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on Jay’s neck. “And if you betray me, I will reach across any
oceans you try
194 / DENNIS LEHANE
to put between us, and rip your jugular from your throat and
cram it through the hole in your penis.”
So Jay went to Florida.
He had no idea what he’d do once he found Desiree or
Jeff Price, only that he wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood.
He’d done that once for the feds in Mexico, and the memory
of the look in the drug lord’s eyes just before Jay blew his
heart all over his silk shirt had haunted him so completely,
he quit the government a month later.
Lila had told him about a hotel in downtown Clearwater,
the Ambassador, which Price had often raved about due to
the vibrating beds and varied selection of porn movies
available through the satellite TVs.
Jay thought it was a long shot, but then Price proved stu-
pider than he’d thought when he walked out the front door
two hours after Jay began staking the place out. Jay followed
Price all day as he met with his buddies with the Thailand
connections, got drunk in a bar in Largo, and took a hooker
back to his room.
The next day, while Price was out, Jay broke into his room,
but found no evidence of the money or Desiree.
One morning Jay watched Price leave the hotel and was
about to give the room another toss when he got the feeling
he was being watched.
He turned in his car seat and focused his binoculars,
panned down the length of the street until he came face-to-
face with another set of binoculars watching him from a car
two blocks down.
“That’s how I met Desiree,” he told us. “Each of us
watching the other through binoculars.”
SACRED / 195
He’d been wondering by this time if she’d ever really exis-
ted at all. He dreamed about her constantly, stared at her
photographs for hours, believed he knew what she smelled
like, how her laugh sounded, what her bare legs would feel
like pressed against his own. And the more he built her up
in his mind, the more she grew into something mythic—the
tortured, poetic, tragic beauty who’d sat in Boston parks
through the mists and rains of autumn, awaiting deliverance.
And then one day she was standing in front of him.
She didn’t drive away when he left his car to approach
hers. She didn’t pretend it was all a misunderstanding. She
watched him come with calm, steady eyes, and when he
reached her car, she opened the door and stepped out.
“Are you from the police?” she said.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
She wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked
like they’d been slept in. Her feet were bare, her sandals on
the floor mat of the car, and he found himself worrying that
she might cut her feet on the glass or pebbles that littered
the city street.
“Are you a private detective, perhaps?”
He nodded.
“A mute private detective?” she said with a small smile.
And he laughed.
22
“My father,” Desiree told Jay two days later, once they’d
begun to trust each other, “owns people. That’s what he lives
for. He owns businesses and homes and cars and whatever
else you can think of, but what he really lives for is the
owning of people.”
“I’m starting to figure that out,” Jay said.
“He owned my mother. Literally. She was from Guatemala
originally. He went down there in the 1950s to oversee
construction of a dam his company was financing, and he
bought her from her parents for less than a hundred dollars
American. She was fourteen years old.”
“Nice,” Jay said. “Real fucking nice.”
Desiree had holed up in an old fisherman’s shack on
Longboat Key, which she’d rented at exorbitant rates, until
she could figure out her options. Jay had been sleeping on
the couch, and one night he woke to Desiree screaming from
a nightmare, and they both left the house for the cool of the
beach at three in the morning, both too rattled to sleep.
She wore only a sweatshirt he’d given her, a threadbare
blue thing from his undergraduate days with LSU embossed
on the front in white letters that had chipped and flaked over
the years. She was
196
SACRED / 197
broke, he’d discovered, afraid to use her credit cards on the
chance her father would notice and send someone else to
kill her. Jay sat beside her on the cool white sand as the surf
roared white out of a wall of darkness, and he found himself
staring at her hands clasped under her thighs, at the point
where her toes disappeared in the white sand, at the glow
from the moon as it threaded through the tangles in her hair.
And for the first time in his life, Jay Becker fell in love.
Desiree turned her head and met his eyes. “You won’t kill
me?” she said.
“No. Not a chance.”
“And you don’t want my money?”
“You don’t have any,” Jay said, and they both laughed.
“Everyone I care about dies,” she said.
“I know,” Jay said. “You’ve had some shitty luck.”
She laughed, but it was bitter and fearful. “Or betrays me
like Jeff Price.”
He touched her thigh just below the hem of the sweatshirt.
He waited for her to remove his hand. And when she didn’t,
he waited for her to close her own over it. He waited for the
surf to tell him something, to suddenly know the right thing
to say.
“I won’t die,” he said and cleared his throat. “And I won’t
betray you. Because if I do betray you”—and he was as sure
of this as he’d ever been of anything—“I definitely will die.”
And she smiled at him, her teeth the white of ivory in the
night.
Then she peeled off the sweatshirt and came to him, brown
and beautiful and shaking from fear.
198 / DENNIS LEHANE
“When I was fourteen,” she told Jay that night as she lay
beside him, “I looked just like my mother had. And my
father noticed.”
“And acted upon it?” Jay said.
“What do you think?”
“Trevor give you his speech about grief?” Jay asked us as
the waitress brought us two more coffees and another beer.
“The one about grief being carnivorous?”
“Yeah,” Angie said.
Jay nodded. “Gave me the same speech when he hired
me.” He held his hands out in front of him on the table,
turned them back and forth. “Grief isn’t carnivorous,” he
said. “Grief is my hands.”
“Your hands,” Angie said.
“I can feel her flesh in them,” he said. “Still. And the
smells?” He tapped his nose. “Sweet Jesus. The scent of sand
on her skin or the salt in the air coming through the screens
of that fisherman’s shack? Grief, I swear to God, doesn’t
live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I
want to do is cut off my nose so I can’t smell her, hack my
fingers off at the joint.”
He looked at us, as if suddenly realizing we were there.
“You son of a bitch,” Angie said and her voice cracked as
tears glistened on her cheekbones.
“Shit,” Jay said. “I forgot. Phil. Angie, I’m sorry.”
She waved away his hand and wiped her face with a
cocktail napkin.
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