Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [33]
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,