading it like a subway commuter. But he was wearing a pair of shorts and an open white linen shirt and his bare feet were propped up on a chair.

"And how's the market today?" I said, knowing his early morning inclinations.

"The w-world is a new and wonderful p-place," he answered, peeking up from his paper, a satisfied schoolboy look on his brown, GQ face.

Billy had somehow foreseen the tumble of technology stocks, and those clients who trusted him, and most of them did, let him put their substantial gains in commodities before the fall.

"Sleep well?" I said.

"Very w-well. Thank you."

The sun was throwing a wide sparkle on the dimpled Atlantic and the sky was stealing some of the blue from the Gulf Stream.

"I thought I might go out today and buy a new canoe," I said. Billy nodded.

"B-Back to the sh-shack?"

"Why not? Can't live with my attorney forever."

We both listened to the sea for a long minute.

"Your p-portfolio is d-doing well. You c-could afford a reasonable p-place on the beach."

I let the thought sit awhile as I watched the broken line of early boats making their way east, out past the channel marker buoys and onto the horizon where their fiberglass superstructures stuck up small and white against the sky.

"You d-don't have to keep h-hiding out there," he finally said and the sting of the logic, the harsh taste of the truth gathered at the top of my throat.

"Oh, so I could hide up here in a tower like you, Billy?"

He turned and stared out at the ocean, a look of thoughtful recognition on his dark face but not a glint of offense. He was a black man who grew up on some of the hardest streets in urban America. He'd made his way past a million slapdowns from subtle to raw to get out of the ghetto, get through law school, gain the respect of his profession and make it to a place where he made his own choices. He made no apologies or excuses for those choices. It was that truth that made our friendship work.

He went back to his paper. I went back to my coffee. We both let the truth sit there for a while.

"Y-You th-think it's done?" he finally asked. "The killing?"

"It's officially done," I answered. "Sometimes that's enough."

"Enough f-for who?" he said, looking at me like a lawyer who knows too much about his client to let it pass. He let me stare at the ocean. But his patience had limits.

"What are you d-doing with the knife?"

I shouldn't have underestimated Billy's ability to put the signs together.

"He's a hunter," I said. "Knows the wilderness. Knows animal tendencies. Thinks like one himself."

"Yeah?"

"Bait," I said.

I could feel Billy's eyes on the side of my face.

"Hunters use it, and they are also susceptible to it," I said. "They'll bait their quarry, but they'll also enter into places they know their quarry is, even if it's dangerous, because that's where the goal is. It baits them."

"So w-what's the b-bait. The knife, or you?"

I wasn't sure of the answer. My hunch was the knife. But I needed to be attached to it. The killer was too afraid of the cops. He might be an animal, but he wasn't a stupid animal. Even a brash hunter won't expose himself too much. But this one had already been bold enough to come into my space, creep my shack, leave a violent piss marking on my territory by smashing my canoe.

Billy's eyes were still on my face.

"S-So you d-don't think it was Ashley?"

"Maybe."

"S-So why not let Hammonds have it?"

"Hammonds won't flush him. He can't get close," I said finally turning to Billy with what I knew was that stupidly confident grin we used in the patrol car in Philly.

Billy met my eyes and said: "Let me show you s-something."

I followed him into his study and while he went into a file room I wandered to the floor-to-ceiling corner windows that looked out on the city. Billy loved high views but the thing about South Florida from a height was its complete lack of borders; no mountains or hills or even small rises, nothing but the horizon to hold it in.

"I know you're fighting with the idea of this thing being done," Billy started, talking from the filing room and out of sight. "But your comment about someone having the capacity to kill started me thinking about your known band of Brown's 'acquaintances,' so I dug a little deeper into the case I handled for Gunther when he was being sued by one of his fishing clients. He had told me it involved a family and he mentioned that he and Blackman often partnered up on trips. But when the case was suddenly dropped by the complainant, I never went much more into it."

"And now?" My attention had wandered to a museum- quality Renoir hanging on an interior wall under its own spotlight.

"S-So I p-pulled the whole f-file," Billy said, coming back into the room and placing a stack of files in the middle of his broad, polished walnut desk. The attorney for the family had taken depositions from the father and mother.