Tropical Freeze (11 page)

That got a slow turn of his head. A squint in his eyes and lift of eyebrow, theatrical slyness.

Gaeton said, “Yeah, that’s right. I know a good bit about you. Heard it on the coconut telegraph. It’s an island, Oz. Somebody takes a deep breath on one side of this town, somebody’s eardrums pop on the other. You forget, man, I lived here all my life. I seen Papa John’s boys before, coming and going. I know what kind of shit he gets you boys to pull for him.”

“What a lying sack.” Ozzie stood and picked up one of the barbells, dangled it over Gaeton’s face. “Don’t give me any more of this bullshit, or I’ll do you right here and now.”

Gaeton said, “He have you popping Pirellis at the restaurant parking lots? Slapping bald ones on his rims, while the guy’s inside guzzling martinis. The Grander brothers still buying them off Papa John? Huh? He still into that?”

Gaeton took a breath, swallowed. He could feel the quirkiness in this boy, his impulses clashing with what intelligence he had. The boy was teetering, and Gaeton wasn’t completely sure which way to nudge him. He wasn’t sure anymore if he was in more trouble or less of it than if Benny was behind this.

Keeping his voice as mellow as he could make it, he said, “I want you to listen carefully to what I’m telling you. All you have to do is ask anybody in Key Largo. You find out I’m her brother, you come back here, unroll me. I’ll get up, and get back to the job I’m doing. Charge this up to an unfortunate mistake. But if you go ahead with what you’re planning, you’re going to get caught within twenty-four hours, and you’ll never see Darcy again. You won’t see your balls again either.”

Ozzie’s eyes seemed to dim from the power drain of the thought.

Gaeton said, “And hey, while you’re checking this out, you don’t want me to die, right?” Ozzie stared down at Gaeton with a sleepwalker’s bland face. Yes, master. What shall I do? No wonder Papa John liked this boy. “So, Ozzie. Go outside and bring me back some water.”

Ozzie left and in a few minutes returned, dragging the hose into the shed. He aimed it carelessly toward Gaeton’s face, squeezed the trigger. Gaeton had to twist to take a bite out of the scalding jet. It’d probably been heating in the sun for a week. But hell, it’d keep him alive for a few more hours, and it washed away that damn roach head.

It was Sunday afternoon, not much after one. Thorn watched the low, leaden clouds. They’d drained the blue from the water. The bay was a drab silver. No horizon line. The forward edge of the front had passed through last night. Today, as the drizzle stopped, the cold would settle in. Chapping weather.

He watched from his stone picnic table as a pelican coasted at fifty feet. A slight dip of the wing to touch up its flight. Then the big bird scudded, backstroked to a stall, and plunged in a streamlined mass into a boiling school of bait fish. In a few seconds it bobbed to the top and tipped its head back, riding the small chop its splash had made. It floated there long enough to let the pinfish slip into its throat, then dragged itself into flight again. The water quickly calm, the sky empty. Nobody had screamed. No one was weeping, not that you could see.

A brown Mercedes pulled into the yard, parked next to Thorn’s VW convertible. The driver looked at Thorn for a minute or two and got out.

He was about six feet and had black hair and was wearing a shiny blue Adidas warm-up suit, with new white running shoes. He’d left the motor running in the Mercedes and was walking down to the dock where Thorn was working on the ballyhoo plug.

He’d used Gaeton’s knife, putting some nice gill grooves in the side of the plug. The Buck knife had felt immediately natural. The right size, right heft. He hadn’t made a slip with it yet.

After he’d gotten the gills right, he’d begun to paint the plug silver. For the last hour he’d been trying to get a shimmer on its belly. But in that light everything was dulled. Hard to tell how he was doing.

The man stopped a few feet from the table. He seemed uncomfortable, in those clothes, in this spot. A long way from the cocktail lounges, shiny gray suits.

“Mr. Cousins got your code violations fixed,” the man said. He handed Thorn some forms from Building and Zoning. Thorn looked at them and put them aside.

He wiped the last drops of silver paint back on the rim of the small paint bottle and rested the brush on the edge of the picnic table.

“Mr. Cousins wants to talk to you.” The guy spoke with a lot of extra flesh muffling his words. He sounded like a retired boxer who’d specialized in the rope-a-dope.

Thorn said, “I’m working.”

The man looked at the ballyhoo plug, then at Thorn, as if he hadn’t been programmed for this many variables.

