They drove back in silence and when they reached the Arizona Inn Sunderson bolted from the vehicle without a word. Safely in his room he uncapped a cheap travel pint of Four Roses knowing it would have taken a gallon to purge the day. There was an envelope with a fax on the coffee table. The voice mail light on his phone was on and he listened grimly to his mother. “Son, Berenice said the restaurant at your hotel is wonderful. We want to come in for dinner.” He called back from his cell phone in case she had caller ID that would read Arizona Inn.
“Mom, I’m on my way to Willcox.”
“The hotel said you hadn’t checked out.”
“I just did.”
“How sad. I had high hopes for a nice dinner.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days.” He called the hotel operator and asked that all calls be blocked, then read the fax from Mona. “This guy’s a wiz. He got on to me and said, ‘You’ll be in real trouble if you keep tracking me.’ Love, your darling Mona who aches for her stepdaddy. P.S. the quote you wanted from Crichton is from the Washington Post not the NY Times.” All our progress of luxury and knowledge… we have not been lifted by as much as an inch above the level of the darkest ages… The last hundred years have wrought no change in the passions, the cruelties, and the barbarous impulses of mankind. There is no change from the savagery of the Middle Ages. We enter a new century equipped with every wonderful device of science and art but the pirate, the savage, and the tyrant still survives.
Sunderson took off his clothes and got under the sheets after mixing a hefty second drink. Life at present called for a professional-size nap but his mind was a whirling jangle despite the alcohol which had failed its soporific mission. It was 5:00 p.m. back in Marquette thus his first full workday of retirement was finished, not that a detective was ever truly off duty. Leisure was overrated he thought in a second euphemism. His mind wandered among its flotsam and jetsam looking for a pleasant factoid that might ease him into unconsciousness. In the 1600s thousands of Tuscan girls starved themselves in order to get closer to Jesus according to a forensic pathologist. No, this was too jarring. Because of his brook trout fishing he had known for two years that the little leopard frogs were disappearing from the landscape before Diane had discovered the fact in an eco magazine. She was angry he hadn’t told her. So what. He had prayed at age eight that his little brother Robert would grow a new lower leg but when he told his dad his dad had said, “That won’t happen.” Now, fifty-five years later there was a suggestion of tears. Lucy was a Diane from hell. There was a split-second image of dropping Bushrod down a manhole and sliding back the heavy cover. Down there with the shit he is. This didn’t work because violence causes a surge of blood. Marion said that there were no truths only stories and how would my story end in the desuetude of retirement? Marion said that the computer allows people to waste endless hours on the novelty of their weaker interests. Just how is flax grown and why are there so many Russian prostitutes in Madrid? Diane’s new husband is ill and is there a chance for us to hitch up again? Doubtful. He was still the same man she left, a man whose horizons were far lower than her own. Early on he busted a college girl for five lids of pot and it ruined her life. That’s what her mother wrote him. Can the brain be swollen with loneliness? Of course. The Evangelicals largely favor enhanced torture. The years have swallowed themselves and disappeared. Through the slit of Slotkin’s book Mona was crossways on the bed, her bare butt aimed at him, a poignantly illegal butt if you weren’t in Mississippi or Costa Rica. His dick rose but his body relaxed. He slept.
It was more dark than twilight with a bird fooling at the window and sharp raps at the door. “It’s me, Lucy,” the door voice said. He turned over looking for a clue to where he might be. The rapping continued and he yelled, “Yes.” He grabbed the wrong one of the two robes hanging from a bathrobe hook, a woman’s robe that didn’t quite close off his middle. Opening the door he glanced immediately away from Lucy’s face which was swollen with weeping as if her entire family had been wiped out in a house fire only minutes ago. In contrast she was dressed sexily in a shortish blue skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. His sleep-slowed brain computed seduction. She threw herself facedown on his bed muffling her voice.
“You had your phone turned off when I needed you.”
“It was a tough day out on the range with your dad. I needed a nap.” She looked attractive indeed but he couldn’t quite make the wires of sex and tears connect.
“I have to leave early in the morning. I had this feeling you wanted me. Sadly I also had this intuition that I reminded you of your ex-wife. So it’s not me you want, is it?”
“What am I supposed to say?” He was buying time what with being half tumescent.
