style="font-size:15px;"> ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word,’ Alex said.
She and Dan were almost to the corner when Junior called out, ‘I’m going to need that offer in writing.’
He sounded dead serious.
Alexandra ran the same stretch of beach every morning after work – to get out of her head, back into her body.
Black jogging bra, white shorts, barefoot. Her car parked across at the Seaquarium lot, Alex doing sprints down the empty distances of Crandon Park. Across the bay, the towering limestone pillars of downtown Miami were candied by the rising light, a pink-and-gold coating that gave a sugary, fairy-tale radiance to the city, magic dust sparkling off the chrome and polished glass. From that distance, a mile, maybe two, the city seemed gorgeously serene. None of the grit visible, no stench of gunpowder, nor the haze of tension and danger from the long night before. For half an hour each morning as she did her sprints, the city was washed with a powerful dose of fresh sunlight and the steady breezes of a new day, and for that little while it was almost possible to believe that her hometown might still be saved.
Dash fifty yards, walk ten, dash another fifty. Stay in the soft sand for maximum resistance. In thirty minutes, she could crank her heart rate up to 175, make her skin shine, make every muscle sing. Sweat out the rancid hours of the night before. Go home somewhat cleansed.
She was twenty-five minutes into it, pulse hammering, her left calf on the edge of a cramp, as she slowed to another short walk. Down the beach, headed her way, was an elderly couple; the man leading the way was bald and shirtless, wearing a baggy pale blue bathing suit. Trailing him by a few feet was a woman with her white pants legs rolled up. She had on a loose flowered shirt and her white hair straggled from beneath a blue porkpie hat. She was swinging one of those wands, a metal detector, scrounging for pennies at the edge of the surf.
Alex took a deep breath, rose up on her toes, and began her final sprint.
And nearly ran over him.
It was as if he’d risen from the sand, an apparition in white long-sleeved T-shirt and white shorts.
Dodging to her left, Alexandra stumbled, almost went down. The man lurched after her, but she got her balance and took two quick steps back, out of range.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you saw me.’
‘Jesus, Jason.’
‘My, my, you look particularly luminous this morning.’
He smiled, kept coming toward her, and she kept backing. At the surf line, the old couple had stopped and were staring at this strange encounter.
Jason Patterson was a handsome man. Dark hair swept back, black eyes, which she’d only lately learned to read. He had strong cheekbones and his skin was a degree or two lighter than cinnamon, as if perhaps his great-great-grandfather had been an Iroquois warrior. Limber as willow and mongoose-quick, he had only one defect as a fighter – a slight lack of killer instinct, a brief hesitation before he struck the finishing blow.
He was circling left, heading into her weaker side.
‘Jason, please. I’m not up to this today.’
‘Another rough night, huh?’ He continued to circle.
‘Bloody Rapist again,’ she said. ‘I’m worn down. Fatigued.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’ll even things up.’
‘No, really. Not today.’
His smile faded. He halted, his body shifting into fudodacbi, the rooted stance. Four feet away. Surf rolling in behind him. Gulls coasting low. A sandpiper strutted stiffly between them, pecked at the sand. A few miles out on the surface of the blinding water, a crimson sun floated like an abandoned beach ball caught on the outgoing tide, while clouds with the dirty gray translucence of fish scales clustered along the horizon.
A few years younger than Alex, Jason Patterson was six feet tall, around 175 pounds, with a competitive swimmer’s cinched waist and deep chest. He was a Rokudan, a sixth-degree black belt and assistant instructor at the Shotokan Karate Center in Coral Gables. He worked as a stockbroker and lived at trendy Grove Isle. Beyond that, Alex knew nothing of Jason’s personal life.
She knew his body, though, was intimately familiar with his reflexes and the power and quickness of his strikes, the moans he made when he was straining, the tart citrus aroma of his sweat, the tensile strength of his fingers, and the nuances of his customary gestures, like that narrowing of left eye, and the one-inch drop of right shoulder that always announced a roundhouse kick.
For the last six years, Jason Patterson had been Alex’s instructor on the mats of the Shotokan dojo. Since the age of eleven, when she’d bullied her parents into letting her, Alexandra had been studying martial arts. First in a run-down strip shopping center near her home, and later in the air-conditioned upscale tranquillity of the Gables dojo. Nearly every week for the last year, it had been Jason Patterson’s custom to select Alexandra as his opponent when demonstrating new techniques. It always brought a hush to the other mats, the students gathering to watch her quickness and ingenuity matched against his superior strength and vast technique. She was certainly not his equal as a fighter, only a fourth-degree black, a Yodan, so she was flattered that he selected her above the more aggressive and accomplished men in the dojo.
Last July when Alex’s dad moved in, something had to go from her schedule, and with considerable reluctance, she’d decided it would be her two evenings of karate. A week after she stopped going, Jason showed up at the beach one morning wearing his white gi, standing quietly in her path along the hard-packed sand, waiting in the sbiko-dacbi stance. He said he missed her, that their workouts weren’t the same without her.
And that’s when he’d proposed this arrangement.
Without giving it a moment’s thought, she’d said yes. She liked Jason, and after skipping only a week, she was already feeling logy and stiff.
Their new sessions would be free-form. Unstructured, unpredictable. Anything was legal. To the limit and beyond. No more mat fighting, no more measured and disciplined lessons.
Full contact, all-out fighting until one of them yielded – nine times out of ten, it was Alex. Sometimes the fight was over in a few seconds; some mornings it took fifteen minutes. Two months ago, she’d cracked a bone in his wrist while blocking a punch, and a few weeks back he’d badly bruised two of her ribs. There had been regular welts, abrasions, strained tendons and ligaments. But she was a better fighter now than she’d ever been. More wary, more observant, and once the fight began, she was quicker, meaner, more willing to bring things to a sudden and complete conclusion.
Jason stepped forward, palms raised, shrugging.
She was settled into a relaxed watchfulness. Not tense, not overflexed.
‘I mean it, Jason. Today’s not good. I’m bushed.’
‘Okay, okay.’
He straightened from the cat stance, shook out his arms like a swimmer loosening up on the starting blocks, half-turned to give the old man a friendly wave, then spun back, lunged, leading with his left foot, a mae-geri, the basic front kick.
Day-one
