Dave lifted his drink off the table and said, “I’d like to think that guy’s a new boat owner and he hasn’t learned the easy touch of getting in and out of the marina, but more likely it’s someone who can’t spell the word consideration.”

O’Brien had just disconnected from the call, jotting down the phone number at the bottom of the picture. He stared at the photo and said nothing. Dave puffed his cigar and studied O’Brien for a moment. “I’ve seen that look on your face too many times, Sean. Something’s happened or happening, and it’s beginning to suck you into the wormhole. Do you mind me asking who was on the other end of the line? If it was your stock broker, I’d infer that you lost a bundle.”

“It was the antique dealer, the guy who couldn’t place the name or face of the man who bought the painting of this woman.” O’Brien motioned to the picture on the table.

“What’d he say? Did he say how he suddenly remembered the buyer’s face?”

“He saw it on television, on the news. It was a picture of the man wearing a Confederate uniform.”

Dave’s eyebrows rose. He sipped his whiskey, cracking a piece of ice between his back teeth. “Was the unlucky fella, the guy who was shot and killed on the movie set, the buyer of the painting?”

“One and the same. The dead guy’s name is Jack Jordan. The antique dealer said the man came in the shop a few months ago with his wife and they bought the original oil painting of the woman in the photo and a stack of old magazines.”

Dave blew air out of his cheeks, his eyes watching the lighthouse. “This is unsettling, maybe a game-changer. It might be a good point in time for you to call your client and politely decline his open offer for you to find and retrieve the painting.”

“Why? Police are saying the shooting appears accidental. The deceased man’s widow may have the painting. Maybe, at some point, my client could buy it from her.”

“That’s possible. However, if you accept the job, your journey could take a fork in the road that may lead you to some murky places. I don’t say that without duly considering the hypothesis. What begins as a lost-and-found may reverse itself and turn into something found and lost. You’re helping an old man find something lost, and by doing so you find the evidence that proves his relative wasn’t a coward in battle…this noble effort may lead to a mystery better left in the past. Why? Well, ask yourself this question: is this chain of events coincidental or are there other forces, darker forces, at play here?”

O’Brien said nothing for a long moment, Gibraltar, rocking slightly in the changing tide. “It could be a fluke, nothing more or less. Like you suggested, if this guy, Jack Jordan, had a man-cave, maybe the painting is there.”

Dave finished his Irish whiskey, lifting Max to his lap, scratching her behind the ears. A salty breeze puffing across the harbor from the ocean, the moving beam from the lighthouse piercing a hole into the dark far out over the Atlantic. “And there could be a hibernating grizzly bear in that abandoned man-cave. You know, Sean, most of reason and deductive logic in life begins with a given — a postulate that can’t be proved or disproved, but the preponderance of reason sets the outer perimeter and everything works inward from there, sort of like working in from the borders of a known circle. That doesn’t exist in the shadowy world you often find yourself in because evil has no borders, no limits, and no presumed axiom from which to start. It’s just there, my friend. And your circle can grow outward because the criminal mind is without conventional reason. So you fight the fight, but never define the undefinable because it’s always just over the horizon…in any and every direction. And there lies evil.”

“Maybe there’s nothing criminal about this. You’re reading the tea leaves and there’s nothing in the bottom of the cup, at least not yet.”

“I’m not reading tea leaves, I’m reading the way that you’re looking at the face of the enigmatic woman in the photo. Don’t let it become the face of unreason, the image of Medusa. Want another drink?”

“I might need one after what you just said, but right now, I’m going to have a long walk with Max on the beach, then take a shower and hit the sack.”

O’Brien was in a dimly lit room, hot air rife with the stench of mouse feces, dead cockroaches in the corners. He sat, stripped to his waist, against a concrete wall, his hands cuffed to a chain locked to a large ring in the center of the floor. His face was bloodied, left eye swollen, lower teeth loose. He could hear them outside the door. He knew the sounds of their boots walking by, the slow stride of the heavier guard, and the lighter steps of the slender guard.

Held prisoner for three weeks in a darkened room, O’Brien felt his senses — hearing and smell — becoming more acute. He could smell the heavyset guard at the door as he turned the key in the lock. The odor was always worse after lunch when the jowly man ate garlic-laced raw lamb, falafel, and tabbouleh, all washed down with sweet wine, except for the parsley pieces that stuck in his small teeth.

There was another sound. Not the noise of boots. It was the softer pace of sandals. Sandals worn by the interrogator. The man entered the room, followed by a tall gaunt-faced man with a knife in his tunic. The interrogator wore the clothes of an afghan warlord — taqiyah hat, thawb coat, a Berretta 9mm strapped to his hip. He carried a wicker basket in one hand. He stood in front of O’Brien and then squatted — eye to eye. “You know, Major O’Brien, they are not coming for you. They disavow your very existence. You are, to them, expendable…collateral damage, as was my son when one of your president’s drones killed him and seventeen other children under the age of twelve.”

O’Brien said nothing.

The interrogator leaned in closer. O’Brien could smell old sweat on his clothes and goat cheese on his breath. “Abdul is so impatient.” The interrogator cut his dark eyes to the man standing at the door. “Abdul has beheaded seven infidels, and his knife is dull. So the process takes a while.”

The man slowly opened the top of the wicker basket and reached inside. There was the buzzing of flies mixed with the stench of rotten flesh. He lifted the decapitated head of a man O’Brien knew well. Maggots wriggled in the eye sockets. The interrogator held the head by the hair, waving it less than a foot from O’Brien’s face. “If you don’t tell me what I must have, Major O’Brien, this is what will happen to you. He was your friend, yes? Guess what my men have done with your friend’s head…they used it as a soccer ball. And now they need another one.” The interrogator grunted, a slow grin forming, his black eyes as detached as a dead mackerel.

O’Brien awoke and sat straight up in bed, breathing fast, sheet soaked from perspiration, his heart hammering in his chest. He looked out the porthole from Jupiter’s master berth, the moon over the harbor, its milky light reflecting from the dark water. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:37. He reached for a water bottle next to the clock and took a long swallow, the water doing little to quench the burning in his gut.

Max raised her head, staring at O’Brien from where she slept curled in a ball at the foot of the bed. “It’s okay, Max. Just a dream…one that keeps coming back. Do you ever dream? Let’s go topside for some air, okay? It’ll be dawn soon.” O’Brien slipped on his jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, and boat shoes. He lifted Max off the bed, went onto the cockpit and climbed the stairs leading to the fly bridge. He settled into the captain’s chair, Max on his lap, the marina soaked in darkness.

A gentle breeze coming in from the Atlantic caused Jupiter to pitch slightly. A sailboat halyard at the top of a mast clanked a half dozen times in the draft. O’Brien watched a shrimp boat enter Ponce Inlet, churning its way slowly up the bay, soon to dock at one of the seafood processors. He could just hear the drone of the boat’s diesels as it chugged upriver, white and red running lights iridescent over the black water.