Tango Key (11 page)

The flip side of this, of course, was the dark fury of that primal burning, its insidious corruption. Despite the premeditation of Cooper's murder, it qualified as a crime of passion. You did not behead a man just because you wanted his money. There were a dozen easier ways to snuff out a life. A gun, a knife, poison, drugs, an explosion.

She had reached an indentation in the beach shaped like a comma and bordered by thick clusters of palm and pine trees. She followed it for a mile or so and reached a tiny cove she'd never seen before. Starlight rippled across the surface of the water, and the breeze strummed the branches of the surrounding trees. The cove was too shallow for sharks or anything dangerous, and there was a certain seduction in the absolute privacy of the place. Aline shucked her windbreaker, the vest, pulled her T-shirt over her head, stepped out of her shorts and panties. She left everything puddled on a flat rock and walked over to the water. It was deliciously warm and closed around her ankles, her knees, the upper part of her thighs; then she shoved away from the shore, submerging herself completely.

Nothing in the world felt quite like this. Nothing. She cut through the absolute underwater silence—a mermaid, a sleek and powerful fish, an embryonic being. She gasped for air as she broke through the surface and tilted her head back, drinking in the sky. She turned onto her back and floated, arms extended at either side, legs slightly parted, hair drifting out from her head like strands of seaweed. She closed her eyes.

She wasn't sure what tipped her off—a ripple of noise that shouldn't have been there, a change in the texture of her solitude, or maybe nothing more than a subliminal awareness that she wasn't alone. But she suddenly snapped forward, treading water to stay afloat, turning in place as she peered through the dark at the shore.

The black silhouettes of the trees seemed to nod toward her. Now she
felt
the eyes,
felt
them like hands on her face, her bare shoulders, and she sank a little into the water, her heart leaping into her throat and sliding down it again like a raw, pulsing oyster.

She heard the faint chirpings of birds.

Crickets.

Twigs crackling underfoot.

Your gun.

Aline sucked in a deep breath of air and let herself sink again, completely this time, the water closing over her head.

She swam close to the bottom, eyes open, the salt stinging them. When her lungs started to ache, she came up, silently, blinking hard to clear the haze from her vision. For a second, the air went utterly and completely still. No crickets, no birds, nothing but the brittle, tense quiet of a world suspended between heartbeats. Then the dark erupted with a loud, sharp cry of, "Hey, you!" and a scuffle broke out in the trees along the far lip of the cove.

Aline swam around the jut of a rock and stumbled onto the beach. She raced toward the flat rock where her clothes were, her gun. She yanked the .38 Super out of her vest pocket and knocked off the safety. Her legs ate up the sand. Blood rushed into her head. Her wet hair slapped her bare shoulders. The warm air dried the water on her skin in a flash. In the distance, she heard a car screech off into the darkness, and as she reached the trees, someone stumbled out—a man—and fell to his knees in the sand, doubled over, hissing, "Fuck oh fuck, that bastard."

"Kincaid?"

His hands were covering his face as he lifted his head. She lowered her gun as his hands fell away, and she saw blood pouring out of his nose. "My God." She dropped her gun and took hold of his arm, helping him to his feet. "C'mon, get into the water. Salt water will help." She didn't know if that was true or not, didn't even know exactly what had happened to his nose, but it was the only first-aid treatment she could think of. He tilted his head back to stem the flow, and she guided him toward the water.

"You shouldn't walk around like that," he mumbled.

For the first time since she'd climbed out of the water, she realized she wore no clothes. "I'll be right back with a compress."

She hurried over to the rock where her clothes were, grateful for the dark, and pulled on her shorts and the windbreaker, which she zipped up. She draped the vest and T-shirt over her arm and sprinted back to where Kincaid was kneeling at the water's edge, his head tilted back. She wadded up the T-shirt and soaked it in the water. "Keep that on your nose, with your head back like that."

"I need ice," he said, "or it's gonna swell bad."

"Can you walk?"

"It's my goddamn nose, not my feet."

She helped him to his feet, then remembered her gun and scooped it up. "I've got ice at my place. It's not too far from here."

"My car's parked on the other side of the trees. There's a path. Of sorts."

"What happened?"

"I was coming down here for a swim, and next thing I know someone's decking me."

"Keep the compress on."

They were on the path now, Kincaid slightly ahead of her, her wadded T-shirt like a huge tumor against the bridge of his nose. They reached his white Saab, which was parked between two pines. "I'll drive," she said, opening the driver's door.

"Thanks." He handed her the keys and she slid behind the wheel as he folded his six-foot-three frame into the passenger seat. She set the gun on the dashboard and started the car. "This T-shirt smells like perfume," he remarked.

"At least you can still smell."

She found reverse and backed out into the dirt road. Kincaid rested his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes.

H
e sat on a stool in Aline's kitchen, his head back, his hand holding her bloody T-shirt in place against his nose. She had wet it again and filled it with ice before she'd gone to get her first-aid kit. Now as she set it down on the counter and removed the items she figured she would need, his eyes slid from her to the counter and back to her again.

"Look, I'm no Nancy Nurse. I really think you should go over to the emergency room and have someone look at it. You've lost a lot of blood. I'll be glad to drive you over there."

"I hate hospitals."

"You may hate this worse." She soaked a wad of sterile cotton in hydrogen peroxide and stepped in front of him. Okay, let's take a look."

He removed the T-shirt and she thought she was going to puke. A gash crossed the bridge of his nose. It was already swelling and bruising, and blood bubbled from it. Torn bits of flesh floated in it.

"If you're not going to do anything, let me know so I can put the ice pack on it again," he said.

"Okay, okay. This is going to be uncomfortable."

