Rough Draft (27 page)

“Am I holding the paddle right Frank?”

“You're fine,” he said. “Just keep stroking at your own pace, I'll stay in time with you.”

“I can't see where we're going.”

To the east the moon was smothered behind a thicket of cumulus. They were already passing beyond the reach of the lights from the motel and tiki bar, just a smear of dim color rode the surface of the Atlantic.

“Don't worry, Hannah, I'm steering. Anyway there's nothing to run into out here. Water's not more than five, six feet deep. You can swim, can't you?”

“I can swim fine. It's just so damn dark.”

“Well, hang on, once we get to the other side of the island, it's going to get even darker.”

They stroked across the swells, Frank keeping them on a heading around the tip of Cape Florida, the old lighthouse, the barren point of land where until a few years ago a dense and shady forest of pines had stood. Hurricane Andrew had changed that, sweeping the land clean, taking away all those fast-growing, shallow-rooted trees and shrubs that had flourished for decades, untested by a real storm.

Frank eased back in the tight cockpit seat. He was enjoying being downwind of Hannah. Looking at her back, at the stray flickering in her gold hair. It was arousing him, catching her scent like this, the flowery taste of her bath soap, the deeper pungency of her rising perspiration. She'd found a nice rhythm with the paddle and was digging the water past them and Frank fell into her pace and the narrow craft slid forward across the dark sheen. Frank mirrored her actions, harmonized with her. A kind of sexual intimacy, like dancing very close without touching. Filming this in his head, Bogart and Ingrid out in their kayak, the silky water, the soft air, the swell of watery distances opening up around them.

“You see why I like it out here?”

“At the moment, Frank, I can't see anything.”

“Well, of course, it's even better around dusk. When the sun gets low, you can see right down into the water, but the angle of the light confuses the fish, they're not spooked
when you pass by. It's amazing stuff you see. Leopard rays, good-size hammerheads. Paddle right over the top of them, you can reach down, pet their fins.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“What? You squeamish?”

“I'm not fainthearted, it's just that I'm used to being a little higher out of the water, that's all. A little less exposed.”

Frank matched her stroke, steering them around the point, twenty yards out, picking up some wind at their back as they came around the jut of land and started off into the dark bay. It was sweaty work but she didn't falter, didn't ask for a breather, nice wide shoulders working the water past them.

“So what's going on with Randall? He seemed particularly pissed on the drive over. He doesn't like staying with Gisela?”

“Like I said, he's threatened by this, Frank. He's afraid I'm stirring things up, putting us in danger.”

“Well, he has a point.”

Hannah took a deep stroke on the starboard side, then raised her paddle and settled it on the hull before her, and they coasted through the dark.

“He said he hated me.”

“Yeah? When'd he say that?”

“This afternoon, while you were on the phone. He looked me straight in the eye and said he hated me and wished he had someone else for a mother.”

The kayak drifted sideways, carried along by the incoming tide, bumping toward the fiats north of Stiltsville. A mile in the distance he could see the dim glow of an outdoor light fixed to the nearest of the stilt homes, running off solar-powered batteries.

“Every kid says that to his parents at one time or another. I know I did. There was a stretch when I told my old man almost every day how much I hated him. Hell, I was twenty-nine at the time.”

“Not me,” said Hannah. “I never said it, never felt it And it sure as hell isn't easy to hear.”

“He's just a kid. What does he know?”

Hannah swiveled and peered back into the dark.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Like a splash.”

“Mullet,” Frank said. “Or a barracuda having a midnight snack.”

“Listen,” she said.

He strained to pick up anything out of the ordinary, but all he could hear was a distant marine engine.

“We keep paddling, we'll be there in fifteen minutes. As long as we can ride this current.”

“I heard something, Frank. Something human.”

He reached down to his feet and patted around the inside of the hull until he found the Maglite clipped to the side. He switched it on, then he used his paddle to turn the kayak in a slow circle, focusing the light out about ten to fifteen feet into the dark. Nothing but the ruffled crests of small waves showing in his beam. Frank made two complete revolutions, then switched it off.

“You're spooked,” he said. “There's always a lot of sloshing out here.”

