Free Blood Foam: A Lewis Cole Mystery (Lewis Cole series) by Brendan DuBois Page A

tonight’s zoning board meeting in order to speak to me, that encouraged me to do another favor. But the favor bank is now empty. I’m leaving now, and based on who you are and what I know about you, I know you’re not going to do anything physical to prevent my departure. Excuse me, then.”
    He walked by me and, knowing when I was defeated, I followed him. At the exit to the building, he shut off the lights to the hall and gestured me out, and I stepped outside into the early-morning darkness of the next day. A streetlight in the nearly empty parking lot gave everything a cold, harsh illumination.
    Behind me he locked the door, and we stood together on the granite steps. He said: “I’m sorry if I’m brusque, Mister Cole. It’s just that in one year and three months, I intend to be on a secluded beach somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, relaxing and never doing anything in the legal profession, ever again. And perhaps it’s the late hour or my exhaustion, I intend to get drunk and get laid every day, to make up for lost time.”
    “Sounds like a plan.”
    “The way things have turned out, and it was no grand plan, I’ve come to this point in my life with no real friends, no family. And I intend to unplug my legal mind and enjoy what’s left to come.”
    He walked over to his car, a salt-stained red Chrysler LeBaron, and I called out, “Can you pass a message along to Mark Spencer, then?”
    Lessard paused, turned. Seemed to consider that for a moment.
    “No,” he said, and he got into his car, started the engine, and drove off.
    About sixty seconds later, I did the same.
    Sleep didn’t come well to me, and I tossed and turned, even though my sleeping bag was recently washed and the inside of the Pilot smelled fairly reasonable. At some point I was awake and there was no going back to sleep, and I stretched and looked out the window.
    Everything was wrong.
    There was no Lafayette House parking lot, no stone wall, no breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
    Instead, there were some pine trees, a crowded parking lot, and the white buildings of Twelve Rockland Ridge.
    Mark Spencer’s home.
    I climbed out of my Pilot, stretched, and then washed up in a nearby grove of woods with some bottled water. I checked myself out in a sideview mirror, guessed I was reasonably presentable, and went to work, remembering what Diane Woods had said yesterday.
    Hate to say it, but go back again
.
    Which is what I was doing this early morning. In my previous canvass of Mark’s residence, I had managed to talk to every one of his neighbors save one. I stood by the front end of the Pilot, waiting. Mark Spencer’s condo was number 4, and the parking spot there was empty. The spot for number 3 was empty as well, and had been empty when I drove in here last night.
    I waited. Watched as men and women, young and not so young, trundled out of their condo units, to head off to work, or to school, or some combination thereof. A handful of kids trooped out as well, to walk down to the small intersection of Rockland Ridge and High Street, and in a few minutes a bright yellow school bus came to a halt, picked up the students, and headed out for the day, leaving me alone in the parking lot.
    Something hollow ached in my chest. All these couples, all these families, all having a place and a purpose to their lives and their loved ones, and here I was, standing alone, my own home shattered and—unless somethingdrastic and unexpected happened within the next day or two—was about to get hammered by a hurricane named Toni.
    I waited.
    About ten minutes after the school bus had left, a light yellow Toyota Corolla with a bad muffler rumbled up the road and pulled into the empty spot next to Mark Spencer’s equally empty spot. A tired-looking man got out, folded newspaper in hand, wearing black slacks, black shoes, and dark blue windbreaker. He unlocked the door to his unit, walked in, and closed the door behind him.
    I waited, and then I went to join