On the other side she had Tran. Very good sex. Excellent sex. And that was important. No question. And he'd never hit her. Never broken a bone. She didn't think he could break one even if he tried, the frail little guy. And the thing she'd felt a few minutes earlier, the electrons or molecules flowing back and forth between them, that was a powerful incentive. That was something new and extreme and important.
But still it was hard, going full blast in one direction then, bam, making a U-turn quick as that. For the last couple of years being in love with Bean Wilson, every day imagining their life together, dinner parties, entertaining the other doctors' wives, setting out her china, crystal, all that, then in a matter of hours, dropping that fantasy and hooking onto a train going flat out in the complete opposite direction. Emotional whiplash.
She was out at the hearse, way off inside her head as she threw the luggage in the rear, when Echeverria came stalking out of the shadows. He was wearing baggy blue jeans that showed his white socks, and he had on a white shirt and black shoes. As usual, dressed like a middle-age dork.
"What're you doing, stalking me?"
"I came by to see you," he said. "I came by to talk."
"Such a sweetheart. So get busy and talk. I'm in a hurry."
"You're going somewhere." Coming up close to her, booze on his breath.
"Yeah, yeah. Tran's going home. The experiment's done, the drug works. So he's leaving."
"Good," Echeverria said. "I don't like that little weasel hanging around you. He's a bad influence."
"Tran's all right. He can't help it he's from the Far East."
Echeverria stood there blocking her way back to the hotel, head slumped over like he was carrying some extra weight in his brain.
"What's chewing your ass, Echeverria?"
"Tomorrow's the day," he said. "The doc told me to come over, make sure you knew. You're supposed to bring the Miss Begotten in to dock, and the three of us are going on a little cruise, tie up some loose ends."
"Which loose ends are those? Greta?"
"Her, yeah, and this other guy. Thorn. We're going to take them out, grind them up, feed them to the minnows."
"Okay, so you told me. You can go now."
Echeverria just stood there, mooning at her.
"There's another thing."
Shooting a glance back at the hotel, Pepper said, "Yeah? And what would that be?"
"I wanted to see if you meant what you said the other night. About you and me getting together."
"I said that?"
"Yeah, you made certain sexual remarks. Salacious suggestions."
"That wasn't me. I never used that word before in my life. I don't even know what it means."
"For a couple of hours you talked very intimately to me. You put forth some fairly serious propositions concerning our future together."
"Hey, I was passing the time. That's all that was, Echeverria. Shooting the ever-loving shit."
A black-and-white patrol car idled up. Fleming, the cop bending low, looking over at them. Pepper gave him a small finger-wave and he kept on going down into the capering shadows.
"I want us to try things out," Echeverria said, voice getting lower. "You and me. Give it a shot, see what happens."
"You want to have sex with me, that what you're saying?"
"More than that," he said. "Not just sex. Hell, I can get sex from my fucking wife."
Pepper closed the back of the hearse. She looked down toward Duval. There were still people walking down there, drunks, tourists, trim gay guys, chunky lesbians, yuppies from Miami, Rastafarians, the usual stream of derelict zombies. Probably nobody she knew personally, but still, it was comforting to see them there, everybody having a good time. One long party. One boozy, dopey night after the next.
"Forget it, Echeverria. Get it out of your head. That was just so much jabber, a way to pass the hours, that's all."
"It was more than talk."
"No, it wasn't. It was words, nothing but."
"It was more than that to me. It got me started thinking about things, about what's important. What I been doing with my fucking life. The shit I been missing out on."
"Well, that's fine. You keep thinking about those things, and if you figure out anything important, you write me a nice long letter and mail it to Vietnam." She started around him toward the walkway to the hotel, but Echeverria stepped in her way.
"I'm talking about you and me living together. Maybe someday more than that. Get married or whatever. We've got things in common."
"You got to be shitting me."
"I'm serious. Stone-cold serious."
"What? 'Cause we murdered a couple of people? Got dolphin blood on our hands? That gives us a bond?"
