Now You See Her

Chapter 12

IT MUST HAVE BEEN around noon when I woke up, but I didn’t open my eyes right away.

As I pretty much always did over the last two years, I lay still, my breath held and eyelids sealed, momentarily unsure and afraid of where I might find myself.

Then I opened my eyes and let out a sigh of relief.

Because I was OK.

I was still free.

I wasn’t in a prison cell.

Not even close.

Yawning, stretching, blinking in the bright, hazy morning light, I sat up in bed, slowly taking in the white-on-white bedroom. From left to right, I scanned the driftwood sculpture on the side table, the seashell shadow box, the book-filled beadboard bookcases.

And, as usual, my waking inventory ended at my left hand. Or more precisely, at the diamond engagement ring and wedding band that had somehow become attached to my ring finger.

Standing, I stopped and shook my startled head at the mirror above the bedside table. From all my sea kayaking and windsurfing over the past two years, my light skin had turned a deep shade of brown. My brown hair, on the other hand, had become lighter, now striped with blond streaks.

I’d somehow become a version of myself I’d never even considered. Jeanine, surfer chick. Malibu Jeanine.

Failing to wrap my head around that one, I crossed the room and opened the vertical blinds on the sliders. I squinted as I took in the lazily leaning king palms, the expanse of Crayola teal water, the forest of boat masts.

My backyard, replete with two white seaward-facing chaise longues, could have been the set of a Corona commercial. I smiled at the muscular arm resting on the edge of the right chair.

Since we were out of Corona, I had to settle for putting an ice-cold bottle of Red Stripe into the big hand as I stepped up.

Two years of healing. Two years of love. No one was luckier than I.

“How’s the fishing there, Mr. Fournier?” I said.

“Slow, Mrs. Fournier,” Peter said, grinning at me impishly behind his Wayfarers.

Chapter 13

YEP. YOU GUESSED IT. Peter and I had gotten married.

Or maybe you didn’t. I don’t blame you. I sure as hell hadn’t seen it coming.

I came down for spring break, and I never went home.

“Fish don’t seem to be biting today,” Peter said, putting the beer bottle down next to his sea rod and grabbing my ankle. “But hey, wait. I think I got something.”

For a scary second, I worried that I’d fall onto our concrete seawall or off it. But then I was on my back, across Peter’s lap, screeching ecstatically as he mercilessly tickled my armpits. Over the last two years in Key West, I was basically majoring in ecstatic screeching.

“You honestly think I’d let you fall in?” Peter whispered as he caught my earlobe in his teeth. “After all we’ve been through? It took me my whole life to catch a real-life mermaid. I’d never throw you back. No way.”

“In that case,” I said, sighing, as I lay back in the neighboring chaise. I smiled up at the merciless blue tropical Floridian sky. “I’ll just have to put up with you mortals for one more day.”

What hadn’t we been through? I thought as I closed my eyes, remembering the night of the accident.

It seemed like a million years ago.

After we had pulled into Peter’s carport, he brought me inside and sat me down on his living room couch and told me to sit tight. About ten minutes later, I heard his boat start up. I fell asleep waiting for him to return and woke to the sun coming up and Peter, back from his night shift, in the kitchen making us breakfast.

He’d taken care of everything, including delivering the Camaro back to Alex and persuading him to drop the car theft charge. It was as if the night before had never happened at all.

When I went back to the hotel that afternoon, the only thing waiting in the lobby were my bags. My friends were gone. Not just Alex and Maureen, but Mike and even Cathy had left. They hadn’t left a message.

I remembered singing “Could You Be Loved?” with them. The answer in my case was apparently a big fat no. Life wasn’t an episode of Friends, it seemed. Not one of them had “been there” for me, that was for sure. Not one of them had given a shit whether I lived or died.

Driving me to the bus station, Peter had taken one look at my face and told me that he had a tiny room above his garage that he sometimes rented.

“If you’re not ready to go back to school just yet, you could stay for a couple of days,” he said.

A couple of days.

Key West’s most famous last words.

When two days turned into a week, Peter said he had a friend, Elena, a female cop, who was part owner of the island’s largest catering company and was always looking for people.

I took the catering job the next day and withdrew from school the day after that.

I knew it was a rash, probably borderline crazy thing to do. I also knew things were different now. That I was different. It wasn’t just the accident. With the break from my friends, the last vestiges of my old life had been cast away. One door had closed, and something in the Key West air told me to sit tight until the next one opened.

And that’s exactly what happened.

From the beginning, Peter was a perfect gentleman. Really more like a father or an extremely protective brother. He was always making sure that I used sunscreen and ate enough and got enough exercise and enough sleep. He was constantly leaving things on the rickety landing outside my door, videotapes, bags of fruit, books.

By far, my favorite offering was a battered, secondhand copy of seventeenth-century English poets, Herrick and Marvell. At night I’d lie in my tiny bed and read, rediscovering why I’d become an English major in the first place. Rose petals and winged chariots, eternal youth and beauty. It was uncanny how well Peter seemed to know me.

Peter actually stuttered the first time he asked me to come to dinner. He served in the backyard with a tablecloth and china. He even wore a jacket with his Bermuda shorts. The lamb chops were burnt, the mashed potatoes were runny, but by the end of the sunset, even before he reached across the table and held my hand, I knew.

We both knew. Despite our ten-year age difference, we’d both known it from pretty much the moment we looked at each other through his cruiser’s backseat mesh.

He proposed two weeks later. Teaching me how to fish, he asked me to reel in the line so he could change the bait. Only instead of a hook, my ring was tied to the end of the line, and I turned to find Peter down on one knee.

We were married in a city hall wedding six months after that.

I knew the whole thing was crazy. I knew that I was too young, that things were happening too fast, that I was being impulsive. But the craziest thing of all was that it kept working.

“Jeanine?” Peter said.

I opened one of my eyes.

“Yes, Peter,” I said.

“I thought you mermaids never wore shirts.”

“That’s only under the sea, silly,” I said. “On land among you mortals, we have to keep the devastating, beguiling power of our boobies in check or nothing would ever get done.”

“Except you?” Peter said.

I closed my eye. “Now you’re getting it.”

“Jeanine?” Peter said, laying down the sea pole.

“Yes, Peter?”

“You know what I’m in the mood for?”

“Devastating beguilement?”

“How’d you know?” he said.

“Mermaids know,” I said, standing and taking my husband by the hand.

Chapter 14

BACK TO THE PRESENT, and I’d just put in a load of whites when I heard the beeping. I padded into the kitchen and turned off the microwave timer before I headed to the rear of our cozy beach bungalow and into the master bath.

Then I took a monster breath and held it as I turned and lifted the pregnancy test off the toilet lid.

Time and my heart stopped at the exact same moment as I stared at the display window with its two identical blue lines. My breath whooshed out of me as though I were a seven-year-old blowing out birthday candles.

Because I’d already read the math on the box.

One blue line plus one blue line equaled one pregnant Jeanine.

Over the past two weeks, I’d been in panic mode. More and more as another day passed and I didn’t get my period. I kept thinking about those three pills that I’d somehow missed. I must have experienced brain freeze in the middle of last month’s cycle.

Peter had elected me the head of the contraception department, and I’d definitely dropped the ball. Talk about a whoops.

I also thought about what a baby would do to my twenty-three-year-old body, my twenty-three-year-old future.

But as I stood there, staring down the two blue lines, something odd and unexpected happened. A warmth started in the center of my chest and for a quicksilver second, I could actually feel my baby, skin on skin, soft in my arms.

Why not? I thought, suddenly dazzled with the life-affirming awesomeness of it. Why couldn’t Malibu Jeanine bring a Malibu baby to the luau? Hell, why not two? I’d always wanted kids. Peter and I had planned for some in the vague future anyway, so why not start early?

Life was crazy. You had to roll with it. If the last two years and Key West had taught me anything, it was that. Mi vida really was loca. Besides, plans were for making God laugh.

I dropped the test, sending the trusty stick flying, when there was a pounding on the door followed by a deafening electronic squawk.

What the?

“THIS IS THE POLICE!” Peter called through a police megaphone. “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOUR PANTIES OFF!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. He was always so crazy and funny, a holy terror of a rascal. All he did was make me laugh. When he wasn’t making me do even better stuff. I knew right then that Peter would make the best dad on earth.

Should I tell him about the test? I thought. No, I quickly decided, hiding it under the sink. In two weeks we were going up to the Breakers in Palm Beach, where we’d spent our honeymoon. I’d drop it on him at dinner. Blow his doors off. Knock his socks off. Then his pants.

He might be a little thrown off, but not for long. I’d show him. I loved him and he loved me. We could definitely make this work.

“I’m coming out,” I said a moment later.

“GOOD MOVE!” Peter squawked. “AND NO FUNNY BUSINESS!”

I unlocked the door. Then I sailed my Victoria’s Secret bra and thong onto the megaphone, right into Peter’s dumbfounded blue eyes.

“Don’t shoot,” I said, wearing nothing but my smile.

Chapter 15

IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY when I decided to clean Peter’s boat.

Peter liked to go fishing by himself on Fridays after work. It was his way to blow off steam, clear his head, transition from the stressful workweek to the weekend. He’d usually come back in at around nine, and we’d end up having a late dinner of freshly caught wahoo or sailfish or blackfin tuna.

So as a surprise, I wanted his boat to be shining when he came home after his shift.

My hair up in a bandanna, wearing stylish yellow kitchen gloves and holding a soapy mop bucket, I boarded his twenty-five-foot Stingray at around eleven that morning. It was a white cabin cruiser, squat and powerful, almost like a speed-but with two berths for sleeping and a small galley under the bow.

An enormous seagull cried from atop the mast of a small sailboat across our canal as I stood on the softly swaying deck. As a breeze came off the electric blue water, I suddenly felt a strange lifting sensation in my stomach, guilt mixed with pleasure, like a child playing hooky. My life consisted of pretty much nothing but playing hooky, didn’t it? I was loving every millisecond of it.

I smiled as I glanced at the CD in the boat’s topside boom box. It was by the seventies one-hit wonder Looking Glass. As silly as it was, the old jukebox staple about a sailor torn between the sea and his beloved bar wench, “Brandy,” was our wedding song.

I didn’t even know why. I guess because it was fun and goofy and yet deep down seriously romantic, just like Peter and me.

Looking at the powerboat’s sleek lines, I thought for the millionth time how much Peter impressed me. As funny and fun-loving as he was, he was an even harder worker. And because he came from meager circumstances in, of all places, the Bronx, New York, his accomplishments were nothing short of amazing.

Without the benefit of a college education, he’d managed to buy this boat, not to mention this beautiful house in paradise that he’d redone himself. All the while becoming hands down the most well respected, competent cop on the island since the moment he’d transferred down from the NYPD seven years before.

Peter was the real deal, the big-city go-to cop that all the other cops called when the shit hit the fan. Unlike my ex-boyfriend, Alex—who had proven himself to be nothing but a completely self-centered jock, faithless and irresponsible, unwilling to deal with anything his talent didn’t easily overcome—Peter was a traditional guy who actually sought out the hard stuff, took on every challenge the world had to offer, the more difficult the better, knowing it to be the thing that, in fact, made him a man.

There was no doubt that I loved my Saint Peter. I loved him as much as you can love someone who is not only your lover and friend but your hero. If he hadn’t existed, I would have had to invent him.

“Brandy,” the groovy seventies singer’s voice crooned as I hit the boom box’s Play button, “what a good wife you would be. But my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea.”

By noon, I had finished polishing and waxing everything topside and I headed belowdecks. It was hot even by Key West standards, and down in the cruiser’s dim, claustrophobic cabin, the warm, icky, hazy air stuck like Saran wrap on my sweat-drenched skin.

I was putting away some paper towels under one of the galley’s lower cabinets when I noticed something curious lashed with bungee cords to the underside of the sink.

It was a gray plastic box, hard and flat like one that a tool set might come in. I was surprised by how heavy it was as I grabbed its handle and slipped it out. I sat on the cabin steps, set it on my lap, and popped its clasps.

My entire body went slack with a sharp intake of breath as I stared down at what was inside it. I pulled off my bandanna and wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

I’d been expecting some sort of first aid kit, but sitting in the gray foam padding was a gun. It was matte black, greasy with oil, a little larger than a pistol. A nasty-looking hole-filled tube surrounded the barrel, and there were a few wraps of gray duct tape around its grip.

The words “Intratec Miami 9mm” were stamped in the metal in front of the trigger. In the foam beside it were two thin rectangular magazines, the reddish copper jackets of bullets winking at their brims.

Being the daughter of a cop, guns didn’t faze me. I actually used to duck-hunt with my dad, so I knew how to use the shotgun and two nine-millimeters Peter kept in the locked gun cabinet in our bedroom closet.

But wasn’t it a little strange to have a machine pistol on the boat? Wouldn’t a shotgun make more sense? Why hadn’t Peter told me about it?

I tightly closed the lid of the box and put it back where I found it before heading back into the house.

Inside, I was startled to find Peter by the kitchen sink in his police uniform home early.

“Peter?” I said.

Then he turned around, and I saw the scowl on his face. I covered my smile with my hand as I saw that his entire front, from chest to crotch, was covered in the residue of white, rank-smelling puke.

