Sunburn (30 page)

Bert the Shirt, his lungs smarting, the phone like dry ice against his face, waited a moment, understood that no reply was coming, and hung up.

In Key West, the Godfather absently put down the handset; then, with trembling fingers, he riffled through Joey's desk drawers until he found a phone book. He looked up Arty Magnus's number; he dialed. The signal went as far as the ripped-out wires, then bounced back and rang and rang, it was hellish in the bland futility of its ringing. He shouted for his son Joey, told him to get the El Dorado ready.

On Varick Street, Bert climbed stiffly back into his cab. He picked up his dog, hugged it, and shivered. Then he looked at the cabbie's license mounted on the dashboard. The guy's first name was Pavel and his last name was mostly z's and w's.

———

"Ya know what I hate?" said Gino, punctuating the words with tilts and thrusts of his pistol. "I hate when a fuckin' outsider tries ta worm his way someplace he don't belong. Like a fuckin' smartass Jew in a Sicilian family. I mean, where the fuck da you come off? Gettin' buddy-buddy wit' my father. Skimmin' off money. Diggin' up secrets, stuff ya got no right ta know. You're a fuckin' worm, a bloodsucker. I hate that."

Arty stood there, pinned like a bug in Gino's flashlight beam. He didn't answer; there was nothing to say. He looked across the width of the bed and wondered if he would have a chance to make a move, to fight, before Gino killed him, or if he would go down passive and pathetic, without so much as a gesture of resistance.

"An' ya know what else I hate?" said the murderer. He jerked the light toward Debbi, seemed to want to ram it through her flesh. "I hate the kinda weak-ass woman who if her pussy's empty fifteen minutes, if she don't have a man t'usher her around, pay for things, she's in a fuckin' panic, she'll spread her legs for anything in pants. Even a Jew bloodsucker. Fuckin' tramp. I hate that."

Debbi said nothing. Her breath came in short quick puffs; Arty felt the heat of rage and terror pulsing off her flank.

Gino rose, he made a lot of noise as he unfolded his damp bulk from the chair. "The t'ree of us," he said, "we're goin' for a ride now. Someplace nice and quiet. The slut drives. I sit inna back. Ya don't do exactly like I tell ya, I splatter brains, I promise."

Joey was two blocks away when he saw the car shoot out of Nassau Lane and head up Fleming Street, pointing out of town. He couldn't see beyond the moonstruck windows, couldn't see how many people were inside. But he could tell it was a T-Bird, and he knew his brother's taste in cars.

He hit the gas, and the eight thick pistons of the El Dorado clattered in their bloated cylinders. His father braced himself with a thin yellowish hand against the dashboard. The old man still had his smoking jacket on, his face was gray and hollow under the flicking streetlamps.

At White Street the T-Bird ran a yellow light; Joey ran the red, tires squealing as the Caddy leaned fatly into the turn. He headed for the bridge that arched over Garrison Bight and led on to the highway. A rusty pickup truck pulled out of the bar at the marina, got between Joey and his quarry, and crawled. When it was time to make the left onto U.S. 1, the T-Bird slipped through on the arrow and the El Dorado sat there two cars back.

The Godfather watched the other car recede, his face like that of a dying man watching his own breath leave his body.

———

Calmly, unhurriedly, Mark Sutton and Ben Hawkins approached the empty cottage.

They saw Arty Magnus's bicycle chained to the Christmas palm. They saw the ripped screen on the front door. Mark Sutton knocked. When there was no reply, he tried the knob. It turned without resistance. He hesitated just a moment, then he entered. Ben Hawkins, weighing his misgivings, followed him into the living room.

The agents heard nothing, saw nothing save for the soft gleam of the single candle that still burned on the bedside table. An abashing thought assailed Mark Sutton: What if no one answered the door because Arty and Debbi were in the sack?

"Mr. Magnus?" he sang out, a little sheepishly.

