Tropical Freeze

by James W. Hall

  A brown Mercedes pulled into the yard, parked next to Thorn’s VW convertible. The driver looked at Thorn for a minute or two and got out.

  He was about six feet and had black hair and was wearing a shiny blue Adidas warm-up suit, with new white running shoes. He’d left the motor running in the Mercedes and was walking down to the dock where Thorn was working on the ballyhoo plug.

  He’d used Gaeton’s knife, putting some nice gill grooves in the side of the plug. The Buck knife had felt immediately natural. The right size, right heft. He hadn’t made a slip with it yet.

  After he’d gotten the gills right, he’d begun to paint the plug silver. For the last hour he’d been trying to get a shimmer on its belly. But in that light everything was dulled. Hard to tell how he was doing.

  The man stopped a few feet from the table. He seemed uncomfortable, in those clothes, in this spot. A long way from the cocktail lounges, shiny gray suits.

  “Mr. Cousins got your code violations fixed,” the man said. He handed Thorn some forms from Building and Zoning. Thorn looked at them and put them aside.

  He wiped the last drops of silver paint back on the rim of the small paint bottle and rested the brush on the edge of the picnic table.

  “Mr. Cousins wants to talk to you.” The guy spoke with a lot of extra flesh muffling his words. He sounded like a retired boxer who’d specialized in the rope-a-dope.

  Thorn said, “I’m working.”

  The man looked at the ballyhoo plug, then at Thorn, as if he hadn’t been programmed for this many variables.

  “He fixed your tickets,” the man said. “It’s courteous to go meet the gentleman.”

  “Listen to that,” Thorn said, lifting his head. It was the repeated shriek of an osprey. The bird, a saltwater eagle, had built a nest in his neighbor’s satellite dish around Christmas. Both the osprey and its nest were federally protected. And the man was a past president of the local Audubon group. Click, gotcha. So now his neighbor couldn’t even rotate his dish. It might dislodge the bird. Thorn had been watching the nest’s progress just above the treeline, maybe a half mile off.

  Thorn said, “When you can see your neighbor’s satellite dish, it’s time to move on. Know who said that?”

  “The smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, is how it goes,” the man said. “And it’s from the Ching Tao.”

  Thorn looked at him more closely. The guy was smiling inside there, inside all that phlegm and muscle and monosyllable.

  “I thought it was Davy Crockett,” Thorn said.

  “Crockett stole it from the Ching Tao,” the man said.

  Thorn wasn’t sure now who was conning who.

  The man put out his hand, said his name was Roger.

  “How’d he fix my tickets, Roger?” Thorn shook his hand.

  “I guess he has ways,” Roger said. “He seems to’ve taken an interest in you.”

  Thorn said, “They were just issued Friday. County offices aren’t open weekends. How’d he do that?”

  “Mr. Cousins’s wired in,” he said. “Offices opened, closed, it doesn’t seem to matter to him. They don’t shut the electricity down on the weekends.”

  “They don’t?”

  Roger smiled uncertainly.

  “Mr. Cousins is very big on computers, one computer talking to another one. He runs his business that way. He must’ve got his machine talking to their machine. Something like that.”

  “I can handle my own business,” Thorn said. “I don’t need someone fixing things for me.”

  “Why don’t you just be courteous, talk to the man?”

  Thorn looked out at the water for a moment, back at Roger.

  “All right,” Thorn said, rising. “Let’s go have a look at him.”

  “You’ll like him,” Roger said. “He’s nuts.”

  11

  On the drive down to Islamorada Thorn asked Roger if he knew what this was all about. He said not exactly. He was a little new in town. He said that until last week he’d worked out of the Palm Beach office of Florida Secure Systems, doing surveillance camera setups and maintenance for the beachfront mansion set. His job was watching winos fall asleep on somebody’s stretch of sand and then rousting them. He was about to quit when he was transferred down here. In the company, working in Islamorada was considered a promotion, becoming the palace guard.

  Just south of the Cheeca Lodge, Roger turned off the highway and onto the old road. He went north a half mile and turned again down a long, narrow lane. The road made a couple of twists and emptied them out on a long, stately drive. A few fifty-foot royal palms lined the driveway at the entrance. At the edge of the drive was a John Deere like the one Thorn had used a month before, augering in his stilts.

