The Blood Red Sea Mass market paperbound - 2005

Excerpt

One


Draw a circle ten inches in diameter. The scale is seventeen nautical miles per inch. Pencil an X at the center; that's the little sloop Roamer, and her position is 19.5 degrees, twenty-nine minutes north; 66 degrees, twelve minutes east. Your diagram represents a great round patch of ocean one hundred and seventy miles in diameter. Pencil in waves if you like, and tiny arrows that show the angle of the southeast trade wind, and insert a dot close to Roamer's starboard beam--that's her: Kate.

Now if you are mathematically inclined, calculate the approximate total area enclosed. Convert those inches, at scale, to surface acres or hectares or square miles or square kilometers, any useful system of measurement. So, taking the sloop's central position, and extending a line around the perimeter, you will find that the nearest land, the north coast of Puerto Rico, is exactly five inches--eighty-five nautical miles--distant. And note that the boat is located over the Puerto Rican Trench, not far, in fact, from the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, at 28,321 feet. That's almost as deep as Mount Everest is tall. A lot of water, then, beneath the keel, a lot of water all around, and the bright powdery band of the Milky Way above. Surely there are other boats within our circle, but they are below the horizon, invisible to us.

You can imagine how vast this circular patch of sea is, how barren, how deep, what an awful midnight desolation . . .

Now tell me: What are the odds of your finding a lone swimmer there, a woman, in the middle of the night?



Two

It was an ordinary Monday morning: the incomparable Candace, behind her cluttered desk, held the muzzle of a chrome-plated pistol near her right temple. It emitted the sort of humming that, in sci-fi dramas, signifies the operation of a lethal death-ray device. Candace squinted her eyes shut and then opened them wide in greeting, and shifted the death-ray-gun's muzzle to her damp blond bangs.

Three more sad losers were sitting in the straight-backed wooden chairs that lined a wall of the outer office: two men and a woman, all trying to look innocent and hopeful in their misery. Candace complained about the difficulty of doing her work while being persecuted by the stares of waiting felons, but there had been little work to perform until such clients began appearing. And she still had time for her obsessive grooming.

"Good morning, Candace," I said.

She switched off the hair dryer. "Buenos d’as, mi caro Se–or Pendejo."

Candace was dating a Cuban who had slyly told her that the word pendejo, like caballero, could be defined as "noble gentleman." And so lately she had been addressing men as Mr. Pubic Hair, or in the secondary meaning, Mr. Fool. She called seventy-nine-year-old Judge Levi Samuelson "Se–or Pendejo Viejo"--Mr. Old Pubic Hair. We did not correct her; we left that to someone who might be less restrained in his retaliation.

I glanced at the fifty-gallon aquarium that sat atop a shelf of law books; two more of the bright tropical fish had died over the weekend, and now, colors dimmed and tails curled in rigor mortis, they floated above the miniature sunken galleon and tendrils of weed.

There were two narrow offices at the rear of the large outer office. Mine was on the left. The room always smelled of dust and mildew after being closed for a couple of days. I switched on the air-conditioning and sprayed the room with a chemical deodorant named Sea Breeze.

I sat at my desk and shuffled through the morning mail, trash-canning all brown envelopes, envelopes that heralded the chance of a lifetime, and envelopes with a cellophane window on the face. I opened those that might conceivably contain a check. None did, but I found an invitation to a wedding that had taken place Saturday.

Candace soon came in, leaned back against the door, and said, "A serial shoplifter, a car thief, and a crazy woman who thinks the government is tampering with her womb."

"What are they doing to it?"

"Her womb?"

"Yes."

"They put a microchip in there."

"Why?"

"I don't know. But she wants to sue."

Candace wore a knit dress that was modest in every respect except for the body inserted within.

"Which do you want to see first?" she asked.

"Tell those people I'm booked full, Candace. Send the two men back to whoever referred them to me. Send the woman to a gynecologist. I'm not accepting any more of these wretched cases."

"Thank God," she said, and she returned to the outer office.

