Magic City

by James W. Hall

  Sugar peered into the lagoon.

  “Damn, that’s no snook. It’s Orca, the killer whale.”

  Thorn watched the snook glide across the basin to the mangrove roots that curved into the basin like the bars of an underwater cage.

  “It’s checking an escape route. It’ll try to cut me off on those roots.”

  Sugar said, “Did I see that right? All those leaders streaming off her mouth? There must be a dozen hooks in her lip.”

  “At least.”

  “What do you figure? Fish that size, it’s got to be ten, twelve years old?”

  “Closer to twenty-one,” said Thorn.

  “Twenty-one? And how’d you arrive at that?”

  “One of those leaders is mine.”

  “Same snook? Oh, give me a break.”

  “I was standing right here when she broke it off. Kate and I were fishing together. That fly was one of my first attempts at a ghost streamer.”

  “So that’s what this is about, fixing some youthful error?”

  “I saw it a couple of weeks ago, all those leaders dangling. I figured I should clean her up. Been out here every night since. Sort of a project.”

  “Well, that’s a first. Thorn getting emotional about a fish.”

  “A creature like that, it’s entitled to a decent old age without dragging around a nest of monofilament.”

  “Maybe those are her medals. An old warrior, she might be proud of them. Shows ’em off to her snook friends.”

  The snook curved away from the mangroves and made another pass at the finger mullet, checking it over, then once again coasting off.

  “You might be about to add one more hook to the collection.”

  “I’m a better fisherman than I was twenty years ago.”

  “She could be a better fish.”

  Thorn stepped out on the dock and towed the bobber closer to a rotting piling. Trying to reassure the fish, make it feel secure with structure nearby.

  A second later the snook reappeared and in a flicker it crashed the bait, then ran so fast that it almost snatched the rod from Thorn’s grip.

  Instead of charging to the mangrove roots like she should’ve done, the fish headed for the mouth of the basin and the flats beyond. But hauling all that heavy line wore her down fast. The drag was set light, reel shrieking as the big fish tore toward open water.

  “Not a smart move,” Sugarman said. “For an old warhorse like her.”

  “Gotten lazy. Cutting corners. She didn’t do that twenty years ago.”

  Thorn tightened the drag, then pumped the rod, reeling on the down stroke. As the hook dug in, the fish broke from the water, jumped high into the rosy evening air, twisting and trying to buck loose. She flopped hard on her side and startled a school of baitfish into a flurry of pirouettes.

  That one jump was all she had.

  As the snook reached the entrance of the basin, Thorn leaned back on the rod and turned her around. The snook made a couple of halfhearted zigzag runs, but as Thorn worked her back toward the dock, it was clear the old girl’s iron will had melted. As he cranked her the last few feet, she was docile.

  “Getting old is hell.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sugar said.

  Thorn hauled the fish to the dock and handed the rod to Sugarman. He knelt and found a safe grip on her lower jaw, then heaved her up onto a wet towel he’d laid out and began to work with his pliers, clipping, prying, snapping the barbed ends off the hooks, curling them free.

  Half a minute later when he was done and the snook’s lip was clear, he lowered the fish back into the water and stroked it back and forth until it recovered and glided forward and was on its way without a backward glance or nod of gratitude. Left behind in the water was a faint cloud of blood.

  “Sometimes you have to hurt them to fix them.”

  “Words to live by,” Sugar said.

  “She’ll be fine in a day or two.”

  “Your good deed for the year.” Sugarman knelt to the basin and washed the slime off his hands. “You’re hereby absolved, my son, and are now free to return to your dissolute ways.”

  Thorn watched the satin gloss of the sunset water, gold and pink ripples spreading out in perfect V’s behind the departing snook.

  “You’re right about Miami.”

  “Which part?”

  “That I’m considering a move.”

  Sugarman was silent, staring at the darkening horizon.

  “I’m trying it out, is all. An audition. Driving up tonight; Alexandra leaves first thing tomorrow. I’ll give it a week, see how it feels, if I can cope. Maybe stay a little longer after she gets back. But even if it works, Sugar, I’ll always have one foot here. I’ll never leave the Keys, not really.”

