Tropical Freeze (26 page)

“Does anything scare you?” she said. “Really scare you?”

“Twelve-foot hammerheads in bloody water,” he said. “Blind men with spearguns.”

“How about women?”

Thorn turned his head, opened his eyes.

“Why do you say that?”

“I think you’re afraid of me,” she said. “We’re involved but you’re always joking, keeping me right here, measured off.”

“I wouldn’t call that, a few minutes ago, measured off.”

“But you are, you’re afraid of letting it get deeper.”

Thorn touched a finger to her wrist, drew a slow line up her arm and back down. Sliding his finger in and out each of the grooves between her fingers.

“Jesus,” he said. “Now the lady wants it even deeper.”

She growled and wriggled her fingers into his ribs, bit him hard on the neck. Thorn pushing at her hands. She fell onto him, and they wrestled. She pinned him finally.

And gradually her bite softened. Her fingers, too. And together they scooted on the comforter slowly away from the edge, back to the center of that new floor.

Christening it. Dozing afterward, and christening it again.

Benny asked at a 7-Eleven, and the clerk said sure, everybody knew Thorn. Up two miles, across from the canvas shop, a little gravel road. No mailbox or nothing.

Benny parked in the canvas shop parking lot. He sat out there smoking Don Ciega cigars, Cuban monsters that kept the bugs away. You couldn’t get these goddamn cigars anymore. But then there were a lot of things you couldn’t get anymore, and Benny still managed to have them.

He sat there from midnight to three, watching the driveway, listening to some radio talk show from Miami, insomniacs arguing about gun control. Should you teach kids how to use a gun or scare the shit out of them so they’d never go near one? That seemed to be the choices. Benny had another idea. Scare the wimps, teach the leaders. Where you got in trouble was giving guns to wimps. They went shooting at guys ordinarily they’d run from. It upset the natural order of things. He thought of calling in and setting this asshole host straight, but then he realized he needed to think about his own situation, not listen to some other guy’s worries. He turned it off.

From midnight to one-thirty he’d sat there, listening to that program, just watching Thorn’s drive. Not expecting anything and not getting anything. Nothing going in or coming out all that time.

For an hour or so he tapped his foot on the floorboard, running it all around, debating it. Not wanting to fall for something, walk into some dumbass trap. Because that’s sure as shit what it felt like, a fucking come-hither psych job.

At about three he got out, opened the trunk. Looked up and down the empty highway. Then lifted out the M-79 grenade launcher. Frankfort Arsenal. And he picked out one of the HE rounds, a forty-millimeter concussion grenade. He could lob it over to Thorn’s little estate, stun every living thing for a hundred yards around. They’d still be alive, but they’d be staggering and mumbling like a 5:00
A.M.
drunk. Then he could just walk over there and sort out this from fucking that.

He carried it twenty feet north of the canvas shop to a little grove of trees. The launcher wasn’t much more than a big shotgun and had less recoil than a ten-gauge. He flipped up the rear sight. But fuck if he knew how far to aim. Thorn’s property was somewhere between four and five acres of woods. He could fire the grenade, be off by a hundred yards one way or the other, and all it would do was make everybody for a couple of miles around piss their pajamas. And if he walked over there and reconnoitered like he should, to do this correctly, he might be walking right into that trap.

So he stood there, taking a leak beside the grenade launcher. Watering the rocks with his seventh cup of coffee. And then, more good karma luck. Here comes a lady. Short black hair, pretty good body on her, comes walking out of Thorn’s driveway.

She headed down the highway on foot. Benny thinking, now what? Go in there while the guy’s dick’s still wet, shake him awake, get some answers. Go pick up the lady? Grill her. Or just let the whole thing slide? Let that goofus country music guy do the work?

Jesus. What was he thinking about? A guy didn’t get up and walk away with a thirty-eight slug in his head. He didn’t give a shit what Roger said. Or the guy at the bar. Or Papa John. So, then, what was that photocopy? Some kind of half-assed trick photography probably. That nurse at Mariner’s Hospital? That’d be easy enough to arrange. It didn’t matter actually. Any way you looked at it, Thorn was jerking his chain.

