Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  To Phoebe, Piney, and Fred, hunkered low beneath the mangroves a mere twenty feet away, the sound was like the desperate clawing of a rodent trapped in a wall.

  Finally the chisel found the groove. A board fell away; a fresh stink wafted from the bilges into Meara’s face. He reached for the safe, fumbled with an unsteady hand to fit the many-sided key into the lock. The safe fell open and he blindly thrust his hand inside, expecting to find…what? A sack of diamonds? A brick of cash? What he came away with was an ordinary envelope—business-size, manila—inside a plastic bag.

  He scuttled backward from the forepeak and out through the cabin. By the time he was once again stomping through the slime on the back deck and clambering over the railing of the trawler, his queasiness had subsided and his incorrigible bravado had returned. Waving the envelope above his head, he called out to Gus Delios, “You see? You see? I told you it was easy money.”

  Delios didn’t smile. Easy money was the only kind he knew but he was as short on nerve as he was long on avarice, and this midnight salvage job was making him miserable. Fear was rumbling his bowels. His jaw ached and he could hear his own teeth as they ground together.

  Meara grinned enough for both of them.

  Fifty yards away, dark and silent, the Sea Queen sat sweetly on its nest of rock. It didn’t bob; it didn’t lean; there was something regal in its stillness.

  Meara gestured toward it with his chin. He said to Delios, “Ease me over there. We make the drop, we’re done.”

  The fat man tilted his engines down until the props just barely dipped into the shallow water. They churned up some muck as they started to spin. Backing through brown foam, the trawler pivoted and turned its nose toward the houseboat.

  The moon was almost down. There was no breeze. The silhouettes of palm trees on the nearby land looked as flat and motionless as if they’d been cut from black paper and pinned to a wall.

  Meara was standing at the bow, his thighs pressed against a rail for balance. Delios maneuvered slowly closer, now in forward, now in neutral, the gearshift thunking with each change. No one spoke until the hulls were nearly kissing and Meara had reached out to grab a life-line on the Sea Queen’s side. He steadied himself and waited for the rocking of the trawler to flatten out, then he whispered, “Nicky!”

  For a couple of heartbeats nothing happened. Then a cabin door slid open and a dark figure stepped out on deck. “Got the goods?”

  Meara waved the hand that held the envelope.

  Two more men came out on deck. A light was switched on behind them.

  Meara froze in mid-gesture and called out “Jefe!”

  It was the exact wrong thing to say, and Benavides shot him through the heart. In his rage he murdered him an instant too soon, before the precious parcel had been handed off to Nicky. Meara’s body fell backward, hard and fast, and landed in a twisted heap on the front deck of the trawler.

  The plastic bag that held the envelope fluttered down as softly as an autumn leaf into the coursing water of the Cow Key Channel.

  At the trawler’s helm, and with a dead man on the deck, Gus Delios was whimpering and quaking. He threw his craft into reverse and revved his engines so that they roared and bucked; he’d covered just a few yards when Gato fired at him through the windshield. The bullet was in the fat man’s brain before the spray of glass engulfed him. Pilotless, the trawler spun off in a lunatic ballet of backward figure-eights.

  And the deed to the Nacional hotel in the heart of old Havana scudded on the current toward the islet in the middle of the channel.

  43.

  The plastic bag rode the wavelets like a jellyfish.

  For Phoebe, standing calf-deep in the muck that ringed the little island, there was never any doubt that she would try her damnedest to swim out and grab it. Piney in his peaceable way tried to discourage that idea. “Maybe better to just let it go,” he said. “Been nothing but trouble. Bad trouble.”

  But Nicky and Ozzie and Bert were still hostage on the Sea Queen, and she saw no way of getting them off alive except maybe, just possibly, by giving the boss what he’d come for.

  She sucked in a deep breath and dove into the water. It was warm and slippery and dim green arcs of phosphorescence trailed her arms as she swam. She set a course toward the bobbing, teasing plastic sack, but invisible currents bullied her, pushing her sideways, rising up against her progress. The rules of geometry seemed no longer to apply; she swam a straight line that arced and curved; the drifting bag tantalized and eluded her, slowing for a moment then whirling away on an unseen eddy.

