Sweet Mary

by Liz Balmaseda

  “What are you doing?” I said. My hands trembled as I gripped the gun.

  “No questions. Just do what I tell you,” he said.

  I followed his order even though my arms trembled. I aimed the gun at the derelict’s torso while Joe rifled through his pockets for cash with swift, expert moves. He found a few crumpled dollar bills and a Florida driver license, but nothing else. Joe slipped the license in his pocket and left the crumpled bills on the derelict’s chest. His eyes half-open, the man didn’t move, although I could tell he was still breathing. In fact, he seemed as if he had given up and was simply taking a little breather.

  Done with the derelict, Joe turned and walked back toward me, his face blank of any expression.

  “Let’s get going,” he said.

  I lowered the Glock, too petrified to say anything. I slipped it into my purse and followed Joe toward the car.

  TEN

  SOUTHERN BREEZE MOTOR INN—DAY 29

  A ’50s-era establishment of neon exteriors and worn rattan interiors. Inside room seventeen, Mary inspects the gun up close.

  Fear is a mystifying state. Back in that alley, I had panicked at the clammy feel of gunmetal. I was afraid I would drop the gun, causing it to blast off and hit me in the face, or something equally stupid. In the end, it was the fear that could have killed me. It could have precipitated a tragic, potentially fatal sequence.

  But in the quiet of my hotel room, as I examined the weapon from every angle, I realized there was nothing to be afraid of, not as long as the gun was in my hands and not as long as my hands were in command. I wasn’t going to fire it. I wasn’t going to drop it. I wasn’t going to let it out of my sight. This realization gave me a power I had never known. I gripped the Glock, now demystified, with perfectly steady hands.

  Joe glanced at me through the mirror, where he was cleaning up a bloody cut at the edge of his lip. He disappeared through a door, into his adjoining room, and returned with a bottle of Bacardi. He poured a couple of shots and handed me a glass.

  “Sorry about what happened back there,” he said. He downed his shot of rum.

  I took a sip from my glass, but I was still too riled to say anything.

  “I didn’t mean for you to see it,” he said, taking a seat beside me on the bed.

  “It’s the same old bullshit with you,” I said. I glared at him. “Deadbeats screaming for their money. Or their drugs. Take your pick.”

  “You’re right. I’m just supposed to let some random freak blow my brains out in an alley,” he said. He got up to pour himself another shot. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “He wasn’t some random freak and you know it,” I said.

  “Really? Who was he, then? You know his name?” he said in a smart-ass tone I had forgotten.

  “How would I know his name?” I said.

  “Then don’t talk about shit you don’t know,” he said.

  Had he said this a decade earlier, I might have clocked him good. But not that night. That night Joe was nothing but another fixture in my motel room, like the sea-grass lamp on the dresser. He was nothing but a middleman. This is what I tried to tell myself.

  “The point is there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle your problems,” I said.

  “There is no right way to deal with scum like that,” he said.

  “You mean like Gus? The scum that got away tonight? Isn’t that why we came down here in the first place?” I said. “We’re lucky that bartender gave up his address.”

  I set the gun down on the nightstand and went to sit by the window. On the street below, a couple of past-their-time frat boys on the prowl whooped it up, hoisting Big Gulp–sized cups of booze.

  “You know what, Joe? You’re stuck in the same exact place,” I told him. “The same place I left you.”

  “Maybe that’s where I need to be. Maybe I have obligations there,” he said.

  “To the junkies of Hialeah, you mean?” I said.

  “To my business,” he said, still hostile.

  “Right.”

  “Among other things,” he said. His tone had softened a bit.

  “Right.”

  “What you’re talking about…that was another time,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, I can’t go back there,” I said, pulling the drapes to expand my view of the street.

  “Who’s asking you to?” said Joe, pissed.

  I nursed my drink, stung by the exchange.

  “Tell me something, Mary. What did you think you were getting yourself into here?” he said. “You thought you’d come down, ride the conch train, applaud the sunset? Maybe pick up a lead or two from the Rotary Club?”

  “And who are you to insult me?” I said. I left the window, ready to oust him from the room. I couldn’t think straight anymore, not with Joe standing there, so close. I could feel his eyes on me, tracking my moves, tracing the lines of my body, my legs, my arms, the slope of my neck. “Look, I need to be by myself for a while.”

  But he made no move to leave. Instead, he came closer.

  “Let’s rewind for a second,” he said, his voice dropping to a more conciliatory level. “When I heard about what happened to you…I mean, you, of all people, don’t deserve this. I know this.”

  The sudden shift of emotion threw me off a bit. I wasn’t ready to make nice. I sat down on the edge of the bed and let him speak his mind.

  “If there’s something you can believe about me, then please believe this: I’ll do whatever you need me to do to help you find this Maria woman. I’ll go to the end of the earth if I have to. I’ll do anything for you, even if it means never seeing you again,” he said. “But, honey, this business of chasing drug dealers…this is not your life. You need to live your life.”

  I looked up at him, but he glanced away and started back to his room, giving my shoulder a fleeting caress as he left.