I leaned back in my chair and proceeded to deconstruct Candace. First, I mentally eliminated the artificial coloring from her hair. The natural color was a light brown tending toward dusty blond, but her hairdresser bleached it to a canary yellow with platinum streaks. And it seemed full of compressed air. I let the air out, and chipped away at the hair-spray glaze. Excellent. Next I removed her lavender contact lenses, removed the mink eyelashes from her lids, restored all the plucked eyebrow hairs, and wiped away the mascara and eye shadow. Yes. Now the phosphorescent orange lipstick had to go, and the matching orange talons--long, curved false fingernails. I mentally wet a handkerchief and wiped away the various skin enhancers and foundation formulas and liquid blushes that I presumed had names like NaturGlow and PassionFlush. I finished my work and saw that it was good. Candace was now a healthy, pretty young woman with lively brown eyes and an attractive mouth ready to smile. She was not the girl next door, but maybe the sexy girl who lived next door to the wholesome girl next door. I preferred the natural, unaffected Candace, though I figured that most men would consider my deconstruction a desecration.

The door opened and the predeconstructed Candace reappeared. "There's another one out there," she said. "He says the police framed him on a charge of manufacturing methamphetamines."

"How did they frame him?"

"They planted a meth lab in his garage."

"Send him away, Candace."

I had been a criminal defense attorney, licensed in the State of Florida, for only four months, and yet I had more work than I needed or wanted. Veteran lawyers in the Dunwoody Building tossed me cases as you might toss a chunk of gristly meat to the mutt under the table. Naturally none of the cases was interesting or remunerative. No society murderers, rich drug lords, corporate bandits, celebrity felons, or corrupt politicans. The lawyers cleared files by sending me their mopes: shoplifters, petty thieves, check kiters, scofflaws, repeat DUIs, abused wives and cuckolded husbands, women with microchips implanted in their wombs. A surprising number of my clients managed to have themselves photographed by security cameras while engaged in various crimes and misdemeanors.

There was not much I could do for them. I pled out nearly all of the cases with the prosecutors. A few clients, contrary to my advice, demanded jury trials, got them, and got stiffer sentences than they would have received from plea bargains. I was astonished by the cavalier processes of the criminal justice system: A man might get a six-month suspended sentence by plea-bargaining; the same man, a year behind bars after a thirty-minute bench trial; and three years if he had the gall to inconvenience everyone by demanding his constitutional right to a jury trial. They were vindictive, those judges, those juries--twelve stone-faced, stone-hearted citizens good and true.

Tom Petrie laughed at my outrage. "Innocent," he called me. "Jackanapes." Tom had a rich vocabulary of invective; "jackanapes" was a new insult. "I told you to check voter registrations. You insist on empaneling Republicans."

"I want thoughtful, responsible, solid jurors," I said.

"Republicans, Baptist elders, retired civil servants with pinched mouths, menopausal divorcees, widows of slain law officers. Didn't they teach you anything at those night-school law classes?"

"They taught me that the jury system is the glory of Anglo-American jurisprudence."

He laughed.

"Maybe I wasn't meant to be a lawyer, Tom."

"That's another thing they forgot to tell you at law school."



A young woman was sitting on one of the client chairs as I passed through the outer office. We exchanged appraising glances. Candace, I assumed, was in our medieval lavatory. I hesitated for an instant, staring at the woman, and then went through the door and down the hall. While waiting for an elevator I was embarrassed to realize that I was silently reciting lines from a Marlowe poem: "Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?" Jackanapes.

The elevator stalled between the second and third floors. The old building had electrical problems. "Where both deliberate, the love is slight." I'd looked up jackanapes: It was in part defined as "a cheeky fellow; bounder; coxcomb." (Coxcomb: a conceited dandy.) It could also mean a monkey or ape. A jolly word, jackanapes, but none of the definitions applied to me.

I created a mental image of the visitor. She was an attractive woman of about thirty. Nothing rare in that: There are flocks of attractive native and migrating women around and about Florida. She was a brunette, and that was somewhat distinctive in these days when so many women were bleaching their hair blond and blonder, or dyeing it improbable shades of red.

The elevator lurched, descended a couple of feet, and again halted. A voice echoed down the shaft, but I could not make out any words. The blower had shut off and it was getting stuffy in the old box. A glass-enclosed instruction card advised me to press the red button. I pressed it without hope.

Thick black hair, uncompromisingly black, glossy with silvery highlights. Black eyebrows, gracefully arched, long black lashes, good cheekbones and a firm jawline, intriguingly curved lips, blue eyes--but you could not tell about eye color in these days of contact lenses. Complexion: creamy, maybe, beneath a bronzy suntan.

"Hey!" the man high above shouted. "Hey, Pablo, for Christ's sake, pull the breaker switch!"

The woman appeared alert, sexy, with a level challenging gaze and a piquant half smile. Was I reading too much into this brief encounter? "It lies not in our power to love or hate; for will in us is overruled by fate."

