“Any luck?” she said.
Wally opened his mouth to rat Thorn out, but Pauly cut a stony look his way and he halted.
“We’re just getting started,” Thorn said.
“There’s plenty of bait around,” said Flynn. “Looks promising.”
“So there’s no trouble, Pauly?”
Pauly looked at her and grunted. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
“I’ll get the grill ready,” she said. “We’ll have a cookout.”
Wally was staring at each of them in turn, trying to decipher the meaning of this moment. Not sure what he was missing. Thorn was just as mystified. Pauly was giving him a pass. A simple word from him and Thorn was done.
“You need me to stick around, make sure everything goes smoothly?”
“Got it covered,” Pauly said.
As Leslie moved her hand to the throttle, out in the western sky, breaking through the thickening clouds, a single-engine Cessna headed toward them, swooping low, thundering only a few hundred feet overhead, then continuing a mile or so out over the Atlantic and circling back for another pass over the island before it headed back in the direction it had come.
Leslie watched it disappear, then took another look at the four of them and kicked the skiff up on plane and roared off.
In the next twenty minutes, as the tide was coming in, Thorn nabbed a dozen glassy minnows and two stray ballyhoo. He handed out the bait and they fished until twilight.
Slow at first, until they found a rocky patch with a hungry school of gray snappers and some white grunts and a good-size spotted sea trout. Before they were done, even Wally caught a lane snapper. A dozen fish in all.
Paddling back in the gathering darkness, Thorn drew alongside Pauly.
Around them, in the thickening dusk, the bay glowed bluish silver as if the water were hoarding the last seconds of daylight within its depths.
“So this was a test,” Thorn said. “See if I’d try to make a run for it.”
“She wants to trust you,” Pauly said. “She thinks you’re hot shit.”
“Why’d you give me a pass?”
“We need six people to make this work. Don’t want it to fall apart.”
Pauly drew his paddle out of the water, looking Thorn in the eyes as they coasted side by side.
“Plus I’m sick of those turkey subs.”
They stroked in unison for a while.
“Good thing we caught fish then,” Thorn said.
Not looking over, Pauly said, “Must be your lucky day.”
TWENTY-FIVE
SOMETHING WAS MISSING WITH THE sex. Like that Chinese-food thing, gulping down a five-course meal, ten minutes later he was famished. His body yearning for nourishment.
Or maybe Nicole had just revved up Sheffield’s appetite so high, now he was hungry all the time. He couldn’t tell. And sure as hell didn’t want to believe anything was wrong. Didn’t want to analyze and overthink the whole thing and destroy it.
Probably it was just his own free-floating doubt, not sure what a smart, attractive lady such as her found so appealing about a man nearly twice her age, a man who had just huffed toward the finish line of yet another romp.
Lolling side by side in the mangled sheets, they stared up at the ceiling.
It was Saturday, early afternoon. The beach in full weekend roar. Fifty yards away on the wide stretch of white sand, competing music blared. Rap, rock, salsa. Laughter, the rolling crash of surf. Out his window he could see some idiot throwing bread up into a screaming cyclone of gulls.
“You need to paint something up there.” Nicole pointed at the white plaster. “Clouds or stars or the moon.”
“On the ceiling?”
“Or maybe a mirror.”
“You find my ceiling boring?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But it wouldn’t hurt to jazz it up.”
“I’m pretty jazzed up as it is. I think I just topped my personal best.”
“You keep records on your sexual exploits?”
“Don’t you?”
“Oh, great. Are we about to have the sexual-history conversation? Compare our lifetime totals?”
“You mean I’m not your first?”
“What matters, Frank, is being the last.”
He liked that. Something to shoot for. The one that didn’t get away.
More staring at the ceiling.
“A mirror would be nice,” he said. “I could see all your angles at once.”
“I like to think I’ve got more angles than that.”
“Oh, really? Angles I haven’t seen?”
“Angles nobody’s seen.”
“You going to show me? Or they off-limits?”
“This is why I don’t like postcoital conversations.”
“All our conversations are postcoital.”