  I clicked off the light and curled up on the darkened bed, afloat on a mild rum buzz. I could hear the shower running through the half-open door between our rooms. I closed my eyes and allowed Joe’s words to settle upon me, and for the first time that day I yielded to the images I had seen. I replayed the scenes at his house over and over again: Joe at his father’s bedside, calm and comforting, his words so lovingly spoken. He hadn’t stayed in that old yellow house on the dead-end street because he lacked courage or ambition or any of the qualities of polished, successful men. He had stayed out of devotion to his father. While some of his friends went away to school or off to find their hustle in the booming ’90s, Joe took over his father’s job at the mechanic shop. He worked that job for a couple of years until it was clear Papo could not return to work. Another son, one who aspired to be wealthy, might have put his own needs first. But Joe wasn’t that guy. He had stayed. And yet I had seen fit to humiliate him for it, to deem him a lesser man.

  The realization hit me hard that night. Maybe it was the haze of alcohol, or maybe it was the simple fact that for the first time in many hours I was standing still amid chaos, but a new awareness washed over me and with it came a flood of tears. I thought about how, in all my life, no other man had affected me the way Joe Pratts could affect me, leaving me exposed and feeling so vulnerable. He knew me too damn well. He knew things about me no other man could ever know—he knew them because he was there. He was there on that September afternoon when I came home to find out my grandfather had died in Cuba. He poured Daddy a shot of whiskey and sat with him beneath the mango tree while Daddy cried. He was there when I came home from my first job at the local fabric store, ready to talk about the tacky homecoming dresses I had enabled with my expert fabric-cutting and excellent customer-relations skills. He was there when I picked up my Outstanding Psychology Major award at FIU, when I bought my first car, when I buried my sweet old pit bull, Star. We came from the same subset of the world. The neighborhood streets that were familiar to me were also familiar to him. Our houses smelled the same and sounded the same. Our record players played the same songs. And
when we fought for the first time, it took just one song—one perfect, soulful song—to bring us back together. The memory of that dance was suddenly so vivid I could hear the song:

  “You got me going in circles, oh, around and around I go…”

  No other man could make me cry at the memory of a song. Even while I was married, doing my best to forget my years with him, I’d grow sad at random memories, a fleeting aroma, a conversation casually overheard. No one else could affect me the way Joe Pratts could affect me. This is why I had left him years ago. I didn’t want to love a man so profoundly, not if it meant getting stuck in a groove. I didn’t want to be stuck anywhere or anyplace, to edit my dreams, confine my life to the same three square blocks. I wanted to break away from the grip of expectation, the neighborhood, the memories, and all that is implied when one marries a childhood sweetheart in that stagnant place: the same bridal registry as the chick down the block, the same outfit for New Year’s Eve, the same barbecue and beer every Sunday, the same fight over the same thing, the same number on the paycheck, week after week. It wasn’t a life I wanted, not even at the side of the man I most loved. And I had not once doubted my decision to leave him. Not until that night.

  When I glanced up I saw Joe in the gray light of the open doorway between our rooms, so ruggedly handsome, a towel draped across the back of his neck. I lifted myself from the bed and went to him. I wrapped my arms around him and let myself melt into his body. He stroked my face gently with his lips, wiping away my tears, and he pressed close to me in a deep, sweet kiss.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I said, kissing the fresh cut at the edge of his mouth.

  “Hush,” he said, his arms tightening around me.

  I surrendered to the moment, giving myself to all those feelings I had kept shuttered in memory. And when I did, I felt liberated, not confined to a house or a street or an expectation, but truly free to love. It was as if no time had passed since the day I first fell in love with him. I knew his smell. I knew the turns of his body from memory, the width of his shoulders, the feel of his skin, the precise angle of our most intimate kiss, the unhurried dance onto the bed, where the intermittent glow of motel lights glimpsed our bodies making love.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up from a stark nightmare. In my dream, someone had abducted Max. I had seen it so vividly I scrambled out of bed in a panic and went to the bathroom to slap some water on my face, hoping to shake the vision. But I couldn’t. The dream intensified my sense of dread and urgency and the nausea that came with it. It felt as if all my internal organs were being suspended with forks. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  I returned to the room, where Joe was still asleep. Quietly, I grabbed my laptop and slipped into the adjacent room. As Joe slept, I went back to work, back to the mission that had brought me to Key West. I surfed all the real estate sites I could remember, searching property records, land deeds, and foreclosures for any shred of a clue. I typed in every name on the Maria Portilla indictment. I looked up Jimmy Paz’s name in all its variations.

  I tried “James Paz”—nothing.

  I tried “James A. Paz”—nothing.

  I tried “Jimmy Paz”—nothing.

  I tried “Jaime Antonio Paz”—nothing.

  I tried “Jaime A. Paz”—nothing.

  I shut the laptop in frustration. Still jarred from the nightmare, I saw two difficult truths quite clearly: I hadn’t come to Key West to hit a dead end in a crappy motel room. And I hadn’t come to Key West to fall in love. A rekindled love affair could only weigh me down or, worse, cast me off on a pitiful tangent. I knew the passion I had felt hours earlier could derail my hunt for Maria Portilla. At the very least, it could muddy things up.

