Tropical Freeze (14 page)

They were sitting at a waterfront table at The Pier, Key Largo’s latest hot spot. The place featured cosmetic redwood beams in the ceiling, big-screen TV in the bar showing an exercise program, potted palms everywhere. Last year at this time the building had housed an auto body shop.

Thorn wore a faded blue work shirt and khaki trousers, a leather flight jacket, and his good boat shoes. It was his dead-of-winter look.

He watched as a couple of guys in wet suits tried to windsurf out on Tarpon Basin. They coasted three feet, then fell off, got back on, hauled up the sail, and lost their balance as soon as the wind began to drive them forward.

Thorn had ordered the hamburger. He knew it was a mistake when the waitress asked him how he wanted it cooked. On a griddle, he thought of saying. With a long steel spatula, and scrape the grease off into the gutter. But he said, medium well. The young waitress wrote that down.

Then it came out smothered in avocados, alfalfa sprouts, half the state of California. It would probably make Thorn live an extra six months just smelling the thing. Sugarman didn’t seem to notice, plowing through his, focused on his plate.

Today Sugar wasn’t wearing his Monroe County Police green and grays. He had on a pink polo shirt and a pair of new jeans, red stitching around the pockets, running shoes, no socks.

Thorn put aside his burger.

“I don’t remember ever seeing you in pink before, Sugar.”

“Speak softly and wear a loud shirt,” Sugarman said.

Sugarman took a small bite out of his cheeseburger. Alfalfa sprouts stuck to his chin, like a wispy Chinese beard.

“I didn’t have time to change,” he said. “Had this private job last night, up in Miami.”

The cook had left the potato skins on the french fries. Big thick-cut chunks. The things probably had sea salt on them. Add on another six months to live. If he ate here every day, he’d have the bowels of a teenager in no time. Thorn made a note to tell Gaeton about this place. Next time you had a hankering for alfalfa sprouts, I got the place for you.

“Beware of work that requires new clothes,” Thorn said.

Sugarman shook his head. Cut him some slack, easy on the jokes.

Thorn reached out and took the alfalfa sprouts off Sugarman’s chin, looked at them for a moment, and ate them. Sugarman finished his Coke, shook some crushed ice into his mouth, and started chewing on it.

“I wouldn’t do this kind of work, but I’m pinched for cash,” Sugarman said. “It’s like fancy car repo stuff. Stealing cars from drug scum. These guys, they’re cheapskates like you wouldn’t believe. They go into a fancy car place, a couple of hundred thou wadded up in their pockets, and they count out ten, fifteen thousand, plunk it down on a fifty-thousand-dollar car. They got great credit ’cause they own some bank around town, one you never heard of, but it’s still full of money. So, they drive the Lamborghini away, or it’s a Rolls, cars I can’t even pronounce their names. And these slobs just forget about paying the other forty. They’re sneerers. They like taking advantage.”

Thorn watched as one of the windsurfing students acquired a sudden fit of balance and began sailing out toward a mangrove island. He waved triumphantly back at his friend, and fell forward into the sail.

Sugarman said, “It can turn into dangerous shit. Because for one, these guys always got six linebackers around them, everybody armed like Israeli commandos. Anyway, so the law says you can’t climb over their wall and hot-wire the thing. They practically stole this car, haven’t made a payment on it in five months, and the most you can do is try to steal it back, but only out in neutral territory.

“So, I’m sitting down the street from this one guy’s twenty-five-room house, in the company car, a piece of crap Chevette, and I wait till this fancy Dan comes roaring out to eat supper at midnight. I follow him till he gets to a red light and pull up behind him and just flat-out ram him in the back bumper. Fender-bender thing.

“He pops out, looks at the damage. And I get out like I’m looking at it, too. The guy looks me over, how I’m dressed, and he thinks, hey, maybe he’s one of us. It gets his guard down a little. And I hand him a business card, and while he’s looking at it, I’m in his car, locking the door, feeling around for the ignition key. And Christ, it’s there. Thank God. So, I go lurching off in this thing, I can barely find the gearshift it’s got so many extra gizmos. This guy meanwhile, he’s yelling at me, brandishing a firearm but not wanting to shoot at his pretty car. I take a deep breath and look over, and there’s a blonde in a red rubber dress right there in the seat beside me.”

