Cape Disappointment Read Online Free Page B

he knows it. A couple of sentences into it, I want to tell him to stop, because it is clear right off the bat that I don't have the capacity to grasp a tale this knotty. Half the names he mentions are people I either don't recognize, can't place, or swear I've never heard of. He speaks for five minutes, and as he speaks I forget nearly all of what he's said. Instead of asking him to start over, or warning him that he's wasting his breath, I let him continue. There is something reassuring and at the same time frightening about his voice. Snake is a competentprivate investigator and a good friend who would do almost anything for me. I don't have many others who are so close.
    Once, while watching an old Glenn Ford movie together, Snake and I invented a test of friendship: A friend is somebody you would trust to help cover up a murder. Not that either of us was planning or had planned a murder, but I have only one friend I would go to for a task like that: Elmer. It was an outlandish way of measuring friendship and an odd thing to remember when so many other memories remain missing. And then I remember the man I'd killed years earlier and what Snake had done for me afterward. The killing had been an accident, but there would have been no way to establish that in a court of law.
    Old memories I had no trouble with. It was the recent stuff that was giving me the slip.
    As he speaks, my mind begins drifting and I start to piece together some of the events and images from the last few weeks. It is as if some maniacal film cutter has taken all the film stock in my brain and cut it into various lengths, so that there's a two-hour film somewhere on the premises, but it's been completely disassembled. My sense of time is so skewed I'm stunned when I realize Elmer is gone and has probably been gone for an hour.
    I sort through random memories. I remember reclining on a bed in a motel room at the ocean. Outside the patio slider I can hear the surf pounding on several miles of flat sand. In the small bathroom Kathy is finishing up her shower, every part of her body glistening except her voluminous dark hair, which she's pinned into a knot on top of her head. She is taking the sort of care women often do after bathing. She spots me watching from across the room, smiles, drops the towel, and strides across the dim room, climbing onto the bed and crawling toward me like a lioness. The playful look on her face is one I don't want to forget.
    And then, without knowing why, I remember myself in a small boat, chilled to the bone, riding an endless series of choppy waves. Nearby, other boats of all descriptions and sizes keep us company. The Coast Guard spotlights are bobbing every which way in the dark. Several local fishing boats are there. I've hired a young man to drive me out to the site in his father's boat. We're both wearing rain slickers— he's loaned me one of his father's, which has a hole under each armpit. I am wet and cold and miserable. I hate small boats. I get seasick on awater bed, so I'm about as wretched as a human being can get. My body is ill, but my soul is worse.
    “You want to go back in?” he asks when he sees how queasy I am.
    “No.”
    “It's your call.”
    I'm peering into the depths with a powerful spotlight, searching for something horrible. This is the worst night of my life.
    I have a vivid memory of running through the darkness. It's a rural area, and there are two of us. We're dashing through brush, large branches of Scotch broom slapping me in the face. I'm breathing hard, but the man I'm chasing is breathing harder. He runs in spurts while I keep an even pace. We've been racing some minutes now. He's beyond redline and will crap out any second. All I have to do is keep pressing on. He's dangerous. That's all I remember about him. He's dangerous, and I'm desperate to get my hands on him.
    Another set of memories— or are they fantasies now?—place me in a small plane, a Beechcraft King Air, a twin