Tropical Freeze (24 page)

John popped one and slid it down the bar to Ozzie.

“So,” Ozzie said after he’d had that first harsh swig. “We gonna get rich together, or what?”

“Excuse me?” said Benny.

Papa John moved down the bar and stood right behind Benny.

Ozzie said, “You think we could release it as a single just like it is. Or maybe it needs some polish. You know about this stuff. I’m just a singer.”

“You are?” Benny said.

Papa John laughed, sputtering cigarette smoke out, coughing a little at the end. Holding his potbelly with one hand.

Ozzie straightened up, had a small sip of the Bud. He swiveled on his stool and came face-to-face with this guy.

“Don’t bullshit me, man. I can take it. Just tell me what you think about my song, my voice. If I’m any good.”

Benny said, “I heard dead guys sing better.”

Ozzie peered at this guy, see if he was joking. He stood up, though he didn’t know what he was thinking of doing. He just knew if he didn’t stand up, he was going to get sick on the bar. Just cover the counter with upchuck and have to clean it the hell up himself. First singing in front of half the county and now these two jacking him around.

Benny said, “Whatta you, gonna fight me now, I don’t like your singing, so we’re gonna duke it out?”

People quieted down around them, giving way a little. Ozzie felt the raw burn of stomach juice coming into the back of his throat.

Benny got down from his stool and loosened his neck up with a lazy twist. He cracked some knuckles in his right hand. He wasn’t but a couple of inches over five feet, but when he slitted his eyes, they got sharp and mean.

“We gonna have a bar fight, you and me?” Benny said, moving out into the center of the room. “That how this is?”

“Whoa now, whoa,” Papa John said. “I don’t like anybody fighting while I’m trying to drink beer.”

Someone called from the crowd, “His song wasn’t so bad you have to knock him down.”

“Yeah, it was,” somebody else said.

John leaned against the cooler, laughing without making any sound. He tried to speak, but he was out of breath from laughing.

Ozzie was edging away from the bar, feeling the barf rising inside him. And it must’ve been the hand of the almighty living God that got him out the door, helped him stumble across the parking lot, and get him over to the edge of a canal before it all came in a scalding roar.

And when he could raise his face again, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he turned and Papa John was standing a yard or so behind him. Smiling, having his fun.

Ozzie asked who those people were in there.

“They’re everybody who’s got more than a dollar’s worth of power in this county.”

“They don’t look like much to me,” Ozzie said.

“In this case, boy, looks ain’t deceiving.”

Benny Cousins came out of the bar and walked over to them.

He got up close to Papa John and said, “This the fuckhead you had in mind to do that little piece of business for me?”

“He’s a better shooter than he is a singer,” John said.

“You better hope he is,” Benny said. “You sure as shit better hope he is.”

John’s head was dropping and rising. It was almost two o’clock, everybody gone for an hour, and the old man had been gabbing on ever since. Bragging to Ozzie, telling one story, then the next one. All of them about the same thing. Him getting the best of some fat cat or another. Tricking people, taking their money or doing something dirty to them. And every time Ozzie walked past him, he’d take Ozzie hard by the elbow and ask him, are you remembering this? Are you? Ozzie saying, yeah, yeah. Getting every word of it.

Ozzie was trying to get drunk himself, but not having any luck at it. Seven or eight beers and he didn’t even have a buzz. He was just too damn wired from all that’d happened today.

Now Ozzie stood behind the bar, his eyes locked on to the loose skin at Papa John’s throat, catching in the light a glimpse of a couple of long whisker hairs that John had missed the last few shaves. Those hairs were driving Ozzie a little crazy.

This old man couldn’t even shave himself anymore. He was sitting there so full of himself, talking to Ozzie the same way he always did, like Ozzie was dumber than a squirrel. And he couldn’t even shave anymore, couldn’t do much more than draw a draft beer and tell these boring-ass stories. The guy used to be able to tear phone books in half; now he could barely turn the pages.

When Papa John finally took a break and slugged down some of the CC and ginger he’d been drinking the last hour, Ozzie said, “I know what you done to me, John. And I know why you done it. You done it to test me.”

“And you passed the test,” John said. “You sang your song in front of the highest and mightiest.”

“Not that,” Ozzie said just as John was beginning to chuckle again. “The other thing. The dead guy in the shed.”

