Bone Valley (7 page)

Having thus chastised myself for my ignorance, I nodded thoughtfully at Josey, but then the angry increase in volume from Angus at the podium made me turn back to him.

“Let those Antheus people think long and hard about what M. David’s body in that gyp pond means,” he said. “There’s a message there to those who would wreak similar havoc in this county.”

Oh, not good, not good at all, I thought. Championing violence is not a desirable trait in a client I was defending, even if his case was just stupid orange libel. I waved my hands frantically at Angus. But before he saw me, Josey pulled out her steno pad and started jabbing down little notes.

Angus kept talking in a threatening way. Desperate to shut him up, I kicked over a folding metal chair in front of me, and the clatter drew everybody’s attention. In the ensuing break, I saw Miguel grab Angus and physically pull him away.

After wrenching Angus’s arm and whispering something in his face, Miguel took the stage, introduced himself, and apologized for the disorder. Angus stomped off out of my line of vision.

Miguel, in all his regal male beauty, talked peace and love and patience and petition signing, no doubt as an attempted antidote to Angus’s tirade. He did one of those love your enemy, but teach them the error of their ways with letters to the editor speeches. Sweet, I thought, but naively ineffective in today’s world; at least Josey didn’t jot down notes during his little pep talk. What she did was smile, smile bigger, and start swaying to the rhythm of Miguel’s speech. So, yeah, right before my eyes, Miguel worked his magic on Josey too. But before I could contemplate what that might mean in either her quest for a murderer, or mine for Miguel, the object of our mutual admiration stepped down from the stage. After that the meeting ran down, and I was glad of it.

When we spilled outside in the dusky, early dark, Miguel and Angus shook a lot of hands, while Josey watched, her eyes seemingly taking notes. Finally, people drifted off, but not before some overweight woman with a flowered dress told Miguel to take the remaining drinks and snacks. “I don’t need them,” she said, and laughed. Then she patted his flat stomach and giggled. “Anything else I can do for you, honey?” she asked.

“You’ve already done more than your share,” Miguel said, and leaned over and kissed the woman on the cheek. She turned red, giggled again, and left us.

Dutifully, Miguel went back inside and gathered up a box of the leftover snacks and loaded them in the back of his red pickup, while I said good night to Josey.

As Josey walked off, Miguel walked back to me and took my hand. “Nice try with the chair. Damn, I don’t know why that boy can’t learn when to shut up.” Then he smiled his slow, Jesus-Feeds-the-Poor smile, the one that seemed soul deep and real. I leaned into his space, his hand still holding mine, and I started to melt.

“Join us for supper? On my sailboat?” Miguel asked.

Oh, sure, I’d join him for supper, that night, the next couple of weeks. Just let me take a shower first, I thought. But what I said was a conventional, “Yes. That would be nice.”

“Okay, we’ll have to stop at Publix and grab something from the deli.”

Uh-oh. Food phobias kicked in. I wanted a nice, big, organic salad. “Where’s the closest health food store?”

“There’s a health food store on the way to the island, west of town, on Manatee Avenue. They have a deli, but it’s a long drive,” Miguel said. “Publix has a good deli.”

“Why’d you knock that chair over?” Angus said, joining us and scowling at me.

“To shut you up. Advocating violence when you’re a defendant in an orange-defamation case isn’t a good idea,” I said.

“Or when a deputy sheriff is listening,” Miguel added.

Oh, yeah, that too.

“I’m not a suspect,” Angus said.

“Well, you probably are now,” I added, and then turned to Miguel. “Publix is a great store. I buy stuff there all the time, but let’s go to the health food store, and get some organics.”

“They have organics at Publix, and it’s not ten miles out of the way,” Angus said. “We’ll go to Publix.”

“Oh, yeah, who put you in charge?” I said, my ire rising.

Miguel stepped physically between us, all peace and love, and said, “It’s not that far out of the way.”

Angus glowered and muttered all the way to the health food store, which, as it turned out, was a hell of a long way out of the way.

Once there, to continue his protest, Angus waited in the car. Miguel and I flirted our way through the produce and the deli, and practically licked each other in front of the frozen-dessert freezer, and finally sauntered back to a sullen Angus, simmering in the pickup.