Pablo, for Christ's sake, at last pulled the breaker switch, and the elevator descended the last few yards to the ground floor.


I was half an hour late for lunch and was surprised to see that Petrie was still in the restaurant. Generally, you waited for Tom; Tom did not wait for you.

"Did the loan company repossess your Timex?" he asked as I sat at the table.

Thomas Petrie, Esquire, was a first-rate criminal defense lawyer, one of the best in the state, one of the best in the country according to him. He liked to say that he had been born poor, but born too with teeth bared and claws unsheathed. "I came out of the swamp thirsty for blood." If you imagine lawfulness as a plateau and crime as a precipice, then you'd say that Tom walked very close to the edge, walked on air at times. Together we had been involved in enterprises that, viewed from even the most lenient perspective, qualified us for serious prison time.

"The elevator got stuck again," I said.

"Take the stairs."

Tom's suite of offices occupied half of the Dunwoody Building's top floor; he usually jogged up and down the flights of stairs to stay fit. He was an athlete who looked slow and bookish.

The restaurant was spread through four rooms, yuppied up in a pseudo-Art Deco style and mostly patronized by a generation that believed martinis were blended drinks, sweetened and brightly colored by fruits or fruity liquors. A waitress drifted over, and both Petrie and I ordered mugs of beer and Italian beef sandwiches.

"I just fell in love," I said.

"Tell me about it."

I told him about my brief encounter with the brunette in the outer office.

"Look," he said, "I hate, I really hate to sound like a psychologist--I have my pride. But your adolescent epiphany isn't surprising considering that your former fiancee got married Saturday. You probably fell in love at the precise instant, forty-eight hours later, that Martina said 'I do.' "

"You see a mystical significance in that?"

"I see a drowning man grasping at straws--a brunette straw."

"Were you at the wedding?"

"Yes."

"Speak."

"It was . . . regal. It was like the uniting of two great dynasties. They should have held the wedding at Westminster Cathedral. White doves were released when the golden couple exited the church."

"No."

"A dozen white doves."

"And Martina?"

"Beautiful. Glowing."

"She rarely glowed for me," I said. "Just flickered a little now and then."

"Static electricity, maybe."

Four fresh-faced twenty-somethings sat at a nearby table, and commenced speaking in the new American female dialect, a slurred baby-talk quacking that had originated in California and would only be stopped by the Atlantic Ocean. "Snot what I wanned," one of the girls said. "Swat he wanned."

"Go on, Tom," I said.

"Martina wore a tiara, and a wedding gown that must have cost ten grand. Gossamer, she was enveloped by mist and gossamer and fairy dust. The groom and his courtiers wore morning clothes."

"Mourning, at a wedding?"

"M-o-r-n-i-n-g."

"What are morning clothes?"

"Formal wear for daylight hours. Tails, top hats, all of that, except the color is gray."

"What else?"

"Flowers, elfin flower girls, pretty bridesmaids, unctuous ushers, an Episcopal priest in gold vestment, candles, solemn vows, rice, doves, delirium."

"Jesus. That isn't Martina. She despised ritual. She wasn't churchy, not the radiant bride in white. Not the standard issue. Doves? It's crazy."

"Wake up. People play more than one role in a lifetime. For you, Marty was austere, independent, self-reliant, a tomboy grown into a pretty woman. But for the groom she is the loving bride, the attentive wife, the angelic mother-to-be."

"Christ. That's dishonest."

"She's gone. Give her up."

"Half a year ago she was mine."

"Martina could forgive you killing one man, but the second? That was de trop. Two is one too many. As Voltaire said after leaving a Paris homosexual whorehouse: 'Once is an adventure; twice is a vice"

Our waitress arrived with the beer and sandwiches. Petrie was a food sniffer; he removed the top slice of bread and sniffed the spicy beef, sniffed the cole slaw and French fries, and then began eating with genteel savagery.

I said, "Did you send me the woman with the microchip in her womb?"

He swallowed, drank some beer. "Nah. I keep the microchippies."

The girls at the next table were simultaneously engaged in four separate conversations; listening to them was like rapidly dialing among four radio stations.

"I sent you the car thief," Petrie said.

After lunch we walked down to the bay front for a smoke. Tom fired up one of his fifty-dollar bootleg Havanas; I got out a two-dollar cigarillo. We sat on a sun-heated slab of rock a few feet from where wavelets fizzed up on the sand. It was a blue day, blue sky and deeper blue sea, with puffball clouds reflected on the water and a warm breeze rustling through the royal palms that lined the esplanade.