Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  In the meantime Ozzie said, “So what else is on the boat?”

  “I have no idea,” admitted Phoebe.

  “But you’re sure there must be something?” Ozzie pressed.

  “I’m not sure of anything. I’m just saying what makes sense to me.”

  “May I please point out that the entire Coast Guard just searched the boat and didn’t find a thing?”

  “They searched for fifteen minutes and they were looking for cigars.”

  “Right,” said Ozzie. “And we have no idea what we’re looking for. And it’s very dark. And it’s the middle of the night. And our boat is trashed. And we’re all exhausted.”

  Lost in his own thoughts, Nicky hadn’t followed in detail these last exchanges between his friends. But now he said, “Look, guys, this is my mess, not yours. You came out here, you warned me. That was great. Thanks. But you’ve done enough. I’ll figure something out from here. You two should go home.”

  Softly but immovably, Phoebe said, “Not doin’ it.”

  “Phoebe, please—“

  “Nicky, listen, let’s be realistic here. You’re in a lot of trouble. You said that yourself. But the upfront money, the cigars, that’s the least of it. There’s something on this boat that somebody wants pretty badly.”

  “Except we don’t know what the hell it is,” Ozzie interrupted.

  “Right. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know where it is. We don’t know how the person who wants it so badly would have gotten at it if the boat was seized like it was supposed to be.”

  “Sounds to me like we don’t know jack shit,” said Ozzie.

  “Well, here’s what we do know,” Phoebe said. “We know that whoever wants what’s on the boat isn’t gonna give up on getting it. Which means they’re gonna be looking for the boat. Who’s the last person who had the boat? That would be you, Nicky. So we need to hide you and hide the boat till we get this figured out.”

  “Figured out?” said Ozzie.

  “Till we find whatever it is that’s stashed on the boat and work out a way to get it to the person who wants it so badly.”

  Ozzie pondered that a moment then said, “Or if this whatever-it-is is so goddamn valuable, maybe we just keep it for ourselves.”

  “Don’t even think that for a second, Oz,” said Nicky. “Thinking like that, that’s what gets people killed.”

  “Killed? Okay, forget I said it. So all we gotta do is hide a boat that everyone knows pretty much exactly what it looks like, and where it was seen last, and by the way can’t travel very fast. Is that all we gotta do?”

  “That, and play for time,” said Phoebe.

  Nicky said, “Phoebe, listen, I can’t let you—“

  Ignoring him, she went on, “I sort of have a plan.”

  Ozzie said, “You do?”

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s not exaggerate. I have maybe a little part of a plan. But one thing I know for sure is we better get back before daylight. Come on, let’s get started.”

  29.

  Despite or perhaps because of the copious amounts of alcohol he’d taken in, Teddy Meara couldn’t quite manage to sleep that night. Back in his dreary mildewed room on Truman Avenue, he dozed a bit then woke up fidgety and itching. For a while he lay still, trying to stop the ceiling from revolving and listening to the tiny crunching bites of termites as they ate the walls. He dozed a little more, got up for a pee, caught a glimpse of his bloated face in the mirror, and wished he’d drunk a bit less. By then it was four a.m. and he was getting jumpy about the job he was supposed to do as soon as possible after his shift began at six. He got up, tried his best to wash the crust off the rims of his eyelids, and started walking back to the Customs base.

  Out on the street, nothing much was moving except for cats, which slunk along so low as nearly to merge with their shadows on the pavement. Now and then, one jumped from a standing start into a garbage can, but mostly they just rubbed themselves against car tires. On Eaton Street a young man in a pink leotard was very precisely folding underwear and shirts in the bright window of a 24-hour Laundromat.

  Meara stopped for Cuban coffee at the same bodega he always went to. It was garishly lit to discourage shoplifters and the espresso machine was manned by the same person who seemed to be there every single day at any hour of the day or night. After knocking back the viscous brew, the red-haired man proceeded down James Street, past the place where the old steam plant had been converted into million-dollar condos.

