CHAPTER 42
We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and headed north for an hour, listening to music and chatting aimlessly about nothing. When we arrived at Point Reyes National Seashore, Nina wound her way down to Limantour Beach and parked on the sandy asphalt. There were a half dozen cars in the lot—including a black Pontiac Firebird with an eagle painted on the hood, a cherry-red Mustang putting the Firebird to shame, a beat-up and dented Pinto, an even sadder, burnt-orange Gremlin, a two-tone VW bus with bumper stickers declaring the end of war, poverty, and clothing, and a Thunderbird with a peeling vinyl roof—easily one of the least practical features in automotive styling. Nina’s oxidizing, forest-green Datsun with cracking, butterscotch vinyl seats melded into the eclectic gathering.
There was a soft breeze coming from Drakes Bay and the sun had finally emerged in all its glory, doing its best to make up for more than two weeks of miserable rain. I grabbed the picnic basket. Nina took my hand and tucked the quilt under her other arm. She led us down from the parking lot into the gently rolling dunes. The sand was soft and warm as we made our way between sprawling patches of ice plant with succulent leaves and stiff clumps of beachgrass with erect stems whispering in the wind. The murmur of the surf breaking below us on the beach matched Nina’s sighs of pleasure as we stopped to kiss like amorous teenagers and then continued to walk wordlessly in search of privacy.
After glissading down a steep, sandy slope, Nina spread the blanket in a sheltered valley between two dunes and shed her clothes. I followed her lead. Her desire to make love in the open air, with the sun and breeze washing over us felt completely natural, not the least bit deviant. Public nudity is illegal, but we weren’t exhibitionists. We weren’t trying to be seen. In fact, quite the opposite, although in the next minutes it didn’t much matter as the world collapsed into the space of a threadbare picnic quilt. For all the waiting we’d endured, the sex was sumptuously slow. At least for a while, a long while.
What the Pointer Sisters sung about a woman wanting “a man with a slow hand” was so much more subtly and sensually evoked by Gustav Mahler’s music. He fell in love with a woman that friends judged to be too beautiful for him, while his family considered her to be dangerously charming and flirtatious. Mahler was a difficult husband in many ways but he was passionate about his wife. Perhaps the Mahlers’ lovemaking was the inspiration for his compositional technique in which extended, hushed—almost inhibited—musical foreplay teased the listener before erupting into an ecstatic climax.
~||~
After a languorous nap with Nina’s head on my chest, we were both deeply satisfied and famished. She tugged on the Giants sweatshirt which mostly covered her, and I pulled on my pants. The sun on my shoulders melted away the tension of a morning spent with a pitiable pervert and a crabby cop. As Nina unpacked the picnic basket, I wondered whether my judgment of Lane Linford was fair. How many of us can claim to be normal? For that matter, why is normality such a good thing? After all, Nina was the only woman with whom I’d made love in the past year. So, I was abnormal given that the annual number of sexual partners for a man in San Francisco was undoubtedly more than one—especially if you included other men and species in the total. But somewhere in all of this, I couldn’t get past fidelity being good, whether or not it was normal.
My ponderings were unsophisticated, but the lunch was exquisite. Nina had packed a crusty baguette (which her father insisted was a “barra”—the Spanish not wanting to cede bakery ground to the French), burstingly ripe tomatoes, plump, purplish olives, a firm and supple wedge of Manchego cheese, paper-thin slices of salty serrano ham, and a bottle of “young Tempranillo” which provided a juicy and tart coupling with the food. Nina propped herself on one elbow, the sweatshirt migrating upward to reveal a smooth, coppery, and very captivating, buttock.
“Damnit Riley,” she said, tugging down the end of her minimal clothing, “you’re incorrigible.”
“Isn’t it a good thing that I can’t keep my eyes off you?”
“Well, yes. I suppose,” she smiled with alluring reluctance. “But I was hoping to have a conversation, as well as being ogled.”
“It’ll be my pleasure. What’s the topic?” I asked, not sure where this was heading but guessing it wasn’t going to be as pleasant as the last hour of flesh and food.
“Nothing in particular, but I do have a question.” I knew women well enough to understand that this meant: Something very specific about which she was about to demand an answer.
“Yes?”
“I haven’t seen Tim around the apartment complex since the beginning of the week. He’s usually somewhere nearby, offering to carry groceries, hold an umbrella, or whatever.” I sat with my knees hugged to my chest and looked toward the ocean, squinting into the sun. There was a long pause. Nina took a deep breath.
“I won’t ask if you did anything to him,” she said. I nodded slowly to convey my appreciation of not being made to lie to my lover. “But I will ask whether you know if he’s alive or badly hurt.”
