Against Nature Read online

  By Casey Barrett

  Against Nature

  Under Water

  AGAINST NATURE

  Casey Barrett

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Author’s Note

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Casey Barrett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2018932844

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0971-4

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0973-8

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-0973-X

  To Bruder Lars

  And

  To George, beloved hound, RIP.

  There is no passion in nature so demonically impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.

  —Edgar Allan Poe

  Prologue

  It was a beautiful view. The deputy couldn’t stop staring at it. Death rested on the rocks below, but his eyes were drawn up and out toward a rolling horizon in a crisp spring sky. The valley was framed in a V by the Kaaterskill Clove, a deep gorge that dove between a pair of green mountains in the northern Catskills. Since the nineteenth century painters had stood on these rocks and tried to capture the absurd beauty.

  His boss, the sheriff of Greene County, gazed over the falls at the broken dead figure that had gone over the side. The body appeared to have detonated on impact. Blood splatter covered the rocks and flowed down with the falling water. He sighed, never looked up, immune to the nature gawking. Every season there would be a handful of these, fool city folk who raced up the sides of waterfalls in flip-flops, then took a wrong step on loose rock and down they went. But this wasn’t that. He knew the poor bastard down there. He was a local, a writer of faded fame by the name of Victor Wingate.

  He went to join a thin man who was crouched off to the side, petting Wingate’s orphaned Lab named Filly.

  “Whaddya think?” he asked.

  The thin man frowned, his eyes moist. They’d been neighbors. He straightened up, gave Filly a pat on her big brown head. “He’s tried it before,” he said.

  The sheriff nodded. “Few years back, was it?” he asked. “After the wife left him.”

  “He was doing well,” said the thin man. “Better than I’ve seen him, in a long time.”

  They glanced over at the apparent reason for this. A frightening beauty dressed in black, smoking and scowling next to a dying ash tree. She was tall, severe, with ink black hair that fell around a pale perfectly symmetrical face. The sheriff approached.

  “He didn’t kill himself,” said the lady. “There’s no fucking way.”

  He backed off without reply. There would be time for questions later. She was giving off a dark energy that threatened to make a bad situation worse. Instead he walked over to his deputy.

  “Bother you for a hand?” he asked.

  The kid blinked, shook his head, as if waking from hypnosis. “Sure, sure,” he stammered. “What do you need?”

  “Called the Rescue Squad yet?” he asked. “Gonna need them to climb down there and retrieve Mr. Wingate before dark. Unless you’d like to do it yourself?”

  The deputy took a last look at that view, then turned and hiked off through the woods to organize the rescue effort, reflecting as he went that rescue was a foolish word for the recovery of a successful suicide.

  The sheriff and the thin man looked at each other, then over at the striking woman in their presence. The gulf between Wingate’s physical appearance and that of his girlfriend was difficult to fathom. “Perhaps hung down to his knee,” the men would say later. Victor was a good six inches shorter than her. Paunchy, almost bald, not much style. A divorced has-been bachelor living like a shy woodland animal in his big house on the side of a mountain. Then this woman showed up.

  “He didn’t kill himself,” she said again.

  On a flat dry rock, a few feet from the falls, there was a glass of cut crystal. The sheriff pulled a sleeve down over his hand to protect the prints and picked it up and smelled the remains. A last sip of bourbon swirled in the bottom. The angel’s share, he thought. He set it back down and leaned against the rock. For the first time he allowed himself a look outward. He noticed that the neighbor and the woman were doing the same. A hawk appeared above the clove, then another, the pair circling in wide graceful arcs against the blue sky, moving lower into the green, preparing to dive for prey in the shallows below.

  It really was a lovely view.

  Chapter 1

  We’d just finished. I was fetching Kleenex after a strenuous round while she lay on her back gathering her breath. My knees buckled as I limped to the bathroom and gave myself silent praise. Well done, Duck. Her response was reward enough, but I couldn’t help thinking of the envelope of cash that would be waiting bedside in the morning.

  My employment was difficult to define these days, but it had its perks.

  I returned to bed, offered her the cleanup Kleenex, and kissed her on salty lips. She returned it with hunger and pulled me closer. I gave slight resistance and she laughed lightly into my mouth. “I’ll give you a few minutes to recharge,” she said.

  My employer slash lover was a catch of considerable status in certain circles. Juliette Cohen: divorced, one child, worth a couple hundred bucks. Art dealers and headmasters and various hat shakers would genuflect in her presence. She was a long-legged blonde, who dressed like the fashion editor she once was. Now in her early forties, money was something to be spent, not earned.