  He crossed Caroline Street and went up to the gate of the base. He had no intention of going in early. He’d never done that before and it would only attract suspicion. He just wanted to have a peek inside. Grabbing the bars and pushing his face between them like a monkey in a cage, he peered through the darkness toward the impound slip, the place where the boat he’d been waiting for since summer should have finally been tied up.

  Except it wasn’t. There was no boat, no dock-lines on the bollards, no guards patrolling and strutting around a captured prize.

  Puzzled, Meara widened his view to take in more of the docks. Two cutters and a pursuit boat were tied up there, and there was something in the way they were positioned that was just very slightly jarring to the red-haired man. Were they berthed exactly where’d they been earlier that night? Were they spaced precisely as they’d been before? In his halfway state between a drunkenness that had faded and a hangover poised to kick in, he couldn’t be sure. He was just very confused. Confused and disappointed. And secretly relieved—relieved with the furtive gladness of the shirker and the coward who hopes in his heart that things go wrong before it’s his turn to fail and the disaster can be blamed on him.

  He went back to the bodega to have another cup of coffee and to wait for dawn.

  “Pineapple!” said Phoebe, in a breathy whisper that was barely softer than her normal speaking voice. “Fred!”

  She was standing in the clearing where the hot dog was. The moon had long been down by then and the only light was a faint greenish glow that seemed to waft up from the warmth of the earth rather than down from the sky. Her jeans had been rolled up to her knees, but even so they were wet along the bottom.

  After a moment, Pineapple’s voice was heard from inside the vending cart. “Phoebe?”

  “I need some help. It’s important.”

  The door of the hot dog was at the back, just where the frank curved up and emerged from the bun, and it seemed to take no time at all for Pineapple to open it and step out into the night. “What is it?” he said.

  Before she could answer, Fred had also climbed down into the clearing. Then she said, “Do you have an ax?”

  Worriedly, Fred said, “An ax?”

  “Or something like an ax. I’ll explain later. Can you come with me?”

  The two men glanced at one another in the dark but asked no further questions. Fred rummaged among his pile of things scavenged or pilfered from work sites and came up with an eight-pound splitting maul. Phoebe ducked into the Sno-Cone truck and found what was left of the can of red spray paint she’d used to apply her logo. Then she led the way out of the mangroves to the empty, silent pavement of A1A.

  On the far side of the road, idling in the rippled shallows twenty yards out from the seawall, a battered houseboat was sitting at anchor. The three friends stepped over the knee-high embankment, gingerly slid down to the ocean, and waded out through cool water that came up to their thighs. When they reached the badly listing craft, Ozzie reached down from the stern to help them aboard.

  Once on deck, Fred said, “Now can you tell us what this is all about?”

  “I need you to help me sink a boat,” said Phoebe.

  Pineapple glanced quickly around the Sea Queen. “This one?”

  “No,” Ozzie put in drily, “this one’s sinking very nicely by itself.”

  “That one,” said Phoebe, lifting her chin toward a tiny and featureless mangrove islet, a couple of hundred yards farther out into the coursing tidal waters
of the Cow Key Channel, where the Mariposa had been gently run aground.

  Squinting toward it through the starlight, Pineapple said, “Gee, that’s kind of a nice boat. Seems a shame to sink it.”

  Phoebe said, “Less of a shame than what’ll happen if we don’t. Besides, we’re not gonna sink it all the way. Just punch a couple holes in it, make it tilt. Smash the windshield, crumple the top. Ya know, just made it unrecognizable.”

  Fred said, “Ya mean, just make it look like one more piece of shit Keys boat?”

  “You got it,” Phoebe said.

  Fred rubbed his hands together then fondled the dully gleaming head of the splitting maul. To him there was something uniquely satisfying about demolishing things.

  Pineapple hauled the Sea Queen’s anchor out of the muck, and Ozzie maneuvered through the current as best he could to where the Mariposa was placidly resting with its bow in the mangroves. Nicky, standing at the transom, reached out his hands to help the wrecking party board.