Benny hustled the grenade launcher back in the trunk. Shut it and got in the car and started it. Pulled out on the highway.

Jerking his chain so he’d do something dumb probably. Like walk into the pointy teeth of some steel trap with his hard-on sticking out.

No, sir. Not Benny.

He drove south, slowed down beside the lady, got a good look at her. Pretty little thing. Nice Winnebagos on her. A regular tempest in a D cup. The guy had reasonable taste in women anyway.

Benny let go of a big sigh. Shit, he guessed he’d just let it go for now. Wait and see if that redneck Ozzie did his work.

Benny didn’t like old ladies. Simple as that. They didn’t fight fair. Take this one, sitting in her wheelchair with a muddy rock in her lap and a green Luger in her right hand, a goddamn water pistol of all things, aiming it at him. Like he was sugar and gonna melt.

And this morning especially, after not getting but an hour’s sleep. The call came at eight that morning from his internal affairs office telling him there was some kind of computer incursion a couple of days ago. Originating in Key Largo. Benny going, all right now, what is this shit? More chain jerking?

“Ma’am,” Benny said, standing just a yard away from a huge pile of rocks, getting a little vertigo from the situation. Not what he’d pictured as he drove over here. “I’m asking you a civilized question, and you go aiming things at me. I don’t think that’s polite.”

A thick-necked tomcat sprang up into her lap and turned and faced Benny. He didn’t like cats either. In fact, animals in general, about all you could say for them was they didn’t talk. Didn’t let on how stupid they were.

“Can we discuss this in a businesslike manner? Sit down and exchange views, that sort of thing?”

“You don’t have any views I want to hear,” Priscilla said.

“You don’t even know me,” he said. “I can be an entertaining fellow.”

“You’re trespassing.”

He said, “The answer to one question would do it for me. You tell me that, bang, I’m out of here.”

She said, “It’s the bang that worries me.”

Benny smiled. Good, she was warming to him. They were getting the dialogue going. After years of studying interrogation techniques, he’d found there was still only one good way. Get them to think of you as their only rational hope in a world gone haywire.

He’d worn his Keys threads today. A green sweat shirt with a picture of a pelican sitting on a wooden piling. Below the pelican, in black it said, “Another Shitty Day in Paradise.” He left his black leather jacket opened so she could read it. His stone-washed black jeans, boat shoes. Telling the world that this man knew how to hang loose.

She said, “All right, then. Put it in five words or less; then get the hell off my land.”

Benny stretched his eyebrows up, trying to ease the headache that was starting to grip his head. Jesus, sometimes these Conchs made New Yorkers seem down-home friendly. He found a level spot on the pile of rocks and sat down. But the old lady fired a shot at him, darkened his sweat shirt at the heart. He stood up. Ice tongs digging into his temples.

He forced out a smile and said, “I understand you do computer work, you know, hire out to do research for people. Things like that.”

“Assume anything you like. I’m sure as hell not going to tell you anything about anything.”

That was it. So much for the buddy-buddy approach. The pincers were digging in. Benny pulled in a lungful of air through his nose. And he stepped around behind her and took hold of the grips and started rolling her toward the water.

When Thorn woke that Friday morning, finding Darcy gone, he walked down to the
Heart Pounder
and lay down in the bunk. But a dream came almost immediately, and it shook him awake. In it the refrigeration in the ice cream truck had failed, and Gaeton was lying there, thawing under a sticky coating of corn syrup and chocolate.

Thorn had dragged himself up from the bunk, off the
Heart Pounder
, up the dock, across the yard to where the truck was parked under the stilt house. He unlocked the door and went inside and opened the lid. There was still thick frost on his friend’s eyebrows. Temperature holding steady at thirty-four.

He stayed in the ice cream truck till dawn, sitting in the driver’s seat. Bones heavy, stomach hollow. A guilt hangover. He went over his final day with Gaeton, the drive to Miami, the alligators, the joking at 120 miles an hour. The look that passed between them as Gaeton aimed his handgun at the gator.

Then he let himself recall those long-ago Saturday mornings in the
Guardian
office. The smell of printing fluid, the comforting chug of the press. Gaeton senior reading, rereading, typing fast with two fingers.