“The last time I saw Tim, he was most certainly alive. He was in some discomfort but nothing that would require medical assistance.” That much was true. Maybe he decided to go to the ER, but a ruptured eardrum would’ve put him somewhere down the triage list along with bleeding noses and dislocated fingers. “I suspect he decided to move on to somewhere less dangerous.” Again, true.
“You know, he wasn’t a bad person,” she said. “He was confused, or maybe ‘disturbed’ is a better word.”
“I was a cop long enough to learn to appreciate that being bad is a relative term. Manslaughter is bad; first-degree murder is worse. The man who planned to kill Petey was plain evil. By that standard, Tim wasn’t a terrible person.”
“He just wasn’t normal. And we don’t know what to do with people like him.” Her voice had become wistful, as soft as the breeze. I didn’t want to break the spell of our afternoon, but I wanted her to understand me. Or maybe I wanted to understand myself.
“Being normal is a tough standard. Tommy isn’t normal. I’m okay with abnormality. That wasn’t the issue with Tim,” I said.
“What was it, then?”
“He couldn’t resist his urges. Whether or not he was capable of doing so isn’t for me to say, but I know he was capable of doing harm to others. To you.” I reached over and ran my fingers through Nina’s silky black hair. “There’s lots I don’t know, Nina. But I know a funnel-web spider can kill a person. And I know if there was one on this quilt coming toward you, I’d crush it.”
“And here’s what I know. I love you Riley, but not always everything about you.” She put her head in my lap and sighed. “I also know that I can’t change you. Nor do I want to, even those parts I don’t cherish.” In the next minute, her breathing became tremulous, heavy-hearted.
“I make you sad, don’t I?”
“Sometimes,” she whispered.
“Like now?”
“Oh, it’s not you, Riley. You are a good man. A hard man, but I know that’s your world.”
“If not me, then what—or who?”
“I was just thinking about Petey. All that he’s been through. All that is yet to come in his life.”
“He had some twisted and brutal days. I wonder what those will do to him,” I said.
“I watched him carefully all morning. I could tell Tommy was worried about him because he invited Petey to join our outing tomorrow. And I know how special those expeditions are to your brother.”
Nina and I were planning to hike the Stream Trail in Redwood Regional Park with Tommy to make up for having missed out on this expedition last weekend. We were going in search of the massive piles of beetles that form under branches and rocks. The well-named, convergent lady beetles exhibit this natural, but very strange, behavior. Supposedly the aggregations function to provide warmth and mates, which seem like fine goals in the winter sogginess of the Bay area. The “lady” part of the insect’s name refers to the Virgin Mar
y—a beneficent figure. And the beetles are widely interpreted as signs of good luck. The Irish call them bóín dé or “God’s little cow” much to Tommy’s dismay. He knows that lady beetles are predators, munching on aphids rather than grass. Despite his pride in our family’s Irish roots, this entomological error is unforgivable in his mind.
“So, maybe Petey will be alright, at least with the security of St. Teresa’s to provide refuge from the streets during the day.”
“If only,” Nina said pensively. “When he wasn’t goofing around with Tommy and Karsa, he just sat and stared. I asked him if something was wrong and he looked puzzled. I was reminded of how N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa author I told you about, described one of his Indian characters, a crippled old man: ‘He wondered what his sorrow was and could not remember.’ Petey feels like an old soul in a boy’s body.”
“These last days have left me wondering, too.”
“About?”
“About humanity, about sanity, about freedom to be whoever we want to be—even if that deviates from what others deem acceptable. I’ve made decisions and I’ll make no excuses. I did what I believed was right.”
We rested in silence. I continued to stroke her hair, lifting the strands for the breeze to catch.
“But?” Nina always seemed to know when there was more needing to be said. She could wield single word questions with penetrating wisdom.
“But I’m feeling more uncertain than I’ve been in a long time. Or maybe naïve, which surprises me.” She rolled over onto her back and looked into my face.
“Or?” Again she probed the unsaid. Jesus, this was starting to feel like one of those fifty dollars sessions with a shrink.
“Or maybe stupid. I’d rather be stupid than naïve.”
She chuckled softly. “Oh dear, Riley. You are a lovably strange man. But you know what Pope John Paul said about stupidity?”
“I thought Popes preached about the sinfulness of gluttony, sloth, envy and lust,” I said, sliding my hand under her sweatshirt and gently massaging her breast to punctuate my list. She shook her head in mock dismay. I knew she appreciated my appreciation of her. “So now the pontiff is condemning nitwits?”
