There was a tiny dagger in Patrick’s enjoyment of the mainland. It was all so perfect: the white sand, the water sweeping in in its never-ending caress of the shoreline. If it were a movie, he’d be content to watch it for hours. But he was part of it—feeling that perfect sun beam down on him, the briny air carrying cool relief on the back of the waves, the caw of seagulls breaking up the monotony of the roving tide.
And yet… was it really that much better than Malibu or Santa Monica? All a stone’s throw away from where he lived, where he worked, and yet he never took the time to savor it. It took a big production like this joint vacation to get him to take his head out of his ass and enjoy life.
And now he’d flown halfway across the world just to let himself relax and take in the same beach vibes he could’ve had every weekend, if he and Nancy weren’t both such workaholics. Never giving themselves a break or each other. It was a wonder their marriage had survived. Or maybe not such a wonder. They both were so used to neglecting themselves that they got away with neglecting each other; becoming roommates more than man and wife.
Well, he couldn’t castigate himself too much for it. They were here, weren’t they? He was going to enjoy himself and see to it that Nancy enjoyed herself too.
He felt Nancy’s thin but powerful arms wrap him up from behind, squeezing him to her as she rained kisses on the back of his neck. “Isn’t this view worth all the flying and the screaming babies and the stale peanuts?”
“And she hasn’t even put her bikini on yet,” Syd teased. “I know you give out some pretty lengthy sentences, Mr. DA, but I hope you can give out enough length for all dat.” She slapped Nancy’s ass with a vibrant loudness that Patrick knew she wouldn’t dare assault his own body with.
Not in public.
“Patrick can be a pretty hard guy,” Nancy teased back. “He’s big on punishment.”
“Good. Some of these bad girls need all the punishment they can get.”
“Too bad for them. Because sometimes the good girls have a tendency to hog the punishment all to themselves.”
Syd’s tongue twisted around her lower lip. “And we were just talking about amazing views.”
Nancy lowered her voice. “And the tide hasn’t come in yet either. It hasn’t even begun to get wet.”
Syd lowered her own voice. “Then how come it smells so nice, girl?”
“Maybe Patrick’s put on his suntan lotion.”
Nancy puckered her lips before responding. “Are you going to get some sun, Mr. McKenna? You’re looking a little pale for that spicy Latina y’all snagged…”
“I like him whether he’s pale or dark.” Patrick felt Nancy’s cheek snuggle into his back. “Some of my favorite parts of him never get tan…”
“His heart?” Syd cooed. “His brain?” Then she grew a wicked grin. “Nah, his trust fund.”
Patrick had to get them back on the rails, all of them. “I was just thinking it hardly seems fair to the great city I’m D.A. of to fly halfway across the world, only to appreciate the same sort of beaches we could’ve enjoyed back home.”
“Ha!” Sydney barked a laugh. “Look at that beach, bitch. A few island boys smoking herb, some fishermen, fuckin’ dudes in canoes… if we were at Muscle Beach, there would be ghetto-ass niggas, crackheads, motherfucking influencers…”
Patrick chuckled, remembering the old Yogi Berra witticism. “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
“Exactly. Eggs-zach-lee. If we’ve gotta go to Dinosaur Island to enjoy some waves without no fucking beatbox playing fucking gangsta rap…”
“A cop who hates black people,” Nancy quipped. “You’re this close to being a stereotype, Syd.”
“Who said anything about niggas? White boys are playing that shit too. Now you can’t get away from it even at a country club.”
“I’m more into rock,” Patrick said.
“Thank God. White boys need to be into white boy shit. I see a white man, I want Chardonnay, I want cheeses, I want David Lean Blu-Rays, not fucking Quentin Tarantino telling me ‘bout how Cleopatra Jones is some underrated masterpiece.”
“Stop fetishizing my husband,” Nancy told her.
“Shit, baby, you’re the one who made white cock sound so good. I know how fine you look. If that’s the nigga who wifed you up, he must have the pipe. You’re too damn smart not to get his house in the divorce if he weren’t keeping you as fuck-drunk as that pretty ass deserves to be...”
The ferry was close enough to lay its ramp down on the harbor. It looked more like a yacht than any of the floating garbage trucks that Patrick usually took across rivers. Sweeping lines, lovely little compartments like the Orient Express. It was a long ride out to the island, but there was nothing cramped or inconvenient about the transit. It was as relaxing as a day at the spa. There were even chaise lounges to sun themselves on, like they were taking a damn ocean liner out for a day trip.