She touched the cotton dripping with peroxide over the gash and heard him suck in his breath. His lapis eyes flinched. As she wiped away the blood, she saw that the gash was at least half an inch deep, maybe more. She squeezed the cotton so the stuff seeped into the gash.

"Was he wearing a ring or something when he hit you?"

"It felt like brass knuckles, but yeah, it was probably a ring."

She began to clean the gash with an antibiotic salve. "You didn't get a good look at him?"

"I didn't see him at all. The bastard came up behind me and . . . hey, watch it, that hurt."

"Oh. Sorry. So you were there first?"

"No, you were."

Her eyes met his. "I suppose you have to do a lot of peeping in your line of work, huh, Kincaid."

"I didn't know who the hell you were. I heard someone swimming. I go down there to swim on nights when I can't sleep. I'm standing there and I hear something behind me and by the time I turn, the bastard's fist had slammed into my nose. I tried to follow him, but I nearly passed out."

"I'm going to put a butterfly bandage on this, okay? To close up the wound. I don't know if it's going to work, because this is pretty deep. If I were you, I'd get a tetanus shot and maybe a penicillin shot too."

"I thought you weren't a nurse." His smile touched only his eyes.

"Cops get a little first-aid training." Aline gently brought the edges of the gash together and fixed the butterfly bandage against it. "If you lie still for another hour or so with the ice pack on it, maybe you won't bleed to death."

As she backed out of the triangle of his open legs, Kincaid brought his head forward and touched his nose gingerly. "I'm going to look like Pinocchio."

She laughed. "Pinocchio with two black eyes is more like it." She made a face as she picked up the bloody T-shirt and tossed it in the sink. "Go ahead and stretch out on the couch over there and I'll fix you another ice pack. A clean one."

"I owe you a T-shirt," he said, sliding off the stool.

"If you get blood on my couch, you're going to owe me more than a T-shirt." She gestured toward his clothes. A bib of blood covered his shirt, and his khaki shorts were splattered with it. "Look, leave your clothes in the bathroom down the hall. There's a robe on the back of the bathroom door down the hall you can use."

"Thanks."

He returned a few minutes later wearing Murphy's maroon terry-cloth robe. It was a bit short in the arms, but otherwise looked better on him than it did on Murphy. He glanced at the couch, which she'd made up with a pillow and a quilt, then at the bowl on the coffee table with the ice pack in it, then at her. She was cleaning up the mess on the counter.

"They teach cops how to be good Samaritans, too?" He sat at the edge of the couch.

"Sure. In return for information."

"Yeah, I figured as much." He fluffed up the pillow and stretched out, drawing the quilt over him, reaching for the ice pack.

"Information and a new T-shirt," she added.

"Uh-huh."

He held the ice pack to his nose, and Aline snapped the first-aid kit shut and returned it to its spot under the sink. She started the coffee, and Kincaid said, "I hope this little guy's de-scented."

She glanced around and saw Kincaid sitting straight up and Wolfe padding toward him, tail erect and quivering slightly. "Oh-oh," she said. "Just stay where you are, okay?"

"He's not de-scented. Hey, great. That's just what I need to top things off. A run-in with a skunk."

Wolfe c'mere, boy. She tapped her nails against the floor and Wolfe hesitated, glanced once more at Kincaid, then waddled to Aline. She picked him up and went over to the couch.
 
She sat at the edge of the coffee table, Wolfe snuggled in her lap. But his tail still quivered and his little nose was busy checking things out. "The only person he's ever blasted never bothered to properly introduce himself."

"Nice to meet you," Kincaid said.

"Stick out your hand so he can sniff it."

He did.

"Now, I want you to know that if I tug on his right ear, it's the signal for him to spray. So why don't you tell me who hired you, Kincaid."

He laid back against the pillow, holding the ice pack against his nose, his eyes still on her. "We're on the same side, Ms. Scott. Take my word for it."

"In that case do me a favor."

"What?"

"Don't call me Ms. Scott." She stood. "I've got to get some sleep."

As she climbed the ladder to her loft, a milky light was oozing through the window. She pulled the curtains, turned off the lamp, shucked the windbreaker and her shorts, crawled between the clean, fragrant sheets, and was asleep in seconds flat.

W
hen she awakened at nine, she knew Kincaid was gone before she even looked downstairs. She could feel the emptiness in the house.

In the kitchen, she found a pale yellow Tango Key T-shirt folded neatly on the counter, and next to it a three-foot-high rubber tree with leaves so glossy they shone like waxed floors. Taped to one of the leaves was a card that said:

Thanks for everything.
Ryan
P.S. Would you like to have dinner tonight? If 8:00 is no
good for you, give me a call at 555-9865. Otherwise see you then.

Ed Waite's archaeological foundation was located in an old neighborhood just off Forty-third Street. The great rambling homes that had lined this road when Aline was a kid had been razed five years ago in the name of "Tango Beautification." Now there were neat, concrete office buildings, all of them soft pink, two stories high, all with wide floor-to-ceiling windows in the front. The mayor who had initiated the project had since been voted out of office, but it hadn't brought back the neighborhood. The only things that remained were the trees—huge banyans with braided branches and roots that broke through the surface of the ground in a rete of twisted canals.

The foundation occupied the first floor of one of the pink buildings. The interior was as unimaginative as a dentist's office. The waiting room had a window that looked into a kind of holding area where women in jeans and shorts answered phones, tapped away at computers, worked at typewriters.

"May I help you?" asked a cute young woman with a spray of freckles on her cheeks.

"I'd like to see Mr. Waite."

The woman gave Aline a quick once-over. She was wearing a flowered skirt with a pink cotton blouse, white sandals, and dark sunglasses. She knew she looked more like a prospective donor, maybe some rich witch from the Cove, than a cop. "Sure, he's in. I'll buzz you on through. He's in the room at the very back."