An Absence of Light

“If they were cops, I guess I don’t understand what they were doing looking for Synar,” he said. The Probst case was closed down over a year ago. What was happening here?

“What if there is a real Colleen Synar?”

“Naw,” Don said. Faeber’s people were supposed to have taken care of that. Now he wondered if they had. That greasy Greek was going to have to hear about this.

Don scratched the hair on his stomach with a thumb. She looked at him. Here he was, his wavy hair kind of wild from being in bed-she guessed he had just run his fingers through it-and even slumped as he was, unconcerned about how he looked, she could see the rows of muscles in his stomach, the lumpy divisions of the different muscles in his arms and shoulders, swinging his feet like a kid. It made her wet just sitting by him.

“Well,” he said, “don’t get too worked up about it If they come back-and I don’t think they will-but if they do, just stick with your story. There’s nothing they can do about that, no way you can get in trouble, as long as you don’t go making up any more than you’ve already told them. Hell, you can’t be expected to know any more than that. Just stick to your story.”

That was kind of smoothing it over, but there was no need in getting her worked up about all the what-if’s in this situation.

Heath didn’t know anything about the arrangements with the police department or anything about that whole operation, or that it even existed. All he had told her back then was that if anybody ever called looking for a Colleen Synar that she was supposed to tell them exactly what she apparently told them. On the other hand, it was decided that they would use his real name. The Greek told him they had it one hundred percent covered but, if for some unforeseen eventuality they had to have a real person to prove there was flesh and blood behind the information, then they wanted him to cover. He was good at that and could handle it. Of course, he got a bonus for allowing them to use his name for this “remote risk.” A one-time chunk. Now it looked like that unforeseen eventuality had happened. He was going to have to think about this real hard. It was time to talk to that goddamn Greek. If he didn’t know what was going on here, he’d better get his greasy ass in gear and find out. If he did know what was going on, then old Don C. wanted to know why he hadn’t been warned.

“I’m not responsible for her not being a real person,” Heath said.

“No, hell no,” Don sympathized. “Just tell them to piss off.” He dropped what was left of the shitty little cigarette between his bare feet into the water.

“Yeah, I don’t even have to talk to them.”

“Shit, no.”

She was quiet for a while, and the water sloshed lazily against the pilings underneath them.

“I tell you what,” she said, dropping her own cigarette into the water now, “for a long time I just took the money and didn’t think about it. I mean, it’s not like it’s drugs we’re dealing with here. I wasn’t going to get busted. And the money’s been so damn good, you know, unbelievable. But, I don’t know, this now…”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

He didn’t like the sound of this too much. They had worked together a little over two years and everything had been fine. He had never allowed her to learn any more about him than his obviously bogus contact name. She didn’t know where he lived or even what he drove. She had always been able to get everything he had requested. She was smart enough to follow the security procedures he had taught her and even smart enough to expand her own little network-the pyramid idea of acquisitions was something she snapped to pretty quick-but she wasn’t that little bit smarter that she needed to be to give him any trouble, to be too curious. Or maybe it was just that she was too passive. She had told him one time that her former husband, the guy she had run away from just before he had met her, had knocked her around a lot, sent her to the hospital three times. Don guessed the guy must have beat all the spunk out of her. She was pretty easy to spook.

“Looking back,” she said, “if I had it to do over and you asked me to cover for you on this Synar thing, I wouldn’t do it.”

Sometimes she sounded like a high school kid, he thought.

“I don’t guess I can blame you,” he said.

“Really?”

She seemed surprised by that, that he would understand. He was looking down at the water, at his white feet in the half light, the water moving under them, back and forth, back and forth around the pilings. He liked the smell of piers, of the way they smelled after years and years of standing in salt water, and people plopping fish up on them and cutting bait on them and spilling beer on them and the sun baking it all and drying it up and always the salt water. You didn’t smell that kind of smell, that exact smell, anywhere else in the world except on piers. He had noticed that all the piers in all the countries he had been in smelled the same.

“I can’t help but wonder what they do with it,” she said.

“What?”