Swimming with the Angels Read online

  Praise for Colin Kersey’s Soul Catcher

  This is a stunning first novel for Colin Kersey. He has written a rousing supernatural thriller as memorable as those of Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Kersey promises to be one of the strongest voices in the genre for years to come.

  TULSA WORLD

  Colin Kersey’s Soul Catcher is the best kind of first novel, a fast-paced thriller absolutely overflowing with riches. Open it and enter a fascinating world of Northwest lore, heartfelt characters, and one very smart dog. Get comfortable, because once the spirit wind launches its reign of revenge on Seattle, you will not be able to put it down.

  JO-ANN MAPSON, AUTHOR OF HANK AND CHLOE

  AND BLUE RODEO

  Exciting, eerie, with excellent characterizations and a fast pace, this is a believable thriller.

  ELLENVILLE PRESS

  Chilling and ravishing. This author has a wonderful ear for the language and a profound insight into the sounds of silence.

  S.P. SOMTOW, AUTHOR OF VANITAS AND JASMINE NIGHTS

  First time novelist Kersey melds elements of the Indian curse story and the disaster novel in the fast-paced horror tale set in contemporary Seattle. Kersey shows an aptitude for bringing characters to life.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Colin Kersey’s first effort is a mature and auspicious debut.

  WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

  Kersey’s supernatural thriller is full of interesting characters and events. The city itself – lovingly and accurately portrayed – and the rampaging williwaw give a special flavor to this engrossing and unusual first novel that will appeal to its readers.

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  A big bad wind avenges the murder of Native American shaman Black Wolf by destroying large areas of Seattle: a rousing supernatural thriller by first-novelist Kersey.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Unclassifiable, but imaginative and intriguing, providing a detailed portrait of Seattle. Kersey has been likened to Dean Koontz.

  THE POISONED PEN

  SWIMMING

  WITH

  THE

  ANGELS

  COLIN KERSEY

  atmosphere press

  © 2021 Colin Kersey

  Published by Atmosphere Press

  Author photo by Isabel Lawrence

  Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

  No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is entirely coincidental.

  atmospherepress.com

  for Vicki

  CONTENTS

  PART I: PHOTOGRAPHS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART II: OPENING DAY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PART III: MOSES

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT ATMOSPHERE PRESS

  PART I

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

  -Joan Miró

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first time a camera saved my life, I was newly married with big dreams and a terrifying level of naivete.

  I left my boots and an accusing fragrance of hawthorn, cypress, and chicken shit in the entryway. It was late on a Friday evening and I was relieved to find Heide was home making dinner. Tonight, she wore only an apron and a pair of blue panties. Some people insist on their food being cooked by people wearing clothes. I am not one of them.

  I kissed the back of her neck while I admired the penne pasta being tossed with chicken, capers, onions, peppers, and olive oil.

  “Looks tempting,” I said as I ran my hands up over her belly to her breasts. “The food looks tasty, too.”

  She snorted and kissed my cheek. “How was work?”

  “Oh, you know how it is with landscaping. Lots of dirt, and then some more dirt. Very dirty.” I tweaked her nipples and continued nuzzling her neck. “How was yours?”

  She spanked the pasta solidly with the wooden spoon, turned off the burner, and swiveled to throw her arms around me. “You are a naughty man.”

  “Dirty.”

  “And I like it.”

  A long kiss followed. Very long.

  “Is the pasta ready?” I asked afterward.

  “It can wait.” She grabbed my belt buckle and pulled me toward the bedroom. Dinner would be delayed.

  ***

  “Seriously, how was your day?” I asked later as she stroked the hairs on my chest.

  “Have I ever told you how much I love your furry chest?” she asked.

  “Once or twice.”

  “My day was great.” She paused. “Incredible actually.”

  I lifted her chin so I could look into her green eyes. “Did you win the lotto or something?”

  “Something like that,” she said coyly.

  “Tell me.”

  She put a finger to my lips. “Why don’t you shut up and get me some wine?”

  When I came back, she was frowning as she held up my mud-caked jeans from the floor where I had discarded them. “You weren’t kidding about the dirt.”

  “You didn’t seem to mind earlier.” I held out her glass of wine. “By the way, what happened to dinner?”

  “Dinner can wait. Put down the wine and come back to bed. I’m not through with you yet.”

  Some nights we skipped dinner. This was evidently going to be one of those nights.

  ***

  “I have no problem living with a man who likes to get his hands dirty,” Heide said later. “Actually,” she purred, “I kind of like it.”

  She reached for the glass of wine on the nightstand. “But I have a problem living with a man as talented as you are and whose vocabulary is limited to four-letter words and a few foul Spanish phrases.”