  “Planting trees down here,” Roger said, “you need nuclear devices, get them into the bedrock.”

  It was a three-story stilt house, tin roof. Wraparound porch, shutters, French doors, the light gingerbread of upper Keys Conch houses. But the house was a queasy pink. All the windows mirrored.

  “Fuchsia? Magenta? I’m not real good on colors,” Thorn said.

  “Electric Strawberry,” said Roger. “That’s what they told Benny, the painters did. But listen, don’t say anything bad about his house. The man loves his house. The thing’s a copy of some pioneer house that used to be around here.”

  “It’s hideous,” Thorn said.

  “It grows on you,” Roger said.

  “Chancres grow on you,” Thorn said.

  Two other brown Mercedeses were parked in the grassy lot. And Thorn could see beyond the house a large wooden deck, a swimming pool with ocean view, people in chaises out there. The Atlantic shaking with the dull afternoon light.

  They got out of the car, and Thorn followed Roger across the grassy lot.

  “For a guy in the security business, he’s not very security-conscious.”

  “Whatta you mean?” Roger said.

  “No walls. No dogs. Just wide open like this.”

  “Don’t let it fool you. Somebody inside the house at this moment knows how shriveled your pecker is.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  Roger led Thorn to the pool area. A redhead was sunning nude on a recliner. A candidate for breast reduction. Thorn thought for a minute he could see blurry waves of heat rising from her. Two of Benny’s men in windbreakers were having their lunch, big submarine sandwiches at a table very near the redhead. Take a bite, take a look.

  Thorn sat down in a cast-iron chair by the Jacuzzi, and Roger joined his buddies at the table across the deck. Thorn watched the hot tub churn. The water jetting in, the fast ping of bubbles.

  Benny made his entrance in five minutes. He was a squat man. He came hurrying out of the house in a white linen suit. Pink sweat shirt. He carried a tall green tea glass, moving like one of those small professional tackles from twenty years ago. Thorn thought, fireplugs, bowling balls, all those short, hard things with low centers of gravity. Bad things to smack into.

  “Mr. Thorn, Mr. Thorn,” he said, smiling, not switching the tea glass, but putting out his left hand. Thorn used his left, too, and Benny took it, directing him back down into his chair. Thorn kept a polite look on his face. But he’d already started forming pictures of Benny fully clothed, bubbling away in that hot tub. Maybe keep the guy in there for a few hours, a regular Mr. Wizard experiment. Shrivel testing.

  Benny sat across from Thorn. He took a huge breath and blew it out, as if it might be his first of the day.

  “So tell me, guy. You and Gaeton, you kissing cousins or what?”

  Thorn considered it a moment.

  He said, “If I was going to kiss a man, it wouldn’t be a former federal agent.”

  Benny smiled. He said, “But the two of you are close, no?”

  “Mr. Cousins,” Thorn said, “I’ve never been anything but self-employed. The only reason I’m here is ’cause of Gaeton. So, yeah, you could say we’re pretty close.”

  Benny hummed to himself,
giving Thorn a curious stare. He shook his head, and said, “OK, then. Let me get right to the point with you. I hear that money isn’t a thing with you. Takes other things to make you hop. OK, I respect that.”

  “I bet.”

  Benny closed his eyes, shook his head. He leaned forward on his chair, elbows on his knees. He said, I hear you know the lay of the land down here. Hell of a fisherman. Things of this sort. You check out good.”

  “What does that mean? Check out good?”

  “We brought you up on the screen,” Benny said. “What? You thought you were anonymous?”

  Thorn watched a trio of killdeer flash overhead, riding a fresh breeze from the northwest, steering wide around that phony house. Thorn on a computer? Thorn, without so much as a Social Security number or a driver’s license. Hadn’t registered for the draft, hadn’t ever paid taxes ’cause he’d never gotten a paycheck. Nothing special about that in the Keys. Living in Key Largo had until recently been like living in a foggy hollow in the Ozarks down a three-day Jeep trail. Revenue men had been as rare as frost. But in the last few years they’d been everywhere, along with their relatives, the FBI, DEA, all the initialed enforcers pushing the boundaries of law down that strip of U.S. 1.