  In the middle of the channel, a hundred yards from anywhere, it dawned on her with a sickening suddenness that she was running out of air. Her legs were heavy; her arms burned in their sockets; in the troughs of the ripples she was gasping for quick breaths that were mostly water vapor and felt soupy in her lungs. Ahead of her, just a couple of strokes away, the plastic bag twinkled dimly with pinpoints of reflected starlight. Summoning strength, summoning hope, she kicked and clawed and finally grasped it.

  The surge of effort depleted her; she yearned to rest but started to sink, pulled down by her sodden clothes. Her arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Salt seared her eyes and she saw nothing but gleaming black water. The sea flowed through her nostrils.

  A strong and callused hand reached down and grabbed her wrist where it dangled just below the surface. She was coughing up water and shaking herself like a Labrador as Fred pulled her up onto the wallowing raft.

  On the deck of the Sea Queen, the burnt and oily smell of fired guns still hung in the humid air.

  The rapt gaze of Luis Benavides had never stopped searching for the treasure that had fluttered overboard and vanished for a time in the chaos of boat wakes and bullets and tumbling bodies. By the time he’d spotted it again, twirling and bobbing and endlessly receding, it was hopelessly out of reach. He’d watched it drift, and as it drifted the thin veneer of sanity seemed to peel away from his obsessed mind, and his gaze became the unblinking stare of the unhinged. He’d watched as a silhouetted figure sprang out from the islet and dove into the water. He’d stared as the distance inexorably closed between the swimmer and his inheritance. He’d gaped as a raft was launched from shore and the swimmer was heaved up onto it by two other figures.

  His mania told him that they wanted the envelope for themselves. Of course they did. He said to Gato, “Kill them.”

  It was a long shot at a moving target in the dark. Gato spread his feet and braced.

  Nicky stepped in front of the gun, its muzzle nearly grazing his chest. He said to Benavides, “Do that and you’ll never get your package. It’ll drift clear into the Gulf. You’d never find it in a million years.”

  Gato slapped him hard in the ribs with the pistol barrel, moving him aside. Through the jagged pain of cracking bone, Nicky went on, “Can’t you see? Can’t you see? They’re coming this way. They’re bringing it to you.”

  Benavides gestured to Gato to lower his gun. He squinted through the darkness and saw that the raft in fact was moving toward them by the tiniest of increments, paddled by a man at the stern with what seemed to be a shovel.

  “Listen,” Nicky went on, “all we want is to have this over with. No cops, no money, no grudges, no memories. You get your parcel. All the rest, it’s like it never happened. Deal?”

  44.

  Stars twinkled. Water burbled over rocks and hissed softly as it sank through sand. Bert and Ponte and Ozzie had come out on deck, quietly taking the air like people on a cruise. As the raft moved slowly closer, the plashing of the shovel blade could be heard as it dipped into the sea.

  Luis Benavides was trembling; his lips were drawn back taut against dry teeth. A lifelong dream—no, more than lifelong, a dream of generations—was about to be fulfilled. It was a crowning event, a consummation…yet, even so, there was a nagging hint of deflation in it. There should have been more grandeur in the moment, a greater sense of ceremony. The Cuban heir looked
across the shrinking distance at the people who were bringing him his fortune. What he saw were two dirtbags and a skinny woman who was soaking wet. Not the ambassadors he would have hoped for. Small people. Nobodies. He almost regretted that of course they needed to be killed.

  The raft edged closer. Phoebe waved the bag that held the envelope. Looking like a very cautious surfer, Pineapple inched forward and leaned out above the water until he was able to grab onto the Sea Queen’s hull. Sea water squished between the raft’s warped planks as it bumped against the bigger craft.

  Gato reached down massive fingers and a hairy wrist to pull Phoebe up on deck. The 9 mm was in his other hand, and Benavides gave him the tiniest of nods as he effortlessly lifted the young woman up and over the railing.