  “Well—” I managed to swallow an obscenity. Heide was right. The dialogue of a landscaping crew made up of several day workers and a couple of full-timers like me was not exactly Masterpiece Theater repartee.

  “Your photographs are better than some of the stuff I see in art galleries. When are you going to get serious about your career?”

  “Someday.” I brushed a lock of hair the color of a rusty nail from her face. It was a great face. Freckles plentiful as stars.

  �
�‘Someday’ is not an adequate answer. I need a plan. Now.” She poked me in the chest. “Either give me a date, or I’ll make one for you. I am not planning to spend the rest of my life in a crappy one-bedroom apartment while my amazingly gifted husband breaks his back putting in lawns and fences for rich assholes.”

  During our first year of marriage, my career—or lack thereof—was one of the few things we argued about and, lately, the discussion was becoming tedious. I felt trapped with a capital “T.”

  I finished my glass of wine and wished I had thought to bring the bottle back to the bedroom.

  “Most photographers make even less than I do,” I countered. “An art director job for an advertising agency in L.A., on the other hand, would not only pay the bills, but leave us with enough for a down payment on a condo. Or maybe even a house with a yard for the kids in a couple of years.”

  “Kids as in baby goats, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, those too,” I said. “But I can’t get a job as an art director if I don’t have a book of experience, and I can’t get the experience without finishing my degree and getting an internship working on recognized brand names.”

  I had managed to finish my third year at Otis College of Art and Design before getting married and running through my savings. Thanks to a trillion or two of unpaid debt, college loans were now harder to get. And call me old-fashioned, I did not like starting off a marriage in deep financial distress. At least not more than the sinkhole we were already in danger of drowning in.

  “We’re talking at least 50K to finish school and that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Not with this landscaping job.”

  Heide was silent for a bit as she sipped her wine. Then she said, “I might be getting a raise soon.”

  My pulse rate rose an octave. “I’m probably hallucinating from starvation, but did you just say you were getting a raise?”

  “Big raise.”

  “Really?”

  She leaned over to kiss my nipple. “Would I lie to you?”

  A shimmer of hope crept under my normally suspicious radar. I might have asked why a wire transfer associate merited a big raise, but then she looked at me with that impish grin that had enraptured me on our first date. As my mother told me more than once: “Dev, you’re a sweet boy but you’re missing one important thing: it’s called ‘horse sense.’”

  I had fallen for Heide at least twelve minutes before the first moment I had seen her. Like so many Match.com subscribers, we met face to face in a coffee shop. Over iced lattes, I learned she had never been married, was not anxious to start a family, was bored with her job at the hedge fund, and wanted to see the world “before it gets too expensive, or there’s another pandemic.” As I recall, no one mentioned money.

  Our second date was on a Friday night. After too many glasses of wine, we went back to her place, made love like it was the Super Bowl of sex and we were on opposing teams, and woke up ready to go again. From that moment forward, we never spent another day apart.

  Yeah, I know it sounds foolish. But it worked. Until that day it didn’t.

  I was so enthralled by her body and the way she laughed that I totally overlooked whatever did not fit my view of her as the ideal partner. Like binge-watching old horror movies until four in the morning. Or the temper that could come out of nowhere.

  For Christmas, she bought me a Canon camera with a telephoto lens that we were still paying for. Among other things, I liked taking cameo photos. I had zero interest in posed photos, or worse—selfies. I preferred capturing the real person, hemorrhoids, and all. Often, the best way to do that was to catch them off guard. Heide did not mind me clicking away while she was taking a shower or getting dressed. If not in a hurry to get somewhere, she would sometimes put on a little exhibition. Taking photos while she was eating, however, was a no-no.

  Later that night, I woke up ravenous and discovered her missing from bed. A light shone from the kitchen. Thinking I might catch her in her nighty or less, I grabbed the camera from where it hung by a strap on the doorknob and tiptoed down the hallway. Shadows dappled the contours of the pale skin of her back as she stared at the bright screen of her laptop. When she heard the soft click of the camera, she slammed the laptop shut and whirled to face me.

  “What the fuck are you doing? Jesus!”

  “What’s with you?” I asked, taken aback.

  “You scared me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “You’re going to be dead tired in the morning,” I warned. We were scheduled to meet her boss and his family for a ride on their boat to Catalina Island.

  Later, I would realize how sadly prophetic my comment would turn out to be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Heide’s friend, Jeff, the head of IT at the hedge fund where she worked, had invited us on the boat. We planned to join his wife and daughter for drinks at their waterfront home on Lido Isle in Newport Harbor followed by a cruise to Catalina Island. Although they were only seven or eight years older than us, we lived on different planets financially. From the way we gawked, you might have thought we were astronauts setting foot on the moon for the first time. As I watched Jeff strut about in his floppy Panama hat, a large Cuban cigar in one hand and a glass of hundred-dollar tequila in the other, I could see how some people—such as my wife, I suspected—might feel jealous. I was reminded, however, of something my father once said. “We have a saying in India: ‘Money hides in the tiger’s ear.’ Do not go envying them with more than us. You don’t know what they had to do to get it.”

