When the young boss pivoted back again, the strained look of phony benevolence was gone from his face, replaced by a glare of frustration and suspicion. The sing-song had vanished from his voice, which was now a rat-a-tat of open threat. “We’re keeping the old man,” he said. “You know why we’re keeping you, old man? We’re keeping you ‘cause I think maybe you’re scamming with this senile routine. And if you are, you’re not gonna see your ninety-ninth birthday or whatever fucking one comes next. Come on, let’s go find that dead man Nicky.”
Phoebe had been pedaling as hard as she could, and by the end of the sprint to Garrison Bight, the noonday sun had mostly dried her clothes. Her magenta hair was spiky where the breeze had swept it up and back; her flip-flops squeaked against the pedals as the last remaining moisture squished out of them. She raced to the foot of the dock where the battered Sea Queen was once again berthed, then dropped the bike and ran breathlessly along the splintery boards to the gangway. “Ozzie!” she yelled as she boarded.
“Yo,” he answered. He was squatting in a corner, gathering up shards of broken crockery.
“You need to get out of here!” she blurted. “They’re in Key West. Ponte. Two others.”
“Hey, I’m just the roommate. What would they want with me?”
“Oz, they’re pissed. They’re desperate. They grabbed Bert. They’ll grab whoever they can grab. Get your bike. Let’s go.”
Thirty seconds later the two of them were pedaling hard away from the marina. It would have taken only twenty, but Phoebe spent an extra moment on the houseboat to retrieve something that had become precious, almost sacred in a crazy way, to her. She picked up Nicky’s guitar and strapped it across her back. The breeze raked through the strings as she rode and she could feel the instrument thrumming just slightly against her body.
No one seriously expected Nicky to be hanging around his houseboat like a sitting duck, but nor was anyone prepared for the utter squalor they found when the four of them, captors and captives, clambered up the Sea Queen’s gangplank.
Gato in particular was bitterly disappointed at the state of the empty houseboat. He’d been looking forward to kicking in a freshly varnished cabin door, but the door was already hanging limp and askew on its ruined hinges. He’d been relishing the thought of wreaking havoc in the living quarters, but there was very little havoc left to wreak; furniture was upside down, shelves tilted and dangling, pillows, pots, and shoes scattered randomly around the floor.
The fastidious Benavides, having no idea how the wrecked boat got that way, was disgusted to the point of nausea by the mess. How could anybody live like that? He said to Ponte, “This is the kind of lowlife scum you get to do my job? This is the quality of person you deal with? What is this fucking guy, a drunk, a junkie?”
Ponte said nothing, just offered a sheepish shrug.
Holding his dog close against his chest, hiding behind a stoic face with a carefully maintained blank expression, Bert the Shirt allowed himself an inward smile. Amazing, he thought, that this glorified raft had made it out beyond the reef; amazing that Phoebe had had the grit and the guts, not to mention the sheer dumb luck, to pull off the rescue. Not realizing he was about to speak aloud, not meaning to speak at all, he murmured softly, “The power of love.”
Benavides heard the murmur but not the words. “Fuck you say, old man?”
Realizing he’d goofed, Bert stalled a beat then said, “Did I say something?”
“Yeah, you did. What the fuck did you say?”
Bert licked his wide and fleshy lips, then gestured vaguely around the trashed interior. “Um, guess I said what a fucking tub.”
34.
In the mangrove clearing up by the airport, Pineapple was sitting on a cinder block and whittling a piece of driftwood into the shape of a soaring bird. Looking up from his work, he suddenly said, “Hey Fred, ya know what I sometimes wonder about?”
Fred was engaged in the more practical chore of clearing a clog in the generator. With his usual aggrieved patience, he answered, “No, Piney. What do you sometimes wonder about?”
“I sometimes wonder whether, if the earth suddenly stopped spinning, would the sky stop too or would it keep on going?”
Matter-of-factly, Fred said, “The earth isn’t gonna suddenly stop spinning.”
