Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page B

He simply hadn’t. The moment had never come. He hadn’t been able to face her. He had slipped away, crossing the Highway to where his car was parked on the dirt shoulder near the boatyard, the bracelet in the pocket of his trunks. He looked at it now, the ivory-white beads with blocky red letters spelling out her name, a heart and a diamond on either side. The rest of the bracelet was elastic string, which had lost its stretch in the intervening years.
    After a moment he slipped it back into the drawer, losing it once again among the photographs.

7
    R IGHT N OW N OTARY AND T AX P REP OPERATED OUT OF AN aging strip mall on Beach Boulevard near Talbert. There was a Laundromat next door and a liquor store next to that, which was also a
carnicería
that sold
asada
and
carnitas
tacos to go, and which cashed paychecks and did a limited pawn business. The counter in the liquor store was shielded by bulletproof glass, and the doors and windows werecovered with a sliding wrought iron gate after two in the morning. The Laundromat was open all night.
    Ray Mifflin sat at the office desk reading a
People
magazine and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He could hear a muffled churning from beyond the wall, a washing machine chugging away in the Laundromat. From time to time he glanced out the window, waiting for his client to show—a Mr. Edmund Dalton of Huntington Beach, son of a very rich man. Dalton was fifteen minutes late. Ray didn’t normally open until ten, although he was usually in the office a couple hours early. This was ridiculous, though. This morning he had pulled in shortly after dawn for an appointment with a man who was too busy to wait for business hours. Ray had just turned sixty, and he was damned if he would put up with being treated like a fool by some rich young punk.
    He was tired, but it was only lately that he had realized it. He
looked
tired. His hair was thin. Rogaine treatments hadn’t done a thing for him. Neither had diet pills. He was sedentary, his back was a wreck, and he was simply goddamn weary of the whole thing. He missed his breakfast, too. When he got up early like this, he always felt starved within a half hour, and this morning he craved a Hostess apple pie, which, of course, he couldn’t put his hands on because the damned liquor store didn’t open until eight, when the vagrants sleeping on the Laundromat chairs woke up hungry.
    He was charging his early-morning customer a hundred dollars to notarize a quitclaim deed, but at this moment the pie was more attractive to him than the money was, and if the man didn’t show up in another ten minutes he was going to hang the be-back-soon clock on the door and head down to the all-night market.
    This whole transaction smelled wrong anyway: the rush to get it done, the early-hours appointment, the money….
    Ray had notarized another deed for the man barely a month ago, and that one had smelled a little high, too, although it was true that he wouldn’t have thought more than twice about last month’s work if it weren’t for this second one. There was nothing really out of the ordinary about thedeed that he had notarized last month. It involved an old guy, pretty much on the ropes, quitclaiming a piece of property to his son, getting out from under some of his assets before he dropped dead and the estate got caught up in probate and taxes. There was something about the son, though, that Ray didn’t like—he was way too anxious and smug. You’d think that if the old man was giving you a gift-wrapped piece of Newport Beach you’d be a little bit deferential, a little grateful. But this had been hurry-up-and-get-it-done, and when the deed was signed, the son had called the old man a cab, given him some folding money out in the parking lot, and drove away by himself in a Mercedes. The old man had hit the liquor store for a pint of bourbon while he was waiting for the cab.
    On the other hand, it wasn’t any of Ray’s concern. If you ask