A mile or two toward the west, coming out of the channel for the Rickenbacker Causeway, was a fast-moving boat with a bright beam swinging back and forth across its path. But beyond that, the bay was empty. Frank knew Helen Shane had to be busting a gut. No way under present circumstances to keep surveillance both active and out of view. A chopper would be too obvious, and any kind of marine engine would be impossible to conceal out on the dark, uninhabited bay. They were probably ganged up back there at the Silver Sands, pacing around, debating what to do.

“Frank, I hear something back there.” But the conviction wasn't in her voice anymore.

“Mullet,” he said. “The last few weeks they've been running like crazy through this pass.”

And he picked up his paddle and straightened them out, then began his stroke, a steady pull toward the faint gleam of Stiltsville.

* * *

Hal wasn't much of a swimmer. A dog paddle was the only stroke he knew. That's why he'd stolen the surfboard from the beach as Hannah and the FBI guy left in their kayak. Paddling now, flat on his stomach, water splashing in his face as he tried to stay up with them.

It was a tortoise and the hare situation. The story his first foster mother had told him over and over. Eloise Bonner, a big woman, twice her husband's size. Trying to comfort Hal with that fairy tale, knowing he was slow, but trying to find the virtue in that. Telling him over and over that the long march was what mattered. Sticking to it. You didn't have to have talent. You didn't have to be quick and bright and strong. Endurance was better than anything else. And endurance was something you could control. It was just a question of mastering pain. Not paying attention to the muscles burning. You stroked and stroked through the ocean, a tortoise, dragging its heavy shell along for three or four steps, pausing for a breath, then trudging on, his eyes always on the hare.

Hal had never been so far out to sea before. It was hard work. But he wasn't afraid of the water. He wasn't afraid of the dark. The ocean was warm and it was quiet, didn't try to knock him down or pull him under. He paddled along behind the kayak, a hundred yards in its wake, stroking quietly. He guessed there were fish out here, maybe big fish with ragged mouthfuls of teeth staring up at his legs as he swam overhead. He was in his underwear and a T-shirt, his clothes lying in a heap back on the beach. He wasn't afraid of sharks. There was nothing Hal Bonner was afraid of. He wasn't sure why. But it probably had something to do with not being afraid of death. He'd been around it, seen it, looked into its eyes from an early age, and it didn't frighten him or amaze him or make him wonder. It was just death. The end of living. The body switched off the same way a TV shuts down when you punch the button. A crackle of electrons and then it's dark.

He paddled the surfboard through the warm water, keeping
his eyes on the dull shine of the kayak. The two of them were going somewhere in the dark. Hal had to follow. This could be the moment he'd been waiting for. This could be where J. J. Fielding was hiding out, in one of those houses that stood up above the water. The houses looked like hideouts. No way to approach them without being seen. A place Hal might have chosen to hide out, if he ever hid out. But he didn't. Only people who were afraid had to hide. And Hal was not afraid. Not of sharks, not of the dark or water or death.

Hal Bonner's first father was a mortician. An old man. An undertaker. People are just dying to make me rich, he used to say to Hal. He made Hal watch him work. There was something wrong with the man's sperm. He couldn't have a real son, so he'd chosen Hal from the orphanage. He wanted someone to take over his business one day when he died, someone who could embalm him with the same skill he used on others. He wanted to teach Hal everything he knew about the dead. He wanted to show off his knowledge, bask in Hal's admiration.

His name was Harry Bonner. He'd given Hal his name and Hal had kept it out of laziness. Harry was short and wiry. He had white wispy hair and a mustache, and his eyes were dark and small. His lips fleshy, his jowls quivering when he sucked on his teeth.

Harry and Hal worked alone in the cool rooms of the mortuary. The smell of embalming fluid. The dizzy reek of formaldehyde.

Harry Bonner specialized in the obese. He could charge twice as much for embalming the fat ones. The relatives of the plump corpse always went along with the higher rates, not aware that a fat man's thoracic cavity was not much larger, if any, than that of a skinny man. One gallon of arterial solution for every seventy-five pounds of body weight. Sixteen ounces of concentrated 50 index was what Harry Bonner used for cavity chemical. And high pressure was required for the fat ones, anywhere from 100 to 140 pounds while implementing the intermittent rate of flow.

