you from spending the past twenty years on a drunken downhill spiral. What's all of that, if not punishment?'
'Bad luck?' I say.
'Bullshit,' Talley says.
I smile a little. 'So you think I'm tired of living with guilt and I just don't care any more what happens to me. You think I want to purge myself, cleanse my soul before I die.'
'Well?'
'You're dead wrong,' I say. 'I don't feel any guilt and I never have. I doubt I've got much of a soul left to cleanse, if I ever had one in the first place. I'm not sorry for any of it, except for driving Bone away and losing my passion for the sea. Punishment? Confession? No way.'
'Then what the devil is this all about?'
'I'm sixty-two years old and I drink a liter of rum a day. They say a sick animal knows when its time is short. Well, humans can intuit, too. I don't have much life left in me, a couple of years at the outside. I've come to terms with that—I'm not afraid of dying. All I want is to live long enough to see my story published.'
Talley frowns. He's getting it now.
'The only things that lift my life above the mediocrity of millions of other lives,' I say, 'are my three crimes. Not one, not two, but three technically perfect crimes. They make me special, they give my time on this earth some meaning and importance. If I took them to the grave with me, nobody would ever know the full scope of what I've done. Jordan Wise would be nothing more than a 'Whatever happened to that embezzler?' footnote in some true- crime book. This way, Jordan Wise is Somebody with a capital 'S.' This way, he'll be remembered.'
'Your little piece of immortality.'
'That's it. Exactly.'
'You know something, Wise?' Talley says. 'Annalise's last words to you were right on. You are a son of a bitch.'
'Damn right,' I say. 'But I'm a special son of a bitch. One of a kind. That's the whole point, isn't it?'
He shakes his head, gathers up his pocket recorder, gets to his feet. 'I'll need to check a few things and then contact my agent,' he says. 'Then we'll have another talk.'
'Any time. You know where to find me.'
Talley goes away, and after a while Jocko brings me a fresh glass of rum. He says, 'What you staring at out there, mon?'
'The sunset,' I say. 'Look at those colors. Scarlet, burgundy, old rose. And the way the light comes through that bank of clouds.'
'Pretty much the same like always.'
'No, you're wrong. This is a special sunset, Jocko. A special sunset for a special son of a bitch.'
He laughs. I laugh, too.
I say what I'm thinking as the colors and the light shift and coalesce: 'It was worth it.'
'What was, mon?'
'Everything. For the sunsets and the Arundel. And the time I had with Bone. It was worth it and I'd do it all again if I had the chance.'
Jocko laughs.
This time I don't laugh with him.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Bill Pronzini is the author of sixty-five mysteries, thrillers, and westerns, including the Nameless Detective series and stand-alone novels such as
