22
When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. Florida is light and fluffy, kitschy, a place for the family vacation. And it is all that, of course. But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged. There are vast untamed places: shadowy mangroves, deep sinkholes, miles of caverns and caves, acres of living swamps. There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance. Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life.
I walk through the mall with Ella. Anyone looking at us as we wander through the shops would see two women with time and money to burn. They might assume that the worst of our problems is a cheating husband or a kid with ADD. As I examine an obscenely expensive handbag at Gucci, I hear a shotgun blast ringing in my ears. I smell smoke. I see Frank Geary’s chest exploding and watch as he falls backward down a flight of stairs. I hear my mother screaming. I don’t know where these bloody images have come from, if they are memory or dream.
“You seem distracted,” Ella says as we sit down to drink espresso in the food court. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say lightly. I keep seeing Simon Briggs in my mind’s eye. He’s the headache I can’t shake. His face, so rough and ugly, is familiar without being recognizable. There are so many things like this that I can’t quite remember-people, events slipping through my fingers like sand. “I’m just…not sleeping much.”
“Well,” she says knowingly, “you’re probably still freaked out by that incident on the beach. That would keep me up at night.”
Freaked out. There’s that phrase again.
“I guess so,” I say vaguely. We both take a sip of coffee.
I let a beat pass. Then, “I’m going to get my scuba-diving certification.”
Ella peers at me over her little cup. “I thought you hated the water.”
“I do,” I say, taking another sip of the black, bitter coffee. “But, you know, I have a daughter now. I want her to see me work to conquer my fears.”
She gives a careful nod. She’s very diplomatic, slow to judge. I like this about her.
“Maybe you should start with swimming lessons,” she suggests delicately. “You know, in a pool?”
“Baptism by fire,” I say with a smile.
She looks at me uncertainly. “Oo-kaay,” she says slowly, drawing out the word.
“Well,” I say, putting down my cup with a delicate clink in its saucer. “The lessons start off in the pool.”
“Good,” she says brightly. “You know what? I’m proud of you. That’s great.”
Her cell phone rings, and she looks at me apologetically as she answers it. I can tell by the shift in her tone that it’s her husband. Her voice gets softer. She turns her head away from me. I stare at the other shoppers, think of Gray off trying to figure out who might be looking for me. I think of Victory off with her grandparents. I’m counting the hours until I can pick her up at school tomorrow. I’m just here killing time. I should be home meditating, trying to remember who Simon Briggs might have been to me. But I suppose part of me doesn’t want to remember. That’s what my shrink believes, anyway.
“I have to go,” Ella says, snapping her phone closed. She looks strained.
“Everything all right?” I ask gently.
“Yeah,” she says with a fake laugh and a weak flutter of her hand. We’re both such liars. I hope she’s lying about less awful things, for her sake.
“What about your Prada loafers?” I ask.
“They’ll wait,” she says. “You coming?”
I shake my head quickly, down the rest of my espresso, and stand up. “I want to pick up a few things for Victory.”
“Okay,” she says, tucking her bag under her arm. “Sorry.”
I wave her off. “Don’t worry about it.”
She looks pale, a little red around the eyes. She never talks about her husband or their relationship except in the broadest strokes.
She rushes off, and I watch until I can’t see her anymore. I wish I could be a better friend to Ella. But I can’t.
When I turn back to grab my purse and shopping bags, I’m face-to-face with Detective Ray Harrison. My stomach bottoms out at the look in his eyes. He looks hungry.
“Let’s talk, Annie.”
“Are you following me?” I say. My voice raises an octave, though I didn’t intend it, and a woman at the next table turns to stare at me.
“Don’t make a scene,” he says with a smile. “You can’t afford to make a scene.”
I smile at him and let him take my arm. I pick up my bags from the floor, and we walk toward the exit.
“That purse you bought. It cost more than my wife’s food budget for an entire month.”
There’s some mixture of astonishment and reprimand in his voice. I don’t say anything. “The mercenary business must be booming,” he says.
He means Gray and Drew’s company, though mercenary is not a word they use in the industry. And indeed, since September 11, business
“One of the hardest things about being a cop,” he says when we’re outside, “is watching the criminals live better than you do.” We’re walking through the rows of cars. I’m not sure where we’re going, and finally I come to a stop. I’m not walking into the deserted part of the lot with this man, cop or no cop.
“What do you want?” I ask him.
He looks around us. The lot is crowded, plenty of activity. People walking, pushing kids in strollers, pulling in and out in their late-model cars. He lets go of my arm and puts his hand in his pocket, starts that rocking thing he does. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it.
He keeps that fake smile on his face. People walking by might think we’re neighbors who bumped into each other at the mall, that we’re having a friendly chat. I know then that his interest in me is not professional, not legal. If it were, he would have put his handcuffs on me and we’d be in the cruiser heading into the station. This alternative is not necessarily good news.
“I mean, I spend my whole life working hard, providing for my family, paying taxes, saving for retirement. Every vacation, every new appliance we need, every repair on the house-we budget and save, you know? And then I walk into some perp’s garage and I’m looking at a Hummer. Or I go into his crib and there’s a flat-screen and audio system that could pay for a year of private school for my kid. I think, here’s a person with no respect for the law, for human life, and he’s living large. I tell you, it eats at me sometimes. It really does.”
There’s something whiny about his righteous indignation. I get where he’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem quite sincere.
“What do you want?” I repeat.
“Let me tell you a little bit about Annie Fowler. She was born in a small town in Kentucky, where she lived her entire life until she and her infant son were killed by a drunk driver just a few years back. She was a good girl, sweet and pretty. She played by the rules, but still she was mowed down by some asshole with no respect for anyone or anything. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what kills me, you know?”
I notice something about him that I hadn’t before. Over his right ear, there’s a shock of white hair about an inch thick. It’s so striking, the light of it against the rest of his brown locks, that I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. Somehow it makes him seem more menacing; I am oddly unnerved by it.
“And then,” he continues, “she’s violated again-by yet another person with no regard for the living or the dead. Someone steals her identity. Someone trying to escape the past takes her Social Security number and uses it to start over. What was this person trying to escape? I wonder. Or who? Must be pretty bad, whatever it was.”
“You’re making a mistake,” I tell him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He takes a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and puts them on.
“Mrs. Powers,” he says with that same fake smile; it’s starting to look as though it will split his face in half.
