Liquid Smoke

THREE

I walked out of the ocean, the board tucked under my arm and Darcy Gill chasing behind me.

“Did you hear me?” she asked, coming up to my side.

“I heard you.”

“Your father is on death row.” “I don’t have a father,” I said.

“Spare me the Movie of the Week drama,” she said, keeping pace. “I know you don’t have a relationship with him. But he is still your father.”

I trudged up the sand, stepped across the pavement of the boardwalk, and set my board down behind the small retaining wall that bordered my patio.

I turned to Darcy. “I didn’t even know his name until you just said it. I don’t know that this guy is my father.”

“Your mother is Carolina, correct?” she said, dropping her rental board against the wall.

I didn’t say anything.

“He told me where to find you,” she said. “He told me who your mother is. I checked you out. He got your birth date correct. He is your father, whether you want to believe me or not. And he is scheduled to die.”

The temperature was in the high sixties, but I fought off a shiver.

I sat down on the wall. “He knew where to find me?”

Darcy nodded. “He knew your address by memory. And your mother’s.” She paused. “And you would have no way of knowing this, but you look a hell of a lot like him.”

Something lurched in my gut. I’d never known a thing about my father. Knowing my mother had nearly done me in. She’d never brought him up, and I’d never asked. There were veiled references on occasion, but nothing strong enough to start a conversation. I’d done fine without a father and, over the years, that independence had only grown stronger and quashed any fleeting curiosity I might have had in learning anything about him.

“Who did he kill?” I asked, trying to get my thoughts in order.

“Two Mexican nationals,” she said, sitting down next to me. “Five years ago. He shot them point blank in the back of the head, hands tied behind their backs.”

“Sounds like a guy I really want to meet.”

“Look, I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “You can find out the facts pretty easily, so there’s no point in it. He’s a hard man. He’s comfortable in jail. He’d been in before this conviction.”

I didn’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, it didn’t matter. I’d never met him, never spoken to him, and never touched him. The only influence he’d had on my life was my having to give an embarrassing answer when people asked where my father was.

On the other hand, if he was truly my father, the blood of a lifelong criminal was pulsing in my heart.

“He was convicted with special circumstances that allowed for the death penalty,” Darcy continued. “He’s never participated in his appeals, and he’s waived the opportunity for several of them even to be heard. That’s why he’s come up so fast. He’s been on the row for eighteen months. Generally, the average is thirteen years before we get to this point.”

“Why hasn’t he appealed?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just picked up this case last month. I work for a firm that only handles appellate cases. We grab cases like your father’s.”

“Don’t call him that,” I said sharply. “And I know what appellate firms do.”

“Then you know we’re his last chance,” she said. “The attorneys who handled his earlier appeals told me that he just wasn’t interested in spending time in court anymore. He’s barely spoken to me.”

I stared at the gray sky draping the ocean like a big canopy. “Why would you think I’d give a shit about helping him?”

“I don’t. But you’re basically my last option to get him to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

She shuffled her feet on the concrete walk. “He killed those two men. There’s no doubt about that, and he confessed to it. But when he was first arrested, he indicated that he was working for someone. He’s denied it ever since. But if I can show that he was under orders, it might buy him a little sympathy and get the sentence commuted to life.”

“You already told me he’s not talking.”

“Not to me. But he might to you.”

I couldn’t imagine what he’d have to say to me. And I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t think I really had anything to say to him. Not anything that was worth the anger it would bring to the surface, anyway.

“Why would he talk to me?” I asked. “We don’t know each other.”

“The only words he’s said to me were about you,” she said. “Coming from a man facing a death sentence, that says a great deal about where his mind and heart are.”

I feared she was right.