"We have that, yeah," Echeverria said. "We have other things too. We can talk to each other, say anything we want, confess things, all the shit we've done, it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't shock me hearing what you done in your life, and I don't think it would shock you to hear my stories. Hell, I never been able to say shit to my wife. If I was to tell her some of the things I been doing, she'd pick up the phone, have the FBI on my ass in a minute."
Pepper glanced over at the beautiful Marquesa Hotel, wished Tran would hurry up and get his shriveled ass outside.
"Now look here, Echeverria. A woman doesn't talk to a guy a couple of times and suddenly decide she wants to marry him. There's foundations need to be laid. If I'm going to get serious about somebody, I got to have some surefire, ironclad guarantees. That's how it works. A woman wants to know she's going to be provided for, wants to know her man will keep her safe and protected and worship her. Make a safe place for her babies.
"And what're you, Echeverria? You're some DEA agent who plays both sides of the street. Who could trust a guy like you? What woman would want to marry some bozo, he can't even keep it straight whether he's a good guy or a bad guy? Not me. No, sir. Give me an out-and-out bad guy any day over somebody who jumps back and forth. So now, you just get on out of my way, please. Tran and I got to be moving along."
"You're going off with that yellow devil. You're running away."
"Don't get me mad, Echeverria. You don't want to see me mad."
"You're stealing that formula, running off to cash in with that Jap."
"He's Vietnamese, Echeverria. There's a big difference."
"Those people will knife you in the back first chance they get. That's how they are. Piano wire around your throat till your eyes bulge out."
"Now, that's a racial slur, Echeverria. That's a very stupid, uninformed thing to say. Not all Orientals are like that."
"I'm not letting you go," he said. "I can't let that happen, Pepper. Not for me, not for the doc and his experiment. No, ma'am, that's not going to be what happens here."
Tran came out the front door of the hotel muttering as he dragged the smallest of his gold bags.
Reaching his right hand around to the small of his back, Echeverria pulled out a black automatic and aimed it at Pepper, then at Tran.
"Put the bag down," he said. "And stand over there beside the car.
"Don't worry about him," Pepper said. "He's lovesick is all it is. A silly boy who's been carving hearts in tree trunks, putting my initials inside. Go on, Tran, load up your luggage. Mr. Echeverria isn't going to do anything to you."
Tran hesitated, saying something in Vietnamese, something so pissed-off and angry, she didn't need any translation. Then he came forward and chucked the luggage in the rear and scurried around to the passenger door and got in.
"Now look, Echeverria. I'm just taking Tran to the bus station. Sending him on his way. Tomorrow, I'm taking the boat out like you said. Give me ten minutes, wait right here, I'll be back and we'll talk some more about this."
Fuck that. Don't try to bullshit me, Pepper. You're running off, I can see what's going on here."
He came around to the front of the hearse and stood in its path and said, "Get out of the car and get your hands up, both of you sex freaks
."
Pepper opened the door and got in behind the wheel.
"One minute you want to marry me, next minute you're going to kill me. You're not convincing me of your mental stability, Echeverria."
"Get out of the fucking car. I'm warning you."
A light came on across Fleming. Some old man stepped out onto his porch wearing pajama bottoms and carrying a white cat in his arms. He stood at the railing of his porch and stroked the cat and watched Echeverria aim through the windshield of the hearse. He had an old bony chest that was yellow and papery in the porchlight.
Pepper cranked up the engine. All the talking she'd been doing had made her jaw ache worse than ever. A tom-tom throbbed in her throat.
Pepper put the car in gear and inched forward toward Echeverria, trying to nudge him out of the way.
He stepped back, stiffened his arms, and the goddamn windshield exploded.
Tran howled and slithered down to the floorboard. There was glass everywhere. In Pepper's hair, a piece embedded in the upholstery next to her shoulder, all over the dashboard. Tran was gabbling and cursing, saying some of the words Pepper had taught him.
"Jesus Christ, Echeverria. Look what you did. You fucked with my car."