John stopped chuckling. He turned his bleary eyes on Ozzie.

“Ain’t you curious about what I did with him? Don’t you want to know?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m curious. Tell me.” His voice was sober now. His eyes clearing up fast as he looked straight at Ozzie.

Ozzie told him about putting the body in the Porsche, dumping it in a canal. John said nothing, cocking his head slightly as if he were trying to hear better.

Ozzie said, “I got to say, Papa John, I was impressed a geezer like you still had the balls to shoot an FBI guy.”

The old man looked at Ozzie, very cagey for a minute. Then he laughed. Trying a short one, testing it out. Then he bellowed. He leaned over, slapped the table.

“Boy, that was all right. Damn good. You had old Papa John going.” He laughed some more, shaking his head. Then he said, “Maybe all my work, it isn’t for nothing. You’re halfway catching on. You’re making progress. One of these days I’m going to have to graduate you to second-class moron.”

“You keep joking me,” Ozzie said, “it’s going to make me mad.”

“Ozzie, my boy,” Papa John said, “you ever run across a guy name of Thorn?”

Papa John was passed out at the table by the front door. Ozzie went on and cleaned up the bar. He was making his plans. First thing was to shoot that lifeguard Thorn, collect his thousand bucks for it. Then slip into Darcy Richards’s trailer, give her the hot beef injection.

After she got a taste of that, she’d for sure want to run off with him. They’d take that thousand. They could go anywhere. Lauderdale, Delray, one of those places. Live at the beach. Keep the door locked. Order out.

He washed some beer glasses. Swept the floor back of the bar. He wiped down the tops of the coolers, wondering why he bothered. But doing it. Just something to do.

Ozzie was putting away a handful of beer glasses, opening the cooler top with his elbow. That’s when he saw it, a black briefcase. He had to set the glasses down back on the bar. He got quiet, listening to Papa John snuffling against the tabletop over there.

He hauled it out and snapped it open.

Hundreds. Packed with hundreds. Sweet Jesus Mother Mary of God. There must’ve been close to a twenty thousand dollars. Enough money in there, it could just flat change everything.

Darcy spent that Wednesday night in a Motel 6 along the Florida turnpike. She lay on the hard bed, the lights off, eyes shut, hugging the extra pillow. For an hour she tried to breathe herself to sleep. Putting her mind in her navel, following her breath down and back out. Hindu Valium. It had worked before. But tonight she still heard every twitch and moan of the building. Every shifting gear from the highway, voices in the hallway.

Finally, she slammed the pillow onto the bed beside her, rose, carried her purse into the bathroom, and switched on the light. She drew the snapshots out of their plastic windows in her wallet, slid them into the mirror’s chrome frame.

Gaeton holding up a gaffed dolphin, still green and gold and blue, fresh from the Stream. Her father looking up from his rolltop desk, his bifocals against his forehead, making a smile for his daughter behind the camera. And her mother, who had died bringing Darcy to birth. A fragile Irish beauty sitting stiffly in a stiff chair. Lucy Donovan.

Darcy peered at herself in the mirror. Touched her cheekbones, her nose. Looking at the photos, then tracing the line of her own eyebrows. She gathered her hair and drew it back tight so she could see the outline of her face.

She closed her eyes, let go of her hair, and sighed. It was her mother’s skull, her mother’s eyes, hair, coloring. Nothing of her father. Not a thing she could see.

She went back to bed, listened to the drone of the turnpike. Shut her eyes again and tried to open herself to the future, to images of what was coming for her. But she saw nothing, only a thick, inky mist.

Homestead was in the farm belt just south of Miami, the last of the Florida mainland before the Keys. Darcy could smell the dirt out there, the air hazy with fertilizer. Maybe it was all those chemicals that were stoning her now, making her feel so spacy. Not the fear after all.

When she arrived at ten, she walked cautiously through the grove of avocados to the small white cottage. Bands tightened across her chest. Her breath came short and shallow.

She stood on the porch and saw through the screened door garish war posters on the walls of the living room. The posters were of men with blackened faces, holding automatic weapons, standing in the jungle or in waist-high water. Biceps gleaming, lit up by rockets’ red glare.

She knocked firmly on the door, and when he came in his karate uniform, black belt, she backed away. He smiled and invited her inside, but she insisted on the porch.

