Tropical Freeze (21 page)

“It might work better now and then,” Thorn said. “Sometimes it’s only the players who know what really happened.”

“Those ideas, what, they out of a book?”

“No, they’re mine. Out of my own noodle.”

“Noodle’s the word for it.”

Thorn was quiet, watching Charlie Manson and his girls.

Sugarman said, “For one thing, Thorn, when we were playing basketball, we weren’t wearing guns. There’s a big difference.”

“OK,” Thorn said, “it’s a shitty analogy. But you know what I mean.”

The tribal leader had left his harem and was edging over to their table. Sugarman turned and nodded at the man. He made his bow again, a little wider this time like he was showing you how long the one that got away was. Not a lunker, but big.

“We have spoken among ourselves,” he said. “And we have decided that the two of you should leave.”

“Why’s that?” Sugarman asked.

“You are creating negative oscillations.”

Sugarman looked at Thorn for a translation.

“Bad vibrations,” Thorn said.

Sugarman stood up. “Some things never change.”

“It’s kind of a comfort,” Thorn said.

He drove over to Darcy’s trailer. It was dark, and the chill settling now. Sky clear, no cloud cover to keep the ground heat in. This new air was cleaner, had a zip to it, a few more grains of oxygen maybe. It’d probably dropped fifteen degrees in the last couple of hours, and because he’d been driving with that convertible open, his fingers were stiff, nose beginning to run a little.

A light was on inside the trailer. He stood outside for a moment, gave his heart a chance to decelerate. Be cool, not show her how just walking up to her door could send it racing.

The neighborhood was quiet tonight, the watt wars observing a cease-fire. Thorn moved over to the front door. The yellow shade in the living room window was buckled and drawn down five inches short of the sill. He could see inside. There was a guy. A blocky guy with shortish black hair sitting in the chrome dinette chair.

His arms were lashed to the arms of the chair with what looked like dark stockings. Thorn blinked and stepped away from the window.

He gave it a few seconds, then leaned over for another look. Still there. The guy nodding now at someone across the table. He looked right at home, relaxed, tied up to that chair. Then he saw Darcy’s hands on the table, the right one holding the .25 Browning with the pearl handle, the left drumming on the tabletop.

Forget it. The Dinkelbary’s dead and gone already. Nevrmind the money hony. XXXX

Thorn read the note again. Darcy watching him. She was rolling the Browning from hand to hand as if it were too hot to hold. She had on a light blue sleeveless T-shirt, gray jeans, running shoes. Her hair was loose, clean, and brushed. Bangs straight and even. A little blush in her cheeks, some quiet green eye shadow. Not letting her grooming slip during this crisis; in fact, seeming to spend more time at it. Finding her own way to sublimate.

Thorn stepped over to the window and drew the shade down the last five inches. He came back over to this guy.

“You write this?” He got down into this guy’s face so he could read his eyes. “This your handwriting, is it?”

“He wrote it,” Darcy said. “We already established that before you got here. This is Ozzie. Ozzie Hardison. He lives in a house over by the marina. He does odd jobs for Papa John. Drives the ice cream van, mows the grass.”

“You know him?”

“I talked to him once or twice.”

Ozzie watched this, flicking his eyes back and forth between them, cutting to the .25, away from it.

“He threw another shell?”

“I caught him before he had a chance. I was outside.”

Thorn searched her face. Her expression was bland, but she was admitting it in her eyes. They were blazing, suffused with anger, but she was holding it off. Performing calmly for this guy.

“Where’s Gaeton Richards?” Thorn said to Ozzie, standing over him. Ozzie didn’t look up. He glanced across at Darcy for a moment, a sheepish look, then looked into this lap. “Where is he, you son of a bitch?” Thorn gripped him by his short, thick hair and lifted his face up.

Ozzie had a fine sprinkling of stubble on his cheeks, his eyes unfocused, dulled from within. He wasn’t looking at Thorn; he wasn’t looking at anything.

“Easy does it, Thorn. He’s scared. He’s too scared to talk.”

“He sure as shit better be scared.”

Thorn let his hair go. Ozzie’s face fell forward again.

“What the hell’re you doing, Ozzie Hardison? Writing a note like this. The hell’re you thinking about?”

“I already asked him that?”

“And?”

“Sit down, Thorn. Just cool off, relax.”