  Benny fiddled with the tiny conch shell dangling from his right ear. He said, “I like to know a guy before I get involved with him. So I read up on you, and I liked what I saw. You’re a guy who wants something done, he finds a way to do it, kosher or not. A man not tainted by a lifetime of law enforcement activities. ’Cause see, in the security business you can’t be too fussy about who you deal with. Some of my clients, they haven’t always been good little boys and girls.”

  No, maybe the hot tub was the wrong approach. Maybe he should lay Benny out and run him through the sawmill. It’d be messy. But worth it. Thorn smiled at the thought of it. And Benny smiled back.

  “As for you, Thorn,” Benny said, “at the moment, I’m personally looking for the right guy, like a private tutor, you know, show me how to hold a rod and reel, simple stuff. Finding fish. The difference between this fish and that one. Shit like that, so I don’t look like Willy off the pickle boat.”

  Thorn mustered another smile.

  “I’m throwing myself into this laid-back Keys shit,” Benny said. “I mean, I’m offering you a job, but it’s like, you come to work with us, you can dress how you want. Let your fingernails go six inches, an earring. Whatever you’re into.”

  Thorn looked at his fingernails.

  “Go without underwear?” he said.

  “Hell, yes.” Benny smiled and tapped his middle finger on Thorn’s knee. “You’re exactly what I’m looking for. The real thing, an authentic. You can show me things. ’Cause you’re it, Thorn. An authentic.”

  “Thanks,” Thorn said.

  “I was something of a maverick myself,” Benny said. “Man, I hated government work. So I started my company, and ding, my life changed. I became an entrepreneur, and all the songs on the radio started making sense. Sunny skies above, don’t fence me in.” The guy was starting to get rhapsodic, swaying to the music of his ego.

  Thorn watched the redhead rise, jog quickly to the edge of the pool. She looked around, waited till all her flesh came to rest and she was certain everybody was watching. Everyone was. She dove in, and as she broke back into the air, she squealed.

  Benny reached out, gripped Thorn’s knee, and said, “Three years ago we were doing nothing but rent-a-cop work for weddings, bar mitzvahs, dances. Shit work. But listen to this: Last year we grossed over eighty mil.

  “ ’Cause we broadened our scopes. Nowadays we do it all, employee surveillance, security procedures, counterespionage. Things as simple as weapons selection, guard dogs even. We’ll take a guy, set up his entire security program for him, small business, international. We do labor disputes. Say a company wants to stay operational in the face of some union bullshit. We do home-away-from-home service, uniformed guards, negotiators, even bedding, laundry, recreational gear, the whole schmear.”

  “You guard scabs.”

  “That’s one way to say it,” Benny said. He looked warily at Thorn. “And seclusion enhancements are also big these days.”

  “Seclusion enhancements,” Thorn said, feeling his mind fog. He said it again. Thorn cleared his throat and said, “Guys you used to put away, now you’re coaching them. That’s how it is?”

  Benny shifted in his chair and sighed.

  “See, what I’m trying to show you, Thorn, is you give me a couple of weeks of your time, let me pick your brain now and then, if it works out between us, there’s a lot of slots a person could fill with this company.”

  Benny leaned back, his eyes panning around his property, snagging for a second on the redhead shivering, toweling off.

  He bent forward, his voice dropping a few decibels, a rough imitation of confidentiality. “Fact is, Thorn. I’ll give it to you in full honesty. I’m in love with these islands. I want to relocate my home office down here. But you know, the place is lousy with disorganized clowns, loners, and losers stepping all over each other trying to get things done. One of my goals is, I’m going to bring this county into the twentieth century, man. That’s the long and short of it. You don’t have anything against the twentieth century, do you, Thorn?”

  “A lot.”

  Benny smiled vaguely and said, “I have guys working for me, they hunt elk in Montana every fall and just work the winter season.” He seemed far away now, not sure what was happening to the thread of his sales pitch.

