When I woke the next day and stepped out the front door to get the paper, there were two guys leaning on a red late model truck on the corner looking in my direction. My wife had gotten the New York Times, and it was about the only thing she did that I held on to. I took extra long leaning over to pick up the paper from the front walk, bending nonchalantly, and sending a nice friendly smile and wave to my two attempting to be noncahalant onlookers, and I turned to go back into the house.

So I was being watched. Now I was in the game. As I sat on the couch with my coffee reading through the paper, Gray uncharacteristically curled in my lap, I felt a strange, extra happiness. At first I didn’t know why, and then I remembered. I was having dinner with Hope. I wondered immediately if it was good, let alone appropriate, that my impending dinner plans with Hope should make me so happy, but I pushed that thought out like I’d been pushing out a lot of things. Especially lately.

The first order of business was to see my old partner. When my second cup of coffee was gone, and I’d shaved, showered, dressed, including my gun, I headed out to breakfast at the diner on Cable. It was only 8:30. Seth had said he wouldn’t be in until 10:00, and the station house was only a ten-minute drive. The two guys from the neighborhood watch and one more guy managed to walk in just as I was forking into my last bite of egg-soaked hash browns, and I realized that I would have to get used to this. And be careful.

I got to the station house at about ten minutes to ten, signed in, and went to wait outside my old partner’s office. He got in at about 10:45, gave a business-like apology, and wanted to know about what I needed. It was good to see him. At first it was awkward. And what I mean by at first is ten seconds. Some people are just easy friends. Like when that wave comes along and you slip right into it like it was made for you and ride it to the end, connected to it like your board has caught into a groove that carries you along, without a moment of doubt or strain. Seth and I were like that. From the time he moved to O.B. in the sixth grade, to joining the junior lifeguards, being on the swim team, then lifeguards together, then joining the force. It was Sara who had driven us apart. He warned me many times that she wasn’t totally right, and he had been very upfront about it. They argued all the time. And he never argued. He was the stereotypical mellow SoCal dude, straight-laced and pure. He came to the wedding, but refused to be the best man, and Sara knew it. Once Sara had me quit the force, it became too awkward, and we finally drifted apart.

Now, here I was eight, almost nine months since Sara had gone, and it was like none of it had ever happened. We hugged. He asked how Sara was. I told him we hadn’t talked, and he let it drop. Then, I think, sensing the concern in my face, stopped.

“Jay, what’s up?”

I told him the story. He said he’d look into it, and made me file a report about waking up on the beach. He told me to be careful and keep in touch. And I could see by the look on his face that he meant it, that something was really bothering him. We hugged again – guy-style, two pats on the back – and I left. But as I exited the front of the building and turned the corner toward the rear parking lot, three guys met me. One guy tried to grab my arm. I deflected it and decked him, but as I was doing this, a second guy grabbed me from behind and the third punched me in the stomach, hard.

“This is a message from Ocean Beach,” said the guy behind me breathing hard on my cheek. “We’re watching you.”

As I tried to straighten, I turned my head to see them disappear around the front of the building. Two of them were in uniform.

That afternoon I had a court appearance on an old divorce case, which I went to as soon as I was able to straighten up. Dinner was at seven. I’d wanted to do some web-searching for unusual suicides before I saw Hope next, but all I had time for was a quick shower and to grab a bottle of wine. Again, I had the thought that taking the wine was going further on down that long dark road that I shouldn’t go down, but again, I ignored it.

As I made my way up her short front walk through the meticulous cactus garden, I had the uncanny feeling that the spirits I used to believe lived in the cliffs, and was starting to believe again, were pulling at my shoulders, I heard the call of a gull, then the screech of tires several blocks away, but I kept walking. Not all the power of all the spirits that live in the cliffs could have stopped me then, but they might have been trying. When she came to the door, my heart stopped and my breath caught in my throat like the hiss of compressed air from the brake lines of a semi at a traffic light, though I didn’t brake, but maybe I did. She was wearing a simple blue flower print dress that models make a living selling – nothing special, but it looked great on her -- and I looked. And I mean I looked, and when she smiled, took the wine and brushed my lips in a ‘hello, come on in kiss’, I was gone.

Something smelled good, I mean other than her, and I asked her what it was. She told me she had made a Mediterranean lamb dish with couscous, explaining that her mother had been Greek. First we had wine with cheese, olives, flatbread and hummus. After a few sips of wine, I started to talk about the case, but she stopped me. ”This is for relaxing. Let’s leave business for the day.”

So we talked about our pasts. I found out that her father’s family had been Welsh and that her paternal grandmother had sparked her interest in witchcraft.

“Grandma called it ‘The Old Ways’,” she said, smiling.

I told her about growing up in O.B., surfing, life guarding, Sara, the force, my brother, who’s busy with his family and I almost never see, and my parents who died several years back in a car accident. She told me of her life growing up in Ohio, how she’d come to UCSD for grad school to study primitive art, got interested in tattoos, met her husband, who was a free-lance journalist through a friend at school, and had Skye.

“He was a beautiful boy,” I said, wondering if it was the right thing to say, touching her leg, which was conveniently close to me on the overstuffed blue couch. At this, she placed her hand over mine and leaned in to kiss my cheek. I turned my head to meet hers and our lips almost touched, then did.

“Let’s eat,” she said, pushing against my leg and standing up. She refilled my wine glass, then walked through the doorway from the little living room to the even littler kitchen, swishing her hips beneath that blue-flower dress, and brought out a platter, which I could now see was leg of lamb, and placed it on the cloth-covered coffee table in front of us. Remember how I told you I would explain about the dagger? She placed a large serving fork on the platter, then walked over to a small altar on the far wall to my right where a blue candle was burning and casually picked up a silver-handled dagger. Not giving me a chance to ask the question that was about to come from my mouth, she explained, “I think magic should be a part of everyday life. This dagger was a gift from my grandmother. I use it for everything.” And the thing is, sitting there, in this small space with this beautiful woman, sipping my second glass of wine, it made perfect sense to me. That voice, that voice that I’d been ignoring so much lately, said, Black Magic. But watching her standing over the lamb, carving juicy pieces of perfectly cooked flesh from the roasted bone with the silver dagger glowing blue and yellow-orange in the pulsing of the blue Christmas lights and the flickering candles, I thought of nothing but how I wanted to help her. And some other things, too. We didn’t sleep together that night, though we came close. There would be plenty of time for that. Maybe too much.

Chapter 9 coming 6/1 (hopefully)!!!