Chapter 20
TWENTY
Lucas
Bobby W looked almost like his old self as they got off the boat in Avalon.
He always perked up on the ocean, the way flowers did in water.
The shore patrol nudged up next to them, and Bobby W hopped on.
The sail had smoothed years from his life.
They both stood, and for the first time in a long time, Bobby W didn’t appear one step away from collapsing.
“Sea air. I love it.” His voice attracted the attention of others on the boat. A couple nudged each other. A few women smiled.
“Hey,” a young blonde, maybe nineteen, her fine hair fanned and tangled by the wind, said. “Aren’t you the Killer Body guy?”
“And a few other forgettable titles along the way.” Bobby W flexed through his black turtleneck and gave her what Lucas had come to call the look of assessment.
Boobs, legs, then, finally the face. “Sometimes,” he said, “especially when we’re young, nature is kind.
Later on, less so. May I say nature has been extremely kind to you, my dear lady. ”
“Thanks.” She nudged her friend and preened in her tight black top, full breasts threatening to spill through the deep, keyhole-shaped neckline.
The old man’s charm never failed him. His rosy cheeks caught the glow of the harbor lights.
His eyes glinted as he chatted with the blonde.
Lucas hoped this was the right move, a positive move, and that it might be able to get Bobby W’s mind off his obsession with Julie and whether or not she’d return.
What will Rikki think?
The thought arrived unbidden, followed by the image of her intense, annoying gaze, staring him down, chin uplifted, blatant accusation in those amazing blue eyes. For the first time since his brief marriage, he was thinking about a woman more than he thought about his job.
“So.” The blonde turned to Bobby W, offering up her chest like a plate of buffalo wings at happy hour. “When are you going to pick another Julie? My boyfriend and I love Princess Gabby.”
Bobby W steadied himself on the rail. “I can’t really say. There will never be another Julie, and she’ll be back very soon, you know.”
His voice drifted off. The blonde frowned. As they neared the pier, Lucas could see she’d lost interest in the conversation.
“So,” she said to her friend. “You want pizza or pasta tonight?”
Bobby W shook his head and gave Lucas an indulgent smile. “Your greatest strength is your greatest liability,” he said, low enough so that no one heard him this time.
“So what’s that young lady’s?”
“She thinks she’ll be like this forever.”
“That’s a strength?”
He raised a cagey brow. “Can be. Depends on which side of the screen you’re viewing the movie from.”
They ended up in a café eating bowls of minestrone and yeasty bread, from which Bobby W ripped out and discarded the centers. He gnawed at the crust between sips of bourbon.
“So, what are we going to do, Luke?”
“About?”
Another sip. Another nibble. “About getting Jules back, of course.”
Lucas looked out between the blue-and-white-checked curtains of the café’s windowpanes, where boisterous visitors strolled toward any number of locations, all ending with food, drink, entertainment. No one came to this side of Catalina Island with any longer-term goals.
“Don’t you think Julie will come back when she wants to?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think she can, or she’d already be here. There was something fake about that conversation we had on the phone.”
“Fake how?” As always, he tried to discern how much was real and how much was just Bobby W being Bobby W.
“As if she was reading it, maybe.” He took his credit card receipt and rose. “Something’s wrong with her. Maybe where she is, she can’t get back.”
They’d seen different sides of Julie, so there was no point in telling him that Julie would do what she damn well pleased, when she damn well pleased to do it.
They stepped onto the sidewalk.
“So, where next?” Lucas asked. “Luau Larry’s? The Marlin Club?”
“The Marlin, of course, with that wonderful fish-shaped bar. Dolores and I used to go there a lot in the eighties, you know. She had the cancer then, but she was still the most beautiful woman in the place. On the whole damned island, for that matter.”
Off they walked, to visit the past. Lucas hoped, as the bracing air hit their faces like a tonic, that Bobby W had forgotten the subject he’d raised at dinner, but, of course, he hadn’t.
“We need to hire someone to find out where she is.” He said it as if ordering a drink.
A niggling itch spread along Lucas’s spine.
“Like a detective, you mean?”
“Or a reporter.” Bobby W stopped, arched an eyebrow. “That little girl impresses the hell out of me.”
“Rikki?” In the rush of night air, his face felt hot. “Forget it.”
“Okay, so the chopped-off hair can be a turnoff, at first, but on her, it’s cute. And her body, Luke. Have you taken a look at that?”
“So what? I know lots of attractive women.”