Harry made Hal assist him in the embalming room. Teaching him a trade, showing him the mechanics. How to use the right carotid artery as the main injection site, how to drain the body's blood from the jugular. Covering bed sores and cuts and wounds with towels soaked in cavity fluid. Relieving the bloating pressure by opening up the anal vent. Packing the nostrils with cotton saturated with insecticide to prevent insects from entering. Sewing the mouth shut with needle and fine catgut and coating the lips with softened wax.

Hal paddled through the dark water of Biscayne Bay and thought about death. Thought about his first father, Harry, thought of the embalming room, the smells, the harsh lights, harsh smells, the glitter of the surgical instruments. He kept his eyes on the kayak and he did his dog paddle and he relived those years. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. A young boy, curious about death. Eager to please his father. Every day another dead body, and another one. Naked women, naked men, and children lying on the steel table. Their blood flushed into the sewer system, Hal, standing on a stool so he could reach the surgical table, had the chore of washing their bodies with germicidal soap, every crevice, every fold.

His father, Harry Bonner, explaining it all to Hal. Showing him the secrets of human anatomy, the hairy, hidden places in women, the large and small breasts and penises, testicles of every size. The strange formations, the humps, the goiters, and lumpy tumors. He made Hal look, made Hal touch and smell and sometimes touch the tip of his tongue to a nipple or a navel. Often Harry Bonner unzipped his pants and pulled himself out and stroked his skinny penis beside the gleaming steel table where the women lay. Showing his son how to enjoy his work. Harry sometimes put his hands inside them, or fondled their empty breasts. He touched their wounds, inserted his fingers into the ones with deep gashes. Moved in and out, closing his eyes.

He was a small man with a musty smell and a glass eye. And he would remove that eye sometimes when the body
was a particularly attractive woman. He would touch the cold marble to her body, roll it across her nipples. He would tell Hal about sex, what women enjoyed, the pain they secretly hungered for. Showing the boy how to enter a woman, her limp legs dangling over the edge of the surgical table while he moved his long thin penis in and out of the corpse. As the formaldehyde pumped, the tubes squirted with blood. He shaved off their pubic hair with a straight razor and hoarded it in shoeboxes. Black hair in one box, and blond in another, red and brown coils of hair brimming to the top of the boxes that lined a shelf in the basement of their house. Harry Bonner used surgical scissors to snip off the women's nipples, then suspended the oily coins of flesh in glass jars filled with formaldehyde. Small nipples and large, puffy ones and dark ones. Harry loved the women, hated to give them up to the earth. He saved as much of them as he dared. Some afternoons Harry Bonner would corner the boy, and force a clump of pubic hair beneath Hal's nose and slap the boy hard if he could not recall the woman's name from the fragrance she had left behind.

Harry Bonner gave Hal a trade, a craft. Something that would serve him well when he became a man. People were dying to make Harry Bonner rich. The living gave their loved ones to him and Harry used them for his profit and his pleasure. He taught Hal everything he would ever know about the human body, about the empty eyes of the dead, the inevitable fate of all living things, and the hollow chill of the human heart.

Harry Bonner was Hal's first victim.

When he was fifteen, Hal returned one day to the mortuary, surprised the small man. He didn't say a word to him, just reached out and took him by the throat and strangled him, lifting him off his feet, and watching his eyes roll back, Harry Bonner, his first father, the man who taught him about death. He couldn't remember why he'd done it, why he murdered the man he thought of as his father. The idea had simply formed in his head, taken shape out of the mist that usually filled his head. He wanted to bury those nipples and
penises and all that pubic hair. He wanted to hide it in the earth where it belonged, so he wouldn't think of it anymore, wouldn't see it when he shut his eyes.

Over time, passing through other foster homes, the murder of Harry Bonner had become so clear and pure in his imagination that he had no choice but to do it. It lay before him, a movie that he had watched a thousand times until he had memorized his part, knew every action, every event exactly as it would unfold. Then he did it. Played out his role. Simple as that. See it, then do it. As though his mind was a film projector, throwing the light out his eyes onto the screen of the world. Seeing what to do, then doing it. He strangled his father in the embalming room, then dug a hole in the backyard and buried the nipples and penises and hair. Harry's large wife, Eloise, caught Hal dropping the last shoebox into the ground. She screamed at him. She hit him with the handle of her broom. She ran into the house to call the police. So he strangled her too.