I squeezed her waist and nodded.
The late moon climbed and whitened. A jackpot on The Lucky Duck was announced by a flat and trivial tinkling.
A while later Maggie turned her face up toward me, kissed me underneath my jaw. "Why do I like you, Pete?" she said. "I don't know anything about you."
I ran my fingers up and down her amazing spine. "Maybe that's exactly why," I said. Then I added, "But hey, you know some things. You know I'm the worst detective in the world. You know I hate to get mixed up in other people's problems."
"That's what you say, but here you are. I can't figure it out."
"I can't either."
Stars wheeled. A big fish or a manta ray trailed green-gold streamers just beneath the surface.
Time breathed in and out. Maggie gently touched the dry cuts on my hands. I found this wildly intimate and maybe just a little bit perverse.
"Tell me about your life before," she said.
"Before?"
"Before Key West."
I sighed. I stalled. I didn't want to talk about it. Not that I was being strong and silent. Just the opposite. I was afraid that if I started talking I wouldn't stop, that I'd be sucked into a whirlpool of whining and regretting, launched upon a litany of rancid old frustrations and ill-digested disappointments. "What's to tell?" I dodged. "It was a pretty standard life."
"Always lived alone?" she prompted.
I felt the rasping birth of a laugh I knew would come out bitter. It would have been rudely out of place in the empty and accepting night, and I tried my best to choke it back. "Basically," I said. "Especially for the six years I was married."
"That bad?"
"Not all of it, no," I said. "For a while it was pretty nice, in fact. But it got kind of uncomfortable once my wife made up her mind I was a failure."
Maggie straightened up a bit. I felt sympathy and indignation in her posture. "Why'd she think that?"
"Because I was."
"I don't believe you."
I looked down at the water. I wiped mist off the gunwale. Then I said, "You know what? I didn't believe it either. I thought I was a success that hadn't happened yet. I really believed that. Slow learner. Late bloomer. But I'd get there. I knew I would. I believed it for years. I really thought I'd do it."
Maggie's eyes were wide, her face a pattern of gleam and shadow in the moonlight. She said, "Do what?"
Right. I hadn't explained, had I? But Maggie's simple question made me shy. A nervous laugh escaped me. To my great surprise, the laugh did not sound bitter. Baleful and nostalgic, maybe, but almost peaceful, almost resigned. Was it possible that old poisons were dissipating, old defeats losing their sting? How did that happen? Was it the velvet quiet of the ocean, or the sweeping breeze that time trailed like a gown? Or was it Maggie? Was it possible that this woman was not just lithe and supple but could be really good for me? "You know," I said, "it's so typical, such a cliché, I feel silly telling you."
"Nothing wrong with feeling silly."
For an instant I thought this was just a quip, then I realized it was far more than that. It was a credo, a statement of a kind of wiggy and unjudging faith. Nothing wrong with feeling silly. A giddy sense of freedom made my hairline crawl. Relief flowed in the form of a flushed heat that came streaming past my collar. I belched out a pure ecstatic childish laugh and decided, what the hell, I'd go on with my silly tale.
Except I didn't get to.
By the time I was ready to speak again, a new sound had started scratching at the quiet. It was a high nattering buzz, faint and distant but becoming less so.
Maggie and I stiffened like hunting dogs. Scanning the ocean, we saw nothing but wreaths of vapor doing a weird slow boil on the surface, rising up to meet faint damp curtains that weren't quite clouds. But small craft were approaching; there was no doubt of it. We felt more than heard them as they thumped and whined, tugging at and wrinkling the carpet of the sea.
A minute passed, two minutes, then finally we saw the rooster tails, tinselly silver in the moonlight, cresting and dissolving like the spray from city fountains. There was a pair of them, as I thought there'd been the night before. They were approaching from the east—from the direction of Key Largo, Miami, the Bahamas, a million other places. Maggie reached down and grabbed the binoculars she'd borrowed.
I watched The Lucky Duck to see if there would be some signal, a flash of warning or of welcome. But tonight there was no beacon, and the Jet Skis kept approaching. Two hundred yards or so from the mother ship, they slowed to idle speed. The rooster tails subsided; the craft rocked with the last of their momentum. The drivers, as far as I could tell, were wearing short-sleeved and short- legged wet suits; the big plastic zippers glinted in the moonlight. Their goggles did too, and made them look unearthly.