  She didn’t yet have her feet under her when Benavides plucked the plastic bag from her fingers and Gato began to raise the pistol toward her middle. Nicky was already coiling for a punch. His hips turned, his shoulder muscles loaded, and when he threw the quick left it was different from any punch he’d ever thrown before; there was no shame in it, no reluctance, no remorse. It was pure. His fist landed on Gato’s solar plexus and plunged deep into his belly. The air came out of the big man and as he doubled forward his wrist hit the railing and the gun sprang from his hand and tumbled overboard. While he was buckled over, Phoebe kneed him hard on the point of his chin and then he was sprawling unconscious on the deck.

  Under cover of the fracas, Charlie Ponte grabbed the little .25 that had been strapped against his calf. He wagged it at Benavides. Benavides wagged back.

  “One on one now,” Ponte said. “Kind of changes things, Luis. Kind of means either you and me could shoot each other or go back to being partners.”

  “Partners? After the way you tried to screw me?”

  They faced off for a hot breath or two, then a soft and even female voice said, “He didn’t try to screw you. Me and Nicky, we made it look that way. We had to. How else could we get the inside guy to grab the package so we could hand it over?”

  Benavides considered that but didn’t answer. His eyes kept flicking toward the wet bag in his hand,

  Ponte said, “So then, partners. You got your envelope, I’ll expect my payday. Just like we agreed.”

  Benavides gestured with the gun muzzle at Phoebe and Nicky and Ozzie and Bert, then down at Fred and Piney bobbing on their raft. “And these losers?”

  “What about ‘em?”

  “They’ve seen way too much. Unlucky for them, I guess. But I can’t have that. Makes me way too nervous.”

  For a moment no one spoke and no one moved. The night hung there with a smell and weight like damp black paper. No other boats were in the channel. Nothing moved on the nearby land.

  Then Bert the Shirt spoke up. He spoke softly, sleepily, but the fact that he spoke at all was shocking. He’d been standing there limp, drained, almost comatose. His eyelids drooped and his dog was dozing in his hand. He said, “Maybe you should check out your deed before making, ya know, any big decisions.”

  Benavides chewed his lip. He couldn’t stop stealing glances at the plastic bag but he couldn’t open it either while still tending to his pistol.

  Bert said, “Or I could tell ya a little bit about it in the meantime.”

  The Cuban’s sallow face locked down like a jail. “You can’t tell me anything. You don’t know shit about it.”

  “At the top,” Bert said, “there’s a buncha squiggly blue lines like they used to put on stock certificates. Very fancy and official. In the middle, big letters, it says Escritura.”

  “Shut up, old man.”

  “A few lines down, it says Hotel Nacional and then there’s some mumbo-jumbo about where it is, size of the plot, and so forth.”

  “I said shut up.”

  “Then near the bottom there’s a notary seal. Something about the legal government of Cuba. And a signature. The signature’s hard to read, kind of scratchy.”

  Benavides pumped the slide of his gun. A bullet dropped into the chamber. The skin at the outside edges of his eyes looked like candle wax. “Don’t say another word, old man,” he ordered.

  “It’s a fake, Luis.” There was something almost like sorrow in his voice. “I’ve seen half a dozen of ‘em. Guys had ‘em printed up when the first exiles were coming over. Nobody thought Castro would last. The exiles had this fantasy. He’d fall any day and they’d go back to Cuba, richer than before. Maybe they’d even own the Nacional. Con men sold it like they sell the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “You’re lying,” Benavides said. His eyes were swollen, his lips had gone dead white, his wrist was wobbling back and forth.

  “Not your fault,” said Bert. “Your family told you a fairy tale, a bedtime story. And it’s a pretty good story, too. It just happens to be bullshit.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Okay, I’m lying. Open it.”

  Benavides looked at the bag in his hand. Then he looked at Ponte with his nasty little .25.

  Bert said, “Come on, Charlie, lower the gun. Give the guy a little room to breathe. Let him look at his deed.”

  Ponte let his arm drop to his side.

