Chapters (11)
You don’t have the good sense to strike a match. “I don’t know,” Keegan said. “We should probably make it somewhere else. Somewhere with people around.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be a problem. There’s no way to change it. I can’t reach him between now and then.”
Keegan breathed into the phone. It felt like the chair he was sitting in was drifting under him somehow. He rubbed his dry eyes again. The ache in his head seemed to be gathering at the front of his brain. He’d give a year of his life for a cool breeze through a window and a sound night’s sleep.
“Please come,” Eve said. Her voice was pleading now. “I want to make things all right,” she said. “I want you to hold me and tell me you forgive me for getting you into all this. I want us to go back to the way things were before.”
IT WOULD TAKE a half-hour to get to the pier without traffic—and there wouldn’t be much traffic at this hour. He’d have to leave soon, but he was in no hurry to get out the door. He found a ballpoint and a sheet of his mother’s best powder-blue stationery and sat down at the kitchen table to write a note. If he disappeared tonight, it would have to tell the whole story for whoever found it. He scribbled with the pen to get the ink flowing and then wrote as it came to him. Six pages. Everything he could remember.
When he was done, he looked down at it. His handwriting had taken on the spindly look of an old man’s. The message was disjointed and jumbled, a tangle of errant thoughts and memories—but he was too tired to worry about the five Ws—it would have to do.
He left Nora asleep in the cottage with the doors and windows open. He filled a couple of pots with fresh water, and another with kitchen scraps, in case she was stuck in the cottage a few days and no one could hear her barking. Surely, if Keegan didn’t return, Moore or his minions would find her here in a day or two.
He got his keys from the entry table and looked around the place one last time. He patted the snoring dog on its head and slipped out the door without waking her. He crossed to the carport, leaving the front door open and the screen door unlatched.
By the time he crossed Sunset Boulevard, he had only ten minutes to make the midnight meeting. That fact didn’t make him pick up his pace.