Tropical Freeze (28 page)

Sugarman seemed to be measuring Thorn’s pupils, see what drug he was on.

“Well,” Thorn said, watching a rock star strut while he guzzled diet cola, “if you’re not going to do anything, Sugar, then I’ll take it from here.”

Sugarman’s face ripened to half a shade darker. His neck bulged around his collar. He shook his head with his eyes half closed. He was saying something under his breath. But Thorn didn’t pay any attention. The Channel Six weather was on. And a 250-pound man with curly blond hair was waving a pointer at the national map, hugging himself and shivering as the temperatures in the Northeast lit up.

Thorn closed his eyes.

He got one of the other deputies to drive him back to Priscilla’s to pick up the VW. For a few shaky minutes he poked around in her houseboat, the cats staring at him, moving out of his way. He found nothing unusual, nothing to indicate Benny had been there.

He refilled all the bowls he could find with cat chow, stood at the doorway, and spoke to the brood. He told them that Priscilla was away, off on a very long trip, that he would check on them for a while, make sure they were behaving themselves.

You had to keep things simple for cats.

On the drive down to Islamorada, Thorn held it under the speed limit. A couple of vacationers honked at him when they finally got a chance to pass, glaring at this burnout in his VW convertible, top down on a freezing day like this.

His arms were limp, and inside his chest galaxies collided, suns died, old women strangled on seawater. Lovers disappeared into the underground. Thorn drove on, knowing he was prepared to do something crazy, things that might get him hurt. Beyond that, he had no idea. Beyond that, he didn’t give a shit.

Before they departed Mexico City, Major Herb Johnson gave her a tour of the plane, his copilot running through the preflight checklist, speaking to the tower.

She watched the copilot flipping switches, Herb saying, “It’s a C-one-forty-one B, the biggest plane in the force. Used to be we employed her mainly for staging and supply missions in Europe, the Middle East.”

She nodded and followed him back into the dark, empty lungs of the plane. Small red woven sling chairs hung from the walls. Wooden pallets were tied down near the rear. Nothing else. You could park a fleet of Lincolns inside there, or tanks.

Herb Johnson said, “These days they got us running pens and paper clips to American embassies.” He gave her a forlorn wink then and said, “This lady’s brought the bodies of heroes back from Lebanon, before that POWs home from Vietnam. And now we’re carrying embossed stationery and God knows what else.”

The plane was based in Charleston Air Force Base, he said. He’d be back there for supper, after they dropped Maria Iturralde off at Homestead Air Force Base. He said he was sorry, but it wasn’t exactly designed for passenger comfort. And then he smiled at her and was pointedly silent. Her turn.

She said nothing, just returned his smile. She didn’t want him to have to give back his blue-eyed merit badges.

Darcy was buckled into one of the sling chairs, her back against the hull. Dust shook loose from the walls of that enormous tube. Her bones rattled in their sockets.

There was no insulation to muffle the roar, and though she had used the yellow rubber earplugs that Major Johnson had given her, jamming them deeper and deeper into her ears, she was sure she would be deaf when they landed.

Thorn parked the car at Marlin Foodmart and walked a half mile down the asphalt road. It had once been the main highway through the Keys. Narrow and shady. There’d been days thirty years ago he had ridden his bike there and had found alligators sleeping in the middle of that road. Two, three cars might be parked, waiting for it to move on, the drivers chatting.

Now the road was known as millionaire’s alley, a potholed lane a hundred feet away from U.S. 1. All the driveways were hung with gates, posted with warning signs. He didn’t know anybody who lived along there anymore. Nobody but Benny Cousins.

Thorn made it twenty feet into Benny’s property when he saw W. B. Jefferson operating the big orange loader. He was just finishing a four-by-four hole in line with the other royal palms.

W. B. wore a blue nylon windbreaker, khaki pants. And under the jacket was that shirt. The bright yellow shirt with the blue hula girls on it. Claude Hespier’s shirt. It was buttoned tight across W. B.’s thick chest.

W. B. saw Thorn and waved, shut down the motor. W. B. had been a couple of years behind Thorn at Coral Shores High, but they’d known each other, like everyone did, black or white, who grew up on the island in those days.

