Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (48 page)

“After tonight I’ll probably never see you again.”

“I’m coming back here the end of next month, in July. Maybe for a week this time.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

It was true. Or half true. Liam and Kate and I had already talked about my returning. They were here for the entire summer and I was welcome pretty much whenever I wanted. But it depended on the work, how much time I’d have.

I kissed her again. This time she didn’t pull away.

And the kiss was just what you always want a kiss to be.

And usually isn’t.

“Let’s walk,” I said.

I slipped my arm around her waist. I didn’t know where we were exactly or where we were going. But it was hard to get lost in a town as small as Cape May. I’d find my way home or else if I was lucky Tess would find it for me.

It was well after two in the morning and the streets were quiet. Nobody walking but Tess and me. No cars at all.

We talked some more and every so often I’d turn and kiss her, hugging her tight, still walking, hardly even slowing down. I felt that intense sense of well-being that you get when the woman on your arm is the woman you
want
on your arm and she’s new and you’ve both had just enough to drink but not too much and you have no idea where all this is leading but so far it’s fine and dandy.

“How about the beach?” I said.

She laughed. Like I’d said something really funny.

“The
beach
!” she said.

I thought it was a good idea. It wasn’t too cold. In fact the night was warmer than the day had been.

Probably I was showing her what a tourist I was, I thought. To her the beach was probably a cliche.

I still liked it. I thought about lying on the sand. Nobody around but the two of us. Moon on the water. Booming surf and big sky. It was a cliche but I liked it anyway. It’s not something you get to do in Manhattan, lying on the beach and necking with a pretty woman.

I smiled. Like I was in on the joke but so what. “Why not?” I said.

She kissed me and then her voice went low again.

“
Sure. Why not
,” she said.

I don’t think we were there ten minutes before we heard the gunshot.

I’d thought we were alone. But then I’d been concentrating on her, on the soft warmth of her mouth on mine and the warmer breasts beneath the denim shirt and the way the nipples rose silky smooth under my fingers.

I looked up and I could see this dark heavy figure the equivalent of maybe three city blocks away running up the beach toward Atlantic Avenue. There was a rifle or maybe a shotgun in his left hand and judging from the loudness of the echo still hanging in the air I was thinking shotgun.

I expected sirens, police pulling up, people rushing out from inside the hotels across the street. But we sat there while the man ran the last few steps up the ramp off the beach onto the high concrete walkway and then started strolling down the opposite ramp toward a car parked just off the walkway—we could only see the top of the car—and then got in and drove away.

Not another soul in sight. Just Tess and me kneeling in the sand. Staring down the beach at another dark figure lying still as driftwood far above the tideline.

Tess got to her feet.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“You sure?” I said. “Maybe we should just find a phone. Call the police.”

She stopped and turned and seemed to consider this and
somehow I thought she was studying me too. Both at the same time.

“He could be hurt or something,” she said. “You can’t just leave him. We have to see.”

I knew I didn’t want to see.

But she had a point. I went along.

The man was lying flat on his back and one of his legs was curled under him, the opposite arm flung high. Like he was running, waving to somebody except he was lying in the sand and he wasn’t going to be doing any running or waving any more. It had been a shotgun, all right. Beneath the outflung arm there was a chunk of him missing as big as a baseball. The chunk was nowhere around that I could see. But the sand was dark all down under his chest and his chest was glistening bright in the moonlight.

Mid-thirties, I thought. Slim and dark and well-muscled. Wearing jeans and a Dallas teeshirt. One eye open wide, the other half shut. Jaw dropped and mouth open. The sand-crabs would love him.

Crawl in, crawl out.

I felt my stomach roll and tasted acid.

“Well, it’s not Elvis,” she said, her voice soft and low. It took me a second to realize she was remembering that dumb-ass line of mine in the bar. “This guy couldn’t even carry a tune.”

And that took a second to sink in too.

“Jesus, Tess. You
know
this guy?”

She nodded. “Yes. I do.”

I waited for her to explain. She didn’t explain.

But I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“I think we’d better find a phone,” she said and turned and started walking.

“Wait a minute. Who is the guy?”

“Look, right now we need a phone. Later, okay?”

She was trudging across the sand, headed for a ramp. Not the ramp the man had used but one further on down the beach.

We hit the broad concrete walkway and I could see a lighted phone booth a few blocks away in front of a closed dark arcade. I was aware of the sea-smell of the beach and the lonely sound of our shoes against the concrete.

She got in the booth. Dialed 911.

“There’s a man on the beach. He’s dead,” she said. “Across from Franklin Street. We found him. My boyfriend and I. We saw a man with a shotgun. He was running away and then he got into a car. We didn’t see the car. You’ll find one set of footprints leading up to one of the ramps and two sets leading up to another.” There was a pause. “No, of course not. Why would you need our names. That’s all we saw. Goodbye.”

I thought,
boyfriend
. I’d arrived there fast. I wasn’t sure to be pleased or worried about it. I was leaving around noon today, about nine hours away. I wouldn’t be back for over a month. If at all. I hardly knew her and I wasn’t sure what it was she expecting.

She stepped out of the phone booth and took me by the arm and pushed me back into the shadows of the arcade and kissed me. I wasn’t prepared for the kiss and certainly not for its ferocity. I returned it, though. Willingly.

“I’m scared,” she said. “What if he comes back? Could you take me home? To your friends’ house, maybe?”

Her eyes glittered, reflecting back the moon. The only light in that dark place.

“Sure,” I told her.

