is. ‘It’s Stitch and Buck, Buck Coleman? From Fort Jude High?’
Fluid, fearsomely easy within his body, Pike stands. Like a priest, he lifts one hand, showing them the blade but stopping short of the blessing. Then he turns and goes inside.
Stitch says, ‘Well, it’s nice to see you too. Son of a bitch couldn’t afford a clean T-shirt when we knew him. Now look.’
Buck is slapping at his pockets. He motions to Stitch to shut the motor. ‘Phone. Crap. Too late.’
‘Probably the girls, getting on our case.’ In Stitch’s pocket, his phone is vibrating off the hook. He pulls it out and checks caller I.D. ‘Wait. No. It’s Chape. Buck, it’s Chape. Yo, Chape!’ He listens carefully. ‘There’s trouble with Brad. He wants us at the shack. We’re on our way,’ he says into the phone and slaps it shut. ‘Damndest thing. He says Chaplin’s coming.’
‘Well, shit.’ Buck looks happier than he has all day, probably because unlike them, all-American high school hero Bob Chaplin is slipping, so much for the leader of the pack. Every man needs somebody to look down on, and now it’s Chaplin’s turn. ‘It’ll be nice to see him. He’s been home, how long? It’s damn well time he showed himself.’
13
Walker Pike
It was funny and sad, watching the two old fuds out in their motor boat, idling a little bit too close to his house. Walker didn’t mind; they looked harmless enough until they hailed him, which drove him inside. He can’t be with people he knows. Walker knows them, all right, but he doesn’t know them well enough to predict what they’d say or do if he let them in, or what might come down if it went wrong.
In high school he had their faces by heart, but he wouldn’t have recognized either one if Stitch hadn’t broadcast their names. Von Harten. Coleman. The least of the fabulous five – football captain and four rich kids from the Fort Jude Club. In high school he hated them. Face it, in high school he envied them. Well, look at them now, bobbing in that crap boat in their floppy crew hats and nose guards and zinc oxide, probably because the wives said it was that or metastatic melanoma from exposure to the sun. Poor bastards, they never had a chance.
Walker’s mind usually travels on another plane but in a way it was gratifying, thinking at ground level, where he left these good old boys the night he left Fort Jude – forever, he thought. He never belonged, for which he’s always been grateful. He didn’t run with them in high school. He observed. An outsider then and an outsider now, Walker is a behaviorist. To him they’ve always been specimens from another culture because they acted so big and thought so small.
In a way, he’s sorry he didn’t wave back when Von Harten hailed him – they’re nice enough and sad, really, with one already dead. It would be fun to see. Too bad he couldn’t invite them to tie up on his dock and come up to the house for a beer.
He’d like these two old guys to see what the kid from Pierce Point made of himself with what little he was given, but it isn’t safe. Now, Walker Pike is safe enough in New York or London or any of the big cities where he does business, but he can’t let himself get close to anybody he knew growing up in Fort Jude. There’s too much backstory between them. Interface and there’s a chance that in spite of his best intentions, it will end badly.
Given the givens, Walker knows it was weird to build down here, when he fought so hard to escape. It’s the terrain. He was driving along the coast outside Cape Town with the crashing surf on one side and mountains rising at his back when he was leveled by homesickness, not for Fort Jude, for sandspurs and summertime heat mirages on blistering white sand. He came back to Florida for the sawgrass and mangroves in certain inlets and the creatures that fed among the roots, these horizons with thunderclouds at one end, and at the other, orange sunset and pink afterglow.
He’s rich enough to telecommute, so he built this place. He bought the plot and surrounding property on the water not all that far from Pierce Point, where he was so miserable as a kid. It’s risky, but heartbreak brought him back. It’s as good a place as