Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10)

by Laurence Shames

  Peter rolled off his lounge and almost landed on the cat.

  Glenda had been sucking iced tea through a straw. Through lips that were still slightly puckered, she said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man with the gun said, “Special Agent Andrew Sheehan, FBI.”

  Lydia, still topless, cool water glinting on her skin, sounded unimpressed. “FBI. You’re the peeper, aren’t you? You think no one saw you peeping? First through the window, now up a tree. That’s pathetic.”

  Glenda, not for nothing her father’s daughter, said calmly but firmly, “You got no business here. Get out, or do we call our lawyers?”

  Sheehan ignored that. To Lydia he said, “You. Put something on.”

  “Why? Am I making you uncomfortable?” She rounded her shoulders and leaned slightly forward, a la Marilyn Monroe. “You’re the peeper. Go ahead, peep.”

  Sheehan tried to look away, and failed. He said, “Where’s the man who kidnapped you?”

  “Kidnapped me? You’re crazy. No one kidnapped me. I’m here with friends.”

  “Your friends always handcuff you when they take you for a ride?”

  “What I do for relaxation is no concern of yours. Why don’t you just shimmy back up your tree and pick some coconuts?”

  Meg pointed at the agent’s arm and softly said, “Your elbow’s bleeding. It’s dripping on your pants.”

  The stoic Sheehan ignored her. To Lydia, he said, “What’s your name?”

  The bare-breasted woman all but laughed in his face. “You don’t even know my name? Peeping, snooping FBI and you don’t even know my name. But okay, I’m a sport, I’ll help you out. Lydia Greenspan.”

  Sheehan said, “I’ll remember it. And I think you should remember mine. I think maybe you’re going to need my help some time.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t. I have some pretty incriminating pictures--”

  “Oh really? So you’re not just a peeper but a paparazzo?”

  “—of you with a crooked stock trader named Marc Orlovsky--”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “—passing information at Grand Central.”

  “Grand Central? Where about a million strangers bump into each other every day. That’s lame. Face it, you got nothing on me, copper.”

  In the next heartbeat, Lydia thought, Copper? Where the hell did that come from? She’d never used the term before in her whole life. Was it some vague memory of a film noir seen long ago, some cheesy women’s prison flick? Or did the brash word emerge from something more mysterious and deeper, some primal badness and defiance that was finally bubbling over after thirty-seven years of being tightly lidded? In any case, something changed between her and Sheehan in the instant that the word came out. His gaze moved from her breasts to her eyes and there was a mutual recognition, a reluctant and unadmitted but powerful perceiving of kinship in the feisty and taunting look they shared. In a flash they understood that in their secret souls they were just alike, playing at virtue and seething with subversion, pretending to respectability and all the while yearning for the heat and danger and hellish pleasures of the improper and the disallowed. In that moment they moved the small but crucial distance from being simple adversaries to becoming co-conspirators in a tangled and beguiling game.

  Sheehan’s eyes stayed on her face now. He said, “Look, I have an idea. How about we start this conversation over?” He put the revolver back in his waistband and stood at ease. “I say I have something on you. You say I don’t. Doesn’t matter. You know why I came down here? I came down here because I thought you were in trouble.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “You came down here because it’s your job.”

  He ignored that and went on. “I thought you were kidnapped. Maybe I was wrong about that but maybe I wasn’t. Either way, you know what? I still think you’re in trouble. With the law. With your so-called friends. I think maybe you and I should talk sometime.”

  He reached into a pocket for a business card and walked across the flower bed and the damp tiles toward the pool. He squatted down in front of Lydia, his long thighs splaying out around her face and shoulders, his torso throwing shade so that she no longer had to squint to meet his eyes. With a wet thumb and forefinger she took the card and held it by the corner. Then, on a crazy, pure, unthinking impulse, she raised her other hand and touched the FBI man’s arm where it was wounded. She dabbed away a streak of blood and traced the ragged scratch with water from the pool. Sheehan felt the good sting of chlorine and a sharper sting from Lydia’s touch. The contact was over in a second.

  He stood up and was ready to leave. Then there came a preposterous moment when he realized he did not know how to. Glenda pointed to an entrance to the house, just beyond the small glass table. “Use the door this time,” she said. “It’s so much easier.”

  28.

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling like I did,” said Benny.

  “Nah,” said Bert the Shirt, “I was happy to hear from you.”

  They were walking on Smathers Beach, a mile-long strip of coral nubs and knuckles thinly covered by trucked-in sand requisitioned by the Tourist Board. Every year they brought in sand before the start of tourist season, and every year it washed away, blew away, percolated down between the bits of coral and vanished. You could tell what month it was by how much sand was left.

  “I just don’t know who else I can talk to,” Benny said.

  “Yeah, I get it. It’s lonely out there sometimes, what with not knowing who to trust.”

  “Plus my nerves are shot.”

  “That much I can see.”