“He fixed your tickets,” the man said. “It’s courteous to go meet the gentleman.”

“Listen to that,” Thorn said, lifting his head. It was the repeated shriek of an osprey. The bird, a saltwater eagle, had built a nest in his neighbor’s satellite dish around Christmas. Both the osprey and its nest were federally protected. And the man was a past president of the local Audubon group. Click, gotcha. So now his neighbor couldn’t even rotate his dish. It might dislodge the bird. Thorn had been watching the nest’s progress just above the treeline, maybe a half mile off.

Thorn said, “When you can see your neighbor’s satellite dish, it’s time to move on. Know who said that?”

“The smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, is how it goes,” the man said. “And it’s from the
Ching Tao
.”

Thorn looked at him more closely. The guy was smiling inside there, inside all that phlegm and muscle and monosyllable.

“I thought it was Davy Crockett,” Thorn said.

“Crockett stole it from the
Ching Tao
,” the man said.

Thorn wasn’t sure now who was conning who.

The man put out his hand, said his name was Roger.

“How’d he fix my tickets, Roger?” Thorn shook his hand.

“I guess he has ways,” Roger said. “He seems to’ve taken an interest in you.”

Thorn said, “They were just issued Friday. County offices aren’t open weekends. How’d he do that?”

“Mr. Cousins’s wired in,” he said. “Offices opened, closed, it doesn’t seem to matter to him. They don’t shut the electricity down on the weekends.”

“They don’t?”

Roger smiled uncertainly.

“Mr. Cousins is very big on computers, one computer talking to another one. He runs his business that way. He must’ve got his machine talking to their machine. Something like that.”

“I can handle my own business,” Thorn said. “I don’t need someone fixing things for me.”

“Why don’t you just be courteous, talk to the man?”

Thorn looked out at the water for a moment, back at Roger.

“All right,” Thorn said, rising. “Let’s go have a look at him.”

“You’ll like him,” Roger said. “He’s nuts.”

On the drive down to Islamorada Thorn asked Roger if he knew what this was all about. He said not exactly. He was a little new in town. He said that until last week he’d worked out of the Palm Beach office of Florida Secure Systems, doing surveillance camera setups and maintenance for the beachfront mansion set. His job was watching winos fall asleep on somebody’s stretch of sand and then rousting them. He was about to quit when he was transferred down here. In the company, working in Islamorada was considered a promotion, becoming the palace guard.

Just south of the Cheeca Lodge, Roger turned off the highway and onto the old road. He went north a half mile and turned again down a long, narrow lane. The road made a couple of twists and emptied them out on a long, stately drive. A few fifty-foot royal palms lined the driveway at the entrance. At the edge of the drive was a John Deere like the one Thorn had used a month before, augering in his stilts.

“Planting trees down here,” Roger said, “you need nuclear devices, get them into the bedrock.”

It was a three-story stilt house, tin roof. Wraparound porch, shutters, French doors, the light gingerbread of upper Keys Conch houses. But the house was a queasy pink. All the windows mirrored.

“Fuchsia? Magenta? I’m not real good on colors,” Thorn said.

“Electric Strawberry,” said Roger. “That’s what they told Benny, the painters did. But listen, don’t say anything bad about his house. The man loves his house. The thing’s a copy of some pioneer house that used to be around here.”

“It’s hideous,” Thorn said.

“It grows on you,” Roger said.

“Chancres grow on you,” Thorn said.

Two other brown Mercedeses were parked in the grassy lot. And Thorn could see beyond the house a large wooden deck, a swimming pool with ocean view, people in chaises out there. The Atlantic shaking with the dull afternoon light.

They got out of the car, and Thorn followed Roger across the grassy lot.

“For a guy in the security business, he’s not very security-conscious.”

“Whatta you mean?” Roger said.

“No walls. No dogs. Just wide open like this.”

“Don’t let it fool you. Somebody inside the house at this moment knows how shriveled your pecker is.”

“That’s comforting.”

Roger led Thorn to the pool area. A redhead was sunning nude on a recliner. A candidate for breast reduction. Thorn thought for a minute he could see blurry waves of heat rising from her. Two of Benny’s men in windbreakers were having their lunch, big submarine sandwiches at a table very near the redhead. Take a bite, take a look.

Thorn sat down in a cast-iron chair by the Jacuzzi, and Roger joined his buddies at the table across the deck. Thorn watched the hot tub churn. The water jetting in, the fast ping of bubbles.