  I went to check on Joe—he was still soundly asleep. The truth is I wanted to crawl in bed with him and fall asleep once again in his arms. But I knew it was an indulgence I couldn’t allow myself to have. I needed to keep moving, and I needed to do so on my own, sharp, focused, unhindered by romance and its obligations.

  I leaned in close to Joe and brushed my lips against his cheek, lingering to breathe in his scent one last time. He kissed me back in his sleep, then turned around and nestled into his pillow once again.

  In a patch of moonlight, I tried to write him a note on a motel postcard, but all I could come up with was this: “I’m so sorry. M.”

  Nothing more.

  I placed it on the nightstand as I grabbed the Glock, and I left Joe Pratts for the second time in my life.

  KEY WEST STREETS—DAY 30

  Mary’s car turns off a main road and into a small thoroughfare.

  Dawn was still a good three hours away as I drove through the desolate backstreets of Key West, tracing my route on a tourist map I had grabbed at the motel’s front desk when I stopped to pay for our rooms.

  I came to a halt outside a dilapidated apartment building and checked the number on its façade. I parked the car and found my way to apartment 26, the last door down a leaky hallway. I banged on the door, but nobody answered at first. So I banged on it harder.

  “Wake up in there,” I said. “Hurry up.”

  After a few moments, the door cracked open to reveal the elusive resident, a bleary-eyed Gus.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing here?” he said. He rubbed his eyes like a big baby.

  I pushed in the door and let myself inside.

  “You know why I’m here,” I said. “Jimmy Paz. We still need to get ahold of him.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “In the car.”

  Gus sized me up like a muscle-head bouncer trying to decide who gets to pass the velvet ropes.

  “How much is it worth to you?” he said, adopting a would-be gangster tone.

  “For an address?” I said.

  “Business is business,” he said, thrusting his jaw out in defiance. “Five hundred.”

  “Like hell.”

  “What do you want with Jimmy?” he said.

  I dug into my purse and pulled out five bills from an envelope, the “emergency” cash stash I had brought with me. I counted them out and slammed them down on a table.

  “Five hundred. No questions,” I said.

  Gus eyed the money with diminished bravado.

  “Cool,” he said. He snatched the bills off the table. “I’ll get his address for you.”

  Within minutes I was several blocks away, knocking on the door of a quaint, gingerbread-style cottage. I could see lights click on inside and hear a light rustling of steps. I glanced at the time on my cell phone: It was two a.m. After a few moments, the door was opened by a very elderly woman in a pale yellow nightgown.

  “Hello there,” she said, “may I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but this is urgent,” I told her.

  “Are you lost, honey? Would you like to come inside?” the old woman said.

  “No, that’s okay—I’ve already been enough of a bother. I’m here because I’m looking for my friend. His name is Jimmy Paz,” I said.

  The woman gave me a blank look.

  “I’ve lived here thirty years and I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

  “Maybe he’s a friend of your son, or your grandson?” I said.

  The old woman’s eyes grew misty as a thought washed over her.

  “I never had children,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Just the cats.”

  “I’m so sorry, but—”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely right now if I just had made different choices along the way,” she said.

  “No, no, I’m sure your choices were just fine,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “You’re such a nice girl, so easy to talk to. My name is Gertrude. Are you sure you don’t want to come inside?” she said.

  I looked at the heartbroken old woman and I had just one thought: Gus, that greasy bastard.

  I apologized
to the woman for interrupting her sleep and I gave her a hug good-bye.

  Back at Gus’s apartment I nearly tore down his front door.

  When he opened it, I barreled in.

  “Why are you wasting my time?” I said. This time, I lugged my computer bag into the apartment.

  “You’re a ball buster, ya know?”

  “True,” I said. “But things could always get worse.”

  “Yeah? And things could always get more expensive. For you,” said Gus.

  “I gave you five hundred dollars,” I said.

  “Price went up,” he said, his jaw high again. “It’ll cost you twenty-five hundred now.”

  I took a seat at the edge of his ratty sofa, and I dug into my purse. I reached past the cold metal of the Glock and grabbed an overstuffed envelope. I tossed the envelope on the floor, next to Gus’s mammoth, hairy feet. It coughed out a wad of cash.

  “Go ahead, count it,” I said.

  Greedy Gus bent down and strained to clasp the envelope, but he couldn’t reach it.

  “Go on,” I said, inflicting upon him an empty, matter-of-fact tone, “pick it up.”

  He wheezed through his chest and tried again. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t seem to reach the money. Then, in one last valiant push, he managed to grab a corner of the envelope. But just as he did, he lost his balance—and his grip on the envelope. All 358 pounds of Gus went crashing to the floor, landing a few feet away from the money.

  “Shit, bro. You gotta help me up,” he said, extending one of his hands. I stopped to notice how small they seemed in comparison to his beefy frame.

  “Okay, stay right there,” I said.

  I grabbed a telephone from a nearby table and yanked off the cord.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m trying to get you up, moron.”

  “With a phone cord?”

  “There’s a technique. Settle down and give me both your hands. Like this,” I said, demonstrating for him by clasping my hands together.

  “Shit, no. I ain’t falling for that.”