Tropical Freeze (29 page)

Papa John smoked faster and faster now. He kept glancing down into the cabin, probably to see if Bonnie was going to be any help in this.

Ozzie felt strange telling this old man about his own mother. He wasn’t sure why he was even doing it. It was just coming, and Ozzie was riding with it, feeling himself swell as he got it out.

Papa John said, “Listen, boy. I’m getting some money out of this deal. That man, Benny, he’s paying me a considerable amount to use that bar as his playhouse. It’d only be fair if I cut you in on the cash. How would that be?”

Ozzie said, “My parole officer used to say being poor wasn’t any fucking excuse, people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps all the time. Well, fuck that. We was so poor we couldn’t afford no bootstraps to pull ourselves up by.”

Papa John nodded like he understood. But Ozzie knew he was just humoring him. Biding his time, probably considering how to get down below to his big .45.

Ozzie, feeling stronger every sentence of this he got out, said, “I’m standing up there the other night singing to those rich fools. And I’m thinking, this ain’t nothing. I been afraid of it all my life, singing in front of a crowd of people. But I get up there, and shit, it’s easy. It wasn’t nothing to it.

“So, I go, hell, I bet it’s the same way with everything. Being scared’s a bunch of shit. It’s what kept my momma living with my hell-and-damnation daddy on that phosphate road. Just that simple. Being scared kept her poor.”

Man, now he was starting to wish he’d brought along a recorder, get some of this down. There were some good things.

He said, “Isn’t no reason on God’s green earth I can’t start being exactly what I want to be. You were getting me ready to be what
you
wanted me to be, so when you died, I could carry things on for you. But the thing is, Papa John, I’m ready now, I’m ready. I’m stepping up onstage now. Today.”

Papa John didn’t react. Maybe he was catching on to how serious this was.

Ozzie saw a sea gull working its way toward them from over John’s shoulder. It was one of those laughing gull things that squawked like a drunk. He stood up and aimed at the bird and squeezed off a round. Missed it. He looked back, and John had changed positions, moved over to the other side of the cockpit. Yeah, they were going to get into it. And it was OK. Just fine and dandy.

“How does ten thousand dollars sound?” Papa John said, his voice a little raspier than usual. Feeble old fart.

“I’m not bargaining with you, old man,” he said. “I’m taking it all. Why don’t you pay attention to me now?”

John was swallowing overtime. He said, “Benny Cousins and me are partners, Oz. He’s gonna want to know what happened to me. You shoot that gun, you’re as good as dead yourself, boy. You better consider it a minute.”

“Benny Cousins wants that bar, he’ll have to deal with Ozzie Hardison now. I can drive a hardass bargain myself.”

“That man’ll eat your lunch,” John said. “Then he’ll eat the rest of you.”

Ozzie stood up, looked around for another sea gull. “That little shitheel? Hell, there ain’t a nigger in Georgia if I can’t take care of that pipsqueak.”

John coughed. He coughed harder, bringing one hand to his throat.

Ozzie was looking at Papa John, and all of a sudden the old man’s eyes came loose, rolling everywhere. And John, very slow, stretched his hands out, in a trance, clawing down thick cobwebs in front of him. Pawing at the air in slo-mo, he leaned toward Ozzie, a strangled look on his face, making gargling noises.

“Don’t pull any shit,” Ozzie said.

Bonnie was in the doorway, watching Papa John.

“He’s having a heart attack, you dorkus,” she said. “You’re giving him a fucking fatal heart attack.”

“It’s a trick,” Ozzie said. He had the pistol pointed at the old man’s chest. “If he don’t settle down, I’ll give him a thirty-eight-caliber heart attack.”

Papa John went down on his knees, still making puking noises but nothing coming up. He stared up at the sky over Ozzie’s head like he heard the heavenly choirs starting in on his song.

Bonnie moved up next to him. She helped him lie down flat on the deck. There was some drool bubbling up out of his mouth now, and the man was squinching his eyes. Bonnie hit him hard on the chest. Then pounded him again.

“I don’t know what to do,” she screamed at Ozzie.

“Don’t do nothing,” he said. “Let him play it out.”

She leaned over him as Papa John squeezed his eyes, hugged himself. And then gasped and let go.

Bonnie tipped the old man’s head back, opened his mouth, pinched his nose, and pressed her mouth to his. She started trying to inflate him.

“Stop that,” Ozzie said. “If he’s dead, let him stay that way. Get away from him.”

