An Absence of Light

He was looking at her breasts when the second wedge of orange turned to napalm in his throat, vaporized napalm, a spray of napalm instantly saturating his sinuses, ripping up into the hollows behind his eyes, actually coloring his vision. He saw scarlet everything, bikini, breasts, navel, smile, and as he staggered back into the red surf he knew he was dying. His trachea and lungs and heart were melted, already dissolved by the napalm, and even the murky Gulf water could not extinguish it.

The last thing he was aware of was the girl bent over him trying to open his mouth, but his jaws had locked down tight on his tongue, and she could only grab and pull at his lips and cheeks.

Frustrated, she gave up and stood for a minute watching him convulse, watching him suck in enough surf to drown even though he was past drowning. When he stopped jerking and flailing in the water, she bent down and worked at his mouth again, finally managing to pry it open. She took out the piece of his tongue he had bitten off and fished around in the sides of his mouth for the orange pulp, digging around the base of his gums, sloshing the frothing salty water into his mouth to make sure it was all washed out.

In a few moments she was finished, and she stood and stepped back away from him. She bent and washed her hands in the water, picked up some sand and rubbed her fingers with it and then washed them off again. Then she stepped back out of the water and watched him roll in the tide, watched him finally go face down, and pitch heavily with the slam of each wave in the rolling surf. After a minute or two, she looked up the beach where she came from, and then she called the greyhound and started walking back, her long, tan legs sauntering, her thick black hair blowing in the Gulf breeze.

Some of the seagulls stayed with him, reluctant to leave, sliding along the margins of the water, back and forth, dipping down, squeaking in the wind. Finally they, too, moved on and in a little while they were all gone, the girl, the dog, and the gulls.

Chapter 16

They sat in the car with the windows rolled down, one of only two cars in the small, otherwise empty lot, a niche carved out of the vast Memorial Park that surrounded them like a rain forest. The lot was at the terminus of a narrow lane that circled around and down behind a chic condominium tower that overlooked the verdant margins of Buffalo Bayou. In the failing light of dusk an arched footbridge with a wrought-iron gate was still visible fifty yards away where it led from the parking lot across a creek to the walking paths that followed the northern bank of the bayou. On the other side of the bayou, obscured by the dense wall of the park’s semitropical vegetation, the emerald golf links of the River Oaks Country Club sloped up toward the city’s most prestigious neighborhood.

Panos Kalatis let a gentle blue tendril of cigar smoke leave his mouth and drift out the car window into the boggy evening air. He was sitting behind the steering wheel, his seat pushed back so that he could turn a little to the passenger beside him and at the same time, with only the slightest movement of his head, be able to see the other man in the back seat.

“No one had any inkling of this, I suppose,” Kalatis said, throwing a quizzical look at Burtell in the back seat “No intelligence about the possibility.” He had just pushed the buttons at his elbow and rolled down all the windows in the car.

“No, nothing,” Burtell said. “You normally don’t have intelligence about suicide,” he added dryly. He wanted to say something else, but he held his tongue. There would be time to say what he wanted to say.

“Then you do think he killed himself?” Kalatis asked, still looking over the back of the seat.

“Yeah, I think he killed himself,” Burtell said grudgingly. He was having a hard time swallowing his anger, his disgust at the two men in front of him.

Kalatis nodded, regarding Burtell with a meditative silence.

“You don’t think they could’ve gotten it wrong?” Faeber asked.

“I doubt it,” Burtell said tersely. Faeber was out of his element. The questions sounded stupid coming from him. He was merely mimicking Kalatis’s role, hoping that by going along with his own needless interrogatories he was ingratiating himself with the Greek.

“But if he was murdered, they’d want to keep that quiet, wouldn’t they?” Kalatis offered.

“You mean a cover-up? No way. Not a cop killing, not in CID.”

“I’ve seen it done before,” Kalatis said.

“Oh, Jesus, Panos. Come on.” Burtell shook his head, impatient with the idea.

Kalatis nodded calmly and leaked more smoke into the failing light. Just then two women in bright nylon jogging shorts and sport bras jogged into sight on the other side of the footbridge and stopped, their run completed, in the clearing at the end of the path. They paced restlessly as they caught their breath and then after a few moments they started across the footbridge to the parking lot.