Tropical Freeze (25 page)

And the documents had excited her, too. Emilio hadn’t forged anything. They were right there in a dresser drawer. Originals. Only her passport and driver’s license had photos. Emilio had spread all this out on his dining room table. Snapshots of both of them out on a boat, at restaurants, smiling, drinking wine.

“Does she speak English?” Darcy had asked him.

“Yeah.” Emilio looked longingly at one of the restaurant photos. “Spanish and Basque. But nobody knows Basque. You could get by with any gobbledygook.”

After Darcy had cut her hair, done her eyebrows, Emilio had taken Polaroid head shots, glued them into the originals, using a small heatpress to seal the plastic over the photos. Delicate work. The man was a professional gluer. He’d looked up at her with his horny grin, getting wired seeing this woman taking on his wife’s approximation.

Darcy was out of there as soon as the glue dried.

Maria Iturralde. Age thirty-one. Five feet five. An inch shorter and three years younger than Darcy. One thirty-five. Fifteen pounds heavier. But people changed. Damn right they did.

Maria Iturralde was wanted for robberies of Quick Marts and 7-Elevens in the Midwest. And then she’d begun taking down massage parlors. She and her black boyfriend. Emilio had kept up with her even though he hadn’t seen her in a couple of years. He had clippings from the papers in Cincinnati and Detroit. Five massage parlors. She’d sent him the news stories from out on the road. Like postcards home. Some kind of quirky getting-even thing.

And then some real postcards from Biarritz, San Sebastián, Pamplona. Maria had gone home, taking her money with her from American whack-off houses, funding the terrorism campaign for Basque separatism. It was good. Not perfect, but better than she’d planned. Gave her a little more confidence.

Maria Iturralde wasn’t exactly in Claude Hespier’s league. Not a killer who ate his kills, but Darcy didn’t think Benny would care. He wasn’t running a talent agency.

She’d called Florida Secure Systems this afternoon and asked for Benny. She’d gotten the runaround for a while till she mentioned Claude Hespier’s name. Then click, click, she was talking to the man himself, patched into his car somewhere. And she told him in two sentences who she was, what she wanted. She would be in Mexico City tomorrow afternoon. It had to happen that fast or she’d go elsewhere.

All right, Benny had said. Have ten thousand cash dollars with you, and in ten days be prepared to transfer another ninety to a bank in Nassau. I understood it was seventy-five total, Darcy had said, thinking she should play tough, bargain. He said, you understood wrong. A hundred total. It’s what Claude paid, non-negotiable. For a genuine nukeproof, good-to-a-hundred fathoms, safe package. You still interested, lady?

I’ll be there, she’d said. Five o’clock. Clicking off. Then she had to call back five minutes later to agree on where.

It was nearly nine when Thorn knocked on her door. The light was on in there, thank God. He’d been over four times Wednesday night. He was afraid she’d gone, begun her plan.

But it wasn’t Darcy who came to the door. Harsh black hair chopped short, black horn-rimmed glasses. A severe woman in a man’s flannel shirt and baggy jeans.

He leaned back and looked up on the outside wall for the address number. One eleven. The right place.

“Darcy here?” he said.

“No,” she said, her voice deep.

“Where is she?”

“Gone.”

Thorn stepped up another step and then put out his arm and levered past her into the trailer.

“Hey, you!”

“Where is she?” Thorn said.

Even when she smiled, it took Thorn a moment. And even when he realized it was Darcy, it was not over for him. He had to sit in the dining room chair and rest his arms on the table.

Thorn asked her what the hell she’d done to herself.

“Calm down,” she said. “It’s not what you think.”

Thorn went to the refrigerator, got himself a can of beer, and brought it back to the table. She was leaning against the kitchen counter, opening and closing the wings of a corkscrew.

“All right,” he said, taking looks at her in small dosages, bringing his eyes back to the beer can. “So what is it then?”

“I’m going back to work tomorrow,” she said. “I wanted a change, that’s all.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” said Thorn. “This’s your plan.”

“OK, all right,” she said. She sighed and made a tired smile. “I admit it, I was toying with the idea still. Playing around with my look. But you’re right, Thorn. It’s too damn dangerous. We need time to let it settle in our minds. Consider what to do. In the meantime, I’m going back to work. I’m on at noon tomorrow. They’ll just have to deal with the new me.” She put the corkscrew down and came over and sat opposite him. She picked up his beer and took a sip.