The man on his porch was stroking his cat, just standing there, the cat watching too. No big deal, gunfire in the street right outside his house.
Echeverria came closer, right up to the grille, aiming his pistol at Pepper.
"Don't be doing anything else to my car. You hear me, Echeverria?"
"You going to come away with me or what?"
"Those my choices, come away or die?"
"Come away or die, yeah. That's how it is. That's the corner you backed me into, you bitch."
"I think I'll take what's behind door number three," she said, and flipped the switch for the hopping pumps.
The front end of the hearse flew three feet up in the air and knocked the pistol loose and it skittered down the sheet metal hood and slid toward the windshield. Echeverria dove for it, sprawling across the hood. He fumbled around, got hold of the pistol, then lifted his head, looked at Pepper, tried to say something, but before he could get more words out to confuse her further, she tripped the hopping pumps again, left front, then right front, bouncing him from one side of the hood to the other, scrambling his brains a little, then she flipped both together, which threw him off into the street.
When he didn't get up, she switched on the hydraulic lifters and slowly raised the car two feet off the ground.
"What're you doing? What're you doing, Miss Pepper?"
She took a breath. The guy'd just proposed, then tried to shoot her. No reason in the world to be crying, but there were the tears, filling her eyes.
"Don't worry about it, Tran. The guy was trying to kill us, trying to wreck my car. I'm within my rights here, self-defense. It's a cornerstone of our American legal system. The right to defend yourself against rogue DEA agents trying to murder you 'cause you'd refused their advances."
The man on his porch was still petting the white cat. But now Pepper saw the cat didn't look right. Its head was crooked to one side, front legs droopy like a beanbag cat. Or a dead one.
Maybe it was time to get out of Key West after all. Men petting their dead cats on their front porches in the middle of the night. Terminal freakiness all around. The whole town rotting away—decaying around her like some old tooth you didn't even know was going bad till all of a sudden one day you bite down on a blackberry seed or something small like that, and the whole thing that's been there all your life and has never hurt and always been invisible, this bone you thought was solid and secure, all of a sudden it just crumbles away, and you have to spit out the pieces of bone into your hand, dark and rotten, and all at once the nerves inside that tooth are exposed to the air and the awful pain begins.
Pepper inched the car forward and when she was fairly sure they were over Echeverria's body she lowered the hearse again, listening to the hum of the pneumatic lifters until they ground to a halt.
Something in her stomach turned over. Her jaw throbbed. There was a man under her car. A big American man with a government job and a pension coming his way eventually. There was a life out there Pepper could have disappeared into. Kids at soccer, grocery shopping on Thursdays, barbecues with the inlaws. Blend in with all the other wives who vacuumed and dusted and taught themselves new recipes every week. A life her daddy had trained her for. Marriage. With a big man moving above her in the dark, drops of his sweat dampening her breasts. A big American man who could share his twisted secrets with her. The bad shit he'd been into.
But Pepper had done that already. Her daddy had shown her all she ever needed to know about that way of doing things. He'd shared his own fucked-up secrets and he'd been good to her and yes, Pepper had enjoyed their time together, but she'd had enough. She had no interest in another turn around that same old racetrack. Not with Echeverria, not with Bean. Not with any of them. It was time to strike out for new territory. Keep her secrets to herself if she wanted, let Tran keep his.
It was a little frightening, sure, going all the way to Vietnam. Being a concubine or whatever Tran had in mind. But then how scary and weird and different could Vietnam be? After all, Pepper had paid her lifelong dues at the mecca of weird, that tiny coral island jam-packed with more misfits and degenerates than they'd invented names for yet
She brushed some of the broken glass off her lap, then very slowly she drove down Fleming into the jittery shadows, hearing the noise of Echeverria's body dragging and scraping along beneath the car. At the next corner, she took a quick look in the rearview mirror to see the trail they were leaving. It was like she and Tran were riding inside some kind of big snail, coasting slow through the two A.M. streets of Key West, leaving behind them the long red slick of an American male.
