Rough Draft (26 page)

“Who knows, maybe he likes playing games.”

“That's what I said to Gisela, but now I don't know. This doesn't feel kosher.”

Frank looked at her, tried a grin, but couldn't sustain it and his face grew serious.

“Why not just stay with the program? See where it leads?”

She gave him a careful look.

“My, aren't we getting conservative all of a sudden.”

“It just makes sense, Hannah. Time's running out on this guy. He's about to croak, for godsakes. Why flail around looking for some other way to find him when he's laid out the bread crumbs for you already?”

“Because that's not who I am. I don't take orders very well, especially from the guy who killed my parents. If this son of a bitch is so damned determined to have me barge in
through the front door, then that's reason enough right there to find some way to break in through the back.”

“You're not going to make this easy, are you?”

“Easy? What's that supposed to mean?”

Frank shook his head, staring out at the empty yard. No parrots now. Quiet out there, just a sea breeze rattling through the avocado leaves.

“So what do you have in mind?”

“My boat's docked at Dinner Key Marina,” she said. “Fifteen minutes from Stiltsville.”

“Okay?”

“That would be the natural, predictable thing for me to do. Go this afternoon while there's still enough daylight, take the boat and check it out.”

“Okay,” he said. “So let's get going.”

“No, I'm not going to do it the predictable way.”

“So what do you do? Skydive in at midnight?”

“What I was thinking, Frank, I'd like to take you up on your offer.”

“Which offer is that?”

“A little outing. You, me, a kayak.”

Frank looked at her. A faint smile beginning to dawn.

“Man, you're something else.”

She managed a small smile.

“You, too, Frank. You, too.”

Misty was sitting at her Radio Shack computer watching her father nap. Her heart was flailing, whipsawed by current events. Things happening so damn fast she couldn't get down a full breath of air. Last night this guy Hal coming out of nowhere to bruise her nipple, then her old man appearing out of the same nowhere, then that fucking Hannah Keller calling her up on the phone asking who she was with that flat cop voice.

Goddamn tilt-o-whirl.

Misty was barefoot, wearing jeans, a white sleeveless T-shirt, and a black baseball cap turned backward. Toying with the idea of calling Hannah Keller back on her cell
phone. She had the number on her Caller ID box. She could scream at her, get it all out of her system, tell the bitch she'd stolen Misty's life, then hang up and get the hell out of Miami, point her car north and just drive till she saw something that caught her eye. Start over, a new identity. She was sitting there watching her old man snooze away in his hospital bed, having escape fantasies, when she heard the tap on her apartment door. She froze.

Way things were going it was probably the Miami SWAT team coming to bust her, ship her off to Raiford Prison. She sat there and listened to the tap on the door. Not moving, not even a breath.

When the tapping finally stopped, Misty slowly inhaled and let it out. Probably the landlord wanting to snarl at her about her rent. Ten days late already. She waited another half a minute, listening to the silence. Then she sighed and settled back in her chair again. And a second later the lock jiggered a couple of times and the door swung open behind her.

She popped to her feet, grabbed the double-action derringer she kept on the desk, and swung around.

He was already inside the apartment, shutting the door behind him, locking it. Hal, the nipple pincher. Wearing black jeans and a blue work shirt and carrying a yellow magazine in one hand.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Jesus, I thought I was done with you.”

Hal walked over to the computer, reached out and took the pistol from her hand, and set it on the desk. Then he bent forward and peered at the screen.

“Your old man been doing anything interesting?”

Misty shook her head in wonder.

“You break into my apartment twice within twenty-four hours and I'm supposed to just say hi, how you doing? Man, you've got a reality problem.”

“Your old man been doing anything interesting?”

“Jesus,” she said. “Here we go. Old one-track mind.”

“Your old man…”

“Okay, okay. He's been sleeping mostly. He called out for
that bitch Hannah Keller a couple of times, but that was a few hours ago. Mostly what he does, he sleeps.”

“Do you know about the waggle dance, Misty?”

“Waggle what?”

