When the Killing's Done (20 page)

“That’s right!” she shouts out, ignoring the startled looks the joggers give her and the way the dogs, all three of them, glance up sharply at the vehemence in her voice. “See you in court!”

Coches Prietos

O
n the back side of Santa Cruz Island, the side that faces out to sea, there are any number of snug anchorages—Yellowbanks, Willows, Horqueta, Alamos, Pozo, Malva Real—but the one he prefers, especially on a weekday when nobody else is likely to show up, is a horseshoe-shaped cove with a buff sand beach called Coches Prietos. That’s where he’s heading now, Anise in the galley fresh-squeezing limes for a batch of margaritas (which he won’t even sample till they’re past the shipping lanes—he can’t count the times he’s been motoring along without a thought in the world only to glance up and see one of those big implacable seven-story container ships coming straight at him like a floating mountain), the chop moderate and the sun burned clear, for two days of R&R. He’s been making an effort to get the boat out of the harbor at least once a month, because what’s the use of owning the thing if you’re just going to park it in a slip like the Janovs and all the rest of the slip hogs who like the idea of having a boat a whole lot better than the reality of sailing it, but with one thing and another there are long stretches when the
Paladin
sits idle. The motor has been rebuilt, top to bottom, and he’s twice had her out of the water to be scraped, sealed and repainted, there’s a new refrigerator with an ice maker and a seriously upgraded stereo-video system (put in by his best installer from the Goleta store), and she handles beautifully,
como un sueño
, as Wilson would say. So yes, he is making the effort to get his sea legs under him and motor out to the islands whenever he can find the time.

It’s not that easy, actually. There’s always something in the house that needs fixing, he can’t seem to stay out of the stores no matter how much he’s paying Harley Meachum to do his fretting for him and the FPA business is staggeringly time-consuming, what with fund-raising, e-mail campaigns, mass mailings and the website. Then there are the endless meetings with his lawyers, not only over the various lawsuits going forward but the final and ultimate hassle of the upcoming bench trial to answer the charges from that fiasco two years back when the engine failed him and he had to sit there at anchor while the Coast Guard came aboard with Tim Sickafoose, bird-watcher and first-class snitch, and Ranger Rick Melman of the National Park Service. That was a sad day all around. Within minutes of getting back to the boat it had begun to rain hard, the sea coming up fast and nasty, and he’d had no choice but to radio for help. Help came, all right—the Coast Guard wound up towing them back to the harbor, but not before arresting him and Wilson on the utterly asinine charges of feeding wildlife and interfering with a federal agency.

Wilson had been ready to fight. He’d been opposed to radioing for the Coast Guard to begin with—“What do we need those motherfuckers for, because you know they’re going to want to poke through everything and how many life jackets do you have and like where’s the fire extinguisher and what’s with the empty cat food bags at the bottom of the trash when you don’t even have a cat aboard?”—but there was nothing either of them could do about the engine and even if they sat there for a day and a night and another day till the weather cleared, what were they going to do, paddle back to Santa Barbara? The champagne was in the refrigerator, untouched, and Wilson was fuming. Finally, he did come around—and Anise was vocal here, since she had a gig the following evening at the Night Owl and there was no way in hell she was going to miss it—but when the Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside and he saw Sickafoose and Ranger Rick there, his eyes went hard. “Don’t let them on board,” Wilson kept saying. “Shove the motherfuckers right the fuck over the rail.”

When it came down to it, when they were actually standing there on the deck in a tight little crowd and poking their noses into the cockpit and the cabin, Anise had gotten hot too. Ranger Rick was tricked out in one of those big black leather belts beat cops wore, replete with nightstick, dangling handcuffs and firearm. She wanted to know what right the Park Service had to board a private boat in public waters off an island owned by the people of the United States—all the people, not just the ones in teal shirts with nameplates on them—and he had informed her, in the sober monitory tones of cops worldwide, that if she didn’t shut it he was going to have to think real hard about working up a conspiracy charge to go along with the misdemeanor counts against her boyfriend and his accomplice.