  “This her idea or yours?”

  “Mine. Alex wouldn’t ask me to do it.”

  “She means that much to you.”

  “She does. Yeah.”

  “We’re talking marriage here? Picket fence, weekend barbecues?”

  “I’m talking about seven days in Miami. See how it feels.”

  Sugarman nodded and looked up at the dying blush in the sky.

  “Well, promise me one thing.”

  “Name it.”

  “It’s a big bad city, and you’re an island boy, Thorn, spent your entire life on this damn rock, which makes you just one notch above a country bumpkin. Promise me you’ll keep your head down, okay? Stay cool.”

  Thorn smiled. He’d been dreading this conversation, the effect it would have on Sugar—and on him, too—speaking the words out loud.

  “I’ll be good,” Thorn said. “Flowers in my hair, peace and love.”

  Sugarman lifted an eyebrow and gave him a dubious smile.

  “Weird shit goes on up there, Thorn. And I do mean weird.”

  Sunday afternoon on South Beach. Across Ocean Drive the art deco hotels stood like a row of sno-cones drizzled with tropical syrups and speckled with peppermint.

  She was there to shoot a man.

  Her only requirements: He had to be Hispanic, tall and slinky. The slinkier, the better. Tall and slinky. Like him.

  Cloudless sky, surf splashing, ocean spangled with white diamonds. Nearby a radio thumped with rap music, loud enough to cover the percussion of her Walther Red Hawk.

  Men strutted the strand, where sheets of surf unfurled before them. Gusts scented with sea foam and baking sand, coconut oil. The riotous screech of gulls.

  An electric buzz inside her head. A buzz. A buzz.

  She had no schedule. Only came to shoot when the dark column of static rose up her spinal cord and the drone began around her head, the hateful buzz.

  She sat in her aluminum beach chair. A floppy straw hat shading her face, hair tucked under. Hiding behind sunglasses with white square frames. A brown towel lay across her lap, concealing the sleek black pistol with its smooth molded edges, lustrous black frame, eight-shot rotary magazine.

  Loaded with pellets. Lead lumps with cinched waists and pointy tips. Shaped like minarets. Twice the weight of BBs. Sent flying by spurts of pressurized gas.

  Lethal, oh yes, if the muzzle was snug against an ear, fired into the soft interior channels, one after the other, or into an eyeball. That could bring death or leave them pleading for it.

  From the distance she was shooting, no, not fatal. Oh, but at five hundred feet per second, what a beautiful, vicious sting.

  Her days of killing were finished. All done. No more guns and blasts of gore. This was more fitting. Sting, not kill. More fitting for a woman her age, her station. Her twisted history.

  So many targets on parade today. So many men in their cocky Speedos, the bulge of crotch. The flaunting display. They swaggered by. A mouth like his. Like his.

  An unbroken pageant of nearly naked men. So many, many Hispanics. The dark hair, insolent smiles, long lashes. Sensual macho lips.

  She saw one coming. Red clingy suit. Head high, dark wraparounds.

  Tightened her fin
ger. Tensing to a pound of pressure, two, then backing off. Letting this Speedo pass. This bulge of prideful meat. She wasn’t ready yet. Too quick. Too early. No reason to rush.

  Drew her hand from beneath the towel, wiped her palm dry. Slid it back inside, fitted her fingers to the molded stock. The molded stock.

  She waited, watched them pass. Looked down the beach. The crowd around her drowsing, talking, reading paperback novels and magazines. She was simply one of them, a lady in late middle age, basking in the sun. No one knew. No one ever knew.

  Five minutes passed before she spotted an even better one. Forty yards off, ambling the hard-packed sand, with gold around his neck; long, loose limbs; a gaudy lump in his black thong. Watching him approach, that smug stride. Deciding, yes, this was the target for today. To hush the drone, the nagging hum inside her skull, the buzz buzz buzz.

  Curling the finger.

  Fifty feet, forty, coming into range. She aimed for the crotch, the tender thighs. Navel to knees, that was her zone.

