Something moved across Wes’s face at that, maybe a flicker of recognition, like I’d said a password he knew.
“Yeah,” Wes said, quieter. “I know that feeling.” Then his easy grin returned, and he dug a battered steel flask out of his camera bag and offered it over. “Sit down before you make the rest of us look bad, Mark Apparently. We’ve got an hour to kill and a sunset to wait on. You’re the only man here qualified to tell me when it’s worth photographing.”
I sank onto the edge of a lounger that was built for a smaller man than me and took a pull off a stranger’s flask. Across the pool somewhere, I heard a laugh I recognized as Finn’s, big and delighted, wrapped in a hobbit’s merriment, floating up over the water. Ifhe’d seen me, he didn’t come over.
For once in his life, Finn O’Brien left well enough alone.
I’d find out later it was the opposite of leaving it alone.
I’d find out he’d seen the whole thing from the bar, had watched me walk up to a stranger and sit down and stay, and had ordered himself another drink and toasted the back of my head from across the pool—the meddling, satisfied, smirking bastard.
But I didn’t know that yet.
All I knew was that the light was about to get good, and that for the first time on this ridiculous trip, I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Chapter 5
It started at breakfast.
Finn found me at a corner table the next morning, already showered, already dressed, already three pages into a resort activity brochure I’d picked up at the front desk because reading a brochure was the closest thing to work available to me.
“What’s that?” he asked, dropping into the chair across from me with a plate that was eighty percent bacon.
“They have a schedule.” I turned the brochure so he could see. “Snorkeling at nine, kayaking tour at ten-thirty. There’s a thing called aqua fitness at noon, a cooking demonstration at two, and a sunset catamaran at five. If we move quickly, we can do most of it before dinner.”
Finn’s fork clanked as he dropped it onto the one baconless spot on his plate. He stared at me with the patience of a man explaining gravity to a toddler. “Mark, this is a holiday, not a triathlon.”
“It’s an itinerary,” I said, waving the paper in the air.
“It’s a hostage situation you’ve drawn up for yourself.” He yanked the brochure out of my hands and dropped it on the empty chair beside him, out of my reach, a tactic he’d perfected over our years of friendship. “Let me give you your schedule. First, you wake up, then you eat, then you lie down somewhere warm. You get up only to eat again or to get in the water. That’s it. That’s the whole agenda. People train their entire lives to donothingthis well, and you want to schedule it?”
“I don’t know how to do nothing.”
“I’m aware. It might be the greatest tragedy of you, but you’ve a week to learn. I’ve appointed myself your instructor.” He pointed his fork at me. “Lesson one, after breakfast, we are going to lie by the pool. We will not do aqua fitness. Neither of us are aqua, and we are certainly not fitness, not this week, at least.”
I lasted, by my own honest count, about forty minutes by the pool.
It would have been less if I hadn’t spent the first twenty of them in a state of low-grade crisis about my towel situation. The lounger Finn steered me to was beside a very relaxed older couple settled in, wearing nothing but sun hats, wrinkles, andcontentment. Finn, who had stripped down to his trunks the second we arrived, shut his eyes like a cat in a sunbeam, finding my discomfort enormously amusing.
“Nobody’s looking, Mark. Why don’t you take your clothes off and stay a while?”
“I . . . what . . . no. Damn it, Finn. I’m aware nobody’s looking. I’m not looking either. I’m looking very specifically at the sky.”
His chuckle had the woman next to me turn and grin in my direction. It took all my willpower not to look from the puffy clouds to stare her down.
“You’re so tense you’re going to pull something just lying there. That’s a new injury. You can’t file a workers’ comp claim for relaxing. You know that, right?” He cracked one eye open.
The woman snorted. I caught her head turning away again out of my peripheral vision.
“Take the shirt off, at least. You’re gonna die in that polo. You’re the only man here generating his own weather system.”
I blew out a long sigh, earning a wider grin from my bad influence of a friend. Reluctantly, I fought my shirt off. It caught on my arm, then my head. Before it was on the ground beside my lounger, I’d bent myself into a pretzel to remove it. Finn avoided being tossed into the pool by chewing on his lowerlip, though his smart-ass smile never left his annoying face.
It was, I’ll admit, a slight relief, and a larger surrender, and Finn had the grace not to comment on it beyond a satisfied little hum, the sound of a man watching a long-term plan advance a single inch.
I made it twenty more minutes before I was up again, because lying still with nothing to do turns out to be its own kind of torture for a man whose entire identity is built on doing. My mind went straight to the Hargrove site, to whether Reyes had remembered to chase the inspector. My hand went straight to the phone I’d promised myself I’d leave in the room. The absence of said phone in my pocket sent a jolt of anxiety through me that I was not proud of.
“I’m going to walk,” I announced.
