Forty settles in and someone else’s ass was there and animals probably dip into this and people are foul. “Come on, Professor,” he calls, waving. “I know you’re all New York and shit but there’s nothing gay about getting into a spring with another dude.”

“I’m good.”

“Come on,” he says. “This is God’s hot tub. This is home, Old Sport. Get in here. Man up. Live up! Feel the fire! You get in here, this is how you make a movie. You let your mind go.”

He waves his arms at the blue blanket sky and howls. I sit down in the dirt. “You know,” I say. “There are just as many creative people out there who aren’t into this sort of thing. Woody Allen would never get into dirty hole of hot water.”

Forty laughs. “He’d fuck a tween though.” He smiles. “He’s an artist! We’re weird! Professor, you need to get your weird on. Stop being so safe. You think, you bear down, but do you ever just go for it? Honestly, you’re a great writer. But I think you’d be golden if you had the guts to get in it.”

This coming from a guy who sold my scripts in his name and I go back to the car to make him more Percocet water. Every time he does coke, he fights my downers. He’s making this so much harder than it has to be and we can’t stay here forever. I shake the bottle and offer it to him.

“I’m fine,” he says, waving me off. “Get in!”

It’s my turn to tell him I’m fine and he attempts to swim in his little hole, as if there’s room. It’s fitting that he will drown in two feet of water when his sister appointed herself a national advocate for water safety. I sip my water, no drugs.

“You sure you don’t want some?”

“Fuck, yes, I want a sip!”

His memory is eroding. I read about wet brain. Maybe that’s what it is, Forty swallowing the water he said he didn’t want a minute ago. I need him lower, weaker. Henderson had no tolerance. He went so quietly in the end but this is ridiculous.

“What else you got in your bag of tricks?” I ask.

“Iowaska, baby!” He reaches in for his tea. He drinks. That’s a good boy. Let that tea mix with the Percocets. Let the poisons collide. He passes me the bottle. I pretend to drink. I am a good boy.

In Closer, Jude Law tells Natalie Portman, “This will hurt,” and then it does hurt. That is where I am right now, no matter what a dick he is. It’s starting to hit me. Killing Forty will hurt Love. In a fucked-up way, she won’t know how to live without the drama and this is going to be harder than I thought. But then, all change hurts. In the end, Love will be a new person without her brother. She’ll sleep better. She won’t have to find a way to forgive him every time he fucks her over. She won’t have to let him into her home or rationalize her feelings. Imagine what she could do with the power, the power I’m giving to her by doing away with him.

Forty flips onto his belly, a baby whale. He dips his butter knife into his bag. “I feel whoa,” he says. “Like whoa.”

“Just go with it,” I tell him. “Ride the wave.”

“Wouldn’t that be cool if there were waves in here?” he asks. “You ever think about that? How there can’t be waves without a lot of water?”

This is the part of college I never wanted: a self-important fuckwit contemplating the sea. I get my phone. I can’t listen to this shit. It’s only going to get worse as he slips away and loses access to his brain, what’s left of it. I have a new e-mail, a Google news alert. My chest tightens. I click on the link and it takes me to the Providence Journal Bulletin. There is a picture of Peach Salinger, looking happier than she ever did in real life. Peach’s parents love her more dead than they did when she was alive. They whitened her smile and enlarged her eyes and now they are seeking justice.

“A wave.” Forty pontificates. “A wave never goes away. Like, what if the ocean just stopped? What then?”

Forty blathers. His words aren’t words anymore, just sounds, as I read the news, the unbelievable news.

The Little Compton Police Department received an anonymous tip regarding local girl and Brown graduate Peach Salinger. Authorities won’t reveal details about the tip but they do confirm that they have reopened the case. They were wrong that it was suicide. Or at least, they think they were wrong. The language is delicate, hesitant, but the message is clear. They think Peach Salinger was murdered. And they have started a brand-new investigation. Oh, fuck. Double thousand triple fuckity fuck. Forty starts slapping the surface to create waves and I have no patience for the whale in the water anymore. I have to get out of here. I have to deal with this.

I put my phone in my pocket and I walk to the hole in the mud. He’s half gone, pupils warbling toward the underside of his skull where that poisoned pink brain slows to a halt. He’s going, but I can’t wait. I can’t sit here, not with an investigation open on the other side of the country.

“Hey, buddy,” I say. And when he swims toward me, I lean over and push Forty Quinn’s head under the water. My hands are on fire. The water is at least ninety degrees and the air is hot and I feel my body become a furnace, the heat rises, curling around my arm like something out of a Dr. Seuss poem. He isn’t like Henderson. He doesn’t struggle. He is weak. Dark yellow piss whispers out of his soft, vile dick. Dehydration. I look up at the sky and I wait for his unconscious body to stop flailing.

Finally it’s over. Monty Baldwin is dead. His fake ID is stuffed into his brick of coke. The condom wrapper is a godsend, more DNA, not mine. I pull my hands out of the water. I catch my breath. At some point the butter knife fell into the water with him and it’s there, glistening at the bottom. I’ve never tried cocaine before. I dip my finger into his bag. I do like he did, one tiny bump. I shake. But maybe that’s just that feeling you get when you’re next to a brand-new corpse.

45

THERE is no way around it. I have to lie to Love. I am on the phone with her while I wait in the JetBlue Terminal at McCarran Airport. They have slot machines here too and I am leaving Las Vegas and I am going to Little Compton but I can’t tell Love that.

I have no explicit plan. It’s probably stupid of me to return to the scene of the crime. But I can’t stay in Vegas and wait for the police to find Forty and I can’t go to LA and sit on the sofa with Love and refresh the search engines for information on Peach Salinger. Because the truth is that I fucked up. I left the mugofurine, my one loose end, and I won’t let it be my undoing.

Besides if I’m going to be caught for murdering that depressive, vicious Salinger, I’d rather it happen there. This is why dads don’t let their kids visit them in prison, why people dying from cancer don’t want their picture taken. This investigation could expose that mug of piss and I don’t want Love to have to see me in handcuffs.

Love is on the phone, silent, sighing every few seconds, a signal that she wants me to stay on. It is never a good thing when a woman is silent. I have to keep asking if she’s there.

“Yes,” she says. “Why?”

“’Cause you’re not saying anything.”

“What do you want me to say?” she asks. “I’m irritated. I’m sick of this. I can’t get anything done and I don’t know if my brother’s dead and it sucks.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”

“Did you start at Caesars like I said?”

And I say yes and we retrace my steps again and I promise to keep trying. “You know he’ll turn up,” I say.

“Which casino are you at right now?”

“Planet Hollywood,” I lie.

She sighs. “He doesn’t like their tables.”

“I know,” I say. “I remember you said that, Love. But I’m trying everything. Unless you want me to come home . . .”