A Visible Darkness by Jonathon King Page B

crossed her mind. You don’t do much sail trimming on the streets of Philly. Then Billy had decided to unfurl his spinnaker in a downwind run and I’d jumped to show I wasn’t useless. The damn sail was huge and far too unwieldy and strange in my hands. When I’d tangled the lines and tripped on a stanchion, the women had smartly taken control. Richards had whipped the lines out of my hands before I went overboard. Then she and Billy’s friend expertly set the whisker poles and stood framed in the billowing color and smiled and hooted at the boat’s speed. Billy winked at me as I settled back in the cockpit and watched with a tainted respect.
    I’d been through a short marriage with a cop in Philadelphia. She, like Richards, had been strong and tough-minded, smart and intuitive. Those were things I liked, things I understood. But both were also emotional, able to absorb a victims pain, to show an instant empathy. The dual abilities were unsettling.
    My ex-wife had also lived on an adrenaline push, one I didn’t want to compete for. I still didn’t think I knew Richards well enough to know if that was another shared quality. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
    “Oh come on, Max. Don’t tell me you got intimidated by two women who could handle a spinnaker in an eight-knot breeze better that you two boys?” she said, breaking my too-long silence.
    “Can’t intimidate a man who knows his limitations,” I said. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been in sooner. So introduce me to a new recipe for mangrove snapper.”
    My apology must have been accepted.
    “How about Banyans at two?” she finally said. “Bring your cash, Freeman, it’s on you.”
    I started back south on A1A, rolled down the windows along a stretch of beachfront where oceanside condos had somehow been banned. From the road the view of the surf and the watery horizon were unobstructed. On the sidewalk I watched a young woman in a bikini walking south, her hips switching like a metronome. Two buzzcut boys walking a pit bull said something to her and she nonchalantly flipped them the finger. I slowed for a middle-aged man crossing from the hotel side, sliding on roller blades, shirtless and tanned with a multicolored parrot perched on one shoulder. I passed a throbbing, low-ride Honda Accord that broadsided me with a bass line from a backseat full of speakers. Eight hours ago I was watching a wild bird hunting gar fish on a thousand-year-old river. Welcome to Florida.
    I got off the ocean drive and went back west half a mile, over the Intracoastal bridge, and found a parking spot across the street from Banyan’s. Inside the restaurant was an open courtyard dominated by the huge trunk of a live banyan tree that measured some eight feet across and spread its monstrous canopy up and over the surrounding roofs. Its leaves were so dense that even at midday it left a cool and dusky patio below.
    When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw Richards sitting at a table near one corner, a cop’s territory where you could catalog everybody who walked in. She was dressed in a cream-colored suit, white silk blouse underneath. She sat at an angle to the table so she could cross her legs. Even sitting you could see her height in the long bones from knee to ankle and elbow to wrist. Her blonde hair was pulled back. Her eyes, I already knew, would look green today. I am not a smiling man, but approaching the table I could feel it coming into my face.
    “Hi. Nice table.”
    “The advantage of two o’clock lunches,” she said without missing a beat. I took her hand and bent to kiss her lightly in greeting and stole a deep draught of her perfume.
    “Freeman, you are god-awful thin,” she said when I stepped back.
    “Thank you,” I said, pulling out a chair to the side of hers so I too might have a view.
    “What, the fish on the river haven’t been cooperative?”
    “You mean they don’t like to be caught and eaten? Or I’m a piss- poor