Florida Heatwave (19 page)

McKool pondered a moment. “Ten percent of gross or twenty percent of net, whichever is higher. One of your boys can sit with me through counting down and doing my calculating at the end of each play. Settle up once a week, Monday night. Best offer.” He stood up. “Last offer.”

“You pay for my oak door, the statue and the windows. And a pair of peacocks—they’re monogamous; one is useless,” Big Tiny said.

“The door and statue, fine. Your boys blew out the windows and killed the bird.”

Big Tiny stood, then walked over to the bookshelves and picked up a bit of broken statue, fondled it almost sadly. “This came from Baghdad. Hittite, four thousand years old. Got it cheap, though; Jersey guy at Port Elizabeth had a container from there. I’ll order another and bill you.”

McKool nodded his assent.

“That’ll work,” Big Tiny said. He spat on his hand, extended it to McKool.

McKool spat on his own hand and shook Tiny’s. “Dinner at six. Cards in the air at six thirty. I’m counting on two of your boys being in chairs,” he said. “Tonight.”

“Done,” Big Tiny said.

“And nobody carries in my house. Not ever.” McKool walked to the door. Jimmy looked to Big Tiny. Tiny nodded and Jimmy stepped aside. I held the door for McKool. Cartouche and Lilith followed him out.

“We got unfinished business,” Jimmy hissed to me.

“None of that, Jimmy. They’re our partners now,” Big Tiny said.

Jimmy glared at me and I smiled my sweetest smile. “You got a problem with me?” I said. “Come play. Let your chips talk.”

We clambered into the Suburban and headed out toward Old Cutler. Long Jack and his friend slipped out of the shadows into which they’d disappeared, and we drove off down the wooded lane.

The Pizzas showed up for the game that evening at 6:07, Joey on crutches with an orthopedic boot on his left foot. When Lilith served dinner—meat lasagna with Caesar salad and warm, crusty Italian bread—they each tipped her ten bucks. She said thanks like she meant it. The game was going full swing by seven thirty, when McKool pulled me to talk outside.

“You helped a lot, Blue,” McKool said as we walked along the pier in the summer twilight, the western sky pink and orange, lavender giving way to purple in the east. “Bobby said your report on Flapper’s car fire made the insurance claim easy. Just an accident, no investigation. The car was leased. Clean paperwork; they just gave her another one. And your presence greatly reduced the potential for violence with Big Tiny. Nobody wants to kill a cop—it’s too much trouble.”

A pair of island-bound freighters guided by squat tugs heading east passed the skeleton of a high rise ascending just downriver from McKool’s. “I didn’t just do it for you,” I said. “They messed with Abuelita.”

“Not to mention Vegas,” McKool said with a smile. “Whyever, you helped. If things had gone bad it could have messed up your career. Big time. I appreciate you standing with me.”

“I still got work problems. I’m gonna catch hell for calling in. Try not to need me like that again. And I’m not sure what good we did. You gave up a percentage. Why didn’t we walk out with Lilith after Long Jack fired into Big Tiny’s?”

McKool picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the river’s surface. He laughed. “Big Tiny lost,” he said. “We won.”

Suddenly I saw it. “You want to get your opponent to do what you want; you lead him into the mistakes he’s most likely to make anyway.” McKool had tried to teach me just that, how people create situations to induce action out of me. “When we talked to the Pizzas about carrying in the game you mentioned how much easier it was for you to make a living than them.”

McKool nodded. “Bait. Joey’s eyes lit right up—he was back with Big Tiny to lean on me two days later. It was a play.”

In the distance I saw another freighter, inbound, city lights atwinkle behind it as darkness settled in. “It was your idea for him to move on you, not his. Why?”

“What it looks like—protection. You know how many gangs work South Florida. Besides your basic Italian families you got pro-and anti-Castro groups, God knows how many Columbian cartels, Rasta posses, Sandinistas and Somacistas, Puerto Ricans, Bloods and Crips from L.A., ex-IRA, Israelis, plus your everyday street bangers. It was only a matter of time before I had to fight somebody off.” The westbound freighters cruised past us towards the river’s end near the airport where most of the marine industries are. “You know what it would cost to keep on ready alert the kind of firepower Big Tiny can muster with a phone call? Now if somebody muscles me, it’s his problem.”

“Why Big Tiny?”

“Because the Pizzas gave me an entrée. And he’s more or less reasonable, can be negotiated with. He’s a businessman, a pro who knows violence is always expensive.”

