KW 09:Shot on Location (5 page)

Part 2

10.

Jake found himself in the water, clothes on, sneakers on, first wading then swimming, surrounded by twenty other flailing people who were trying clumsily, desperately, to help. It could have been a scene from the pilot of
Adrift,
people clawing at the sea with looks of horror on their faces. A better swimmer got to Donna first and dragged the limp body ashore; it left behind it a meandering zag of blood.

It was impossible to tell if Donna was alive or dead. Her right shoulder was hunched up much too high; the arm seemed stuck in an ungainly position, as if she was about to serve a tennis ball. The salt water had mostly stanched the bleeding from her appalling wound, but the torn flesh had an oozing sheen to it, a sheen like that of defrosting beef. Someone who knew CPR took charge. He turned Donna’s head sideways and pressed lightly on her belly. Pink water, an intermittent stream of it, as from a faulty pump, spilled from her nose and mouth. He cleared her tongue, pinched her nostrils, and starting breathing his own air down into her lungs.

After a while, her eyes very briefly opened, a single cough wracked her, and she gurgled out something that sounded like
Fuck happened?
Then she either passed out again or died.

In minutes a helicopter appeared. Riding pontoons, it landed in the shallows and dispatched two men and a stretcher. They carefully maneuvered the motionless Donna onto it and flew away.

Once the engine noise had faded there was a shocked and shamefaced silence around the set. People had a hard time meeting one another’s eyes. The cast and crew seemed in the grip of an obscure, unfocused guilt, as if they secretly believed that, by their lack of interest in Donna’s big scene and in Donna herself, they had somehow conspired in the calamity, tossed her away as a sacrifice. Cameras sat idle, lenses cast down. Lights and scrims hung forgotten in trees like pieces of last year’s Halloween display.

The Marine Patrol arrived, then the cops. They started asking questions, and the queasy silence was replaced by a chorus of nervous, staccato answers, people jumping at the chance to speak, to purge themselves of what they’d seen. But it turned out they had almost nothing of use to say. The incident had been filmed, correct? Well, actually, it hadn’t been. It
should
have been, but it wasn’t. Only a single camera had been trained on Donna as she swam. The cameraman, knowing that the take was ruined when he saw the sound man toss aside his headset, then catching the general panic as the boat wheeled into the channel, had abandoned his post to join in the futile waving and shouting. The camera had pivoted, capturing serenely useless images of blank horizon and innocent sky.

That left eyewitness accounts, and it turned out that, in the rush and terror of the moment, no two people had seen the exact same thing. The most basic details were a muddle. What color was the speedboat? Some people thought the hull was black, some remembered it as dark blue or green. Some people recalled an open cockpit and a windshield, others thought the cabin was enclosed. Some people had seen a lone man at the wheel; some thought they’d seen a pair of men, and others had seen no one on the boat at all. Did the boat ever seem to be intentionally steering toward the victim? No one could say one way or the other. Did it seem at any point, before or after the collision, to slow down? That was the one thing everyone agreed about. The craft had never slowed.

The cops left. The silence returned. The cameraman who’d failed to shoot the scene busied himself with trivial tasks and tried to disappear. People wandered, paced. No one quite knew what to do with the rest of the morning. After a brief and awkward time, Jake told Claire he had to leave.

He took the barge across to Big Sandy Key to meet the driver with the black Town Car. Seeing him alone, the driver said, “Holy shit. That chick they med-evac’d. Was that your girlfriend?”

“She’s not my girlfriend. Where’s the hospital?”

---

At the front desk of Florida Keys General, the switchboard was flashing and the receptionist was frazzled. No, there was no information available on Donna Alvarez. No, she had no idea when there would be. No, there was no one else he could speak with at this time. He was welcome to wait in the lobby but she really saw no point in it. Information would be made public as it came available. She had no other advice, she had to pick up on a call.

