Tropical Freeze (2 page)

Thorn took the lantern outside and met Barnes on the dock and helped him make fast. They sat on the edge of the dock and looked out at the black harbor, at the moon muffled deep in clouds.

“Those Grizzlies you tied are knocking them dead,” Barnes said, whiskey and green peppers on the breeze.

“So I hear,” said Thorn.

“Had an angler this afternoon, he hooked himself what must’ve been a fourteen-pound bonefish. Just inside Dove Key in about a foot of water. He wrestled that bone for half an hour and got tired and wanted to give the rod to me. I wouldn’t take it, so he kept on cranking, got it up to the boat, and that horse broke off soon as it saw the net. That Grizzly still in his lip.”

Thorn said, “Probably showing it around tonight. What to watch out for.”

“I lost all four of those you made for me. My angler snagged two on the bottom, logs or some such.” The doctor smiled, his lips blistered, his blue eyes bleached by the sun. “So, I’m here to buy a dozen more.”

Thorn told Bradley he was out of the materials for the Grizzly. There weren’t going to be any more of them.

“What exactly were they?”

Thorn was silent. In a minute Bradley laughed into the dark.

“Can’t shoot me for asking,” he said. “Like asking the pope what he spiked that wine with. Well then, hell, I’m going back out there tomorrow, see if I can’t find those logs those flies got snagged on. See how long I can hold my breath. I got my heart set on that fly-fish trophy at Old Pirate Days this year.”

“That’d be four in a row, wouldn’t it?”

“Four’s a good number,” he said. “I got a fondness for it.”

When Barnes was gone, Thorn went inside and opened the drawer beneath his bunk, where he kept his materials. The piss yellow swatch of polar bear fur was there, still enough of it left to stuff a football. He could make enough Grizzlies to flood the market, catch every bonefish left in the Keys.

Twenty years ago the fur had been a gift from his foster mother when she’d returned from Alaska after a month of fishing up there. He’d found it at her house, in his boyhood room last August, when he was cleaning out the place to ready it for sale.

He had tried using a pinch of the fur on a standard fly, something close to the Bonebuster, two silver eyes, a crimson belt of Mylar that cinched in the pinafore of polar bear fur, the hook curling out the spray of skirt like a single disfigured leg. He’d named it the Grizzly.

And now the impossible had happened. The lure was consistently firing their brains, bringing them to the surface with an eerie regularity. It’d been happening now for two months, the longest string of luck any of his lures had ever had.

Thorn tried to imagine what strange collision of scents this was, how the fur of that Arctic beast could catalyze these tropical spooks. What was it they saw? This invader from a universe of ice twitching in their marshy pool, igniting some ancient rage perhaps, some hatefulness for the outsider, the alien.

Thorn took the wad of polar bear fur out on deck, dropped it into the departing tide. He watched it as it floated across the basin, and in a while into a slick of yellow moonlight, then into the path of a shrimper on her way out, disappearing finally below the hull, churned to particles by the prop.

Benny Cousins stood on the lower deck as the forty-five-foot Bertram idled across the flats. The water here was less than a foot in places, laced with sandbars and coral heads. It’s why he’d hired this jerkoff captain to bring them in. Guy by the name of Murphy, who’d worked this shoreline for the Coast Guard for twenty years. Murphy was retired and living down in Grassy Key, making do on his pension and Social Security. So you’d think he’d be happy to make five hundred bucks to do a little boat handling for Benny, just keep his mouth shut and steer them to shore. But no, this tightass wanted to know everything. Like he was going to file a float plan with the fucking Supreme Court.

Benny said don’t worry about it. I’m picking up a friend of mine about twenty-five miles offshore, bringing him back to the Keys for a weekend party. All you need to know is the loran coordinates for the meeting and the location of our landing in Key Largo.

But this guy wouldn’t give up. He kept bugging Benny all the way out from the docks in Islamorada. This isn’t some kind of drug run, is it, Cousins? Hell, no. I look like a drug runner to you? You can’t tell, the jerkoff had said. Everybody’s into it these days. Well, I’m not fucking into it, Benny said. I hate drugs, drug runners, everything they fucking stand for.