  They strolled in silence for some moments, tracking the meanders of Bert’s chihuahua. For Nacho, with its three-inch legs and tiny paws, walking on Smathers was mostly an erratic and largely sideways dance in which the little creature tried to spring from one small patch of sand to the next, avoiding the larger hunks of coral—boulders to the dog--that might trip it up.

  “The truth, Bert?” Benny resumed. “The truth is that I just don’t know what the fuck I’m doing these days. I’m not deciding things. Things are deciding me. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure, Benny, sure.”

  Bert was listening but he was also looking down at his feet. As Smathers lost its sand and became more reef-like, it presented a challenge to his balance, with treacherous unsuspected humps and slick places where the slope increased with no warning. But the old man had walked a dog there every day for as long as he could remember, and he wasn’t about to stop just because it got a little dicier from year to year.

  “Like with this woman, this Lydia,” Benny said. “It was never my idea to whack her, never my decision. But it wasn’t really my decision not to, either. I mean, it wasn’t a decision at all. It’s just that I couldn’t do it.”

  “And you should never’a been asked to,” Bert responded. “That’s bullshit. Back in the day, our people would never clip a woman. Ruin her life, maybe. Kill her husband, her father, take away her livelihood, burn down her house. But shoot a woman point blank, bang, you’re dead—no, that never would have happened.”

  Benny started to say something, held back, and for a moment just looked down with dismay at the fancy, thin-soled shoes he’d worn to his meeting with Carlos in hopes of looking like a businessman. They were scratched and scuffed now, covered in fine coral dust the color of bone. When he spoke again, it was in the hushed tone of a confession. “But you know what, Bert? I can’t really take this high road bullshit and say I didn’t do the job because it was a woman. Even if it had been a guy I couldn’t’ve pulled that trigger. I couldn’t have. No way I could’ve known that for sure before. But now I know I couldn’t’ve done it.”

  They walked. The dog danced ahead and deposited a few drops of urine on a volleyball that had rolled away. Bert weakly kicked it back toward the people who’d been playing with it, and then he said simply and finally to his companion, “You don’t belong in this life, Benny.”
>
  “You think I don’t know that? So how the hell do I get out?”

  The old man shook his head. “No idea. But at least you’re thinking about it before ya got blood on your hands. You’re way ahead of where I was at your age.”

  Benny gave a quick unhappy laugh. “So I guess that’s the good news. But meanwhile I gotta get this woman stashed someplace.”

  “You have a plan for that?”

  Benny told him.

  Bert listened with his hand on his chin and his head cocked at a sagacious angle, then he said, “The Cuba part I like. The Cuba part’s a natural. Involving Carlos, that I’m not so sure about.”

  “Who else could I have asked?”

  “That’s a point. No one that I know of. S’okay, it’s Carlos. How well do you know him?”

  “Not very,” Benny admitted. “You know, from around town, mutual acquaintances. I went to him a month or so ago about this other idea I had—“

  “Other idea?”

  Benny got shy. “Doesn’t matter. Probably dumb. Probably impossible. A business thing. Legit. Anyway, I was just looking to rent a place from him. I thought he might be someone I could talk to, you know, a businessman but not a stiff, someone who’d get it that I’ve never bothered with banks or credit checks or any of that bullshit.”

  “Someone legit but not too legit,” Bert said.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Well, I guess that pretty much sums up Carlos. Complicated guy. Reminds me a little of a younger, smarter, Cuban version of your father-in-law. Mix of criminal and, whaddyacallit, entrepreneur. Except that with Fortuna it’s like ninety-eight percent thug and two percent citizen. With Carlos it’s more like fifty-fifty. Makes him a lot harder to read. You paying him for his help?”

  “He hasn’t agreed to help yet,” Benny pointed out. “But yeah, if he helps, it’ll be for money.”

  “Good. Keep it simple. Cut and dried. Fee for service. None of this vague owing a favor bullshit.”

  Benny nodded.

  “And one other thing,” Bert said. “If you throw in with Carlos, have a backup plan.”

  “Backup plan?”

  Bert said nothing for some seconds. He was gazing off toward the horizon, a hazy blue-green seam where the sea curved away and the sky seemed to lean down over it like a mother tucking in a child. “Ya know, in case he doesn’t one hundred percent exactly fulfill his half of the bargain. In other words, like if he decides to take your money and fuck you right up the ass.”

  Benny swallowed and kicked a piece of coral with his dusty shoes. He said, “So, like, what kind of backup plan?”

  “I have no idea,” said Bert the Shirt. “Just have one.”

  29.

  “So honey, how was your day?”

  “Christ,” said Benny, “I could use a martini.”

  They were standing in the doorway of their house, just disengaging from a welcome-home hug. Glenda had fixed her hair the way her husband liked it best, swept up from her forehead and her temples, piled and twirled on top. She’d changed into a loose-fitting, languorous shift in shades of purple and magenta. She said, “They’re already made. In the freezer so they won’t get watery.”

