“I'm sorry, Melinda,” I said.
She slapped my face. It stung, and I reflexively grabbed her arm before she could do it again. She let out a bloodcurdling scream.
A huge bouncer stepped into the lounge. He yanked me off the couch and hustled me through the club. I looked for Cheever at the bar, but he was gone.
As we went through the club's front door I expected the bouncer to stop, but he instead gave me a mighty shove. I flew forward with my arms flapping like a bird and hit the pavement hard.
“Stay out of here,” the bouncer yelled.
I lay on the pavement and watched the rain come down in sheets. The knees of my pants were shredded, my jacket torn. I tried to find the bright side, only there was no bright side. I walked stiff-legged to my car.
As I got in, Buster cowered fearfully against the passenger door. Then the rancid smell hit me. My dog had puked Slim Jims on the floor.
“It's okay, boy,” I told him. “It's okay.”
The words seemed to reassure him, and Buster slithered into my lap. He stayed there all the way back to the Sunset.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The storm skirted south of Dania, and I reached the Sunset in blinding sunshine. I washed the floor mat in the ocean and placed it on the hood to dry. A few hours of daylight were left, and I went inside to change.
In my room I tugged on my Speedo bathing trunks. I'd lost twenty pounds in the past six months and acquired a flat stomach and deep tan. Although my hair has thinned, my friends said I looked younger than my forty years. Maybe I had found the fountain of youth. It was called hitting the skids.
I rolled my wet clothes into a ball and headed downstairs. At the bar, one of the Seven Dwarfs, Whitey, was doing a magic trick with a book of burning matches. The comic effect was great, only he was enough of a menace to burn the place down. I extinguished the matches in a glass of water, and he howled in protest.
I tried to catch Sonny's eye. He wouldn't meet my gaze, and I guessed he was still ticked off about the punch-in-the-face crack. I said, “Heads up,” and tossed my clothes over the bar like a basketball. Sonny caught them with a puzzled look on his face.
“Throw those out for me, will you?” I said.
“Your suit?” Sonny asked.
“Yeah. I'm shedding my old skin. And while you're at it, give everybody a round of drinks, including yourself.”
The Dwarfs gleefully pounded the bar. Sonny tossed the clothes into the trash with a grin on his face. All was forgiven.
“You want the drinks on the big tab, or the little tab?” Sonny asked.
“The little tab. I'm trying to balance them out.”
“Little tab it is.”
I lowered my voice. “I need a favor. You might get some calls from people looking for me. Reporters, police, that sort of thing.
Tell them I haven't been around, okay?”
“You in trouble?” Sonny asked.
Normally, I would have lied to him, but with my ever-dwindling pool of resources, I needed all the friends I could get. I nodded. Reaching into a cooler, Sonny removed a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser, my signature drink, and stuck it into the ice chest.
“Have a nice swim,” he said.
The day my wife walked out on me, I took a drive. I didn't know how I was going to cope with her being gone, and eventually I found myself parked on the northern tip of Dania Beach. Then, I'd done what any heartbroken male would do. I got naked and went for a swim. I don't know why I did this; it just seemed the right thing to do at the time. And when I stepped out of the water an hour later, I knew I was going to be all right.
I started swimming competitively when I was ten and was good enough to get my name engraved on a plaque at the Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale. My specialty was the backstroke. What started out as a sport had become my daily therapy. I made it a point to swim every day, rain or shine. When I didn't, I got grouchy as hell.
The ocean was the temperature of bathwater, and I waded in with minnows darting between my legs. A hundred feet from shore I began my laps. I started with the crawl, then reverted to the backstroke. There was no lifeguard at this end of the beach, or other swimmers to call if I should need help. If I cramped and drowned, no one would know. I'd sink like a stone and get swept out to sea. Death scared me as much as the next guy, but the idea of drowning never had.
Perhaps it was because I was not truly alone. Lurking just beneath the water's surface were scores of stingrays, tiger sharks, and jellyfish. I supposed I should be wary of these creatures, but I wasn't. Not once had I been stung, nibbled on, or had my space invaded. Someday I might get my arm chewed off, but until then, I was willing to take my chances.
I swam for an hour, then headed back to shore. I heard a siren coming over the bridge. Dania was God's waiting room, and I assumed it was an ambulance. But then the siren multiplied: two, three, four. Police cruisers, all in a line.
I hit the shore running. Sonny met me halfway, looking panicked.
“I blew it,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I went to piss, and the phone rang. Whitey grabbed it. Some cop asked if you were here. Whitey told them you'd gone swimming.”
My feet took the stairs to my room three at a time. Banging open the door, I called for my faithful companion. Buster jumped off the bed and followed me downstairs. Sonny stood in the bar's entryway.
“Hold my calls,” I said.
Beneath the Sunset was a shady space where the sand and the wood meet that was impossible to see from the beach. I hid there with my dog and peered out through a decorative latticework nailed to the side of the building. Four wailing police cruisers pulled into the lot, and a gang in blue piled out. Russo was with them and looked mad as hell. I guessed he'd already taken his Suburban to the shop.
The cops entered the Sunset, flat feet pounding hard boards.
“Where the hell is Carpenter?” Russo roared.
“Swimming!” Whitey replied.
I listened to Russo walk out of the bar and climb the narrow stairwell. At the top he addressed the uniforms searching my room.
“It's clean,” a cop said loudly.
“You couldn't have searched it that quickly,” Russo said.
“There's nothing in it,” the cop said.
“Search it again,” Russo said. “Tear the place upside down, rip the mattress in half, I don't fucking care. That file has to be here.”
I leaned back in the sand and shut my eyes. I'd forgotten all about the file.
The day I'd left my job with the sheriff 's department, I'd taken Simon Skell's case file with me, intent on poring over clues until I could unravel the mystery of how he'd made his victims vanish without a trace. I hadn't thought the file would be missed. So many things have vanished from the Broward County Sheriff Department's building, like bales of marijuana and thousands of rounds of ammunition, that one stinking file should have gone unnoticed. Stupid me.
Russo padded down the stairs and reentered the bar.
“That Acura parked in the lot. That's Carpenter's, isn't it?” he asked.
“That's his car,” Sonny said.
