Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“We’ll take the truck,” I said.

“So you can dive Morro Bay and Point Arena.”

“That thought comes to mind.”

“And the Farallons?”

“I did that for Rusty.”

The Farallon Islands off San Francisco are the most dangerous place on earth to dive. They’re crawling with white sharks, the water is cold, the visibility is poor. Death can get its teeth into you before you even know what’s happening. If the sharks don’t get you, the currents will. The rocks are sharp as razors and there’s not even a place to moor a boat for landing. It reminded me of what I’d seen in the fucking art world-sharks and teeth.

Rusty was an old friend, a brave and sometimes crazy man who was still making his meager living diving for urchins in that lethal water. He saved my life at Corcoran, and I will do almost anything to save his. He is stuck with me for life, and I with him.

I went to the South Farallons with Rusty the day Christopher Thomas went missing. Rusty and I made the rugged crossing that night and dove for urchin in the morning. I was forty feet down when a white shark emerged from the unfathomable darkness, came at me, and veered back into the darkness. I remember his teeth, the swatch of underside white. I realized, again, that miracles happen daily. We got six hundred pounds that day, not too bad, better quality than the Japanese can find, top dollar for Rusty.

The cops found this story hard to believe. A felon’s alibi is rarely considered airtight, especially when corroborated by another felon.

“If you can survive the art snobs,” I said, “I can survive the Farallons.”

She looked at me, then went back to work on the canvas, a troubled look clouding her beautiful face.

We ate dinneroutside that night in honor of the first day of summer, even though the clouds had deepened and brought a chill to the night. We’ve got an old picnic table in the backyard, set up under a coral tree. There’s a barbecue and a hammock. The kids, Jimmy and Elsa, were already inside working on the dishes and feeding scraps to the dogs. They don’t know about me yet. There will be a time for that. I could see them through the windows, standing in front of the kitchen sink in the yellow light, innocent, full of life and promise.

“You don’t have to go to San Francisco, you know,” said Belle. “Those aren’t your people up there.”

“They’re not yours either.”

“It’s for Rosie. Only and purely. I made a promise.”

“If you go, I go. I might get to punch somebody out, make a scene. Get thrown in jail.”

Belle smiled and shook her head. “I’m giving you an out.”

“I don’t want an out.”

“I don’t mind if you see Rusty. I understand. But the Farallons spook me.”

“They spook everybody, even Rusty.”

“But he dives them anyway.”

“Yes.”

“And you do too, which spooks me even more.”

I looked at my wife, then out toward Laguna. The town was hidden beyond the hills, but I could see the glow of the city lights rising into the pale cloud cover. Down below us, the cars moved along Laguna Canyon Road, sending up a distant hiss.

Belle went to the house and came back with two snifters of cognac.

We walked up the road to a flat spot in the hills and looked down on the city.

“I wish it had never happened,” said Belle. “None of it. I wish it was over. But it isn’t. It never ends.”

“Then we’ll stay away.”

“We can’t. It’s cowardly. And I have to be there.”

It was a long drive but he’s found Laguna Canyon Road.

Now he follows the couple from a safe distance, watches as they cut across a large swath of land studded with wildflowers and sagebrush.

When they stop in front of a small outbuilding, he waits behind a tree, raises the binoculars to his eyes, turns and adjusts the lenses until everything snaps into focus-the woman’s face in close-up, blond hair, blue eyes.

He turns his attention to the man, focuses on the muscular arms, a blurry prison-type tattoo of a snake on his biceps, and wonders when the hell he will get out of there.

Binoculars back on the woman, the one who interests him. She knows something, this pretty woman with the worried, innocent face.

I’ve never been a morning person. But this morning I couldn’t wait for the muse to drag her lazy bum over here and sprinkle inspirational dust on me. The commission was due next week. I struggled with it but I absolutely could not miss the deadline. Despite assumptions associated with my chosen profession as an “arteest,” I’m not a go-with-the-flow kind of gal. I plan. I fret. With bills to pay I have a timetable to keep. Inspiration is a luxury I can’t afford.

In my younger years, I’d postulated that creativity didn’t hold normal office hours, nor did it owe allegiance to a singular space. I’d painted some of my best works in the dead of night, in a crappy apartment, no eye on the clock. Just me, paint, and canvas, locked in battle, the potential of the piece in my mind’s eye warring with reality-misshapen forms, mismatched colors, misaligned borders-which fed my frustration with the process but fueled my creative spirit to hold something tangible in my hands at the end of the fight.

My youthful idealism had been worn to a nub over years of feast and famine in the art world. Now with two kids to wake, coddle, and send to school, two dogs to pet, feed, and walk, plus a husband to tend much in the same manner as dogs and children, my middle-of-the-night painting sessions are as much a memory as the cramped apartment, the shrill sounds of sirens blaring outside my window, and the sickly bluish green fluorescent lighting that used to glow over my workstation. Gone too are the days of having to scrounge up items to pawn in order to buy another tube of Sennelier.

These days I bask in natural light pouring from the skylights above my workstation. In this dedicated “creative” space the younger me would’ve scoffed at, I’m treated to humid, salty ocean breezes wafting through the windows, rolls of canvas stacked against the wall, stretched in frames, draped across every horizontal surface, and dozens of tubes of paint in every hue imaginable. Still, in deference to my eco-consciousness-the only conviction left from my youth-they are environmentally friendly paints. I’ve got space and light and time-the latter at least until the school bus pulls up.

But I don’t have concord.

You think too much, Belle .

It made me smile to hear Don’s voice resonating inside my head. Don understands my neuroses better than anyone else. But he rarely lets me give in to them.

Even after managing to make a living as an artist for the past fifteen years, I still suffer from no-confidence days, when I’m reminded of harsh words from a decade past, words that slice my thin strip of confidence into a single frayed thread. On those bad days, my retreat to prove my critics wrong seems more like hiding than working.

Squinting at the blobs of paint on the canvas, I harkened back to the time I slaved feverishly, hoping to create a masterpiece that’d put me on the map-or at least on the wall of a successful art gallery. Rosemary had tried to give me that chance, despite her husband’s attempt to screw me over, in more ways than one.

The irony isn’t lost on me, trying to duplicate Waves 27 for this new commission, a moody piece that was perfectly suited to the tragedy, secrets, and lies surrounding the Thomases. Working on the painting brought back a coterie of memories, most painfully, my final visit with Rosemary in prison when we’d last spoken of Waves 27 . And with the shadowy underpainting in front of me, and the implications of Tony Olsen’s invitation whirling in my head-knowing that the time had finally come, knowing what I was going to have to do-I was filled with a strange sense of foreboding.