On the long drive back to his sailboat, Miguel put one hand on my neck and rubbed, while he steered with the other. “You need to let me Rolf you. It’ll help you relax and breathe better.”

“I breathe just fine. I’m alive, aren’t I?” I didn’t mean to be so snappy, but Angus was poking the sack of groceries into my thigh and I thought he was doing it deliberately. I pushed the sack back toward Angus.

“I can get rid of that sore neck,” Miguel promised.

“I don’t have a sore neck.” Oh, yeah, that was a whopper. Every trial attorney I’ve ever known has a sore neck. Tension, stress, bending over desks and reading small print—it would be freakish not to have a sore neck in my business.

“Yes, you do. I can tell by the way you hold yourself.”

Before I could respond, Angus dumped the grocery sack in my lap with some force. Something popped, then squished, and I felt cold and damp soak through my jeans. I didn’t want Miguel thinking I was a quarrelsome person, so I took the sack from Angus.

“So what do you do, sail from port to port and Rolf the needy of neck?” I asked, trying to get my Flirty Girl voice back.

“Basically,” Miguel said, “but I’ve been in Manatee County long enough to buy a truck and develop a steady client base. Getting Rolfed on a sailboat adds a certain allure that helps me attract clients.”

Jealousy kicked me in the gut, just about where the deli package Angus had squished was leaking junk on me. I’d just bet those clients were all women.

“Yeah, and Rolfing on a sailboat lets him charge more, you know,” Angus the still-pissed-off said.

“So what exactly is Rolfing?” I asked.

“Sometime real soon, I’ll show you,” Miguel said, and my heart thumped so loud I was sure they could both hear it. Miguel chattered on, but my ears had disconnected from my brain. I was in fantasy overload.

By the time we finally got to the Bradenton Pier, where his boat was docked near the neck of the Manatee River and Tampa Bay, I was hungry enough to eat the paper sack, but this was all but overridden by the thought of Miguel Rolfing me—I mean, wasn’t Rolfing like a massage? Didn’t that mean I got to get naked and he would rub his hands all over me?

We scrambled out of the truck, me all eager to wash stuff, eat, see the sailboat, and then get naked.

“I live here on the boat too,” Angus said, as if he were reading my mind and wanted to thwart me.

Well, damn, he
was
the chaperone from hell.

“Just temporary, till I get a new house,” Angus added, as if I cared unless he was moving out by midnight.

Thus, brought back from my fantasies, I looked around me. The lights on the pier gave off a ghostly glow in the heavy mist from the river and the humidity of a subtropical night. Boats of different kinds and sizes lined the pier. Here and there, some murmurs of voices floated out toward us, but I didn’t see anybody else on the pier or on the boats. Under the pier, the water slapped at the pilings in its rhythmic ebb and flow.

While I listened to the water, Angus snatched the groceries from the front seat where I’d left the sack, and, grunting like it was too heavy, glared at me. Miguel took my hand as Angus stomped past us and headed down the pier, toward the end.

“Come on, I’ll show you my boat,” Miguel said. We walked hand in hand, saying nothing. The inside of his palms felt rough, almost calloused, like a man who had done a lot of hard work. They would feel wonderful on my skin.

For a moment, walking side by side through the river’s mist with Miguel, I wondered if what I felt was more than just primitive, animal lust. Miguel was a man of great passion, I thought, admiring in retrospect the care with which he’d faked a second panther on the Antheus property and how he seemed to believe he could save the world by curing sore necks and having people sign petitions.

“This is it,” Miguel said, and pointed to a sailboat.

Boats I don’t know, having grown up landlocked in Bugfest, Georgia, where a Jon boat or a bass boat was about as fancy as anyone got. But this sailboat looked small. Maybe a tad junky. While I was trying to wordsmith my reaction into something pleasant, Angus started to climb onboard.

“Hey, Lilly,” Miguel said, “I forgot the snacks and drinks in the back of the truck. Come back with me and help me bring them in?” He smiled in a way that seemed to suggest we might stop on the way to make love.

