Surface Tension by Christine Kling Page A

the pool of congealing blood. I couldn’t face catsup anymore.
    “Did you talk to her?”
    He shrugged. “A little. She told me there was some girl at her other job that she would like to introduce me to.”
    It was always that way with B.J. Women were drawn to him like flies to a bug zapper always flitting about him and trying to get closer to the source of the heat. Luckily, attraction to B.J. was never fatal. There were no broken hearts. In the years I’d known him there had
    been lots of short-term girlfriends who became long-term friends. I’d never known one of them to go away bitter, but they always went away. They seemed to understand that they would never play a larger part in B.J.’s life.
    I, too, was thankful for our friendship, but in a different way. Ever since I had shot up in height in the fifth grade, I’d felt awkward around incredibly handsome guys. This made it a challenge just talking to B.J. He worked for me as a handyman and mechanic, yet he had a couple of degrees in classical lit and Asian studies, so not only was he gorgeous, but he was damn smart. Being friends with B.J. put us on a different level; sometimes he made me feel like a complete idiot, but at least I didn’t need to play any boy/girl games with him.
    Apparently, even though Patty Krix had already teamed up with Neal, she couldn’t let irresistible B.J. be. She figured she’d fix him up with her friend. I was beginning to get an idea of who Patty was.
    “But I thought Pete said she used to work here.”
    “That was just part-time. She was also a dancer at that Top Ten Club.” B.J. smiled. “I’d have liked to see that.”
    I felt my jaw sag. “What? You’re kidding.”
    “No. She was really built.”
    I tapped my forehead with my fingertips and shook my head at him. “I mean, I had no idea she worked at the Top Ten Club. Don’t you think that’s kind of odd?”
    “I’ve never understood why a woman would want to dance around naked for a lot of strange men.” I could tell by the sparkle in his eyes that he was teasing me, pretending not to understand. But it still made me mad.
    “According to Pete,” I said, “the day she met Neal, it was almost as if she was looking for him. And she worked for the same outfit that used to own the boat she died on.”
    “What, you mean you think she might have been some kind of Mata Hari or something?”
    “I don’t know. Neal was the one who was more likely to see conspiracies everywhere, not me. You should have heard him carry on about that Crystal character he worked for. I’d mostly just tune it out, attribute it to too many years in the big-govemment machine. But now . . . I don’t know.”
    It hurt to think about it. I wanted to talk about something else, anything—the weather, the sea conditions, the job B.J. was working on this week. But Neal’s absence loomed between us, and I could feel myself dancing around the periphery of this big dark place. Like a scuba diver’s blue hole, the depths gaped invitingly, taunting me with the unknown, daring my curiosity. It was too dark down there to see what lurked in the depths, but I knew somehow that I wasn’t ready to go there yet.
    By the time we walked out to the parking lot together, it was nearly eight o’clock. The lot backed onto a street across from which rose the high, nearly windowless walls of the big new Broward County Jail. There were no lights working in the lot. B.J.’s perfectly restored jet- black El Camino was parked in the pale light that was cast by the restaurant’s bathroom windows. We stopped next to his truck, and he asked if I wanted him to follow me home.
    “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”
    We stood for several seconds facing each other, neither of us certain what to do next. I was intensely aware of the way his royal blue T-shirt was stretched taut across his pecs and then fell loosely around his narrow waist. He smelled faintly of coconut soap. Buddies though we were, I couldn’t not be