Benny made his entrance in five minutes. He was a squat man. He came hurrying out of the house in a white linen suit. Pink sweat shirt. He carried a tall green tea glass, moving like one of those small professional tackles from twenty years ago. Thorn thought, fireplugs, bowling balls, all those short, hard things with low centers of gravity. Bad things to smack into.

“Mr. Thorn, Mr. Thorn,” he said, smiling, not switching the tea glass, but putting out his left hand. Thorn used his left, too, and Benny took it, directing him back down into his chair. Thorn kept a polite look on his face. But he’d already started forming pictures of Benny fully clothed, bubbling away in that hot tub. Maybe keep the guy in there for a few hours, a regular Mr. Wizard experiment. Shrivel testing.

Benny sat across from Thorn. He took a huge breath and blew it out, as if it might be his first of the day.

“So tell me, guy. You and Gaeton, you kissing cousins or what?”

Thorn considered it a moment.

He said, “If I was going to kiss a man, it wouldn’t be a former federal agent.”

Benny smiled. He said, “But the two of you are close, no?”

“Mr. Cousins,” Thorn said, “I’ve never been anything but self-employed. The only reason I’m here is ’cause of Gaeton. So, yeah, you could say we’re pretty close.”

Benny hummed to himself, giving Thorn a curious stare. He shook his head, and said, “OK, then. Let me get right to the point with you. I hear that money isn’t a thing with you. Takes other things to make you hop. OK, I respect that.”

“I bet.”

Benny closed his eyes, shook his head. He leaned forward on his chair, elbows on his knees. He said, I hear you know the lay of the land down here. Hell of a fisherman. Things of this sort. You check out good.”

“What does that mean? Check out good?”

“We brought you up on the screen,” Benny said. “What? You thought you were anonymous?”

Thorn watched a trio of killdeer flash overhead, riding a fresh breeze from the northwest, steering wide around that phony house. Thorn on a computer? Thorn, without so much as a Social Security number or a driver’s license. Hadn’t registered for the draft, hadn’t ever paid taxes ’cause he’d never gotten a paycheck. Nothing special about that in the Keys. Living in Key Largo had until recently been like living in a foggy hollow in the Ozarks down a three-day Jeep trail. Revenue men had been as rare as frost. But in the last few years they’d been everywhere, along with their relatives, the FBI, DEA, all the initialed enforcers pushing the boundaries of law down that strip of U.S. 1.

Benny fiddled with the tiny conch shell dangling from his right ear. He said, “I like to know a guy before I get involved with him. So I read up on you, and I liked what I saw. You’re a guy who wants something done, he finds a way to do it, kosher or not. A man not tainted by a lifetime of law enforcement activities. ’Cause see, in the security business you can’t be too fussy about who you deal with. Some of my clients, they haven’t always been good little boys and girls.”

No, maybe the hot tub was the wrong approach. Maybe he should lay Benny out and run him through the sawmill. It’d be messy. But worth it. Thorn smiled at the thought of it. And Benny smiled back.

“As for you, Thorn,” Benny said, “at the moment, I’m personally looking for the right guy, like a private tutor, you know, show me how to hold a rod and reel, simple stuff. Finding fish. The difference between this fish and that one. Shit like that, so I don’t look like Willy off the pickle boat.”

Thorn mustered another smile.

“I’m throwing myself into this laid-back Keys shit,” Benny said. “I mean, I’m offering you a job, but it’s like, you come to work with us, you can dress how you want. Let your fingernails go six inches, an earring. Whatever you’re into.”

Thorn looked at his fingernails.

“Go without underwear?” he said.

“Hell, yes.” Benny smiled and tapped his middle finger on Thorn’s knee. “You’re exactly what I’m looking for. The real thing, an authentic. You can show me things. ’Cause you’re it, Thorn. An authentic.”

“Thanks,” Thorn said.

“I was something of a maverick myself,” Benny said. “Man, I hated government work. So I started my company, and ding, my life changed. I became an entrepreneur, and all the songs on the radio started making sense. Sunny skies above, don’t fence me in.” The guy was starting to get rhapsodic, swaying to the music of his ego.

Thorn watched the redhead rise, jog quickly to the edge of the pool. She looked around, waited till all her flesh came to rest and she was certain everybody was watching. Everyone was. She dove in, and as she broke back into the air, she squealed.