Tropical Freeze (13 page)

There was nothing in there. Benny stood up, wiped the saliva on his pants legs. Maybe he should slice him open. A little work shed autopsy. But shit, what was the point? He’d like to see the medical examiner who could match up earlobe samples.

Benny Cousins looked down at the shadowy figure of Gaeton Richards. Then he bent forward and cleared his nose, one nostril at a time over that stupid man. Dead men were always so stupid. Even worse than the living.

“I’m not riding with some fucking corpse,” Bonnie said.

They were in the shed. Bonnie had rolled out of bed wearing a black sweat suit. She was standing there holding a Budweiser, looking down at this guy, some of his forehead gone. It was about two-thirty in the morning. Dead calm. Some sand fleas chewing on his neck, but Ozzie couldn’t even work up strength to brush them off. There in that shed, the one yellow light bulb was showing this guy’s brains stuck to rakes and hoes.

He couldn’t goddamn believe it. It made his head swirl. At the bar that Sunday night he’d waited till Papa John went to take a piss and he’d asked Crump Berry about Darcy, if she lived with her brother. Crump drove a shrimp truck out of Tavernier. He came into Papa John’s Bomb Bay Bar every night. Crump said, yeah, sure, the brother was FBI or something like that. Straight as they come. And his sister used to be a Miss Florida beauty contest girl. Everybody knew those two.

Ozzie had to put his hands under the bar, they started shaking so bad. About then Papa John came back and said he’d gotten a call from some lady down in Islamorada about Ozzie insulting her and her kid last night when all they wanted was some ice cream and a few joints. Ozzie said, yeah, yeah, all his fault. He’d gotten his period or something. Sorry, never happen again.

Ozzie finished cleaning up the bar, a zombie, and wobbled out of there somehow. He sprinted through the cold the two hundred yards back home. The whole way thinking, well, the lifeguard offered me a deal, right? Let him go, forget the whole thing.

And then Ozzie got to the shed panting. He couldn’t believe it. The fucking door was jimmied open. And as he opened it, right off he smelled the gunpowder. And something worse. But he stepped in anyway, reaching up for the string to the light, feeling the stickiness on his flip-flops. Jesus.

Then he’d run upstairs and shaken Bonnie, rattled her eyes around. Ozzie thinking, that bitch offed this guy just to trip him up. But she’d barked at him. Man, Bonnie could turn Doberman, snarling, snapping, clicking out her claws. And then Ozzie had to tell her the whole story. Who this guy was, why he was out there rolled up in linoleum. It woke her right up and got her to quit snapping at him.

She said, “You pathetic dickhead.”

Ozzie said, yeah, yeah. Agreeing, taking her shit. Ready to take everybody’s shit tonight.

He led her down to the shed, showed her the stiff. He picked up the Colt lying on the floor and looked it over. Nice pistola. That made three of them he’d gotten out of this. A .357 Smith in the lifeguard’s shoulder harness. On the front seat of the Porsche, a ten-millimeter Colt, looked like a midget .45. And now this one. Ozzie was thinking, man, you shake one of these lifeguards and guns come clattering out.

Ozzie by then was wondering, what the hell, maybe he’d killed him. He could’ve blacked out, walked in, and shot the guy. But no, that morning he’d driven around the neighborhoods in Key Largo selling ice cream till late afternoon, working his way down to Tavernier and back. Then he got some hedge clippers out of the toolshed and walked through the trailer park, pretending to clip this and that, but actually circling in closer and closer to Darcy’s trailer, trying to work up the stomach for going in there and asking her … but what? What the fuck could he say? Is it your brother or your boyfriend I got rolled up back of my house? So he clipped and snipped and wound up doing nothing.

Then he spent the evening trying to write a new song, used up ten sheets of paper and got nowhere. Then, at one in the morning, he went to work. He took his raft of shit from Papa John and asked Crump about Darcy. That was the whole day. Nobody killed in there anywhere. Much as he wished, he couldn’t claim this one.

Ozzie said, “I’ll be right behind you in the truck.”

Bonnie said, “Eating Fudgsicles while I have a date with a dead guy.”

“It’s ten miles is all it is. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

“Some cop stops me, what am I going to tell him?”

“Go the speed limit, who’s going to stop you?”

