It was as though he had been constructed specifically to refute my belief that a bureaucrat is the scariest thing there is. He was good at it, too.
First of all, he was big as a mastodon. I saw him right away, before he even entered the compound, and I spilled the beer I was pouring myself. I take great care not to spill beer. He had to turn sideways to come through the open gateway, which is not small. I remembered big Jim Omar carrying that gate away in one hand, an hour or two earlier, and estimated that this guy could have carried Omar and the gate in the same effortless way.
It wasn’t until you got past the sheer mountain-out-for-a-stroll size of him and got a close look at his face that you really started to get scared.
Look, he wasn’t quite as big as the late great Andre the Giant, okay? And if Andre was ever defeated in the ring, I never heard about it. But the moment I saw this guy’s eyes, I knew he could take on an armed squad of angry combat-trained Andres, barehanded, with a high degree of confidence. And probably would have, given the opportunity, for no other reason than to prove he was alpha male. I stared at those eyes of his for several long seconds, and the first human emotion I was able to identify there was a very mild disappointment that none of us men present was enough of a challenge to be any fun to kill. I felt keen relief. He ignored all the women present. I sensed that to him women were interchangeable; when he was ready, he would simply take the nearest one.
Then his eyes went toward the spot where my thirteen-year-old daughter was sitting.
3
BIG STONES
It’s funny. I knew, for a fact, that there was no way he could form a real danger to Erin. Try to bear-hug her, he’d end up holding her empty clothes. Try to shoot her, he’d be in serious jeopardy from the ricochet. Try to outsmart her, and gods who’d been dead a thousand years would come back to life just to laugh at him. I knew all that. Do you think it made the slightest difference in how I reacted? If so, you must be childless. Some of the basic human wiring is buried so deep it simply cannot be dug up and replaced with fiber-optic cable. I wanted him dead, wanted to do it myself, and knew I would die trying. Every gland in my body went into full production.
But Erin was not where she had been sitting a moment ago.
She was behind the man monster now, looking at me. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed slightly brighter than anything else in my visual field, twin tractor beams locked on my own eyes. Far away, someone said something. I found myself remembering what Erin had said yesterday about the fight-or-flight response. Were those really the only two alternatives? I hoped not. He didn’t look like a fight I wanted any part of, and I was not going to flee my home. I’d done that more than once in the past, and I was sick of it.
I perceived that Erin was breathing in and out in long, slow, measured breaths. I could almost hear her voice saying, We can’t afford to give up any IQ points, Pop, and I knew it was true. I struggled to follow her example, for the ten or twenty seconds it took the man monster to reach the bar area, and by the time he was close enough to throw peanuts at, I was getting a pretty good supply of oxygen to the cerebral cortex, and beginning to feel fairly confident of bladder control.
Unfortunately, by then he was close enough to smell. Something about his smell went straight to some atavistic part of my brain that lay even deeper than the basic human wiring. Externally it was as though my friend Nikola Tesla were playing one of his benign practical jokes with electricity on me: every single hair on my body tried to stand on end at once. The silhouette of my head must have expanded by 10 percent.
I forced myself to devote all my energy to my breath, like Captain Kirk telling Sulu to divert all power to the shields. In. Om mani padme hum. Out. Om mani padme hum. In. O pinupdi podbe dorhal—
The man monster reached the bar; cleared a section of debris such as drinks, coasters, ashtrays, and bowls of snack food with his forearms; and leaned forward to rest his weight on them. The groaning of the bar top coincided with a squeal from the foot rail below. Our faces were now two or three feet apart.
In spite of myself, kicking myself for it, I dropped my eyes from his. Only then did I take in how he had dressed to come to South Florida. Dark double-breasted suit. White shirt with button-down collar. Wide necktie. Stingy-brim fedora. I already knew he wasn’t local—no way he could live on an island the size of Key West for as long as a week without every Conch hearing about him. In my years as a barkeep, I’ve become pretty good at guessing where the tourists are from, but this guy was almost too easy: he fit one of the oldest templates I have on file. The way I phrased it to myself was, from the neighborhood: half a wise guy. I glanced quickly over at Fast Eddie and saw that he had spotted it, too; he rolled his eyes at me.