So Murphy gives it a rest for a few minutes. They’re out there in the dark, cruising out to sea, Benny looking up for the couple of constellations he can name, and this guy starts in again. How come your friend didn’t fly in? What’s all this boat shenanigans? It don’t smell right. And Benny left him up there on the bridge and climbed down to the deck, where his two men, Donald and Joe, were smoking cigarettes, sitting in the marlin fighting chairs. Let that jerkoff Murphy guess all he wanted. Fuck if Benny was going to say another word to the guy.

But Murphy did have a point. Benny could’ve brought Claude in by plane. Walked him right through Customs, done it under their noses. But what fun was that? He liked playing up all this clandestine bullshit. It impressed the clients, helped spread the good word among their kind. If he made it look too easy bringing these guys across, they might think it wasn’t worth the price.

Right after midnight the thirty-foot Donzi showed itself, made its three shorts, one long flash with its searchlight. The off-loading worked fast and quiet. Not a word. The Haitian, Claude, climbed aboard with his suitcase, wearing a flowered shirt, white pants. Benny waved at the man on the Donzi, and the boats separated. Start to finish, the whole thing was a minute, a minute-thirty tops.

And now they were idling across the flats, heading to Dynamite Docks in North Key Largo. There was no development at this end of the island, nothing but hundreds of acres of mangroves and alligators and scorpions. And this one cement dock that ran out a couple hundred feet. The place was a legendary drop-off spot for smugglers. It’s why Benny had picked it. Nobody used it anymore because the DEA had built one of their outpost stations a few hundred yards from the docks. That was just the kind of heavy-handed symbolism they liked. Hey, look what we’re doing! Shaking the bushes real loud as they snuck up on you. It was one of the reasons, just one, that Benny had quit the DEA.

He liked the irony of bringing Claude ashore here, within spitting distance of his old colleagues. And Dynamite Docks had the reek of history. He could imagine the wagons of rum creaking down a sandy path out to some old jalopy on the highway. And he could picture the hippies back in the sixties, VW vans gridlocked back there in the woods, waiting for their bale of grass.

They were about fifty yards from shore when Murphy called down that there was a boat and some activity at the docks. Claude moved alongside Benny, staring at him in the dark.

“You said it was all arranged,” Claude said.

“Hey,” Benny said, “I can account for every fucking DEA boat, Customs, Coast Guard, you name it. If it’s one of ours, I know its present location. And they aren’t around here.” Benny strained through the dark toward the darker shoreline, the Bertram still gliding forward.

“What do I do?” Murphy called down.

“Keep going,” Benny said. He told Claude to get his ass down below and stay there. Then he got Donald and Joe arranged flat on the front deck. He told them to keep their Mac-10s trained on the shore. Benny shook his head and snapped the slide shut on his Smith automatic. All right then, gentlemen, start your engines.

Murphy slid them neatly up to the edge of the dock. The other boat was an eighteen-foot Boston Whaler. Benny could see the black gleam of a plastic-wrapped bale. He could even smell the shit. Nobody was around.

He hissed at his guys, waved them back to the stern deck. Claude was glaring at him through the parlor window, making slit eyes at Benny. He probably scared normal people with that look.

Donald and Joe made the Bertram fast to the pilings, and Benny stepped onto the dock. There was a black Ford van parked about twenty yards off, near the trees. Benny motioned for Donald to go one way, Joe the other way, surround the van.

When they were in place, he walked across the sandy ground and stood facing the rear doors, raised his automatic, and was about to fire when the door came open a crack and a boy’s voice said, “We surrender.”

“Get the fuck out here,” Benny said. All that DEA adrenaline soaring through him again. “Now, motherfuckers!”

It was a boy and girl with matching frizzy blond hair, both in blue jeans and black T-shirts. Rock stars in training.

Donald and Joe came around the van. The teenagers edged away from them. Benny opened the van door. In the half-moon glow, he could make out two or three bales.

“How old’re you two punks?” he said, closing the doors.

“Eighteen,” the girl said.

“Ken and Barbie,” Benny said, “out in the spooky woods at night with a ton of illegal drugs. How does that happen? Huh? Where in hell did you develop fucking values like that?”

“We have the right to remain silent,” the boy said. “The right to have an attorney present.”

Benny snorted, turned to his men. Donald smiled. Joe was eyeing the girl.

“What is it?” Benny said. “Your old man a lawyer?”

“As a matter of fact,” the boy said, “he is.”

