Cooler Than Blood by Robert Lane Page B

interview them. It was on the bay across from her sick puppy and just a long enough stroll to sweat my shirt. I knew the place well from my year on the beach.
    I took a wooden stool at the mahogany bar that preserved old postcards of Florida under strata of shellac. That is where the past belongs—immobilized under transparent layers so we may see it but never touch it again. Black-and-white pictures of the damage from Hurricane Donna hung on the wall to my right. She was the last big one, a cat four in 1960, until Charley swung by in 2004. Grouper gave me a tuna salad on wheat toast and an iced tea. He wore a polo shirt with his restaurant’s name and a spotless white apron folded down at the top and tied around his waist. His real name was Peter. But young Pete’s first word had been cast from his lips while his father fished the piers of the canal behind their home. His mother’s protests were never enough to overcome what the stars had ordained.
    “What’s the deal again?” he asked. He untied his apron, tossed it under the bar, and wrapped another clean one around his midsection. He picked up a glass and dried it with a towel.
    “I’m camping out here while she calls her employees. They’ll drop by within the hour. She wanted me to send a photo to their phones, but I insisted on a face-to-face. Only four, including Tuesday, rotate on the front desk.” Grouper knew Tuesday and Susan as members of the local bar and restaurant association, and I had filled him in on Jenny’s disappearance.
    “She was okay with sending them here?”
    “Why not?”
    Grouper shrugged. “Nothing. I hope that girl surfaces. But she is eighteen. Maybe she just needs to hang with herself after what she went through.”
    “You know much about eighteen-year-old girls?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Makes two of us. But as a breed, I don’t think they’re a solitary species.” I changed tack. “What are you doing with Susan to the south and Tuesday to the north?”
    He put down the glass and shrugged again. “Susan, underneath—she’s got a bit of a nuclear streak. I just don’t swing from that tree.”
    The man changed his apron five hundred times a day and operated one of the nicest waterfront places I’d ever been to. He sported two pierced ears and was president of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Florida. He reopened the organization after it had shuttered its doors and left five hundred children proof that no one gave a damn. He swung pretty effortlessly from tree to tree, but I didn’t challenge him on that.
    “And Tuesday?”
    Grouper didn’t have a chance to answer, as a girl blitzed me from my right like a heat-seeking missile. “Are you Mr. Travis? ‘Cause I’m Allison, and Tuesday asked me to stop by, and it’s my day off, so whatever it is, make it snappy.” She popped her gum the split second her verbal attack ended. She took the stool next to me.
    She wore a low-cut brown sundress and smelled of suntan oil and spearmint. Her thick jet-black hair was wrapped in cords that fell down the left side of her head and beyond her shoulders. Her clavicle looked like a hanger with skin and two balloons on it. She slid over onto the half of her stool that was next to me. She was the type who invades the space that separates strangers. I held my ground. Pleasure to do so. I gave her the background pitch and brought up the pictures on my phone. She hesitated at the picture of Zach.
    “Curly’s cute,” Allison said, “but here’s a flash for you: I’ve never seen those guys. I’m mostly part-time when someone calls in sick, like Daniel does about every day ‘cause he can’t handle a watered-down margarita on a full stomach, but Tuesday puts up with him ‘cause he’s been there, like, forever. I gotta go. Sorry I can’t help you find…”
    “Jenny.”
    “Right.” She slid off her stool and touched me lightly on my right arm. “I was yanking your cord, not knowing her name and all. We’re having a fire on