  Ostensibly, my job was tutor and swim teacher to her eight-year-old son, Stevie. I had surprised myself with competence. Stevie had responded to me, I’d managed to teach him a few things of value: like how not to drown, and how to play a bit of piano. His mother told me I was the only male he’d ever listened to. Never mind the father, his bitterness at losing a reported 300 million dollars in the divorce left him uninterested in parenting a son produced by that greedy slut. He was off on family number two now, with a pair of daughters and a younger wife who signed a favorable prenup.

  * * *

  I met Juliette in the usual way, on a case, a simple matter of deterring an overeager suitor. Divorcées with that kind of money become a mark
. Eyed by rising finance guys, the sort who worship hedge fund managers like A-list celebrities. They keep an eye on ladies like these, tracking the constellations of fortunes like astronomers. This one was a chiseled smiling sack of flesh named Bret, a VP at Fortress. He made the common miscalculation, confusing proximity to wealth to possession of it. He was caught throwing a coke party at her Village apartment, while mother and son were out at their place in Amagansett. When she found out, he took a helicopter out east, and billed it to her account. He told Stevie to shut up when he tried to intervene in an argument. And finally, one high Saturday night, he refused to leave after too much blow prevented him from performing. He did not take the breakup well. He wouldn’t leave her alone.

  I was referred by a mutual acquaintance, one Margaret McKay, whose life I helped wreck after she hired me to find her missing daughter a year earlier. The search—and eventual horror show of discovery—had shattered both of our lives. I was still a cracked shell; I was surprised she was still alive. In the aftermath I was confident that suicide was inevitable for her. I’d set my own odds at 50/50, and so far the coin toss was settling on this side of life. I had Juliette to thank for that.

  It didn’t take much to deter the determined Bret. The threat of physical violence tends to backfire with these sorts. They want to fight back, and if that looks like a losing battle, they’ll hire reinforcements. But the threat of shame is always effective. An email to the boss, a humiliating confrontation during a business meal at Per Se, these things put the fear of the money god into a man. He learns that it’s easier than he thought to be excommunicated from the church of the Street. He falls in line and learns to set his sights a bit lower than the Juliette Cohens of his world.

  I should have learned as much.

  Instead I filled his bedroom void. It was a subtle arrangement with a noble cause. The night we settled our case, which ended with an emailed pledge from Bret never to contact her again, we enjoyed a few bottles of Chateau Latour. The conversation was easy and interesting and flirty, the sort that leads to the inevitable, but that night Stevie was having a sleepover. With a trio of eight-year-olds and multiple nannies mulling about, it would have been inelegant to stay late. We ended our evening by eleven, with me agreeing to give Stevie a swim lesson at their building’s rooftop pool the next day.

  Eight months later I was a part of her staff. I hadn’t worked a case since. I felt like a rescue dog picked up by his best-case scenario, only to resent the taming process. I was healthier than I’d been in years, and trying to keep a lid on the self-loathing. Juliette helped keep me off the bourbon and painkillers. Our only indulgence was expensive wine and a bit of weed. It was as close to clean living as I cared to get.

  She was disciplined in all things in her life, but sex. Her body preserved by a strict regime of yoga, Soul Cycling, and vegan eating. In the evenings she allowed herself a moderate amount of wine, followed by a single small bowl of sativa, inhaled from a one-hitter and exhaled with eyes-shut bliss through a cracked living-room window. She claimed to dislike the high of the healthier trend of vaping; burning fresh weed the old-fashioned way was her one private vice.

  Then she would drag me off to the master bedroom, where I would earn my income. Since my teaching rates for her son were never clarified, the arrangement was loose but impossible to misunderstand. The thickness of envelopes bore no relation to Stevie’s progress. They were based on the pleasure I provided after he’d gone to bed.

  * * *

  Juliette wiped between her legs and handed me the Kleenex.

  “Love, would you mind getting me a glass of water?” she asked.

  I swallowed a grumble and moved back toward the bathroom.

  “From the kitchen, darling,” she said. “You know I can’t drink it from the tap.”

  Another gulp of sleepy pride, then I stepped into a pair of boxers and left to make the walk across the endless apartment. The floors did not creak. No sounds of the city filtered up through the windows. They were hermetically sealed to ensure total silence. The effect of lifeless luxury was unsettling. Large modern art from Gagosian and Zwirner stared down at me through the darkness with incomprehension. The sound of the refrigerator opening felt like an intrusion. On my way back I found myself tiptoeing aware of the slightest disturbance. As I approached the bedroom, I noticed a light shining beneath the door. Inside, Juliette was sitting up in bed, staring at my phone.

  “You have a text,” she said, icy as Arctic.

