Big Al said, "Please. You're makin' a mistake. Call Tony—"
Squid raised his gun butt, gave him one brisk hack where the spine ended and the skull began, and caught him neatly by the armpits as he sagged. He muscled him into the trunk and slammed the lid on top of him.
Nicky turned his gun toward Katy and ordered her into the car.
She stood where she was. Trying to sound firm, trying to convince him with her righteous certainty, she said, "You got your guy. We can go now, right?"
"Sorry, sister. Job ain't finished yet."
"But you said—"
Squid was moving toward her across the oily floor. He grabbed her almost gently by the elbow.
Nicky interrupted her. "What I said is that I don't like witnesses. Get inna fucking car."
Ushered by Squid, dizzy on her high shoes, she slid into the backseat once again, allowed herself a shudder and a groan as she nestled next to Tusch. Fifi bounded onto his lap, licked their joined hands.
"That's quite a dog you got," said Squid.
Chop drove off slowly through the scattered drops of blood that the rottweiler had left behind.
36
Halfway to Stock Island, Big Al Marracotta woke up in the trunk.
It was pitch dark in there, with just a small supply of viscous air that smelled of grease and rubber. The tires were loud as their treads sucked at the pavement, and he bounced with every seam in the road. Potholes sent him flying against the underside of the lid. He curled up and cradled his head and wondered if it was absolutely certain that he was being taken to die.
In the passenger compartment, things were not much cheerier. For a while no one spoke. Al and Katy leaned against each other, their flanks growing very warm where they touched. The heroic shih tzu perched proudly on her master's lap as a few hideous miles of U.S. 1 slipped past in what was now full night. There was the glare of fast- food joints and desperate strip malls, crappy motels shilled by giant signs that throbbed like boils. Nicky Scotto plucked at his pants and wondered if, with Big Al gone and the fish market solidly his, he might ease back into wearing decent suits.
Chop approached the little bridge at Cow Key Channel. Squid pointed to a hollow on the far side of the road. "That's where we picked up your stupid license plate," he told Al Tuschman. "Tailed you all the way to your hotel. You didn't notice nothin'."
No, the furniture salesman admitted to himself, he hadn't. But why would he have? He wasn't a criminal, didn't have violent enemies, didn't have to live life looking back across his shoulder. He'd arrived in Key West, just a few short days ago, as one more average schmo with average hopes for his vacation. Get a tan, maybe meet a woman. Step, however briefly, however meekly, outside the self he was by habit, and go home with life enriched by a memory or two. Modest expectations; sane expectations. Why would he have noticed, or believed, that two maniacs suddenly were out to get him?
They drove past tattoo parlors, liquor stores.
In the trunk, Big Al Marracotta bounced and rolled, and tried to avoid admitting he was terrified by getting more and more pissed off. Disagreements happened; guys got iced. He accepted this, except when it was happening to him. Now it all seemed senseless and unjust. Why was he getting killed? Because that putz Benny Franco got himself indicted? Because Tony Eggs didn't make a phone call?
Or was it even crazier and more infuriating than that? Was he getting killed because he took vacation? This was the price of a goddamn week away from work? Or was it that he took vacation with a no-good, ingrate tramp who sold him out?
Baffled and furious, he bounced, he tumbled, and gradually he realized that he was running out of air. He had to pull hard from the bottom of his lungs to inhale; he smelled his own stale breath going into him again. In the blackness of the trunk, he felt a sudden excruciating loneliness, previewed the unspeakable remove of being dead, and the helpless and humiliating sorrow of it only made him madder. He swore to himself a solemn pledge: if he was going down because of all this unfair craziness, these betrayals and these blunders, he wasn't going down alone.
Curled up, panting, he reached toward his ankle. He felt for the slender knife that Squid's hurried frisking hadn't found. One knife against three guns—there was no chance he could save himself. Yet there was a certain spiteful comfort in knowing there was still somebody weaker he could hurt. Pulling the weapon smoothly from its leather sheath, he tucked it up his sleeve between the bounces of the car. He pulled hard at the rank and thinning air, and took a final nasty pleasure from figuring how he might slash and tear the woman who had turned on him.
*
Chop turned off the highway at MacDonald Avenue, then wound through streets of deepening dreariness.
