Tropical Freeze (7 page)

Papa John watched the boy looking soulfully out at the empty bar, watched him strumming that scarred-up guitar and tapping his flip-flop out of rhythm to the song. He was no Hank Williams, but he had a passable voice. Not much style, but John was giving him advice there, too. Look mean, get more smoke in your voice. Say a few words before you start in hammering on that guitar. Stuff like that.

Ozzie was a good-looking boy in a cheap, shifty way. He’d brought that song in one night, proud as could be. And he’d gotten up there and sung it to Papa John, just the two of them in the bar. And damn if John hadn’t felt the hot burn of tears rising inside. The boy had him hooked.

Now he let Ozzie get up there and sing the song every night, a sort of taps. Times like this Papa John thought maybe he was being too hard on the boy. Maybe it was time to give him a little more responsibility than driving the ice cream truck. Sometime soon maybe he’d even take the boy out on his boat, do some target practice, see if the boy had any kind of eye.

To the north the sky was jammed with the alternating light-dark scales of a mackerel sky. A few fat cumuli hovered to the south, their edges whipped into feathery mare’s tails. A sign the wind had shifted up there and soon would switch down below.

Thorn watched as Jack Higby parked his pickup next to the VW. Since August the convertible top on the VW had been stuck in the open position. He didn’t see much point in fixing it. Maybe he’d just drill a hole in the floorboard when the summer rains began.

Thorn was working the lathe. Since daybreak that Saturday morning, he’d had it going. He was turning one-and-an-eighth-inch squares of mahogany, bringing them down to one-inch pegs. He had found a soothing, dead-brained motion, dropping one peg every minute or so into a straw basket. Those pegs were holding the house together. Stronger than nails, they’d give it flex enough to keep it from snapping apart in a hurricane and sailing off to Yucatán.

That particular chunk of mahogany had come from a tree knocked down by Hurricane Floyd that he’d found at the county dump. He hadn’t paid a nickel yet for wood. In fact, they were about a third done on the house and were only up to three hundred dollars total. Most of that was for gas to Miami and some blades. Higby was going to take his wages out in fishing trips on the
Heart Pounder
. Thorn figured he owed Jack about six years of good hard fishing by now.

Jack came over and watched Thorn work for a minute, then yelled over the bray of the lathe, “What about them red tags?”

Thorn shut the machine off and stepped away from it, dusting the spray of sawdust from his arms. “I’ll go down the building department Monday, see what the jerk wrote us up for. We could just catch up today, the pegs, whatever you think.”

“Well, then I’m going to tackle that sink again,” Jack said.

As Thorn got back to work with the pegs, Jack fastened the big chunk of lignum vitae to the standup Blaisedell lathe. It was a machinist’s drill press that Jack had converted. It had a Model A five-speed transmission and must’ve weighed a thousand pounds. Jack had gotten the idea that Thorn should have a wood sink in his bathroom. He’d cut off an eighteen-inch section of the trunk of that tree and was smoothing a basin into it. It was becoming a pretty thing.

A welder down on Big Pine Key had hauled that lignum vitae tree up one afternoon a month ago. He said it’d been struck by lightning and had been lying out in his backyard for five years. The man had stood there, ready to leave, looking at the tree he was leaving behind. He told Thorn, if he wanted to bring back the smell of that wood, nice honeydew aroma, he’d have to treat it like a woman he’d been married to for fifty years. All the smell’s still in there, he said, but you have to rough her up a little to get it back.

Thorn watched Jack turning that sink for a few minutes, then stepped back and looked at the skeleton of his house. It was at a stage now, there were a dozen projects to choose from. He could mill the siding boards or spend the day doubling up the top plates for the roof trusses. Or set up the builder’s level, that telescope on a tripod, and shoot all the levels, going from corner to corner, making sure everything was dead even, shimming up the low spots.

Or he could stretch out in the hammock, have a beer from the cooler. He could watch Jack work for a while. Lie back and feel the new stirring in his chest that Darcy Richards had set off.

Deputy Sheriff Sugarman rolled into Thorn’s yard at that moment. In his patrol car, and in uniform. And as he got out of the patrol car, Thorn could see he was in a bad mood. The way he huffed when he had to open the door again and pull out a wad of papers. The stiff, military way he walked across the yard toward Thorn. The sharp nod he gave Jack as he walked past the scream of the lathe. The tug he gave the zipper on his jacket.