W. B. got down from the seat and shook Thorn’s hand.

“I ’spect there’s bells and buzzers be ringing right now inside that house.” He wiped some sweat away from his face with a blue bandanna. “Hell, by now they know when you was born, how many illegitimate children you got.”

“That shirt, W. B.,” Thorn said. “Where’d you get it?”

“You like it, I’d take a dollar for it.”

“I just want to know where it came from.”

W. B. said, “Right here, right where I’m working. I find every kind of thing out here.”

Thorn could hear voices down the drive, toward the house, a car’s engine starting. W. B. was knocking dirt clods and limestone chunks off the auger blade with the edge of his thick dark hand.

Thorn said he wanted to hear about that shirt.

W. B. tied the bandanna into a scarf on his head. Then he gazed down the drive toward the house. Thorn took a breath, hearing the car crunch down the drive.

“Well, it was one morning last November,” W. B. said, “I was lowering that palm right over there into the hole, and I had it hanging there, and I came over to see was it going in straight, and that’s when I saw a little piece of something sticking up out of the dirt inside that hole. I got down in there, and I pulled it out, and it was a sleeve to a nice white sport jacket. Silk or some such. Not my size, but I give it to W. B. junior.

“So, now I check every time, ’fore I put the tree in. And lordy, the shit I find. Watches, wallets, every kind of clothes. I got to stick my hand in there a foot or so. It isn’t the first time I seen people use their tree holes to get rid of garbage in, but my, my, what these people throw away.”

One of Benny’s brown Mercedeses was pulling up. A guy spoke into a walkie-talkie, got out the passenger door. He was wearing a white Adidas tennis warm-up. He said something to his twin, the driver. And the driver stayed put, his eyes on Thorn.

Thorn said, “That’s where that shirt came from, buried in the dirt?”

“Just last Monday,” he said quickly, almost a whisper. He nodded his big chin toward where the last fifty-foot royal palm had gone in. “It don’t fit me that good. But it’s bright.”

The man from the car moved up to Thorn’s shoulder.

The guy’s Old Spice took Thorn’s breath away for a moment. He stared at Thorn as if deciding which stranglehold to apply.

“Get in the car,” the man said.

“I got my own car,” said Thorn.

Thorn could feel W. B. moving away from this. He didn’t want to muss that hula girl shirt.

“Get in the car,” the man said again, quieter this time.

Thorn turned his back on the man and said to W. B., “Hey, I’ll talk to you later. You stay loose, you hear.” W. B. didn’t answer, watching the big man coming up behind Thorn.

When he felt the guy on his right shoulder, Thorn took a quick half step backwards, planted his right foot between the man’s legs, swiveled, and brought his chest to the man’s chest.

The man lurched backwards, and Thorn kept walking into him. Get people off-balance and they got funny looks. Take this guy with his tipsy grin, whirling his hands like he was treading air. Thorn had him in a full-tilt backwards stumble, driving him back until he thumped against the Mercedes’s driver door. It slammed the breath from him and sent his buddy back into the car.

Thorn pressed the man against the closed door while he patted down his warm-up suit. He found the hard lump he’d expected and reached under his jacket while the man got his breath back and pushed weakly at Thorn’s hands. He drew the .38 out of the holster, jabbed it into the man’s ribs, and heard the passenger door swing open.

His partner cocked his pistol and said, “This the day you want to die?”

Thorn’s breath was burning. He’d been neglecting his aerobics lately. He turned his head slowly to look over at the other man. He was aiming a .44 across the roof. Thorn let the .38 drop to the dirt and raised his hands. His eyes drifted up to the overcast sky.

“Well, it looks like we got us another cold front coming,” he said. The man started around the car, holding the .44 with both hands. “You know, it’s because of the damn termites,” said Thorn. “Giving off all that methane gas. You heard about that?”

The man told Thorn to shut the fuck up.

Thorn shrugged. The guy probably didn’t have any grandchildren. Probably never would.

“You want to take a boat ride?” Ozzie asked when Bonnie’d shut off the acetylene torch. He was standing in the doorway of her workroom, wearing his white shirt with the epaulets. Admiral Oz.

“Who’d you steal a boat from? Customs? Drug Enforcement Agency?” She raised her goggles and did her smartass grin.

“Har, har,” Ozzie said. “Never mind then.”

He started to walk off, but she said, “Yeah, I would. I’d like to take a boat ride. I need to get out of here.” Trying in her way to make up to him.