“I’m going to say what? This bozo sucked on a forty-five ’cause I wouldn’t come across for him.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Ozzie.

“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

But Ozzie could hear it. A little respect in her voice. The woman was starting to see who he was. What he was made of.

“Hey, I’ll buy you breakfast afterwards.”

“Yeah, sure, right. Maybe a nice rare steak.”

Ozzie started to unroll the guy. God, he hoped the lifeguard was still limber enough to wedge him into that car.

Out there in alligator country, the lights of Miami made a reddish haze in the sky off to the north like the city was on fire. Probably was. They were in north Key Largo, down one of those rutted roads that led west off 905. The place was crisscrossed by canals back there. Ozzie’s hands still herky-jerky.

Bonnie pulled up to the edge of the canal and killed her headlights. Ozzie got out of the truck, came around to look. It was colder out here, with a raw wind stinging right through you. And shit. The canal was full there, too. Cars, stoves, refrigerators. The Porsche would be sitting up out of water. The canal must have been twenty, thirty feet deep, and it was brimming over.

He told Bonnie and she cursed at him.

“I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “It’s not my fault.”

“Well, just take your flashlight and walk along the edge till you see an open spot, why don’t you?”

So he did. Damn. This place had gotten so popular. Not like three years ago. He’d brought a Toyota out here and dumped it. In and out in five minutes. He’d gotten two hundred bucks for it. A Cuban he’d met in a bar at Vacation Island. That night Ozzie’d gotten out of the car, gone around to the back of it, rocking it back and forth to push it over the edge, and Jesus, then he knew what the deal was. The stench coming from the trunk. Whew.

That time he’d had to walk the ten miles back down to Key Largo. But he’d learned things since then. Get a partner, even if she was a Doberman. This time things were going better. Except he couldn’t find a space. Another one of the goddamn problems with overpopulation. All the garbage.

Ozzie walked along the canal edge. Cars, cars, trucks. Insurance, insurance. He felt like putting in a call to the TV people to expose this. Make the cops get off their fat asses. They were so busy ripping off cocaine dealers they ignored these canals out here. Oh, they knew about them, and every six months or so when they needed to get some press, they’d bring a fleet of wreckers out here and haul all the stolen vehicles out. But with half of them working part-time for the drug guys, things were getting out of control. It made it hard on everybody.

Finally he found a spot. He blinked his flashlight at Bonnie, and she started up the Porsche and hauled ass down to him.

She parked it right on the edge of the canal, put it in neutral, brake off, got out in a hurry, and right away she started trying to rock it into the water.

“Wait a minute, goddamn it. Wait a minute.”

Something had come to Ozzie as he’d been driving up from Largo. How he could maybe squeeze a dollar or two out of this. Long as he was in this far, what the hell. He went around to the passenger side and opened the door. He’d noticed the ring before, thought of just stealing it and trying to pawn it. There was some kind of blue stone in it, a wide gold band. It’d bring maybe fifty bucks. But no, this was better. Ozzie was learning. He was proud of himself, getting smarter finally.

Ozzie took Gaeton’s hand out of his lap and twisted off the ring. It was the first dead guy he’d touched since that black field hand in the ditch. He kind of liked it. It put a zoomer in his bloodstream for a minute. He hadn’t felt his blood race like that since Bonnie had squeezed off a couple of rounds at him last month.

He slammed the door of that Porsche and looked over at Bonnie. She was cursing him, stringing together all the names she’d been calling him lately. Maybe he could get that into a song. Something about touching dead guys, living with a Doberman.

You know your honey loves you when she aims too high. Something along those lines.

The two of them pushed that car. They got it going fast enough to get it over the edge and splash into the canal. Ozzie almost lost his balance and went in with it. But Bonnie, goddamn her, caught him by the neck of his sweat shirt, yanked him back. They watched it settle into that water, find its spot, get comfortable, let go of a couple of bubbles. And that was fucking that.

They were sitting in the ice cream truck in the dark parking lot of the Holy Fisherman Episcopal Church. Bonnie stood in the front of the truck. Ozzie sat in the driver’s seat, staring out through the window. She’d been heaping shit on him all the way back. At this point he needed a scuba tank.

Well, if Ozzie hadn’t killed this guy, who had?