***
Greta's pain was gone. Like someone had shut off an alarm bell that had been ringing deep inside her flesh for months. An immense vacuum echoed in her ears.
But the opposite of pain was not pleasure. It was nothing. No feeling. Just being there. Lying on that bed. And that was what was in her ears now, that was what she felt at the core of her bones. Nothing. Not pleasure, not joy, not the tickle of sensuality. She felt as neutral and colorless as water in a glass. No taste, no smell. A dull peacefulness.
She was awake, alert. Hearing the croaks of the ship, the harsh squeak of the anchor line as it pulled tight against the tide. Greta Masterson lay still and watched the starlight through the porthole across from her. She was the squeaks and the starlight now. That's all she was anymore. Not daughter, not mother, not woman. Just a screen on which were projected the impressions of the moment.
She breathed in the musty wood of her cabin, the stale dust that lined the cracks of the ship. She was alive and without pain, without judgment or regret or longing. She did not miss her daughter. She did not miss her legs, or her freedom to move, to dance, to climb garden walls to clip orchid blossoms. She was alive, in the cabin of a ship anchored offshore a few miles from the southernmost tip of Florida, inhaling the night air, basking in the flicker of ancient starlight, Greta Masterson without worries or wishes.
Whatever Bean Wilson had injected into her pump was by now bathing her spinal cord. Greta Masterson didn't care what it was, didn't care about its name or its history, its source or chemical makeup. She cared about nothing but the blue curtains over the porthole, fluttering, giving shape to the wind. She cared about the wood beams of the decking above her, teak or mahogany. Parallel rows of wood. Parallel lines that could run to infinity and never intersect, unless some man-made error had miscalculated and pigeon-toed them slightly, in which case infinity was plenty of time for them to find each other, to cross for the briefest of moments and begin to move away from each other for another eternity.
Adrift in those airless solar winds, Greta was indifferent—no longer hungry, not thirsty. Her body was the same, but she was a new creature, as if some great kn
owledge were passing through her wordlessly. Like a conduit carrying a wisdom she couldn't comprehend. Changed by the drug flooding her spine, changed into something with a smooth unbroken history, a connection to the primitive earth more natural and profound than anything human. As though she'd been transfused with the plasma of angels, a dense light saturating her brain and nerves and filaments.
A rising breeze moved through the porthole. Starlight shivered. Insights strobed through her head faster than she could absorb. She felt the weightless presence of knowledge course through her bones. Watching the breeze toss the curtains, listening to the water slap against the hull, the boat's slow undulations. Knowing something she couldn't say.
Maybe she was dying. Maybe that's what this was. Life leaking from her, replaced by this other thing. But even that was all right. It simply no longer mattered. For a short while the world had made a space for Greta Masterson and now that space was closing. She watched the blue curtain flutter, subject to each new impulse of wind.
CHAPTER 29
When Thorn woke before dawn, Monica was gone and the room was as bleak as an Alabama jail cell. Wind gnawed at the edges of the house, the oak creaking.
For the next hour he struggled through his morning routines. Like one of those pommel horse gymnasts, he straight-armed himself from the wheelchair to the wooden straight-backed chair sitting in the shower stall, soaped and rinsed, then hauled his body back to his wheelchair, using his wooden slat as both lever and inclined plane. He was slightly better at the complicated maneuvers than he'd been a couple of days ago, but they weren't skills that came fast.
Lying on the bed, he dried himself with the flimsy towel, then squirmed into a pair of khaki shorts and a blue work shirt and wedged his boat shoes onto his swollen feet. By the time he was done he was out of breath, heart heaving. He lay there for a few minutes watching the first light gather against the pitted walls.
Maybe Monica had been right after all. He should give up the idea of saving Greta, call in the blue suits and let them fumble with it. Maybe this was simply beyond his abilities. If he was pushed to his physical limits just to shower and dress, how in God's name could he expect to take Bean down and maybe a couple of others as well?
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 27
