Tricky Business (13 page)

They started across the common room, going as fast as they could, which was slow. When they'd almost reached the grand piano, halfway to the door, Arnie glanced right. Harpwell appeared to be finishing his conversation.

“Move it,”
Arnie hissed.

“This is as fast as . . . Oh
no,
” said Phil. He had walked into Mrs. Krugerman, the woman who had the hots for him. She'd been lurking behind the piano and had lunged her walker into Phil's path.

Some enchanted evening,
shrieked Mrs. Bendocker,
you may see a stranger . . .

“Hey, stranger,” said Mrs. Krugerman, grabbing Phil's wrist. “Where've
you
been hiding?”

“I have to go,” said Phil. He tried to pull his hand loose, but Mrs. Krugerman, who took Tae-Bo for Seniors, was stronger than he was.

“Let me go,” said Phil, trying to yank his arm loose.

“You just
got
here!” said Mrs. Krugerman, strengthening her grip. The woman was a python.

“Come
on,
” said Arnie. Harpwell was finished with his conversation; he was now looking at some papers in his hand, starting to turn their way.

“She's got me!” said Phil. “You go on without me!”

Arnie looked over at Harpwell. He was still looking down at his papers, but was walking slowly in their direction. Any second now, he'd look up and see them, and that would be it. Arnie glanced back through the lobby doors, at the waiting van. He took a step that way, then looked back into Phil's eyes, his buddy's eyes, the eyes of his only friend left in the world, and he knew what he had to do.

Arnie went to Mrs. Krugerman, stepped up close to her side, his body pressing against her walker, put his arms around her, and said: “I'm the one you want, darling.” And he turned her face to his and kissed her on the lips, a real kiss, mouth open, some tongue, the first such kiss he had given a woman who was not his wife since 1946. Mrs. Krugerman, who had never been kissed this way by
any
man, including her late husband of 46 years, went limp, and in her limpness released Phil's wrist. Arnie pulled his lips from Mrs. Krugerman's, put his arms on her shoulders, looked her in the eyes, and said, “I must go now, my darling. Wait for me.” He released her and stepped back, and only her walker kept her from collapsing in a rapturous swoon.

Arnie looked over at Harpwell, still looking down at his papers, but only yards away now.

“Go go
go,
” Arnie hissed, shoving Phil toward the lobby doors, which sighed open automatically to let them through. As they sighed closed again, Harpwell looked up from his papers. His eyes registered the two departing shapes, and there was something about them that tickled something somewhere in his brain, something that he almost started to retrieve. But before he could get to it, all thoughts were blown from his brain as Mrs. Bendocker took her shrieking to a new level, aiming gamely for, but missing, those big final notes . . .

Outside, in the driver's seat of the van, Nestor said, “What the hell is
that
?”

“Mrs. Bendocker,” said Arnie, climbing into the back.

“Sounds like some kind of human sacrifice,” said Nestor.

“I don't think she's human,” said Arnie.

Phil got in next to Arnie.

“Jesus, that was close,” he said. “Listen, Arnie, what you did back there, that was, Jesus, I mean, thank you.”

“Forget it,” said Arnie.

“What'd he do?” said Nestor.

“I said,
forget
it,” said Arnie. He still had the taste of Mrs. Krugerman in his mouth. It was not an unpleasant taste. It was the taste of Fixodent. Arnie would not admit this to Phil—he could barely admit it to himself—but he kind of liked it, tasting Mrs. Krugerman. Maybe he would look her up some time, see if she played pinochle.

“OK, then,” said Nestor, putting the van in gear, easing out of the covered driveway. “I still think you boys are crazy, going out on a boat in this weather.”

“Yeah,” said Phil, watching huge drops splatter on the windshield. “It's gonna be ugly out there.”

“Hey,” said Arnie, “after what we've been through already, how bad can it be?”

“THIS IS GONNA BE BAD,” SAID EDDIE SMITH, on the bridge of the
Extravaganza of the Seas,
looking out at the bay.

Eddie Smith was captain of the
Extravaganza.
He was a good seaman, a natural boathandler, always had been. He once had a very promising nautical career. He hadn't expected it to lead to this, driving this butt-ugly neon-smeared tub around in circles, going nowhere.

In the '80s, he'd been a hotshot mate in the cruise industry, rising fast through the ranks on the big ships that sailed from the Port of Miami, loaded to the gunwales with chunky Midwesterners wearing active leisurewear and blindingly white sneakers, ready to spend a fun-filled week at sea, getting chunkier.

In those days, Eddie had cut a fine figure. He looked good in his white officer's uniform, reminding people of Kevin Costner. He was tall and lean, hair going just a little gray, indicating seriousness, offset by an easy smile, indicating a desire to get laid.

Which he did, a lot. Single women went to great lengths to be in Eddie's vicinity. So did married women. That was Eddie's problem: the married women. The truth was, he liked it
better
when they were married. He liked the excitement, making plans to meet them on deck, looking around to make sure nobody saw, climbing into the lifeboat where he kept a blanket stashed. Or sometimes, when their husbands were in the casino, Eddie would even go to their cabins—into their damn
cabins
—and the sex was even better, because of the danger of getting caught.

So for a while there, Eddie was one happy ship's officer. But like most men whose brains are in their dicks, he was not really thinking things through.