“Let’s leave that on the side for now. Say it did. If the sky kept going, I guess it would be really windy, right? Like way windier than a hurricane. But if the sky stopped too, then there’d never be a breeze again. If you were where the sun was, you’d burn to a crisp. Which way do you think would be worse, Fred?”
He didn’t get to answer because just then Phoebe and Ozzie came bouncing up the nubby path that led in from A1A. Hearing their clattering arrival, Nicky emerged from the hot dog, where he’d been trying to wash the dried salt spray from his face and arms and hair. Phoebe, still flushed and hyper from her dash around the island, stepped off her bike and said, “They’re coming after you, Nicky. Like we figured.”
The words didn’t quite register for a moment because his attention was riveted by something else. “You brought my guitar,” he said.
For an instant she’d forgotten she had it on her back. “Oh yeah, I did.” She handed it over gently. He received it tenderly. A caress by proxy.
The sweet mood evaporated quickly when she went on. “They took Bert.”
“Shit,” said Nicky. “That’s really low.”
Ozzie said, “What did you expect, nobility?”
An uneasy silence descended on the clearing as the little group thought about the cagey but fragile old man who was now in custody.
After a pause Nicky said, “Well listen, I’ve been thinking. I think if we’re gonna get this settled, what we gotta do is we gotta find the inside guy.”
“Inside guy?” said Fred.
“There’s gotta be an inside guy,” said Nicky. “Think about it. The boat was supposed to get seized. That was the whole idea.”
Fred, listening intently with his head cocked to one side, said, “So you were just a pigeon?”
Piney said, “Come on, Fred, isn’t that a little harsh?”
“It isn’t harsh,” said Nicky. “It’s true. A pigeon is exactly what I was set up to be. The real payload’s still on the boat. There’s gotta be someone inside whose job it is to score it.”
Ozzie said, “Inside, like at Customs? Customs is all Feds, Staties, military types.”
Pineapple surprised himself by speaking up. He almost never talked to more than one person at a time, but he was somehow galvanized by being part of the conversation, by thinking maybe he could help. He said, “I don’t think all. They hire just regular people for some of the crummy work. Even Fred’s done some day-labor there.”
“Whaddya mean, even Fred? Like I’m the lowest of the low?”
Phoebe had been rolling a coral pebble with her toe as she listened to the back and forth. She said, “Fred, when you worked there, do you remember what time the shifts changed?”
His face twisted up as he spat out the distasteful memory. “Six and two. Either ruin your whole night having to be in so early or go in in the afternoon and fry your ass off.”
“I’m going down there at two o’clock,” she announced quietly but firmly. “See who comes out of that gate. See if I can tell which one’s our guy.”
“You can’t do that, Phoebe,” Nicky said. “Way too dangerous. What if Ponte’s there? He’d recognize you. I’ll go.”
“That’s even a way worse idea,” said Ozzie, though he didn’t volunteer himself.
There was a pause, but only a brief one, before Pineapple said, “I’m going.”
“You?” said Fred. “What can you—“
“It’s the best idea,” said Piney. “No one knows me. No one’ll notice. I’ll sit. I’ll watch. I’ll see what I see. Can someone lend me a phone and show me how to use it?”
Benavides and Gato, with Ponte and Bert and his dog in tow, spent the better part of t
he next two hours driving around Key West looking for the Mariposa. They looked at the Yacht Club, at the Galleon Marina, at the Key West Bight where live-aboards whose
skin was burned a permanent rosewood color lolled in hammocks or fiddled with balky outboards. They searched among fishing skiffs and charter boats and million-dollar ketches, Benavides slipping hundred-dollar bills to harbormasters and twenties to dock boys as he probed for information. In their increasingly irritated circuits around the island, they drove past Cow Key Channel three different times and never noticed the half-sunk boat with its cratered topsides and shattered glass and lumpy coat of red paint on its transom.
