Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  I figured about where I’d have to shoot to pop at least one tractor tire. It was going to be riskier than before, of course, because before I just went up to the tire and shot it point blank. To shoot the tractor tire from at least fifty feet away, that would be something that took a little skill and a lot of luck.

  So I tried to settle my mind, and my hand. I tried to think of everything Red had ever told me about how to aim with your guts and not with your eyes. How you have to think that the shot’s done even before you pulled the trigger. How you had to make your mind understand that the shot was nothing. Plus, I wasn’t shooting a guy, which I didn’t know if I could actually do or not. I was shooting a tire.

  So. I shifted. I sat. I pointed. I breathed. I shot.

  The gun went blam and, almost at the same time, the tire exploded.

  Once again, it was so loud that I couldn’t hear anything for a second. I saw, however, that my ploy had worked. Harvey reacted to the noise by pulling up and away from the tractor, and Officer Gordon got him twice out of five quick shots. The AK went clattering to the floor, followed almost immediately by Harvey.

  Meanwhile Henderson was also startled and backed away from the tractor. I got myself to my feet as fast as I could and ran like I had a dog chasing me, right toward Henderson. He saw me coming and, for the first time, he looked scared.

  That was very satisfying.

  ‘Tell me one thing that keeps me from shooting you dead,’ I shouted at him as I came roaring down on him. ‘Give me one reason I shouldn’t empty this gun into your guts, you son of a bitch.’

  He was backing up fast and making little barking sounds. He eventually got stopped by the wall, but I kept coming. We ended up face to face, with his daughter’s little gun jammed into his solar plexus so hard I thought he might stop breathing.

  ‘Can’t think of anything?’ I whispered.

  I made a motion like I was cocking the pistol, although with the Sig, it wasn’t really necessary. I did it for effect.

  ‘Our deal!’ he snarled. ‘I won’t tell anyone your real name; they’ll never find you. I can do that.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said, even softer than before. ‘I know you won’t tell anyone my real name because, as it happens, you don’t know it. That name you spewed out, the one you think is my real name? It’s one of about seventeen aliases I acquired in Brooklyn as a teen. I have so many names on account of good advice I got back then. See, if they don’t know your real name, they can’t find you so good. So, no, Mr Henderson, no deal.’

  For emphasis I shoved the pistol so far into his guts I could feel his backbone.

  Henderson shrieked. Also very satisfying.

  Then I heard from behind me, ‘All right, Moscowitz. I got it.’

  I turned my head a little to see Gordon behind me. He had handcuffs in one hand and his gun in the other.

  I paused for just a second to make Henderson think I might just go ahead and pop him as it was, then I backed away slowly, holding the gun out to the side so that there would be no question in Gordon’s mind what I was about.

  ‘This pistol,’ I said to Gordon, ‘belongs to Sharon. You want me to give it back?’

  ‘Just hang on to it for a second,’ Gordon said, ‘while I finish this up, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed.

  ‘Pascal Henderson,’ Gordon said, very much like a cop on television, ‘you’re under arrest for the statutory rape of Lynette Baker, resisting arrest, ordering the shooting of a police officer, attempting to flee, and, if I understand some documents we’ve just received from the Seminole Tribal Council, land fraud.’

  Henderson was momentarily too stunned to say anything.

  ‘Have a look at Baxter, would you?’ Gordon said to me. ‘Then, if you know how to work it, go to the squad car and call for an ambulance, right?’

  I moved instantly while Gordon put Henderson in cuffs. I noticed that Gordon had kicked the AK-47 far away from Harvey, who was unconscious, or dead. Still, I liked to ere on the safe side. I scooted over and collected the rifle, then hurried to Baxter.

  Baxter was passed out, but he was very much alive. He had a bad wound in his right forearm and a graze on his left thigh. I ripped up the sleeve of his cop shirt and make a quick bandage out of it for the arm. I couldn’t tell if the bullet was still in or not. The thigh was bleeding, but not as bad.

  Philip and Mister Redhawk were up and moving. They seemed amazingly calm. Mister Redhawk stopped beside me, but Philip kept going toward his Jeep, with a quick smile and nod in my direction.

  ‘How is he?’ Mister Redhawk asked, standing over me and Gordon.

  ‘I’m worried about the arm, but I think he’s fine,’ I said. ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ he answered. ‘We won’t forget this. I think things are going to be better for you now.’