  “From who?” I offered the water, reached for my cell.

  She ignored the glass, looked down at the offending screen.

  “From Cassandra Kimball,” she said. “It reads, ‘Need you. Please call.’ ”

  I snatched the phone from her grip. Ice water splashed from the glass across Juliette’s bare chest. “Watch it, asshole!” she said.

  She dried herself with the sheets, glared up at me.

  “You’re fucking her again?” she asked. “How dare you.”

  I looked at the screen, confirmed the message; I looked down at my snarling lover. “I never was,” I said.

  “Oh, bullshit. I’m supposed to believe that?” She kicked at the phone in my hands. I dodged the painted toes. Then she flung herself from bed and fled to the bathroom.

  I looked back at the text. Need you . . .

  It had been twenty months since we’d seen each other. Twenty months since I’d almost gotten her killed. At the end of the McKay case, Cass had absconded to the country. The bullet in her gut left a scar, but nothing like the psychic wounds we would both forever nurse. I didn’t blame her for going. It was too much for anyone to process. But I blamed her for not coming back. After she left, I did my best to sober up. I rode the wagon like a good boy as I put mind and body back together. But then one day I received a letter from the still-missing girl, Madeline McKay. It brought back all the failures and demons and soon I was reaching for the bottle. I dove into the whiskey abyss, deep as I could go. I would have kept diving until I reached the land without light, if not for Juliette. No, that’s not quite right—if not for her eight-year-old kid.

  The day I showed up for his swim lesson was the first day I hadn’t taken a drink before lunch in months. It was selfishness at first, and greed. Like Bret and plenty of others, I was seeing his mother as a mark, even if I wasn’t admitting it to myself. She had overpaid me in the blithe way of wealth for my services with her spurned lover. I figured she was good for another easy payday for teaching her kid. I just had to stay sober until after the class. I did. Then for reasons unclear to me I did not drink to unconsciousness later that night. So began another reluctant limp back to sober-ish living.

  And now with a four-word text I was on the cusp of being thrown from this well-paid paradise. The thought made me smile. This was not the facial expression desired by Juliette when she emerged from the bathroom.

  “How dare you,” she said. “You smile . . .” I watched as she searched for something to throw. She chose an elephant figurine, the trunk used as a ring holder. Juliette grabbed it and flung it, end over end, at my head. I ducked and heard it shatter over the bed.

  “Get out,” she said.

  I scurried for my clothes. She watched as I dressed. Maybe she expected me to plead, to gush out all the perfect words that would soothe her raging ego. I stayed quiet, kept smirking. Then came the slaps. Her fury exceeded the jealousy of an ill-timed text, no matter how threatened she was by Cass. It was my response, my grin. There was no denying it. I couldn’t wait to call.

  When her blows abated, I tried to explain that there must be something wrong, how long it had been. My lover was not interested. After all I’ve done for you was the prevailing theme. I reached the bedroom door with one shoe on and my t-shirt backward. Tears came next. The untrusting, burned divorcée alone again behind a wall of fortune that prevented basic human bonds. She gathered herself while I lingered, wondering if there was some way to appease her. Juliette wiped at her damp blue eyes and
inhaled a long breath through her nose like her yoga training taught her. She exhaled, tilted her sharp chin up to me. “Don’t come back here,” she said. She closed the door.

  In the living room I found my keys, wallet. I took some parting mental snapshots of this gorgeous apartment. From the open kitchen through the dining and living areas, the loft stretched some seventy feet across, with a dozen high windows from end to end. Large silk rugs in an aqua palate covered the blond hardwood floors. The décor was Turkish inspired, with exotic lighting and richly patterned pillows across plush couches and low-slung designer chairs. Tossed on one was Stevie’s backpack. I wondered for a brief mad second if I should go wake him and bid my farewell. Then I heard his voice behind me.

  “Duck, what’s going on?” he asked, rubbing at his eyes.

  “Hey, buddy, I’m sorry to wake you,” I said. “I need to head out.”

  “Why?”

  I took a step closer to him, reconsidered and backed up again. “A friend of mine is in trouble,” I told him. “I need to see if she’s okay.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t know yet, she just asked me to call.”

  “You said she was in trouble.”

  “I think she is, or I’m sure she is, but I don’t know what’s happened.”

  I lowered myself to his eye level, then reached out and patted his shoulder. “I’m sure everything will be okay. Just go back to sleep, all right?”

  “Are you coming over tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I hope so, buddy, but I’m not sure,” I said. “Ask your mom, okay?”

  He nodded, understanding. Already the scar tissue of divorce had built its layers of protection. Stevie turned and shuffled off toward his bedroom without looking back.