Heart of Palm (30 page)

“Hiya, Do-Key,” he said, and Keith scowled.

“Officer Keith! You’re running for sheriff, eh?” George said, stating the obvious as only George could do, given that Keith had by now deposited a stack of
DONALD
KEITH!
FOR
SHERIFF! signs on the bar.

“Yes, numb-nuts, I am,” Keith said. He’d put on more weight through the years, and now, in his early fifties, he had a soft, overfed look that did not inspire great faith in his ability to protect and serve. His hands were too small for his arms. His uniform stretched like vinyl across his stomach. He sat down on a barstool next to George.

“I’ve come to ask for your support,” Keith said, staring at Frank levelly.

“Mine?” Frank said, genuinely surprised.

“Yours.” Keith looked around the restaurant, where the tables were filling up and the front door was still opening at regular intervals to admit more customers. “You got you some constituents here, Bravo,” he said.

“What are you asking?” Frank said, staring at him skeptically. He put a round of beers on a tray, slid it to Irma, who was waiting at the end of the bar, hands on her hips.

“You need a written request next time?” she said. “I gotta place an advance reservation? I got people waiting.”

“Settle down, Irma,” Frank said. “The night is young.”

“Put up my signs in your parking lot,” Keith said. “It would help.”

Frank raised his eyebrows. This was impressive. He couldn’t believe Keith had the
cojones
to ask
him
of all people, Frank Bravo, to help promote his campaign. This was rich.

“Officer Keith,” he said. “If I put your signs in my parking lot, that might give people the wrong impression.”

Keith furrowed his brow, waited. When Frank didn’t elaborate, he was forced to ask, “What impression?”

“The impression that I choose to support you. Which I don’t.”

George snickered. Keith’s face darkened. “I thought you would have been a bigger man than this, Bravo,” he said. “I thought by now you’d be grown up enough to do the right thing.”

Frank looked away, watched Irma plod through the restaurant. Don’t do it, he said to himself. Don’t bite.

“You could stand to gain here, Bravo,” Keith continued. “You and me, we go way back. You should know I’m the real deal. I’m working toward a better county. A safer county.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Frank said. “You’re working toward a fatter paycheck.”

“Don’t you think we have work to do in this county?” Keith demanded. “Don’t you think there’s room for improvement? I’m working on more officers. Cracking down on the God-damned vagrants. Making the roads safer. Don’t you think the roads should be safer? Jesus, Bravo, you of all people.” Keith watched Frank’s face carefully, and he knew the cop was working an angle here, trying to invoke the tragedy of Will’s death, trying to use it to his advantage, and it pissed Frank off. Fucking Do-Key. He made Frank sick.

“You know what, Do—, I mean, Officer Keith?” he said genially. “I think it’s great you’re running for sheriff. And maybe you’re right. Maybe there is work to be done in this county.”

Keith straightened up, nodded, smiled. “I thought so,” he said.

“Who are you up against?” Frank said. Keith slid the campaign signs closer toward Frank, nodded again in the direction of George, seeking his agreement, too, it seemed. George sipped his beer and said nothing.

“Conroy Mathis,” Keith said, and he watched as Frank took a slip of paper out from under the bar and jotted down the name.

“Got it,” Frank said. “Thanks.”

“What do you need that for?” Keith asked.

“Well, I need to call him,” Frank said. “Ask him for some campaign signs. For my parking lot. I got me some constituents in here, you know.”

Keith placed two small, fat hands flat on the bar and heaved himself off the stool. He looked at Frank darkly.

“You’re one son of a bitch, Bravo,” he said. “Always have been, always will be.”

“Regards, Do-Key,” Frank said. He wiped a damp rag on the surface of the bar where Keith’s hands had been and then, as an afterthought, pulled a bottle of Windex from under the counter, sprayed the bar, and wiped it again.

“Hope you’re careful in here,” Keith said. “Hope I don’t find no kids drinking in here, Bravo. Could cost you your license, you know.”