  Within a minute, Fred, lying on his belly and sliding his head and shoulders below the rusted lifeline, had started swinging his maul against the mahogany lapstrake of the hull. At first the stalwart boards repelled the blows, sent the hammer bouncing back and stinging Fred’s hard hands; but the repeated pummeling seemed gradually to sap the old boat’s will, and finally it appeared to let itself die the way a wild animal allows itself to die, struggling and writhing for a time then taking refuge in a serene and painless calm. The blade of the maul bit through the splintering and exhausted boards at last, and through the spreading gap at the waterline the sea flowed in undramatically, almost lazily. The boat settled more snugly against the bottom and tipped slightly on its stubby keel.

  Meanwhile, puffs of red spray paint tinged the night air as Phoebe covered over the boat’s name on the transom. Fittingly for a Key West-style job, the paint ran out before the edges and the corners could be tidied up. There were drips and bubbles left over from where the spray got thick and sticky at the bottom of the can.

  Fred raised himself from the deck and pointed to the windshield. To Pineapple, he said, “Wanna do some?”

  Pineapple shook his head. He felt sorry for the boat.

  “It’s fun,” Fred urged.

  Sorrowfully, Piney shook his head again. Fred shrugged and clobbered the windshield. In an instant there was a fist-sized hole where the maul had landed, a universe of tiny fractures radiating out from it. It took only a few blows to put a deep crease in the pilothouse roof, and only a single kick to stave in the companionway door.

  By the time the first faint yellow gleam of daybreak was brightening the eastern sky, the now nameless Mariposa looked like a wreck that hadn’t floated in many years. Four people were climbing down from the Sea Queen and slogging through the shallows toward the clearing in the mangroves. And Ozzie Kimmel, alone now on his devastated houseboat, was limping back to Garrison Bight and the cozy berth he hoped never to leave again.

  30.

  By 6 a.m. Teddy Meara’s nascent hangover had blossomed into a raging headache that made even the gentle light of dawn a torment to behold. Walking gingerly so as not to jar the stack of bones that led up to the bottom of his throbbing skull, he entered the base and punched in at the old-fashioned time-clock; the dry snap of its stamping mechanism thundered in his ears.

  Casually, he wandered over to the docks and secretly examined the official craft tied up there. There were flecks of drying foam shaped like fish scales on the cutters’ hulls. He placed his palm against a steel plate near the stern; it was still faintly warm with engine heat.

  He picked up a broom and for a few minutes pretended to be sweeping up not much of anything. Then he slunk off to a quiet place and called Luis Benavides. “Good morning, Jefe,” he said.

  Benavides had been asleep in his South Beach condo when the phone rang. Even so, expecting that his treasure was about to be delivered, he sounded almost amiable in reply. “Hello, Teddy. You’re on your way?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “But it went well? You’re off the base at least?”

  “I’m on the fucking dock, Jefe.”

  The sour boss’s spasm of pleasantness evaporated in a heartbeat. “What the hell are you still doing there?”

  “There’s no boat.”

  “What?”

  “I said there’s no boat. Nada. Nothing.”

  Benavides was wearing silk pajamas and he now spun out of bed so quickly that the creamy fabric squeaked against the sheets as he pivoted to stand up. “But that’s impossible!”

  “Possible, impossible, I don’t know. But I’m telling you there’s no boat here.”

  Quick to feel betrayed, Benavides said, “You’re lying, Teddy. And if you’re lying you’re a dead man.”

  Meara’s headache was so horrendous that at that moment the thought of being murdered didn’t seem so bad. Sounding more bored than terrified, he said, “You think I don’t know that? You think I’m that stupid?”

  Benavides didn’t answer one way or the other.

  “Far as I can tell,” the red-haired man went on, “a couple of cutters went out from here last night. They came back empty-handed. More than that I couldn’t tell you.”

  The boss who was now pacing in his silk pajamas pondered that a moment. Then, by an instinctive paranoia that moved faster than conscious thought, he suddenly shifted the focus of his suspicion. “Fucking Ponte,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Never mind, never mind.”