  He slowed, then halted, stooped for something in the retreating surf. A white chip of shell. He stood, holding it. Examining. A sensitive fellow. A willing target.

  She squeezed and squeezed again, then once more. Three quiet plonks lost amid the noise around her.

  He dropped his shell, slapped a hand to his thigh, looked down to see the blood drooling from a tiny hole. He crumpled to his knees, a husky roar.

  “I’m shot! Someone shot me!”

  At the brim of his thong, a second puncture in the flesh. Then she saw the ragged slash in the nylon crotch.

  Three for three, a notable day. Sting, sting, sting.

  As once she was stung.

  Shrieking women ripped up their towels and blankets, fled.

  A panicked exodus, which she joined. Simply another woman padding up the hill of sand toward Ocean Drive. A Jeep roared up. Beach patrol. It had been happening for years. Blamed on gangs, soulless teens. A dangerous prank. Police were on alert but always came too late.

  She mounted the dune. The buzz had toggled off. Sweet silence swimming up her spine. Brain quiet. Buzz gone. Just the ocean, the restless sea.

  While on his knees on the hard-packed sand, the man, the random man, screamed and screamed and screamed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eight o’clock on Sunday evening, Stanton King trailed his lovely wife, Lola, through the snooty throng at Merrick Gallery. As usual when Lola passed by, men nodded in approval and spoke her name, women smiled with icy politeness and edged closer to their partners. It was the same performance Stanton had witnessed for the entire span of their marriage, and he took more than a little pleasure in watching it unfold.

  After all these years, Lola King had lost none of her power to excite. As they made their way across the gallery, male libidos drummed in counterpoint to the hiss of female envy. At times such as these, in crowded rooms, Stanton took an honored place beside his wife, matched her step for step, received her cool hand on his offered arm, feeling more intimate with her in such public gatherings than he ever did when they were shut together in private.

  Nearly once a week they were similarly engaged. Gallery openings like tonight’s, or dedications of halfway houses, fund-raisers for homeless shelters and historical-preservation-league functions, environmental campaigns, thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners for one or another of Lola’s charitable causes.

  It delighted Stanton that even in her sixties Lola was the object of such palpable lust and that he as a result could bask in covetous esteem. Sadly, the display was all pretense, for Lola had not shared her bed or body with Stanton in decades and they rarely engaged in conversation on topics more intimate than the grocery list, but still, the wave of arousal that rippled through the gallery cheered him. It was the reason he accompanied her to these stuffy events, simply to live out the public version of what he no longer enjoyed in private.

  Tonight Stanton’s white frizzled hair was unruly as always, an electrified mass that bore a resemblance to Einstein’s. He wore a blue aloha shirt decorated with white oversize hibiscus blooms. White slacks and white shoes. A costume that in Miami was considered formal wear.

  Lola was tricked out in a pastel pink sheath dress with a scooped neckline that displayed the ample cleavage she’d possessed since her twenties. Her waist was slim and the swell of her hips still well within ideal proportions. For tonight’s occasion she’d swirled her red hair into a dramatic display, and her complexion, an unblemished creamy white, was undusted by powder.

  Within her blue eyes, a dark light fluttered like a volatile magnetic field. It was Lola’s custom to fix her gaze on whoever was closest at hand. She was not one of those annoying women always scanning for a better circumstance. It was part of her charm, part of her wondrous attraction, that she could bring the full force of her allure to bear on a single individual.

  After greeting several acquaintances, Stanton and Lola joined the line that moved in a slow clockwise amble around the perimeter of the gallery to view the artwork. Behind him Lola settled into quiet pleasantries with Miguel Marquez Estefano, a squat, silver-maned Cuban gentleman who operated the largest Toyota dealership in the city. Lola and Estefano occupied seats on several boards together, and after a brief acknowledgment of Stanton, Estefano held Lola’s attention as the conga line progressed past the black-and-white photographs that were the cause of the evening’s celebration.

