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chartable, predictable. Withdrawal from a chemical dependence would take time, but the chemical’s hold must necessarily grow weaker day by day by day.
    It made sense that the same would be true of Pilar’s hold on me.
    So slowly, surely, I began to resume my old life at Dinkin’s Bay as well as my old role as willing confidant,sunset cocktail buddy, dependable big brother, dispenser of cold beer and heartfelt advice and of confidential favors.
    In short, I was making the return to the quiet and peaceful life I’ve always wanted.
    Which is when Tucker Gatrell called….

3
    T he thing that first surprised me about Amanda Calloway (Amanda Richardson, as she told me to call her) was that she looked so unlike her father.
    Didn’t have Bobby’s perfect features, that’s for sure.
    No, he’d been tall and golden haired; of a type you sometimes hear women say, “He’s
too
good looking,” as if, by dismissing him, they could distance themselves from a man who was probably beyond their wildest hopes anyway.
    Bobby knew it, too. Was very, very careful about his hair and his clothes. On R&R in Singapore or Bangkok, he had his favorite barbers, his favorite masseuses, his own personal tailors.
    Vain, yes. But a womanizer, no. He was committed to Gail, his wife. We spent four months together in Asia; he’d been there a couple of months before I arrived and there was not a single lapse. Not that he ever mentioned to me. No joking around about being “separated,” no locker-room winks and nudges. The man loved and was dedicated to the woman with whom he’d already had one child and hopedto have more. And half a year is a long time to be alone in a region we called the Back of Beyond.
    So it wasn’t women. No … Bobby just liked it; liked being healthy and handsome; the expensive life. The same way some men and women enjoy bodybuilding, he took pleasure in the details of an elevated lifestyle and the way he looked.
    “This is why I need to make lots and lots of money,” he’d tell me. Or: “Man, I was born to be rich. I got no other choice.” He might be modeling some silk suit; looking at himself in the mirror, being critical and enjoying it. “There’s no way I can afford this kind of stuff—a tailored Armani? Even a copy like this. Are you kidding? Not back in the States on what I make. I need to get the hell out of this work and start my own business. Or maybe the movies. What’a you think?”
    I told him he’d made a very strange choice, getting involved with Naval Intelligence and Naval Special Warfare, if he had aspirations of being a film star.
    He’d said that he couldn’t help himself. He was hooked, out of control or something like that—which was bullshit. He was playing a standard role, Mr. Adventurer, for standard reasons: “I’m a dead-on adrenaline junkie and where else can I get paid to skydive, scuba dive and sneak around at night wearing tac-paint while bad guys try to pop me? Carry a weapon, allowed to
kill
people? Jesus, anyplace else, what I do’d be illegal.”
    No argument there.
    It was that way with most men who were involved in that peculiar and dangerous line of work. They had talent, brains—name a field, they would have probably excelled in it. And Bobby seemed to have more going for him than most. He had looks, taste, style … and that peculiar light that one associates with certain politicians who have the knack of inspiring affection rather than creating envy.
    Bobby Richardson had it all; seemed to have been born under a lucky guardian star. Until one night, 100 klicksnorth of Phnom Penh, he was vaporized by a mortar round and was sent back to the States in a sack not much bigger than a cigar box which contained a hand, a foot, bits and pieces of hair and bone, with no space at all left over for ego or hopes or vanity….
    Bobby’s only child, however, was very plain in comparison to the way he had looked….
    I was on the lower deck of my stilthouse working on the fish