Dim and secret bars gave way to crowded plots of rusting trailers lifted up on cinder blocks; the trailers yielded to a precinct of windowless garages housing auto-body and machine shops. Where the asphalt ended and the road became humped gravel dotted with deep foul puddles that would never dry, there were random shacks with kinked and crumpled metal roofs, their grassless yards littered with splotched banana leaves and decomposing fronds. Streetlamps grew sparse; they wavered in uncertain, percolating ground that was only inches higher than the ocean. There was a smell in the air of sea corrupted, a salty stink like that of anchovies kept too long in the tin.
Chop serenely drove; the Jaguar clattered over stones.
Dead ahead, inexplicably standing sentinel in the middle of the street, there was what appeared to be an ancient tollbooth. It leaned on rotting stakes; boards were missing from its wooden flanks; there was no glass in its windows.
On closer inspection, it proved to be the box office for a long-abandoned drive-in theater.
Beyond the tiny building, bathed in wan and opalescent moonlight, stretched the ghostly parking field. Low concentric mounds built up of shells and bits of coral lifted vanished cars to perfect viewpoints. The posts that had held the scratchy speakers poked up crooked from the contours. The screen itself—its paint long seared away by sun and salt, its plywood face splintery and scarred—loomed patiently, waiting for the inevitable wind that would send it crashing down.
Chop rode the mounds like waves, finally broke the silence. "Good place, huh?" he said to Nicky.
"Beautiful."
Gasping in the trunk, Big Al Marracotta bounced and rolled with every hump.
The driver headed for what once had been the snack bar, a fragrant place of Milk Duds and malteds and soggy burgers wrapped in foil. Boarded and imploding now, it was only something to hide behind. Chop pulled up near it and switched the engine off.
37
They climbed out of the car.
Nicky plucked at his damp and hated suit. Squid twisted his torso, stretched his bandy muscles. Chop halfheartedly produced a gun, but seemed to wish he was still behind the wheel.
Fifi jogged in little circles, then paused to sniff the seam where the snack bar met the ground, detected memories, perhaps, of ancient popcorn, archaic franks. Katy rose up tall on her high-heeled sandals. The night air was still warm against her legs; she concentrated on the feeling. Al Tuschman stood close to her and looked up at the rotting, tilting movie screen backed by a spray of starlight. Drive-ins had been big in Jersey. He remembered going in pajamas as a little kid. Life seemed very safe then.
Nicky and Squid trained their pistols on the Jaguar's trunk. Chop flipped a lever and the lid yawned open.
Moonlight wedged in, and Big Al Marracotta squinted at the sudden brightness, sucked greedily at the rush of salty air. Nicky said to him, "Get up."
It wasn't that easy. His legs had cramped, his blood grown grainy and stagnant. He rocked and strained, flopped like a fish on the beach. Eventually he was sitting on the trunk's sharp lip, his small feet not reaching to the ground. He looked straight at Nicky's gun and said, "You really don't have to do this."
"Hey," said Nicky, "you've seen my cards. Gotta finish out the hand."
Big Al bit his lip, looked aro
und. Absently, he said, "Fuckin' drive-in? Ain't seen one a these in years."
No one joined the conversation.
Big Al stared over at Katy, measured the distance between them. Twelve, fifteen feet. She was standing next to the big guy with the curly hair. Not touching, but very close. He said to her, "So you're wit' this asshole now?"
Katy didn't answer that.
Big Al said, "Boom—just like that. After all I done for you."
Katy said nothing.
Big Al shook his head. And lightly shook his arm, so that the tip of his knife rested against the heel of his hand just at the edge of his cuff. "Well," he said, "win some, lose some. No hard feelings."
He looked down a moment then said to Nicky, "Bitch cost me a lot. Still, good girlfriend, lotta ways. Mind I kiss her goo'bye?"
Nicky seemed bleakly amused by the show of gallows sentiment. It was all the same to him. They were both dead people anyway. He just shrugged by way of answer.
Big Al eased down from the trunk. His weird hair gleamed like plastic in the moonlight. Shells and knobs of coral crunched beneath his shoes. Slowly and deliberately, he turned his back on the men with guns and shuffled toward his former girlfriend. For a moment that boy-devil grin was on his face, then his lips got hard and flat.