  In the far corner of the room Stanton noted Mr. Alan Bingham, the photographer whose work they were honoring tonight. Stanton identified him from the snapshot on the printed program, a gaunt man in his fifties, surrounded by well-wishers and friends. He seemed a quiet sort. Wispy and unassuming. The type of individual who could slip here and there and snap his photos without stirring the air around him.

  His exhibit displayed the seamy edges of Miami with a wry, good-hearted slant. Strippers and drunks, obese tourists frolicking inelegantly, forlorn immigrants trapped behind razor-wire fences, all of them staring frankly into the lens and revealing some angle of themselves that was cocky or profoundly desperate or just plain goofy. As the line moved forward, Stanton entertained himself by looking past the obvious subjects of the photos and trying to place the locations where each was shot. Krome Detention Center, Miami Beach, Opa-locka, a strip club on Biscayne Boulevard. All of them rendered in the unsparing black-and-white manner of Diane Arbus but tinged with a hearty humor Arbus never managed.

  Midway through his journey around the large hall, with Lola and Estefano trailing behind, Stanton confronted a shot of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston poised mid-ring on that night in 1964. He halted briefly and craned forward for a sharper view, his heart rising quickly to a hammering percussion. A wave of chilly sweat broke out across his back.

  Beyond the fighters, in the third row of the Miami Beach Convention Hall, sat a group of fans who were watching the proceedings in various degrees of attention. Framed perfectly by the rope rings, these fight fans were most certainly the focus of the photograph. Five of them sitting side by side.

  It was, Stanton saw with horror, a collection of notorious people who might easily be recognized by any of a dozen patrons in the gallery tonight if they bothered to stop and take a longer look and burrow back into their memories for faces and events from forty years ago.

  Stanton slid forward, his breath tight, and behind him Lola and Estefano passed by the boxing photograph, unaware of its import. But as they were edging forward to the next selection, Lola halted and reversed course. For several seconds she absorbed the image before her.

  When she turned to Stanton, the faint smile that had been fixed on her lips all evening had vanished. Her eyes were blurred and her features tensed into a grim, rubbery mask. Her lips drew open as if she meant to scream.

  “It’s nothing, darling, I’ll take care of it,” he assured her. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

  Stanton broke from the line and headed for a rear exit. The moment he was in the alley, he drew his cell ph
one from his trousers and made the call.

  In his panic he misdialed and got an angry man who clicked off as Stanton was apologizing for the wrong number. He looked up and down the dark alley, drew a long breath. He counted to ten, then to twenty.

  He focused on the keypad and punched the numbers, and after a single ring the familiar voice answered.

  “I have a job for you,” Stanton said. “It’s of the utmost importance.”

  Stanton stepped farther from the rear exit.

  “It will involve illegal acts. It must be done tonight. Are you willing?”

  One in the morning, in the alley behind Merrick Gallery, Carlos Morales splashed kerosene on the heap of framed black-and-white photographs. Snake stood watching. When he’d emptied his can, Carlos scratched a match with his thumbnail, flicked it into the pile, and they watched as the flames meandered through the photos.

  “Now for the good part,” Carlos said. “Mr. Photographer.”

  As he was turning to leave, Snake glimpsed an image he hadn’t noticed before. The photo lay on top of the pile, flames moving around it. He went back, leaned over the fire. A shot of a boxing ring, two black men at arm’s length, behind them the crowd. Cassius and Sonny. February 1964.

  “What the hell’re you doing?”

  Without thought, Snake thrust his hand into the flames. Gripped the frame, but the heat crippled his fingers and the photograph slid away, wedging deeper into the bonfire.

  As it was consumed, he studied the image, watched it darken and crinkle, turn to red and yellow ribbons of fire twisting into the night. Cassius up on his toes, Liston heavy and slow. Behind the boxers, rows of men in suits and white shirts and narrow ties, some with kerchiefs in their breast pockets.

  Then he saw the two men sitting side by side, and his heart roared.

  Three rows from the ring was a man with a birthmark on his cheek, Mayor Stanton King. Next to him a stocky man thrust a cheering fist toward the boxers. A diamond flashed on his pinkie finger. Exactly like the ring on the man Snake had confronted in his sister’s room forty years before.