Benny shook his head and said, “Jesus Christ, that’s the way it’s fucking going.”

He shot the boy in the knee. And when the kid was on the ground writhing, Benny moved over to him, stepped on the ankle of his good leg, and shot him in the other knee. The girl screamed for him to stop.

A brown Mercedes rolled up the narrow path.

“It’s about fucking time,” Benny said. He shot the boy through the chest and turned to the girl. “You wouldn’t ever do anything like this again, now would you, sweet pea? Seeing what can happen.”

She swallowed, mouth quivering. She said, “No, sir. No, never.”

He pressed the barrel of the Smith against her left breast. Rubbed the barrel against the cotton, until he felt her nipple harden. He trapped the tip of her nipple inside the barrel. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Yeah, it figured. It went with the rest of her values.

“You promise now?” Benny said. “You give me your sacred word of honor you won’t ever participate in this kind of filth again?”

“I promise,” she said. “I promise.”

Benny squeezed off two quick rounds into her left breast. It blew her backwards a couple of yards into a bush.

“Jesus Christ, Benny!” Donald said. “Why’d you do that?”

Benny put the Smith back on his hip, turned, and looked at Donald. He said, “To teach her a goddamn lesson.”

Thorn was idling in his driveway, looking for a space in the traffic on U.S. 1. It was Friday, the tenth of January, and the winter Winnebagos had arrived, and the bright rented convertibles, and dusty station wagons from Indiana. All of them streaming through Key Largo, on their annual hunt for paradise. Thorn had been waiting there for five minutes. He needed a wide break in traffic, because his VW had lost its will to rush.

He was on his way up to Miami to get a blade for the Lakowski 175 sawmill he was using to rebuild his house. A hardware store in Hialeah was the only place for a hundred miles around that still stocked blades for that electric monstrosity.

When he saw a space coming up right after a brown Mercedes, Thorn slipped the shifter into first, revved it hard. But the Mercedes slowed, pulled into the gravel along the shoulder, and tucked into the drive beside him.

It was Gaeton Richards who got out of the car. He was wearing a blue windbreaker, madras plaid shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. He’d grown a mustache since Thorn had seen him last, sandy blond, like his hair. Thorn got out of the VW. They shook hands; then Thorn laughed and opened his arms, and Gaeton stepped forward into an embrace.

When they stepped apart, Thorn said, “It’s been what, over a year?”

Gaeton said, “It was Old Pirate Days last January.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thorn said. “We made conch fitters over at your trailer.”

“And you got drunk, sang Christmas carols.”

Thorn said, “Yeah, it’s coming back to me.”

He’d noticed a man sitting in Gaeton’s car, not looking over at them.

Gaeton said, “Well, hell, let’s do it again this year. Dress up this time, get polluted, kidnap a maiden. Hey, we could make your VW into a float, ride in the parade. Really do it up right.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said, smiling.

Gaeton said, “You’re on your way somewhere.”

“I was going up to Miami, but I can do it later.”

“No, that’s perfect,” Gaeton said. “I got to take this guy up there anyway. Come with us, zip this guy by the car showroom for a minute or two, run your errands, come on back. Give us time to shoot the shit.”

“You were coming to see me?”

“Yeah,” Gaeton said, his voice lower. “I needed to talk.”

“OK, let me stash the VW.” Thorn turned to get in his car, then turned back. “Up and back, right? No side trips.”

“My word on it.”

Their passenger was a quiet gentleman. He had a mat of crinkly yellow hair that he brushed straight back away from his face, cheekbones that could slice ten-pound test line, and raw pinkish skin. If he wasn’t an albino, he’d climbed out of the same gene pool. He sat in the back seat, wearing a blinding yellow shirt with blue hula girls on it, and white pants. He looked like nobody’d ever shown him how to smile.

As they crossed the Jewfish Creek Bridge out of Key Largo, Gaeton launched into a story about his final assignment with the Miami field office of the FBI. Seems there was an elephant shipped into the Metrozoo from the Far East. The unfortunate pachyderm had been stuffed full of garbage bags of heroin. Just as the
federales
were closing in on the zoo handlers who were plucking bags out of the elephant goop, the elephant started having intense seizures. Must’ve digested one of the bags during his voyage. And there he was, rearing up, threatening good guys and bad guys alike.