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know shit. He didn’t know what anybody in all of Key Largo could’ve told him. That these two were brother and sister. The weatherlady and the FBI agent. So come on, doofus, try thinking for once. Who did this guy? Who left him there for you to clean up?

Fuck if he knew.

Who? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he have the brains God gave a green apple?

No, he guessed he didn’t.

It was something the FBI guy was working on. Some case he was doing. And the bad guys some way or another saw what Ozzie did to this guy and came for him, did him and left him for Ozzie to fucking explain.

That made sense. Or maybe not. He’d have to think this one out. Ozzie looking out at that church, wondering why she’d told him to stop here. What were they going to do? Pray? Repent? Oh, shit. That’s how far down he was right now, he was willing to consider that even. Whatever she said.

And Bonnie went on with her reasoning. So who are these guys, do you suppose? Who would an FBI guy be chasing around down here? Huh?

Ozzie worked on it. He was feeling sleepy, though. All that frizz in his blood for the last few hours, it’d died out and left him wanting to stay in bed for a week. He couldn’t remember her question. He tried, but he couldn’t remember it, so he just said what he always said when that happened, how the hell should he know something like that?

Drogas,
Bonnie said. You dimbrain. Colombians. Or Cubans or Jamaicans. Smug drugglers. She’d said that. Smug drugglers. Shit, ever since Bonnie had started going to those community college classes, she was talking different. Making jokes he didn’t get. Her voice coming down on him from a little higher up. Smug drugglers. Shit.

So? Ozzie had said. Big deal. They hit their guy, it’s all done. We did the rest of their job for them. They should be happy. They should pay us something is what they should do.

“What I’m saying is, Ozzie, you’ve got us in some stinky shit, man. These kind of people, it’s a wonder we’re still alive at this moment.” Bonnie leaned against the dashboard, brought her face around so Ozzie would have to look at it if he looked up from his lap. He kept his eyes down. That was it? That was her whole thing? That they were hip-deep in the cesspool? Big surprise.

“Now come on,” she said. “We’re going to get that window.”

Oh, that. How’d he forget about the fucking window? A big stained glass thing at the front of the church. Jesus surrounded by lambs and children, some disciples and other guys standing around behind. Big mother of a window. It had enough stained glass in it to keep Bonnie in business for the rest of her life. She was guilting him into helping her do it.

Ozzie hated churches. His father’d been a preacher, part-time. The other part he worked as a roofer. Always saying it was his way of staying as close to God as possible when he wasn’t actually preaching.

Ozzie thought churches were dangerous places. The place where people had fits and old people fell on the ground and cried. The place where his father would cuss and scream at everybody in the room just like he did to Ozzie and his mother at home.

So when Bonnie’d said she wanted that window one day a couple of weeks back, Ozzie had just pretended not to hear her. But now here they were, Ozzie owing her one.

Bonnie grunted at him to help her get some of these boxes empty. Shake out the Fudgesicles, ice cream sandwiches. Something to carry it all in.

“What about the priest or whatever he is, lives back there?”

“What’re you, scared? You got the drug world after us, and a priest is scaring you?”

He helped her empty a few boxes, and they climbed out of the truck and crossed the dark lot to the front of the church. Bonnie bent over and started loosening up a cement parking marker. In that moonlight it could’ve been petrified elephant flop. Ozzie watched her rock it loose and raise it up and set it on her shoulder. Half a shot put. He was feeling a little warm toward her just now. Strange as it seemed, all the shit she’d been giving him. But there she was, kind of like him. What artists wouldn’t do for their art.

She carried the rock over to the window, hefted it up, checking its weight. Then she backed up a couple of steps and started hopping toward the window to make her toss.

“Drop that stone!” a man’s voice said.

It came off Bonnie’s shoulder and went about a yard into the hedges surrounding the church. Ozzie raised his hands, and Bonnie turned and raised hers, too. A guy in his pajamas and robe was there holding out his gun in the moonlight. He had a beard and short gray hair. And though he wasn’t wearing his collar, Ozzie knew just from the way his voice had commanded Bonnie to stop, that this guy had the power of God streaming through him.

Thorn and Sugarman were eating silently. Thorn could feel the hum of some leftover tension from Saturday. It had been the first time Sugarman had ever used his police voice on Thorn.