  His gaze twitching and flicking like that of a boxed animal, Benavides took a small step backward on the deck. Panning with his pistol all the while, he clumsily opened the plastic bag, clutched the envelope inside, and tore off a corner of it with his teeth. Coaxing out the neatly folded document, letting it fall open in thirds, he winced at each damning detail. The squiggly blue lines like on a stock certificate. The bogus notary seal. The deluded nonsense about the government of Cuba. The signature that couldn’t quite be read.

  “I’m sorry, Luis,” Bert said.

  The young boss let the paper fall from his hand onto the Sea Queen’s soggy Astroturf deck. His concave face squeezed

  down like a piece of drying fruit and then suddenly relaxed into a hint of a ghastly and self-mocking smile. Almost as if he’d always had his doubts, sort of suspected all along. He raised his gun, tucked the muzzle just beneath his ear, and pulled the trigger.

  Epilogue

  Even after its wildest episodes, life has a way of drifting back to normal much more quickly than we might expect. Adrenaline subsides. Terrors nestle down in the soft cotton of time and mellow into memories, into stories. Exhausted people catch up on their sleep and wake up as the same folks they’d been before the big excitement.

  Or almost the same folks. But sometimes they’ve been invisibly but deeply changed by unexpected acts of courage and resourcefulness, by flashes of valor and unselfishness that shocked them in the moment and left them quietly proud of what they did. Then they get back to the business of the everyday.

  For Charlie Ponte, the everyday consisted mainly of presiding over his dwindling empire of rackets and scams, herding and occasionally rewarding his ragtag little group of obsolescent hoodlums. At unguarded moments he almost let himself admit that the Benavides affair had been not just a flop but a humiliation; he’d been outmaneuvered by a bunch of amateurs and had come away with nothing. Maybe he really should retire…Then, in the next moment, his battered but pliant ego would reach exactly the opposite conclusion and he’d believe the affair had proved that he was still a player. He’d come so close to a big score, to an alliance with a rising young Latino boss…if only he’d found a different fall guy, a different hard-luck case, one whose luck was not just then on the verge of turning.

  For Pineapple and Fred, the usual routine was measured out in tins of stew and six-packs of beer, in whittled figurines and wages for hard labor paid in cash, in the rise and fall of tides that whispered past the seawall where they sometimes sat. The seawall faced out toward the islet where they’d paddled their raft and hid out with Phoebe, where the wreck of the Mariposa was still settling hour by hour into the welcoming muck of Florida. They felt good when they looked out at the islet. They felt bigger than they’d felt before. The islet was the place where they’d found a way to rescue their
friends.

  For Bert the Shirt, the everyday revolved around the care and feeding of his dog. The morning walk, the evening walk, the carefully prepared bowls of kibble blended with tepid water and particles of some unspeakable dog-food loaf into a gray and fatty mush. Bert kept dutifully to the schedule, but for the first few days it wasn’t easy. He didn’t spring back from nearly fatal escapades as readily as he used to, and he took a lot of naps in his resplendent bathrobe of royal blue satin with a collar and sash in Chinese red.

  After one such nap, he woke to find the chihuahua curled up on the broad arm of his Barcalounger. He tried to shift position without disturbing it; the movement was awkward and it hurt his hips and shoulders. “No picnic getting old,” he said to the dog.

  The dog licked him on the knuckles.

  “’Course,” he went on, “there’s some advantages, too. Least I hope there is. Like, for instance, if I wasn’t so frickin’ old I wouldn’t’a known about those poor bastard exiles from Cuba. And if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t’a known about the phony deed. And if I didn’t know that…well, whaddya think woulda happened, Nacho?”

  The dog cocked its head at a thoughtful angle but didn’t answer.

  “I’ll tell ya what woulda happened. Benavides woulda shot us. Then he woulda tried to cash in the deed. Then he woulda finally realized ya should never believe bullshit about how rich and great your family used to be before you came along. Then he woulda blown his brains out anyway. Big waste, huh?”

  The dog jumped off the arm of the chair and into the old man’s crotch.

  “Damn right it woulda been,” said Bert. “You and me, Nacho. Good thing we was there.”