Gator Wave

by David F. Berens

  Two nearly empty tubes of lipstick, three gummed up sticks of mascara, an open and desert-dry package of makeup removers, several different colors of eyeshadow … she rummaged a bit more sending much of the flotsam and jetsam spilling out into the seat around her.

  “Really, Gary?” she said out loud. “No powder?”

  She was about to give up when she saw a glint of something metallic. Like a bird drawn to a glittering piece of tinsel, her hand thrust into the nether regions of the purse and grabbed at it. The shiny object turned out to be a gold buckle, on a wallet. Oh, geez. He forgot his wallet. He won’t be able to buy his Fresca, she thought. Upon further examination, she found the buckle was broken. The wallet flopped open revealing a dozen or more credit cards and a—her heart stopped beating. The driver’s license beneath the clear plastic window showed a glowing, wide-grinning picture (better than most DMV photos) of … Dani.

  “Shit!” she said, chucking the purse into the floorboard.

  To her horror, she’d been rifling through the purse of a … of a dead person. It was Dani’s purse. She rubbed at her hands to try and wipe off the … well, the death. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes.

  The remaining objects in it flew in random directions all around her shoes. Keys, cotton balls, tissues, various single earrings, and … a ring … a familiar looking ring. She wiped at her eyes and reached down to pick it up. When she did, she was startled to see the ring was on a severed finger.

  “Oh, crap!” She exclaimed, dropping it back into the bag.

  Eventually, her curiosity got the best of her and she used one of the tissues to pick up the finger to examine it.

  The ring was heavy, a manly thing, not what she would’ve expected Dani to wear and the finger didn’t have nail polish—she knew enough about Dani to know that she wouldn’t be caught dead out without nail polish.

  She rolled it around like Indiana Jones examining a long lost artifact of Mayan treasure. It was a bulky thing like a high school or college ring, or one of those monstrosities worn by professional athletes upon winning a championship.

  She rotated it and stopped in sudden recognition. Fear burned into her throat like a hot wire wrapped around her neck. The crest on the side, she had seen it many times before. She knew this ring well. It was Matty’s ring and … oh, God … Matty’s … finger? She looked up to see Gary walking out of the store. She slammed her hand down on the lock, checking to be sure it was engaged on both doors.

  It was Gary. There hadn’t been an alligator attack. She had no idea why, but she knew for sure that Gary had killed Dani … and before that … Matty.

  She wanted to scream, but he was there, staring into the driver’s side window.

  “It’s just me, girl. Open up.”

  She screamed.

  32

  Can You Hear Me Now?

  Troy felt the edges of the plastic ties around his wrist digging in. Warm rivulets of something—might be blood, might be sweat, he couldn’t tell—dripping down his wrists to his fingertips and dropping in splashes on the floor like an old kitchen faucet. His phone was still locked and counting down the seconds—one-hundred forty-seven of them to be exact—until he could attempt to use it again. The noises coming through the wall connected to the stripping side of Woody’s reminded Troy of a 2-year-old discovering the cabinet with the pots and pans and reveling in the noises they could make when banged together. Even as muffled as it was, it still made his molars shake. He wondered how anyone sitting in the bar itself would be able to hear after the ear-splitting performance.

  He was lost in trying to decipher the angry shouting voices buried in the clatter when his phone rang. He jumped in surprise and wondered if he could answer it if it was locked. Cinnamon’s name appeared at the top and he wasn’t sure if he was relieved, shocked, or something in between. A very small part of him felt like a teenage boy seeing that his crush was calling.

  He dragged his nose across his shoulder, which was almost as sweaty as his face—the old man liked his office to be toasty warm … or maybe the A/C was out. It didn’t help much, but at least he wasn’t dripping onto the screen when he leaned over and swiped.

  As he jabbed at the phone with his nose, he wondered why in the world the phone manufacturer would make the green “Accept” button so infuriatingly small? Didn’t they know there would be kidnap victims trying to push it with other, less accurate body parts? On the third try, he hit it just right and the call connected.

