San Diego Noir

Hooked, I was. That meeting by the cross was only the first. I had never known a woman anything like Sharon. Her appetite, as she’d said, was enormous, and it wasn’t surprising that she was too much for Terry to handle. As she’d said, he didn’t seem to mind. After a couple more meetings on top of the mountain, in the dark, she started inviting me to the house. Every now and then we saw Terry, usually as she led me by the hand toward a spare bedroom. He’d give us a knowing smile and a nod, and now and then a few friendly words. I wasn’t sure how a man with such a fiery animal of a wife could be so utterly nonpossessive, but I wasn’t about to question it. Sometimes we’d hear him moving around, and once I saw someone at the window as I was driving away, watching from behind a sheer curtain—someone who didn’t look like him in that instant’s glance, but who must have been.

Sharon exhausted me. When I was away from her I couldn’t think of anything but her. When I was with her I didn’t think at all. I just was. There was no intellectual engagement; we barely spoke, beyond the necessary words: Faster, slower, here, like that, there, don’t stop. I tried to keep our meetings outside working hours, but when she called, I came. Sometimes I left the company car someplace and drove my own over to the house, then made up a story about why I had been parked for so long.

I started to think I was in over my head when I got my third reprimand at work. My supervisor wasn’t buying my stories anymore, and I was on the verge of being fired. I shouldn’t have cared—private security was a game for kids, anyway, or ex-cops trying to stretch their pensions, and unlike most of my coworkers I wasn’t in it for the power that a badge and a steel-clad flashlight offered. I liked the solitude, the freedom to chart my own course through the night, to drive the quiet streets and watch the houses, the ocean down below, the stars wheeling overhead.

But I was only fooling myself if I thought I didn’t need the job. Sharon had her financial demands, and I had my own—an apartment two blocks from the water in Mission Beach, alimony from an early, stupid marriage, car payments, a TV that was too big for the apartment and had cost more than I could afford. People needed money to get by, and I was no exception.

In high school I had been a jock, an outfielder who could snag a ball that had wings on it, then sail it to first base or third or home without breaking a sweat. I had been so good that it took awhile to understand that I just wasn’t quite good enough to win any scholarships, and without that I couldn’t afford college. Since then, I’d been a guy that things happened to. My wife had proposed to me, and I’d gone along with it. She had decided the marriage was over, and I’d accepted that too. I fell into low-paying jobs, like the one at Gold Shield. I had pretty much given up thinking I would ever have anything like real money, or real love, or any real excitement.

Sharon was something else that happened to me, not anything I had set out to claim, to conquer. And as much as I hated to consider it, I knew I’d have to stop seeing her before I lost my paycheck. One more time, I told myself, and then one more time, and one more time after that.

When I was away from her I was resolute. Then when she called, I was putty.

On a mid-October night, with the first hint of autumn crispness in the air, she called again. “Mike,” she said, “I need you to come over. Right now.” Her voice was different, her words terse, clipped.

“On the way,” I answered. The night had been quiet so far, one alarm that had gone off without any evident cause, homeowners not there. I’d had it shut off and decided to make regular swings past the place throughout the evening, just in case.

But I could be gone for the hour or so it would take to see Sharon. Anyway, she didn’t sound amorous, she sounded upset.

When I got there, the house was dark. I buzzed myself in—I had long since been given the gate code—and parked in my usual spot beside the fountain. I got out of the car, listened to a breeze rustling through the leaves of a banana tree, then ducked back in for the flashlight. I started to wish I’d been assigned a gun. Something wasn’t right; the place was never this quiet.

I tapped on the big door with the end of the flashlight. “Sharon?” No answer, so I leaned on the handle, pushed the door open a few inches. They never set the alarm these days, not with me coming around so often. “Terry? Sharon?”

No sound came from inside. I clicked on the flashlight and went in. The house looked like it always did, but there was a sense of emptiness to it that was new. Usually I was with at least one of them, and the other was close by.