So I was less surprised than I might have been when the monster made a perfunctory left-right sketch of looking around the place and said, in a voice like a garbage disposal working on a wristwatch, words anyone else would have realized were a ridiculous cliché:
“This a real nice joint ya got here, chief. Be a fuckin’ shame if somep’m bad was ta happena the place, ah?”
Down at the end of the bar, Maureen emitted a gasp that was almost a shriek, and then clapped a hand over her mouth.
I didn’t blame her. He was an evolutionary throwback. Go to any museum with a diorama of Early Man, shave the Missing Link down to a ten o’clock shadow like an extremely coarse grade of sandpaper, and you’ll have something very like his face. Failing that, there are a couple of Frank Frazetta cover paintings that depict him trying to rip Tarzan’s throat out.
Okay, Mr. Sulu—divert a little power to the voice.
To my great relief, it did not quaver when I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, “I’ve always thought so.” I forced myself to meet his eyes. “Not for nothing, but you’re a long way from home, ain’t you, pal?” I asked.
He squinted at me and pursed his lips. He was thinking about frowning at me, and if he did, I was going to have to drop my eyes again. “You born inna Bronx, chief?”
I nodded. “Moved out to the Island when I was six.”
He aborted the frown. “Oh. For a minute there, I t’ought you was squeezin my shoes, talkin at way.” Without warning he smiled, and I needed full impulse power to keep the blood from draining from my head. “Okay. So you unnastan the way things work. Terrific.” The smile went away, like a furnace door slamming shut. “Half a the mutts down here, I gotta drawer ’em a pitcher, an then come back inna couple days when they heal up enough to talk again. Waste a fuckin time, nome sane?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” I said. “We don’t get many guys like you in Key West. You’re the first I’ve seen, and I’ve been down here ten years.”
He shrugged. “All good things come to a end, chief. You own iss dump?”
“On paper,” I agreed. “I’m Jake Stonebender. What’s your name?”
He smirked. “Fuck difference it make, really? Like you just said, there’s only the one of me.”
“I have to call you something.”
Very slowly, his massive head went left…right…stopped. “No, ya don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“You ain’t gonna be talkin about me. Unna stanwhum sane?”
I sighed. “Aright. You wanna bottom-line this for me or what?” Amazing how easily New Yorkese came back to me, after all those years. Some things you never forget, I guess: like stealing a bicycle.
He took a step back and turned in a slow circle. People seemed to wither slightly under his gaze, in a wave, like wind passing through a wheatfield. Even Harry the Parrot was silent. The only one who didn’t flinch was Fast Eddie, who grew up in darkest Brooklyn back when there were Dodgers there. Willard and Maureen actually ducked their heads and averted their faces.
The man monster took in the entire compound: the bar area with its big freestanding stone fireplace, the nearby pool, the scatter of tables and chairs, the five cottages, the shell and coral gravel parking area
to the south that rarely held anything but bikes and mopeds, the flaming canopy of poinciana overhead, the handful of obligatory palm trees here and there, and the tall thick hedge that enclosed and shielded the property on all sides. With no apparent pause for computation, he named a sum. “That’s what I figure ya take in, here, an average week.”
I shook my head. “You’re high. Way high.”
He shook his. “Not when I’m workin. Now, I can prackly guarantee ya no trouble here for only a quarter a that.”
“Twenty-five percent is pretty stiff,” I said evenly. My hands were starting to ache from wishing they held a shotgun.
“Not when ya add it up,” he said. “No fires…no explosions…no armed robberies…no random drive-bys…no customers mugged or raped onna way in or out…no wakin up onna bottom a the pool strapped to a safe…ya add it all up, chief, it’s a fuckin bargain.”
When in doubt, stall. “I have a partner I have to consult first.”