Emilio Fernandez came outside, checking her out from shoes to hair. He sat in a black wooden rocker, and Darcy arranged herself uncomfortably in a hard wicker chair.

Emilio, with dark eyes, hooked nose, black flattop, kept peering out at his avocado trees, the long rows of bare branches, gangly and dark, as if he were on watch.

“Five thousand dollars is what it’ll set you back,” he said, nothing Hispanic about his accent. It sounded like Indiana. He brought his eyes to Darcy to see how she’d take that amount. She showed him nothing, or maybe a little of the irritation she felt.

“I’m in a hurry,” she said.

“I never met one of you who wasn’t.” His eyes were on the grove.

Darcy worked a piece of broken wicker loose on the arm of the chair and said, “Maybe Carlos gave me the wrong man.”

Emilio said, “I see the five thousand, I give you your cards and papers.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Darcy.

“Sure it is,” he said. A smile began to take shape.

“You’re not Basque, are you?”

“I was married to one,” he said. “For a while.”

“That’s how you know Carlos?”

“Usually I ask the questions,” Emilio said. “It’s not normal someone comes in here and asks me a lot of questions. I mean, I’ve done a good bit of work for the man. His politics suck; but he’s steady, he’s tough, and you always know where he is. So, I tell him, yeah, you got a broad wants some new paper, a face-lift, I can handle it. And I’m here, prepared to help you out, but, lady, I don’t
do
fucking interviews.”

Darcy said, “OK, let’s start over. What I want is to be somebody that already exists. A criminal. Somebody you’d find on a post office wall, but not top ten most wanted.”

He said, “What? You want to get
into
jail? Now that’s kinky.”

Emilio’s smile spread. The man looked as if he’d modeled for those posters, and after the photographers left, he’d waded on through that swamp and emptied his weapon joyously into a ring of huts.

“Can you do it?”

“Well, I don’t know now. Wanting to take over a criminal’s identity, that’s good. I
like
this.”

“But can you
do
it? And I don’t mean a major offender here.”

Emilio kept smiling. He hadn’t taken good care of his teeth. Floss must’ve been hard to come by in the swamps. Darcy gave him a strictly business stare.

She said, “I have friends in law enforcement.” She dug into her purse and pulled out three sheets. Wanted posters. She handed them to Emilio Fernandez. “These looked good to me. The kind of thing I have in mind. The flyers don’t give us a whole lot of details, but we can wing the rest.”

He looked the posters over and set them aside on the table and smiled at her again, eyes excited. They stuttered here and there. On her face, out to the grove, back to the wanted posters. Nodding his head, keeping time to a fast march.

“We don’t need these,” he said, his smile contracting.

She said, “It’s the way I want to do it. Base this on a real person. It won’t work to just pull this out of the air.”

He said, “I got a better idea.”

“This one.” Darcy picked up the poster of a woman wanted for bombing a federal building. “She’s my favorite.”

“No, no. I got the exact lady for you,” he said. “Much better than these bitches.”

“Yeah?” Darcy sat forward.

“Yeah, yeah, a serious perpetrator but not a major offender.” He smiled a little more, airing out those teeth.

“The five thousand, it’s not a problem,” Darcy said. “I have a cashier’s check with me.”

He inspected his fingernails for a few moments, then laughed briefly to himself and said, “Well, what the fuck.”

Darcy said, “Can you get enough information on her so I’m convincing? Just so I knew some facts about her.”

“Oh, I know the facts, all right. I got facts and facts on this lady,” he said. “I used to be married to the whore.” His smile soured briefly but came back. “That is, before she took such an interest in armed robbery.”

Darcy stared at the image in the shadowy mirror in the Airstream trailer. Blunt cut hair, two inches long. Just barely long enough to comb. She’d parted it on the right. And the dye had come out even blacker than she’d pictured. She’d shaved her eyebrows. Now they were just a slash of black pencil.

A mass of her red hair was in the sink back at Emilio’s. A five-thousand-dollar make-over. Her savings account down to eleven thousand.

She looked like she was ready to sling a leg over her Harley and ride into the night, or else heave a Molotov cocktail into a Guardia Civil station in northern Spain. Her face seemed more angular now, determined. Her eyes were red from the sleepless night in the motel. It matched the impatient burn inside her. She just wanted to be there, inside Benny’s fortress. Get this thing going.