Chapter 31

ANTHONY

IT WAS STILL daylight but inside Poor People’s Pub it was perennially twilight. Anthony called Joy six times as they walked over; she didn’t answer even once. His heart was hammering, and he was sweating through his gray T-shirt. He felt the same smoldering fear and regret he’d felt when Huxley Wilder had called and said those five words: Puckett. We have a problem.

“What do you have for tequila?” Shelly asked the bartender, whom Anthony recognized as Joy’s friend Peter. Peter rattled off a list of names, most of which were unfamiliar to Anthony, who was not by nature or habit a tequila drinker. It had always seemed so unnecessarily complicated, the business with the lime and the salt: one more thing to figure out in an already abstruse world. “Ohmygod, you have Herradura?” She grasped Anthony’s arm. “Have you ever tried Herradura?”

Anthony had not, and said so.

“You. Will. Fucking. Love it. I promise.” To Peter she said, “Two,” and also held up two fingers; Anthony supposed this was in case the word two was somehow unclear.

“Ah,” Shelly said when the bartender put the shots in front of them. “God, I love the smell of a tequila shot, don’t you, Anthony?”

Anthony hadn’t done any kind of shot since the night before his wedding, when his groomsmen had taken him to Three Needs on Pearl Street in Burlington and gotten him inauspiciously loaded on Jack Daniel’s. “Sure,” he said politely. “Tequila. Love it.”

The bartender brought over a small plate with two slices of lime, a saltshaker, and two cocktail napkins; Shelly waved him away. “We don’t need the chasers,” she said. “Not with Herradura.” She lifted one of the shot glasses and handed the other to Anthony; she tipped hers into her mouth and indicated with one hand that Anthony should do the same. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly: a gesture of ecstasy. “God, that’s good,” breathed Shelly. “It’s bold, I mean, you can taste it, but it’s so smooth. Doesn’t leave you cringing.” She flagged down the bartender. “Two more.”

“I’m all set,” said Anthony, who hadn’t done his first shot. Shelly shrugged and made no corrections in the order. She seemed entirely unaffected by the tequila. She was so very thin, he didn’t understand how this was possible.

When the next round arrived, Shelly dispatched her second shot as efficiently as she had her first and smacked her lips together. “So,” she said. “This place. Block Island. It’s so funny. What’s it like, for real?” She pushed his shots closer to him.

Anthony took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s . . . amazing,” he said at last. “It’s really an amazing place.” Amazing was such a vague and banal word, and it didn’t begin to describe the blue-green water, the juxtaposition of the farmland with the ocean, the beach grasses blowing on the way to Scotch Beach. Mohegan Bluffs at sunrise. North Lighthouse at sunset. “Amazing,” he said for the third time. His father would have been ashamed of him. Specificity over vagueness was one of Leonard Puckett’s tenets. You had to be specific, when you were writing two thrillers a year. Your readers wouldn’t stick around otherwise. “I mean,” he finished lamely, “it’s a really nice place to take a break. Let’s put it that way.”