  There was a brief silence. The top of a searing white sun broke through the horizon and Meara turned his back on it. “So Jefe,” he said sulkily, “what the fuck you want me to do now?”

  Benavides, in fact, had only a vague idea what his next move should be but he was not a man to acknowledge doubts. Firmly he said, “Just stay where you are.”

  “But—“

  “I’m gonna find that boat, Teddy. And when I find it, you’re gonna do your job. You still have the chisel and the key?”

  “’Course I do.”

  “You’re the only who has it, Teddy. Remember that.”

  “I will.”

  “And so will I. You better be ready when that boat turns up.”

  Fred was assuming that Nicky would be sleeping at Phoebe’s place. Isn’t that the way things always went? The two of them were young, they obviously liked each other, Phoebe had just taken a big chance to help him out. True, they were exhausted, bedraggled, and the circumstances were not exactly what you’d call romantic. But even so…As the four of them picked their way by the low and slanting light over the coral nubs that led on to the clearing, Fred made himself a silent bet. He bet himself a beer that Phoebe and Nicky would jump into the sack that very morning.

  So he was a bit surprised when they reached the Sno-Cone truck and Phoebe asked if maybe they could find a little extra room for Nicky in the hot dog. Nicky himself tried his very hardest not to show any reaction at all to the question. Pineapple immediately replied that sure they could, he and Fred had finished sleeping anyway, he’d go tidy up his bedroll and make sure Nicky had a nice level place to lie down in. He motioned to Fred to come along and help him, though mostly what he was doing was trying to give Phoebe and Nicky a little time by themselves.

  The sun was just high enough by then that its yellow-white light was all tangled up in the twisted trunks and waxy leaves of the mangroves. The sudden heat silenced the nighttime insects and drew forth a salt and iodine smell from the tiny puddles where water was trapped by cup-like roots. For a moment, Phoebe and Nicky stood silently on either side of a little pile of ashes left over from a campfire. Then she said, “You disappointed, Nicky?”

  “Hm?”

  “That I didn’t invite you in.”

  They were both barefoot. Nicky kicked lightly at a stick of driftwood that hadn’t completely burned. “Yeah, I guess. A little. Wasn’t taking anything for granted, but, you know—“

  “Don’t think I d
idn’t think about it,” Phoebe said. “I did. A lot. But out here, like this, with everything that’s going on…It’s just not the way I wanted it to be. You know what I mean?”

  He nodded, and in that moment was visited by a crazy aching fantasy, a vision of the two of them in a luxurious hotel room, ocean view, fluffy bathrobes, champagne in a silver bucket…

  She said, “You mad, Nicky?”

  “No, I’m not mad. Not at all.”

  She lifted an eyebrow a quarter of an inch and very softly said, “Maybe some other time?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Some other time, like, soon?”

  At that he had to smile, and as he smiled he pulled his eyes away for just a second, and when his gaze went back to her he saw that her face was moving close to his and before he could even pucker up his lips she’d kissed him. It was not a deep kiss, not even fully on the mouth, but just at the corner of it where his faint, shy smile still lingered. His arms reached out to hold her around the waist but by then she’d backed away and was already headed toward the Sno-Cone truck. “We better get some rest,” she said across her shoulder. “I think it’s gonna be a complicated day.”

  31.

  Back when Charlie Ponte was a bigger cheese, he’d lived surrounded by several layers of security. Pairs of tough guys had loitered in front of his building on Biscayne Bay, toying with their Ray-Bans as they scanned the visitors dropping off their Jags and Benzes at the valet parking. Those who were allowed upstairs to the boss’s penthouse floor were patted down, sometimes in a friendly manner, sometimes with an enthusiasm that left marks. But that was in the past. These days Ponte lived no more insulated than the typical well-to-do and slightly paranoid city dweller, with a doorman, a concierge, an intercom, and a handgun in a bedroom drawer. So when his buzzer rang at 8 a.m., it was Ponte himself who answered it, from bed, and when he was told that a Mr. Benavides, along with another gentleman, was there to see him, he saw little option other than to have him sent up.