Sacred

Maybe this place wasn’t so bad.

“Why’d Trevor put the pressure on all of a sudden?”

“The Weeble you mean?”

“And Cushing.” I waved my arm at the room behind me. “All this shit.”

She shrugged. “He’s getting frantic about Desiree.”

“Maybe.”

She turned and leaned back against the railing, the bay framing her, her face tilted to the sun. “Plus, you know how it is with rich guys.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Well, it’s like if you go out on a date with one—”

“Hang on, let me get a pen for this.”

She flicked her cigarette ash at me. “They’re always trying to impress you with how fast they can get the world to jump at a snap of their fingers, how every wish they think you have can be predicted and accommodated. So you go out and valet people open your car door, doormen open other doors, maître d’s pull out your chair, and the rich guy orders your meal for you. This is supposed to make you feel good, but it makes you feel enslaved instead, like you don’t have a mind of your own. Or,” she said, “a choice in the matter. Trevor probably wants us to feel that every one of his resources is at our disposal.”

“But you still don’t trust the room or the rental car.”

She shook her head. “He’s used to power. He’s probably not very good at trusting others to do what he’d do on his own if he were healthy. And once Jay went missing…”

“He wants to know our every move.”

“Exactly.”

I said, “I like the guy and all…”

“But too bad for him,” she agreed.

Mr. Cushing was standing by his Lexus out front when we stopped to look out the window from the mezzanine level. I’d gotten a look at the parking garage on the way in and saw that its exit came out the other side of the hotel and emptied onto a small street of boutiques. From where Cushing stood, he couldn’t see the exit or the small bridge that led off the island.

Our rental car was a light blue Dodge Stealth and had been rented from a place called Prestige Imports on Dale Mabry Boulevard. We found the car and drove it out of the lot and off Harbor Island.

Angie navigated from a map on her lap and we turned onto Kennedy Boulevard and then found Dale Mabry and drove north.

“Lotta pawnshops,” Angie said, looking out the window.

“And strip malls,” I said. “Half of them closed, half of them new.”

“Why don’t they just reopen the closed ones instead of building new ones?”

“It’s a mystery,” I said.

The Florida we’d seen until now had been the postcard Florida, it seemed—coral and mangroves and palm trees, glittering water and pelicans. But as we drove Dale Mabry for at least fifteen of the flattest miles I’ve ever driven, its eight lanes spread out wide and pointing infinitely through waves of rubbery heat at the overturned bowl of blue sky, I wondered if this wasn’t the real Florida.

Angie was right about the pawnshops and I was right about the strip malls. There was at least one of each per block. And then there were bars with cleverly subtle names like Hooters and Melons and Cheeks broken up by fast-food drive-through places and even drive-through liquor stores for the drunk on the go. Pocking the landscape within all this were several trailer parks and trailer park dealerships and more used car lots than I’d ever seen on the Lynnway Automile.

Angie tugged at her waist. “Jesus, these jeans are hot.”

“Take ’em off then.”

She reached over and turned on the air conditioning, hit the switch on the console between our seats and the power windows rolled up.

“How’s that?” she said.

“I still like my suggestion better.”

“You don’t like the Stealth?” Eddie, the rental agent, seemed confused. “Everyone likes the Stealth.”

“I’m sure they do,” Angie said. “But we’re looking for something a little less conspicuous.”

“Wow,” Eddie said as another rental agent came in off the lot through the sliding glass doors behind him. “Hey, Don, they don’t like the Stealth.”

Don screwed up his sunburned face and looked at us like we’d just beamed down from Jupiter. “Don’t like the Stealth? Everyone likes the Stealth.”

“So we’ve heard,” I said. “But it doesn’t quite fit our purposes.”

“Well what y’all looking for—an Edsel?” Don said.

Eddie loved that one. He slapped his hand on the counter and he and Don made noises I can only describe as hee-hawing.

“What we all are looking for,” Angie said, “is something like that green Celica you have in the parking lot.”

“The convertible?” Eddie said.

“Sure ’nuff,” Angie said.

We took the car as is, even though it needed a wash and gas. We told Don and Eddie we were in a rush, and they seemed even more confused by that than our desire to trade in the Stealth.

“A rush?” Don said, as he checked our driver’s license information against that on the original rental agreement Mr. Cushing had filled out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s when you have places to go in a hurry.”

Surprisingly, he didn’t ask me what “hurry” meant. He just shrugged and tossed me the keys.

We stopped at a restaurant called the Crab Shack to pore over the map and figure out a plan.

“This shrimp is unbelievable,” Angie said.

“So’s this crab,” I said. “Try some.”

“Trade.”

We did, and her shrimp was indeed succulent.

“And cheap,” Angie said.

The place was literally a shack of clapboard and old piling wood, the tables pocked and scarred, the food served on paper plates, our plastic pitcher of beer poured into waxed paper cups. But the food, better than most seafood I’d ever had in Boston, cost about a fourth of what I was used to paying.

We sat on the back patio, in the shade, overlooking a swamp of sea grass and beige water that ended about fifty yards away at the back of, yep, a strip mall. A white bird with legs as long as Angie’s and a neck to match landed on the patio railing and looked down at our food.

“Jesus,” Angie said. “What the hell is that?”

“That’s an egret,” I said. “It’s harmless.”

“How do you know what it is?”