Thorn hesitated a moment, staring at Ozzie, then pulled out the third dinette chair and turned it around and straddled it.

Darcy touched a finger to her bottom lip, rubbed it the length and back again, looking at Thorn, considering all this.

She said, “He thought this was an act of kindness. He meant it that way.”

“An act of kindness,” Thorn said. “That’s a good one.”

“I’m trying to tell you, Thorn. Who we’re dealing with here, how he arrives at things.”

Thorn rubbed his hand over the lump in his pocket. Gaeton’s knife. Just touching it seemed to freshen his blood. He imagined holding its keen blade against this guy’s throat. Carve him a new Adam’s apple.

A loud rapping came at the door. Thorn jerked.

“It’s the pizza man,” Darcy said. “We ordered a pizza.”

“You ordered a pizza.”

She rose and took her purse from the kitchen counter and stepped out the door.

“We were hungry,” Ozzie said.

Thorn stared at this guy, listening to Darcy outside with the delivery man. Bouquet of pizza already floating into the room.

“We didn’t know if you liked anchovy or not,” Ozzie said. “So we got half with anchovy, half just extra mushroom.”

“You knew I was coming?”

“She said you probably were.”

Thorn shook his head. Not believing this.

“You her brother, too?” Ozzie said. Just shooting the shit, an everyday thing tied up with dark stockings, waiting for the pizza.

Thorn said, “Now listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m about a split second from cutting off your air supply. So just stop the mouthing, and sit there till I say you can talk. That clear?”

Ozzie nodded. No anger showing, no malice of any kind, just a schoolboy agreeableness.

She brought the pizza back inside and got some cheap china plates down from the cupboard, napkins, asked Thorn what he wanted to drink. Whiskey, he said. Asked Ozzie, and Ozzie was about to speak, caught himself, and looked to Thorn for permission.

“He’s not thirsty,” Thorn said.

She brought Thorn a bottle of Early Times and a glass with ice. Set it down in front of him, tore off a wedge of pizza, and sat back down to eat. Ozzie watched this, licked his lips cautiously, staring at the pizza.

“When we’re finished, Ozzie,” Darcy said, “you can have a piece or two.”

Thorn sipped the bourbon. Finally the hunger moved his hand forward, and he tore off a slice and ate it.

Darcy was staying inside herself. One quick, light look for Thorn, warning him to cool it, then saying, hmmm, as she ate her pizza. Tapping her fingers as if a tranquil tune played inside her. Thorn tried to bring her eyes to his, but she seemed to sense it and kept her gaze floating around the room.

Ozzie said, “This guy your other brother?”

“No,” she said, “I only had one.”

Ozzie blinked, swallowing, looking down, but Thorn could see he’d been nut-kicked. A flush coming to his cheeks.

“I’m her friend,” Thorn said. “Her good friend.” And that did it, a three-point play. Ozzie lifted his eyes to Thorn’s, a dead look, his mouth fighting off a sneer.

Darcy chewed her pizza peacefully.

They ate all but the last piece. Thorn looked at it, reached out, then looked at Ozzie. The sneer solidly there now.

“It don’t matter,” he said. “I’m not hungry anyway. So eat the damn thing.”

Darcy wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, said, “Ozzie says he found Gaeton in his shed. He’d been shot. He didn’t know what to do with him, so he took him out in the Glades and dumped the body. But he took off the ring first, thought he’d make a few dollars out of it. Then he changed his mind, decided it was too cruel. So he wrote this other note.”

“You believe that?”

“Somewhat,” she said.

“It’s true, just like she said it,” Ozzie said.

“Where in the Everglades?”

“In a canal I know about, up on nine-oh-five.”

“I’m calling Sugarman,” Thorn said.

“No,” Darcy said. “Not yet.”

“You believe this, this act of kindness bullshit?”

“I believe Ozzie has become enamored of a media personality, and he considered this an appropriate courtship gesture.”

Thorn looked at Ozzie. He’d missed it all. A foreign tongue.

“I know who done it,” Ozzie said. “And why.”

“Tell us, Ozzie,” Darcy said, using a voice Thorn hadn’t heard. Maybe it was her TV voice. Stiffer than her real one, sounding like a second-grade teacher, sweet but full of iron.

“I can’t do that,” he said. “But I’m planning on setting things right. You’ll see.”