“Good thing you weren’t in here last night then,” Frank said. “We had Brownie Troop number twenty-four doing a wet T-shirt contest. Two-for-one drafts.”

“I’m not kidding, asshole. I could shut you down so fast that. . . .” Keith trailed off, looking a little confused. “So fast,” he concluded.

“You just keep checking, officer,” Frank said. “Keep coming in to see if there’s any cute little girls drinking in here. Or any cute little boys, for that matter. We know you’ll be on top of that.”

Keith slid the signs off the bar and lumbered out of the restaurant, and Frank watched him go, his pleasure at having gotten the donkey’s goat dissipating quickly as he returned to the moment and remembered the sight of his truck, Carson at the wheel, exiting the parking lot on its way to Aberdeen. Elizabeth. Bell. The bed.

“So anyway, Frank,” George said. “Whole life.” And he was off again.

It was Utina, all of it. Melted pies and early-bird diners and bullish cops and foul-mouthed insurance-selling trash collectors—that was Utina. No end of annoyances, no end of blind alleys and wrong turns and aggravation around every corner. Maybe Carson was right. Maybe they all needed a change. A way out.

But Arla. Frank had a vision of his mother the day Dean left them, sitting very still in the kitchen at Aberdeen, her cane out of reach against the kitchen counter. “Frank,” she’d said, after a while. “Get me that cane, would you?” He’d brought it to her and had steadied her by the arm while she stood.

“Thank you, Frankie,” she’d said quietly. “You always prop me up.” He’d watched her walk unsteadily out the door. That night he’d driven out to the beach near Crossroads. A couple of surfers were strapping boards to their car when he arrived. He recognized them from school, and he waved but did not speak. He walked up and over the dunes and sat for a long time, looking at the ocean. Then he went back to the truck and drove to the place in the dunes where it had happened, the place where they’d left Will. He walked into the thicket. He saw Tip Breen’s hand on Will’s shoulder, and then the small image of his brother’s face in the wing-mirror of Carson’s truck.

When he came back from the beach, long after midnight, he saw Arla’s light, shining like a beacon through the trees. They owed her. He and Carson and Dean. For what they’d done. But now Dean was gone, and the debtors had been reduced to two. He wasn’t sure, never had been, if Carson was good for the tab. But Frank paid his debts.

Now he mopped the bar again with a damp rag, listened to George drone on. He thought about Carson, and Alonzo Cryder, and big money, but then he shook his head, dislodged the thoughts like so many buzzing gnats. Arla and Sofia were out at Aberdeen, Morgan was slinging fritters in the kitchen, and Frank was stuck, like Susan Holm in her Mazda, between a rock and a hard place. And no tow truck was coming to pull him out.

T
EN

Beneath a heavy metal overhang in the semicircular drive of St. Johns Hospital in Jacksonville, a trio of broad-bottomed women, dressed in powder blue scrubs and plastic clogs, stood smoking. The picture of health, thought Carson Bravo, who had no patience with either body fat or cigarettes, both of which, in his opinion, were signs of weakness. He parked in the skimpy shade of a thin pine at the edge of the parking lot and got out of his car, a used late-model Acura he’d bought from a client and, he now realized, looking at it, had paid too much for. Another expensive mistake. He was getting good at them.

The smoking women were blocking his approach to the door.

“Morning,” he said tightly.

One of them exhaled and slowly moved aside.

“
Thank
you,” he said, fanning the air in front of his face theatrically, but the woman simply turned back to the others and resumed her conversation. A pair of automatic glass doors made a soft sucking sound as Carson entered the building and made for the reception desk. While the air outside the hospital had been hotly oppressive, inside the temperature seemed to be hovering around the twenty-degree mark. A bank of tall windows along one wall was damp with condensation. Carson shivered.

“I’m here to see a patient,” he said to a dowdy woman at the reception desk. She had hair the color of mud and seemed, like her cohorts in the smoking section, to have not missed many meals.

“Visiting hours haven’t started yet,” she said. “Not till ten.”