Katy leaned backward on her shoes but couldn't get her feet to move.
He approached without hurry. The ground crackled beneath him. He turned his wrist just slightly so that it faced away from Nicky and Chop and Squid. When he was a single stride from Katy, he twitched his hand and the knife blade slid down across his palm and he caught the hot handle in his fingers.
Alan Tuschman saw the blade glint in the moonlight, saw Big Al Marracotta crouch ever so slightly to turn his next step into a thrusting lunge.
He had no time to think. He had only that fraction of a heartbeat in which the brave man acted while the phony hero postured, and bargained with his nerve, and thereby lost the moment. Al Tuschman didn't hesitate.
Stomping fear, throttling caution, he threw himself in front of Katy, across the path of Big Al Marracotta's jabbing blade. He grabbed at his namesake's flailing arm but didn't catch it cleanly; Marracotta jerked his hand free and stabbed up toward Tuschman's neck. The salesman deflected the thrust, but the knife slashed past his shoulder. He felt it cut his shirt and slice his skin and bite through to the yielding flesh. With the ooze of blood came less pain than an ecstatic charge, a hectic self-forgiveness of past shirkings and doubts and fallings-short.
Wounded and wildly heedless, Al Tuschman bulled straight at the man with the knife. Marracotta thrust again. The tall man seized his pumping arm; the knife flashed and wiggled like a snake. For a long moment the two Als pressed against each other in a dreadful stalemate, then the mobster lost his footing on the loose and chalky gravel, and they both went tumbling to the mounded ground.
Fifi circled and barked and nipped at Marracotta's ankles. Amid the tumult, no one noticed that Squid had slipped away. No one paid attention to the grinding startup of a different engine.
Al Tuschman scrambled flat on top of Big Al Marracotta, slugged him awkwardly across the chin. The short man kneed him in the groin and rolled him over and strained to lift the arm that held the knife. The salesman kept a hand clamped around the mobster's wrist and struggled to hang on. Marracotta lifted, grunted . . . and Tuschman suddenly let go, bucking and shoving as Marracotta's unsprung arm flew up and wrecked his balance. The little gangster tipped over and crashed onto his side. The impact of his landing shook the knife out of his hand; it skated over shells and coral for half a dozen feet.
Big Al went crawling after it. He was about to grab it when a pair of long bare legs moved in to block his path.
Katy Sansone lifted up a high-heeled sandal and kicked him in the face. He saw the shoe hurtling toward him and then he felt his nose cave in, spiky shards intruding on his passages. Like a half-crushed bug he tried to keep on crawling, swimming toward the knife, but Al Tuschman had him by the feet, pulled him back across the lacerating shells.
The desperate and preposterous tug-of-war went on for several seconds, then Nicky Scotto sauntered over and, with a wagging pistol, called it off. Dryly, he said, "Amateur wrestling. Tag-team. Very entertaining."
Big Al lifted his neck and rolled his eyes way up like in a painting of a saint, saw Nicky's gun poised not far above his head. He tried to speak but blood and mucus had pooled in his throat and for the moment he could only gurgle. He kicked his legs and made a reflexive attempt at standing.
Nicky cocked the hammer of his pistol. "Don't bother getting up," he said. "You'll only fall back down again."
That's when the truck came tearing around the back side of the snack bar.
It whined and roared, its tires spitting gravel out behind as it rocked on the uneven ground. Glowing softly in the moonlight, the writing on the trailer said LOWER KEYS SEAFOOD COMPANY—EAT FISH LIVE LONGER. Through a glaring silver starburst on the windshield, Squid could just barely be seen, manically grinning, spasmodically swallowing. He drove straight at Big Al.
"Jesus Christ," said Nicky, as everybody scattered.
Al Marracotta, his back to the screaming vehicle, crawled and reared and scrabbled to his knees but was flattened by the fender and pounded like a cutlet by the left front tire. It crushed his ribs; the doubled rear wheels wrung his innards out like sponges, made them into paste. He twitched once like a shocked frog, and after that was still.
The truck's momentum carried it another fifty yards. It came to a skidding halt on the coral rubble and slowly turned around. Squid paused a moment then revved it high in first, slammed it into second.
