Connie reached for the fridge. ‘He’s for real?’
‘I think so,’ Eddie said. ‘Those assholes. Jeez, my head hurts.’
It was four o’clock and Slappy Jack’s was empty. It was a small bar, with lots of dark wood and battered stools and pictures of the old town in heavy frames on the walls. Was a time when Key West was the biggest town in the whole of the United States. Wasn’t that way any more, not by a long, long chalk, and on afternoons like this you felt the town knew it and didn’t much care either way. Big towns have to get out of bed in the mornings and go do stuff. Prove themselves. Key West just put its feet up and ate some more dressed crab and thought about having another beer.
Afternoon light slanted in through the windows of the bar, twirling motes of dust and casting highlights around the room like someone was setting it up for a photograph and wanted everything just right. At this time of day, there were worse places to drink. At night it was a different proposition, packed with tourists too shit-faced or stupid to realize the name was a take-off of Papa’s favourite watering hole, and not the real thing. Come to that, even the real thing wasn’t the real thing any more. The real Sloppy Joe’s was too small and nondescript for modern tastes, didn’t look enough like the real thing should—and had been superseded by a vast hell-hole on Duval which you’d have to be out of your mind to drink in.
Connie worked both the afternoon graveyard shift and the small hours, mixing strong cocktails and stuffing green olives with almonds. Big as Connie was—and he’d been hired as a deterrent to weekend warriors with Margarita hard-ons, and had spent a long time doing successfully violent things over in New Orleans—Eddie was tougher. They both knew it, so that was okay.
‘You want me along?’
Eddie shook his head. ‘Not tonight.’
‘Need anything else?’
‘Just the boat.’
Connie went off to make the call. Eddie sat at the bar, sipping his beer. Not for the first time he wondered what drew them to Key West, the people who needed him. Maybe nothing, and five in three months was a co-incidence. Or perhaps without knowing it they found themselves heading in the direction of the Triangle. Or it was just Eddie’s long-overdue good fortune, turning up in a curious package. Whatever. They were a lot easier to deal with than his previous kind of client, the type who insisted on working in Central America and driving around in expensive company cars, or who lived in the US but were just too dumb to realize they’d accumulated enough cash to make them an obvious target. Doesn’t matter how you’ve made your money, a fat bank account is likely to breed a confidence which is a short step away from being an asshole. His new clients were less rich and usually frightened half to death, and thus prone to do what he told them. The problem was dealing with the kidnappers.
In the old days, when Eddie took a job, he always used to hope it was Colombians he’d be dealing with. There was a set way of doing things. You thrashed out the deal in a bar somewhere, over a few lines of coke. You negotiated for the bad guys to be paid a percentage of what they might have expected to get out of the kidnapping: in return, they didn’t actually go through with it. Like a vaccine. Preventative maintenance. They got some money without all the grief, and the client got to stay at home with his family, not pose for those pictures with newspapers in your hands which are never flattering, and avoided being starved, tortured and probably killed in the end. Much more convenient for everyone concerned.
The Colombians knew the score, were professionals. You arranged the vaccine, it was a deal and it was respected. These days Eddie thought he’d settle for a bunch of whacked-out Miami gangbangers, rather than the people he actually had to deal with. They were nutcases, pure and simple.
The story George Becker had told him was similar to all the others he’d heard. At first it was an occasional feeling of being watched, and half-memories of dreams which frightened him. Then one night George had been driving home after working late and it had gotten a little weirder.
He and his wife lived out of town, in a nice house which had a wet bar and a media room and was far too big now both kids were out in the world making the same old mistakes and calling them their own. Half a mile away from home George had been chugging along, listening to the local radio station, when suddenly it faded out. He wasn’t too bothered, it was a lousy station anyway, but then the car’s lights went off and he stalled. He slammed his foot on the brake but it didn’t seem to make any difference: the car just cruised to a halt and then sat there, ticking as it cooled.
Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, other than the sound of insects and wind in the trees.
Then the lights flicked back on, and the radio station faded back, as if he were driving into its signal. George tried the ignition, and the car started immediately. He drove slowly home. He told Jennifer what had happened, and she shrugged, told him to take the car down to the shop in the morning. As you would—you didn’t know about the dreams, and she didn’t.
He took the car down the shop. They found something to charge him for, but it was the usual bullshit. The car was fine.
Nothing else happened for a while. Nothing to do with the car, at least. Occasionally things in his workshop seemed to have moved, but you could put that down to absentmindedness. And sometimes the phone rang at odd hours, and when George picked it up there was usually nobody there. Once he thought he heard his mother talking, but the line was very bad and she’d been dead nearly ten years, so he wasn’t sure.
He put up with this for six months, and had almost gotten used to it, when it suddenly started to invade his work. George’s office had two names above the door, and his was one of them. He and Dave Marks had built the business from nothing, and were now both immovable fixtures in the annual list of the top five realty producers in the state. He believed the building their business was conducted in to be as inviolable as their status: unbreachable, the castle that Englishmen’s houses were supposed to be. George rarely called Jennifer from work, unless it was urgent, and she had only visited him there a handful of times. That wasn’t what the office was for.