  At exactly that moment, the door to Woody’s jerked open and the not-quite-right and ridiculously loud opening bars of Led Zeppelin's “Whole Lotta Love” burst through like a wrecking ball pushing Dante Caparelli into the room. The old man flew in as if a tsunami was carrying him on stumbling feet. Troy could barely hear Cinnamon’s frantic voice coming through the phone. With more practiced accuracy, he leaned down and punched the Speaker icon. Her shouting made Troy jerk at his wrists again, trying to free himself to no avail.

  Dante, as if pushing back a physical wall of sound, shoved on the office door until it slammed behind him. Cinnamon’s voice was suddenly clear over the dampened cacophony outside.

  “... you there? Where are you?” She was yelling into the phone, on the edge of hysterics. “I need you!”

  “Hey, I’m here.” Troy said, ignoring the fact that Dante was listening. “Slow down. What’s goin’ on?”

  She didn’t slow down. In fact, she sped up to a speed and pitch usually reserved for 33RPM records being played at 78RPM’s on a vinyl player. Troy looked up at Dante, who squinted his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and held his hands out, palm up as if to say he had no earthly idea what she was saying either.

  But eventually, she ran out of breath and that slowed her long enough for Troy to hear another voice on the line. It was distant and quieter and punctuated with loud thumps. It was a man’s voice—a man that did not sound happy or calm.

  “Darlin’,” Troy shouted. “I can’t understand what you’re sayin’. You gotta speak clearly so I can hear you.”

  That seemed to do it. Her words suddenly broke through like a radio station locking in on an old dial stereo.

  “I’m trapped. I’m stuck in the car and he’s outside!”

  Troy’s skin went icy as if he’d made an impulsive decision to join in the Polar Bear Plunge. Despite the hot and humid conditions in the room, he felt a shiver run up and down his spine. He knew this feeling all too well. The PTSD which hadn’t bothered him for a while began to snarl and growl at him from the back of his mind—an evil, burning demon that threatened to petrify him. He shoved back at it. He had to. If he didn’t get a grip on the situation, Cinnamon could be in grave danger.

  “Who’s outside? What’s wrong? Are the keys in the car?” he asked, trying to keep his voice under control.

  Dante just stared at the phone, his mouth hanging open, eyes still narrow slits.

  “I’m in his car at Dion’s.” Her voice was followed by some thumping and sounds of rummaging. “I don’t see the keys. You’ve got to hurry. I think he’s going to hurt me.”

  Troy opened his mouth to ask who was going to hurt her, but before he could get it out, her voice rose to a new level so high that he wondered if any dogs nearby would start barking.

  “The window just tore! He wants in … he’s going to get in. God, Troy, please help me.” She said through sobs. “He killed Matty! He killed Matty and now he’s going to kill me. Troy, please—”

  “Don’t let him in!” Troy yelled.

  Duh, he thought. What a stupid thing to say.

  And with that, Troy heard the man’s voice, closer, louder. Cinnamon shrieked and Troy was sure the man had her. And then, in time with the final cymbal crash of the biggest hit from “Led Zeppelin II,” the line went dead.

  Dumbstruck, Troy looked up at Dante who was equally surprised. The old man stared at the phone, his mouth working in a silent speech trying to comprehend what they had just heard.

  “He killed Matt
y,” Dante finally said, then repeated it slowly, emphasizing each word. “He. Killed. Matty.”

  Troy nodded his head.

  Slowly, methodically, Dante pulled a pair of scissors out of his desk drawer. He clipped the ties around Troy’s wrists.

  “Looks like you’re off the hook, cowboy,” he said as Troy gently rubbed away the sweat and oozing blood.

  The band outside the room started a new song, something Troy did not immediately recognize, but it was full of drums and raging guitar. He wasn’t sure what the old man would do now, but he at least felt like he might avoid the pair of cement shoes and boat ride he was sure was coming. Dante slid the scissors back into the drawer and closed it with a screech. A red phone on the desk rang. He picked up the receiver, glared at it, then slammed it down so hard, it splintered sending shards flying across the desk.

