Survival Game

Chapter three

Gorge White enter his driveway, just as the sunset. He lives on Biscayne Boulevard, an island in the shadow of downtown Miami, but a world apart. Through the bay, beyond the sprawling city and somewhere over the far Everglades, fluty hands of pink, orange and magenta were slowly crumbling into the darkness of night. It wasn't until all colour had disappeared from the sky that it suddenly dawned on him what day it was. It's been a year exactly from the day he had divorced his wife Jane. Jane had started the process of their five years.

Happy anniversary, he said to himself.

Gorge was a private detective who specialises in bringing criminals to book. Though he also took interest in some cases that interest him, and in some cases, he turns them down when they don't interest him. The thing is that he liked what he did but didn't make a ton of money doing it. Self-gain had never been his goal. Gorge's work didn't go well with his father but that was sort of the idea. After four years of tweaking, his old man proved to be substantial, and In case anyone had written him off as a bleeding heart liberal, he completely veered around and made name for himself as a fair but bold detective. He left the U.S police force on good terms, but almost two years later he was still trying to find his footprint in private practice. To be sure, everything from a messy divorce to a dead client wife in her bathtub had served as a "distraction" along the way, and he was determined to give his own office a fair shot before changing professional course again.

" Hey, James!" He called out across the lawn.

James didn't seem to hear him. He was busy scrubbing down his twenty-four sport fisherman, which at the moment was suspended by davits and hanging over the water. The one saving grace of Gorge's austere rental house was the fact that it was on the water with its dock. This was his fourth rental since his divorce, part of his whirlwind quest to find the perfect digs for a divorced man with no drug addictions and surprisingly little interest in dating. His latest experiment was a "Mackle home" A simple four-bedroom, bathroom, cinder-block house with a small screened-in porch and no central air conditioning. In the early 1960s, the Mackle brothers built scores of these basic beach bungalows and their young families. Then Biscayne was little more than a mosquito swamp, so Mackle homes were about the inexpensive housing around, with a common closing price of twelve thousand dollars. In recent years, the lot alone went for about ten grand per foot of linear waterfront. Every week a developer would drop by, to enter Gorge's living room with a bulldozer and blueprints. Gorge house was the last of the waterfront, Mackle still standing.

" Yo, man!"

There was still no response. Working on a boat with the music blasting was enough to put James in another world. Gorge don't have a boat but he allows James to dock behind his house. It was perfect for James, who ran his bar at night, fished and slept all day on the boat. He was one of those rare friends who never seemed to age, which wasn't to say that he didn't look older from one year to the next, he just refuse to grow up which made him fun to have around.

James was hosing down the deck as Gorge walked toward him

" Catch anything?" He asked

James kept cleaning and said

" Not a damn thing.

" It's like they say: ' That's why they call it fishin not....."

James turned the hose on him, giving his suit a good splash.

"Catchin," said Gorge. He was dripping wet but pretends that it hadn't happened, wiping the water from his face.

" You know, babyface, sometimes you are just so full of ......."

" Wisdom?"

" That is exactly what I was gonna say, wisdom."

" I guess it takes a genius to taunt an ex-con who is holding a garden hose,"

Jack said as he brushed the water from his pinstripes.

James climbed out of the boat, smiled, and gave Gorge a bear hug so big that his feet left the ground. James had the height of a basketball player.

Gorge took a step back, surprised

" What was that for?"

" Happy anniversary, buddy."

Gorge was surprised that James remembered but he figured he must have mentioned something to him about the one-year milestone.

" I wouldn't exactly call it a happy anniversary. "