Surface Tension

“Shut up, you fucking dog,” Cesar called across the river.

I felt Su

“Come on, Cesar, we lost them. Crystal’s go

Su

At the Seventh Avenue Bridge, I pulled off to the side and grabbed hold of a piling. The noise of the cars passing on the steel grate overhead sounded like the rumbling of a jackhammer. This was where I had told Lex we would meet up with her. I waited five minutes before moving on.

The city was dead quiet as we passed under the downtown bridges. A few cars passed on streets parallel to the river. Each time I held my breath, terrified that it might be them. But even along Riverwalk, there were only a few solitary couples far too wrapped up in themselves to pay us any mind as our creaky oars pulled us downriver.

Lex would be fine. She was a survivor, I told myself. Then I remembered the last time I had heard that.

XXIV

We didn’t say a word to each other. I didn’t know what Su

Su

After tying the punt’s bowline off to a piling, I climbed on the dock and gestured for Su

Peering through the crack in the gate, I saw the dark shadow of a vehicle parked out in the Larsens’ driveway. I slipped through the gate and, crawling on my hands and knees, made my way to the drive. When I lifted my head to have a look, I saw a black El Camino, B.J. slumped over in the front seat.

I made my way around to the driver’s side of the car. The window was rolled down. I didn’t know if he was asleep or unconscious or worse. I reached in and shook his shoulder.

He started awake, wide-eyed and alert. “Uh... what?”

I held my fingers to my lips. “Shh.”

“You okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah.” At that moment I heard a car start down the street. “B.J., duck, hide.”

I made my way to the front of B.J.’s truck, where I couldn’t be seen from the street. The car, the same dark blue Camaro with tinted windows, slowed to a stop at the Larsens’ drive. I could hear the radio tuned to a rap music station, and then Cesar’s deep voice. “See anything?”

“Nah, it’s too soon, man.”

The car moved on, making a U-turn and then coming back past the house once more before leaving the neighborhood.

I slid back around to the window. “Come on. Let’s go out back.” He sat up and opened the door. The noise it made when he closed it made me cringe. I hoped they were well down the street. We hurried back through the gate, and I led him down to the dock, where Su

“Help her up, will you?”

Su

“I don’t think we ought to go into my house. Let’s go into the Larsens’ place.”

“Good idea,” B.J. said, and went for the key hidden by the back kitchen door.

Food smells lingered in the kitchen when B.J. opened the door.

B.J. reached for the wall plate, and I grabbed his hand. “No lights.”

Su

“We need to get her into a warm shower. She’s been too cold too long.”

“You, too,” B.J. said. “You need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re shaking.”

I hadn’t even noticed it, but he was right. Taking her by the hand, I led her through the dining room to the downstairs guest bedroom and bath. At first she didn’t want to take a shower in the dark, but once I explained the situation to her, she agreed. I found huge, thick towels folded in the closet, and I set one out for her and another for myself, then turned down the covers of the queen-size guest bed. She didn’t speak to me when she got out, just toweled off and crawled under the covers.

The clothes I peeled off stank of the river: rotting vegetation, oily street runoff, and sewage. The clean hot water felt good, but it restored feeling to my limbs and body, which had been pleasantly numb. Now the many aches returned. In the dark I ran my fingers over the little barnacle cuts on my belly and thighs, the bumps on my head, the deep bruise in my shoulder, the raw blisters on my hands.

After toweling off my wet hair and combing it out, I wrapped myself in a huge white bath sheet and went in search of B.J. I found him standing to one side of the unshuttered entry window, keeping watch over the front of the house.

“Any sign of them?”

“They’ve driven by twice so far. Now they’ve parked. See, down there by the stop sign.”

“What happened to the cops who were out there?”

“They left around seven o’clock. I guess they gave up.” B.J. continued to stare at the vehicle down the street. “I bet they’re talking right now, saying you’ve probably gone somewhere else tonight, but they know you’ll eventually be back. They’ll just wait. And they’re right.” He turned to face me. “You can’t hide in here forever.”

“No, I know that.” I looked around the front room. “Any idea what time it is?”

“It’s just after two. I saw a clock in the kitchen.”

“So we have some time before daybreak. The Larsens shut off the phone when they’re out of town. So I have to sneak over to my cottage and call Mike Beesting in a bit. I know why Neal was out there that day on the Top Ten. We’ll take Gorda out in the morning.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know what Neal was diving for out there, and I know why people are getting killed.”

He reached out and ran his hand over my slick wet hair. He felt the old bump from the fire extinguisher and then the new one from when they pushed me into the closet.