Big Tiny had walked like a fat, juicy crustacean right into McKool’s lobster pot. “You trapped him.”

“It’s even better than that,” McKool said. “The Pizzas fire up the game—now we get them every night. That’s guaranteed shuffle-up and deal at six thirty sharp, plus an extra hour minimum late night—pure profit. They’ll give action. More action, more players; more players, more hours; more hours, more rake. My collection issues should disappear; nobody wants to mess with these guys. And I get to lay off my sports action cheap when the book’s out of balance—that alone nearly justifies the deal.”

When they invite you to a poker game, it’s not because they like you. McKool had held the door wide for Big Tiny.

We headed back inside. As we entered the room, Cartouche approached McKool. “Joey Pizza took another t’ousand,” he whispered. “On ze book.”

McKool smiled. “Big Tiny’s good for it.”

“Seat open,” Dartboy Dave—the dealer covering for Lefty—called out.

“Go ahead,” McKool said to me. “First nickel’s on the house. Play good.”

Dartboy rearranged the players so that the open seat was on Flapper’s left. I got a rack of reds from Cartouche, sat down and posted the big blind. I would play good, I promised myself. I had the World Series ahead of me. I looked at Jimmy Pizza three to my right—stuck and steaming and staring me down. He’d be firing, trying to run over me in pots. And I’d be ready to take his chips. Ready to lay a trap.

BY JIM PASCOE

“Goddammit!”
She stuck her finger in her mouth, sucking at the blood.

He looked up from the cold deli meat he was folding onto white bread. “What? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just a paper cut.”

He pulled a knife from the block. “Need to be more careful.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I need.” She folded the paper again. Holding it between her thumb and middle finger (index finger and pinky extended), she slipped it into the envelope. “Don’t want to behave recklessly around paper. Who knows what’ll happen. Next time it—”

“Christ!” He slammed his fist on the thin Formica kitchen counter. “Don’t, okay. Just fucking don’t.”

Her wet tongue touched the envelope flap and traced its edge. She never broke eye contact with her husband.

He dragged the knife across the bread, then wiped the blade with a paper towel and returned it to the block.

“Mail this for me.” She pushed the envelope at him. Her red painted nails looked wet against the dull white of her skin.

He asked, “What is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Fuck you. Gimme the letter.” He grabbed it, pulling it toward him. He examined it carefully with a close, measured inspection.

“Jim, you can’t open it.”

“I’ll seal it back up.”

“I’m serious.” Her words drifted past her lips with little seriousness and even less concern.

He held the envelope to the kitchen light, but all he could read was the address on the outside. “Who’s this guy? Van Wagener? He a foreigner?”

“You don’t know him,” she said.

He glared at her. She returned his expression with silence.

“Deb, you …” He crumpled the flap of his lunch bag, strangling out all the air until his sandwich was closed tight in the brown paper. He put a rubber band around the whole thing. “You remember when I would do anything for you, anything you’d say? Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

She considered making a snide comment about last December. But she knew he wasn’t being literal. “You’re going to be late.”

“Then I’ll get going.”

He drove past the post office. The radio in his old Mustang didn’t work. All he heard was his balding tires licking asphalt, occasionally hiccupping on the cracks in the highway.

The Port St. Joe sky swelled above him, the purple of early dawn bleeding through the egg clouds. He rubbed his eyes with the fleshy part of his thumb.

The envelope sat on the passenger seat.

What was she up to?

He sipped slowly at his 7-Eleven coffee, tasting more of the thin plastic lid than the sour black liquid. He hated milk and hated milk in his coffee. He remembered kissing Deb in the mornings—back when they still kissed—and hating the taste of sweetness her light coffee left on his tongue.

His eyes closed to the memory. He kept the car at a constant speed, kept his hands on the wheel. The car held the line on the straight, empty road. When he looked up, only the thin paper trees on both sides of him registered in his mind. A forest of fragile sticks, barely twenty feet tall, appeared everywhere he looked. Each tree looked thin enough for him to wrap a hand around, as if he could strangle the trunk. It reminded him of masturbation.

Ahead of him, not yet in sight, sat the paper mill, lying in wait as if work might suddenly spring on him, gator-like, snapping its jaws before returning to the dark waters of North Florida.

The address on the envelope read
Jacksonville.

