Sole Survivor

horny fourteen-year-old, their strategy would have been effective.
        With long tan legs and deep cleavage and tight round rumps, maybe they were also meant to engage Joe's interest and seduce him into conversation with them. If this was part of their assignment, they failed. Their charms didn't affect him.
        During the past year, any erotic image or thought had the power to stir him only for a moment, whereupon he was overcome by poignant memories of Michelle, her precious body and her wholesome enthusiasm for pleasure. Inevitably, he thought also of the terrible long fall from stars to Colorado, the smoke, the fire, then death. Desire dissolved quickly in the solvent of loss.
        These two women distracted Joe only to the extent that he was annoyed about their incompetent misidentification of him. He considered approaching them to inform them of their mistake, just to be rid of them. After the violence in the lavatory, however, the prospect of confrontation made him uneasy. He was drained of anger now, but he no longer trusted his self-control.
        One year to the day.
        Memories and gravestones.
        He would get through it.
        Surf broke, gathered the foamy fragments of itself, stole away, and broke again. In the patient study of that endless breaking, Joe Carpenter gradually grew calm.
        Half an hour later, without the benefit of another beer, he was ready to visit the cemetery.
        He shook the sand out of his towel. He folded the towel in half lengthwise, rolled it tight, and picked up the cooler.
        As silken as the sea breeze, as buttery as sunlight, the lithe young women in the thong bikinis pretended to be enthralled by the monosyllabic repartee of two steroid-thickened suitors, the latest in a string of beach-boy Casanovas to take their shot.
        The direction of his gaze masked by his sunglasses, Joe could see that the beauties' interest in the beefcake was pretence. They were not wearing sunglasses, and while they chattered and laughed and encouraged their admirers, they glanced surreptitiously at Joe.
        He walked away and did not look back.
        As he took some of the beach with him in his shoes, so he strove to take the indifference of the ocean with him in his heart.
        Nevertheless, he could not help but wonder what police agency could boast such astonishingly beautiful women on its force. He had known some female cops who were as lovely and sexy as any movie star, but the redhead and her friend exceeded even celluloid standards.
        In the parking lot, he half expected the men in the Hawaiian shirts to be watching his Honda. If they had it staked out, their surveillance post was well concealed.
        Joe drove out of the lot and turned right on Pacific Coast Highway, checking his rear-view mirror. He was not being followed.
        Perhaps they had realized their error and were frantically looking for the right man.
        From Wilshire Boulevard to the San Diego Freeway, north to the Ventura Freeway and then east, he drove out of the cooling influence of the sea breezes into the furnace heat of the San Fernando Valley. In the August glare, these suburbs looked as hot and hard-baked as kiln-fired pottery.
        Three hundred acres of low rolling hills and shallow vales and broad lawns comprised the memorial park, a city of the deceased, Los Angeles of the dead, divided into neighbourhoods by gracefully winding service roads. Famous actors and ordinary salesmen were buried here, rock-'n'-roll stars and reporters' families, side by side in the intimate democracy of death.
        Joe drove past two small burial services in progress: cars parked along the curb, ranks of folding chairs set up on the grass, mounds of grave earth covered with soft green tarps. At each site, the mourners sat hunched, stifled in their black dresses and black suits, oppressed by heat as well as by grief and by a sense of their own mortality.
        The cemetery included a few elaborate crypts and low-walled family garden plots, but there were no granite forests of vertical monuments and headstones. Some had chosen to entomb the remains of their loved ones in niches in the walls of communal mausoleums. Others preferred the bosom of the earth, where graves were marked only with bronze plaques in flat stone tablets flush with the ground, so as not to disturb the park like setting.
        Joe had put Michelle and the girls to rest