Darcy stood and came around to Ozzie and untied his left hand.

“Go on, have that last piece,” she said.

Ozzie looked at it for a moment, then took it and began to eat it, keeping his eyes down. It only took him a minute to get it all down. Darcy brought him a Budweiser, opened it, and set it in front of him.

Ozzie drained about half of it and set it down and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his work shirt. Now he looked at Thorn. Narrowing his eyes to make himself look tough.

“You know what, Ozzie?” Darcy said. “You can convince us you’re telling the truth by describing exactly where my brother’s body is.”

Ozzie thought about it. His face softened as he looked at her. Darcy gathered her hair with her right hand, lifted it off her neck to let her skin breathe. Dropped it. She stroked the blond hair on the back of her wrist, breathed through her nose. She scratched lightly at the edge of her collarbone. Ozzie watched all this, slumped forward, his throat working. Breathing visibly.

It was sexual theater. Darcy’s basic movements, the power she was radiating, bristling this guy’s short hairs, charging the air with her heat and spark. Something in Thorn sagged. Was that all this had been between them? The con of sex. A tango of lust. One more twitch and countertwitch between woman and man. Was that all it ever was? Fine arts. Had she summoned this same candescence for him, drawn them together fluidly and inevitably?

Ozzie said, “I’m a songwriter. I’m a lover, not a killer.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Thorn said. “Would you listen to this.”

“All right,” Ozzie said. “I’ll tell you just where you can find the body, but I’m not going out there again. I don’t like that place.”

“That’s a start, Ozzie,” she said. “That gets us going.”

Thorn was driving the 1963 Ford tow truck. He’d called up Shep Daniels at Largo Texaco and settled on twenty dollars and a dozen bonefish flies as payment.

It was almost nine o’clock, and Darcy and he were creeping through the deep dark, down a narrow sandy road that went west off 905. They’d flushed a rabbit and two possums, a squalling white heron.

“We should’ve kept him tied up, Darcy.”

“I think he can help us more if we let him stay loose.”

“What’s to keep him here? What’s to keep him from hitching up the road right now?”

Darcy looked out at the narrow roadway, the underbrush almost concealing their way. Headlights so dim on this old truck that you couldn’t make out more than ten feet ahead.

She said, “He’s not going anywhere, Thorn. You saw him. The boy’s dead in love. As long as he thinks he has a chance of that, he’ll be close by.”

“A lover, not a killer,” Thorn said. “Good God.”

“As if he couldn’t be both,” she said.

Ozzie was in his bedroom rubbing his wrists where the stockings had burned them. Shit, he could’ve stayed there for days. Tied up with her own stockings, having her wait on him like that.

Now all of a sudden he had a real hunger to look at his Johnny Cash collection: the newspaper photos he’d torn out, the headlines, and a couple of photographs from shiny magazines. He kept them all stored inside a liquor box in his closet.

He got it down and sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at each of those photos. Getting his fix. The man had had a rough life. He’d hung in there, gotten out of prison, taken his dose of shit, and then he’d climbed right up on top of the whole world and sung his lungs out. The man dressed in black. The black hair, those eyes that just said everything about being dirt poor and hating it, and fistfighting his way past all the losers. He’d gotten way out there ahead of them all, his picture in every magazine, his name on the lips of beautiful women. All because of his voice, because he could take what was burning in his heart and bring it up into his mouth.

Ozzie took each and every article out of the box and gave each one a long look. First time he’d needed to do that in about a year, since he’d come to town feeling lonely and out of it.

And at the bottom of the box were the three fancy pistols. The two he’d taken from the dingleberry lifeguard and the one he’d picked up off the shed floor. And the box of cartridges he’d bought a couple of days ago. He held up the one with the silencer on it and found a good comfortable grip on it. Aimed it around the room.

Thorn was soaked. He shivered now as the wind came into the tow truck’s broken window. The sour funk of canal water filled the cab.

Darcy said, “You’re sure it’s him?”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “It’s him.”

She was staring out her window at the dark sky.

“OK, we got him out of the water. Where’re we taking him?”

“Maybe to Benny’s place,” she said. “Just drive up and dump the body on his front steps.”

“Yeah, I could beat my fists on his chest, demand a confession.”

“You still don’t believe this has to do with Benny, do you, Thorn?”