“Like Ellen?”
“Ellen and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“So all of those dinners and lunches, and you’re not getting any?”
“You know it’s against the Killer Body code of ethics. No relatives, no dating, right?”
Bobby W’s parchment lips tightened. His eyebrows rose. “Would that stop you?”
“It would stop me with Ellen. It’s stopped me with people in the past. Boring, aren’t I?”
The door of the Marlin Club was opened. He turned to Bobby W, about to ask if the fraternization policy would stop him.
Instead, a tightly wound guy in a stocking cap almost collided with him, then shoved him out of the way.
“Watch where you’re going, asshole.”
He looked like a power-boat owner, or maybe just someone who traveled on one.
Lucas stepped back in his path. “Maybe you’re the one who’d better watch where he’s going.”
“You think so?” The sailor raised something that looked like a thick, gray wand.
Lucas tried to block it with his upraised hands, but the weight of most of it assailed him. He felt a hard hit from which he couldn’t quite recover. Felt himself crash into something solid. No, God, not Bobby W.
Yes, it was. Bobby W moaned beneath him.
“Careful, you pricks.” The man’s voice, a hoarse whisper, was the most frightening sound Lucas could recall in his adult life. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t. Oh, God, he really couldn’t.
“Leave this thing alone,” the man said.
“What thing?” Lucas choked out.
As he did, a sharp pain caved in his right side.
“This thing, asshole. Don’t ever ask no one about Julie Larimore, not you, not this old dead-ass man. Understand?”
The pain rang through him again, sharper, closer to his kidneys.
“Yeah, I understand.”
Another kick, sharper and more splintering this time. Lucas knew, as his body jerked to protect himself, that the assault was more directed to the pleasure of the one inflicting than to the fear of the one receiving.
He heard a retching sound beside him, knew it was Bobby W. That alone forced him to fight the blinding blackness, open his eyes. As he did, he heard a woman scream.
Tania Marie
Word of the day: Instauration: Restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation
Finally, after breaking every speed limit and not taking even one pee or food break, they parked in front of Virginia’s, as evidenced by the purple neon sign in small lowercase letters.
Rossi told Tania Marie to wait in the truck, but he could kiss her ass. As he slammed the door of the driver’s seat behind him, she opened the other door. Damned lucky she didn’t break a leg having to scramble out of the pickup.
“I told you to stay put.”
“Fuck you.”
She’d refused to speak to him on the horrendously long drive, planning what she’d do once they got here. Now she stormed past him into the restaurant, past bald Max at his glass-brick station, past the hostess in her long black gown, right into the sacred, frigging kitchen.
Late as it was, the place was packed with customers lingering over drinks and conversation. Let them linger over this !
Virginia presided over the line in her white jacket, looking like a crazed, brilliant scientist. Her hair, an angled bob about the same color as Tania Marie’s swished like filmy fabric around her face as she turned from the line.
“He brought you here?” She shook her head as if correcting one of the line chefs. “The idiot!”
“Watch who the hell you call an idiot. And I don’t care if you are my boss.” Rossi stalked in behind Tania Marie and went straight up to Virginia, who was almost his height.
“So, why don’t you tell me why you brought my daughter inside this restaurant when you knew she’d throw one of her fits?”
Rossi didn’t flinch. “Did you expect me to tie her down, lock her in the truck, maybe?”
This was fresh. No one talked like that to Virginia.
“Certainly not. And that’s not what’s upsetting me.”
“Hey, Gin, you told me to get her. I got her. You told me you were scared. I believed you. Now you’re telling me I should have made her stay in my truck.” He looked from her mother to Tania Marie, then back again. “In case you haven’t noticed, your daughter has a mind of her own.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Since when?” Tania Marie demanded. Now she was really steamed. She nudged up next to Rossi, close to Virginia’s flushed, angry face. “Since when have you noticed one thing about me?”
“Keep your voice down, Tania Marie.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. This is my kitchen, my restaurant.”
Tania Marie took a look around, surprised by how in control she felt.
At the shrine of Virginia—all sauté pans and bubbling water ready for the next pasta order—the white-clad line cooks pretended this nasty little scenario was invisible.
Tania Marie guessed everyone in Virginia’s life did that. Everyone but her.
“But it’s my life.” Tania Marie walked along the line as each cook turned away, like cartoon characters, heads down, waiting for the next command. “It’s my damned life. Why did you hire him to yank me out of it?”