Chapter 10: The Living

I ran after him as fast as a pregnant woman can run on a wet dock.

Clancy dropped his fritters and came after me.

"Get your phone out," I told him. "Film everything."

"Which end?"

"The end with the dead woman on it."

He fumbled his phone up and veered off toward the fuel dock for a clear angle.

I got mine out as I ran.

My thumb found the red button.

Lawton reached the finger pier first.

People were already turning to look.

A tall man in a hurry, a crowd of tourists eating lunch on the dock, a couple of charter captains hosing down their decks.

The man on the pier stepped back.

The woman on the deck stopped laughing.

She lowered her glass.

For one second she just looked at him.

Then she took off her sunglasses, slowly, and smiled.

"Well," Mariel said. "Look who learned to read a bank statement."

Her voice carried across the water.

Lawton stopped at the edge of the pier.

His hands hung at his sides.

"You're alive."

"Clearly."

"I looked for you for nine hours. I was in the water. The coast guard had to pull me out."

"I remember." She tilted her head. "You looked very handsome doing it. I watched from the dinghy for a while."

A woman at the lunch tables put her hand over her mouth.

One of the charter captains turned his hose off.

I came up beside Lawton with the phone held steady at my chest.

Mariel's bright blue eyes slid to me.

Down to my stomach.

Back up to the phone.

"And you must be the bartender."

"I must be," I said.

"How's the five hundred a month treating you, sweetheart? I hear you've been very brave about it."

"Better than the drowning's treating you," I said. "You've got a sunburn on your nose."

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