More walking in the mist hand in hand, who was I to refuse? Though it did seem to me that he was perfectly capable of carrying the junk food by himself. We walked off, leaving Angus struggling with a bag of health food and a latch on the boat.

We were almost back to the pickup when I heard a big boom. A very big boom. Before my brain could process it, Miguel threw himself on top of me, knocked me down on the ground, and covered me up with his body.

The wooden pier seemed to vibrate beneath me, and the lights popped and crackled, and then went black.

I had a sexy man lying on top of me in the dark, but all I felt was fear.

Something close by
had just blown up in megadecibels that would be the envy of any punk-metal rock band; a man was lying on top of me; buzzy, indistinct sounds ricocheted about my ringing ears, and I was beyond dazed and confused, and hungry to boot.

Little sprinkles of hot, flighty things rained down on me, burning tiny spots on my hands, which were splayed out beside me, the only skin not covered by Miguel’s spread-eagled bodily protection.

The night wasn’t turning out well.

But as Miguel climbed off me, and I shook my head and struggled to stand up, it still hadn’t hit me what had happened.

Until I heard Miguel scream.

A long, inarticulate sound that crashed against my already wounded ears.

Then I looked at the space where Angus and the sailboat had been, and I saw smoke and fire and black things floating up and down in the strange air currents of river mist and destruction.

Miguel grabbed my shoulders. “Get out of here. Now.”

With that Miguel jammed his keys into my hands. Though the streetlights on the pier had blown out, the fire and the background city lights illuminated the area in a netherworld sort of gloom.

I stood there stupidly, trying not to vomit.

“Go!” he yelled at me. “Get out while you can.” With that, and a small shove, Miguel turned and ran toward the fiery debris.

Then my head melted. That’s exactly what it felt like, something warm and wet oozing down inside my skull. I stumbled back against a bench on the pier and almost lost my footing. Something wet trickled down my chin and I realized my nose was bleeding, and I rubbed my hand across my face, smearing it. My purse lay on the pier, and when I stooped to pick it up, I threw up, missing my purse by mere inches.

When I righted myself and looked around, I saw that people were coming out on the decks of the other boats.

Clutching my purse in one hand and Miguel’s keys in the other, I wondered: Why should I run? Dizzy, I leaned back against the bench. What
had
Miguel said?

“Get out while you can.” That’s what he’d said, and Miguel’s command was clear. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Could I be in trouble? I mean, more trouble than ringing ears, bleeding nose, and the banging-head contemplation of the great hereafter that nearly being blown up had just wrenched up from my gut? Trouble from the police? From the bomber?

Then I thought of Angus. Could he possibly still be alive?

People began to dash past me in the poor light. Against the glow of the fire, I saw Miguel dive into the smoke and water where his boat had recently been.

Please, God, let Angus be alive, I said. There didn’t seem to be anything else useful I could do.

No one was paying attention to me—yet. For reasons wholly unclear to me, I started sprinting like a track star on meth and yanked open the door to Miguel’s red pickup and squealed the wheels backing up and spinning out of there. Nobody tried to stop me, and before I could inhale, I was several blocks down the road, heading for the relative safety and open spaces of the Tamiami Trail.

In the evening traffic, I slowed down, and I cried.

By the time I was nearly back at my little concrete-block great-starter-home in Southgate, my ears were still ringing, but my head was clearing—a little, anyway. Enough that I didn’t think parking Miguel’s red pickup in front of my own house was a good idea. I still wasn’t sure why Miguel had commanded me to run and thrust his keys at me, but now that I had, I didn’t think I wanted to advertise the fact that I had fled the scene of a felony, if not a murder.

Running away doesn’t look good to Official People.

It didn’t feel so good to me either.

Nonetheless, I rubbed at my nose again with my sleeve, not having anything else, and I parked the truck in the lot at the Southgate Community Center. Full felon-in-flight mode took over—I don’t quite get this part of me, like I was a major criminal in a past life, oh, yeah, well, and that minor criminal phase in the youthful part of this life—but I was usually good at things like breaking and entering and remembering to wipe off my prints.