Then one afternoon the phone on his desk rang, and when he picked it up there was no-one there—but the silence had a strange undertone that made it sound as if someone was, but they weren’t saying anything. He tried to find out from the operator who’d been calling, but as usual they didn’t have a number recorded.
A week later a fax arrived on the private machine in his office. There was just one line typed on it, a description of a place in a forest that at first meant nothing to him. The paper was otherwise entirely blank, without even the sender information at the very top that just about every fax machine in the world automatically provides. George threw it away, and that lunchtime found a bar a few streets away and drank vodka so no-one would be able to smell it.
He was feeling hunted now, by something that wasn’t even there. Thirty, forty years ago, long before he and Jennifer had met, he’d been unfaithful to a previous girlfriend—with a friend of hers. He was mid-twenties, he got drunk, it happened. It didn’t mean anything except for how bad it made him feel. He didn’t call the girl, and heard nothing from her for over eight months. He assumed she’d done the same as he had—realized it was a silliness with no future in it, and tried to forget it had happened. But he didn’t know this. Not for sure. There was still the possibility that at some point, with no warning, a disaster could explode into his life. Then one night he and his girlfriend were in a bar, and they happened to run into this other girl. She smiled on seeing them, and he knew it was all going to be alright, and he was so relieved he spent the whole evening babbling until both girls told him to shut up.
It was like that, but a lot worse.
He started fixating on the idea of their Florida vacation, only a few weeks away. He told himself that if he could just get through until then, it would be okay. Although he’d already begun to entertain some pretty odd notions of what might be happening to him, he somehow thought he
’d be safe away from home.
There were two more calls before they left—one at the office, one at home. Jen glanced at him for a moment after he told her that the second had been a wrong number—again—and then went back to finding out what dungeon of homemaker psychosis Martha Stewart was plumbing this month. Something told him that, while Jen was without doubt completely unconscious of thinking this way, he wasn’t going to be allowed many more wrong numbers.
On his last night at work, the car cut out again on the journey home. At exactly the same spot, in exactly the same way. George, a cautious man, had taken the car to the shop only two days before, making sure it was in good shape for the trip down. They’d tried hard to rip him off, but only been able to find a few bucks’ worth of tinkering to do. The car was fine.
The next morning they locked up the house, briefed the neighbours a final time about cat-feeding, and set off. As they pulled down the drive, George felt his heart lighten. They only did a couple hours driving that day, to break themselves in gently, and stopped at a shiny new Holiday Inn in some little town whose name they didn’t even register. The guy behind the desk recommended a restaurant a short stroll down the street, and they had a great dinner, much to their surprise—pleased to be roughing it and coming out on top.
By the time they got back to their room they were feeling the way long-term couples sometimes do when they’re out of their usual environment and have had a few glasses of wine. Jen said she wanted to shower quickly, and kissed him on the lips before she went. George sat on the bed, listened to the water falling on his wife’s body, and smiled a little at the pair of them. Old guys going wild into the country.
Then the phone rang, and it wasn’t anyone he knew. Or anyone at all, in fact. Just the rustle of wind high up in the trees. The sound of somebody not talking.
He told Jen it had been reception telling them about check-out times, and did his best to pick up where they’d left off. He did a good job considering, but it wasn’t the same.
There were no more phone calls over the next few days, as they slowly made their way to Florida, down the Gulf side of the panhandle, and then into the Keys. Increasingly George found his mind was elsewhere. The sentence about the forest, which at first he’d just dismissed, kept coming back into his mind.
He couldn’t remember the place it described. Nobody would have been able to. It was both too specific and too vague—as if it was not so much a real location, as a type. It just said ‘Three pines almost in a line, with rocks all around and a dark mountain behind’. It could have been anywhere. The more he worried over it, however, the more it began to be associated in his mind with flashes of white light, with a sensation of breathless running, and with the idea that something might have happened a long time ago, which he had simply blanked out.
In the hotel in Key Largo he woke up a little after midnight. He didn’t know why. There’d been no dream, no sound, nothing. He was just suddenly awake. He eased himself out of bed, swapped his pjs for shorts and a shirt, and slipped out of the hotel room. The sky was wide and very dark blue. There was nothing in it. He heard the sound of faint laughter, at a distance, and saw that a few people were still lolling around the Tiki bar by the pool. On impulse he walked over, and charged a couple of Manhattans to the room. When he returned, half an hour later, he got back to sleep without any problem.
The next day they arrived in Key West, and late in the evening George had found himself in another bar, again alone, and talking to a man called Connie.
That was his story. But Eddie knew George was right to think he hadn’t heard the end of it. The nutcases had gone easy on laying in false memory, which was good and unusually restrained, but everything else suggested they were settling for the long haul.
Connie came back. The boat would be set up, with fuel and ammunition on board. Eddie stayed a while longer, drinking beer and helping stuff olives. A couple of tourists poked their head in the door, but Connie scowled at them and they went away.