“Notify, ya mean. Where’s he at?”
I shrugged as eloquently as I could. It wasn’t quite a lie: as long as I didn’t look at my watch, I couldn’t be certain whether Zoey was still rehearsing, or setting up for the gig. I poured a shot of Chivas and slid it across the bar to him. “Give me forty-eight hours.”
He thought it over. So far I had not said or done anything disrespectful, even for form’s sake. “Okay.” He gulped the shot, turned on his heel and lumbered away, dropping the shot glass onto the cement beside the pool as he passed it. It broke, a musical period to his overture.
It was quite a while after he was gone before anyone moved or spoke.
“Holy this,” Brad said finally. “How saw that guy, Jake?”
“Yeah,” Walter agreed. “And what want he did exactly here?”
“Well, I didn’t get his name,” I said, “but I bet I can guess the name of the organization he represents.”
“You’re wrong, Jake,” Maureen Hooker said.
Something in her voice made me look down the bar to her. Nearly all of us Callahan’s Place alumni tend to tan so poorly that we’re always being mistaken by tourists for other tourists. But now Maureen was pale, the kind of fish-belly white you usually see only on a night-shift worker from Vladivostok. So, I suddenly realized, was her husband Willard. Since I happened to know them both, from conclusive personal experience, to be about as timid and panicky as your average Navy SEAL, this caught my attention. “You’re telling me that guy is not mobbed up?”
Willard answered. “You know the way some respectable Italian-American citizens resent the Mafia, for making all Italians look bad?”
“Sure,” Fifty-Fifty said, and I nodded Irish agreement.
“Well, that’s the way Mafiosi feel about him. They figure a guy like him makes regular Italian murderers and thieves look bad.”
“Which is just backwards,” Maureen added. “He makes Capone and Mad Dog Coll look good.”
Doc Webster cleared his throat loudly. “All right, goddamn it, if nobody else will ask, I will: who was that massed man?” He paused a moment for people to resume breathing. “And where do you two know him from?”
Maybe Maureen’s wince was due to the Doc’s pun. (Mine was.) And maybe it wasn’t. “I’ve never seen him before in my life, Doc. But there’s only one person he could possibly be.”
Her husband nodded glumly. “And until five minutes ago I’d have told you, with some confidence, that he couldn’t possibly exist.”
Maureen half turned in her chair to face him. “But there isn’t any doubt, is there, sweet?”
Willard was frowning so ferociously he looked like a migraine victim. “Not in my mind,” he said, and opened his arms.
They hugged each other hard.
The Doc cleared his throat again, perhaps half an octave higher, and said in his very softest, gentlest voice, “The first one who tells me who that guy is might very well be allowed to live.”
Willard sighed. “That guy,” he told us all, stroking his wife’s hair, “pretty much has to be the son of Tony Donuts.”
“I believe you,” I said. “That’s so weird it almost has to be true. But it doesn’t tell me anything, yet. Who exactly is Tony Donuts?”
“A memory, now.” He shuddered, and I don’t think it was theatrical. “Not a good one.”
“Well…mixed,” Maureen said.
“He was a mixed cursing,” her husband agreed. “I can’t deny that.”
“Willard and I knew each other for years,” Maureen said, “and at various times we were partners, lovers, friends. For a while we weren’t anything at all. Then Tony Donuts came into our lives and brought us back together…and when the dust settled, we were married.”
“Whoa,” Long-Drink exclaimed. “And that’s not enough to make him a good memory? What was he like?”
Willard looked thoughtful. “Picture the monster that just left here.”
Long-Drink frowned. “Okay.”
“Two inches taller, fifty pounds heavier, ten years older.”
With each successive clause, Long-Drink’s frown deepened. “O-kay.”
“With a permanently abscessed tooth.”
Long-Drink’s eyes completely disappeared from view beneath his eyebrows. “Ah,” he said.
“That was Tony Donuts on a good day.”