Hal had opened the yellow magazine and was paging through it. It was a copy of
National Geographic.
Her mother used to subscribe and Misty remembered looking at the glossy photos, naked natives from New Guinea or the Amazon. Imagining herself among them, those topless warriors, spears and shields and loincloths. Hunting lions and rhino, taking shit from nobody.

“Bees do it,” he said. “It's how they communicate.”

“You broke into my apartment to talk about bees?”

“It's called the waggle dance,” he said. “Where's your bathroom?”

He held the magazine out to her and she took it. The cover was coated with a brownish sticky film.

“Where's your bathroom?”

She hesitated a moment, shaking her head.

“First door to your right.”

“You'll like it, Misty. The waggle dance, it's very interesting. You can read, can't you?”

“I can read.”

“Reading's important. I get a lot of good ideas from reading.”

He walked past her, then halted and stared at her Barbies. Four of them lined up side by side on the wall near the bathroom. The dildo Barbie, one rubber cock in each hand, a battery-operated dildo glued between her legs; and the condom Barbie with lubricated, nipple-end Trojans unrolled over her arms and legs and one covering her face like a robber's mask; the crucifixion Barbie, her arms spread, her body pierced with jackknives and steak knives, a darning needle and straightened paper clips poked into each eye socket. And the one Misty liked the best, the disemboweled Barbie. Sawed in half from the top of her skull to her crotch and hinged open, the empty spaces inside filled with miniature replicas of T-bone steaks and lamb chops, a tiny red
Maserati sports car, and a plastic Jesus in his manger and the Three Wise Men and all the donkeys.

“These are weird,” Hal said.

“I'm surprised you can tell.”

“You ever think about selling these? Go into business, open a shop somewhere.”

“You think there's a big demand for Barbie sculptures, do you?”

He squinted at her for a moment.

“I like you, Misty. I like your jokes.”

“Oh, yeah, I'm a regular comedian.”

“I can only stay a few minutes, then I have to get back on the job.”

“Don't let me keep you.”

“Hannah Keller is going to lead me to your father. I have to get back over to her house and start tailing her again.”

“Is that right? And how the hell is she supposed to find him? All the cops in the world looking for him, all the drug guys.”

“Your father's sending her secret messages.”

“Oh,” she said. “Is that what he's been doing?”

“Yeah, he wants to see her.”

“Why? Why the fuck does that dying old man want to see her, of all people? Not his wife, not his own daughter.”

“I don't know. He just does.”

“Look, I don't want any part of this,” Misty said. “Just use the bathroom and hit the road, okay?”

“You know, we have things in common, you and me.”

“No, we don't.”

“We both want the same thing, Misty. We both want to find J. J. Fielding.”

“No way. I don't want to find him. He's dead as far as I'm concerned.”

“Oh, yes you do. You want to find him. You want to hurt him like he hurt you. I know how that is. That's how I got my start. Going back to see my father, hurting him like he hurt me. I was in a lot of pain before I did it, but once he was dead, the pain went away. I cured myself.”

Misty looked at the computer screen. Her father sleeping. Maybe there was a grain of truth to what Hal was saying. Maybe that
was
what she wanted. To hurt the old man. To get her revenge on him, not Hannah Keller after all. Maybe that would set everything right, kill the old bastard, then she could get on with her life.

“You got a nail file?” Hal was still looking up at the disemboweled Barbie.

“Nail file?”

“I need to put the edge back on.”

He held up his right thumb.

“In the medicine cabinet,” she said. “First shelf on the right.”

Hal looked over at her for a moment as if he was waiting for her to make another sarcastic remark. Then he turned and disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door. A few seconds later the shower water started to roar.

She picked up the double-action derringer from the desk and aimed it at the closed door. Whipsawed again. Things happening so fast she couldn't keep track. Bing, bing, bing. Tilt-o-whirl spinning out of control, an earthquake rattling the ground beneath it.

She set the pistol down and looked at the magazine. The sticky stuff was all over her fingers now. It had a smell. Strange but familiar. She brought her fingers to her nostrils and inhaled the scent, then touched her fingertip to her tongue. She recognized it from somewhere but couldn't place it.

