“Just a jerk,” I said to her.
“Worse than that.”
There wasn’t much of a moon, but the sliver cast enough light to reflect off the Little Peconic Bay, and the air was clear enough to see the sparkle of the houses built along the opposite shore. When I pulled into our shared driveway she told me she wanted to go right to bed.
“He’s just a jerk,” I repeated when she opened the door. She shut it again, switching off the cabin light, so I couldn’t see her face.
She leaned over and kissed me, then got out of the car.
I watched her walk down her stretch of the drive and disappear into her house. I always liked to watch Amanda walk, and despite it all that night was no exception.
Eddie Van Halen, the mutt who lived with me, was waiting on my front stoop. He had a secret door to the house that led through the basement hatch, but like me he preferred to stay close to the weather, so I’d usually find him outside when I came home. Either that or he faked it by running out the hatch whenever he heard the Grand Prix coming up the street.
He honored me with a slow wave of his long feathered tail and a look that said something glorious was awaiting us inside the house.
In my case it was another Absolut on the rocks. For Eddie, a Big Dog biscuit, which he waited to crunch on until I was with him on the screened-in porch facing the Little Peconic Bay. This was where we lived year-round with the help of a woodstove and the big wooden storm windows my father built as an energy-saving measure, or maybe as an act of self-preservation against the screeching brine-soaked winds that came off the bay throughout the winter months. Neither of my parents ever used the porch in the cold weather, but I found it impossible to be in the cottage without staring out on the impatient, unpredictable little sea.
When the moon was big in the sky, I’d sit in the dark so I could see the surface chop throw back the silver blue fragments of moonbeam. Despite the lack of moon, I decided to leave the light off, more for the mood than the view. Given the unusually warm weather, I didn’t need the woodstove, though I lit it anyway. Eddie lay where he always did, stretched out on the braided rug.
I was going to sit at the battered pine table, but I didn’t think I had the strength to stay upright. So I lay on the daybed and recited out loud, like an incantation, my reasons for avoiding any and all confrontations.
“I can’t do it again,” I said finally to Eddie. “For any reason.”
I didn’t like to think of myself as a middle-aged guy who sat drinking alone in the dark, talking to his dog about his fears and uncertainties. But I’d been doing that to Eddie since saving him from the pound, so he must have assumed listening to a bunch of worthless crap was part of his daily work product.
“I can’t do it,” I repeated.
All he did was look at me over the crumbled remains of his biscuit. I let it stand at that and finished my drink, then one or two more to be on the safe side, before letting the encyclopedia of irresolvable quandaries that continually cycled through my consciousness shift into a dream state, thereby maintaining a continuity of torment from wakefulness to sleep.
TWO
A FEW HOURS LATER I awoke to someone pounding on the kitchen door. In the glow from the embers in the woodstove I could see Eddie curled up on the braided rug, his head slightly raised, not bothering to bark, the urgent bashing coming from the kitchen not rising to his standard of alarm. I was still in my clothes, which added to the feeling of squalid disorientation as I swam through a layer of exhaustion, adrenaline poisoning and partially metabolized Absolut.
I hauled myself off the daybed and went into the kitchen. I flicked on the stoop light and saw my friend Joe Sullivan, his face cupped against the window. The wall clock in the kitchen said it was three-thirty in the morning.
“Good, you’re dressed. Let’s go,” he said, shoving past me and filling up the kitchen. Sullivan was about six feet tall but well over two hundred pounds. He’d been a patrolman with a uniform and a car with lights on the top for twenty years, but he’d done well enough recently to get promoted to detective, despite his heartfelt opposition. His wife was the deciding factor, since the new job came with more money and easier hours. At least theoretically.
He was wearing a Yankees cap over his buzz-cut blond hair and a bulky army field jacket. Black Levi’s with a pressed-in crease and a pair of alpine hiking boots completed the look. Ostensibly a plainclothesman, one glance and you’d assume cop, unless you took him for a mercenary fresh from an African coup.
“No time for coffee. Too bad,” he said, his bright blue eyes darting around the kitchen.
His heavy boots were covered with mud. Eddie was helping him distribute it around the kitchen floor. Sullivan bent over to pet his head.
“Maybe I can make it while you tell me what’s going on,” I said, splashing water from the kitchen faucet on my face. It woke me up a little but did nothing to improve my equilibrium.
“Your girlfriend’s house is burning down. Not next door,” he added quickly. “One of the knockdowns.”
He walked into the bedroom behind the kitchen, which had a view of Amanda’s house.
“No lights’re on,” he yelled back. “I guess nobody’s called her yet. Must be asleep.”
“Which knockdown?”
“The one near the tip of the neck. Come on, we gotta tell her. Leave the dog.”
We drove the three hundred feet to Amanda’s house in Sullivan’s busted-up Ford Bronco. He told me he heard about the fire from Will Ervin, the young cop who’d taken over his beat. Sullivan had given Ervin a standing order to report anything that happened in North Sea, supposedly to ease him into his new territory. The transition was now in its seventh month, and Sullivan’s interest in everything North Sea was still unflagging. Car accidents, break-ins, bar fights, house fires.
“You can see the glow,” he said, pointing to the tree line across the lagoon from Amanda’s house.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, but the whole thing’s involved. Main job now’s keeping the fire out of the woods or jumping to another house.”
The warm air from earlier in the evening had fled and the stiff northwesterly was back, breaking itself across the tip of the peninsula. I shivered on the hard seat of the old 4?4, an electric itch from the vodka skittering across my nervous system. I lit a cigarette to complete the effect. Before Sullivan could tell me to put it out we were there.
We rang the doorbell and lights flashed on.
“This can’t be good,” she said, holding the door open with one hand and her silk robe closed with the other.
“You got a fire, Amanda,” said Sullivan. “One of your houses on Jacob’s Neck. The one near the point.”
“You’re joking.”
“You should get over there,” he said. “Is this for real?” she asked me.
Sullivan brushed past her into the house. We could hear him walking through all the rooms, snapping on lights and opening and shutting doors.
“Why’s he doing that? When did you hear about this?” she asked, her face tight with distress.
“Routine precaution,” I said, as if I knew what I was talking about. Then I answered her other question: “Just a few minutes ago.”
“I got to go now,” she said with a shake of her head, reaching for the front door. I slipped my hand around her wrist.
“Not like that. Get dressed. I’ll go with you.”
She stood up straight and nodded.
“Of course. What am I doing?”
I stood waiting in the foyer until I noticed my legs start to falter. I slid down to the cold hardwood floor and braced myself against the wall. The floor listed to starboard, but I held my ground. My head felt like somebody’d filled it up with lubricating oil. So far my stomach was on the sidelines, relatively calm, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I reminded myself that the only way to sleep off a big night was to actually sleep, which had been the plan for