There was a brief silence, as we all tried to picture such a creature. “I see,” Long-Drink said, though it’s hard to imagine how he could have; by now even the bags under his eyes were obscured.
Fifty-Fifty spoke up. “How’d he get that name? Was he a cop once?”
Willard briefly sketched a smile. “No, Marty. He was born Antonio Donnazzio, that’s part of it.”
“And the rest?”
Willard grimaced. “With children present, I hesitate t—”
“One time he was raping a woman named Mary O’Rourke,” Erin said, “and her husband kept trying to stop him.” She saw Willard’s surprise. “Lady Sally told me the story once. So Tony decided to secure Mr. O’Rourke out of the way, and the tools at hand happened to be a mallet and a pair of large spikes. Afterward one of the crime-scene cops voiced the opinion that Mr. O’Rourke’s scrotum now looked like a pair of donuts, and the name stuck.”
“So did O’Rourke, it sounds l-oooch,” Long-Drink said, the last syllable occasioned by the heavy shoe of Doc Webster.
“So how did you two get mixed up with him?” I asked Willard, to change the subject.
He sighed, looked down, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Well…this was back in the days when some people called me The Professor.”
Yipes. I had a sudden flashback of several decades, and made a clumsy attempt to interrupt him. “Uh, look, we don’t really need to go into this level of detail—”
Maureen was shaking her head. “Thanks, Jake, that’s sweet—but it’s okay. There isn’t a single want or warrant outstanding for anyone of that name, in this or any jurisdiction,” she said. “There never was.” You could hear the pride in her voice. Not many world-class confidence men can make that claim.
“In the course of business,” Willard continued, ignoring my interjection, “I found myself in sudden urgent need of a fair amount of really good funny money. Fifty large, to be exact. So sudden and urgent that I was willing to deal with Tony Donuts, who had only recently finished murdering the best counterfeiter in the country and stealing his equipment. I knew better than to do business with Tony. And I was right, too. Almost the moment I had put the amusing currency to its intended use, and it was forever gone from my control…Tony decided he wanted it back again. The feds had got on to him, and suddenly he didn’t want large blocks of evidence in circulation.”
“Jesus,” I said, “he wanted you to sell him back his counterfeit fifty grand?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Just give it back.”
“But that’s not fair!” Erin exclaimed.
Willard did not smile. “He said he would keep the phony fifty thousand…plus, to
cover his time and general aggravation, the five thousand in real money I’d already paid him for it…and in return, I could keep all twenty fingers and toes, and my genitalia. Sounded like a fair deal to me, at the time. A bargain, in fact.”
“A steal,” Maureen said. “With the genitalia.”
“Ah,” Erin said.
“If I could possibly have returned Tony’s moneylike paper, I would have done so without regret—even though it was the bait in a million-dollar sting I had working. Unfortunately, that bait was gone, already deep in the water with a large shark’s mouth around it. And disobedience was simply too novel a concept to risk baffling Tony Donuts with. So I changed my appearance and went underground at Lady Sally’s House…which is where I hooked up with Maureen again.” Without looking he reached his hand toward her; without looking, she took it. “That complicated things.”
“The Professor couldn’t hide in a whorehouse and impress a girl at the same time,” Maureen said, “especially not one who worked in the whorehouse. So he needed to cool Tony.”
Willard took the narration back. I was pretty sure they hadn’t rehearsed this story; maybe they were passing cues through their joined hands somehow. “There just wasn’t any way to come up with another counterfeit fifty large—not of that high quality, not quickly.”
“Besides, all the Professor’s seed money was spent,” Maureen said.
“There was only one thing to do,” Willard agreed.
After the silence had gone on long enough, I finally got it. I drew a pint of Rickard’s Red and slid it down the bar to him.
“Thank you, Jake.” He raised his mug to me, took a long sip, set the mug down, held up one finger and looked down at his belt for a long moment. Finally he threw his head back, belched ringingly, lowered his finger, and said, “We stiffed Tony Donuts. We gave him real money.”
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