  Over the new number the band had launched into that Troy now recognized as something from the early Bon Scott AC/DC catalog, Dante looked up at Troy and shouted, “But who the hell is Dion?”

  33

  Yekaterina’s Got A Gun

  It had started as a dull, monotonous, quite normal evening at Dion’s Quik Mart. Yekaterina Kuznetsov—who often went by the shorter, slightly more American version, Katerina—cursed the digital cards for not lining up correctly in the fifteenth solitaire game of her overnight shift. With the tourist season not quite in full swing, customers were few and far between. Most of the people she rang up each night were locals looking for lottery tickets, cigarettes, and beer. But there was the occasional vacationer headed down to Key West looking for lottery tickets, cigarettes, and beer.

  Tonight, she hadn’t seen anyone at all until the flamboyantly dressed young man had hopped in looking for the key to the restroom. She handed it to him along with the short chain attaching it to the brass dolphin sculpture. No one worried about the statue being stolen as it was missing its tail and its dorsal fin effectively making it a thick, hotdog shaped paperweight. But Katerina took the young man’s car keys as collateral anyway.

  “Do not steal it,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “And when you come back to get your keys, you buy something, no? Is for paying customers.”

  He smiled and gave her a thumbs up gesture and danced out of the store. She clicked back to her game—the sixteenth one now—noting with glee that her cards were all lining up perfectly. Most of her business was tourist driven and she had settled into the normal island rhythm of coasting until the season started. She glanced up at the calendar and noted that there were seventy-four days until Fantasy Fest—the next big peak of visitors. Between now and then, she would make do with a few off-season travelers and the elite local clientele who liked the beer she kept at forty-four degrees. Her husband, Morty, God rest his soul, had insisted on building the four-thousand square foot beer cave with sections designated for domestic, imported, craft, and the occasional local brew. She had argued that he was building above the level of alcoholic common to the islands, but his business savvy had proven him right. In the long run, they made over seventy-five percent of their sales from beer and gas.

  She raised a hand toward the ceiling. “I told you, I told you,” she said to her husband’s ghost above her. “You were right.”

  When she looked down, she noticed her cards were bouncing around the screen in their satisfying victory dance. She was just about to click the reshuffle button when movement outside the store caught her eye. She was horrified to see the man she’d given the bathroom key, banging the broken brass dolphin into the side window of the Jeep parked at gas pump number two.

  Oddly, there was no broken glass. Katerina had no experience with Jeeps and the fact that some of them had nearly impenetrable vinyl windows—impenetrable to dolphin paperweights anyway. The man was frantic hurling it against the Jeep over and over again, screaming at the poor girl in the passenger seat. Katerina could see that the young woman was recoiling away from the attacker in fear. She picked up the phone and dialed emergency.

  Later, when she was giving her statement down at the Islamorada Sheriff’s Station, she would complain that she called them ten times and always got a busy signal. They would say that wasn’t possible and she would insist it was, showing them her outgoing call list in which she had dialed 1-1-2 eleven (not ten) times. The friendly sheriff, whom she knew from his bimonthly visits to pick up his beloved Samuel Adams’ Utopias Ale—which she up-charged two-hundred percent to six-hundred dollars a bottle—pointed out that the number for emergencies in the United States was 9-1-1. Katerina had clapped her hand over her mouth as if she’d made a blunder akin to accidentally spoiling the end of a twisty thriller novel and apologized over and over to the officers on the scene. They put her in a cruiser and took her to the station where they could properly check the license on her firearm. What firearm you ask?

  When Katerina had failed to get an answer from her misdialed attempts to notify the police, she threw her phone down and decided that the woman—who had now climbed into the driver’s side seat to avoid the man who was running around the Jeep in a circle of blows from the dolphin—was in grave danger.

  She glanced back at the ceiling as if to tell Morty he was right again, but when the woman outside shrieked loud enough that she heard her through the plate-glass front of the store, she went into action. She flipped the combination on the lockbox quickly and opened the gun safe. The massive pistol lying wrapped lovingly in the dimpled foam lining, gleamed at her. She hadn’t touched it since before Morty passed, and was pretty sure he had cleaned it daily—whether it needed it or not. Thankfully, he had shown her how to put bullets in it, but that was about it. She had resisted learning anything more about the vessel of death.