Then, later on those afternoons, Gaeton senior would lean back in his swivel oak chair, pick up that knife, and begin to whittle again on a piece of oak, making those puzzles he did, a ball inside a slotted vase, a woman trapped inside a cage. While Gaeton and Thorn stacked the
Guardians
in the baskets on their bikes, then pedaled up and down the highway, delivering papers till dark.

Thorn sat in the ice cream truck, watching the bay turn silver, then dark green. He remembered how he’d felt on those days, that radiance in his chest. Whatever name he might give it now, then it was simply that people smiled to see him coming with the paper, and in his rearview mirror they shook the paper open and began to read as they walked back to their houses.

Even in Key Largo, a town amused by its own corruption, where folks were never shocked or even mildly surprised as they read the truth about themselves and their leaders, still, they seemed happy to see him coming and read carefully when he left.

Thorn dressed in a pair of rumpled tan pants, a plaid flannel shirt. He brushed his teeth and washed his face at the spigot under the house. He combed his hair with wet fingers. By ten o’clock he had the Lakowski sawmill going, getting some nice-looking planks out of a dirty-dog chunk of white ironwood.

The tree had come from a stand of ironwoods that were bulldozed recently, making way for the new K Mart. The county biologist had quietly protested that these were the last ironwoods anybody knew about in all of North America. The proper downcast looks came over the county commissioners. Another loved one is about to leave us. And the vote was unanimous.

None of the locals had fought very hard for those trees. It was getting so people were bored fighting these battles. Nobody was taking the long view anymore. Thorn had begun to believe it was because there was a drop in the population of grandchildren. When people stopped having kids, it rippled everywhere. It got harder to care about what happened in the middle of the next century when nobody you loved would be alive then. To hell with the long view.

And you needed a damn long view for a white ironwood. You planted a seed, it took six years to get tall enough to tell it from the grass around it.

He reset the saw blade and jammed the last of that heartwood into the shriek of the machine.

When he looked up, Nan LaCroix was standing a few feet away. She was the head librarian for the local library. He brushed the sawdust from his arms, switched off the big machine, and said hello. Nan was tall and thick, had the remnants of a British accent. She was dressed for work.

“Priscilla asked me to come see you,” she said. “Just now.”

“Yeah?”

“Someone called the library.”

“What is it, Nan?”

“Well, I don’t understand this, but she said you would.”

Thorn took a breath, dusted more wood flakes off himself.

She said, “A person called and inquired about our use of a computer at the library.”

Thorn stopped brushing at his flannel shirt.

“And you said?”

“Well, I didn’t talk to him myself, but Margaret Elkins told him no, we weren’t that newfangled. And the man asked if there was somebody who worked for the library who had access to a computer terminal, somebody who might be able to do a little computer research work for him. And Margaret told him that no, nobody who currently worked for the library did, but that there
was
somebody around town who knew computers and might like to pick up some extra money. Priscilla.”

“You phone Priscilla, tell her about the call?”

“Yes, we did. And she became quite excited and said to come get you. To tell you to come over right away.”

Thorn said, “Did anybody tell this guy how he could find Priscilla?”

“Margaret Elkins did, yes,” said Nan. “Did she do wrong?”

Benny was applying some intense psychotherapy to the old lady, showing her the connection between sanity and gravity by hanging her front wheels over the edge of the seawall.

He said, “You pulled a prank. You knocked on my door and then I got up from what I was doing and came to the door and you ran away.”

There was a stiff breeze coming across the bay today. Coolish, it jostled the water against the seawall. Benny tipped her forward and watched as she gripped her armrests. The cat looked down at the water and climbed up onto the old lady’s shoulder and jumped back to land. So much for animal loyalty.

Benny kicked at it, almost lost his balance, and dropped her in the drink. The muddy rock she’d been carrying in her lap slid forward and splashed into the bay.

He rolled her back a bit and said, “I think somebody put you up to that. Am I right? I don’t think you were just sitting around and said to yourself, think I’ll call up some businesses, sneak into their computer, prowl around. You don’t seem like that kind of old lady to me. Huh?” He gave her a little rattle. Her butt scooted forward a couple of inches.