“OK. Meet me down at the bar.”

His voice was taking on that husky sound that Johnny Cash always had. Ozzie was a natural tenor, and he worried sometimes that there was too much falsetto creeping into his everyday talking voice. It was like having good posture. You had to keep after it. Hold your head up, keep your shoulders back and your voice deep in your chest.

By God, it was working at the moment. She was on her way upstairs.

Papa John was taking an old fart afternoon nap when he and Bonnie came aboard. Man was pretending he couldn’t pry his eyes open. So Ozzie pulled the fancy pistol out of the waistband of his jeans and showed it to the old man. It made him blink.

Bonnie stood behind Ozzie at the doorway down to the cabin. In her little leopardskin bikini. Her gut pooching a little over the brim of the bikini. Both of them had pretty much the same look. Not completely sure what the fuck was up. And not really all that afraid of Ozzie, but willing now to go along.

“Whatever you say, boy,” Papa John said, getting out of his bunk, yawning. “Man draws his gun gets to go where he wants.”

“Ozzie, you dickhead,” Bonnie said. But there wasn’t any bite in how she said it.

“Out past the shipping lanes,” Ozzie said. “I want to see that Gulf Stream you’re always yammering about.”

“What a dickhead,” Bonnie said sadly.

Ozzie hid the pistol inside his shirt. He unlashed the mooring lines, watching both of them as he did it.

They moved carefully out of the channel, heading past Rodriquez Key. When they were in maybe ten feet of water, Papa John told them to hold on, he was going to get them up on plane.

Ozzie waited till the boat had leveled out and figured it was as good a time as any. He aimed it down into the cabin and let go of a round. He just wanted to feel the jump of that pistol. There was hardly any recoil to it at all, and it made a noise like snapping a big stick in half. Put a hole in the hull, too, above the waterline. Papa John eased off on the throttle.

“Keep us going,” Ozzie yelled at him.

Bonnie was backing away from him, giving Ozzie a sloppy, scared look.

“You’re always calling me things,” he said to her. “I never liked it. I never thought it was funny.”

She said, “I’m sorry.” She sounded like she meant it, but he wasn’t sure she was sorry about calling him names. Maybe she was thinking how sorry she was she’d decided to come along.

They were maybe fifteen miles out; the freighters, rusty and clumsy-looking, were between them and land now. The sky was fresh paint blue. The breeze cool but not cold. It was the kind of weather that put a bounce in Ozzie’s step, a quiet burn in his blood.

Papa John had cut the engine and was smoking a cigarette in the captain’s chair, giving Ozzie his silent respect. And Bonnie was lying down in Papa John’s bunk. She’d gotten a little seasick.

Ozzie sat on the fish box, keeping his pistol right out there where the old man could see it.

He said, “I listened to all your bullshit. All that Hemingway this and Hemingway that shit. And what a great fisherman you were, and how you put this one over on this guy and that one over on that guy.”

“Look, Ozzie,” Papa John said, voice scratchy but steady. The fucker wasn’t too worried, despite the pistol and the shot Ozzie’d fired. John said, “You’re disappointed. I can dig that. I know it’s gotta be a big upset to you, me selling out.”

“You don’t know how I feel,” Ozzie said. “You don’t know squat about me. ’Cause of you never listened to me when I talked to you.”

Papa John was quiet, like he was trying to figure out the right approach to take. But Ozzie knew there wasn’t any right approach. This was a done deal.

He said, “You don’t know what it’s like growing up back on some phosphate mine road. Trucks coming past all day, getting white dust in everything, in the food, on my pillow at night. Hell, man, when I was little, I’d cough and it’d come up like grits. If it hadn’t of been for country music, I wouldn’t even known there was any other way of living.”

Papa John said, “Hey, listen, Oz …”

“You listen, you old cow. For a fucking change, would you, for once? And don’t tell me how bad my story is till I’m fucking well finished with it.”

John flicked his cigarette over the side, reached in his shirt pocket for his pack, and shook out another one.

Ozzie said, “Five years old and I was trying to sing songs. I’d stand up on a chair singing to my mother. That’s the way I always thought I’d get out of there. Listening to the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ every Saturday night and seeing those badasses up there flirting with those pretty ladies. That got me going. Up on my chair afterwards singing, making my momma smile.”