“Yeah.” Thorn smiled, watching his buddy. “What’d she say?”

“She smiled at me, blew me a kiss. Freaked me out.”

“Maybe she’s used to it. Like a baton, getting passed on to the next guy running full speed.”

“It freaked me out. Miami freaks me out. Nonstop.”

“If you’ve got to moonlight, couldn’t you find something down here?”

“This pays too good to miss,” Sugarman said. “Even if it is in Miami. And plus, if I hang in there long enough, the company is branching out down here.”

Thorn twisted in his chair. He thought he knew the answer, but he asked it anyway.

And Sugarman said, “Florida Secure Systems.”

Thorn picked up a spoon and swiveled it in and out of the light. He said casually, “Benny Cousins’s company.”

Sugarman kept his coffee cup at his lips, staring at Thorn.

Thorn said, “He pays good, does he?”

Sugarman set his cup down and cocked his head.

“OK, what is this, Thorn? I don’t like how this sounds.”

“I’m just curious. I like to know things.”

“I’m curious why you’re curious.”

“Hey,” Thorn said, “humor me a minute. Tell me something about this company.”

Sugarman sighed and frowned. A small smile in his eyes.

He shook his head and said, “I know it’s very big, based in Miami, but they do work all over the world. They guard factory bosses, oil sheikhs, guys afraid of being kidnapped. They do fancy burglar alarms, James Bond stuff. They’re into antiterrorist things, too, I hear. They’ve just generally got a great rep. A couple of guys from the sheriff’s department applied but got turned down, so I consider myself lucky getting on with them.”

Thorn picked up another french fry, dabbed it in ketchup, but put it down. His gut was feeling a slight chop, all this funny food.

“Now you talk to me,” Sugarman said.

“I don’t know exactly what it is,” he said. “But something smells funny, and it’s blowing in from Benny Cousins’s direction.”

Sugarman craned forward, squinted at Thorn.

“You’re weird, Thorn. You and Higby been breathing too much South American sawdust. You’re starting to imagine things.”

“Sugar,” he said, “your boss, Benny Cousins, fixed my red tags. Overnight. You’re going to arrest me Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon my house is a A-OK legal. Doesn’t that sound strange to you?”

Sugarman lifted his eyebrows, gave Thorn a long, dismayed look.

“The man offered me a job, Sugar. He tried to bribe me into working for him, be his personal fishing guide, put him into some fish, show him how to cast his line.”

“He did?”

“Did you know Gaeton is working for him?”

“I heard he was,” Sugarman said. “But I haven’t seen him in a long while.” He pushed his plate to the side. “Thorn, you got that look again. I don’t like that look.”

“The guy’s crooked, Sugar. He fixes things at the courthouse so somebody owes him one. He recruits his staff like that.”

Sugarman shook his head and said, “Not Benny Cousins. The guy’s an ex-fed, for christsakes, about as far away from a crook as you can get.”

“You’re not listening to me, Sugar. He fixed my code violations.”

“Well, if that was true, it’d change my feelings about him,” Sugarman said. “I got like a pet peeve about that sort of thing. I hate it when I’m there, doing my job, filling out every goddamn form they throw at me, and then somebody comes in and winks at the right secretary, gives somebody a fifty-dollar handshake, and man, the rules disappear. I get so ticked off it makes me just want to pack it in sometimes. Just hang it up.”

A screech came from below the table and Thorn dropped his french fry.

“Just my beeper,” said Sugarman, reaching to his belt to shut it off. He rose from the table. “Got to call in.” He gave Thorn a helpless look. Eyes half closed, shaking his head.

The waitress appeared after Sugarman had left. She had no makeup, straight brown hair. Her eyes were merry and bright. He bet she’d never worn a pencil behind her ear, or called a customer honey in her life, or laughed while she swatted away a pinch.

As she began clearing the plates, all full of the pep she’d learned at hotel school, Thorn tried to fight off his grouchiness. It was just that he’d never seen pep in Key Largo before. Sloth, yes. Lethargy, certainly. All the pores wide open. That was Key Largo, all the Keys. About as close to pep as you could get was some New Yorker on his first day on the island, all manic to go here, do this, see that. But give them one night breathing that air, snorkeling on the reef, and next day at breakfast, they’re staring out at the water, face slack, not looking around for the waitress.