For a few minutes Jake paced through the lobby, slaloming around the potted palms, his feet still squishing in his sodden sneakers. Belatedly, it occurred to him to wonder why he’d gone to the hospital at all. He and Donna were mere acquaintances. And he was, generally speaking, a rather aloof sort of person, a watcher, a teller of stories rather than a participant in them. So why was he getting involved? The best he could come up with was that he didn’t seem to have a choice. You didn’t always get to pick the people or events you cared about. Sometimes things just happened. You started as a mere bystander, a chance witness, nothing more. Then, either suddenly or by slow degrees, you noticed you’d been tricked out of your detachment, you’d crossed a line and actually gave a shit how this thing turned out. Why? Simple decency? Idle curiosity? Or was it just that the bad luck of witnessing a train wreck conferred responsibility, imposed a connection it would be shameful or impossible to dodge?

He took another run at the receptionist and got nothing. Finally he gave up and went back to the compound. It was barely noon but it felt much later. He hadn’t yet spent twenty-four hours in Key West. Way too much had happened.

He pushed open the compound gate and found Joey Goldman sitting by the pool. Sitting, but not relaxing; he kicked his feet out, pulled them back, kept rearranging his elbows. He said to Jake, “Helluva thing, huh?”

“You’ve heard?”

“It’s all over local news already. I mean, come on, it’s show business. I came down to check on Donna’s place, see if there was anything I could do.”

Jake said, “I just came from the hospital.”

“Nice of you to go. You see her?”

“See her? I don’t even know if she’s alive.”

Joey blinked. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“She’s in the I.C.U. Serious condition, just down from critical. Expected to recover. It was on the radio like ten minutes ago.”

Jake felt his face get instantly hot, the skin congested. His eyes burned and welled up. This was from relief but he chose to ascribe it to fury. “Fuck! They won’t tell me anything while I’m standing in the lobby but they’ll put it on the radio?”

“Crappy hospital,” said Joey. “They shoulda took her to Miami. She was a star, that’s where they woulda took her. You saw it happen?”

“Yeah. It was nasty.” Jake blew out a deep breath. It suddenly seemed like it had been a while since he’d used his lungs. Inhaling, he remembered the taste of the air, flowery and salty. He sat down in a chair near Joey’s.

Joey said, “The cops are calling it an accident. That’s their way of saying the victim was an out-of-towner and they don’t wanna be bothered.”

Jake said nothing.

“It look like an accident to you?”

The writer fumbled for an answer. Until that moment it hadn’t really occurred to him that the disaster could have been anything else. The possibility put a sick taste at the back of his throat. “I … I don’t know,” he said. “People like to go too fast in boats, right? That adrenaline thing. Plus, the way those crazy speedboats ride so high, I can’t figure how anyone sees what’s out in front of him. Happened so fast, maybe the guy didn’t even know he’d hit anything.”

“He’d’ve felt a bump,” said Joey. “Could’ve been bottom. Could’ve been a big ray or a manatee. Next time the guy turns on a radio or television, he’ll know what he hit. Then we’ll see what happens. My guess: nothing.”

Jake looked down at the pool and had a brief, lovely, and disturbing vision of Donna swimming in it. He blinked it away. “Nothing?”

“Think about it,” Joey said. “Say it was an accident. Totally innocent. Now it’s a hit-and-run. The guy’s gonna turn himself in? What if he was hopped up, drunk, in the middle of a blowjob? What if it was someone’s kid out for a joy ride? Forget the criminal part, just look at the liability. I just don’t see somebody coming forward.” He paused, rearranged his restless feet. “Even if it was an accident.”

Jake looked sideways at Joey. “But you don’t really think it was.” He didn’t put it as a question.

Joey shrugged. “Hey, wha’ do I know? Very little. But I’ve lived down here a long time and I know there are a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things with very fast boats. Running drugs, running guns, smuggling people. And usually not getting caught. That fucking boat could be anywhere by now. Miami. Cuba. The Bahamas. Or tucked into some mangroves right under our noses.”

Jake still resisted the idea of murderous intent. It just distressed and offended him too much. “Why would someone want to hurt her?”

“I’m not saying someone does. I’m just saying we may never know. Happens a lot down here. Weird shit happens and stays weird. Eventually people lose interest or forget. Or get paid off to forget. That’s just how it goes.”

There was a silence. The palm fronds waved and scratched. A faint whiff of chlorine spun up from the pool.

Jake said, “D’you know her very well?”

