Paint It Black

“The Gulf of Mexico,” he said, pointing. “Man, that’s pretty, don’t you think?”

She nodded briskly and buried her face back in her Barbara Cartland paperback. Louis looked back to the window. A sweep of beach came into view and then a block of custard-colored buildings along the shoreline.

A soft voice came over the intercom, a

He leaned back in the seat, his gaze drifting back to the window, the same question in his head that had been bouncing around there for days now. What in the hell was he doing here anyway?

Dodie . . . it was all his fault. If Dodie hadn’t called, gotten him out of bed. Or if it hadn’t been so damn cold that morning. Or if his damn car battery hadn’t been dead again. If any of that hadn’t happened, he might not have accepted Dodie’s offer, might not be on this plane now, going to a place he didn’t know, a job he didn’t really want.

Hell, not just a job. A hundred bucks a day, with a minimum of fifteen hundred, just to do some digging around and find out who killed some woman’s husband. Dodie had told him his friend, the wife’s lawyer, needed someone special for the job.

“I’m a cop, not a private dick,” Louis had told Dodie.

“For a hundred bucks a day, you can be any kind of dick you want,” Dodie said. “You want the job or not?”

He didn’t want it. But there was nothing else on the horizon. He was finished as a cop in Michigan, if not technically, then practically. There was nothing to do but start over again. He shook his head slowly. Twenty-six and starting over again. And not even with a real badge. He didn’t even have a gun anymore.

He looked back out the window, at the checkerboard of white tile roofs and green palm trees.

“Shit,” he muttered. “At least it’ll be warm.”

Southwest Florida International Airport was small, modern, aggressively upbeat, and air-conditioned to arctic levels. Louis slipped on his University of Michigan varsity jacket and waited for his bag, searching the crowd for Dodie. It struck him that the people had a different look here, lighter somehow, than they had seemed back in the cold of Michigan. Men in bermudas and baseball caps, women in sundresses and sandals. He focused on one woman standing impatiently at the Avis counter. She was thin and dry as a twig, eyes hidden behind big Jackie O shades, wearing a white pantsuit and heavy gold jewelry, with one of those yappy little cockroach dogs tucked under her arm.

“Kincaid!”

Louis spun at the sound of the familiar baritone. He was looking for a pale pitted face under a red ball cap and at first he missed him. But then, there was Sam Dodie, tan and smiling. Dodie thrust out a hand and Louis grasped it, surprised by the surge of feeling in his chest at the sight of his ex-boss.

For a second, they just looked at each other; then Dodie cleared his throat awkwardly and took a step back.

“Well, you made it. How was the flight?” Dodie said.

“Good. Long layover in Atlanta. Sat in the bar and watched the Hawks-Knicks for two hours.”

“Didn’t know you were a basketball fan.”

“I’m not. Football.” Louis smiled. “It’s good to see you, Sam. You look . . . good, really good. Retirement agrees with you.”

Dodie patted his belly. “Margaret’s taking cooking classes, French shit.”

Louis found himself staring at Dodie’s outfit, a pale yellow, boxy short-sleeved shirt worn loose over his shorts. The shirt’s fabric was so sheer he could see Dodie’s undershirt beneath.

“Interesting shirt,” Louis said.

Dodie ran his hands down his chest. “You don’t like it? It’s called a guayabera. It’s Cuban. Lots of guys down here wear ’em. They don’t pit out.”

Louis laughed. “Just never saw you in anything but fla

“Well, things is different here, Louis. I’m different here.” He picked up Louis’s bag. “Well, let’s get going or we’ll get caught in rush hour. Margaret’s waiting supper on us.”

“Hold on.” Louis disappeared into the crowd. He returned, lugging an animal carrier.

“What the hell’s that?” Dodie asked, staring at the black cat inside.

“A cat. Its name is Isolde.”

“What?”

“Issy . . . it’s called Issy.”

“Shit. Where’d you get it?”

“It’s a long story,” Louis said with a sigh. “Come on, let’s go.”

They headed west, out of the airport, in Dodie’s Chevy, through a scrubland dotted with scrawny cows and billboards. The pastures soon gave way to a scorched-earth suburban sprawl of Arbys, Home Depots, and tract subdivisions with names like Cape Verde Isles and Paradise Palms. As they neared downtown Fort Myers, the numbing newness fell away, replaced by a pleasing funk of mom-and-pop motels, small businesses, and palm-shaded streets.

“It’s not what I expected,” Louis said, eyeing a roadside stand whose sign promised JUMBO SHRIMPS AND ORANGES SHIPPED.

“What isn’t?” Dodie asked.

“Florida.”

“Everybody says that. What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know. Coconuts. Water.”

“This is the mainland. Plenty of water where we’re heading.”

As they approached a high-arching bridge, Louis caught sight of a gray-blue river. The Caloosahatchee, Dodie told him. They went through a pretty neighborhood, the boulevard lined with towering royal palms standing guard like a precision drill team lining a parade route. Dodie flipped down his visor and steered the car due west into the sun.

They started across a two-lane causeway. The sign said WELCOME TO SERENO KEY. HOME OF THE WORLD’S BEST FISHING.

“This is it,” Dodie said proudly. “My little piece of paradise. All the water a man could want.”

They were crossing a large open bay, and the confluence of water and sky was sudden and startling, like being injected into a sparkling, bright blue ball. The bay extended in all directions as far as Louis could see, broken by green islands and the razor-wakes of darting Jet-Skis.

The causeway rose over a low-slung bridge and Louis watched a pelican ride the current, keeping pace with the car. Then, suddenly, it curved out to the water and rode inches above until it suddenly nose-dived in, like a paper glider crashing into the grass. The pelican surfaced with a fish in its bill. Louis laughed.

“What’s so fu

“Nothing, nothing,” Louis said softly, settling back in the seat.

Sereno Key wasn’t a very big place, Dodie told him, as they touched back onto land. Only a couple thousand folks, some trailer parks, motels, landscaping nurseries, marinas, boatyards, and a small shopping area everyone called “the town center.” Sereno was a dog-bone-shaped island sandwiched between the Fort Myers mainland to the east, Pine Island to the north, and the gulf barrier islands of Sanibel-Captiva to the west. The mainland, Dodie informed him, was where “regular folk” lived, and Sanibel-Captiva was where all the tourists and “money folk” lived.

“We’re kinda in between here,” Dodie said, slowing the Chevy to accommodate the key’s two-lane main road. “Lots of retirees and folks who just want to be left alone.”

Sam and Margaret Dodie’s home was on the north end of the key on Tortuga Way, in a modest neighborhood cut with canals and lined with palms. It was a tidy, two-bedroom bungalow rendered charming by small touches: yellow paint with turquoise trim, a picket fence, shutters, and a porch decorated with wood cutouts of dolphins.

“Made them myself with the jigsaw,” Dodie said. He brushed his hand through a windchime as he opened the screen. “Margaret! He’s here!”

Louis had never met Margaret Dodie before, had never been invited to the Dodie home in the months he had lived in Mississippi. Sam Dodie had been the sheriff, his boss, and it had been a prickly relationship, growing from distrust to respect. But it had been strictly professional right to the end. Part of it, he knew, had been the place. Born and raised in Black Pool, Margaret Dodie probably had never had a black man sit at her di