Patrick slipped on the complimentary sunglasses and laid himself out on a lounge chair, tilting his baseball cap down until it totally blocked the sun. Then he felt Nancy’s hand wind its way into his, her fingers worming into the tight grip he knew she wanted.
“Life should always be like this,” Nancy purred. “No cares, no worries, just lots of sun and the deep blue sea.”
The yacht moved smoothly on the calm waters, like a drop of rain sliding down glass. With the speed it was doing, the wind flew by, actually chilling Patrick enough to raise goosebumps on his skin. There was no heat anymore. That bright sun was just light. Patrick unbuttoned his guayabera shirt and basked in it. He basked even more in Nancy’s touch when she started playing with his chest hair.
“Maybe you should get a tan,” Nancy said, her lilting voice suggesting her reasoning would shortly turn kinky. “Imagine us making a sex tape. Both of us nice and gold. You all muscle, me all me. It’d look just like it’d feel; like there was no way of knowing where you ended and I began.”
The chair on the other side of Patrick squawked with Syd’s weight on it. “No, don’t make a sex tape. It’d be too damn cruel to know that footage is out there and I don’t get to see it.”
“Who said you wouldn’t get to see it?” Nancy cooed.
“Don’t tease me.”
“Don’t tease my husband. It’s another two hours until that dick can see anything but the inside of his shorts…”
“Fuck him in the bathroom, girl. Shit, this really is the first vacation your workaholic ass has ever taken, innit?”
“It’ll be the only one I ever take if we get our reservations canceled for indecent exposure.”
Sydney grinned. “I sure wouldn’t call you decent, Nanc, but indecent doesn’t cover it either.”
“Do you two talk about sex this much at the station?” Patrick asked.
“When there hasn’t been a murder,” Nancy said. “That can be a bit distracting.”
Speaking of which… Syd was suddenly up and at the guardrail, bouncing up and down in excitement, which served wonderfully to show the springiness of her well-sized ass. It wasn’t fat, but it damn sure was there and her pants held onto it like a layer of paint.
“Guys! Guys! Fucking look! Dinosaurs!”
Patrick got up and went to the railing, finding that he was moving fast, moving like a kid who still weighted nothing at all.
As a boy, Patrick had been unsatisfied—as many children were—with the boundaries of human knowledge. He wanted to explore, to feel his mind grow as his body would. But it seemed like the only uncharted mysteries were the esoterism of mathematics and the seeming flim-flam of quantum physics. So his adolescent mind went to more uncouth obscurities. The Bermuda Triangle. UFOs. Bigfoot. And, yes, the Loch Ness Monster.
The plesiosaur—a Tuarangisaurus, the tour guide in the pilot house said—was real. Astonishingly, jaw-droppingly real. Every drawing or computer graphic he’d ever seen of the Loch Ness Monster… that most famous and fakest of all plesiosaurs… had tried to look real. It’d adhered slavishly to realism and plausibility, trying to give the CGI creature weight and smoothness and intelligence.
But nothing, no Hollywood effect, could possibly compete with seeing the thing and knowing that it simply was. A cross-section of the evolutionary tree. The four spade-shaped fins, the girthy bovine body, the sculpted symmetry of the long tail and long neck that ended in a torpedo-shaped head with a sharp-pointed maw to delight any twelve-year-old.
Because while all animals held a fascination to the one and only creature divided from the animal kingdom—most especially dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, sabertoothed tigers, all the refugees from long-ago extinction—there was a thanatopic zeal that could only be applied to the predators, the carnivores, the toothy ones. Those that could eat the so-smart humans who were so often the eaters.
It was a rare reversal of man’s dominance and much as Patrick would hate to be gnashed between those forty teeth the guide described a Tuarangisaurus as having… he did not back away from the railing.
The sea spray that crashed against him in stinging flecks put a real chill into his body. An unpleasant one that went for the bone. It also made him more keenly aware of the feminine warmth to his side and, without thinking about it, he reached over and put his arm about her waist. Moving her a few inches close and then delighting in that new nearness. Nice and close and his to touch.
Only she wasn’t. She was Sydney and despite her allowance for his touch, he suddenly wished he didn’t have an arm. Because with it, Patrick was both unable to touch this woman and unable to stop touching her… not without making it even more awkward than having his hand on her midriff already was.
Nancy sidled over to join them. Instead of grabbing hold of the railing like they were, she put her arms around Syd. The other woman took it as well as she’d taken Patrick’s hold on her. She even let Nancy play with her hair.
“I think we found someone just long enough for you, Syd.”
“I think so too,” Syd replied, and Patrick could not be more aware of his hand on her dark skin than he would be of his hand touching a red-hot stove.