Kelly inched closer to me, and I took my finger and traced a line that ran along her cheeks and onto her neck. Her hair fell onto my shoulder. “What do you want to do today?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

We started cracking up then.

I hadn’t shaved in a couple days, and she took the back of her hand. Ran it down the coarse area along my jaw. “You have a good face,” she said. “And there haven’t been a lot of good faces in my life.”

She closed her eyes and I did the same. Resting there. Thinking nothing.

We got up a bit after that, and Kelly made eggs. I got out the fishing gear, and the two of us joked around, but kept steering away from topics we couldn’t handle right now.

After breakfast, we sat out on the smaller deck. The afternoon water was calmer than usual, and a swallow-tailed kite dive-bombed the blue-green water, but pulled up right before he hit the surface. Then he flew back to a tiny island of grass nearby. Stared at us from a thick tree twig. And then repeated the same action all over again.

Kelly donned a Braves tee, tied tight in a knot around her slender waist.

We had drifted into the low water near a shoreline, and a musty sulfide odor from the blue-green algae filled the air. I motored farther out into the deep water.

“I’m gonna go inside and read a book,” she said.

“Okay.”

After an hour I lowered the bill on my fishing hat and closed my eyes.

When I awoke, hours had passed and I ambled over to the cabin.

Kelly had fallen asleep, a copy of Brian Panowich’s Like Lions dog-eared on her lap, about two hundred pages in.

I moved up to the main captain’s chair on the bow, where I’d been fishing, and pulled out my cell. A handful of texts came in, but I didn’t look at them.

Something had been stirring within me since Kelly’s question about taking the law into my own hands the night before.

Remy answered on the fourth ring.

“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“The chief didn’t tell you?” I asked. “About my email?”

“Sure he did,” she said. “But that didn’t keep me from stopping by your house. I wanted to see if you were okay.”

“I just needed a couple days.”

“Of course,” Remy said.

“How’s Gattling?” I asked.

“Not good,” she said.

I saw this coming the other night. The way he’d been rocking as if in a trance at the back of the ambulance.

“I went by Marvin’s, and he said you went fishing.”

“I’m sitting on a boat right now,” I said. “Staring at the water.”

“Well, don’t worry about the case.”

As she said this, it dawned on me that I hadn’t considered the case at all in the last two days. Hadn’t thought once about the short man or the old man.