It was a still night. The water was flat and calm. Just after ten o’clock, Eddie cut the engine and let her drift a while. It was extremely dark, the only light coming from the boat’s lamps and the stars in the deep nothing above. He was five miles out, over part of the long reef that starts north of Miami and follows the coast down into open sea. During the day you could join a cruise out of the Havana Dock, come and look down at the fish and sharks swimming around over the coral. After the sun went down the only people who came out this far were marine biologists who wanted to check out the nightlife on the reef. Tonight there weren’t any around, which was good.
Eddie set the radio to send, lit a cigarette, and settled down to wait. The signal was a sequence of fifty tones, repeated in an order so complex it looked random. Wouldn’t mean anything except to the people it was supposed to. Meanwhile he checked his gun, which had seen service in half of Central America, two European countries and the back streets of more than a few US cities. So far he hadn’t even had to pull it on one of these jobs. But you never knew. He cleaned it, loaded it with shells, and then laid it on the table in front of him. He felt keyed up, but not nervous. Eddie had done many unusual things in his life. This was merely the latest.
Fifteen minutes later the lamp on the front of the boat flickered and then went out. Gradually the other lights started to dim, and then the boat was in darkness. Eddie picked up the gun, put it in his shoulder holster. It had occurred to him, on the very first trip in fact, that there was no guarantee it would even work. They probably had ways of affecting things like that, like the stuff they could do with electric power. But he felt better having it around.
The water around the boat started to become glassy, losing motion until it felt like solid land. Everything went silent.
Then bang—the light went on. Eddie flinched, cursed, and refused to look up into it. The light came down like a cylinder, a circular beam that was a couple of times wider than the boat was long. Though it looked just like someone had turned the world’s biggest halogen flashlamp on him, Eddie knew it was more complicated than that. The boat was now rock steady, the sea within the beam frozen in place. The light wasn’t just a source of illumination. It grabbed hold of things, and could pull them up.
‘It’s Edward Kruger,’ he said, loudly, shielding his eyes with his hands. ‘Turn that fucking thing off.’
There was a long pause, during which the light stayed exactly as bright as it had been. Then it dimmed—very, very slightly.
‘I want to go to the island,’ he said. ‘I’ve got business there. And I want to go the old-fashioned way, because this isn’t my boat. Okay?’
Another pause, and then the beam went out.
Eddie looked up, but as usual there was nothing to see. The boat lights slowly came back on, in the order they’d gone off. Eddie started the engines.
It took another twenty minutes before he could see the island. There was a single light at the dock, and he headed for it. The tying point was at the end of a long wooden walkway, as they often were on the Keys, because the water around the islands was so shallow.
In the old days there had used to be an island on the chain called No-Name Key, a few miles north of Key West: presumably so-called because the early settlers had run dry of the creative energy required to name the hundreds of local bumps in the sea, some little bigger than sandbars with a couple of trees. That island was called something else now, he couldn’t remember what. Something dull, or quaint, or both.
The island he was about to land at wasn’t even called something as unimaginative as No Name. It wasn’t known as anything at all, and never had been, because as far as Eddie could tell, he and Connie were the only humans who’d ever been aware of its existence—and Connie had never actually set foot on it. It wasn’t on any of the maps, and Eddie had never been able to find a reference to it in any of the painfully exhaustive and quasi-literate local history books. He’d come to believe that for most of the time it simply wasn’t there. Some
kind of cloaking device, he assumed—in place for a very, very long time.
He got the boat tied up to the dock, and climbed out. Took a deep breath, looking back the way he’d come. You couldn’t see the lights of Key West from here, or any of the other islands. It was very quiet, just the sound of his footsteps and a faint creak from the walkway swaying in gentle time with the water. You might just as well be on a different planet.
At the land end of the walkway was another light, which showed the path ahead through the forest. Apart from the dim lamps every couple of yards along it, the path was the only sign of artificiality on the island. As far as Eddie could tell, the rest of it was entirely covered in trees and brush. He lit another cigarette before he set off. He didn’t really need it, but it was nice to have something man-made in your hand. It was grounding. Rah-rah for the humans, something like that.
After a few minutes on the path, he heard a sound over on the right, amongst the trees. He stopped, listened. Nothing. There weren’t even any insects on the island, and it was deadly quiet. It was much warmer than it had been on the boat, and humid.
He started walking again, and this time heard the sound from the left side, maybe five yards into the trees. He kept on walking.
And then he suddenly turned around.
Behind him on the path, caught and frozen, were three small humanoid figures. About four feet high and thin, grey in colour, with bulbous heads and large black eyes that looked like those sunglasses people were wearing a couple of years back.
He laughed. ‘What’s the matter, someone leave the cat flap open? Going to be trouble when they hear you’re out.’
The little guys looked at each other, then back at him. One of them cleared its throat.
‘Hi Eddie,’ it said. Its voice was a poor approximation of human speech, more of a clicking rasp. ‘You got anything for us?’
Eddie reached in his pocket, pulled out a spare pack of cigarettes. He tossed it to the nearest grey.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 53