Normally he was a handsome man. Dark eyes, straight, thin nose,
café con leche
skin. A short Afro. Harry Belafonte as a young man, riding the lobster boats ashore. A couple of inches over six feet, just taller than Thorn. But you wouldn’t call this man stalking across the yard handsome, not today.

Up close, his anger was even more obvious. He glared at Thorn, shoulders heavied down, an almost imperceptible shake of his head. If they hadn’t been closest friends since they were six years old, Thorn might’ve run for cover. As it was, he said, “What’d I do now?”

“Nothing,” Sugarman said.

“Whew, that’s a relief. I was getting palpitations.”

“No, no, buddy. This nothing is a bad nothing. This nothing is a nothing that should’ve been something.”

Sugarman looked off at the dark line of clouds to the north.

“Thorn, you didn’t file for a permit, you don’t have a licensed contractor, you got no proper plans.”

“I have plans,” Thorn said. “Yeah, I do, over there.”

He hustled over to a stack of mahogany siding boards beside the stone barbecue pit, looking for that book of poetry by John Ashbery. Thorn had found it in a remaindered bin at the Book Nook. He’d bought it because he liked the name, Ashbery. But the poems seemed to be encrypted by the insane. So Thorn was using the printed pages to start the nightly charcoal and the blank end pages to sketch on.

He found the page with the plans sitting on the barbecue pit and brought it back to Sugarman.

“This is just a box,” Sugarman said. “A box on six stilts.”

“Exactly right,” Thorn said. “Our plans.”

“Give me a break, man. This is worthless. You need detailed blueprints.”

“Look at the house, Sugar,” Thorn said. “We’re doing fine with these plans.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is?”

“Well, the point is somebody has a wild hair at Building and Zoning, and they’re going to make your life shitty till you go along with the rules for once. That’s all there is to it. And next time they send a cop out here it won’t be me, and it won’t be a warning. They’ll put you in the tank.”

Sugarman frowned, massaged his brow, his receding hairline.

“How’s the food in the jail these days?” Thorn said. “Still serving tacos on Fridays?”

“You never quit, do you?”

“What’s to quit?” Thorn said. “It’s still us against them, isn’t it, Sugar?”

“I’m afraid it’s us against you, Thorn, this time anyway,” he said. He let his eyes drop from Thorn’s, studied the ground between them. “There’s rules,” he said to the dirt. “You either play by them, or you get screwed. That’s just how it is.”

The load on Sugar’s shoulders was bearing down. He was shaking his head. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Saying oh, no, not this again. No, I don’t believe this.

Thorn said, “What is it, Sugar? You look terrible.”

Sugarman settled against the edge of the maple workbench. He shook his head again.

“I just helped slide two decomposed teenagers into body bags,” he said. They were out in the weather at least a week, at Dynamite Docks. The raccoons’d been at them.”

“A drug deal,” Thorn said.

“Looked that way,” he said. “Just a couple of Miami high school kids.”

“That’s tough,” Thorn said.

“Days like this, I think it may be time for another forty-day flood. Wash it all clean and just start over.”

“Yeah, well,” Thorn said, looking off at the darkening sky. “The problem with that is, nowadays it’s the bad guys who have all the arks.”

Gaeton Richards sat on the edge of the motel bed. He watched Myra Rostovitch standing in front of the window, sipping her coffee from a large Styrofoam cup. The light was leaking in around the venetian blinds now. It was still before eight on Saturday. He listened to the traffic on Calle Ocho, the blat of motorcycles, Cuban voices arguing in the parking lot.

She ran her fingers down the blinds, flattening them a bit more. There was a shine in her curly black hair.

A year ago Gaeton would’ve risen from the bed and kissed her, turned her around and unzipped that gray dress, rolled down her panty hose, and led her to the cool sheets. They would’ve stayed the weekend, their handguns on the bedside tables.

“Adamson sick or what?” Gaeton said.

Myra Rostovitch said, “Things have changed, Gaeton. Adamson’s out of it. I’m taking it over from here on.”

She blew on her coffee, paced in front of the TV, sipping it.