He was on the point of exploding himself—all this trouble and expense only to get arrested on his own boat in a bay eleven miles from the nearest reporter while the vitamin K was dissolving in the rain and he was utterly helpless to do anything about anything—but for once, he curbed himself. His focus was on keeping things from escalating. This was bad, sure it was, but he was already calculating how he could play it up for publicity, the charges clearly trumped-up, absurd—it’s against the law to feed animals and perfectly fine to poison them wholesale? All he said was, “We’re a vessel in distress, with a storm coming up. The rest of it, I never heard of. It’s crazy. We took a hike, that’s all. Tell me there’s a law against that?”

Today, though, it’s different. It’s been a long time since the incident, time enough for everybody to forget all about it—except the court, that is, and the Park Service and Alma Boyd Takesue and all the rest of the vengeful sons of bitches—and his lawyer has put things off with one motion or another till finally he can put them off no longer. The trial—or farce, as his lawyer calls it—isn’t till Monday next and at this point it’s nothing more than a formality. Or at least he’s ninety-nine percent sure it is. Or will be. Wilson’s already pled to the charges and received a suspended sentence and a $200 fine—and since it made no sense for both of them to go down, Wilson stepped forward and stated for the record that he’d acted alone, that Dave LaJoy had no knowledge whatever of what he planned to do to save the lives of innocent animals and protect the planet from the people who would rather kill than preserve, that his friend was along merely to take a hike that day. How they’d missed the sign at the trailhead, he couldn’t say. But it was windy, dust blowing in their faces, so they had their hoods up. And then it rained.

That’s how things stand. So he’s not sweating it. Or at least that’s what he tells himself, because he’s facing six months in jail and a $5,000 fine on each of the two counts, but today he’s not going to think about it. He’s here, out on the water, on an afternoon made to order, doing what he needs to do more of—and for now he’s just going to push the off switch in his brain and open up and appreciate the world in all its glory.

The Anacapa Passage is a little rougher than he’d like, but nothing his stomach can’t handle, given that he hasn’t put anything in it except a slice of dry toast and two Dramamine, and the chop goes flat once he makes San Pedro Point and the big cliffs start knocking down the wind. He stays just offshore, in twenty to thirty feet of water, as they cruise along the southern shore, round the point off Albert’s Anchorage and ease into the cove at Coches. Which, he sees to his satisfaction, they have to themselves. Every once in a while, especially on weekends, he’s come all the way out here only to find that somebody else has beaten him to it, sometimes two or even three boats, but today, a Monday in early June while school’s still in session and it’s nose to the grindstone for the average wage-slave who can only dream about his two weeks off in August, it’s deserted and looking as pristine as if he were the first to discover it, as if he were Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo himself, sailing for the Spaniards four hundred and fifty years ago. He’s thinking about that, about what it must have been like when no one knew what was here, when the world was a mystery and the maps teemed with sea monsters and vast null stretches of terra incognita—anything could have happened, any miracle or horror, each new island more bizarre than the last, a fantasia of imaginary flora and fauna made concrete in the instant it took to record it on the retina—as he cuts back on the throttle and glides in on his own wake. In the next moment, when they’re more or less in the middle of the cove, he swings the boat around to anchor stern-in so they can sit out on the deck and take in the view of the beach and the cliffs that frame it.

The anchor drops. The boat drifts tranquilly out to the end of the line and the line tightens. Satisfied, he settles into the deck chair, and Anise pads up barefoot from the galley and hands him the first margarita, the contemplative one, so cold there’s a rime of frost on the glass. She’s in her bikini, two little black strips of cloth that seem nothing more than an interruption in the blinding white spill of her. Her hair is up and she’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat and retro shades that make her look like she’s stepped out of an old black-and-white movie. “Nice,” she says, easing into the deck chair beside him.

The margarita, the simplest recipe and the best—fresh lime juice, Herradura reposado, triple sec, shaken and poured into a salt-rimmed martini glass—is, he’s thinking, the finest he’s ever had. It kicks in right away on an empty stomach and as he lifts the glass to toast her he’s feeling so relaxed he might as well be asleep. “Yeah,” he says. “As nice as it gets.”

Time compresses. There is no human sound, nothing, not the ticking of a clock or the murmur of a radio, no digital beeps, no sough and wheeze of appliances. He can hear the water trickling along the hull, the cartilaginous creaking of a gull’s wings as it cranks past. The beach glows as if lit from beneath. The cliffs hold everything in.