He was answered by a hollow silence. Emboldened, he took out a flashlight and moved toward the bedroom. He found sleeves and cuffs poking out of drawers. He found the shredded pink tatters of what seemed to have been a woman's scarf. Ben Hawkins knelt to examine the ripped-apart fabric; there was mayhem in it, and he realized all at once that this sideshow might yet be a violent sideshow. By reflex, he felt quickly for his pistol in its shoulder holster. Then, suddenly intent, he took out his own beacon, combed the walk and floors and furniture with it. He went back to the living room, raked the light along the baseboards, found the yanked-out wires of the telephone.

Mark Sutton's beam discovered the moisture-fattened spiral notebook on the ratty table. "I have a feeling someone's coming back for that," he said.

———

Joey roared off at the green, wove in and out among the mopeds, the drunks who spilled forth from roadside taverns, the high Jeeps with their booming speakers. He scanned ahead, couldn't find the T-Bird. To the left, moonlight glinted on the Gulf of Mexico; to the right, the trashy neon of the Key West strip assaulted the eye.

Joey humped and veered, and at the east end of the island, just before the Cow Key Channel, he again picked up the Thunderbird, maybe a hundred fifty close-packed yards ahead. He urged more speed out of the Caddy's bellowing engine, trying desperately to catch his brother before the road narrowed, went two-lane, at Boca Chica. He cut onto the dusty shoulder to pass an ancient van; the huge tires shied on the gravel, Vincente bounced against the door.

When they passed the lane drop there were still half a dozen cars between them.

The honky-tonk had been left behind now; both sides of the road were flat and dim. Slices of Gulf and ocean shimmered among plains of limestone spoil and creeping mangrove. Spectral pelicans swooped and dipped in moonlight. Joey kept sneaking into the oncoming lane like a voyeur creeping closer to a window, was thwarted in his attempts to pass by glaring headlights and screaming horns.

Moonlight poured down, the landscape grew ever sparser. Then Joey saw a little cloud of grayish dust, perhaps a quarter mile up ahead. The dust swirled and drifted at the margin of the roadway, pulsed and billowed like a genie.

His younger son swallowed hard, braked hard, cut the wheel sharply to the right. The tires screeched, the car slid broadside, then was pointing through the cloud of limestone dust at an unpaved unmarked road that fell down from the hump of highway and snaked off through the mangroves.

———

Ben Hawkins unholstered his gun, positioned himself just to the right of Arty Magnus's bedroom doorway, and settled in to wait. The bedside candle still burned, soft breezes pushed its flame this way and that, shadows rolled around the walls with every flicker.

Mark Sutton staked out the kitchen. He put his pistol on the counter, leaned back and flexed his triceps. Now and then bugs rattled against the screen, time went very slowly. He crossed and uncrossed his ankles and at some point he knew he was going to slip across the living room and borrow Arty Magnus's notebook from the ratty metal table. He knew he shouldn't do it, it was privileged property, a journalist's personal notes. He teased himself another minute; then he held his breath and, stealthily as any thief, he glided through the dark and grabbed the stained and moisture-thickened book.

Ben Hawkins saw him sneak past, understood what he was up to, and said mildly, "I don't think you want to do that, Mark."

Sutton ignored him. Back in the kitchen, he switched on his flashlight and felt a rude excitement, the arousal of a boy with a pocketful of filthy pictures. He riffled through the damp and wavy pages of Arty Magnus's scrawl, at first reading only the headings, which struck him as peculiar. History of Sicily. Courage to Judge. Gardening in Queens. He had no doubt that these puzzling phrases were somehow coded, that beneath them, in the all but illegible squiggles and loops of Arty's writing, would be all sorts of implicating hints: names of criminals, dates of crimes, places where the bodies were buried.

Straining his eyes around the thin beam of the flashlight, Sutton struggled to read, decipher, memorize. Time flew now, the young agent was wholly caught up in his work. He knew that somewhere beyond the old man's musings and complaints and gropings after sense, bound up in the tangled knots of the ghostwriter's scribble, were the forbidden secrets whose discovery would establish him as a rising star, a man with a brilliant future.