Yeah, things had changed all right. But she hadn’t. She was still inside herself. Still could work a stretch of silence as well as anybody he’d ever seen. Turn it into some kind of drama or make it sexy. He’d seen people talk for an hour and not say as much as Myra got out of a minute of dead air.

“You know I’ll have to call Adamson, check this out.”

Myra nodded, still pacing, staring into her coffee.

She sat down in the Danish modern chair across the room, crossed her legs, set her cup on the bureau.

“Gaeton,” she said, “there’s been a fuck-up. A major one.”

Now Gaeton tried it, the thing she did with the silence. But it didn’t have the same effect. It just lay there.

Finally he said, “A fuck-up.”

She studied him carefully.

“It was a simple case of the right hand not knowing what the hell the left was up to,” she said.

“Give it to me,” he said. “I can probably handle it.”

“Well, it all sounds perfectly reasonable when you list it out,” she said. “Adamson gave us the history of it, from his point of view. Last January one of his confidential informants gives him Benny Cousins’s name, suggests Benny may be consorting with known felons for unknown purposes. Adamson is intrigued. Former DEA official up to no good. It sounded like it was worth a look. So he put you down there. It made sense it should be you. You already had a network of contacts in the Keys. You were the obvious choice. It could be a RICO case, racketeering, whatever. Adamson OK’s it; you go undercover, move down there; the bureau drops some taxpayer money on it.

“And let me tell you, you did a good job. Buddied right up to Benny. In six months you were his number one man. And you’ve got a case on him, no question. I’ve seen your reports, bribery, extortion, conspiracy. Some of it is maybe a little dirty, entrapmentwise, and a trifle rinky-dink, but still, it’s a case.”

“Rinky-dink?” Gaeton cocked his head at her. He tried to get her to smile one of those old smiles, one of the coded ones they had. But she wouldn’t snag on to his eyes. He said, “Last time I looked, bribery of a public official, racketeering, extortion, it totals up to fifteen to twenty years. He’d take some county politicians down with him and some code enforcement people.”

She shook her head, looking into her cup.

“Like I said, rinky-dink.”

Her gaze wandered over the budget motel room, the details of this place, the double bed, the antiseptic bathroom, the seascape painting. Once they had transformed Spartan rooms like this, made them into warm, glowing oases.

She said, “Look, Gaeton. The truth is, Benny’s one of the central players in a very big, and I stress it, very big situation we’ve been developing for quite some time.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “And believe me, this is out of Adamson’s league. This is out of Miami’s league, this comes from farther north, a good way up the road from here.”

Gaeton tried to recall who he’d been when they’d loved each other. Had she seen him as a hotshot on the rise, on his way up the road, north? No. More likely, she’d known the truth all along. By thirty-five Gaeton had peaked and was already heading south. Destined soon to sink back into that slum of lower-echelon agents, bogged down in the tedium of uninspired investigations. Had she timed it so she stepped away from him just at his apogee? Gaeton starting his spiral down, no more promotions, only minimum raises, and Myra, her boosters about to switch on.

Even her voice had moved to a higher plane. It was amplified now, as if she’d retrained it from sessions at long, expensive conference tables, speaking down those polished planks to men who monitored every word she uttered for any falter.

“We screwed up,” she said. “It was just a case of our going in too many directions. By the time your operation came to our attention, you were already burrowed in there with Benny.” She looked over at the bathroom. She saw something in there that held her attention for a moment. Some memory. Maybe a shower they’d taken together, giddy from champagne. Something that made her almost smile, almost brought back that face he remembered. She turned to him, her features hardening back into this new face, and said, “But fortunately you never seemed to catch on to our operation. So we let you stay in there.”

Gaeton smiled painfully. “If I’d been more alert, figured things out, what, you would’ve yanked me? That it?”

She nodded.

“Glad I could oblige,” he said.

She said, “And now, Gaeton, it’s time to start planning on how to bring you out. That’s what this meeting is about.”

“Bring me out? I’m just down the road. I’ll drive up.”

“No,” she said, and sighed. She tugged her dress down an inch. “You’re out on a limb, Gaeton. Way out. You don’t know it yet, but you are.”

He stared at her, remembering for a moment how that mouth had molded itself to his. How it had felt to hold that solid body. The sparkle she got in her laugh.