On the way back to Queen Street I didn’t push her about the guy. I figured, let her open up to me in her own good time.

The walk didn’t take long. We met no one along the way.

When we were nearly there she said, “his name was Tommy Brookwalter. He was a year behind me in high school. I knew him a little then but you know, a year’s forever when you’re in high school. Then he moved to
Boston while I was working on my Masters. He looked me up and we had a thing for a while. It didn’t work out.”

I put my arm around her. She sounded sad and I knew she’d cared for him. And then we were home.

We poured some drinks downstairs and crept quietly up to my room so as not to wake Liam and Kate—and that was the second pair of drinks we never got round to drinking that night because as soon as we sat down on the bed we were both all mouths and hands, we were suddenly nothing but flesh, trying
against
flesh to stifle the moans, the hisses and gasps of pain that came of the sheer steady violence of it, her fingernails gouging my back urging me to violence of my own, sex like the pounding weight of surf strong enough to break the shell and polish the stone, the two of us like a pair of sin-eaters devouring the crimes and guilts of the dead and of our own.

We had all that. And then we rested.

And then we had it all once again.

In the morning she was gone. Of course she was.

It was the cops who awakened me, talking downstairs to Liam and Kate.

Two ordinary-looking men in shirtsleeves and ties. She had given them this address and she had given them my name.

They wanted to establish that I was with her. All night. I said I was. I told them it was the two of us who had heard the shot and seen the body and that of course it was Tess who called it in. But I was curious. How had they arrived at
Tess
as being the woman on the phone? They said they hadn’t. That Tess had just admitted it to them an hour ago when they questioned her.

I didn’t understand.

The cop I was talking to sighed and told me that Tommy Brookwalter was pretty much the reason Tess was back in town in the first place. That they’d been all set to open up a business together, a restaurant and raw bar coupled with
a fish store that would contract directly to local fishermen and wind up selling the best damn seafood in town. They knew Cape May and they knew there was room for a place like that. Meanwhile they’d been engaged to marry. Until Brookwalter took up with another woman. And not long after that Tess got the boot. The woman was now his wife and the restaurant belonged to them and Tess was out of the picture completely and working for her parents at their little Bed & Breakfast.

It was common knowledge that Tess had taken all this badly. She drank. And when she drank she talked.

Not to me, though.

She hadn’t talked to me.

I was trying to take this in. I asked them if that meant she was a suspect, if they were saying they thought she’d
arranged
it somehow.

Not at this time, they said. Right now they were only asking questions.

And I was her alibi.

A pretty damn good one at that.

I got the train back to Manhattan. I stood in the cool misty rain at Penn Station wondering which was likely to be more dangerous—going back there and calling as I’d promised her I would or never going back there again and never ever calling her at all.

The answer would have been obvious. Except for the last thing she’d said to me.

The last thing she said before I fell asleep.

Well, she’d
sung
it, actually.

And me, I’d smiled.

You’re caught in a trap. You can’t walk out. Because I love you too much, baby.

I thought she had a really good voice. A nice husky alto.

It didn’t surprise me.

For Neal McPheeters

The old woman in bed number 418B of Dexter Memorial was not his wife. There was a strong resemblance though. Bea had died early on.

He had not been breathing well that night, the night the dead started walking, so they had gone to bed early without watching the news though they hated the news and probably would have chosen to miss it anyway. Nor had they awakened to anything alarming during the night. He still wasn’t breathing well or feeling much better the following morning when John Blount climbed the stairs to the front door of their mobile home unit to visit over a cup of coffee as was his custom three or four days a week and bit Beatrice on the collarbone, which was not his custom at all.

Breathing well or not Will pried him off her and pushed him back down the stairs through the open door. John was no spring chicken either and the fall spread his brains out all across their driveway.

Will bundled Beatrice into the car and headed for the hospital half a mile away. And that was where he learned that all across Florida—all over the country and perhaps the world—the dead were rising. He learned by asking questions of the harried hospital personnel, the doctors and nurses who admitted her. Bea was hysterical having been bitten by a friend and fellow golfer so they sedated her and consequently it was doubtful that she ever learned the dead were doing anything at all. Which was probably just as well. Her brother and sister were buried over at Stoneyview Cemetery just six blocks away and the thought of them walking the streets of Punta Gorda again biting people would have upset her.

He saw some terrible things that first day.

He saw a man with his nose bitten off—the nosebleed to end all nosebleeds—and a woman wheeled in on a gurney whose breasts had been gnawed away. He saw a black girl not more than six who had lost an arm. Saw the dead and mutilated body of an infant child sit up and scream.

The sedation wore off. But Bea continued sleeping.

It was a troubled, painful sleep. They gave her painkillers through the IV and tied her arms and legs to the bed. The doctors said there was a kind of poison in her. They did not know how long it would take to kill her. It varied.

Each day he would arrive at the hospital to the sounds of sirens and gunfire outside and each night he would leave to the same. Inside it was relatively quiet unless one of them awoke and that only lasted a little while until they administered the lethal injection. Then it was quiet again and he could talk to her.

He would tell her stories she had heard many times but which he knew she would not mind his telling again. About his mother sending him out with a nickel to buy blocks of ice from the iceman on Stuyvesant Avenue. About playing pool with Jackie Gleason in a down-neck Newark pool hall just before the war and almost beating him. About the time he was out with his first-wife-to-be and his father-in-law-to-be
sitting in a bar together and somebody insulted her and he took a swing at the guy but the guy had ducked and he pasted his future father-in-law instead.