“Go ahead. Laugh it up,” he said with a wide grin. “Look what a nice drunken lady tourist gave me over by the La Concha hotel. Nice of her, wasn’t it? Smells like she had the clam chowder for lunch, don’t you think? Did I ever tell you how much I love being a Key West cop?”

I quickly decided that now probably wasn’t the most opportune time to have a sit-down about Peter’s choice of firearms. It was probably just a rah-rah-cop gung ho throwback to his bachelor days anyway. He probably used it to shoot beer cans with his buddies when they went fishing.

“Let me get a garbage bag,” I said as the puke stench hit me. “On second thought, I’ll get some lighter fluid and a match.” I laughed.

“What are you talking about, Jeanine? I thought you said I look hot in my uniform,” Peter said, mischief gleaming in his blue eyes.

I knew that look.

“Don’t you dare,” I screamed, running as he came quickly around the kitchen island with open arms, puke emanating from his shirt front.

“Come here, Brandy. Where are you going, Mermaid?” he said, laughing as he ran after me into the backyard. “Time to give your husband some sugar, baby doll. Stay right where you are. We need to hug this thing out.”

Chapter 16

ON THE EDGE of the manicured lawn, I sighed as a cello, flute, and violin trio played Pachelbel’s Canon in D with perfect, aching precision.

Work, work, work, I thought, filling another long-stemmed glass with two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle Krug brut champagne. The aristocratic wedding guests at the reception we were catering seemed every bit as elegant as the crystal as they laughed and hugged around billowing, white-draped tables arranged on the emerald grounds.

Even to a jaded veteran caterer like me, the wedding on the sprawling front lawn of the Hemingway Home was breathtaking. The famed Spanish colonial in the background had its hurricane shutters flung wide, as if Papa himself might come out at any moment onto the second-story veranda with a highball and offer the lucky couple a toast.

The bubbly that I dispensed in perfectly folded linen was ’92 Krug to be exact, the year the sleekly beautiful, dark-haired couple, a convertible bond arbitrager and an art dealer, both from New York, had met. Between refills, I watched them as they smiled, hand in hand, on the western fringe of the lush lawn, taking pictures to capture the Key West Lighthouse in the background.

One day I’d probably finish my English degree, I thought, as I sighed again. But until then, I had no problem chilling out here in wedding world, where it was forever Saturday afternoon, complete with classical music, popping corks, raised champagne flutes, eggshell and ivory, eternally blue skies.

Of course, I would have preferred to spend all day fishing with Peter, but he’d been working overtime on Saturdays for the last two solid months with a DEA task force. It was undercover work, which I knew was dangerous and I hated, but I also knew my husband. Peter was a hard-driving superstar cop, more than capable of taking care of himself and his buddies. It was the bad guys who needed to worry.

“Your wedding was better,” my boss and Peter’s coworker Elena Cardenas said, hip-butting me as she passed with a tray of sesame chicken.

“Yeah, right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Which part did you like more? When Peter faked throwing me off the bar’s dock or his drunken rendition of ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’?”

“Hard to decide,” the full-figured blond Cuban said with a laugh. “At least he didn’t appear to have a pole up his keister like this groom. Anyway, Teo is up to his neck and running low on champagne at the bar. Could you run and grab another box of Krug out of the van?”

“Aye, aye, captain,” I said.

“And remember, watch out for the Jump Killer,” Elena called as I went toward the iron street gate.

The Jump Killer was on my mind and probably that of every young woman in South Florida that summer. An ongoing Channel 7 news story told about spooky abductions up in North Miami, missing prostitutes, an unsuccessful attack in which a man tied up a woman with parachute cord. The words serial killer were being used, though no bodies had been found. Gee, thanks for reminding me, Elena, I thought as I walked down the deserted street toward the van.

I was coming back up the faded sidewalk with the champagne when I spotted a man in the beat-up black Jeep across the street.

He reminded me of the tennis player Björn Borg, with long, dirty blond hair and wraparound sunglasses. He also sported a blond Jesus beard. I glanced at the windshield, and though his face was pointed away, I got the impression that as I approached he was watching me from behind the glasses. He took something out of the pocket of his cutoff denim shirt and started playing with it. It was a gold lighter, and he started clicking it in rhythm to the clink of champagne bottles as I walked past.

I swallowed, suddenly afraid. The guy was definitely creepy. As I picked up my pace and made it back to the gate, the Jeep roared to life and peeled out, its big tires screeching as it took the first corner.

What the hell had that been about? I thought, hurrying back toward the white tent.

Teo didn’t so much as grunt a thank-you when I dropped off the heavy case by his busy bar, which was par for his course. I couldn’t decide what I disliked more about the young, handsome Hispanic with frosted hair: the several occasions I spotted him coming out of a bathroom rubbing his runny nose or the way he constantly tried to look down my shirt. If he wasn’t Elena’s cousin, I would have complained. I was definitely losing my patience.

I found Elena with her business partner, Gary, the chef, in our staging tent. She smiled as she pulled a tray of puff pastries off the portable oven’s rack.

“Hey, you made it back,” she said, winking at Gary. “See any dangerous-looking parachutists?”

I actually was about to tell her about my evil Björn Borg sighting, but the way she said it, like I was a complete idiot, checked me. It would only lead to more teasing. I liked Elena, but sometimes her tough-chick sarcasm was a little hard to take. I decided to keep the creepy encounter to myself.

“Ha-ha. At least you have a gun,” I said. “Speaking of dangerous, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Elena. How dangerous is that DEA task force thing at work?”

“Are you kidding me?” Elena said, handing me an hors d’oeuvre–packed silver tray. “You have to be a stone-cold supercop like your husband to even think about doing undercover work. Besides, you mean how dangerous was that DEA task force thing. They rerouted the DEA agents back to Miami, like, two months ago. Fed funding dried up. Sucks, too. I did surveillance for them for almost two weeks. The overtime was kick-ass. Take those out now. The yuppie natives look like they’re getting restless.”

Over? For the last two months? I thought as I stumbled out onto the grass, the tray almost slipping from my hand.

Then where the hell had Peter been going on Saturdays only to come home at three in the morning? I wondered.

For the last two months.

Chapter 17

PETER BLINKED when he turned on the kitchen light and saw me sitting ramrod straight with my arms folded at the table at five thirty the next morning.

“Jeanine, you’re up,” he said.

Two months, I thought, noticing that he was showered. I didn’t know whether to scream or cry or hit him. I was ready for all three at once.

Why had Peter been lying through his teeth to me for over two months!?

“I’m up all right,” I said. “All night, in fact. I wanted to ask you a question. Um, I wonder how I can put this delicately. Where the FUCK have you been going every Saturday for the past two FUCKING months?”

Peter held up his hands, a completely floored expression on his face. “What in the name of God are you talking about? Where do you think I’ve been? Mexico? I’ve been at work.”

“Then why did Elena tell me that the DEA task force returned to Miami two months ago?”

“She what?” he said. He actually laughed. “It’s OK, Jeanine. Don’t shoot. I can explain. It’s simple. For a cop, your boss, Elena, is one hell of a caterer. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You didn’t tell her, did you? That I was still involved with the DEA?”

“No,” I said, confused. “Don’t change the subject.”

“Listen to me for a second, all right? The DEA only said they were going back to Miami. They have a confidential informant who said there’s a leak in the department. Some bad cop is leaking stuff to a suspected drug smuggling operation. That’s why the chief hand-selected me. It was stupid not to explain it to you. I should have told you. The important thing is not to tell Elena about it. Don’t tell anyone.”

“You think Elena might be a bad cop?” I said.

“Who the hell knows?” Peter said, shrugging as he took the orange juice out of the fridge. “Somebody in the department is. We can’t rule her out.”

“Are you sure about all of this, Peter?” I said, staring into his eyes. “I mean, are you really sure you’re sure?”

“Am I sure?” he said, laughing again as he stared right back. “Christ, Jeanine. Look at you. I thought cops were suspicious. You want to look at my pay stubs? Check our phone records. If you want, I’ll bring home a CSI kit so you can take prints.”

“It’s just…” I began and then started crying.

Peter stepped over and opened his palms.

“Hands,” he demanded.

I gave mine over.

“Look in my eyes,” he said. “There. Much better. Now, I have a question. Why do you think I married you?”

“You love me?” I said.

“Ya think?” he said. “Look, Jeanine. I never told you this before, but you weren’t the only one that night on the beach who was seriously thinking about calling it quits. I was sick of it. Being a cop, Key West, people, partying. I don’t know, being alive, everything. It all seemed so meaningless and stupid.” He smiled down at me.

“Then I rolled up and looked into your eyes, and I haven’t been inside a church since my Communion, Jeanine, but it felt holy, you know? Like God sent me an angel down from heaven. After I got to know you and realized how incredible we were together, I knew it was true.”

“Not an angel, a mermaid,” I said, sniffling.

“Exactly,” Peter said, wiping a tear off my nose. “You’re the first thing in a long time, maybe the only thing ever, that actually makes me want to get out of bed and floss my teeth and balance my checkbook. You understand? I’m not Alex. I’m not some asshole. I’d do anything. I’d die before hurting you. I’d burn this shit-heel, sunburned tourist trap to the ground, if you wanted me to. I’d—”

“Oh, Peter,” I said, crying as I kissed him. “I know. I’m sorry. My Saint Peter, my love,” I said, burying my face in his shoulder.

Chapter 18

ON FRIDAY NIGHT, exactly one week before our trip to Palm Beach, I was sitting on the couch, thinking about going to bed early. But at the last second, I decided to throw caution to the wind and put my flip-flops on and head out to the island’s only Blockbuster, half a mile away on North Roosevelt Boulevard.

Peter was pulling a double, directing traffic at some road construction on the Overseas Highway up in Big Pine Key, so I was flying solo. Being much more of a classic movie buff than he was, I decided I couldn’t waste the home-alone opportunity to indulge in a late-night Alfred Hitchcock double feature. I snagged The Birds and North by Northwest off the shelf.

I was a foot out the door when I hit the Unlock button on my car key fob and heard the faint bloop-bloop.

No, wait, I thought as I suddenly spotted my battered blue Vespa at the curb. What was I thinking? I’d taken the moped. Our new Toyota Supra was still with Peter at work.

I stopped and stared down at my car key fob, confused. Why had I heard the car beep, then?

I scanned the parking lot as I thumbed Unlock a second time. I turned to my left as the double bloop sounded out faintly again.

What the heck? It seemed to be coming from across the street.

I stepped past my Vespa to the edge of the sidewalk that rimmed the strip mall’s lot and hit the fob one last time.

In a parking lot directly across North Roosevelt Boulevard, a parked car’s lights went on and off with the familiar electronic bloop.

I stared across at it. It was sleek, black, brand-new. What the hell? I squinted at the Florida license plate. Yep, it was ours. It was our Supra.

But why was it there? I thought. Shouldn’t it be parked at police headquarters? Shouldn’t it be at Peter’s job?

Then I made the mistake of reading the lit sign on the building behind the car.

A sickening numbness sprouted in the pit of my stomach and began expanding upward, outward, filling my chest like a swallowed balloon.

BEST WESTERN, the sign said.

Chapter 19

CARS WENT BACK AND FORTH on North Roosevelt as I stood there, staring at the shiny black hood of Peter’s car sitting in the Best Western parking lot.

OK, I finally thought as my shock eased up slightly a long five minutes later.

Slowly now, I urged myself.

Think this through.

I tried. Nothing would come. It was fruitless. There wasn’t anything to think about. Even an idiot like me knew what finding your husband’s car in a motel parking lot meant.

One word surfaced in my swirling mind. It made sense that it had four letters. As I stood there, it was as if each one was being struck into the surface of my brain with the heavy-handed pound of an old-fashioned typewriter.

L-I-A-R.

Peter was a liar.

There was no construction job at Big Pine. No overtime. I also figured there was no DEA assignment and never had been. Peter had lied about the other night and about all the other double shifts over the last two months.

As I stood on the sidewalk in the dark across from the Best Western, the thing that struck me most—more than hurt, more than even anger—was the sudden knowledge of exactly how vulnerable I was.

Because my whole life revolved around Peter, I realized. The house was his, and so were the car and the boat. In the last two years, my six-dollar-an-hour, off-the-books catering job had paid for what? Some clothes from the Gap? The occasional meal?

I had nothing, I realized. Not even the University of Florida academic scholarship I had blown off when brilliant old me decided to throw caution to the wind and pull a Jimmy Buffett and take that last plane out.

I’d put all my chips on Peter, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that his car across the street meant that I’d lost big time.

No, wait a second. Correction, I thought, cupping my stomach.

It wasn’t just me who had lost big time.

So had my brand-new baby on board.

Well, what did you expect, Jeanine? screeched my next thought.

This new internal voice was my mother’s, I realized. The unforgettable tone was her black, drunken raging that occurred more and more after my dad’s death.

Are you really that stupid, Jeanie Beanie? What kind of cop would cover up a man’s death? What kind of cop would get rid of a body? An Eagle Scout? Did you really think you could make a bloody mess and not have to pay for it? And while we’re on the subject of bloody messes, what’s up with the machine pistol you found on your handsome husband’s boat?

A hair-raising pulse of terror gripped the back of my neck like a claw. I reared back until my shoulder blades found the video store’s wall. I started sliding down it until my butt touched the cold, hard concrete.