“You want another?” she asks. “And maybe a sandwich? I’ve got some of that Gruyère you like—on a ciabatta roll. How does that sound?”

He’s put up the canopy to keep the sun off the deck because she’s worried about her skin, milk-white, white as the flesh of the calves they deprive of light and iron so they can serve them up as veal for all the butchers and carnivores out there, and when she comes back from the galley with two sandwiches and the shaker of margaritas—and here’s the first mechanical sound, the faintest click of the ice cubes dropping down out of the ice maker in the depths of the boat—he sees that she’s removed the top of her bikini, and why not? It’s not as if anybody’s coming to lunch.

The sight of her—all that incandescent skin, the heavy ever-so-slightly asymmetrical load of her breasts—stirs him, and why wouldn’t it? He’d have to be comatose not to respond to something like this, like Anise, all but naked. And that’s the beauty of it—they’ve got all day, all night, all day tomorrow and tomorrow night too. No need to rush. “Nice,” he says, the adjective of the day, as she hands him the plate and leans over him to pour the glass full, and he’s thinking of the women’s magazines she leaves lying around, a model all rigged out on the cover and the various come-ons, in neon letters, radiating out from her as if she were Kali of the supernumerary arms.
Love Secrets of the Stars, How to Please Your Man in Bed (Guy-Tested!), 63 Ways to Turn On Your Mate
. As if it was that hard. All you have to do is take off your clothes, baby, and if he’s not dead he’ll jump your bones.

So there’s a nice little frisson going as he eats his sandwich with a hard-on, sips his second margarita, contemplates the waves and allows the sweet purr of her voice to envelop him as if she were singing, and maybe she is. Soon, when the mood takes him, he’ll get up and slip the bikini bottom down her thighs and take her by the ankles, lift her legs and slide it off her. But right now he’s savoring the moment. Like all women she can sulk and brood for days on end over some imagined slight or a thing so inconsequential—what somebody said to her at work, the color of the dress she knew she shouldn’t have bought—as to make him question her sanity, but he’s never seen her in a better mood than this, so pleased to be here on this deck anchored off her own special island at half-past twelve when everybody else in the world’s at work, three-quarters naked and savoring the moment as much as he is. He hasn’t touched her yet but she’s wet, he knows she is, and he’s thinking maybe they’ll do it right here, right on the deck . . .

“You know what this reminds me of?” she asks, stretching her legs all the way out to flex her toes against the rail, the base of the cocktail glass balanced on her sternum, between her breasts. “I mean, out here all alone like this and nothing but open water all the way down to what, L.A.? Mexico?”

“What?” he says. “What does it remind you of?”

“
The Island of the Blue Dolphins
. You ever read that book?”

“I don’t know. Sounds familiar.”

“It’s a children’s book, I guess, or what they call young adult now. My mother read it to me when I was a kid, over and over—it was my number one favorite for a year probably.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know. Eleven, twelve maybe.”

He holds on to that a moment, trying to picture her at that age, pubescent Anise, with her honey-colored hair and rounded limbs, breasts just starting to break through as if they’d sprouted from seed, which in a way they had, everything programmed in the genes, her smile, her voice, this gentle graceful irresistible flow of limbs and hair and lips and eyes holding him transfixed in this instant on this deck off the back side of this rocky volcanic island with its skirt of white foam and the cliffs that soak in the sun as if they were molten still. Natalie, his first love, was fourteen when she magically appeared at the desk across from his in Mr. During’s third-period history class at Santa Barbara Junior High, a transfer from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she’d gone to Catholic school and learned to smoke Larks and the odd joint when the nuns were busy doing whatever nuns do. She didn’t look anything like Anise—she was short, even as a newly minted adult of eighteen, which was when he married her, with her mother’s Sicilian complexion that made her look as if she’d just stepped out of the tanning salon no matter the season. To him she was a real exotic, with her black hair and copper eyes and the way she pronounced things like fall and dog (“If it’s dawg,” he’d say, “then why isn’t it lawg and fawg and bawg?”). Exotic can only take you so far, though, and when you marry that young—he was only nineteen himself—you’re asking for disaster. Which was what he got. They lasted two years, during which he was working part-time and getting his associate’s degree at the community college, and then he started up the business with help from his father and she was gone out of his life. “I’ll bet you were sexy,” he says.