An Absence of Light

Graver reached up with one hand and pressed his fingers into the base of his neck where the muscle had been tensing tighter and tighter all evening.

“But I’ve got to get something more to substantiate our suspicions,” he said. “They’re going to rely on Dean to be their first line of defense, the one to know if anything’s amiss. We’ve got to be careful with him.” The words almost stuck in his throat. “Maybe this thing goes laterally and other investigators and analysts are involved. Maybe it’s vertical, goes higher up…”

He stopped and shook his head slowly. This was goddamned unbelievable. And, on a personal level, it was excruciatingly painful.

Chapter 15

Ray Besom had been walking fifteen or twenty minutes when he saw the wooden hull of the old wreck emerge above the dune grass a hundred yards ahead of him. Unconsciously he quickened his step, his excitement almost making him forget about the weight of the tackle box and rods and bait bucket he had been lugging for the last three quarters of a mile from the point where the hired skiff had dropped him off. The guy would be back at nine o’clock, well after dark, to take him back to Port Isabel. Boca Chica was the end of the line. You couldn’t get any farther south. If he walked another mile and a half he would come to the broad sand flats where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, and then on the other side of that nasty hemorrhage-maybe two hundred yards-was Mexico. That’s why he came here. Except for an occasional wanderer, it was isolated.

Besom looked at his watch and then looked into the wind, out to the Gulf. The water was a dull, grayish brown with an occasional hint of pale turquoise and sometimes even a paler blue in the curls of the breakers. The Gulf oi Mexico was not a pretty thing, not in the traditional sense that someone thinks of coastal waters as being pretty. But to him that characteristic, unlovely color of the warm Gulf Stream was beautiful, even exotic, and nothing at all in his experience compared to the tangy smell of these salt-laden breezes which, if you caught them at just the right time early in the morning or late in the evening, like now, carried with them the smoky aura of Mexico.

This was his sixth and last afternoon. His brother-in-law, who had driven down with him from Houston, had gotten sick on the second day and had flown back home. That was fine with him. The guy wasn’t much of a fisherman, really, and he didn’t like to hang around the bait shops and bars and icehouses when the dead tides made the fishing bad. But those were the places you learned things, those little dives where old farts with beer bellies, burned skin, and bad teeth laid up in the shadows in the heat of the day. These guys could tell you a thing or two about how to handle yourself if the tides were right and you wanted to get a hook into a redfish or speckled trout or flounder. This was the one week that he lived for during the other fifty-one.

He checked his watch again as he walked up to the old hull of the shrimp boat that had washed onto the beach seven years ago. He had checked the tide tables and in half an hour he wanted to be in the water. The sun was way behind him, going down somewhere in Mexico. He had a good two hours to fish before dark. But first, just to enjoy the moment, he dropped his equipment next to the hull and sat down in the sand. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lighted it, and then he reached for the waders he had been carrying, put his hand down into one of the legs and pulled out a single bottle of beer. He popped the cap on the sweaty, amber bottle and sat back against the bleached hull of the shrimper. Seagulls slid across the sky above him, squeaking, hovering, dipping down to look at him. If this could last forever you wouldn’t hear any complaints from him.

When the cigarette gave out, Besom tossed it away and tucked the bottom of the beer bottle into the sand. He reached for his waders and began pulling them on, stopping a couple of times to work on the beer before it got warm. Standing, he finished buckling the waders and then reached down for the beer and finished it, tossing the bottle in the sand near the hull. He picked up the largest of the two rods-Go for it, he told himself-and checked the shimmering green Ambassador 5500 casting reel. Opening his tackle box he surveyed the trays of lures, having already decided against the shrimp tails in the bucket He selected a Gold Spoon, rigged it, and walked across the beach to the water.

Wading into the water until it was just above his crotch and just below his waist, he spread his legs slightly for balance and began casting. It was a hell of a pleasure, a real pleasure like sex, to hear the reel whine in the casting, to let the lure settle a second and then begin bringing it in, feeling the tug and nuzzle on the line as the surf pulled and pushed at his pelvis.