The traffic went by obliviously on the dark street as I covered my face with my hands like a toddler trying to make herself disappear. At that moment I realized something for the first time.

It had somehow completely escaped me.

I had taken everything Peter had told me about himself at face value.

I really had no idea at all who Peter was.

Chapter 20

IT WAS ABOUT ten soul-annihilating minutes later when one of the motel’s ground-floor rooms opened and a man exited.

Even though I’d been expecting it, it still felt like an uppercut to the chin when I saw that it was Peter.

That wasn’t the only blow, either. Peter was wearing a suit. It was a tailored dark blue one I’d never seen before, an Armani maybe.

I started sobbing. How could this be happening? How could the man who’d introduced me to “Brandy” and The Princess Bride and the joys of Japanese beer be the world’s biggest lying scumbag?

I watched Peter as he scanned the parking lot carefully. Seemingly satisfied, he pulled the motel room door closed behind him and headed for the Supra.

I turned and broke into a run for my moped as he opened the car door.

Was whoever he was with still in the room? I wondered, still flabbergasted. Or maybe they hadn’t met yet. Maybe he was going to pick her up?

“Hey, can I be the fifth wheel on your date, you son of a bitch?” I said to myself, truly losing it as I gunned my Vespa to life. “Thanks, Peter. Don’t mind if I do. Sexy suit, by the way.”

Duval Street, Key West’s main strip, was staggering room only as I buzzed onto it two cars behind Peter’s Supra a few minutes later.

With its packed bars and outdoor street stalls that sold beer and rum the way Coney Island sold hot dogs, Duval Street was to Key West what Bourbon Street was to New Orleans. Except in Key West, it seemed that Mardi Gras was every night.

I pulled to the curb in front of a crowded bar as Peter turned the car into a side alley beside a T-shirt shop and parked. What now, Peter? I thought. Some drinking and dancing? A late dinner perhaps?

My clenching hands shook on the moped’s sweat-slicked rubber handlebars. I still couldn’t believe this was happening.

I sat waiting about a block back, scanning the Friday night sidewalk parade of navy aviators, drag queens, college kids, beach bums, and trendy millionaire couples on vacation. Peter appeared a few moments later from the alley. He was holding a small green duffel bag now, I noticed.

How do you like that? I thought as he headed south through the crowd. Maybe Peter’s alter ego was now going to hit the gym?

A double shift? I thought, absolutely stunned, as I gunned my moped to life and started to follow him again.

It was more like Peter was working a double life.

I came to a hard stop, scraping my moped and ankle off the curb, when I saw Peter turn the corner onto Fleming Street around the south side of the more shabby than chic La Concha hotel. I hopped off, keeping in the shadows beneath the storied art deco hotel’s awning, as I jogged to the corner and peeked around the side street.

Peter was standing on the brightly lit sidewalk in front of a Hibiscus Savings Bank ATM. As I watched, he took a thick envelope out of the bag and slipped it into the bank’s deposit slot.

A late-night deposit would have been normal enough, I suppose.

Except Hibiscus Savings wasn’t our bank.

Our savings account was with First State. At least the account that I knew about, I thought, shaking my head.

I was trying to process that revelation when a small silver Mazda Z with tinted windows pulled past me. It slowed and made the turn onto Fleming. Peter turned as its horn honked and ran around to the passenger side and got in.

I ran back to the moped.

Peter’s night was apparently just getting started.

Chapter 21

A NEW POSSIBILITY slowly occurred to me as I tailed the Mazda Z off crowded Duval and onto the darker side streets of the adjoining Bahama Village neighborhood.

It was actually a comforting one. Definitely soothing, considering the current circumstances.

Maybe this was the DEA thing after all, I thought.

Maybe Peter really had to work undercover and had just invented the story about traffic duty in Big Pine so I wouldn’t be worried. Sure, he’d still lied to me, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as I had first thought.

Please let that be the reason, I prayed as I buzzed along behind him like a complete maniac through Key West’s pitch-black streets.

Ten minutes later, the car pulled into the empty parking lot of Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. I waited on the street by the park’s walled entrance, watching as the Mazda stopped in the center of the lot and sat idling. After a moment, its lights dimmed and went off.

Were they staking someplace out? I wondered. Doing a deal? Waiting for someone?

Wind began blowing through the darkened, creaking palm trees as I crouched along the stone wall, watching the car. As I stared down the deserted street at my back, I remembered Elena warning me about the Jump Killer. About how some people thought he was from Key West.

Great, I thought. Thanks again, Elena. Really appreciate it. I really need something else to freak out about around now.

I sank down behind the wall as the car suddenly started and screeched out of the lot.

I lost the car as I was getting back on the moped, so I decided to drive back to Peter’s car parked in the alley on Duval. The silver Mazda was letting Peter out beside the alley when I made the corner half a block north ten minutes later. I pulled to the curb in front of the crowded corner bar to see what would happen next.

The first thing I noticed was that instead of the green duffel I’d seen him with, Peter was now carrying a much larger black leather knapsack.

A feeling of desperate, last-ditch hope floated in my chest. Did that mean there really had been some kind of DEA work? I wanted so badly to believe that what I had just seen was Peter working undercover.

The Mazda Z pulled onto Duval and rolled to the red light where I sat idling. Spanish music began to blare out of it as its tinted passenger window zipped down. I listened to horns and bongo drums racing each other as I laid my wide eyes on the two people inside.

I squinted in surprise and shook my head. That couldn’t be right, I thought.

I knew them both.

Teo, the skeevy bartender with the frosted hair, was behind the wheel doing what he seemed to do best, rubbing at his nose.

Even more surprising, beside him, my boss, Elena, sang along to the salsa with her eyes closed as she drummed on the dashboard to the beat.

Then the light turned and the tricked-out Mazda peeled off and disappeared into the traffic of upper Duval.

Still sitting on my buzzing moped, staring at its red running lights, I tried to piece together what I had just seen. For a moment, the fact that I knew everyone involved in the odd encounter gave me a feeling of relief. I actually wondered for a silly second if they were doing all this sneaking around for my benefit, as if they might be planning some kind of surprise party for me.

Then reality took hold. There was no party. Quite the opposite.

My husband is a bad cop? I thought.

No, I realized. It was Elena! Elena was the bad cop. Peter was working a case against her and Teo. I knew for a fact that Teo did coke and he probably dealt it, too. That had to be it!

That’s when the car behind me laid on its horn.

I turned the handlebars and throttled to get out of its way, but I must have given it too much gas. The back wheel spun out, the bike tipped, and I went down hard. I lay there for a moment, my elbow and knee in agony, my head in the gutter. Then I scrambled out from underneath the moped and sat on the curb.

I stared fascinated at my torn-open knee. A thin line of blood rode down the ridge of my shin and took a left as it reached my ankle.

As I watched myself bleed, the Rick James song “Super Freak” floated out into the street from the crowded bar behind me.

“When I make my move to her room, it’s the right time,” the drunken crowd sang along. “It’s such a freaky scene.”

“Hey, you OK? Can I help you?” called a beery male voice from somewhere on the sidewalk behind me.

I shook my head as I lifted the bike, got back on, and headed home.

Chapter 22

IT TOOK ME TWENTY MINUTES to get home. I took a shower and bandaged my knee. When I got into bed, I lifted the remote off the night table and turned on the TV. I was determined to stay up until Peter came home, but after only a minute or two I found myself nodding off.

The sky outside my bedroom sliders was the dark gray of predawn when I woke up. The TV was showing an aerobics program: thin young women with too much makeup, smiling like Miss America as they counted off toe touches.

Then the doorbell rang.

I stumbled out of bed. Was it Peter? Did he forget his key?

I was even more confused when I saw a squad car in the driveway outside the living room window.

I opened the door. It wasn’t Peter. It was a short female officer in a Key West PD uniform. I thought I knew all of Peter’s fellow cops, but I’d never seen her before.

“Jeanine Fournier?” she said.

Even in a dazed fugue, I could tell by her demeanor, by the intense look in her eyes, that something was seriously wrong.

I suddenly felt tired and powerless, thoroughly unprepared for whatever I was about to be told. Staring at the woman’s hard face, I felt like going back into my bedroom and lying down. The sun broke as I stood there, light rapidly filling the sky.

“Yes?” I finally said.

“You need to come with me, Jeanine,” she said.

What the? What was this?

“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” the lady cop said. “It’s your husband. Peter. He’s been involved in a shooting.”

Chapter 23

A SHOOTING?!

That one stupid thought kept repeating in my numb mind as I sat in the passenger seat of the speeding cruiser. Every few seconds, I would try to form another thought, but my indignant, stubborn brain wouldn’t have it.

A shooting? I thought. A shooting?

That meant that Peter had been shot, right? I stared down at the cop car’s incident report–covered carpet. It had to. Otherwise, the red-haired lady cop behind the wheel wouldn’t be involving me.

I needed to talk to Peter. To find out what was going on. Now he’d been shot? I didn’t know what to think as the cop car’s tires cried around a curve. What did it mean?

If I thought I’d been disoriented riding in the cop car, it was nothing compared to the skull slap I felt as we screeched to a stop beside a Shell gas station on North Roosevelt.

It looked and sounded as if the world was coming to a violent end. Besides a half-dozen siren-screaming patrol cars, there were three ambulances and a fire truck. Yellow evidence tape strung across the pumps wafted in the breeze from the nearby north shore. The whole block around the station looked like a huge present wrapped in the stuff. A crowd of tourists and beach bums stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, behind the yellow ribbon like spectators at a strange outdoor sporting event that was just about to get under way.

It seemed like every cop in the department was there. I glanced from face to face, marking the people I knew. At our pickup softball games and barbecues, these men had been so happy and laid-back. Now, as they secured the crime scene in their stark black uniforms, they suddenly seemed cold, heartless, angry, almost malevolent.

What the hell had happened here?

“She’s here,” a cop and good friend of Peter’s named Billy Mulford said as he saw me.

The last time I saw Billy, a blond, middle-aged fireplug of a man, he was doing a cannonball off a booze cruise boat at a retirement party. Now he looked about as fun-loving as a concentration camp guard.

“It’s Peter’s wife, Jeanine. Let her through,” he ordered.

I was too stupefied to question what was happening as the evidence tape was lifted up, and I was beckoned under. Why were they treating me like a first responder? The deafening siren of yet another arriving ambulance went off as Mulford quickly led me over the sun-bleached asphalt and past the pumps.

Just inside the door of the food mart, half a dozen EMTs were kneeling down beside someone I couldn’t see. My hands started shaking as I tried to figure out what was happening in all the commotion. I grasped them together in a praying gesture.

“Come on, come on! Give me some fucking space here,” a big black medic barked as he retrieved a syringe from a bright yellow hard-pack first-aid case.

“Coming out!” someone else yelled in a high, panicked voice a moment later. There was a tremendous clatter as a trauma stretcher was clicked into rolling position. The crowd of cops and medics began to part in front of it, letting the stretcher through.

My knees almost gave out when Mulford moved out of my line of sight and I finally saw who was on the stretcher.

I staggered back, shaking my head.

Something caved in my chest as Peter was rolled past me, his eyes flat and unfocused, his face and chest covered in blood.

Chapter 24

COPS MADE A TIGHT CIRCLE around Peter, shielding him from the public as he was rolled toward a reversing ambulance.

I noticed several things at once. He was sheet white. A thin spiderweb of blood was splattered across his cheek and neck. His uniform shirt had been cut open, and I could see more blackish blood caked on his arm, dripping off his elbow.

Peter didn’t just look shot, I thought, staring at him as he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. Peter looked dead.

“Let her through,” Mulford said, dragging me forward. “It’s his wife.”

“Not now, goddammit,” the burly black medic said, stiff-arming him away.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Mulford said, shaking his head as Peter was borne away. He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jeanine. This shouldn’t be happening.”

“What happened?” I said.

“We’re not sure,” he said, ashen-faced, as he shrugged his shoulders. “I just got here myself. We think Peter came in here to get some coffee during his shift. Walked into the middle of a robbery. Two Jamaican males. They had some kind of machine gun. Our guys were ambushed. We’re looking for them now.”

Mulford wheeled around as a wiry, startlingly muscular female EMT with bloody sneakers emerged from the food mart door.

“How is she?” he asked her.

She? I thought.

I stepped to my right and looked farther into the store. That’s when I saw the rest of them. Three more EMTs were surrounding another body.

When I stepped forward and saw the spill of blond hair beside a fallen police cap, I felt like I’d walked face-first into an invisible electric fence. For absolutely no reason, I began slowly nodding to myself.

My boss, Elena, her throat shot to ribbons, was lying in a pool of blood, dead on the floor.

Chapter 25

ONE OF ELENA’S UNMOVING EYES, the one that wasn’t shot out, was wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Blood was everywhere as if a mop bucket filled with it had been overturned. On her uniform. On a bunch of knocked-over plastic jugs of blue windshield-wiper fluid. On the surgical gloves that one of the EMTs snapped off with a loud curse. Ink blots and dashes and horrid smears of copper-smelling crimson red blood.

“I’m so sorry,” the female EMT said to Mulford. “Poor thing took at least half a dozen in the face and neck and another four in the lower abdomen. She’d lost too much blood by the time we got here. She’s gone.”