Which is what I did—I practically scrubbed the keys on my shirt. Then, holding them by my shirttail, I eased the keys under the front seat. After that, I carefully wiped off the steering wheel, the inside of the cab, and the outside doors with the same shirttail. I backed off from the truck, wondered if I was missing something, checked for nearby witnesses watching me, and, seeing none, I anchored my purse around my shoulder, ran a few feet, and stopped.

I went back to the truck. After yanking open the passenger-side door, I banged open the glove compartment. Looking for what, I didn’t know—maybe a gun, a handkerchief, a spare Handi Wipe, or some more of the paper that Angus had pulled out earlier with phosphate data on it. As a trial attorney, I’d learned never to underestimate the potential value of scrap pieces with odd bits of information written on them.

Papers jumped out at me. So Miguel was a slob, I thought, itching to organize and label the jumble, which at a quick glance appeared to be mostly shopping receipts. Then a modicum of reason sputtered through me, and I grabbed up the random sheets and stuffed them in my purse to study later. I rewiped down the inside and outside of the truck, and made my escape, jogging down the side road toward the humble haven of my own home.

If a cop drove by, I was dead. I mean, my shirt was bloody, my face was bloody, I was running, and without a real clue as to why I was running.

But no one stopped me. I got home, and there, I swear, was Jimmie’s car in my driveway. Actually, the thought of Jimmie was reassuring, like the thought of my granddad waiting up to hear my adventures. I burst inside my own house, and hyperventilated. Jimmie came staggering into the living room, clutching a bottle of wine, and before I could say anything like “I almost got killed,” damned if he didn’t start complaining about Dolly.

“That there neighbor lady done been over a couple times ’bout my car. So I reckon I got to go move it, now you’re home. Anyways, I done promised her I’d get it out of here.”

Then I watched Jimmie actually look at me, and watched him processing what he saw. “Lady, sweet Lord, what in tarnation happened to you? You awright?”

“No. I’m not. I nearly got killed and I threw up in public.” Okay, so that might have missed the more important part of the evening, but throwing up in public is not only pretty disgusting, it is also clearly a mark of someone not on their way up the social or professional ladder.

Jimmie inched forward toward me like I might explode.

Which is, more or less, what I did—I burst into tears, not the dainty sniffling I’d done on the Tamiami Trail, but great, gulping, end-of-the-world-horror sobs. Angus was surely dead. That was finally sinking in.

Angus, oh, poor, volatile little man, I thought, and cried harder. Then I thought of Lenora, and that whatever Angus had been to her was gone now, and I sobbed so convulsively I couldn’t get enough air to breathe. Frankly, if I had cried any harder, I would have passed out.

Jimmie grabbed me into his skinny arms, holding on, and hugging me, and he even smelled like my granddad—which is to say, he smelled like liquor and sweat.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you now I got you,” he said, and for a moment, I believed him.

I calmed down, but got the hiccups. With Jimmie’s encouragement, I managed to tell him what had happened on the pier, in little bits and pieces of information between hiccups and sniffles and wiping my nose on the same damn sleeve.

“Reckon I otta call Philip?” Jimmie asked.

“No. Not Philip.” I needed to think, and Philip would want me to call the police or do something that he, Philip, in his usual alpha-male manner, would decide I should do. Also, I looked gross, and the last I could remember, I was mad at Philip.

No, instead of letting Philip tell me what to do, I was going to decide what to do myself.

What I decided to do was take a shower and pop a Xanax.

I stayed in the shower until I drained the hot-water tank and I could feel the little peaceful chemical fingers of Xanax soothing out the bunched muscles in my neck and easing my brain back into a state that didn’t call for fight, flight, or hysterical tears.

With the last of the hot water gone, I toweled off, slipped into a T-shirt and shorts, and went in search of the rest of the bottle of my wine that Jimmie was obviously taking for his own.

And there sat Philip, in my kitchen, with Jimmie blabbing an earful at him.

“I done called him anyways,” Jimmie said, and ducked his head.

When Philip saw me, he eased out of his chair and moved slowly toward me, keeping eye contact and searching my face. For what I didn’t know.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Physically, yes, but I wouldn’t know about the rest until the Xanax wore off. “Fine,” I said. And I waited for him to hug me. But he didn’t.