But she didn’t. She kept breathing into him, and when she came up for her own breath, she’d hammer Papa John on the heart again with her fist. Down for another blow. It made Ozzie sick watching that. Her mouth getting slimy.

Ozzie stepped across Bonnie and the old man, glancing down as he did, and thinking maybe he’d caught a blue tint in the old man’s face now. Down in the cabin, it smelled like mildew and piss. He poked under the mattress, opened all the closets. Glanced back and Bonnie was still going at it.

He tore down the calendar thumbtacked to the clothes locker, nothing behind it. And then a photo Scotch-taped up beside it of Papa John with Benny standing out in front of the Bomb Bay Bar. Benny had his arm around John’s shoulder, both of them smiling to beat the band. Ozzie tore that into confetti and proceeded to ransack the cabin.

The money was in the vegetable hamper, in with a shriveled-up apple. Ozzie stuffed it in a grocery sack. It looked to be even more cash than what’d been in the briefcase the other night. Bingo, bango, bongo, there’ll be dancing in the Congo.

He came back onto the deck, and there she was, Florence Nightingale, still huffing and blowing into Papa John’s mouth.

The old man sputtered once, and Bonnie pulled away from him and told him, yeah, come on, you’ll make it. Breathe, goddamn it.

And Papa John blew a spit bubble and popped it. And then he opened his eyes. Ozzie sighed. Relieved and pissed both.

Papa John’s eyes looked up at Ozzie. The old man followed Ozzie’s hand as he brought the pistol up to the back of Bonnie’s head and got steady. He aimed down over her shoulder at John. Ozzie let the old man think about that for a minute, get a grip on it. He felt the trigger cool against his finger, just a curl away from being different. Being a rich man, a man the weatherlady could look up to. Could maybe even love.

Ozzie said to Bonnie, “Well, you finally found some use for all that hot air inside you.”

She started to turn her head and say something bitchy, but he fired one quick shot down through Papa John’s brain. Bonnie screamed, rolled off to the side. She’d probably be deaf for a month.

Ozzie stepped back and watched the blood gather beside John’s bristly cheek. He stared at it for a moment, then stooped over and touched a finger to it, and brought it up to his nose. It didn’t smell like much. He’d thought it should smell like Canadian Club or something.

Ozzie shook his head, trying to get his brain firing all its cylinders. Blood smelling like whiskey? What was he thinking about? He looked at his hands shaking. Over at where Bonnie was. She’d crawled backwards across the deck and was trying to make herself small under the steering wheel. Ozzie put his finger on his neck to feel the bump of his blood. Yeah, it was jitterbugging all right.

“I done it,” he said to her. “I finally shot somebody. Killed him. Jesus Christ Almighty. And it was easy. Fairly easy.”

Bonnie cowered there. Every bit of smartass venom she’d ever stored away was trickling out between her legs. She was sitting in a warm pool of smartass.

He listened, and it was spooky quiet out there on the ocean. He tried to think what to do now. How to handle the next part. Papa John would’ve known. He would’ve just said, do this, go there, do that. Ozzie thought for a second he was sorry he hadn’t paid more attention to the old man, learned a little more stuff before killing him.

But no, he couldn’t start thinking that way. He’d get in a panic if he did and start hearing his daddy’s voice, or else the voice of God. No, sir, he had to get a grip.

He reached down and took hold of John’s chin and turned his face up so he could see him. Papa John had an expression on his face Ozzie recognized. It was a whole lot like the look Bonnie got when she was working on one of her stained glass designs. The little smile that came over her when things were starting to fit together good.

He walked over to Bonnie, the pistol still in his hand. He stood in front of her and she looked up at him and there wasn’t nothing but hangdog cringing fear in her face.

A title came to him then. God, he wished he had a pencil and a scrap of writing paper. But maybe if he tried hard, he could just remember it. It was good enough, it could be an album title.

He said it out loud to Bonnie to help keep it in his head, “You killed one, you killed them all.”

At the front door Roger told Joey that it was OK, he knew Thorn. Knew what to do with him. Joey shot Thorn a see-you-later-asshole look and headed back to poolside.

Now Roger was taking Thorn on a tour of Benny’s house. Leading him somewhere but letting him have a gander along the way. Thorn hesitated in the doorway of the living room. Roger was in bathing trunks, squeaky rubber thongs, and a shorty T-shirt that revealed his expanding gut, standing at Thorn’s shoulder while he surveyed the room.