“And the other one?” Mulford said to the EMT, pointing to his left. I followed his finger to the pair of bare brown feet that poked out from the end of the aisle like the wicked witch’s from under Dorothy’s house.

“The station clerk?” the medic said with a shake of her head. “He took a long burst in his throat, looks like. Died instantly.”

I slowly nodded again at the new knowledge. There was a third victim?

I gaped at the blood-and-brain-splattered food racks, the brass shell casings, the broken glass. In the air was the strong hospital stench of voided bowels. I’d never been that close to so much violence and death. It was literally a bloodbath.

I stumbled behind Mulford back outside to get away from the smell and noticed that the crowd beyond the tape seemed to have doubled in size. A tall, shirtless middle-aged man in cutoff shorts and a panama hat suddenly reached under the crime scene tape and lifted a shell casing to his red-rimmed eyes.

“Hey! Put that down!” Mulford yelled, running toward him.

That’s when I noticed the gun.

On the fuel-stained asphalt, halfway between the first pump and the gas mart’s front door, beside a bright yellow police evidence cone sat a flat black pistol.

When I took a step forward to look at it more closely, I saw that I was mistaken. It wasn’t a normal pistol. It was a larger black submachine pistol with little holes around its barrel. It had gray duct tape around its grip and scuff marks beside the words “Intratec Miami 9mm.”

I stood there bent over, staring at the weapon. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, in fact.

Because it wasn’t just like the gun I’d seen on Peter’s boat. It was the gun from Peter’s boat.

“That’s a roger,” Mulford said into his radio as he arrived back beside me. “Get those detectives down here ASAP. It looks like the goddamn Valentine’s Day massacre. Tell them that Officer Cardenas has been killed in a robbery-homicide. See if that gets them moving.”

As I stood there, the white masts of the sailboats at the Palm Avenue marina across the street from the gas station suddenly became supervivid against the blue sky.

Peter’s gun? Why was Peter’s gun here? Was it really his?

“Come on, Jeanine. They took Peter to Lower Keys Medical. I’ll take you right there,” Mulford said.

We walked to his cruiser and got in. I jumped as the feisty little cop suddenly punched the steering wheel.

“Those fuckers,” he said. After a moment, I realized he was crying. He quickly wiped his face and got the car started.

“Sorry, Jeanine,” he said. “Elena was just awesome, you know? How can she be dead? At least they got Peter’s bleeding under control. We can thank God for that.”

“They what?” I said, sitting up as if Mulford had punched me instead of the steering wheel.

“What? No one told you?” Mulford said. “The EMTs got the bleeding under control. It looks like Peter’s going to make it.”

Chapter 26

THEY’D BROUGHT PETER to the Lower Keys Medical Center five minutes from Key West on Stock Island. I was told by a male ER nurse that Peter had been taken directly to surgery.

For the next couple of hours, I sat in a cop-filled waiting room on the hospital’s second floor.

After a while, the surrounding cops started drifting out into the hallway and stood in clusters speaking softly to one another.

From the cheap TV above the door, I watched a 7 News special report about the Jump Killer. A Filipina massage therapist from Marathon, Florida, had gone missing, and speculation was that the Jump Killer had struck again.

The special report had just been replaced by Family Feud when a tall, gray-haired uniformed cop entered the waiting room.

“Jeanine?” he said as he crossed the room in two quick strides. “I’m Chief John Morley. Peter’s boss. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all of this.”

I shook his hand. I’d seen Morley’s picture in the local papers before, but this was the first time I’d actually met him.

“Thank you, Chief,” I said.

“Please call me John. How’s Peter?”

“Still in surgery,” I said.

He pulled over a chair.

“You must be going through hell,” the chief said with a sympathetic shake of his head. “It looks like Peter and Elena interrupted a holdup in progress, but when a police officer is shot, it could be anything. You mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“No, of course,” I said.

“Has Peter had any disagreements with anyone that you know of? A neighbor? Anyone who might be holding a grudge against him? Strange phone calls? Can you think of an unusual reason why this happened?”

I thought about everything I’d seen last night, Peter’s bizarre behavior. I decided not to mention it until I spoke to Peter.

“I’m not really sure. I don’t think so,” I said with a shrug.

Morley kept eye contact as he patted me on the knee.

“It could be anything, Jeanine. Has Peter been acting strangely at all lately?”

I squinted at him. He seemed to be pressing me a little. Frantically wondering how to respond, I was relieved when an attractive Asian woman in green doctor’s scrubs came through the doorway a moment later.

“I’m Dr. Pyeng,” she said. “Your husband is out of surgery and in stable condition. Please come with me, Mrs. Fournier.

“We were able to retrieve the bullet intact,” Dr. Pyeng said as I quickly followed her out into the hall. “The gunshot tore up a lot of deep muscle tissue in his shoulder, but thankfully it missed bone. Also no major blood vessels or nerves were cut, so I’m confident there won’t be any permanent damage.”

Instead of heading into the elevator as I expected, we made a right through some automatic swinging doors. Dr. Pyeng stopped at the first room beyond an empty nurses’ station and opened a door.

The room inside was narrow and dim. Beside the bulky hospital bed, a glowing white heart monitor beeped softly next to a half-full IV drip. Peter was lying on the wheeled bed with his eyes closed. There was a thin, pink-tinged tube under his nose. There was also a huge bandage on his left shoulder and an IV inserted into his uninjured right forearm.

“His blood pressure is looking good, so I think we’re out of the woods in terms of shock,” Dr. Pyeng whispered as she led me inside and closed the door.

Peter’s eyes were glazed. I glanced at the IV bag.

DIAZEPAM SOLUTION, it said in bold red letters, and in smaller type, I spotted the word VALIUM.

He squeezed my hand. Then he stared at me, sighing as he broke into a wide, serene grin. “Mermaid,” he whispered.

There he was again, my big teddy bear, my drinking buddy. Even lying there in a hospital bed, he was handsome. He gave me his boyish Brett Favre winning-in-overtime smile.

I held my breath as I stared down into his groggy blue eyes. They were his best feature, as pale and soft as faded denim.

His eyes closed after a few seconds, and he started snoring.

“It’s the painkiller,” Dr. Pyeng whispered in my ear. “He should probably get some rest now. He’ll be more lucid tomorrow when you come back.”

Chapter 27

“YOU KNEW ELENA as well, didn’t you?” Chief Morley said as we pulled out of the medical center’s parking lot in his department Bronco.

Morley had been standing in the hallway directly outside of Peter’s room when I came out. He’d insisted on driving me home. Not being able to come up with a valid excuse, I’d finally reluctantly agreed.

“We worked together catering,” I said. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“None of us can,” Morley said as we turned south on the Overseas Bridge back to Key West. Then he nodded with a frown. “Don’t worry. We have an APB stretching from the Lower Keys all the way up to Miami. Catching these pieces of garbage is only a question of time.”

Morley cocked an ear as something garbled squawked over the dash-mounted police radio. He lifted the handset to say something but then seemed to reconsider and placed it down again. He gave me a weary smile. “How did you and Peter meet, if you don’t mind me asking? You seem, well, a little young.”

“I was down here on spring break two years ago,” I said. “I met Peter, and I never left.”

“Ah, love at first sight. That’s awesome. Was he off duty?” Morley said with a grin. “Or did you fall for the uniform?”

“It was all about the uniform,” I said with a weak smile. “I ran a stop sign with my rental scooter, he pulled me over, and the rest is history.”

It was the lie Peter and I had agreed on.

“Romance at the scene of the crime, huh?” Morley said with a nod. “That’s how it happens with cops. Occupational hazard. You slap the cuffs on somebody one night at the beach, and the next thing you know you’re letting them go and giving them a diamond ring.”

I shot a look over at the police chief. For the second time, I got the impression that he was prying, trying to rattle me in some strange way. But his eyes were on the road. There was no trace of irony or accusation.

Still, I held my breath as the words slap the cuffs on somebody one night at the beach kept looping through my mind. Was the phrasing just coincidental, or did he actually know my secret?

The inside of the police SUV suddenly seemed hot, airless. Drops of sweat started to bead on my neck and underarms, along my lower back. I tried to zip down the electric window. Nothing happened. Morley must have had the child lock on.

Who was Morley really, anyway? I wondered dizzily. Who was he to Peter? Just a boss? Or was he a friend? An enemy like Elena? An accomplice?

We suddenly slowed and stopped. I looked out the window. We were in front of my house now.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, getting out.

“Any time, Jeanine,” Morley said. “Sorry we had to meet under such bad circumstances. Remember, anything at all you can think of that might help us understand why Peter and Elena were shot, don’t hesitate to call. Day or night.”

“Will do,” I said.

The cool trade breezes that make Key West bearable felt ice-cold as I resisted running to my front door. Once inside, I locked the door behind me and went to the living room window.

Morley was still sitting there, idling in the street in front of my driveway. After a gut-churning three or four minutes, he slowly pulled out. I’d never been so relieved in my life.

I continued to stand there for the next few minutes, scanning out the window up and down the street. I looked out across our sandy little lane at the palm fronds waving in the wind for another five minutes before I turned to go.

I stopped as something inched into my peripheral vision. Outside the window down on the corner of the block, Morley’s PD Bronco slowed and stopped.

My face began to tingle, pins and needles in my cheeks, my lips.

What the hell was this?! Morley was watching the house now? Watching me?

I backed away from the window in disbelief, fighting for breath. My back hit a chair, and I collapsed onto the Mexican tile.

Chapter 28

IT WAS SUNSET when the sound of seagulls woke me from the living room couch. Two of them were fighting over something along the backyard seawall. I watched them with horrific fascination as they cawed and hacked at each other with their beaks.

I gulped down a glass of water at the sink. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I was opening the fridge when I heard a car and the crunch of wheels in our crushed-shell driveway.

I ran to the living room window in a full-blown panic. Morley’s black-and-white Bronco was gone, but instead, there was a police cruiser pulling into the driveway.

The cruiser’s passenger door opened, and I almost passed out.

The cruiser backed out of the driveway as Peter, his left arm stiff, walked to the door.

Peter?

Why was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in a frigging hospital bed!? Why the hell would they let him come home so soon? He’d been shot!

I backed away from the window, swallowing hard as his keys jingled at the door.

The lock clicked open as the knob turned.

Peter stopped like a kid playing freeze tag when he spotted me from the doorway.

I was frozen as well. Everything was strange, slightly off kilter. Even the light was wrong. It didn’t feel like sunset. It felt like the morning.

Peter closed the door behind him. Then his keys dropped from his hand as his blue eyes beaded with tears. He squatted and then collapsed onto the front hall tile.

“Those assholes at the hospital told me to stay, but no way,” he said, squinting up at the ceiling. “Soon as I woke up, I pulled that shit out of my arm and left. Fuck them and fuck those assholes who tried to kill me. I made it. I win. They lose. I’m home, Jeanine.”

I thought about everything then. All the strange things I’d seen. Everything Peter had been keeping from me. I knew that what Peter was up to probably wasn’t by the book, but I also knew that whatever it was, there had to be a good reason behind it.

Maybe he was in over his head, I thought suddenly. He did the finances. Maybe he’d made a bad investment and was trying to make up for it by doing something not exactly legal. Couldn’t his nocturnal activity be his way of trying to protect us?

After all, I, of all people, knew he wasn’t exactly a by-the-book sort of guy. Peter was a risk taker. He’d certainly taken a risk on me. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have married him, right?

A pang of love and sympathy for him went through me then. I didn’t want him to go to work ever again. I wanted him to stay here in our house, where it was safe. To stay here in our sanctuary, where bad things were kept away and all mistakes were forgotten.

I walked over and sat down beside him. I held his hand as he buried his face in my hair and cried.

“I was so afraid, Peter,” I said. “I thought I lost you.”

Chapter 29

ELENA’S WAKE was the following evening at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home on Simonton Street. Peter and I were instantly swamped by the block-long line of dress-uniformed law enforcement on the sidewalk.

Peter, too, was wearing his crisply ironed uniform, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his dress blue coat draped over his wounded shoulder like a cape. I walked beside him in my somber black dress, holding on to his good arm.

Hundreds of hands patted Peter softly on the back as we walked through the parted crowd.

“We’ll catch those bastards, man,” a bald state trooper with a twirly circus-strongman mustache said.

“Hang in there, buddy,” said a short black female cop in a Marathon PD uniform.

Down the other side of the block, a crowd of saddened black people were also filing into the funeral home. I spotted young black boys in starched white shirts and bow ties, young girls in what looked like Communion dresses. There was even a Creole band playing for the mourners from the flatbed of a parked pickup.

They were there for the store clerk who had been killed, a fifty-three-year-old Haitian immigrant by the name of Paul Phillip Baptiste, who was being waked tonight as well. It seemed like the entire island had turned out.

Peter nodded with solemn concern as the gathered mourners embraced him and gave him their condolences.

“I couldn’t get through this without you at my side, Mermaid,” Peter whispered to me as we finally entered the funeral home.

I gave his hand a squeeze. “Where else would I be, Peter?” I said as we waited in line to sign the viewing room book.