  “Pull this thing back, point the small end at the burglar, and pull the trigger,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s about it.”

  She remembered waving him off in dismissal as she slid the bullets into the cylinder. She had no idea what kind of gun this was, but it was silver with dark wood on the handle. It was as long as her arm from her elbow to her finger and she had to use two hands to pick it up. She took a deep breath, imagined drawing the sign of the cross over her body as she couldn’t let go of the gun to do it or it would’ve dropped to the ground. Steeling herself, she burst through the door, pointing the revolver more or less at the man who was still racing around the Jeep bouncing the bathroom key and attached brass dolphin all over the hood and doors. He was screaming so loud, and had continued to beat the car when she came out, she wasn’t sure he heard her yelling at him.

  She took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. She had intended to shoot above the Jeep and scare the man off, but it was so heavy, she missed a few feet lower than she’d been aiming. The bullet slammed into the top portion of pump number two, shattering the new plexiglass Marlboro ads she had just put up there yesterday. A shower of plastic and the louder-than-expected boom stopped the man dead in his tracks. She ignored the trickle of pee running down her leg and shouted at him.

  The maniac—who had somehow gotten a hand inside the car and was holding onto a small handbag—scrunched his eyes in confusion and she realized that she might have been speaking Russian, or maybe a mixture of Russian, Yiddish, and English. Whatever it was, the man’s temporary bewilderment evaporated as she raised the gun again.

  The man did not wait for her to speak or fire the gun. He turned with a shriek and sprinted away from Dion’s Quik Mart, still holding the brass dolphin and purse in his hands.

  Katerina would have gone after him to retrieve it, but the woman in the Jeep needed her. She was sitting on the center console, her head buried in her hands, sobbing. Katerina sat the gun on the hood of the Jeep and tapped on the side window.

  “You’re safe now, devushka,” she said, just loudly enough for the woman to hear. “The bad man is gone. You can come inside and we will find out why the police refuse to come.”

  The girl inside looked up, her mascara running in black streams down her chee
ks. When she realized the man was gone, she opened the door and stepped out. Her knees buckled under her, but Katerina caught her in her arms and walked her inside.

  The girl sniffed and said, “I think I peed myself.”

  Katerina laughed, a hoarse, deep bark, “As did I. We will find something to change into.”

  “Thank you,” the girl said with a smile.

  Katerina outfitted the girl with a pair of hot pink panties from the back of the shop with a bright red image on the front and the words, “Tasty Cherries,” a pink and tan tank top sporting a pair of antlers and the message, “With any Luck, a Buck in the Truck.” The only shorts she could find for the girl—whom she learned was called Cinnamon—were a pair of black shorty-shorts with a white handprint on each buttock.

  The old Russian woman apologized that these were the only clothes she had for Cinnamon, but the girl—who looked quite ravishing in the makeshift outfit—seemed not to be worried about it. In fact, she pulled out a carefully folded wad of cash from her wet pants and handed it to Katerina.

  The grandmotherly owner of the convenience store tried to refuse the money from the girl, but she had insisted and sealed the deal with a hug and a kiss on each of the woman’s cheeks.

  “How about we try the police again?” Cinnamon asked, scrubbing the dark trails of makeup from her face with a wet wipe from behind the counter.

  “Not before you tell me why is this man trying to break into your Jeep?” Katerina wagged her finger as she said it.

  The girl relayed an incredible tale involving her fiancé, or boyfriend, or something of that nature being killed by the flamboyantly dressed man. At first, Katerina had thought it might be a love triangle gone wrong, but quickly determined that the Jeep beater was gay and only friends with Cinnamon. She tried desperately not to raise an eyebrow when the girl had told her that he had also killed his own fiancé, or boyfriend, or something of that nature. Try as she might, Katerina could not make much sense of Cinnamon’s story, but what she did know was that the girl was in danger and needed to be in the care of the police—even if she doubted the quality of that care.