He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty. Fabulous. He’d driven all the way from St. Augustine to Jacksonville in thirty-seven minutes, a personal best, only to face a half-hour delay at the hands of this washed-out pudding of a woman?

“Chrissakes,” he said to her. “Does it really matter?”

She looked at him with dislike. She wore oversize glasses with gold monogrammed initials in the corners of the lenses. Nice. “We have policies,” she said. “You’re welcome to wait.” Then she turned away.

He looked around the lobby and walked toward a small and purposefully unwelcoming waiting room tucked into an alcove, where two wall-mounted TVs blared competing newscasts from opposite walls and where all the chairs were empty. He clenched his fists one time, released. He didn’t like waiting. Deep breath. Sit down. Focus. He could hear Elizabeth, telling him he was too impatient. Too wound up. Too stressed-out.

He sat down, and his left knee immediately started jiggling, as it always did. He didn’t try to stop it. He had restless leg syndrome, or so Elizabeth had reported to him after spending an evening Googling medical sites and compiling what turned out to be a comprehensive list of Carson’s psychosomatic faults: bruxism—grinding his teeth so hard and loud in the night that it sounded like a buzz saw, or so she said. Finger tapping. Chronic sighing. Excessive
drinking
. According to Elizabeth, he was exhibiting every stress-induced or tension-related symptom, disorder, or weakness in the book. Well, fuck it. He’d deal with all of it later. After he settled this other issue.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Two missed calls from Christine Hughes. One business and one pleasure, he’d bet. She’d want to know two things: when her fund dividend was due, and when she could expect their next extracurricular romp at the Hilton, and he’d been turning the act of avoiding both questions into a fine art. Things were getting complicated. These
women
. A few weeks ago he’d lowered the boom and had let go of his
other
dalliance, Holly, which had been an act of poor judgment from the outset and now had proven disastrously ill-executed. Things were getting harder to manage. Maybe, though he hated to admit it, a bit out of control. Holly had threatened to go straight to Elizabeth, and he’d been sure she was just blowing smoke until he came home from the office and found Elizabeth had jumped ship for Aberdeen and taken Bell with her.

But this, he was sure, was a temporary setback. Elizabeth would be back. She wasn’t ready to break up Bell’s home life, and he was counting on that, though he knew, vaguely, it was cowardly to be banking on his daughter’s innocence to buy himself a little time. That was all he needed. He’d convince Elizabeth the affair with Holly was over, which would be easy, because it
was
over, that little bitch, the little rancorous, spiteful, small-time hussy. Jesus. Where did he find them? He’d convince Elizabeth it would never happen again. He’d beg for her forgiveness, and she would grant it. She would. Wouldn’t she?

If it wasn’t for this other thing. This thing with Christine Hughes. Here he was, ready to chart a course on the straight and narrow and stick to it, ready to keep his word and write himself a little redo on his marriage vows to save the ship before it went down for good, and then along came this thing with Christine Hughes and the God-damned Bravo Multi-Fund.

He wished he’d brought a jacket to the hospital, which was ridiculous, needing a jacket in Florida in the middle of August. How much were they spending on air-conditioning here, anyway? They ought to call the facilities manager on the carpet, string up the son of a bitch for wasting resources, squandering energy, mismanaging money—

Oh, Jesus.
Mismanaging money.

His leg started quaking again. It would have been nice, it occurred to him, if Elizabeth had not chosen this very moment to pull her little protest, just when he was in the middle of the biggest crisis of his career, to go off on a little field trip to Aberdeen. Elizabeth was the only thing he could rely on. And now she was gone. He pushed down on his knee, tried to make his leg stop shaking. If she was here she’d tell him to walk it off. Tell him to drink more water. Tell him to take a deep breath. Tell him to calm down. So he tried it. He got up and paced.

Fuck
. Easy for her to say. Calm down—she had no idea. No
idea
of the shit he was dealing with while she was off on this little
break
or whatever she wanted to call it, staying up at Aberdeen with his mother, of all people. It was pissing him off to no end.