Cooler Than Blood (27 page)

Hey, Jake,
I thought
, guess what goes with cooler than blood? What? Dumber than shit!

Kathleen voice, like a guardian angel warring evil spirits, switched on in my head: “
What kind of man would that be?”
Now mine:
Would I feel the least bit of remorse holding another man’s daughter as a hostage to accomplish my goals?
What type of woman owns a Grady and…
To hell with questions I can’t beat back but am too chickenshit to answer. Are we more than one person? Can we love more than one? That question cuts two ways. Double hell with it. The greatest illusion of all is that every question has an answer.

“Jake?”

I should’ve played my card. But I’ve still got it, and I know—

“Jake?”

Garrett was ticked, and he was right.
Did I let my memory of an encounter with a barking little girl influence such a decision? Good God. But I can
play it anytime.
Maybe tomorrow morning. That’s what I’ll do. Tomorrow morning I’ll—

“Hey.”

I turned. Kathleen was in front of me. We stood on the lawn a foot from the seawall. The others had gone into the house. Her hair was down. It was the color of the late stage of a sunrise, when the orange and red are gone and the sky and clouds are a vibrant yellow, just before the blazing ball brightens the sky and extinguishes all color. “You look…pensive,” she said. “It fits you poorly.”

I gave a slight shrug. “You know”—I put my arms around her waist—“I’ve been slightly preoccupied the past few days. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been, or—”

“I like you that way.”

“What way?”

“Preoccupied,” she said. “Gives me freedom for my preoccupations.”

“You look wonderful in that dress.”

“Thank you. I—”

“I bought you a dish.”

“Okay…jumping around a bit, aren’t we? What dish?”

“The Silver Springs porcelain dish.”

“Ah…I see.” She gave a slight nod and a smile. “You’re right. I keep the car fob in it, don’t I? Well, we both forgot—otherwise you would have vigorously defended yourself after my statement that this was the first item you ever bought me. That’s what we get for running around in circles that only occasionally interlope. Let’s touch the brake, shall we? Take me reading in the morning.”

“Reading?”

“In the kayaks. Remember?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Are we just doing questions? If you’re busy, that’s—”

“No, no. I’m not busy at all tomorrow morning.” I kissed her forehead. “It’ll be my pleasure. And sometime…”

“Yes?”

“We’ll take the sunset cruise. See what it’s like from the other side.”

Kathleen brought her right hand up to my left cheek and held it there. “I know we will.” She said it with the absence of a smile, which seemed strange, for Kathleen smiled at everything.

We turned to go inside, but not before I caught a glimpse of the red channel marker, its pulsating reflection on the darkening water streaking toward me in a jagged, attacking line. It was always blinking, warning us of the fine line between a good day on the water and a bad day, between the safety of the deep and the dangers of the shallow, between who we want to be and who we become after we slide off the razor’s edge and our answers shatter the calm, mirrored waters of our illusions.