Yesterday had actually been wonderful. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent so much unbroken time together. We ate in, and when we weren’t in bed, we were watching the sunset. A couple of times it seemed as if he wanted to tell me what was going on, but then he changed his mind and the subject. I didn’t press him. I don’t think I wanted to know. I just wanted us to be together. The world be damned.

Besides, I knew he would tell me everything eventually. We were best friends.

There was one odd moment this morning. As I returned to the kitchen after drinking my morning coffee in the yard, Peter was standing with his back to me, speaking softly on the phone. I stopped, frozen in the doorway, when he suddenly raised his voice.

“Fuck your plans, Morley,” Peter barked in a tone that managed to be fierce and cold at the same time. I’d heard Peter speak that way only once before. The night he’d arrested me.

“You just be there,” I heard him say very distinctly as I went back outside. “I won’t tell you twice.”

It seemed odd that Peter would speak that way to his boss. I remembered Morley watching the house. It was hard to understand.

When it was our turn to pray, Peter and I walked together over to Elena’s closed, flower-covered casket and knelt down. There was a hush in the room behind us as people realized what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Peter remove his hat. After a moment, his face crumpled as if buckling under an unbearable interior torment, and I took his hat from him.

Peter and I became separated as he stayed and spoke with Michael Cardenas, Elena’s husband.

I shook hands with the priest beside him and some more people I didn’t know.

“Jeanine, there you are,” Gary, the chef from work, said as he scooped me up in a painful hug. “Can you believe any of this?”

“No, Gary. It’s just horrible,” I said looking around. “I don’t see Teo. Is he taking this very hard?”

“He’s gone,” Gary said, shaking his head. “It’s the craziest thing. Teo called me the night after the shooting. He said that he got a hotel job in the Dominican Republic and that he was leaving immediately. Elena’s death must have been too much for him to take. You had to hear him on the phone. I felt so bad for the guy. I went by his apartment with his check the next day, but the landlord said he was already gone. Left his clothes and everything.”

Peter’s hat dropped from my hand as I remembered the last time I’d seen Teo. It was the night I had tailed Peter. Teo had been behind the wheel of the Mazda with Elena.

Elena was dead, and now Teo was just gone?

As Gary greeted someone else, I turned toward the front of the room by the casket. Morley had arrived, and Peter was standing with him. They were speaking quietly but intensely.

“Mrs. Fournier?” someone said.

I turned around. For a moment, I panicked. Standing very close beside me was a handsome man with long, dirty blond hair and a Jesus beard. It was the Björn Borg look-alike who’d scared me outside the Hemingway Home when I was catering. That now seemed like a thousand years ago.

“Do I know you?” I said, taking a quick step back.

“No,” the man said in a voice deeper than I expected. “But I know you. Sort of.”

What the hell was this? I thought. “Are you a cop?” I said doubtfully.

“I’m actually an FBI agent,” he said, discreetly tucking a business card into my hand.

After a shocked moment, I looked at it. It had a raised FBI logo. “Special Agent Theodore Murphy,” it said, with a phone number.

“Why are you giving this to me?” I asked.

Continuing to scan the room, he shrugged his shoulders. “Nice to have help when you’re in a tight spot,” he said. He nodded at the card with his blond chin. “Hide it now before someone sees.”

“What?” I said. “Before who sees?”

Murphy looked up at the front of the room where Peter and Morley were talking. Then he shrugged again. “You need to be very careful, Jeanine,” he said, and then he turned and walked away.

Chapter 30

IT WAS SEVEN in the morning, a week after Elena’s funeral, when I heard the engine on Peter’s Stingray growl to life. Coming out of the shower, I dropped my towel and ran to the window.

Through the blinds, I saw a man rolling a large cooler across our backyard toward Peter’s fishing boat. A tall man with cropped gray hair. It was Chief Morley.

As he boarded the boat, I remembered Peter’s strange phone call: Fuck your plans, Morley. You just be there. I won’t tell you twice.

There was a soft knock on the bedroom door.

“Jeanine! Whoa!” Peter said, poking his head in and seeing that I was naked. “You made me forget what I was going to say. Oh, right. I totally forgot to tell you that Chief Morley and I are going on a fishing trip.”

A what?

“I know, I know. I should have said something. Bad Peter,” he said, slapping the back of his hand. “It was the chief’s suggestion. He thought this would give us a chance to clear our heads after the shooting and maybe get to know each other a little better. Sounds good, right? Hanging with the boss man. Who knows? Maybe it’ll lead to a promotion. Don’t worry about my shoulder. I’ll let the old buzzard do most of the heavy lifting.” Peter kissed me on the forehead softly and let me go.

“Thank you for being so supportive this week, Jeanine. You’re the best. I can’t wait to go to the Breakers with you. Steak au poivre, a nice red. Love you,” Peter said, closing the door behind him.

“Wait,” I said.

Peter smiled as he came back in.

“What is it? A quickie?” he said, hugging me. “Sure, but we need to hit it double time. Can’t keep the boss waiting.”

“No, idiot,” I said, giving him a faux pound on his chest. “This is so sudden. What time will you be back?”

“I don’t know. The usual. Sundown?” Peter said. “We’ll grill. We badass about-to-be-promoted cops like to eat what we kill, you know.”

I nodded. “See you at sundown,” I said.

“Not if I see you first,” Peter said, pinching my butt before he left.

Chapter 31

TWO HOURS LATER, sweating not just from the rising heat, I waited on the coral pink steps of Key West’s public library on Fleming Street. At nine thirty on the dot, I finally heard the lock turning behind me, and I jumped up, lifting the couple of large Dunkin’ Donuts coffees I’d brought.

The tiny librarian, Alice Dowd, smiled in surprise as I approached the reference desk and handed her one of the coffees.

“Jeanine, bearing gifts,” my elderly friend said with a smile. “What can I do for you, my dear, on this lovely morning?”

“Actually, Alice, I needed to do some research on my late father,” I lied.

“Research, I see,” Alice said, placing the coffee I gave her onto a tissue she produced from her desk. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Where do you want to start?”

“Do you have access to the Boston papers?” I said.

“You’re in luck,” Alice said, standing. She gestured for me to follow her through a book-lined corridor behind her desk and into a little room. “We just got these new computers with new software called Netscape. It helps you surf the World Wide Web, thousands of newspapers and magazines and databases and archives. Here, let me show you how to use it.”

After setting me up at one of the computers, I waited until Alice was back at her desk before I took a sip of my bitter black coffee and contemplated my next move.

Then I made it.

I took out the card that Björn, or Agent Theodore Murphy, or whoever he was had given me at Elena’s wake.

Then I turned it over and read what was handwritten on the back.

Boston Globe, September 22, 1988Boston Globe, October 29, 1988You’re not safe. I can help. Call me.

I’d felt disoriented and tense ever since he’d given me the card. What did the Boston Globe have to do with me? And why had I been approached by an FBI agent? Was he watching Peter? Had he been doing surveillance when I spotted him the first time at the Hemingway Home wedding? Of who? Elena? Me? Was he trying to recruit me or something?

I didn’t have answers, but I had kept the card hidden.

I took a breath and typed “Peter Fournier” along with “Boston Globe” into the search engine and hit Enter.

The screen blinked. I began to cough as two links popped up.

Both were from the Boston Globe. The dates matched those on the card.

I quickly clicked on the first one before I could think of a reason not to. The screen blacked out for a second, and a little hourglass icon appeared. I was about to get up to ask Alice what was wrong when an image appeared.

Boston Globe

September 22, 1988

ROOKIE COP’S WIFE KILLED IN ROBBERY

Chapter 32

September 22, 1988

ROOKIE COP’S WIFE KILLED IN ROBBERYAmanda Fournier, wife of Boston Police Department rookie Peter Fournier, was killed in a holdup of a Boston delicatessen on Thursday. Around noon, witnesses say, a masked man entered the establishment, brandishing a shotgun and demanding money. The assailant grabbed for Mrs. Fournier’s purse, and during the struggle the gun discharged, killing the twenty-year-old instantly. The suspect fled in a blue Chevy pickup truck. The Fourniers, police sources said, were planning to start a family.

I swallowed involuntarily, my hand shaking. I felt like throwing up, like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

Coffee shot out of the lid of my cup, scalding my jittery hand, but I couldn’t feel it.

The date seemed to make sense. It was Peter. I could feel it in the marrow of my pregnant bones.

He’d had a wife? A wife who’d been killed?! Why didn’t he tell me that he was a widower? I wondered. He did tell me I was the first girl that he’d ever dated for more than a month. He’d also told me he was from New York, not Boston. Which I’d accepted at face value despite the suspicious fact that he was a die-hard Red Sox fan.

“No!” I actually said out loud to the screen.

I wiped sweat from my face with my wrist. When I turned, Alice was looking at me funny from her desk.

“Everything OK in there?” she said.

“Fine,” I lied again as I looked back at the screen.

So what? I thought angrily. What did this prove? It was just a coincidence. Someone named Peter Fournier was a cop in Boston. There were lots of Peter Fourniers in the world. It was just a coincidence.

What was I doing here anyway? I wondered. Wasting my time was what. Driving myself crazy was what.

I stood and grabbed my barely touched coffee. I needed to get out of this cramped concrete box and go for a jog on the beach or a long swim. Maybe in the afternoon, I’d head down to one of the wharves in Old Town and buy some freshly caught wahoo in case Peter and Morley came back empty.

Maybe he was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, but we could deal with that. Checking up on him like I was Nancy Drew was too out there. Screw Björn and his cryptic bullshit. My trip to Crazyland was over. I needed to go where I belonged. Home. Now.

As I stood, I couldn’t help but remember the second link on the screen.

I clicked on the back arrow and stared at the Enter button as if it meant “Self-destruct.” Then I put my coffee back down and clicked.

“Come on already,” I said, nervously flicking the coffee’s plastic lid with my thumb as I waited for the screen to change.

There was a hum, and then my stomach dropped as the black screen turned to white. The first thing that appeared as I began to scroll down to the article was a smudgy photograph.

I stopped scrolling, my whole hand trembling on the mouse.

It was Peter.

He was a few years younger, and he was wearing a Boston PD uniform.

As I looked into Peter’s eyes, it felt like my throat was slowly closing, garden hose to coin wrapper to bar straw.

I finally closed my eyes to make the picture and the rest of my rapidly disintegrating world disappear.

Unbelievable, I thought, keeping my eyes closed.

I assumed I’d calm down after a while, but it wasn’t happening. The office chair beneath me suddenly felt wobbly, as if all the screws had been removed.

I’d thought that I’d grown up on the day my father died, but I’d been wrong. Sitting there in front of the picture of my husband that proved he was a liar, I felt my heart concede and my head take over.

I shook my head at my wedding and engagement rings. I had to get it out of the sand. I needed to wake the hell up.

There was no more denying it. Pictures didn’t lie.

Fact: Peter was from Boston, not New York.

Fact: Peter had been married before to a woman who was killed.

Fact: Peter had been lying to me from day one.

Fact: I was in some deep shit.

It felt like time stopped as I glanced down and spotted the new headline beside Peter’s picture. My eyes ran over the five words, and it felt like the rapidly spinning world had stopped dead right there under the public library fluorescents.

I didn’t think that it could get worse.

God, was I so very wrong.

“Cop Questioned in Wife’s Death,” the headline said.

Chapter 33

Boston, MA

COP QUESTIONED IN WIFE’S DEATHAuthorities in the Boston Police Department have questioned the husband of the woman killed in a delicatessen holdup last month. Peter Fournier, who is a rookie patrolman on the Boston Police force, refused to answer reporters’ questions as he left headquarters with his lawyer late last night.Twenty-year-old Amanda Fournier was killed by multiple shotgun blasts during the midday holdup on September 21. A receptionist in a pediatrician’s office on Crescent Street, she entered Jake’s Deli next door a little before noon. Witnesses say a masked assailant entered behind her and that she was shot several times when she hesitated to give up her bag. No one else was injured.The autopsy report released from the Suffolk County coroner’s office confirmed that Mrs. Fournier was pregnant.Detectives would not reveal if the questioning was routine or not. But a source close to the investigation described the events surrounding the murder as “suspicious.”Neighbors of the couple described the Fourniers as close and were shocked to learn of the questioning of Mr. Fournier. As were Mr. Fournier’s fellow Boston PD officers, one of whom described the twenty-six-year-old rookie and former U.S. Army Ranger as extremely competent and “a cop’s cop.”

I stopped reading. The world turned gray, as if a dimmer switch had been hit. I blinked, unable to breathe, waiting for my heart to start beating again.

I noticed that there was another photograph at the bottom of the article. I shuddered as I looked at the picture of the young woman above the “Amanda Fournier” caption.

The young woman had a lot of high hair and some dark eye shadow. I realized two things about this photograph simultaneously. It looked like the girl’s high school picture, and she looked a hell of a lot like me!

I thought about what Peter had said when I confronted him about his double shift.

Then I… looked into your eyes, and I haven’t been inside a church since my Communion, Jeanine, but it felt holy… Like God sent an angel down from heaven.

I’ll bet! I thought as I sat there, unable to pry my eyes away from the photo of the deceased young woman on the screen.

I didn’t actually remember printing the article or leaving the library. Or starting my Vespa, for that matter. The first place I found myself after my shock subsided enough for me to form a thought was the main post office on Whitehead Street.