  Benny clutched both his wife’s hands when she said that and his eyes briefly welled up with tears of gratitude. He vaguely wondered what the hell was going on with him. Before the last couple days, he hadn’t cried in fifteen, maybe twenty years, and suddenly everything was making him weepy; he teared up with thankfulness just because his wife had thought to make him a drink. It was like he was a leather jacket that had been turned inside out so that the soft side where the meat and nerves and blood had been was finally exposed. He said to Glenda, “Baby, please, don’t ever leave me again.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and led him through the kitchen and out to the shady table by the pool. When they’d clinked glasses and sipped the first stinging bit of gin, Glenda said, “So, you met with Carlos? He’ll help?”

  “He’ll tell me tomorrow. Meanwhile he made me feel like a slob.”

  “You’re not a slob, honey.”

  “This guy, every hair’s in place. Nothing’s wrinkled. He doesn’t sweat. I’ve never seen anyone like that. He looks like a goddamn anchorman.” He nipped at his martini and went on. “I called Bert afterward. Needed to talk. Bert doesn’t really trust him. But enough about me. How are you? What’s been going on around here?”

  Glenda looked down at the table. She fished the toothpick out of her martini glass and nibbled on an olive. Cherishing the sweet romantic moment, not wanting to cloud it over, she stroked the back of Benny’s hand before saying, “Well, the FBI was here.”

  “What?”

  “Not the whole FBI. One guy. He fell out of a tree.”

  “A tree?”

  “A palm. A frond let go. He was sort of wrapped up inside it, sort of like a cannoli. He fell over there.” She pointed to the flower bed where some pansies and impatiens were trying to recover from being squashed. “Turns out he was the peeper from last night.”

  Benny had to admit to himself that this was relatively good news. Better the Feds than one of his former buddies from the crew. “Okay,” he said, “a cop falls out of a tree. Then what?”

  “He went over to Lydia. She didn’t have a top on.”

  “No top?”

  Discreetly lowering her voice, Glenda said, “She’s got big boobs. We didn’t have anything that fit her.”

  “All right, all right, forget about the boobs. What happened?”

  “He talked to her. Said she was in trouble. Said she’d need him sometime. Tried to scare her. But she didn’t scare.”

  Benny sipped some gin. “You sure?” He asked it quietly but it was a question of some importance. If Lydia got scared enough to turn under the protection of the FBI, there was every chance that she could save her skin and maybe not even do jail time. She might even bring down Frank Fortuna. But in the meantime Benny would definitely, without a doubt, be iced.

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Glenda. “She didn’t rattle. She let him talk and then she told him off.”

  Benny nodded and considered. He mostly trusted Lydia. She was reckless and she had a death wish but all in all he believed she was solid. And besides, back in the New Jersey junkyard, she and Benny had each had the chance to kill the other and both had taken a pass. How likely was it that she’d sell him down the river now?

  Then Glenda very softly resumed, “But—“

  “But what?”

  “But something’s going on between those two. The way he looked at her.”

  “Well, sure, she’s got big boobs and she didn’t have a top on.”

  “But that’s the thing,” said Glenda. “That’s not where he was looking. I mean, he checked them out, of course he did, but then they just locked eyeballs. Really stared. For a long time. They stared so hard that even though no one moved it seemed like their faces were getting closer and closer together. You know what it was like? It was like a scene in an R-rated movie, the scene where first it’s the guy’s face, then it’s the girl’s face, then it’s the guy’s face, then it’s the girl’s face, then they make you wait, then everybody parts their lips and in the next second they’re chewing on each other’s tongues and tearing each other’s clothes off.”

  Benny said, “I think maybe you’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m really not,” said Glenda. “Those two have some kind of hot game going on and I don’t think it’s cops-and-robbers.”

  30.

  In the guest bedroom, Peter was sitting in a wicker chair. The cat was on his lap and he was scratching it behind the ears. This rhythmic scratching had in recent hours become a sort of nervous tic with Peter, and it already felt so natural that it would have been hard for him to remember what he did to skim off nervous tension before the cat had slinked into his life.

  Meg was half-reclining on the bed, her head propped on a stack of pillows. Lydia was luxuriously arrayed on a
chaise longue, her ankles crossed, the oversized tee shirt draping loosely over the tops of her slightly sunburned thighs. In a breathy and softly rapturous alto voice she was telling Meg about the galvanizing strangeness of the look she’d shared with Andy Sheehan. “I’ve never felt anything like it in my life. It was more than just excitement. It was…I don’t know, this’ll sound corny…it was like destiny. Compulsion. What’s that word people use when they’re wildly, crazily attracted to someone and it takes them over, they know they can’t escape from it? Thrall. That’s it. I met his eyes and I was enthralled. You ever look at a man and feel that way?”

  Peter quickly said to his wife, “If it’s not about me, don’t say so. I’m insecure enough.”

  Meg said nothing, but it really didn’t matter. Lydia in that moment would have had a tough time believing that anyone else had ever truly felt what she was feeling.

  “The bond,” she went on. “How do people feel a bond like that in a matter of seconds? I mean, we were sparring, dissing each other, being total enemies. And at the same exact time there’s this ka-POW thing going on, like we’ve been lovers all our lives and were just waiting to actually meet.”