"The motherfucker's crazy," Nicky said, though it would be another moment before he realized that the seafood truck was coming back for him.
He didn't realize that until the truck had veered so that its hood ornament was pointing squarely at his face. Disbelieving still, he yelled out, "Hey!" And when the truck did not change course, he raised his gun and shot the windshield out.
Squid Berman, hunkered down beneath the dashboard, reveled in the spray of broken glass.
Nicky Scotto fired again, this time murdering the radiator, and then he started running, his stiff, cheap jacket flying out behind. He took off over humps and mounds, past headless speaker posts sprouting bouquets of disconnected wires. Squid dogged him like a cowboy, pivoting and leaning, motor whining like a whinnying horse. Nicky ran along the contour of a mound, seemed for a deranged moment to be racing across the drive-in screen. Finally, legs heavy, breath failing, he turned around to fire once more. The bullet exploded a sideview mirror; but after that, winded and dispirited, the doomed man could hardly do more than jog.
The truck caught up with him but failed to run him over. It somehow lifted him behind the knees and waffled him against the grille, broken but alive. A disembodied hand raised up grotesquely, wagged a moonlit gun above the level of the hood. Squid Berman floored the truck and headed for a speaker post, used Nicky Scotto's body as a ram to knock it down. The pistol went off skyward as his back was snapped and his lifeless body rolled in its horrendous suit down a hump of shells and coral.
38
"I wasn't afraid! I wasn't afraid!" Al Tuschman had said to Katy in the moment before his knees had buckled and he'd crumpled slowly to the ground.
He sat there now, his back against the Jag, his eyes tracking with a dreadful fascination the homicides by seafood truck. Katy sat near him, dabbing his cut shoulder with a hankie. Fifi smelled her master's precious blood; full of worry and compassion, she wouldn't stop licking his hand.
Chop nonchalantly kept his gun pointed at the captives as he watched his partner run people down.
Then Squid drove back across the humps and mounds and screeched to a stop half a dozen feet away. The truck's windshield consisted now of several snaggled shards quaking in the frame. Antifreeze was dribbling from below and the engine was already smoking. The driver jumped down from the cab, ar
ms twitching, tongue busy at the corners of his mouth.
"Nice work," Chop said to him.
Modest and not completely satisfied, Squid said only, "Aawh."
He did a little pirouette, then pulled his pistol from the waistband of his pants, and for a few moments he paced intently back and forth in front of Al and Katy. Moonlight rained down and a smell of damp rubber rose up from Big Al Marracotta's corpse. Whenever Squid changed the direction of his pacing, his feet broke some seashells and they made a crispy sound.
Finally he paused, leaned low before his captives, and barked right into their faces, "I fucking hate to make mistakes!"
He sprang into motion once again, and added, "It's like noisy, cockeyed, out of tune. Depressing. Ya see what I'm saying?"
Cautiously, Al and Katy nodded.
"Coulda been a masterpiece, this job," the bandy man continued. "Had everything. Theme. Shape. Room ta improvise. Instead I hadda backtrack and erase. And now I got these extra pieces."
"Extra pieces?" said Al Tuschman.
"You, numbnuts."
A puff of breeze made the tilting movie screen groan on its moldy pilings. Squid kept on pacing and Fifi kept swiveling her head to track him. After a time he stopped again, crouched down, and put the muzzle of the gun very close to Alan Tuschman's forehead. He said, "Lemme ask you a fairly important question. Tell me what you did tonight."
A little cross-eyed, Al said, "Huh?"
"You deaf?"
Katy said, "We checked out of our hotel. Rented a car. Drove up to South Beach."
"Meet anyone? See anything unusual along the way?"
"Nobody," said Katy. "Nothing."
"Nothing at all," Al Tuschman blithely said.
"Then how'dya cut your shoulder?"
"Umm ..."
"Lover's quarrel," Katy said. "Nobody's business."
Squid considered that a moment, then he started pacing once again. In his pacing was the torment of the artist before a canvas that simply would not come together. Sighing, he said at last, "Look, it bothers me ta have ta kill ya. But come on. After what you saw? Nicky woulda took you out. Big Al woulda took you out."
Welcome to Paradise Page 18