At 1:45, hot, hungry, frustrated, and ready to kill somebody, they parked across the street from the Customs base. Gato, his silver jacket now sticking to his skin and pocked with sweat, positioned himself next to the gate through which Teddy Meara would be exiting. Ten feet away, a homeless man with a lean ascetic face was sitting on a blanket, an array of whittled figurines around him. He asked Gato if he’d like to buy a seagull or a turtle. The big man ignored him altogether.
At a couple of minutes after two, a thin stream of workers, maybe a dozen in all, started moving through the gate. Some walked in pairs or threesomes, chatting and laughing. Others walked alone. When a rather dumpy and disheveled red-haired man came through, Gato approached him and, just because he felt like it, gave him a quick, hard, and nearly invisible punch in the kidney. The red-haired man crumpled but before he could fall Gato had grabbed his arm and was leading him toward the waiting Jaguar.
Pineapple looked up from his figurines, squinted toward the glare off the windshield, and winced in sympathy as the red-haired man was roughly folded over and shoved into the car.
35.
“Gettin’ kinda crowded in here,” said Bert the Shirt, shielding his dog as Meara was squeezed firmly up against him by the force of the slamming door. “Just my luck to get a middle seat.”
Benavides told him to shut up. To Meara he said, “You look like shit.”
“What could I tell you, Jefe? I had a rough night.”
“So what happened with my boat?”
“What happened? I told you what happened. Nothing happened. They sent out a patrol and it came up empty. That’s it. Cops don’t talk about failed missions. Have you ever noticed that?”
Ponte leaned across Bert and insinuatingly asked Meara if he’d heard from Nicky.
Meara leaned across Bert from the other side and said, “Who the fuck is Nicky? And who the fuck are you?”
Pressing closer, Ponte said, “Don’t act like you don’t know.”
Pressing closer in turn and defiantly sticking out his chin, Meara said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“And I’m like suffocating here,” said Bert, as the two men went nearly nose to nose at the level of his solar plexus, forcing him to lift his flailing chihuahua almost to the ceiling. Even with the A/C blasting it seemed like the agitated bodies in the car had displaced all the air. What few molecules were left were polluted with the smells of sweat and after-shave and the sour reek of imperfectly digested alcohol that wafted out of Teddy Meara’s pores. “Could you two hard-ons please back off an inch or two?” the old man went on. “You’re givin’ the dog a claustrophobia attack.”
Meara gave a little ground, not much. Then he said, “Jefe, listen—“
“Call me that one more time and I’ll kill you,” Benavides said.
“Okay. Listen. This bastard over here making accusations, I don’t know him from Adam. This corpse in the middle, I don’t know him either. All I know is your boat didn’t come in. What else can I tell you?”
“You still have the chisel, the key?”
“Of course I do.”
“Give them to me.”
“Tha’d be my fucking pleasure,” said Meara, and pushed back against the seat so he could reach deep into the pocket of his baggy, sweat-stained pants.
As he pushed back he leaned heavily against Bert’s collarbone, and the resulting flash of pain seemed to carry with it a jolt of clarity that lit up the old man’s brain. Wait a second, he thought. Meara has a key? A special chisel? Maybe this is the only guy who could grab the whosiwhatsis and get Nicky off the hook…
Still fishing in his pocket, the red-haired man said, “Then I can go? We’re quits?”
Before Benavides could answer, Bert the Shirt mumbled very softly, “I think that’d be a bad mistake.”
“Excuse me?”
“You got a guy right where you need him,” said Bert. “Okay, he doesn’t strike me as a genius, but he’s in place. Why not keep him on the job?”
Benavides pulled his eyebrows together, looked from Bert to Meara, from Meara back to Bert. Then he said, “For this you come out of your coma? Fuck’s it to you?”
“To me?” said Bert. “To me it’s nothing. But whatever it is you’re so hot to get your hands on, I hope you get it soon so I can get the fuck out of this car before I die.”
Meara’s hand was still in his pocket, fingering the key he wanted so badly to lose. His eyes flicked back and forth between the two men who were discussing his destiny as though he wasn’t there. He’d been a heartbeat away from freedom, from a Greyhound ride to somewhere else, and now he was hanging in the wind as Benavides thought it over.