Benny’s fireplace was veneered with slabs of bleached coral, pitted and veined. In the vaulted oak ceiling there were skylights shaped into stars, boxes, triangles. Bright Audubon prints crowded the walls, egrets, herons, standing in shallow water pulsed to strike. A waterfall spilled from a spout in one wall, trickled down some mottled chunks of granite and poured into a trough of green glass. A couple of sluggish goldfish swam inside.

Dark walnut antiques were arranged rigidly in the middle of the room. They had plush red velvet covers. There were wing-backs, ottomans, two couches, a love seat. Heavy burgundy drapes darkened the room.

“Subtropical funeral parlor,” Thorn said.

“The man couldn’t decide,” Roger said. “Beach house or bordello. His two favorite places.”

Thorn could feel his heart knocking. Everywhere he turned, he saw the faint afterimage of her white hair floating on the gleam of the bay. He could still taste her lips as he had tried to revive her. And now Claude’s shirt. The hole in the ground. His hands quivered.

Roger said, “Mr. Cousins’s just got eclectic tastes. Let’s try this, let’s try that.”

Thorn hid his hands behind his back. He said, “Where is he?”

“I’m used to it, though,” Roger said. “Twenty years with the Justice Department, you don’t get exposed to a lot of good taste.”

Roger led them down the hallway. Thorn glancing up a spiral oak stairway, opening himself for any sounds, scents of Darcy.

“I want to see him, Roger,” Thorn said.

“He’s at Rotary, putting the trim on his float.”

Thorn followed him into the Florida room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the flats, out to where Darcy must have taken her photographs.

The rattan furniture was covered in prints of ferns, palm fronds. Two white paddle fans stirred the air. In one corner there was a life-size carving of a Haitian woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head.

“Buy you a drink?” Roger said.

Thorn said he wasn’t thirsty. He sat on the couch.

Roger got comfortable in one of the chairs, put his feet up on a rattan stool. He chewed his gum thoughtfully.

In a moment or two he said, “You know, back when Mr. Cousins interviewed me for this job, he asked me just one question. Up there in his office, both of us in our best suits, him there behind that beautiful desk, he looks me straight in the eye and asks me, if I had the ability to suck my own dick, would I do it?”

“He’s such a classy guy.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you miss the point,” said Roger. “He asks me that, and I’m thinking, what’s the right answer? No? That’s the disciplined response. That’s what you’d say in the FBI. Hell, no, sir. And if I say yes, what does that make me? Is he trying to weed out fags? Or what?”

“Yeah, right,” Thorn said, “this is a Zen master question. Sound-of-one-hand-clapping kind of thing.”

“All right,” Roger said, “all right, that’s fair. I’m glorifying this a little maybe. But what I’m telling you is, I said yes, yes, I would. ’Cause yes was the truth. And Benny smiled. That’s what he wanted, the truth. He stood up, put his hand out, and shook mine and told me, good, that was good. He didn’t want to hire any goddamn liars or puritans.”

“So you think you work for Albert Schweitzer?” Thorn said.

“Boy, are you cranky today,” Roger said, frowning, smacking his gum. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “What I’m trying to say to you is, you and me, we sort of hit it off that first day, laughed at each other’s jokes. That’s good. I like you. In another time we could be buddies. But just now we’re standing out there bad-mouthing Benny’s taste, and it comes to me that maybe you’re expecting me to gang up on him some way or other, or maybe not carry out something the man asks me to do, regarding you or anything else. Well, I’m telling you straight out, that ain’t going to happen. I’m a loyal guy, true to my school.”

Roger chewed his gum, leaned back. Thorn looked out at the blue-green dazzle of the flats. He thought he could see some bonefish tailing out about a hundred yards. The water was so shallow it looked as if a man could walk across there, clear to the horizon and not get his ankles wet. Be like walking through heavy dew.

“Tell me, Roger, you know Benny’s houseguests are crooks?”

“Where’d you get a thought like that?”

“Day you turned in your badge, you turned in your morals, too? That how it went? Or did you even wait that long?”

Roger snorted.

“Listen up, Thorn. If somebody wants to buy one of your fishing lure things, you check out their rap sheet first? Does anybody down here care who sleeps in their motel, buys their rumrunner? Shit, no. A guy pulls out his wad of hundreds, you give ’im what he asked for, right? Well, that’s how it works. It’s America. Until proven guilty. And Benny sells security systems. All kinds of people want security. Guys from both sides. That’s just how it is.”