Imagine you're a guy who drives a snack-food van. You're out there every freaking day, rain or shine, hot or cold, fighting traffic, busting your hump to refill vending machines with Doritos, Snickers, all that crap that office workers eat. You're constantly being hassled by cubicle dwellers who claim the machine ate their dollar, acting like you're supposed to reach into your pocket and just hand them a dollar, these people who make more than you do for sitting on their Snickers-padded asses all day. You don't like this job, but you've been doing it for twelve years, and you're probably going to keep doing it for twenty-five more because you have a wife and two kids and no college degree and this is what you do.

Now imagine that your wife talks you into taking a cruise, which you really can't afford, but, hey, you haven't had a real vacation, just the two of you, since you went on your honeymoon, which was in Atlantic City, and it rained both days. So you figure, OK, what's another two grand on the Visa, you're never gonna pay the goddamn thing off anyway.

And so you go on the cruise, the two of you, and it really is nice—Jesus, the
food
they give you—and you're having a good time, even winning a little at the slots. And then on the third night, this officer sits at your table, tall guy, big smiler, white teeth, you can tell he thinks he looks like hot shit in his uniform. The women, your wife included—your wife
especially
—are looking at him like he's a movie star. You even hear your wife tell somebody else's wife this guy looks exactly like Kevin Costner, whom your wife loves. The guy is talking about what it takes to handle a big ship like this, how
complicated
it is, and your wife is eating this up, and you're thinking you'd like to see this pretty boy handle a truck in the traffic you deal with every day, without 97 crewmen to help, but you don't say anything, you just order another beer.

After dinner, you want to hit the casino again, maybe try blackjack tonight, and your wife says she's tired, she's just going to take a walk on the upper deck and maybe turn in early, and you say suit yourself, because to be honest you're a little pissed off at her anyway. When you get back to the cabin, she's acting like she's asleep, but you can tell she's really not. You get in bed, and after a while you hear her crying. You ask her what's wrong and she says nothing. You say, OK, then why are you crying? She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom and closes the door and stays in there doing God knows what, and you fall asleep.

For the rest of the cruise, she acts weird, like she's off in space. A couple more times, you hear her crying in bed, but she still won't tell you why. You figure she probably got her period.

But when you get home, even after a week, she's still acting weird. And then one night, after the kids are asleep, you come into the bedroom and she's sitting on the floor, back against the wall, sobbing like a baby, and when you ask her why, all she says is I'm sorry, over and over, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, and you sit down next to her and put your arm around her and hug her, and that makes her sob even harder, and finally she turns to you, and she tells you about that night on the ship, how he took advantage of her, he gave her something to drink, she didn't know what was happening, it was all hazy in her mind, she was too scared to say anything afterward. Somewhere in your mind is the suspicion that this might not be exactly what happened, but you believe her, because you need to believe her.

That's how Eddie Smith's cruise-ship career ended. Cruise lines depend heavily on repeat business, and have a near-pathological obsession with customer satisfaction. The last thing you want, if you're a cruise executive, is to pick up the phone and hear a customer screaming that he's calling the police, calling a lawyer, calling the TV stations, that he didn't pay your company two thousand fucking dollars to have one of your employees jump his wife.

Eddie's ship was at sea when this call came. The cruise line sent a helicopter to pick him up. That's how badly they wanted to get him off the ship, bring him back to Miami, and fire him.

In the end, the D.A. didn't press charges, because it was pretty obvious to everybody but the husband what had really happened. But the cruise line had to pay $50,000 to make the couple shut up, and there was no way it was going to hire Eddie back. None of the major lines would even talk to him. He was cancer. He had traded his career for a sexual experience that had lasted maybe eight minutes. And it hadn't even been particularly
good
sex.

Eddie quickly ran out of money and started working as a mate on day-charter fishing boats out of Bayside, playing caddie to guys who, on their own, couldn't catch a fish if it jumped into their shorts. He baited their hooks, rigged their lines, told them when they had a fish on, told them how to play it, half the time pretty much hauled the damn thing in himself. On the way home, he opened their beers, lit their cigars, listened to their bullshit, pretended to laugh at their moron jokes, hustling for tips.

He was drinking a lot now, getting those veins on his nose. He lost some hair, didn't take care of his teeth, no longer reminded people of Kevin Costner. He discovered cocaine, which was not difficult in Miami in the '80s, when it was everywhere, it was falling out of the damn sky. He used it a little at first, and then more, and then more, and pretty soon he didn't have enough money to support his habit. This is when the guy who supplied it asked him if he was interested in getting into the supply side of the business.

And so Eddie embarked on a new kind of nautical career, living in the Bahamas, piloting a 38-foot go-fast boat, twin turbocharged 500-horsepower engines, screaming across the Gulf Stream in the dead of night at sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty miles an hour, lights out, rafting up with a transfer boat off the U.S. coast, offloading the cargo, then getting the hell out of there.

The money was very, very good, enough to retire on soon if Eddie had saved it instead of putting it up his nose and leaving thousand-dollar tips for barmaids, just to get their attention. He'd go to Freeport, to one of the big casinos, with $15,000 cash in his pocket and wake up three days later with nothing, not even a memory of where it all went, and he didn't care because there was always more coming. He figured there would be time to settle down, one of these months, but time ran out one night at Fowey Rocks, about ten miles out from Miami. Eddie had just rafted up and was about to transfer 1,400 pounds of cocaine and 600 pounds of pot when
oh shit
there's a Coast Guard helicopter screaming over the horizon, searchlight blazing, making it look like daylight out there at 3:30 A.M.