A Coppertone-colored bum making a straw hat on the curb glanced up as I swerved to a dust-raising stop. There was a pay phone inside the post office, I remembered. It was inside a dark, old-fashioned phone booth with a door that closed, like a confessional. I had actually called my college from this secluded booth to tell them I wasn’t coming back.

That was exactly what I needed now, I realized. Privacy, darkness, confession.

I thought of another headline as I entered the post office, like a movie zombie.

“Cop’s Wife Goes Nuts.”

Chapter 34

AS IF IN A TRANCE, I pushed into the post office and fished out a bunch of quarters. I collapsed in the circa 1930s phone booth in the corner and closed its folding door behind me. Quarters rang off the dusty marble between my feet as I dropped several while dialing 411.

I needed to know what happened after Peter had spoken to the detectives. I needed to go to the primary source, get to the bottom of this.

If it had a bottom.

I got the Boston PD number from information, dialed, and began feeding the phone quarters.

One fact actually made me dry-heave as it kept repeating in my mind like a news crawl across the bottom of a TV screen.

Amanda Fournier was pregnant.

Just like me.

My sweat almost made me drop the receiver as the last quarter bonged home and the phone rang.

“Boston.”

“Hello. May I speak to Detective… Yorgenson?” I said, reading from the printed article in my hand.

“Hold on,” said the gruff Boston cop.

“Yorgenson,” said an even gruffer voice a moment later.

“My name’s Jeanine Baker,” I said with a convincing Southern twang. My current state of insanity apparently was a wonder for my acting chops. “I work for Tony’s Bail Bonds down here in Miami. We’re doing an employment check on a Peter Fournier. Rumor has it he was involved in some kind of homicide. I got your name from a Boston Globe article. Can you give me some clarity on Mr. Fournier?”

Even at that point, I was hoping for some good news. Even after the lies and strange behavior, I was hoping that there was some reasonable explanation. That it was all one big mistake.

“Miami?” Yorgenson said. “So that’s where that virus Fournier turned up. I’d be delighted to give you some clarity on Petey. The son of a bitch killed his wife and got away with it. He should be in a jail cell.”

Chapter 35

I OPENED THE BOOTH DOOR at the dusty post office, unable to breathe. The air had a strange new pressure, a new weight, as if the room had been suddenly filled with water when I wasn’t paying attention, and now I was drowning.

“A shock, isn’t it?” the cop said. “I know. Pete doesn’t look like a psychopath, does he? He’s a real charmer, especially with the ladies.”

“How can you be so sure he did it?” I said.

“After his wife turned up dead, we went by the book, looked at Pete straight off the bat more to clear him than anything else,” Yorgenson said. “But we found out some very interesting things about Mr. Rookie of the Year.

“Like how he had dozens of brutality complaints. Like how he was rumored to love to party with nose candy. Like how he and Amanda had been separated. One of Amanda’s friends told us it was because of the baby. He wanted her to abort it. She filed for divorce instead. He’d been harassing her for months before the shooting. Stalking her at work. Following some of her male coworkers home. ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will,’ he told her on several occasions.”

Yorgenson paused, letting it all sink in.

“I don’t remember if it was in the papers, but Amanda was shot several times. The first time in the abdomen. The first officer to arrive on scene retired soon after on a psychiatric disability pension. I hear he lives in the subway station down at the Government Center now.”

Yorgenson chuckled bitterly.

“Think Petey Boy was nervous when we came to question him? Think again. He sat there with those big cold baby blues of his and a shit-eating grin, like we were best buddies watching a Sox game at the corner watering hole. Had his alibi information ready and waiting for me. He didn’t even bother asking if we had any other leads. The whole thing seemed to amuse him.”

“But why didn’t he—?” I started.

“Go to jail?” Yorgenson finished. “I ask myself that every day. Classic stalker-husband-kills-wife open-and-shut case, right? Wrong. The DA wouldn’t prosecute, wouldn’t even help us get a search warrant to look for the murder weapon.

“If I had to bet, Peter’s uncle, Jack, who was the head of Boston PD’s Internal Affairs, used every dirty secret and favor and string he had to squash our case. At least the stink I made got the punk to resign from the force.”

I closed my eyes, my forehead banging against my knees as all the breath escaped my lungs.

“If you ask me—” Yorgenson started.

Then my time had elapsed and the phone went dead.

The phone clicking back into its cradle sounded like a pistol shot in the silence. A bullet right through my brain. I stared down at my hands as they shook in time with the painful thump of my heart.

I wandered outside dazed. Blinking in the sunlight, I felt weary, drained, like I’d just completed a stint of hard labor. The sun-blasted steps and sidewalk were empty. The George Hamilton look-alike bum who’d been weaving palm frond hats was long gone.

What a coincidence, I thought, glancing up into the painfully blue sky. So was my mind.

I left my moped where it was and decided to walk. I headed south past a construction site where a bunch of black and Mexican laborers sat in the shade of a king palm on a metal tool cart, staring blatantly, silently, and rapaciously. Usually I was nervous about such scenes, but that morning, I stared back defiantly, daring them to whistle, to say something to me, to set me off.

Where was I going? I wondered as I made a turn and wandered down a picket fence–lined street. I didn’t have a home anymore. I’d never had one, in fact.

How stupid could a person be? I thought. Red flag after red flag had been raised, and I’d pushed them aside time and time again. It was over. I’d been duped, scammed, fleeced. The strangest and by far the worst part of all was that I was the one who’d conned myself.

Peter wasn’t my best friend, wasn’t the love of my life. I thought about the happy life of ease and suntan lotion on the deck of Peter’s Stingray I’d been envisioning less than twenty-four hours ago, and I started laughing. Instead of tanning myself topside, I was in a hole as black and deep as they come, and I had no idea how to get out of it.

It was a rabbit hole, I realized as I walked down the sunlit street, skating along the edge of my sanity. And I was Alice. Peter was the White Rabbit. Who had Elena been? The Queen of Hearts, I thought. And off went her head.

Key West was actually Wonderland, I thought. The theory made a lot of sense, especially if you’ve ever been to Duval Street after midnight.

Chapter 36

I RETRIEVED MY MOPED and got back to the house twenty minutes later. I went straight to the bedroom closet and took down a suitcase. I opened it on the floor of the closet and threw in some underwear, my shirts, my jeans.

I glanced up at the top shelf at the big white box that contained my wedding dress and shook my head. That was staying. All yours, Peter!

By Greyhound bus, it would take about four or five hours to get back to Homestead, my small Florida hometown. My mom was gone, but I knew a couple of people there. I had a grandaunt I could crash with for a few days. I lifted the phone to call a taxi. Maybe I could get a job at the Gap, where I’d worked summers, until I figured things out.

I dropped the phone back into the cradle.

Wait a second. What was I doing? That would be the first place Peter would look for me.

I was assuming Peter would just accept the fact that I had left him. But hadn’t the Boston cop said that Peter had stalked his wife when she tried to leave? I held my head in my hands as I sat down on the bed.

Was that what I had to look forward to? Would Peter stalk me now? Murder me in a staged robbery?

My hand covered my mouth.

Wait a second. No.

Just like Elena.

Jamaicans hadn’t killed Elena and the store clerk.

Peter had.

It all clicked into place. Peter had shot Elena with the machine pistol I’d seen on his boat and made up the story about the robbery.

It was over drugs, I realized, nodding my head. Which had to be why the FBI was involved. Peter was under investigation!

As I sat there, I knew it was true. All of it. I couldn’t believe how much denial I’d been in.

Peter wasn’t my hero. He wasn’t the love of my life. He was a corrupt, drug-dealing cop and an ice-cold-blooded killer.

What now, Mermaid? I thought, dropping onto the bed. I lay there for a while, staring up at the ceiling.

Then I sat back up and took out the FBI agent’s card.

I turned it in my hand as I stared at the phone.

Maybe I should call him? He knew the jam I was in. He could help me. He said so.

No! I thought, tapping the card to my forehead. Then everything would come out. What I’d done. How Peter had gotten rid of Ramón Peña.

I held my stomach in my hands. Staring down at the bulge that had already started to take over my belly, I envisioned myself giving birth in jail.

Unbelievable! I crumpled the card as I curled up on the bed. I couldn’t call the FBI either. I might as well get a taxi to the nearest prison.

It took a little over an hour for the third option to finally dawn on me: What I needed to do. How I could try to go about doing it. It was an absolutely insane idea.

Right up my alley, I thought, getting to my feet.

Chapter 37

THE FIRST THING I did was carefully put all my clothes away. After I replaced the suitcase, I went into the bottom of my sock drawer and shook out every nickel of catering-tip money I’d put aside to buy Peter a watch for our anniversary. Two hundred and eleven dollars wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

I quickly put the money into the pocket of my jogging fanny pack and changed into a gym shirt and sneakers and shorts. Finally, I went into the bathroom and put on some lip gloss before doing my hair up in a cute ponytail.

I needed to look my best.

I was, after all, going to be abducted by the Jump Killer this afternoon.

It was the news story at the hospital that had inspired me. The missing Marathon woman. The fact that the serial killer was now supposed to be in the Lower Keys.

Nineteen young women had gone missing, as if they’d disappeared into thin air.

I was going to be number twenty.

Peter wasn’t stupid, I knew. If my plan was going to work, it would have to be flawless, perfect in every way. The second he found out, he was going to be suspicious. So was my new FBI friend.

But I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted to get away from Peter, to get out of the immense hole I’d dug for myself, I had to try. It was my only shot.

I checked myself in the bathroom mirror one more time and then looked at my watch. It was just coming on noon. I went into the bedroom and stared out the sliders at the sunlit water. There was no sign of Peter’s boat. At least not yet. I’d have a six-or seven-hour head start.

I didn’t want to be late to my own funeral.

After I locked the front door, I pulled up my gray jogging T and patted my belly.

“Wish us luck,” I said to my baby. “Mommy’s sure as hell going to need it.”

Chapter 38

TEN MINUTES LATER, I was cruising at full throttle along Smathers Beach on my moped. Surprisingly, there were only a few people on its sugar white sand. A woman braiding her daughter’s wet hair and a couple of pudgy old men the color of leather, casting sea poles into the almost glass-still water. I looked up as a biplane sputtered by: COME TO THE GREEN PARROT! RIGHT BESIDE US 1’S MILE ZERO! THE MOST SOUTHERN BAR IN THE US! read its ad banner.

Mile Zero, I thought. That’s exactly where I was. Make that Mile Less Than Zero.

I suddenly put on the brakes as I spotted what I was looking for. A tall, skinny white kid with dusty blond dreadlocks was sitting on the concrete boardwalk in what looked like a yoga position. Yet another one of Key West’s many street kids and skate rats and punk rockers. A young beach bum come down to the country’s lower right-hand corner God knew why, escaping God knew what.

I was escaping, too, in the opposite direction, and I needed his help.

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping in front of him.

The kid held up a still finger, his eyes closed. After a moment, he stood, a guileless smile on his tan face.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said in a Texas accent. “Just doing a little Zen breath counting there. Sorry to make you wait. What can I do for you?”

Oddly enough, this was the way most Key West conversations went.

“I know this sounds weird,” I said, “but I was wondering if you could buy something for me.”

“Drugs?” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

“No, no,” I said. “Nothing like that. I need you to buy me some cord.”

“Cord?” he said, eyeing me. “Like rope? You gonna hang yourself? I don’t go for that kinky stuff.”

“Of course not,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. I need paracord. It’s a special kind of rope for parachuting. I use it in my parasailing business, and I’m out. My ex-husband owns the only marina supply store on the island that sells it, and I don’t want to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of going in to buy it myself.”

I needed the cord for my escape plan, of course. The ligature was linked to several of the Jump Killer cases.

I knew the request and my explanation sounded fishy, but I also knew it didn’t matter. Despite its small size, Key West had a healthy big-city, screw-the-cops, left-wing street vibe. Even if this stoner put two and two together after my disappearance, there’s no way he’d go anywhere near the cops. Who better than some burnt-out street kid to be a go-between?

“What do you say?” I nudged him.

“Paracord, huh? That does sound pretty weird,” the kid said, adjusting his dreads as he stood. “But I’ve been down here for a month now and have heard a lot weirder. I happen to be in the cord-buying business this morning. Ten bucks do it for you?”

“Ten bucks, it is,” I said, waving him toward my scooter.

Chapter 39

AFTER MY YOUNG ZEN-COWBOY FRIEND scored the paracord for me, I hit a vintage clothing store in Bahama Village and then a CVS. A thin, homeless, twenty-something girl with sun-and-drug-wasted eyes holding a baby asked me for money as I exited the pharmacy, carrying two brimming bags.

Though I could hardly spare it, I stopped and gave her a dollar, praying that I wouldn’t be her pretty soon.

I took the Vespa back over to Flagler Street and stopped at my favorite bodega for lunch. I ate my cubano slowly as the sun crested almost directly overhead.

I figured it would take until probably midnight for Peter to come looking for me. If I was lucky, he might even wait until morning.

After I finished lunch, I drove back to Smathers Beach, which ran along the southeast side of the island. Near its most deserted end, by the airport, I pulled over and got off the bike and stepped across the sandy path to the dunes.

I walked along the beach to where the beach grass grew about chest high and hunkered down.

There was no one on the beach, no one in the water.

It was time.

