Southern Comfort - Fern Michaels [4]
Even Patrick Kelly, known to old friends as Tick, although those friends were long gone, ignored the place, which was three miles down the beach from where he lived.
The reason he’d ignored the construction was because he was in a drunken stupor for the two years it took to build, and the third year, he was just more or less coming out of his stupor. And the least of his worries was someone building a house, a castle, a fortress, or that place. It simply held no interest for him; it was all he could do to get through one day so that he could go to sleep, wake, and struggle through the next. Today, seven years after the fact, he still had no interest in what he considered an abandoned structure he happened to see when he walked the beach, swam, or fished.
It was a beautiful August day on Mango Key. But then most days were beautiful except during hurricane season, and those exceptions usually lasted only a day or so. The sun was startlingly bright, warming Tick’s body as he walked out of the ocean. He had his dinner in a net—a fish he couldn’t name. Nor did he care if it had a name. He called all fish dinner. A few wild radishes, some equally wild onions, a few mangoes, and maybe an orange, and dinner was ready. A great diet. He’d dropped twenty-five pounds since arriving at Mango Key. He weighed 170 pounds, the same weight he’d carried when he was twenty-eight and in top form. Now pushing the big four-oh, at six foot two, he still carried the weight easily. He was brown as a nut, living in cutoffs and sandals. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a shirt. Maybe hurricane season last year, when the temperature dropped to sixty-five degrees.
Patrick Kelly, hobo, derelict, beach bum, drunk, former homicide detective, ex-father, widower, rich best-selling author, and recovering alcoholic.
Tick stopped two hundred feet from the place he’d called home for almost seven years. His abode, that was how he thought of it, had been little more than a lean-to with iffy rusty plumbing and an even rustier generator when he arrived. It had stayed that way for close to three years, until he’d woken up one day and knew that his drinking days had to come to an end or he would die, which had been his purpose all along. But that particular morning, with the sun warming his bloated body, he’d taken his best friend, his only friend, Jack Daniel’s, and dumped him in the ocean.
He wasn’t sure now, but he thought he’d had the shakes, the crawlies, the hallucinations for a full week before he had shed all the bad toxins from his system. Then he’d reared up like a gladiator and taken a few steps into the land of the living. After which he took a few more steps and headed for the mainland, where he ordered all the lumber and nails he would need to redo his house, which he worked on from sunup to sundown. He’d made two more trips to order furniture, generators, appliances, a new laptop, a printer, scanner, cell phone, and anything else he thought he might need to make his life easier. The renovation took eleven months. He now had a skimpy front porch, with a swing and a chair. He’d christened the finished product with a bottle of apple cider. He’d even given his new abode a name. He called it Tick’s Tree House because he’d rebuilt the structure on stilts. He loved it as much as he could love anything these days.
Tick headed up the steps that led to his porch and started to laugh when the parrot who came with the house began to squawk. At least he thought it had come with the house, but with his foggy memory, he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t remember if the bird was in residence when he had arrived or if it came later. He marveled at the bird’s vocabulary and couldn’t remember if he’d taught it to talk or it learned from somewhere else. He called it Bird and had no way of knowing if it was male or female. Bird ruffled his feathers, and said, “You’re late.”
“Am not.”
“Five o’clock.”
Tick looked down at his watch. It was four thirty. “It’s four thirty. Four thirty means I’m not late.” Bird rustled his feathers, then swooped down and