The unmarked road soon became a mangrove tunnel.

Tangled boughs arched overhead; rubbery vines clutched at them and dangled down. Frogs croaked. Mosquitoes buzzed. Lizards clung to rocks and stumps, puffing out their ruby throats. The only sign of human presence was here and there a bleached-out beer can, a shattered soda bottle.

The beam of Joey's headlights was swallowed up by foliage and moths. He drove on slowly, the car rocked over chunks of pitted limestone and through fetid puddles that stank of sulfur.

The ground grew softer, spongy, as he drove, phased without boundary into inches-deep sea. Water squished from porous rock as from sodden moss. He looped around an encroaching web of mangrove roots, and when he straightened out again his headlights found the red gleam of a car's reflectors a hundred yards ahead. He tried to go faster; his wheels spun in the muck, he felt the chassis sinking. He eased off, cruised forward slowly as a docking ship.

They reached the dark car. It was a Thunderbird. There was no one in it. Vincente was out the door before Joey could speak, clambering through the rooty seeping swamp in his soft and slick-soled loafers.

Mangrove leaves drank up the moonlight, but here and there waves of brightness poured through like milk. In the gleaming patches there was water coated with pollen, tiny crabs nipping sideways over stones. Joey trailed his father as the old man pressed on through the marl. Wetness covered his shoe tops; the canopy of foliage cracked open to show a starry sky.

By its pallid light, Vincente Delgatto, himself still unseen and unheard from fifty feet away, saw his firstborn son standing calf-deep in slimy water, holding a moonlit gun on Debbi Martini and Arty Magnus. The tableau suggested a macabre wedding. In the silvery glow, Debbi looked like a bride, her skin lucent through her tear-streaked makeup; close at her side, Arty, his hands clenching and unclenching, had the posture of a nervous groom. Before them, Gino stood like a devil's priest who would bind them together for eternity.

The Godfather trudged on, dragging his feet through the sucking morass. The heavy air around him moved and pulsed as it got ready to carry sound. In a voice that was low and ancient and commanding, he said, "Gino, put the gun away."

His son's head snapped around like that of a boxer who's been jabbed; his eyes searched for the voice in the broken moonlight. Then he said, "Stay the fuck outa this, Pop. Don't come any closer."

Vincente kept coming. Each step through the slime took all his strength; one of his shoes was pulled off in the mud; he continued on without it. "Put it down, I said."

Gino licked his lips. Mosquitoes were flying in his ears, his eyes, he swatted at them with a gloved hand. "Mind your fuckin' business, Pop. These people gotta die."

The Godfather moved forward. Crabs scampered in front of him, toads leaped on floating leaves. He was twenty feet away. "They ain't done nothin' wrong," he said.

Gino laughed. It was a bitter mocking laugh, diabolical, forsaken. "You still think that's how it works, old man?"

Vincente dragged himself on. Hot blood pounded in his head, green streamers streaked behind his eyes. "Yeah, Gino, I do."

"You're wrong as shit," said his firstborn, waving blindly at mosquitoes.

"Gino," said his father. "Please." He trudged inexorably forward. Joey appeared at his shoulder. Arty and Debbi looked stiff and frail as glass in the cool white moonlight.

"Right, wrong—you're fuckin' nuts, old man."

"Don't hurt them, Gino. There's no reason."

"Pop, you just don't fuckin' get it, do you?"

No one saw Vincente reach into his smoking jacket. Wicked quick, his. 38 was in his hand. "Put the gun away, Gino."

Pale light glinted on Vincente's weapon. It took a moment for Gino to believe that he was seeing it. His tone turned wheedling, whiny, as full of despair as cruelty. "Pop, I can't."

"Drop it, Gino," Vincente said.

His son turned away from him, faced back toward his victims. His pistol was raised, his thick finger wrapped around the trigger. His voice was thin, metallic, his throat engorged with blood. "The way it stacks up, Pop, it's either them or me."