San Diego Noir

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“Seems to me like you really don’t have much choice.”

She called me two days later, on an unseasonably gloomy autumn afternoon when the sun had ducked behind a gray haze and wouldn’t show itself again. When I recognized her voice, I almost called her Sharon, but I caught myself in time.

“Meet me,” she said. “At the cross.”

“When?”

“Now. Soon as you can.”

I was home in Mission Beach, so it took awhile to get up there. When I arrived, she was sitting on the bench, our bench. We were above much of the haze there, but it sat all around us like a thick, fuzzy blanket, blocking out the world below. Sounds of traffic on the 5 and 52 freeways wafted gently up. The parking area was deserted. I zipped up my leather jacket and approached her, half expecting her to pull a gun.

“You came.” She wore a considerably more expensive leather coat, and leather gloves with fur linings. Her jeans were expensive too. She was still beautiful, would always be beautiful, but she was more finished than she had been in the old days, before she was Mrs. Terrance Paulson. She’d even had her teeth fixed.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You’ve always known.”

She reached up, took my hand, pulled me onto the bench beside her, the outer edges of our thighs touching. I could smell her. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

“He’s going to kill me,” she began.

A chill ran though me, as if my clothes had suddenly dissolved and I was sitting naked on this fog-enshrouded mountain. “What makes you think that?”

“The way he looks at me. I can tell.” She gave a single dry chuckle. “I’ve seen it before, right?”

“I guess.”

“So I know.”

“What are you going to do about it? You can’t exactly go to the cops.”

“What am I going to do?” She put her hand on my leg, rested her head on my shoulder. Two fingernails began tracing up my thigh. “You mean, what are we going to do?”

“We?”

“Of course.”

“Hold on, Lacie.”

“What?” she said. She had shifted again, so her mouth was close to my ear, her voice a low purr. Her breasts pressed against my arm, and those fingers kept tracking north. “It’s always been you and me, Mike. Always. I just … I just had to bide my time. Until it was safe.”

“Safe? You call that safe? You’re talking about killing your husband.”

“Safer than letting him kill me. And don’t worry, if he goes, I inherit everything. And then there’s his life insurance—I’m the beneficiary on that too.”

“Some people just don’t learn,” I said.

Her lips grazed my cheek. Her fingers found home.

I was right. I was the only one of the three of us who hadn’t taken part in a murder, and yet I was lunging for that night-crawler, the one with the hook inside, the barbs that would jab into my cheek and draw me along. Some people just don’t learn.

When it came to lures and hooks, hers were better than Terry’s, and they always would be. But if Terry was murdered, the cops would take an especially close look, given Sharon’s fate. They might even reopen that case. And I didn’t know what Terry had done with the goods he had on me, when they might show up.

I pulled myself away. The effort was almost more than I could make. “Listen, Lacie, I … I have to go.”

“So soon? You just got here.” She twirled some hair around her right index finger, then lowered the finger slowly, letting it glide across the swell of her breast. “We’re all alone.”

“I know. But we’ll have plenty of time for that, right?”

Lacie smiled. “Yes. All the time we need.”

“Then there’s no rush.”

“No rush.”

“I’ll call you,” I said. I turned and made for my car as fast as I could, afraid I’d change my mind, go back to her, throw her down on that cold stone bench and take her right there.

Take her. Funny how a simple phrase can have multiple meanings.

I got in the car and turned the key, listening to the engine start, the radio come on.

During the next few days, I’d have to kill someone, or help do it.

Between now and then, I had a lot of thinking to do.

They wanted to turn me from a fake murderer into a real one. I was willing to go along with that. What I didn’t want was to be left out in the cold when it was over.

The time had finally come, I thought, to look out for myself. Time to chart my own course again, to pick my path through the unbroken darkness. I knew what Terry had to offer, and what Lacie did.

I looked back once, in the rearview, and saw Lacie sitting on our bench, arms wrapped around herself to fend off the cold, and I wondered which one I would choose.

KEY WITNESS

BY MARTHA C. LAWRENCE

La Jolla Cove

The beach was nearly empty. I checked my air hose and regulator—twice—before diving into the surf. The early-morning skies over La Jolla Cove were clear and blue but beneath the sparkling surface the tides were restless and the water murky. On the plus side, a tropical storm brewing up from Mexico had warmed the ocean by a degree or two. On the down side, the storm had churned up a lot of debris. Visibility near shore wasn’t great; fifteen feet at best.