Aaron Inveigle had a smile like Humpty Dumpty, and Ream Robertson had a beard like a cloud, its curly black hair hovering on the taller mill worker’s face. Jim sat opposite them at the laminate table. All three were drinking coffee in the break room before their shift.

The envelope was folded in half in Jim’s pocket.

“I think my wife’s cheating on me.”

Inveigle spoke up, said, “You think or you know? Big difference between the two. Big difference, Jim.”

“I don’t have proof if that’s what you mean.” Jim crushed the empty 7-Eleven cup in his hand and tossed it into the trash.

Ream’s words sounded like dirty oil leaking out of a broken engine. “Do you
need
proof to know?”

“I’d need proof to know for sure, wouldn’t I?”

They both just looked at him.

Jim stood up. “Go to hell, guys.”

Ream cleared his nose and spit the brown mucus into his coffee cup. “What are you going to
do
about it?”

“Why does he need to do anything, heh?” Inveigle turned to Jim. “You still getting laid?” His eyes went wide with slow recognition. “Aw you’re
not
… well, yeah, okay okay. That shit’s no good.”

“If I wanted to get laid I could.”

Inveigle blew air past his fat lips. “No doubt.”

“She asked me to mail something, my wife.” Jim kept the envelope in his pocket. “Some Joe I don’t know.”

“Well, you open it?”

“Nah. She asked me not to.”

“Meeeow … ke-raack!” Inveigle laughed. “Ain’t that right, Ream? Whip of the ol’ pussy cat.”

“I would kill him, the dude fucking your wife.” Ream picked his nose, then rubbed his fingers together, crumbling the dry snot onto the floor. “I’d find him and I would kill him.”

Jim tensed. “Like I said, I don’t know anything for sure. You guys heard of a Van Wagener?”

“He a foreigner?” Inveigle asked.

“Let’s say you
do
kill this dude and your whore of a wife—”

“Hey, fucker!” Jim ran to him, fists out.

“—You need an
escape
plan.” Ream met him chest first, like a rooster. “You thought of that, Jim? Where you gonna fucking go?”

Through gritted teeth: “Nobody’s killing nobody.”

Ream kept talking. “I’m just saying. Shit like this messes up your mind all kinds of ways. Dark things cloud your fucking reason. I should know. I had an episode like that when I was in Jacksonville—”

“When the fuck were you in Jacksonville?”

Slowly: “Dark things cloud your reason.”

The metal door to the break room opened with audible velocity. Behind it dopplered the low siren voice of the mill foreman.

“Ho! What am I payin’ you nancys for? We don’t make ‘fuckin’ around,’ we make paper. You wanna work at a fuckin’ around mill, move to Lauderdale and get VD. Now quit lookin’ at me like you’re learnin’ something and get to fuckin’ work.”

The three workers weasled around the fat boss’s girth. A ham hand collared Ream, holding him back. “You. Me. The office. We gotta talk. Let these jokers get back to earnin’ a paycheck.”

Jim could feel his neck still hot as he walked toward the heavy machinery. His temples hurt; his jaw sore from clenching his teeth. He looked over at Inveigle. “What was Ream getting at about Jacksonville?”

“The past is a maze, man. The future … shit, I don’t know. Don’t ask questions. That way you don’t got to deal with the answers.”

Of course he opened the letter.

He didn’t even bother trying to slice it open carefully so that he could seal it back up. He just tore into the envelope, digging his finger under the flap, rending the paper into a white wound.

Overhead the exposed pipes dripped a mustard paste—corrosion from the mix of chemicals and extreme humidity. Turns out this Van Wagener was an old flame. A writer. A goddamned writer. It was fucking bullshit.

While his mind pinballed on the tilt table of fury, his fingers hit a sequence of buttons, switches, and levers he had memorized from rote. Jim operated the wet end of the Fourdrinier machine. He’d make a small adjustment, and pulp stock would flow into the machine headbox. Another knob would cause white water to splash out and dilute the mash. A turn of a wheel and the paste-like pulp would crawl onto the wire-mesh belt on its slow climb to becoming paper.

When he first met Deb he had told her that he did something else for a living—he hadn’t wanted to admit working at the mill. Maybe it was the way she asked him, like it was a test to see if he was good enough for her. Had he been the kind to think fast, he would have asked what the hell
she
did that was so goddamn important. But all he could think about was how ridiculously white her skin was. So he lied about his job and listened to her talk about wanting to leave Florida someday.