The first thing I did was upend my fanny pack, which contained my keys and wallet. Then with a pair of scissors that I’d bought, I cut a length of the paracord and dropped it on top of my CD Walkman.

The next part of the plan was the one I’d been dreading. It was also the most crucial. I took a small package out of the CVS bag and opened it.

It contained razor blades. They flashed like mirror shards in the bright light as I retrieved one and looked down at myself, debating. I swallowed as I finally decided on the back of my left calf.

I bit my lip as I lowered the blade down and sliced myself open. I hissed as I started the incision a little down from the back of my knee. Then teared up as I dug in harder with the blade, parting my skin.

At first, only a little blood dribbled out of the wound, but after I began to flex my calf over and over again, more came until I had a nice red stream going. It began to drip down my leg and off my heel, darkening the sand. I hopped around on one foot, flicking the blood on my fanny pack, the sand, the sea grass, the piece of paracord.

After about ten minutes, the area looked perfect, a total bloody mess.

Why not? Peter had shot himself to make his crime scene look good. The least I could come up with was a bit of self-mutilation.

I hopped back a few feet and sat down in the sand. I cleaned and bandaged myself carefully with peroxide and gauze and bandages that I’d bought at the pharmacy. I was even more careful to retrieve every scrap of trash.

After I was bandaged, I went over and kicked some more sand over everything. Then I stared at the scene for a minute, resting my chin on my thumb like a painter before a canvas.

Finally I stood.

It would have to do.

I crossed my fingers as I turned and walked away.

Chapter 40

IT WAS AS DIM as a cave. The concrete floor was littered with cigarette butts and some wriggly-looking thing I didn’t even want to think about. The smell of urine made my eyes water.

Perfect, I thought, locking the door of the public beach bathroom a ways from my fabricated crime scene.

It was skeevy and scary, but the most important things were that the women’s side had a lock on the door and the sink worked. I turned on the sink’s rusty tap as I opened the CVS bag.

Twenty minutes later, I looked at myself in the mirror.

My reflection provided some much-needed comic relief.

My still wet, self-cut, bleached hair was already turning platinum, and I had more black around my eyes than a raccoon. In the Catholic-school plaid skirt, black Social Distortion concert T, and Doc Martens boots that I scored from the secondhand store, I now looked like a cross between Courtney Love and a homeless fortune-teller.

My disguise was complete. I could have been any of the punk-rock girl runaways who hung around Duval asking for handouts. Time to go.

There was a city bus to Marathon, but that would be the first place Peter would check if he wasn’t convinced by the crime scene. My plan was to hitchhike out, find some tourist passing by who would never link sweet young cop wife, Jeanine Fournier’s, disappearance to my new punk-rock persona.

The wind was picking up as I came back out onto the beach, the first gold shadows stretching over the sand. There was a roar, and I looked up at a small “puddle jumper” passenger prop plane coming in. Happy tourists about to touch down in paradise.

“One piece of advice. Take a pass on the Jell-O shots,” I called up to it.

I shook my head as I gazed at the ocean, at the curvature of the world that I was about to enter practically penniless, definitely friendless, with a baby inside of me.

My Doc Martens clopped loudly on the concrete jogging path as I pointed myself toward the first bridge and whatever the hell would come next.

Chapter 41

THE SPEEDING STINGRAY rose and dipped like a skipping stone as Peter opened up its three-hundred-horsepower engine full throttle on their way back in. This was Key West at its finest, he thought, looking through the spray at the red-gold sunset. Wind in your hair, cold beer in your hand, cooler bursting with amberjack.

The pink clouds starboard reminded him of the blood in the water when they’d fed Teo’s body to the sharks that afternoon.

The product that Peter had bought from him and Elena was supposed to have been pure. He’d paid for pure. But it had been cut. Not a lot. Just enough to get them both killed.

Peter took another icy hit of his Corona and placed it back into the drink holder, his blue eyes glued to the horizon. He thought what he always thought when push came to shove and someone had to go.

Goddamn fucking shame.

It was twilight as they turned into the bay. Killing the engine, Peter expertly drew up along the seawall and saw that all the lights were off in the house. He hopped out of the boat and went inside as Morley tied up and unloaded.

“Jeanine?” he called.

He noticed that her sneakers were missing from the closet when he walked through the bedroom. A glance out the front door showed her Vespa wasn’t in the carport either.

He went back into the bedroom and made a phone call. The phone kept ringing. He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed, thinking. He looked in the closet again. All their bags were still there. All of her clothes.

Finally, he looked at their wedding portrait on the shelf beside the bed.

“Fuck,” he said.

Morley was at the picnic table, dividing up the catch into freezer bags, when Peter arrived beside him.

“What is it?” Morley said.

“Jeanine,” Peter said. “Something’s wrong.”

Chapter 42

IN THE RISING ENGINE WHINE of an approaching truck, I scrambled up onto the tiny concrete ledge on the highway bridge’s shoulder just in time. Blinded by headlights, road grit biting at the side of my face, I easily could have reached out and touched the side of the rattling, creaking, speeding eighteen-wheeler flashing by.

Or ended up underneath it.

My knees buckled as its swooshing waft of air came close to knocking me over the bridge’s shin-high railing and into the water. At least he was kind enough not to hit his eardrum-puncturing air horn as he clattered past like the truck before.

I hopped down off the ledge and soldiered on after the truck’s red taillights, swinging my CVS bag up on my shoulder. There wasn’t much left in it, half a package of Combos and a dwindling bottle of water. Supplies were definitely running low. My legs were OK, but my feet were killing me, starting to blister now in the Doc Martens after nearly four hours of walking.

Far out at sea, I spotted the red running lights of an anchored tanker. Above them, the clear startling night contained about a hundred billion silver-blue stars. I remembered how Peter and I had lain out in our backyard after our city hall wedding, drinking Coors Light and kissing in the dark like teenagers as we watched for shooting stars.

Now he was probably searching for me.

I figured that I’d covered about 20 of the 105 miles that make up the Overseas Highway, but I still wanted to put a little more distance between me and Key West before I tried to hitchhike. I wanted to be far enough away that anyone picking me up wouldn’t think to put me and my planned disappearance together.

After another ten minutes, I stopped and sat in the sand and finished the Combos. I stood immediately after I dozed off for a second. I couldn’t put it off any longer, I decided. I had to hitchhike now. If I didn’t, I’d fall asleep on the spot.

Peter was certainly back by now, and there was only one road out of Key West. If I was on it come morning, he would find me. I couldn’t let that happen.

I stood as a pair of northbound lights appeared in the distance behind me. I walked to the road, tentatively lifting my thumb.

The vehicle’s high beams dimmed as it slowed. I heard loud music coming from the radio.

Who would stop for someone out on this isolated piece of road? I thought, holding my breath. A good Samaritan? A weirdo? Peter?

I bit my lip to stop it from quivering as the lights hit me, and the car rolled to a stop.

It wasn’t actually a car, I realized, but a vintage hot rod pickup with windsurfing boards and sails jutting out over the cherry red tailgate. The radio was blasting AC/DC.

I took a breath as I made eye contact with the two people inside of it. The driver looked friendly enough, a young guy with short, reddish blond hair. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Neither was his wiry, older, and meaner-looking friend, who had a bottle between his knees and a well-endowed-mermaid tattoo on his forearm. I winced as I spotted their glazed red eyes and caught the reek of pot.

Damn, I thought. What have I gotten myself into?

“Hey, punk-rock girl. Need a ride?” said the wasted driver, turning down “Hells Bells.”

His Red Hot Chili Pepper reject of a friend took a swig of Southern Comfort and burped. “Cab’s a little crowded, but let me clear off a seat for you,” the tattooed guy said, wiping at his face.

I knew it, I thought, as icy pinpricks of fear made a path down my spine. I should have waited to hitch until I was at a place with more houses, more lights.

“Actually, guys, I changed my mind,” I said, walking away. “I think I’m going to keep walking. Thanks. My boyfriend will be here any minute anyway.”

I could feel my heart beating madly in my throat as the truck rumbled. I felt like crying as it kept pace alongside me.

The driver called to me, “Honestly. We’re more than happy to give you a ride.”

The truck suddenly shot off the road and did a half doughnut in front of me.

“Yeah, come on and stop being a bitch already,” said the skinny guy with a smile as he opened his door. “We won’t rape you. Promise.”

Chapter 43

I DROPPED MY BAG as I turned and sprinted in the other direction. The skinny bastard laughed and gave a rebel yell as the truck rumbled again. I looked over my shoulder to see the truck reversing.

Were they just trying to scare me? They were doing a damn good job.

I was thinking about heading into the brush to hide when I saw another set of headlights. A car was coming off the bridge to the south. I ran out into the road, waving frantically. It slowed and then stopped ten feet in front of me. It was a dark Mercedes.

“Say, are you OK?” asked the man behind the wheel. He had a British accent. A feisty Jack Russell began barking from the passenger seat behind him.

Before I could answer, the reversing pickup came to a sand-raising stop in front of the luxury sedan. The two shirtless men hopped out.

“Beat it, fool. Before we put you in the hospital,” said the mean, wiry guy, brandishing his booze bottle like a club.

Instead of screeching away as I feared he would, the Mercedes driver just leaned out of his window and smiled.

“Oh, I don’t want to go to the hospital,” he said to them in a campy, whimsical Shakespearean voice. “How about if we just stay here and play doctor in the back of that butch truck of yours instead? I call doctor. Who wants to get examined first?”

He was a member of Key West’s vast gay community, I realized.

The wiry guy with the tattoo gave the bottle a deft flip as he stepped over to the driver’s side of the Mercedes.

“The only thing that’s going to get examined is your wallet, queen. After I knock all your teeth down your throat.”

That’s when the Mercedes driver opened his door and my jaw dropped.

The handsome black-haired man was massive, well over six feet, his bodybuilder chest and arms stretching his black polo shirt to the breaking point.

“Forgive me for being so forward, young man,” he said, stepping toward the windsurfing punk with his veined arms crossed over his fifty-inch chest. “But has anyone ever told you how utterly striking those eyes of yours are? Let me guess: you’re a Sagittarius?”

The two windsurfing fools looked at the WWF-sized gay Brit and then at each other in utter horror before racing back to the truck. A boogie board flipped over the tailgate and onto the road as they peeled out.

“I get the hint. Two’s company and three’s a crowd,” the big Brit said to me with a wink and a sigh. “If that isn’t the sad story of my life.”

Chapter 44

“SIR FRANK, at your service, m’lady,” the Brit said, walking over to me and offering his hand. “And that little brat in the car there”—he gestured toward his Jack Russell—“is my loyal squire, Rupert. Those weren’t friends of yours, I hope?”

“Not at all,” I said, shaking Frank’s large hand. “Just two jerks who offered me a ride. Thank you so much for stopping. Do you and Rupert always go about rescuing damsels in distress?”

“To tell you the truth, we’d much prefer to rescue a prince, but in your case, just this once, we’ll make an exception. Hop in. I’m only heading up as far as Little Torch, but you’re welcome to join me.”

“First you rescue me, then you offer me a ride?” I said. “If I weren’t so road-grimy, I’d hug you.”

“If you weren’t so road-grimy, I’d let you,” Frank said with another smile. “Actually, I have one minor request. Rupert and I have been celebrating a little too exuberantly tonight, I’m afraid. Sometimes there’re police along this stretch of the road, and we’d prefer not to get a DUI. You, on the other hand, look sober. Would you drive?”

Drive?! I thought. A Mercedes? Duh. “Not a problem,” I said. “Assuming that it’s OK with Rupert.”

Sir Frank leaned over and conferred with the dog.

“Rupert says hop in and step on it.”

I smiled at my tan, muscular friend as I walked around the car to the driver’s side.

Gay British Prince Charming to the rescue. Only in Key West, I thought.

The car had wood trim everywhere and sumptuous leather seats that smelled like expensive cologne. I would have accepted a ride in the back of a chicken truck, I thought, closing the door with a heavy vaultlike clunk. My luck was definitely turning.

I slid the gearshift into drive and tapped the gas. Sand flew as the car roared and lurched onto the road like an uncaged lion.

“Ease up a tad, would you?” Frank said as he produced a silver flask from the glove compartment and took a sip. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

“Nina.” I made it up on the spot.

“To you, fair Nina,” he said, taking a tipple.

I was really enjoying the car. I’d never been in a Mercedes, let alone driven one. I liked the way it handled and especially the way it was making the highway railing blur by on both sides, putting distance between me and Peter. My escape plan was working out even better than I had expected.

“Hitchhiking on the Overseas doesn’t seem very safe, Nina,” Frank said. “Tell me. Are you running away from something or to something?”

“Neither,” I lied again. “I’m just down here on vacation from New Jersey. My girlfriends and I are staying up in Big Pine. Got separated from them at a party in Old Town.”

“New Jersey?” Frank said, taking in my Goodwill attire and scrunching his face in doubt. “Yes, well, quite.”

“I love your car,” I said to change the subject.

Frank smiled as he pushed his rakishly cut black hair out of his face. There was an almost Asian cast to his dark eyes. His teeth seemed a little too perfect. Were they capped? I wondered.

“Funny you mention that,” he said. “That’s exactly what I said to its owner when he picked me up an hour ago. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to squeeze the big son of a bitch into the trunk.”

