San Diego Noir

it?”

“It’s impressive. You’re impressive. Your husband is a lucky guy.”

“He gets what he wants, I get what I want. It’s a trade-off, but it works for us.”

“What do you mean?” I didn’t know why I felt so stupid around her, but apparently it wasn’t going away.

She came closer, enveloping me in a musky scent that made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was feral and rich at the same time, and I didn’t want to exhale and let it go. She took my hand and walked me away from the cars, toward one of the overlooks.

The air was alive with a brittle clarity. I could see the lights of Del Mar and beyond, up the coast. Looking back the other way, while waiting for Sharon, I had seen SeaWorld and downtown San Diego and Mexico past that. Closer in was the working-class community of Clairemont, and below us La Jolla glittered, then dropped off to black at the coastline.

“Like I said, I don’t come from money. I need it, though, and do what I need to do to get it. My mom’s not well, and my little brother … he’s got MS, we don’t know how long he’ll live but while he does he needs special care, special equipment. Terry’s generous. But he doesn’t give me everything I need.”

“Like what?”

“What do you think? I’m a young woman, Mike. I have needs. Terry is kind, he’s gentle, but …” She let the sentence trail off. By now even I had figured out where she was going, but I wasn’t going to let her not lead the way. I stayed quiet, and she picked up where she’d left off. “Viagra’s great, but at a certain point, the world’s finest chef could prepare his finest meal, and a man who’d just eaten a three-pound steak wouldn’t touch it. Availability and appetite are two different things. I’m lucky if he wants it once a week.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was stupid, but I was at a loss for words. “I’m sure you could get—”

“There are plenty of guys I could get. The question is, which one do I want?”

She pushed me down on a bench and stood in front of me, hands on my shoulders, leaning in, letting her breasts brush my face. “See, I have a much bigger appetite than Terry does. I’m just about always hungry.” She ran her hands down my chest, lowering herself to her knees in front of me, and clawed at my zipper. I sat on the bench, hands pressed against the cool stone, feeling her heat on me and my response to it, and at the same time feeling like a trout that had just bit into a nightcrawler only to find a barbed hook hidden inside.

Hooked, I was. That meeting by the cross was only the first. I had never known a woman anything like Sharon. Her appetite, as she’d said, was enormous, and it wasn’t surprising that she was too much for Terry to handle. As she’d said, he didn’t seem to mind. After a couple more meetings on top of the mountain, in the dark, she started inviting me to the house. Every now and then we saw Terry, usually as she led me by the hand toward a spare bedroom. He’d give us a knowing smile and a nod, and now and then a few friendly words. I wasn’t sure how a man with such a fiery animal of a wife could be so utterly nonpossessive, but I wasn’t about to question it. Sometimes we’d hear him moving around, and once I saw someone at the window as I was driving away, watching from behind a sheer curtain—someone who didn’t look like him in that instant’s glance, but who must have been.

Sharon exhausted me. When I was away from her I couldn’t think of anything but her. When I was with her I didn’t think at all. I just was. There was no intellectual engagement; we barely spoke, beyond the necessary words: Faster, slower, here, like that, there, don’t stop. I tried to keep our meetings outside working hours, but when she called, I came. Sometimes I left the company car someplace and drove my own over to the house, then made up a story about why I had been parked for so long.

I started to think I was in over my head when I got my third reprimand at work. My supervisor wasn’t buying my stories anymore, and I was on the verge of being fired. I shouldn’t have cared—private security was a game for kids, anyway, or ex-cops trying to stretch their pensions, and unlike most of my coworkers I wasn’t in it for the power that a badge and a steel-clad flashlight offered. I liked the solitude, the freedom to chart my own course through the night, to drive the quiet streets and watch the houses, the ocean down below, the stars wheeling overhead.

But I was only fooling myself if I thought I didn’t need the job. Sharon had her financial demands, and I had my own—an apartment two blocks from the water in Mission Beach, alimony from an early, stupid marriage, car payments, a TV that was too big for the apartment and had cost more than I could afford. People needed money to get by, and I was no exception.

In high school I had been a jock, an outfielder who could snag a ball that had wings on it, then sail it to first base or third or home without breaking a sweat. I had been so good that it took awhile to understand that I just wasn’t quite good enough to win any scholarships, and without that I couldn’t afford college. Since then, I’d been a guy that things happened to. My wife had proposed to me, and I’d gone along with it. She had decided the marriage was over, and I’d accepted that too. I fell into low-paying jobs, like the one at Gold Shield. I had pretty much given up thinking I would ever have anything like real money, or real love, or any real excitement.

Sharon was something else that happened to me, not anything I had set out to claim, to conquer. And as much as I hated to consider it, I knew I’d have to stop seeing her before I lost my paycheck. One more time, I told myself, and then one more time, and one more time after that.

When I was away from her I was resolute. Then when she called, I was putty.

On a mid-October night, with the first hint of autumn crispness in the air, she called again. “Mike,” she said, “I need you to come over. Right now.” Her voice was different, her words terse, clipped.

“On the way,” I answered. The night had been quiet so far, one alarm that had gone off without any evident cause, homeowners not there. I’d had it shut off and decided to make regular swings past the place throughout the evening, just in case.

But I could be gone for the hour or so it would take to see Sharon. Anyway, she didn’t sound amorous, she sounded upset.

When I got there, the house was dark. I buzzed myself in—I had long since been given the gate code—and parked in my usual spot beside the fountain. I got out of the car, listened to a breeze rustling through the leaves of a banana tree, then ducked back in for the flashlight. I started to wish I’d been assigned a gun. Something wasn’t right; the place was never this quiet.

I tapped on the big door with the end of the flashlight. “Sharon?” No answer, so I leaned on the handle, pushed the door open a few inches. They never set the alarm these days, not with me coming around so often. “Terry?