“He’s not against foolishness. The pope says that stupidity is a gift from God, but we shouldn’t misuse it.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“We all have failings. And we can use our limitations to live humbly.”
“Being humble is fine. But in my experience, people too often use humility like a crutch, to avoid making hard decisions. It’s a way of turning cowardice into a virtue. A cop or an exterminator has to make judgments and then take action, which sometimes means doing bad things for good reasons.”
“The Pope didn’t mean you can’t act. He meant you have to allow the possibility that what you’re doing is mistaken, uninformed—wrong.” She paused and murmured, “Although what you’re doing at this moment is very right.”
We lapsed into silence for long minutes, until I reached over to tilt the picnic basket and asked, “Did you bring dessert?”
Nina gave a sly smile and slowly wriggled her hips against the quilt, the sweatshirt sliding upward. “Yes,” she said, “but it’s not in the basket.”
I knew what she meant. I wasn’t that stupid.
— The End —
But wait, there’s more ...
Don’t miss the first two
Riley the Exterminator Mysteries
Poisoned Justice: Origins
What if an exterminator learns that the worst pests have two legs?
When an activist ecology professor is found dead in his hotel room, the police chalk it up to natural causes, but his wealthy and fiery widow is convinced it’s foul play. She needs someone who can operate behind the scenes—in the dark cracks and gritty crevices of San Francisco. Riley the exterminator fits the bill.
Riley’s career as a police detective was cut short when do-gooders saw him beat information out of a child kidnapper. Now running his father’s pest control business, Riley pursues two-legged vermin on the side. Turned out an ex-con can be licensed as an exterminator but not a private eye.
Winged ants and dead flies at the death scene suggest something’s amiss to a man who knows insects. The dead professor’s students, each harboring a secret, reveal that their environmentalist mentor had plans to take down the pesticide industry. But he needed cash for the operation—and that put him on a collision course with a most unusual drug lord.
When Riley’s investigation unexpectedly reveals that the drugs that poisoned his own brother might be connected to the professor’s death, extermination is in order. But he’ll need to join forces with an intoxicating South African beauty—a reluctant ally, armed with lethal poison.
Can Riley rid San Francisco of its most deadly vermin?
Get your print or ebook copy now at
www.Pen-L.com/PoisonedJustice.html
San Francisco, 1981.
Danger is in the air and nothing is as it appears.
But then, neither is Riley.
The body of a gay cop who committed suicide, a radical commune in the hills above Berkeley, and a pest outbreak that will cost California $10 billion if not controlled would be sufficient problems by themselves. But the maggots don’t match the policeman’s time of death, the hippies aren’t as peaceful as they claim, and the Medfly is spreading faster than it can move on its own.
Knowing that police detective-turned-exterminator Riley has what is needed—knowledge of both two- and six-legged vermin—an old flame draws him into a perilous search for the mastermind behind the most devastating insect outbreak in the nation’s history. Riley must determine whether the Medfly infestation is the work of a government insider or a radical environmentalist.
As crops are reduced to worm-infested mush, Riley and his loyal crew at Goat Hill Extermination zero in on the perpetrators of gruesome murder, brutal kidnapping, and economic devastation.
But it’s revenge, not money, that has bullets drawing blood and wasps delivering venom in a battle to determine who lives and who dies. Between romance reigniting and terrorism smoldering, Riley knows he’s likely to get burned.
Get your print or ebook copy now at
www.Pen-L.com/MurderOnTheFly.html
About the Author
Jeffrey Lockwood is a most unusual fellow. He grew up in New Mexico and spent youthful afternoons enchanted by feeding grasshoppers to black widows in his backyard. This might account for both his scientific and literary affinities.
He earned a doctorate in entomology from Louisiana State University and worked for fifteen years as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming. He became a world-renowned assassin, developing a method for efficiently killing billions of insects (mostly pests but there’s always the innocent bystander during a hit). This contact with death drew him into questions of justice, violence, and evil.
His career metamorphosed into an appointment in the department of philosophy and the program in creative writing at UW. Unable to escape his childhood, he’s written several award-winning books about the devastation of the West by locust swarms, the use of insects to wage biological warfare, and the terror humans experience when six-legged creatures invade their lives.
Pondering the dark side of humanity led him to the realm of the murder mystery. These days, he explores how the anti-hero of crime noir sheds existentialist light on the human condition: In the end, there are no excuses—we are ultimately responsible for our actions.
Find Jeffrey at:
Website: JeffreyLockwoodAuthor.com
Goodreads, Facebook
Email: [email protected]
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Lethal Fetish Page 32
