Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“I’d wear it two nights straight, too, if it looked as good on me.”

“What a ghastly visual.”

“It got your attention. I’m Roland Ford.”

“I know. Justine Timmerman. I landed in the public defender’s office about the time you ditched the sheriffs. If you ask me, your partner should have been fired and tried for that shooting.”

We sat side by side at dinner, surrounded by people I didn’t know. The party was thrown by my “personal-wealth advisor,” who had put on much more of a spread than my modest investments deserved. I’d worn my best suit.

Justine was there with her friend Elke Meyer, who sat on the other side of me and told stories of Justine and her fishing in Baja the previous September. Justine had flown them to La Paz and back. Third year running. The women also snowboarded, skydived, and collected lobster together, at night, with headlamps to find their prey in the shifting black Pacific. Justine was a pilot, Elke a boat captain with a Master near-coastal license who “punched the clock” as an ophthalmologist.

They laughed and talked easily, a bit of competition in the stories. I sat between them like a stump. They’d known each other almost all their lives and were the same age — twenty-nine — and proud to still be under thirty. They joked about pumping out some babies before too long, in plenty of time to get back to the careers and the fun.

They seemed interested that I’d lived up and down the coast, surfed and boxed and shot it out in the first Fallujah because I really did believe in service to country. They thought I’d done the right thing in regard to a trigger-happy sheriff’s partner, and seemed intrigued that I could actually make a living as a private investigator. I had never wanted more to impress.

The three of us danced together after dinner. Happy chaos. But dancing is the one social skill at which I score above average, and I like it, so afterward I took them separately on sambas and fox-trots and swings. Elke was very good and Justine more intuition than skill, and I was proud to be the center around which they moved. When I finally took a break I downed my whole glass of ice water.

“Anyone up for a dip in the bay?” Justine asked. I looked out at the windblown rain and the bony fingers of lightning now closer to land.

“I’m in,” I said. Testosterone pumping, compelled.

“Let’s go,” said Elke.

We checked our coats and valuables, then burst outside. The storm roared down extra hard, as if it had been waiting for people like us. Two blocks. The bay boiled before us. We ran across the small beach, shucked our shoes, and waded in. I remember the sharp cold, and the hard-to-forgive idea that I was willingly ruining good clothes to impress the redhead. Lightning cracked and thunder rumbled. We swam and splashed and yelled, then trudged across the sand to the boardwalk and back into the dignified lobby of the Hyatt. Got our personal things from the coat-check clerk. Justine’s and Elke’s party dresses were little more than drenched rags plastered to their bodies. People looked at us with amused disapproval.

At floor seven they stepped out of the elevator and blew me kisses while the door shut.

After that first unusual night, Justine and I became a two-person swarm. We were together almost constantly. I’d been a bachelor all of my thirty-four years, hot and cold, all in or all out, eager or bored, faithless or betrayed or both. I was never one for meeting the family. Neither was she.

Six months later we were married on a large motor yacht, Cassandra, offshore of San Diego. It was as fine a wedding as I can picture — good people filled with goodwill, all thankful for the present and bullish on the future. A genuine celebration. Justine was ridiculously beautiful. The families got along. My mother and father were proud and blended in happily with the conspicuous wealth around them. As a former sailor, Dad loved the 248-foot Cassandra , with her helipad and “Balinese spa” and swimming pool. Grandpa Dick and Grandma Liz behaved themselves until well past midnight. We carried on late.

During the many congratulations I received that day, I secretly congratulated myself for having the good sense to love her.

Looking back I see our year and a half of life together as a half-crazy blur. Work hard, play hard. Sleep when you’re dead. I regret not having considered that sleep might come to one of us much sooner than we’d thought. But we were young and in love and death cast no shadow that we couldn’t outfly.

One Saturday in March, the first week of spring, two weeks shy of our anniversary, Justine woke up before me and came back to bed with two cups of coffee. She set one on my nightstand and took the other to her side and we propped up pillows and watched two orioles courting in the oak tree outside our window. “I’ve decided, Roland. I want to lay an egg, too.”

We’d been talking about that — Justine laying eggs — for weeks. She’d never come right out with it until then. I told her the same thing I’d said before. “I think you should.”

“You really do?”

“You’ll hatch it, I’ll bring the worms, and we can give him the whole bitchen world.”

“Give her the whole bitchen world.”

“Give all of them the whole bitchen world.”

“Well, that was easy, Daddy Rolando!”

We made love with full abandon and no protection twice that morning before breakfast. It is an entirely different experience when a life is in the making. Nothing like it. After which, Justine, still in my arms and breathing hard, said we had to go celebrate with the cloud gods.

But I’d made an appointment for early that afternoon with an old friend, down on his luck and needing my help with an employee who might also be an embezzler.

“Oh, let’s just fly instead,” she said.

“He’s a friend.”

“Then he’ll understand if you reschedule.”

“I did that already. Last week, when we went to the concert.”

“Just call him.”

I did, but my friend really did need my help, and professional pride wouldn’t allow me to postpone meeting him twice in a week’s time.

With a smile and a wave Justine drove her convertible down the Rancho de los Robles drive. Sunshine glinting on her hair, music blasting.

In the time we were together she mentioned her mortality just once. “I’m not scared of dying,” she said. “I’m scared of being forgotten.”

Now, as I approached my home on that same long winding drive on which I had last seen her alive, Justine was not forgotten. She was everywhere.

Coming up the drive, I saw that things were wrong at the rancho. A black SUV stood outside the main house. Wesley Gunn, running toward me, arms waving. Dick and Liz, near the SUV, gesticulating at each other. Lindsey and Burt outside casita three, in animated discussion.

I punched the truck around the last curve and skidded to a stop as Wesley reached the window. “Weird guy with a gun came looking for you. We got him cuffed and locked in the empty casita!”

“Get in.”

By the time we got there, all of the other tenants were now clustered outside casita three. Dick and Liz stood at one of the windows with their hands cupped, looking in. Lindsey leaned back against the front door, doing something on her phone. Dressed brightly for his thrice-weekly eighteen holes of golf, Burt waited on the front porch of the casita, feet spread and thick arms crossed. “I was putting my clubs in the trunk when he came racing up and demanded to see you,” said Burt. “Opened the gate and drove past the no-trespassing signs. Gave me half a look at some federal ID and the gun in his holster. So...”