  That was all. He was gone.

  I glanced over at John Horse, who was getting himself to his feet as well. ‘This turned out even better than I thought it would!’ He had a big smile on his face.

  ‘Are you going with Philip and Mister Redhawk?’ I asked him. ‘Because I think I still have some sorting out to do, and I’d like to talk with you a little bit more, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he assured me, ‘I’m here to be with you. We’ll take care of this mess, get everyone off to the hospital or to jail, and then go back to your place and talk, if you like.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now I have to call for an ambulance.’

  I headed for the cop car.

  ‘Hey, Foggy,’ John Horse called out. ‘Do you see which side you’re on tonight? Take a look around this place. Do you see what that means?’

  I didn’t feel like taking a look around because I wanted to call the hospital. But then I realized, just as my hand was on the driver’s side door of the cop car, exactly what he meant. I was about to get into a police vehicle willingly for the first time in my life. And I was doing that to call for help for two policemen, and a woman who was my boss and also a person who did me wrong. And that was happening while the baddest of the bad guys got cuffed, primarily on account of me. I was in the process of seeing to it that criminals got arrested and policemen got help. And I thought to myself, Well, this is certainly a topsy-turvy world.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Ambulances arrived, people departed, and I decided for some reason that I had to go back to my office and finish signing my time card. Funny what gets into a person’s head after a series of difficult events; funny what you think might give you the feeling that it was all finally over. John Horse said he’d drive me. We didn’t talk much on the way.

  The sky was beginning to clear, and every once in a while you could see a silver moon. The streets were slick with rain, and the occasional neon was splashing around in the puddles.

  We pulled up in front of my office building and, before I got out, John Horse spoke up.

  ‘Now,’ he announced, all business, ‘let’s sort out a few things, like you said.’

  I stared at him. ‘Just like that? No slow cooking?’

  ‘You’ve had a hard couple of days,’ he said. ‘I’d imagine you’re pretty tired. I thought I would spare you the crafty Seminole schtick.’

  I continued to stare for a moment, trying to figure if he was still messing with me or not. He didn’t return my stare, so I gave up after a second and went along with him.

  ‘OK,’ I mumbled.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight ahead, his hands still on the steering wheel.

  ‘Well, OK, I am curious about something that Mister Redhawk said to me just as he was leaving the airplane hangar,’ I suggested.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He said, “I think things are going to be better for you now,”’ I told him. ‘What do you think he meant by that, would you happen to know?’

  ‘If I had to guess,’ John Horse answered, ‘I would think he meant that Sharon’s not go
ing to be your boss anymore. I think that somehow you’ll be in charge up there in that little office of yours. That would be better, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You think he can arrange a thing like that?’ I asked, uncertain how I felt about it.

  ‘Yes. I’ve told you already, Foggy,’ John Horse said, ‘I think you have talents and abilities that you’ve wasted, or haven’t discovered, because of your past. Mister Redhawk agrees with me about that. Now is the time to start using those talents. Now is the time to become the person you really are. And you’re not a car thief.’

  ‘What am I?’ I asked, mostly to be polite.

  I was suddenly feeling completely exhausted. All I wanted to do was go up to my office, sign my time card, declare the case officially finished, and then sleep for a week.

  ‘What did the water people tell you?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Oy, again with the water people,’ I complained.

  ‘I think you should examine it for just a second,’ he said. ‘What was the last thing that the water people told you?’

  I grumbled, but I could see that I was going to have to humor him. He wasn’t going to let it go, for some reason. So I tried to think back to my tea-induced trip. And after a second, there she was: the water girl, in the place under the lake.

  ‘I was telling the water girl how nice it was under the water. She was telling me I had to go back to save children.’ I related this begrudgingly, because I was a little embarrassed to be taking it even a little seriously.

  ‘There you go.’ He nodded once. ‘Right now it looks like you might be a person who saves children, in one way or another. Sounds corny, I know, but that’s what you are.’

  ‘Yeah, about that,’ I said, unwilling to ponder his suggestion. ‘What’s going to happen with Lynette and the baby, and also to Sharon, who, after all, is only an older wayward child? And while you’re at it, what’s going to happen with the Seminole land and the oil rights, really?’

  He looked out on to the silvery streets for a moment and then up into the clouds.

