Status Updates From Scorpion Reef

I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada--Not the big places where we'd be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.

I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was "button, button." The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn't find it, you killed somebody. You didn't know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.

She didn't say anything. She brought her arms up very slowly and put them about my neck. We went under, our lips together, arms tight about each other. It was like falling endlessly through a warm, rosy cloud. I seemed to realize, very dimly, that it was water we were sinking through and that if we didn't stop it and swim up we'd drown right there, but apparently there was nothing I could do about it.

I didn't know much about the law or the workings of the courts, but I had sense enough to realize that what I was about to do was criminal. The other hadn't been, even though it had killed him. I could still go call the police and everything would be on my side. A half dozen generations of lawyers and New England clergymen leaned over my shoulder and whispered fiercely that that was the only thing to do.

I went out in the street and bought a paper, standing on the corner while I rustled impatiently through it to the classified section. She was still listed among a dozen others in the broker's ad. 36 ft. aux, slp. Ballerina. Slps 4. Now there was a description, I thought sourly. The poet who dreamed it up would probably call the Taj Mahal an oldr. type bldg, suitbl. lge. fmly.

It was a hot, Gulf Coast morning in early June. The barge was moored out on the T-head of the old Parker Mill dock near the west end of the waterway. Carter had gone to New Orleans to bid on a salvage job and I was living on board alone. I was checking over some diving gear on the forward deck when a car rolled out of the end of the shed. It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a girl in it.

There was something ghostly about it. The mate and the two ABs of the boarding party looked at each other, unable to believe what they saw.

Solo llevo un 4% y ya sé que voy a disfrutar mucho este libro. Una narración extraordinaria. Unos diálogos exquisitos.
"Salió, cerró la puerta y anduvo hacia el borde del muelle con la tranquila suavidad de la miel vertida".
Genial.

Primer libro que leo de uno de los mejores de la novela negra.