“You telling me the truth, Darcy?”

She nodded.

He said, “We’re going to consider all the options. Everything. Even keep our minds open about telling this to Sugarman.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I was just reacting, temporarily insane, thinking I could pass myself off, go in there, bring Benny down like that. I’ve calmed down. It’s OK. We’ll figure a way.”

He looked at her now, full on, and shook his head.

She laughed and said, “Yeah, I know. It looks pretty radical. But I can soften it some. Rinse the color out for one thing.”

He said, “You go to work tomorrow like that, they’ll want to switch you to live studio wrestling.”

She smiled. Her eyes going soft, staying with his. She asked him if she could sleep at his house tonight. See how the construction was coming. Sure, he said. He let go of both lungs of air. Sure, OK, let’s go.

Benny was crouched in the aluminum shed, poking at the gouge in the cement that one of his slugs had made. He located the other two and ran his fingers over the ragged craters, touched the bloody stains. He stood up, kicked at the roll of linoleum, and shook his head.

He walked over to the Bomb Bay Bar. Nothing much going on over there. He was in his black jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, parrots and speedboats. A pair of canvas deck shoes.

He took a seat at the bar. The only other customer was the guy that drove the shrimp truck. Papa John brought Benny a Coors and set it in front of him.

“So, how’s the pirate business, pardner?”

“Tell me something, John,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“I’m not discussing my shit anymore,” John said.

Benny shook his head and said, “You ever hear of somebody shot in the head, the pistol pressed flush against their skull, right here.” Benny pressed his pointing finger at a place in the middle of his forehead. “You ever heard of somebody like that living? Getting up the next day and reading the newspaper?”

The guy at the other end of the bar said, “I have. It happened to a guy I knew in Nam.”

“Fuck you, weirdo,” Benny said. He looked back at John. “I’m serious. You ever hear of something like that?”

“Once or twice,” John said.

“I’m serious,” Benny said.

“So am I,” John said.

As they drove to Thorn’s in the VW, Darcy said, “Did you know Gaeton kept some of your flies in his office downtown, on a corkboard on the wall, right up there with his citations? He acted like they were artworks or something. And there I thought they were just a bunch of thread and Mylar wrapped around a hook.”

“That’s all they are,” Thorn said. “Little tricks.”

“Well, he fell for them,” she said. “You doing them lately?”

“A lifetime ago,” Thorn said. “I only barely remember them.”

“When this is over,” she said, “we should get back to what works for us.” She rested her hand on his shoulder and touched a finger to the back of his neck.

As he turned into his drive, he said, “You dye all your hair?”

She smiled and her finger ran down into the collar of his shirt.

She said, “If I tell you, it’ll just spoil the surprise.”

He parked the VW next to the ice cream truck. No way to avoid it. She got out and leaned against her door. Thorn came around and stood beside her, took her hand.

“We didn’t have any kind of ceremony,” she said quietly.

The compressor was running, a low hum.

“Gaeton wasn’t much on wakes,” he said.

“No,” she said. “When Dad died, you remember, people came by the house, stood around, ate conch fritters, drank rum. And Gaeton told funny stories about Dad. The time he was pulled overboard by a tarpon. It dragged him so fast Dad tried to get up and ski. Cracked everybody up. People came up when they were leaving, said things like, we had a great time, we got to do this again, I can’t remember when I laughed so hard.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I remember that. He was a funny guy.”

“A no wake guy,” she said.

The compressor shut off, and she slipped in under his arm, found a comfortable notch there, both of them still watching the ice cream truck.

Thorn said, “Want a Fudgsicle? Nutty-buddy?”

“Thorn.”

“Well,” he said. “Let me show the house then.”

“It’s a good size,” she said, “comfortable but not too big.” Her head on his bare chest, gazing through the rafters at the big dipper, Polaris. The starlight sparkled in her pubic hair.

“I can’t take any credit for it,” Thorn said. “I was born this way.

Darcy said, “I meant the house.”