But pep had arrived, like some kind of retrovirus, bringing its feverish, empty excitement. And here she was, with her bouncy step, her eager smile. A cheerleader for the New Age.

She began to bubble out the dessert choices. Thorn’s mind shut down after the granola-blueberry yogurt and the white chocolate mousse. When she’d finished, he asked her if she had any peppermint patties. She cocked her head, gave it her best effort; then with a blank shake of her head she said no.

“Two cents, in a bowl by the cash register? Those things.”

She smiled sadly as if she were embarrassed for him. For wanting something so meager, for mistaking this classy place for some diner.

“The check then,” Thorn said.

That brought her back to life. A twitch came back into her walk. She gave Sugarman a peppy hello as they passed. A guy she could relate to, Mr. Pink.

Sugarman sat down at the table and drew in a long breath.

“Who was it?”

“Jeannie.”

“She beeps you?”

“She likes to tell me when she’s had an insight.”

“She had an insight,” Thorn said.

“Yeah, she’s been having a lot of them. Psychological insights. She’s been going to see Don Meagers, the counselor at the elementary school. He does adults at night.”

Thorn opened the lid of his hamburger, scraped some of the exotic vegetables off the meat, and took another bite.

Sugarman said, “She’s decided she’s an adult child of a co-alcoholic mother who hates men because they love her too much. Or … is that it?” Sugarman nudged his french fries and put his wadded-up napkin beside his plate. “No, but it’s like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Thorn said. “I get the idea.”

“I mean, I understand a lot of it,” Sugarman said. “I do. This business about how you wind up repeating your parents. Or trying to, and the other person is doing the same thing only with their parents, so you get into these fights ’cause it’s not just the two of you married, but it’s her parents and your parents and the two of you.” Sugarman took a slug of his ice, crunched it for a moment. “Six goddamn people fighting, four of them ghosts.”

They both looked out at the windsurfers for a minute or two. The guys were hopeless. They looked like they might have trouble standing up on land.

“Was everything all right?” The waitress was there, holding the leather binder, the check sticking out. She was looking at Sugarman. Thorn had stepped across into the alternate universe for her. Not there, just the husk.

Sugarman handed her a twenty, and she left.

Thorn felt a rumble in his belly. Six-point-one on the sphincter scale. Tectonic plates grinding. Tidal waves moving.

“Sugar,” he said, “I know if you hear anything suspicious about Benny, you’ll tell me.”

Sugarman rose, looking out at the windsurfers.

“In my next life,” he said, “I’m going to choose my friends better. Find some dull normals who get excited about checkers.”

“Whatta you mean?” Thorn said. “I’m about as quiet a guy as you’ll ever meet.”

“Yeah, right,” said Sugarman. “Uh-huh.”

Who was he kidding? He didn’t have anything to say to Gaeton, bothering him on a cold, blustery Monday afternoon. He was at the trailer park because of Friday night. The kiss. Because something in him had swung open, and he didn’t want it to lock up again. He was there to see his friend’s little sister. Go on, look it in the face.

The window unit was chugging hard as Thorn knocked on her door a couple of times. When she didn’t come after a third round of knocking, he pushed the door open. Stepped into the stuffy room.

He smiled. So, she was one of those. Never used air conditioning to cool. But when the temperature dipped into the sixties, she switched the reverse cycle on high. If she wasn’t sweating, something must be wrong.

She glanced up from the book she was reading on the couch, waved him in. She was in a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and red running shorts and sandals. Her hair was stacked in no particular order. Bobby pins helter-skelter. She was holding a paperback, wearing a Walkman. She smiled, took off the earphones.

“I tune in between the stations,” she said, “get some white noise and dig into a hot read.”

“What is it?” Thorn said.

She showed him the cover.
Moby Dick
. Her finger held her place halfway in.

He said, “I got an old high school report on that you could read, save you the trouble.”

“Yeah?”

“I think what I said was that Ahab had the wrong kind of tackle. Whole problem was he was using those harpoons with short lines, trying to tire the whale out from hauling around boats full of men. When he should’ve used a lot more line, let the drag on the line do the work. Let Moby run all he wanted and stay back. That’s what I said. I think I got a C or something. Miss Antrim said I missed the point. You remember how she was.

“I think I agree with her.”