Acts of Nature Read Online Free PDF Page B

as I followed through with the stroke. “Why? You don’t like it?”
    She looked back with that grin that shows more in her eyes than it does on her lips.
    “It’s way different from anywhere I’ve been,” she said. “Maybe a little too innocent.”
    “It does have that quality,” I said, thinking of the term as a positive whereas I was sure she was still unsure of her own definition. We lapsed into silence again. If you took a deep breath down here, the must of growing grass and decaying humus was sweet and ancient. If you stood, just the altitude of a few feet changed the aroma like a lingering perfume that only interests you when the woman wearing it passes by but intrigues you as it drifts away.
    “I think Jimmy would have liked it out here too. He liked innocent. That’s what got him killed.”
    If it were possible to sound both wistful and bitter at the same time, Sherry had captured it. Her husband, also a cop, had been killed in the line of duty. He’d answered a robbery in progress at one of those convenience stores every cop hates and often call the Stop & Rob, letting the humor cover the anxiety. Jimmy had caught a glimpse of someone running from the store as his partner pulled the squad car up, and he bailed out of the unit and then chased the subject into a dead-end alley.
    “You really think that, Sherry?” I said. “He was a good cop from what I’ve heard. A holdup. A routine traffic stop. You know the statistics. It wasn’t like he was cowboying.”
    She took another two strokes before answering.
    “I’m not saying he wasn’t careful, or that he was naïve, really. But he had a certain trust in people, especially kids.”
    When Jimmy had closed in on the runner trying to scale a ten-foot wall at the end of the alley, he realized it was just a kid, a skinny-armed eighth-grader wearing sneakers too big for his feet. He relaxed. His weapon was still holstered and he was giving the boy one of those “come here, kid” gestures, his fingers bent, palm up like he’d caught him sneaking candy from a bowl. That’s when the child pulled a 9mm from his baggy shorts and fired a round into Sherry’s husband’s heart. Freak tragedy. Never should have happened. It’s something you never forget if you’re the loved one left behind. All that crap about closure and moving on doesn’t remove the memory cells that live in a human brain. I’d seen Jimmy return in Sherry’s eyes a few times since we’d been together and I was still at a loss for how to react. Maybe she was thinking of him, what she was missing. Maybe she was thinking of what it would be like to be with someone who was the opposite of him. So I stayed quiet. Let her enjoy it, or shake off the vision on her own. Some things we handle alone.
    I nodded when she looked back at me. The grin was back in her eyes and for the next hour we talked about our favorite bakeries, about Tuscany cannoli and key lime pie and why nobody in the country can make a Philly cheesesteak sandwich the way they do in the city because of the bread from Amoroso’s. We were on to the delights of fresh stone crabs straight off the boat at the docks in Chokoloskee when we suddenly broke out of the high grass and slid out onto several acres of open water and the change caused Sherry to stop midsentence. On flat water the sunlight was pinging off the reflected blue of the sky and for a moment the scene was like a still life painting, the colors too perfect, the lack of movement too unreal. Sprigs of marsh grass spiked up from the sheet of glass before us and I actually watched the small ripple of wake from our bow move out for ten yards ahead of us until its offensive disruption was absorbed. For a full two minutes, neither of us spoke, maybe afraid to break the spell.
    “Humans don’t belong here, Max,” Sherry whispered from the bow and I let the statement stand until a breeze rose from the west and rustled the grass and nipped at the water and life moved back