TWO

Jack stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom off his study scratching the little cleft on his chin and looking at the dark stubble. Something in the image troubled him. A single wisp of gray hair had slipped out from the sea of dark brown at one temple. At his age he could have had a mass of these. But Jack led a charmed life in all ways but one, the only one that seemed to matter to him at the moment.

He was bare to the waist, trim and athletic, with a tan that he’d added to on a five-day trip to the Bahamas, an excursion to kill the frustration and pain of continued failure. A hot beach and the warmth of the sun always gave Jack the lift he needed in low moments. And the young girls in thong bikinis with tans to match didn’t hurt.

But now he was back at Coffin Point and the realities of life, which at this moment in his mind were dismal.

He plucked the gray hair from his temple and washed it down the sink, put his body on the scale and weighed it. Lost three pounds. He always did in the tropics. Life was not fair, and Jack was on the winning side more than he had a right to be. He had the wild consolation that if he went to hell, a prospect that given his diversions in life was not entirely improbable, even in that hot place he could debauch himself, attract all the best-looking women, and still lose weight.

He checked the luminous dial of his diving watch. Seven-thirty. He shaved, combed his hair, pulled a white polo shirt on over his head, and wandered in front of the dormer windows of his study. Beyond the yard and the marshes, a twinmasted ketch plied its way through the winding channels using its engine to buck the tide as it motored in the direction of Hilton Head.

He looked at the yard and the peeling white picket fence that separated it from the marsh. The old plantation house had seen better days. Jack had the money for repairs but not the inclination.

He walked to the desk and for a long moment simply stared down at the surface. There in the center on top of the leather-edged blotter was the letter with its envelope, ragged edge torn open across the top. It had arrived yesterday morning, the fifth such letter in two months.

He picked it up and read the words one more time, only five lines long, then folded it neatly and slipped it back into the envelope, headed out the door and down the stairs.

In the hall he paused long enough to open the center drawer of an antique secretary, reach inside and remove the nine-millimeter Beretta. He fished in the back of the drawer and found the loaded clip heavy with fifteen rounds. He slammed the clip into the handle and tucked the pistol into the belt of his pants at the small of his back. Now he moved quickly without hesitation down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back door to the yard.

Salt air and sea breezes hit his nostrils as he paced across the yard, a hundred feet, past the brick patio with its chairs and umbrella-covered table; another fifty feet to the picket fence where he stopped, nearly in a daze. A bead of sweat trickled from the hair at the nape of his neck down his shirt. He looked at the boat in the distance, and for several moments stood stone still, his hands resting on the pickets of the fence, his mind absorbed in thought. Then almost absently he slipped the envelope with its letter into the crack formed by the fence’s top railing and one of the pickets. Trapped in this crack, the envelope’s loose left end in the gap between pickets fluttered in the breeze. Jack looked at it in a trance, and slowly moved away as if he were making one final attempt to distance himself from the letter’s bad news.

At the patio, he reached behind his back, removed the pistol, and laid it on the table. Then he slumped into one of the chairs and stared off into nothingness. He sat there still and silent for more than five minutes.

Finally he reached for the gun, kicked off the safety with his thumb so that the red dots appeared at each side. He pulled the slide back and let it go, slamming a round into the firing chamber. Carefully he held the muzzle up close to his mouth, until he could easily reach out with the tip of his tongue to flick the white dot on the front site.

In a flash he leveled the muzzle and pulled off five quick rounds. The roar of gunfire sent birds billowing into the air from the trees. He realigned the sights and fired ten more shots, emptying the clip.

Fifty feet away, little punched-out pieces of paper fluttered to the ground where they joined a small but growing pile—the fractured trademarks and names of a dozen book publishers. With rejection letters Jack always concentrated his fire on the company logo in the left-hand corner.