What did he just say? I thought, laughing tentatively.

I turned to him. He took another sip from the flask and sat staring ahead silently. The only sound was the rushing air in the dark. After a long, awkward and tense moment, he laughed loudly.

“Do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do,” he said, imitating the Twilight Zone theme before laughing again. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. You should see your face. You need to learn to take a joke, fair Nina. Though it is dangerous to hitch. You’re lucky I’m a good person. Who knows what some completely crazy wanker might do to you out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Thanks again,” I said after I swallowed.

Was it me? I wondered. Or was this getting weird very quickly?

I was doing my best to keep my eyes on the road ahead when there was a flash and a loud click beside me.

Frank, now holding a Polaroid camera, pulled out the advancing instant film and started shaking it.

What the? Now he was taking snapshots?

“Photography’s a little hobby of mine,” he said, blowing on the film. “You know what my favorite American expression is? ‘Take only snapshots, leave only footprints.’ You look shocked. Don’t tell me a pretty girl like you doesn’t like getting her picture taken?”

That’s when a snatch of the Jump Killer news segment I’d watched in the hospital came to me. My lungs stopped working as I almost ran off the road.

The car theft and the body in the trunk may have been jokes, but the wrapper for Polaroid film was found at the site of one of the prostitute abductions!

“Say cheese,” Frank said, raising the camera again.

Chapter 45

“YOU HAVE nice bone structure,” Frank said, shaking the second instant film sheet as we drove along. “I have a friend who does some model scouting. Would you like a makeover? I could do wonders for you. Take some head shots. After I do something with that vile hair. Did a blind person color it? You could shower at my motor home.”

At the mention of the words motor home, my throat closed, as if it had been stuffed with a rag. The Jump Killer was speculated to have one of them as well. For the first time, I noticed the key chain dangling from the ignition.

No.

I closed my eyes as my hands started shaking on the leather steering wheel.

It was an eagle on a black shield. I’d been around enough military down in Key West to know that it was the Airborne symbol. Airborne meant parachutes and paracord. And how could a British guy be in the U.S. Army?

“So what do you say? Head shots? Shall we do it?” Frank said, as every molecule of saliva in my mouth evaporated instantly.

I saw some lights up ahead. Red neon in a small window. It was a bar. I accelerated toward it.

“I have to use the bathroom. I’m going to stop,” I said weakly.

“Don’t bother,” Frank said. “My motor home is parked just up the road. You could go there. Won’t be another second.”

I kept gunning it and put on the turn signal. “It really can’t wait,” I said.

“Fine,” Frank said as he put down the camera. “As you Yanks say, ‘When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.’ ”

Maybe I was wrong about him. Was I jumping to conclusions? It didn’t matter, I decided. He had turned out to be a lot creepier than I’d first thought.

Frank capped the flask and put it back into the glove compartment as I braked for the turn into the bar’s parking lot. When he took his hand back out, he was holding a blunt black gun. He pressed its barrel into one of my nostrils.

“On second thought. Keep driving, skank,” he said suddenly in a New York accent. He definitely didn’t sound British anymore. In fact, he no longer even sounded gay. “I freakin’ insist,” he said.

Chapter 46

THE JACK RUSSELL started barking from the little space behind the seats as the red lights of the bar disappeared on my left.

“What is this?” I managed to stammer out through my utter shock.

“This? It’s a Walther P99,” Frank said, waving the ugly gun in front of my eyes. He definitely didn’t sound so whimsical anymore. His voice was deeper now, ice-cold.

“Why are you doing this?” I said.

My breath came irregularly. I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Maybe I’d fallen asleep on the side of the road and was dreaming. That’s what it felt like.

Because how could this have happened? I’d set out to pretend to be abducted.

Now I actually was!

“You know what I hate?” he said, sounding like Robert De Niro. “Cute little things like you who think that all they have to do in life is shake their ass, and the world will beat a path to their door. If I were a woman, I’d hang myself when I hit puberty. I swear to God, I would. You’re too disgusting for words.”

From out of my terror-induced fugue, I remembered reading somewhere about how victims had to try and humanize themselves. If your abductor thought you were human, it would be harder to hurt you.

“Please don’t do this. I’m pregnant. Please let me go.”

“Pregnant?” he said. “Does the father know?”

“Are you him?” I said, trying to shift the attention off myself. “The man in the paper? The one who’s responsible for the missing women?”

“What do you think?” he said with a sigh. “The Jump Killer. What a stupid name. Not a single reporter could come up with something better? How about you?”

Pain blossomed in my mouth as he suddenly raked the barrel of the gun hard over my lips and teeth.

“How about instead you shut your face before I break those exquisite cheekbones of yours.”

I felt dizzy. The surface of the road seemed to ripple through the windshield. My stomach suddenly clenched into the world’s tightest knot.

After a moment, I realized it was full-blown nausea, from Combos and exhaustion and more terror than I’d ever felt in my life. The contents of my stomach started to slosh and churn, demanding immediate release.

I was leaning to my left, about to vomit out the window, when another thought occurred to me. What did I have to lose?

I turned and heaved loudly and violently onto the Jump Killer’s lap.

As he howled in disgust, I impulsively reached over and unclipped his seat belt. The engine screamed as I dropped the accelerator to the floor and wrenched the wheel to the right.

Even with the air bag popping, the shoulder belt friction burned into my neck as we hit a telephone pole head-on. The hood of the car folded back into the windshield, shattering it before the momentum of the crash swung the car up and to the right. I heard the world’s loudest nails-on-a-chalkboard screech as we skidded along the concrete railing.

Then we flipped over the guardrail backward, and we were falling through the air.

Chapter 47

STARS GLITTERED through the shattered windshield as we free-fell. My skull whacked off the headrest as we hit the water with a booming splash. It felt like I’d been hit from behind with a baseball bat.

It was amazing how quickly the cold, black water poured into the car. Definitely a lot faster than I could think what to do about it.

I tried to open the door, but it was too heavy, and by then the water was up to my neck. I took a last gulp of air as it closed over my head.

I couldn’t see anything. The car seemed to twist around and swing forward as we submerged. I wasn’t sure if we were upside down.

Along with panic, I was now attacked by a strange, sudden paralysis. Could I find an air pocket? I wondered stupidly. Should I try opening the door again?

I realized the window was open. I tried to pull myself out of it. I couldn’t. I was stuck. Then I saw that I was still wearing my seat belt.

Pain bloomed at my right elbow as I desperately tried to unclip myself. It was the Jack Russell. He was biting me under the water. I shoved him away in the dark and finally freed myself. The dog nipped at my boot as I was on my way out. I turned and reached in. My hand wrapped around fur and I dragged him up with me.

I don’t know who was gasping louder when we broke the surface, me or the little dog. He tried to bite me again as I pulled him by his collar toward some mangroves growing from underneath the concrete roadbed of the highway to the left.

“Stop it!” I screamed at the dog. “Do that again, and I’ll leave you for good!”

He finally seemed to get the message. He made a whimpering sound as he relented and let himself be dragged. In the heavy boots, I was hardly able to keep us both above water.

When I was close enough to the shore to stand, I turned back toward where we’d gone under. There was no sign of the Jump Killer. Did he make it out? God, I hoped not. The whole thing had happened so fast. I think I was still in shock.

The Jack Russell barked and followed at my heels as I headed out of the water through the brush and sand toward the road. I cursed. With its wall angled away from me, it was going to be hard to climb. The top edge of the metal railing was about three feet over my head.

It took me four jumps off a large piece of driftwood to grab on. Because of the angle, I couldn’t use my legs. I was hanging there, swinging back and forth, trying fruitlessly to get my huge, heavy-booted leg up onto the top, when there was a splash behind me.

Please be a sea turtle, I prayed.

“Nina? There you are. Wait up,” the Jump Killer called from the water in a strangely calm voice.

Chapter 48

“HOW AM I DOING, you wanted to know?” he continued, as he sloshed through the water. “Let’s see. My collarbone is broken, my face is sliced to ribbons, and one of my eyes is full of glass. Otherwise, I’m as right as rain.”

I started to cry as I swung my leg up as hard as I could. I managed to get the toe of my soaked boot onto the metal railing this time. But then it slipped off, and I was dangling there again helplessly as the splashes behind me got louder. I screamed as I tried again. Not even close. I was too terrified.

“Your arms aren’t getting tired, are they?” the Jump Killer asked as the splashing became crashing through the brush behind me. “And what are you doing? Don’t you know it’s not legal to leave the scene of an accident?”

He would catch up to me in a second. My arms felt like wet spaghetti. I had to try again. I swung up. And missed!

“Darn nice try, Nina. You almost had it that time,” the Jump Killer said directly beneath me as I swung back down.

I kicked out blindly behind me. My heavy boot heel came into delicious contact with his face. There was a strangled animal scream, and he was on his knees, holding his nose.

With the last of my strength, I changed my grip and did a chin-up to the rail. I hooked my right arm around it. It felt as if I’d torn a stomach muscle as I rolled over it and dropped into the road.

And heard the thunderous whine of an approaching truck.

You have got to be kidding me, was my only thought as I lay there on my belly with the blinding headlights of a truck coming straight at me. I couldn’t do anything except watch the lights grow bigger and bigger as the air horn sounded. Its seizing brakes gave a drawn-out metallic chirp-chirp-chirp.

Chapter 49

THE TRUCK STOPPED six feet in front of me with a deafening outrush of the air brakes. From my perch almost underneath the thunderously rumbling vehicle, its grille looked as tall as a skyscraper. It felt like my heart had stopped, too, as well as all of my major brain function.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind!?” someone yelled.

I looked up. Far above me, a middle-aged blond woman’s pissed-off face was sticking out of the tractor trailer’s passenger window.

She jumped down and dragged me to my feet roughly. All I could do was stand there, staring at her. She was one of those heavy women that people think would be gorgeous if they were skinnier. As if that were relevant. I had post-traumatic stress disorder by this point.

“You stupid, stupid girl,” she said, shaking me. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that my husband didn’t kill you? What happened to you? You’re soaked. Are you drunk? Drugged out? Is that it?”

I looked back at the concrete wall I’d just climbed and then back at the woman with my mouth open. Where was the Jump Killer? Would he hop out now? Or was he hiding? Running away?

“She’s not talking, Mike,” the woman called up to the driver. “I think she might be some type of foreign person. Call the police on the CB.”

“No, wait,” I finally got out.

I wanted to tell her what happened, that I had just run into the Jump Killer, but I realized I couldn’t. No way could I have contact with the police. Even after all this, I still had a chance of getting away from Peter.

“No, it’s OK,” I said. “I broke up with my boyfriend. We’d been swimming a ways back there and when I came back in, he’d, uh, left me. True, I cheated on him last night with his cousin, but still. I’m down here without any money, and I was trying to hitchhike home. I guess I fell asleep,” I said.

“Fell asleep? You make a habit of falling asleep on the highway, you’re going to wake up in a graveyard, moron. And you’re certifiable to be hitchhiking. Couldn’t you call your family?”

“My mom doesn’t even know I’m here,” I said. “Please don’t call the police. She’ll throw me out if she finds out.”

“Where’s home?” the woman said.

“Boca Raton,” I said off the top of my head.

“Should I call the cops or not, Mary Ann?” the driver called down.

The heavyset woman stared into my eyes fiercely. “Don’t bother,” she called back up after a second. Then to me she said, “We’re going as far as Miami. Would that help you out?”

If by “help out,” you mean “save my life,” I thought. “Thank you so much,” I said.

The woman shook her head. “Well, c’mon,” she said, boarding the truck and waving me up.

Mike, the driver, was bald and had a Hemingway-esque curly white beard. His head was down on the wheel, and he was breathing heavily when I entered the cab. And his agitated face was whiter than his beard.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” I said to him.

He just shook his head as his wife closed the door.

“Told you this run to the Keys would be interesting, Mike,” the woman said. “Keep your eyes peeled for any more youngsters napping in the middle of this goddamn road.”

I looked out the window at the water as the truck crunched into gear and we rolled out. I couldn’t see anything along the concrete bridge wall. There was no movement in the water, no movement in the brush. The Jump Killer must have been hiding underneath the side of the bridge, I realized. Like a troll, I thought, still dizzy with panic.

After a minute, as the truck began to pick up speed, Mary Ann rummaged in the berth behind her and handed me a towel. Wrapping myself in it, I wriggled up against the passenger door and stared out at the stars sliding past. The lights of the road ahead curved out over the dark water like spots on a connect-the-dots sheet.

What would the next dot be? I wondered. More ruin, no doubt. More horror. More pain.

Because I was cursed, I thought. Wherever I went, death and craziness homed in on me. I seemed to emit a scent that attracted these things.

I tried to figure out why that was. Was it something in my nature? My inherent gullibility?

As we roared around a long curve of the Overseas Highway, out on the water to my right I suddenly saw a small, distant light. It was the tiny running light of a small anchored sailboat.

Or Ramón Peña, I thought as my ten-ton eyelids began to drop. It was the soul of the man I had run over and allowed Peter to sink in the ocean. Ramón was the reason for my bad luck, the reason why I would always be hounded. Peter wasn’t the only one with blood on his hands.

I deserved to be haunted, I thought, and then I finally, gloriously, passed out.