“Well? Not really. But she’s been here almost three months, off and on, whenever they’ve been shooting. Usually on her own. At the start there was a guy with her some of the time. Haven’t seen him lately. I think she threw him out a month or so ago. Just as well. Struck me as a knucklehead, maybe worse. But her I like. A little crazy, I think, but a pistol.”

“Yeah, she is. Both.”

Jake looked away and Joey took the opportunity to send him an appraising glance. The new arrival looked fairly ragged, beat up, overwhelmed; Joey felt bad for him and wanted to do him a kindness. Rising from his chair, he said, “You happen to be free for dinner?”

Jake just blinked.

“Tell you what. Why don’t you come by later and eat with us. Me, my wife, an old friend.”

Touched, surprised, Jake said, “Jeez, that’s really nice but —”

“Come on. We’ll drink some wine, we’ll toast to Donna’s health. You’ll feel better being with some people.” He glanced toward the stunt girl’s empty cottage. “Little too quiet around here today. Come by around six. Twelve-fourteen White Street, two blocks before the pier.”

11.

At a private marina on an exclusive island in Biscayne Bay, a gleaming speedboat was being carefully tied into its berth.

The boat’s color was a mysteriously shimmering purplish gray, easily mistaken for blue or black. Its steeply raked and mirror-tinted windshield was seamlessly joined to a fixed bimini that made the cockpit appear, from various angles, either open or closed. There was something shark-like in the tumescent bulge of the hull. The custom craft was on the one hand very distinctive and on the other hand a numb amalgam of the many hundreds of fast, loud, expensive and dangerous toys that plied the waters of the Gulf Stream and the Florida Straits.

When the last dock line had been cleated off, a big man stepped from the boat, eschewing the offered gangway in favor a single, long, thick-legged but athletic step to shore. Reaching into a pocket of his tight black shorts, he produced a wad of bills and peeled off a fifty for the wiry Spanish guys who manned the ropes. Then he headed toward land, where a rank of condos rose like abrupt glass buttes in a landscape that was otherwise astonishingly flat.

Seen from behind, the big man was a series of hard angles and lumpy curves. His short black hair was clipped knife-straight across his neck; muscles bulged in his shoulders like the knobs in braided bread. His hips were square and narrow but his rounded buttocks flinched inside his too-tight shorts, pulling the seam into his butt-crack, forcing him to kick out and shake a foot every third step to clear it.

He walked over to a high-rise whose pretentious porte-cochere was mere yards from the softly lapping bay. He gave his name to a surly doorman and was shown up to the twenty-second floor. Not to an apartment on the twenty-second floor — to the entire level of the building. He was met at the elevator by a bodyguard even beefier than himself. The two giants greeted one another with a light bump of their enormous fists, then the visitor was ushered into the sprawling apartment.

In the living room he was briefly blinded by the glare of the unshaded windows, behind which the view was so large you could see the curving of the earth. Yachts, fishing skiffs, cabin cruisers inched along the water, leaving tiny chevron wakes like toy craft in a park pond. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a short man sitting on a sofa, one arm circling behind as though staking claim to some babe. He was short but not small; he had a thick neck that seemed to have been hammered down into his wide shoulders and a barrel chest that stretched the buttons of his patterned shirt. He said, “So?”

By way of answer, the visitor reached into his shorts and produced the ignition key for the speedboat. The short man raised a hand and he tossed the key to him.

“Ya have the class to gas it up at least?”

“To the brim,” the big man said.

“It’s clean?”

“Washed and buffed at the gas dock. Those spicks are pretty good.” There was a brief silence, then he added, “Don’t worry, no problem, everything went fine. Just a little something I had to do.”

The short man stopped him with a gesture. “Don’t tell me how it went. Don’t tell me where you went. Don’t tell me what you did. It’s got nothing to do with me. You asked me to loan you the boat, I loaned you the boat. I did you a favor. There’s any headaches, I report it stolen and it’s your ass that’s in a sling.”

“I get it. That’s the deal.”

“And inna meantime, you owe me. Don’t forget that. Don’t make me remind you.”

He ended the meeting by looking away. That was all it took, just a shift in his glance. The big man left, discreetly kicking at his too-tight shorts as he walked.