Under Cover of Daylight (34 page)

“Nineteen is old enough. You knew what you were doing.”

“Did I?” Thorn said. “Think who you were at nineteen.”

“I’m still nineteen,” Sarah said. “In here.” She tapped her left breast with the butt of the Colt. “Nineteen. Ten. All of it.”

The two teenagers chased each other across the calm water, circling thirty yards around the skiff. The girl whooped as the boy pulled alongside, swerving close to her, making a theatrical grab for her. The girl, seeing Thorn standing naked, slowed.

“Come on, Sarah,” Thorn said. “We’re past this point. Things have changed for us. Promises you made when you were a little girl, they’re not binding now.”

“Listen, Thorn,” she said, a roughness in her voice, “somebody’s got to stop this thing. Somebody’s got to break the cycle.”

The two kids on the jet skis were creeping closer to the boat, whispering.

“I want you in that water,” she said. “If I have to shoot you and throw you in, I want you in that water.”

He wasn’t feeling detached anymore. His ears were still thumping from the gunshots earlier. He wanted badly to tell her what he saw now. That they were joined. By thin, invisible umbilicals, hooked together. Every pinprick made the other wince. Her stricken face, the panic in her eyes at what she might do, was a replica of his face. Her exhalation came with his inhaling. Twined. Something more powerful than love binding them. It was a marriage consecrated by a ’65 Buick, by a lifetime of regret and loss and anger.

The sun seeped into the horizon’s edge behind her, and her shadow fell onto him. He wanted to tell her this, show her this fact. That they were halves of one whole, depending on the other. If he sank below the surface, she would be dragged down too.

He said instead, his voice surprising him with its calmness, “I did it. I killed your father. I killed him, and I’ve had no rest since.”

She nodded, turning her eyes to the deck.

Holding onto the gunwale, Thorn slipped overboard. The water was bath warm. He held to the skiff, his breath coming with difficulty. The wake from the jet skis was rocking the boat. She waved him away from the side of the skiff with the Colt. Her mouth was open, her eyes muddy.

He turned, let go, began to breaststroke toward the spot where it had happened. Where he had made it happen. The water, thicker than water, warmer than water.

And he knew she was right; he had just been looking at it. He had come out there and sat and stared and said the same things to himself. The appearance of penitence. He’d rehashed the story to himself a hundred times, and though a deep hurt came to him when he recalled it, that pain had not changed him.

Thorn was twenty yards from the skiff when he stopped swimming, paddled around, and faced her. She had skinned out of her clothes and was standing naked now, holding the pistol by her side. The teenagers had slowed to a crawl thirty yards away, staring on, their machines muttering.

Thorn waited there, treading water. He could feel the tickle of the turtle grass against his feet. The drag of the tide, already hauling his body toward shore.

She found a good grip on the barrel of the Colt and slung it out into the lake. He’d never seen her throw before. She had a damn good arm.

She slipped over the side of the skiff and glided through the water toward him. Thorn released the breath he’d been holding and pushed ahead against the swelling tide toward her.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1987 by James W. Hall

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

978-1-4532-2346-8

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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