Finally the young boss said, “The mummy’s right. You’re staying.”
Meara said, “But—“
“But nothing. You’ll go to work tomorrow. You’ll go the day after. You’ll go every fucking day till we find the boat and you do the job I paid you for. You got that?”
Meara slumped down in the seat again and didn’t bother answering.
“Let him out, Gato.”
The huge man walked around the car and opened a back door. Meara climbed out and for one suicidal yet oddly joyful moment he thought of bolting, pictured himself running at least a few gloriously futile steps before Gato took him down with a tackle or a gun and ended this humiliation. The heroic fantasy didn’t last long, and when it was gone there was only one thought left in Meara’s mind. He badly wanted a drink.
From across the street, Pineapple discreetly watched as the red-haired man straightened out his rumpled clothing and started slowly walking away. Without hurry or apparent interest, he gathered up his whittled figurines and folded up his blanket and followed half a block behind.
“Play that song for me, would you, Nicky?”
“Which one?”
“You know. That one about people waiting for their luck to change.”
They were sitting on coral rocks in the clearing by the Sno-Cone truck. The guitar was leaning against a bumper. Except for a few scratches on the back it had come through its recent ordeals in pretty good shape. Nicky picked it up and strummed a tentative chord but didn’t launch into the song. Instead, he said, “Seems kind of funny now.”
“What does?” Phoebe asked.
“That I’ve been singing my guts out about luck changing, and then, sure enough, it does change. Except it changes for the even worse.”
Phoebe pressed her lips together and tried to find a compromise between an optimism she couldn’t quite buy into and a pessimism to which she would not yield. “I guess you could say we’re kind of in a rough patch.”
Nicky gave a quick laugh at that. “Rough patch. I get fired. The Sea Queen’s trashed. You find out you’ve been ripped off with the truck. Plus now we’re hiding out from gangsters and I’m sleeping in a hot dog with two homeless guys. Guess you could call that a rough patch.”
“It hasn’t all been bad, has it, Nicky? I mean, at least we’re getting to know each other better.”
He didn’t disagree, but said, “Other people, they’re getting to know each other, they go out for coffee, they meet for a drink. They don’t wreck their lives and maybe die.”
“Guess you don’t get to pick exactly how you find someone.”
Nicky looked at her from underneath his eyebrows. “Fin
d someone?”
Phoebe might have blushed at that, though the blush was very hard to see through her suntan and the pink and lavender patterns on her tattooed arms. She wasn’t quite sure if she’d said more or less than she’d really meant to say. Gathering herself, she said, “Nicky, let me ask you something. Why’d you get involved with this smuggling thing in the first place?”
He’d promised himself he would never bring that up with Phoebe and he didn’t want to go there now. “Look, I was out of work. I needed—“
“I don’t believe that, Nicky. Can we please make a deal? Look, the world is full of bullshit, people bullshitting, twisting things, saying things then unsaying them. Can we please just be honest with each other? You got into this to help me out. Isn’t that true?”
He looked off toward the edge of the clearing, where the shadows of the mangroves were beginning to distort and smudge in the lengthening light of late afternoon. Finally, he said, “Yeah, it’s true.”
“Why, Nicky? Why’d you do that?”
He glanced down at his guitar, spent a long moment trying to rub a scuff off its side with his thumb. He felt cornered, and the feeling was both terrifying and delicious, because in some way he understood that the only way out of the corner was to stop dodging and give in to the dangerous thrill of letting himself be caught. In an instant so intense that it made his vision swim, he rehearsed what he wished he would say. I did it because I’m crazy about you, Phoebe. I’ve been crazy about you since the first day—
That was when her cell phone rang.
It was Pineapple, calling from a streetcorner to report all he’d seen and saying in a scratchy whisper that he’d found the inside guy—a stocky, red-haired man in very wrinkled clothes, who’d just that minute gone into the Brigantine Bar.
36.
Teddy Meara’s hand trembled slightly as he raised the shot glass to his lips.
Key West Luck Page 15