Instead, Philip asked me for an exact accounting, and I understood this was his client-in-trouble approach, not his the-woman-I-love approach.

I walked past him, got a glass, and poured a trickle of wine from the nearly empty bottle on the table.

Jimmie hopped up and said, “Ah, Lady, let me open you another one. I, er, ’bout drunk that ’un, well, you was gone a long time.”

“I don’t think wine is a good idea. Not until you tell me exactly what happened,” Philip the substance-abuse counselor said. “You should be clearheaded.”

No, clearheaded was the last thing I wanted to be. So I said, and perfectly nicely too, “Yes, Jimmie, that would be good of you to open another bottle. A glass of wine would be good.” Xanax kept my voice calm, my vision of the explosion soft and fuzzy in the memory box, and it kept me from snapping at Philip, who, after all, was only trying to help, and, might just possibly, I now realized, also have been mad at me. After all, not only does mad beget mad, but I’d snapped at him this morning, stood him up for a date so I could eat supper on a boat with another man, and entangled myself in a felony, if not a murder.

Jimmie, guided no doubt by some granddadlike radar, stopped to hug me on his way to open the bottle of wine.

Maybe I’d marry him instead of Philip, I thought.

As soon as I had half a glass of wine floating through my system, which punched up the Xanax nicely, thank you, I eased my way into explaining the explosion to Philip.

“Why were you going to have dinner on the boat with them? We had a date for tonight.”

I sighed. Yeah, definitely mad. I sipped more wine. “I canceled that date, don’t you remember?”

Philip eyed me curiously. I couldn’t read his expression. Possibly because I couldn’t read anything by then.

“How come you run off like that?” Jimmie asked, and then poured himself another glass of wine. “From that pier, I mean. You hadn’t done nothing bad.”

“A very good question,” Philip said, “that is, why you ran. And one I would like to explore in greater detail. But first, tell me, where was the explosion? Was it within the jurisdiction of the city police?”

I nodded. “The pier was right off downtown Bradenton. You know the one, it’s not all that far from your Bradenton office.”

“All right, then. I have a source in the Bradenton Police Department. Let me call him and see if he can tell me anything.” Philip rose from his chair at the kitchen table, neglected to kiss me, and moved toward my den and my phone, leaving Jimmie and me alone so we could do what we so clearly had decided was the most sensible option open to us under the circumstances: We refilled our wineglasses.

A few gulps later, Philip came back into the kitchen, picked up the bottle, corked it, and shoved it in the refrigerator, and then gave Jimmie and me the same look my grandmother gave my grandfather the day he drank a fifth of Black Jack and drove his riding lawn mower over her petunia bed and straight through the plate-glass window. “He does not know anything yet. The police are at the scene, investigating,” Philip said.

“What about Angus? Any word on whether he…survived?”

“We don’t know, Lilly. I just told you, my informant doesn’t know anything yet.”

I sat back and closed my eyes, trying to visualize some version of what I remembered where Angus might have survived the explosion.

“You being a criminal-defense lawyer what gets the bad guys out of jail, how come you got somebody at the PD that’ll tell you stuff?” Jimmie asked.

Philip shrugged. “Money will buy you information any day of the week.”

Yeah, sure. I was long used to paying large hourly fees to expert witnesses who would tell a jury anything I wanted them to say. Idly, and wholly off the main point, I wondered if paid police-insider informants were more reliable. “Money will buy you words, but truth is a whole other issue,” I said.

Disregarding this wine-induced philosophical quip, Philip said there wasn’t anything to do now but wait and see what his man could find out. “Thank you, Jimmie, for your help tonight,” he said, in clear tones of dismissal.

“I reckon I better stay the night, ’case something more happens.”

“I believe I can handle things,” Philip said.

“Jimmie, there are clean sheets for the futon in the hall closet,” I said, and rose from my chair, suddenly feeling all too sober. I couldn’t for the life of me get shed of the idea that not only was Angus surely dead, but that he had died while I was mad at him, and he at me.

Not that it probably made any difference in the great hereafter.

But in the here and now, it might have been easier to bear if my last words to him had been something nice.