John Sandford: The Fool's Run

"Yeah, it is."

"Have you thought about Dace at all?"

"You mean, do I feel guilty?"

"Yeah."

I stopped painting and looked at her. "Yes. I do. I thought I knew what we were getting into, and I didn't. And Dace paid. But there's nothing I can do about it. I could go after Maggie, I suppose. But I can't do that, either. And I like it here. I don't want to spend the rest of my life running from somebody, the cops, or the mob, or whoever."

She nodded. "That's where I got to, sitting on the beach. I kept thinking, Dace would want us to do this, or Dace would want us to do that. Then one day I figured, Dace doesn't want us to do anything. He's dead. It's like they turned out a TV. It's like thinking a TV show wants you to do something, after you've turned it off."

I went back to painting and she watched for another minute or two, then ran off down the sandbar, stopping to look at the flotsam. She was back in five minutes with a wasp-waisted seven-ounce Coke bottle.

"Must be twenty years old," she said.

"I don't want to break your heart, but you can still buy them like that."

"Oh yeah?" She looked at me suspiciously, but when I nodded, heaved it into the river. She had a good arm. The bottle hit and bobbed up, its neck sticking out of the water.

"Been stealing anything?" I asked.

"Nope. I'm too rich," she said. "But I'm thinking about it anyway."

"Playing the ponies?"

"A little."

"How about the nose candy?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Were you faithful to me down in Mexico?"

She snorted and threw a driftwood stick after the Coke bottle and watched them both float away. A tow jockey ran his harbor boat by, heading toward the coal dump downriver.

"Are you, you know, involved with anybody?" she asked.

"Nah."

"What are my chances of getting laid?"

"Pretty good, if you play your cards right," I said.

"Okay," she said. "All right."

She looked happy. She found a flat rock and tried to skip it side-armed out in the river. It skipped once and crashed.

The river itself was dark and black and snaky, the currents and crosscurrents bucking up along the bar. We spent most of the afternoon there, painting and talking and watching the clouds roll in, up from the south, over the Mississippi.