  ‘What’s going to happen with the moon?’ he said.

  I sat silently, because I had no idea what he meant.

  ‘The moon?’ I asked after a minute.

  ‘What’s going to happen with the moon tonight, as the night wears into tomorrow?’

  ‘I guess … I don’t know, it’ll move across the sky, set, and disappear around the other side of the world. But—’

  ‘And what’s going to happen with it tomorrow night? The moon. It’s going to rise again, and ride across the sky again, and set again. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I answered uncertainly.

  ‘And it doesn’t matter if you want it to or not, and it doesn’t matter what you do, and it doesn’t matter what you hope for or what you wish.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to do what it does.’

  I blinked.

  ‘All right, I’m going home,’ he said. ‘You can walk to your apartment from here when you’re finished?’

  I glared at him for a second, and then let out a slow, patient breath. ‘If I don’t just curl up on top of my desk and fall asleep, yes – I can walk home from here.’

  ‘You should come and visit me soon,’ he said, still not looking at me.

  ‘How would I do that exactly?’ I sighed. ‘I have absolutely no idea how to get to where you live.’

  ‘Philip will probably drop by to check up on you. He likes you. He could bring you to my house.’ He smiled then. ‘Isn’t it funny that you had to come back to this office, after all that’s happened?’

  ‘It’s a riot.’ I started to get out of the Jeep.

  ‘It’s almost like you’re already the boss.’ He shifted into first. ‘Nice to be in charge of your own life for a change, isn’t it?’

  And just like that, he was gone.

  I stumbled a little getting up to the offices and, when I shoved in through the front door, it felt, all of a sudden, very empty. I turned on the humming florescent overhead, and there it was – my plywood desk, the smeared walls, the spattered blond carpet. And, even after all that time in a swamp, a gas-soaked airplane hangar, and several bars, I could still smell the stale cigarette smoke from the previous occupant of my office.

  I was aching, wet, freezing, shivering, and about as coherent as a sardine sandwich. So when the phone on my desk started ringing, I was certain I didn’t want to answer it. Who, after all, would be calling at such an ungodly hour?

  But it wouldn’t stop ringing, and so I picked it up at last, with no small sense of déjà vu, since the last time that had happened it had been Sharon on the other end, inviting me into my recent adventures in hell.

  ‘Moscowitz,’ I said, but I sounded like an undertaker.

  ‘Oh my God, you’re actually there,’ the voice on the other end said.

  There was a lot of noise and loud music in the background.

  ‘Yes I am,’ I affirmed. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Gerard,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to call you. I’m at the club now.’

  ‘Gerard?’ I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to focus. ‘How did you get this number?’

  ‘You gave me your card, remember?’ he said.

  ‘Really? Well, good. Good, then. So. How are you?’

  ‘How are you is the question,’ he said. ‘I wanted to check and see if you were all right.’

  ‘This past couple of days were very strange,’ I told him, ‘but things turned out all right. How about you?’

  ‘Peachy,’ he said, all lit up. ‘Remember my telling you about my difficulties with that Jody girl?’

  ‘Yes.’ I sobered up just a little.

  ‘Well, problem solved!’ he said quite cheerfully. ‘And I gather it had something to do with you. She showed up here in our dressing room about an hour ago, looking like hell, and collected her girlfriend – you know, the one who hates me? – They split like they were on fire, packed up everything and told the management they were leaving town for good. Leaving town!’

  ‘Say,’ I told him. ‘That is news.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But since they said you had something to do with it, and it sounded, I don’t know … a little dicey, I thought I would give you a call. I was worried.’

  ‘Thanks, Gerard,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘It’s nice to know somebody was concerned.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re all right, that’s all,’ he said. ‘And Jody’s gone and taken her filthy drugs with her. Maybe things are looking up around here.’

  I thought about that assessment for a moment.

  ‘Maybe they are at that,’ I finally told him, and I might have been smiling – it was hard to tell.

  We said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked around my crummy little office. Then, although I still couldn’t have told you exactly why, I actually filled out my time card. I put it in the outbox and managed my way to the door. When I turned off the light, I could see moonlight slanting hard through the window blinds. I peeked out, and the whole town – the streets and the buildings and the alleyways – were all painted white by the moon, like there was snow everywhere. And then, all of a sudden, for no reason I could figure, I wasn’t quite so cold anymore.