They both laughed, and she lifted her head and kissed him again. She drew a slow line from his Adam’s apple to his navel. And then began a delicate journey into his pubic hair, lingering there, combing out the snarls. He shifted beneath the comforter, opened himself to her.

“Well, architecturally speaking,” he said, “it’s nothing much, just a little box.”

She cupped him. Jiggled him lightly.

“Don’t you remember, Thorn?” she said. “It’s not the size of the ship that counts. It’s the motion of the ocean.”

While they chuckled into the chilly dark, Thorn located with his right hand the place he had found before. The place that made her shut her eyes and lean her head back. Made her throat quake. He touched her lightly there, teased it, and then lowered himself slowly, down her body and brought his tongue to her, separating the folds, tasting again that tart jasmine that was her scent.

She lifted her legs, brought her knees to her chest, and embraced them with one arm, her other arm slung out across the floor. And Thorn drew an alphabet there with his tongue, flicking it, flattening it, probing. He vanished into the damp heat of her. Gone. A twilight in his head. She writhed and began to speak her garbled commands. And his tongue answered her in this way. A guttural mumble.

She had not dyed that hair.

Darcy brought her feet down and pressed them on the floor and lifted her hips, pressing back, grinding into his mouth.

In a while he raised himself from her and looked up across her belly and breasts at that harsh foreign face. She smiled down at him, and he brought his lips back to her and fastened himself to those other lips, shaping and reshaping the fit, the pressure, the pace, until he felt a flutter escape from her, and a sudden flare of heat, and she raised her hips from the mahogany floor and he raised his face with her.

She shivered, and snarled. Began a slow crescendo of distressed cries as if she were losing her balance on a narrow ledge. And finally it broke from her, and she brought her legs back up and hugged her knees. And she started to sob, a deep rush of tears. With one hand she held his head in place as she wept.

It was an hour later. Near midnight. The sky a dark blanket tattered with stars. The marker light sent a pulse of yellow light out across the bay. They were sitting on the porch, the comforter draped over their shoulders, dangling their legs over the edge. Thorn could feel the print of mahogany grain in his naked butt. The Coleman lantern hissed nearby.

“Did you know,” she said, “that for every human being on earth, there’s a ton of termites?”

“You’re so romantic,” he said.

She smiled, said, “And when they eat wood, they give off methane gas. Methane’s one of the greenhouse gases, seals in the earth’s heat. Which all means that termites are changing global weather patterns in a major way.”

“Well, then,” Thorn said, “there you go.”

She hugged the blanket around herself. The compressor mumbled down below. She was staring at the bay, eyes on something way out. He slipped out from under the comforter and lay back on the floor.

“I’m serious, damn it,” she said. “Worldwide, we’re cutting down forests the size of England and Scotland every year. There’s never been a better time to be a termite.”

“I bet this’s some kind of an analogy, right? It applies to us somehow.”

She shook her head, glanced back at him, fighting off a smile. She said, “I was just looking at all your pretty wood. Wondering why it made me so sad.”

“Most of this wood was headed for the dump. I’m not going to feel guilty about using it. Scotland, England, I don’t care.”

“Before long all we’ll have left is the punky trees,” she said. “Melaleucas. Good for nothing but draining the Everglades.”

In the lantern light her skin was flickering gold.

Darcy said, “You know, in a lightning storm the melaleucas, because their bark is so papery, they catch fire very easily. The fires spread to the hardwoods, but the melaleucas don’t burn down themselves. They’re too waterlogged. They have the insides of a cactus.”

Thorn was up on an elbow now, watching her.

He said, “You get very passionate. About all kinds of things.”

“Those melaleucas,” she said, “they’re overrunning the Everglades. When someone goes to chop one of them down, the tree senses it somehow and puffs out a million spores.”

“I think I know how they feel,” he said.

She huffed and said, “Somebody has to do something, Thorn.”

He lay back, watched the starlight shimmer.

“Then we’ll make it our next mission.”

She said, “I want to see Benny dead, Thorn. I do, and I don’t much care how.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I do, too. And we will. We’ll do it. But let’s think it out, do it right.”

She was quiet for a moment, wagging her legs over the edge. Then she turned and lay back beside him and propped her head on her hand. She began to draw lazy circles in his chest hair. Her breasts pressed against his ribs.