  My father has been in America for nearly 40 years, but to listen to him talk, you might think he just stepped off the plane from Bangalore. He often uses Indian proverbs when he speaks to me. Many of these colorful platitudes refer to tigers. I am not sure what this says about him. Or me.

  Newport Harbor is the picture-perfect place to live in Southern California. It is the largest pleasure-boat harbor in the country with more than ten thousand boats of all sizes from eight-foot dinghies to 150-foot luxury yachts. There are at least a dozen colorful bars and restaurants for people-watching and weather that is always at least ten degrees cooler than the rest of Orange County. Property is outrageously expensive, of course, which is why Heide and I were living two miles inland in a “charmingly petite” one-bedroom apartment. But you could enjoy an evening stroll or morning run on our hilltop bluff with a panoramic view of the harbor and the Pacific Ocean for free.

  It was the perfect place to live unless you must often drive to distant jobs on one of the many freeways. As I did with a million other drivers, many of them texting on cellphones, interspersed with the occasional lane-splitting daredevil motorcyclist. Travel time could easily double or more if a texter and daredevil crossed paths.

  Water lapped at the pier where I stood as the green-fringed fingers of California fan palms whispered secrets in the mild breeze. A slender line of clouds lay to the north while twenty-six miles to the west, the usually smog-obscured Catalina Island sat. It gleamed as if detailed in one of the car washes that Southern Californians frequent to rinse away the grit and grime from their cherished vehicles. With the Canon camera I captured a burst of photos as a brown pelican of prehistoric design swooped low, and then, wings tucked tightly against its sides, plummeted into the harbor in search of breakfast. Two docks away, a German shepherd gave chase, barking and leaping into the saltwater. A large sailboat glided by followed by a couple of young women paddleboarders wearing bikinis, their tanned leg and arm muscles taut as bowstrings.

  Each house snuggled up against its neighbor so that the view from the waterfront was of docks populated by electric Duffy boats with their trademark blue canopies, or by large sail or motor yachts, many of them outfitted with fake owls to scare away seagulls. Perched a few feet beyond the water’s edge and up short stairways were small but elaborate patios. They displayed explosions of potted red geraniums and expensive outdoor furniture posed on travertine flagst
ones circumscribed by immaculately groomed boxwood hedges leading to multi-million-dollar homes, each one striving to appear as prosperous as its neighbors.

  I noticed all this because my photography-trained eyes are accustomed to observing such details and, as part of a landscaping crew, I know how to spot thousand-dollar pots.

  Back at the nearly all-glass house a mere twenty feet from where I stood, Jeff’s wife, Debbie, and their young daughter, Christy, were carrying dishes of fruit, cheeses, and other munchies to their boat, a 30-foot-long bolt of cadmium-yellow fiberglass that appeared lightning fast just sitting there. A pirate flag hung from the rear stanchion like a one-finger salute to all those less fortunate.

  I was annoyed to see that Jeff had slung his drink-carrying arm around Heide, their heads bent close together. Occasionally, I would arrive home to find Heide missing. When she arrived home an hour or two later, she would often be slurring her words while apologizing for working late or having a drink with co-workers. Although still February, it was a gorgeous day in the mid-‘70s. Heide had insisted on wearing a sundress which showed off her legs to advantage but would provide minimal protection from the sea breezes once we were out of the harbor and sprinting across the ocean waves with nothing but a low windscreen for protection.

  “What was that about?” I asked when we were seated together in the rear of the boat a few minutes later. Jeff had exchanged his floppy hat for an Angels baseball cap to protect his prematurely bald head and was busy flipping switches and topping off his drink while Debbie untied the lines.

  “Oh, that was nothing.” She smiled and waved her arms. “Just work stuff. Isn’t this just amazing?”

  “Spectacular,” I said. “Gives me chills right here.” I pointed to the wallet in my rear pocket. That earned me an elbow in the ribs.

  “This could be you and me one day,” she said.

  “Even with a job someday as an art director, I don’t see a 30-thousand-plus monthly mortgage payment in the cards. Not in this lifetime.”

  “Frankly,” I said. “I’m a little surprised a young guy like Jeff, can afford this.” He was a smart guy, educated at Wharton, but still on the low side of thirty-five. “Who are all these people? Hollywood stars, pro athletes, Google founders?”