This day, of all days, he had an obligation to the dead. Two teenage boys, improbably thin, wearing baggy swim trunks slung low on their narrow hips, ambled along the beach from the north and stopped near Joe’s towel. One wore his long hair in a ponytail, the other in a buzz cut. Both were deeply browned by the sun. They turned to gaze at the ocean, their backs to him, blocking his view.
As Joe was about to ask them to move out of his way, the kid with the ponytail said, “You holding anything, man?”
Joe didn’t answer because he thought, at first, that the boy was talking to his buzz-cut friend.
“You holding anything?” the kid asked again, still staring at the ocean. “Looking to make a score or move some merchandise?”
“I’ve got nothing but beer,” Joe said impatiently, tipping up his sunglasses to get a better look at them, “and it’s not for sale.”
“Well,” said the kid with the buzz cut, “if you ain’t a candy store, there’s a couple guys watching sure think you are.”
“Where?”
“Don’t look now,” said the boy with the ponytail. “Wait till we get some distance. We been watching them watch you. They stink of cop so bad, I’m surprised you can’t smell ’em.”
The other said, “Fifty feet south, near the lifeguard tower. Two dinks in Hawaiian shirts, look like preachers on vacation.”
“One’s got binoculars. One’s got a walkie-talkie.”
Bewildered, Joe lowered his sunglasses and said, “Thanks.”
“Hey,” said the boy with the ponytail, “just doing the friendly thing, man. We hate those self-righteous assholes.”
With nihilistic bitterness that sounded absurd coming from anyone so young, the kid with the buzz cut said, “Screw the system.”
As arrogant as young male tigers, the boys continued south along the beach, checking out the girls. Joe had never gotten a good look at their faces.
A few minutes later, when he finished his first beer, he turned, opened the lid of the cooler, put away the empty can, and looked nonchalantly back along the sward. Two men in Hawaiian shirts were standing in the shadow of the lifeguard tower.
The taller of the two, in a predominantly green shirt and white cotton slacks, was studying Joe through a pair of binoculars. Alert to the possibility that he’d been spotted, he calmly turned with the binoculars to the south, as if interested not in Joe but in a group of bikini-clad teenagers.
The shorter man wore a shirt that was mostly red and orange. His tan slacks were rolled at the cuffs. He was barefoot in the sand, holding his shoes and socks in his left hand.
In his right hand, held down at his side, was another object, which might be a small radio or a CD player. It might also be a walkie-talkie.
The tall guy was cancerously tanned, with sun-bleached blond hair, but the smaller man was pale, a stranger to beaches.
Popping the tab on another beer and inhaling the fragrant foamy mist that sprayed from the can, Joe turned to the sea once more.
Although neither of the men looked as if he’d left home this morning with the intention of going to the shore, they appeared no more out of place than Joe did. The kids had said that the watchers stank of cop, but even though he’d been a crime reporter for fourteen years, Joe couldn’t catch the scent.
Anyway, there was no reason for the police to be interested in him. With the murder rate soaring, rape almost as common as romance, and robbery so prevalent that half the populace seemed to be stealing from the other half, the cops would not waste time harassing him for drinking an alcoholic beverage on a public beach.
High on silent pinions, shining white, three sea gulls flew northward from the distant pier, at first paralleling the shoreline. Then they soared over the shimmering bay and wheeled across the sky.
Eventually Joe glanced back toward the lifeguard tower. The two men were no longer there.
He faced the sea again.
Incoming breakers broke, spilling shatters of foam on the sand. He watched the waves as a willing subject might watch a hypnotist’s pendant swinging on a silver chain.