  “Hunt elk,” Thorn said quietly. “With the antlers.”

  “Or wild boars,” said Benny. “Whatever you’re into.”

  “Could I shoot people?”

  “Not regularly,” Benny said with the same flat voice.

  “I’d miss shooting people,” Thorn said. “If things got dull, could I shoot at you?”

  “All right,” Benny said, his voice suddenly neutral, finally catching on. He turned a twisted frown on Thorn. Things jumped in his temples. The gold conch shell flickered.

  One of Benny’s men was striding over, carrying a portable phone, wiping his mouth with the wax paper from his submarine sandwich. He handed Benny the phone. Benny held it, still glaring at Thorn, tapping his finger on the edge of the table as if counting off the seconds.

  Thorn made him count off a few more, then stood, moved to the edge of the hot tub.

  He kind of enjoyed the rumbling sound of the hot tub. It reminded him of one of those cracks in the ocean floor he’d read about, where the lava superheats the water, bubbles out, filling the water with its dark fertility. The fish growing huge, the plants monstrous. He liked that, a fissure between this world and that one. A place where you could go to see the two worlds clashing and bubbling and the fish feeding on the bounty.

  Benny came close to Thorn, looked down at the bubbles. “OK, so I was wrong about you,” he said. “But let me tell you something, hot rod. You wouldn’t have lasted with us anyway. I’m looking for men. Guys got uranium in their balls.”

  “You know,” Thorn said, turning and taking a good grip on Benny’s lapels, “person like you needs to learn to relax. Get your blood pressure down in the double digits. Slosh around, open the pores.” Thorn had him on the edge of the steamy Jacuzzi. Benny helpless, at arm’s length now from Thorn. Roger was on his way over from the gazebo to protect his boss, not exactly in a hurry. “Guy like you puts so much stress on himself, it’s got to be bad for your arteries. I feel mine get tight just looking at you.”

  Thorn let Benny go. He looked down at him there, splashing around, the guy not relaxing after all.

  12

  Gaeton had dreamed through the afternoon. It was his horny dream about lush jungle women. Brazilian, Peruvian. He wasn’t sure. He’d been having it now for weeks. The setting and the women always the same, but the story line different. Probably it was his libido sending tomtom messages to his brain. Cut out all this thinking and figuring, get back to the glan
dular truths. Now he wished he had.

  In this afternoon’s dream he had cruised batlike through a tropical rain forest, steam rising from rivers. Sharp cuts in the emerald shade of palms. He’d seen the iridescent blues and reds of macaws, lizards. Deeper and deeper into the green shadow of the jungle until he coasted into a clearing.

  And there he was suddenly sitting on a golden throne. He had tribal markings on his face and arms. Naked village maidens were lined up to present themselves to him, one by one. Good-looking maidens, too. Sonia Bragas, every one of them. That hair, those swollen hips. They lay down on the grassy earth, opening themselves to him.

  He could feel his erection pushing against the linoleum. It brought him almost back to consciousness.

  Then a blast of light. Sonia gone. The macaws flying into the brightness.

  Gaeton swiveled his shoulders as much as he could to see the silhouette standing in the doorway of the shed. It was late afternoon. The door closed on an ominous sky. Probably five-thirty, maybe six. Sunday. Less than a week till the Old Pirate Days festival.

  He’d always loved that time of year, even after it got so touristy. The seafood festival, the kissing booths, four days of everybody in Key Largo dressed like Blackbeard. Hey, me hearty. The treasure hunt at Harry Harris Park. The silly parade with pirate beauty queens in prom dresses and eye patches. The volunteer fire department throwing out rubber swords and headbands. It was goofy and small-town and commercial. But for three days in the middle of every January everybody on the island was smiling. And shit, when did you ever see that anymore?

  Gaeton made himself look up into the shadow. He couldn’t make out the kind of pistol, but he could tell it had a silencer screwed on the barrel.

  Benny leaned over and pulled off the tape and pulled out the sock. Gaeton had tested his range earlier in the day, rolling a half turn to his right, coming back, taking a breath, another fierce roll. But what then? Bite Benny’s ankle till he gave up?