She sat down at the computer again. Her daddy was still sleeping.

She opened the magazine to the dog-eared page. An article about bees. She listened for a minute to the shower run. The steam was seeping out beneath the door and her coconut bath soap was filling the air. She read a couple of paragraphs of the bee article, then took a sharp breath and leaned back in her desk chair.

She'd just remembered what the sticky stuff smelled like.

That time five years ago, a week after her father disappeared
and it was obvious he wasn't coming back, and Misty and her mother were sitting there with about a hundred dollars in the bank, not enough to pay the mortgage, grocery money disappearing fast. She'd come home from school one afternoon, went into her bathroom, filled the bathtub with hot water, and she'd stripped naked and slipped into it and she'd scooched low in the water for a long time thinking about her life, about the hopelessness of it, the dead, empty feeling she'd had as long as she could remember, only now even deader and emptier. A father who'd abandoned his family and took every last cent, a mother who'd become catatonic. Lay in her bed all day staring at the ceiling, not crying, not talking, nothing. And Misty couldn't think of a single reason to keep on living in the world, not a single one. So she picked up the straight razor her father used to shave with, and she laid the blade against her left wrist and she drew a long slice against the white skin. Then quick, before she even felt the pain, she drew the blade across her other wrist.

That's what the sticky stuff on the magazine smelled like. The scent of fresh blood.

On the phone Gisela said sure, no problem, she wasn't busy tonight, she'd be happy to take care of Randall. It just so happened she'd rented a couple of movies that might suit him.
Star Wars.
The first two. They could have a special-effects orgy, sit there in the galley of her houseboat, make some old-fashioned popcorn in an iron skillet.

Gisela said, “I'm not even going to ask where you're going on a school night. I don't want to know. What is it, a date?”

“You remember Frank Sheffield?” Hannah said.

“The FBI guy? You're kidding. He's cute.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“It's not like that anyway. We're working on the J. J. Fielding thing.”

Gisela was quiet for a moment, Jimmy Buffett moaning in the background.

“Is this a sleep-over, Hannah? Am I supposed to take Randall to school tomorrow?”

“I doubt it'll come to that.”

“But it might?”

Hannah leaned into the doorway of her bedroom, watching Frank out in her front yard. He was staring up into the Indian rosewood. Through the open French doors she could hear him. Apparently he was trying to mimic the squawk and screech of a large green parrot roosting there. Like some overgrown Boy Scout working on his birdsong merit badge.

“I don't know,” Hannah said. “I guess there's some remote
possibility it could turn into an all-nighter. Could you handle that?”

Gisela let the question hang there a moment. Hannah could feel her smiling on the other end of the line.

“Look, I'm off Wednesday and Thursday. I could take him to school tomorrow, pick him up, bring him back here, maybe the two of us will tool around the bay, snag our dinner.

“He'll go into withdrawal without his computer,” Hannah said.

“Hell, I'll keep him so damn entertained he won't have a chance.”

“You're a peach, Gisela.”

“Hey, I'm the boy's godmother, for chrissakes. This is the international godmother's job description. And, anyway, if I can help you get laid, hey, it's my sworn duty.”

“It's not like that,” Hannah said. “Really it's not.”

Tuesday night, ten o'clock, Operation Joanie was in hour forty-six. A little more than twenty-four hours left And Frank Sheffield was fairly sure he was on his own for the moment, separating from surveillance when he slid the two-man kayak into the dark, foaming surf just south of the Silver Sands Motel. Not that he was worried about losing contact Let them scramble, figure out how to keep the surveillance active, give them a little challenge. And he certainly wasn't worried about deepening the hole he'd dug for himself. It was a cinch he'd already moved well beyond the limits of Rosie Jackson's power to save his ass. That fist in Senator Ackerman's gut wasn't going away. But Frank had to say, it was a hell of a way to resign from the Bureau. Nice flourish. Knock the air out of one of the most powerful men on earth. Something he could share with his grandchildren, or, more likely, the way his procreative life was going, he'd have to settle for bragging about it to some old geezer buddy in the nursing home.