Tropical Freeze (31 page)

Benny said, “What is it? You think I look silly?”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

“I’m supposed to look this way. It’s historically accurate.”

“Well, that’s different,” Roger said.

Fucker still wouldn’t look at him.

Benny massaged his head some more, said, “The lady arrive?”

“An hour ago.”

“She give you any trouble?”

Roger said no.

Benny said, “From here on, we keep them upstairs till they move on. No shopping. No phone calls. Nothing. I’ve had enough of that Claude shit, catering to these assholes so they’ll send a nice report home.”

“Right,” Roger said.

“I don’t want anything else fucking up this weekend. I been looking forward to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, I’m going up and talk to the lady. And I don’t want you to bother us. You hear noises up there, ignore it.”

Now Roger looked at him. All the humor gone from his face.

“Yeah, you heard me,” Benny said. “I got a thing for these Latin types. And these goddamn tight pants, they’re giving me a terminal hard-on. Goddamn things’re probably the reason why the pirates had to rape when they’d finished pillaging.”

Benny knocked and asked if he could come in.

Darcy jerked awake from her nap, blinked. She’d been flying inside clouds, thick dark ones. Inside the leading edge of a cold front that rumbled down the continent like a C-141B, powered by heavy Arctic air. Swirling inside that gaseous mass, plowing into the moist tropical atmosphere. Explosions of lightning all around her. The thunderous clash of yin with yang.

She woke drenched. Benny knocked again and opened the door a crack and slipped his head in. He said, “You decent?”

Darcy cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes. She nodded that he could enter. No lock on her side anyway.

He was a stumpy man in leggings and red vest, his pirate gear making him seem young, harmless. A boy at play. But his eyes up close were different from anything she had made out in her long-distance photographs. A caginess. Flirting with her as he came across and sat on the edge of her bed.

“Do you mind?” he said.

“Mind what?”

“I sit here?”

“It’s your house,” Darcy said.

“Yes, that’s a fact. It’s my house.”

She didn’t like this. Fencing like a dating couple. No. No, like hooker and client. See who had the power.

“Good trip?” he said.

“All right.”

“They treat you OK? They didn’t try to pry into who you were or anything, I hope.”

“They treated me very politely,” she said. “Who were they anyway?”

“People I know. That’s all,” he said. “It’s not your concern.”

Benny half turned to look at her now, planted his hand near her hip to steady himself.

He said, “So tell me, we had a hard time pulling anything up on you. Anything recent. Last jobs you pulled were what, two, three years ago? Banks, was it?”

“Two years ago,” she said. “That was massage parlors.”

Benny nodded, said, “So, how about lately? You retired, kicking back or something?”

“I’ve been with ETA. It’s a political organization.”

“Political organization.” Benny pronouncing it, smiling. He was looking across at the window, palm fronds wavering in the dusky light. “This is one of those political groups, it shoots generals on the sidewalk. Isn’t it? Walk up behind them, they been at mass praying, and you say to their wives, excuse me, senora, but your husband was once a friend of Franco. Bang, bang. This political organization, it parks cars out front of bars where police hang out. Cars full of TNT. That it? You do shit like that?”

Darcy said, “You interrogating me? Is that it? Do I need my lawyer with me?”

He turned and brought one leg up on the bed. One foot still on the floor.

“It’s a hobby of mine,” he said. “I like to get to know you people. See who it is I’m dealing with. How your brains work.”

“My brain works fine,” Darcy said.

“And everything else?”

Darcy said nothing. Reminding herself now, Maria, Maria Iturralde. More than just a tough broad. A lot more.

Benny said, “Personally, I like a woman, when I bite, she bites back. Know what I mean?”

He was looking funny at her now. Something registering in there. A light coming to his eyes.

She said, “You don’t want to bite this woman, mister.”

Benny swiveled quickly onto her, sitting astraddle her legs.

“I saw you,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ! It was you, wasn’t it? On the highway.” Benny leaned back, closed one eye, staring at her face. “Coming out of that fucking Thorn’s place. Last night. Right? Am I right?”

Darcy was silent. Her stomach had made a fist as she remembered walking home from Thorn’s last night, the Mercedes that had slowed beside her, driven on.

“Well, my, my,” he said. “My, my, my. The Hardy boy and his cunt, Nancy Drew. Pulling tricks. A couple of fucking chain jerkers.”

Benny smiled. His hands going to the snap and zipper on her jeans. And Darcy sat up and seized both his ears and rattled his head back and forth.

He sucked in a squeaking rush of air and slapped her hands away. She sat back against the headboard, drew her right hand back quickly, and punched him flush in the nose. Followed it with a Three Stooges eye poke, fingernails finding wet.

“Jesus!”

As he rubbed the sight back into his eyes, she twisted to get out from under him. But he kept her pinned, bearing down hard against her knees.

And when he could see again, a bitter smile came to his mouth. And he threw his sudden weight behind a right uppercut to her chin. It banged her back against the headboard. A spangle of orange and red brightened inside her eyelids. White spirals revolved.

Her head was heavy, her eyes somehow looking down at this from the ceiling. Down a long numb shaft of time, she could feel her jeans opening. And she wondered if Maria Iturralde knew what was happening to her. Wondered what she would do when she woke up and found this dime store pirate on top of her.

From the ceiling she watched as this man cocked his right arm back, held it there, saying something. And let go of a punch to Maria’s chin.

Darcy, coming back to the surface, saw lights undulating above her. And she broke through to the air, gasping, blinking her eyes.

She lifted her head slowly, her teeth aching as she tried to align them right. She looked down at herself, her jeans at her ankles. Blue panties still in place. Her chin was anesthetized, and her tongue had inflated to fill her mouth.

Someone was banging on her door. Benny, standing at the foot of the bed, was fumbling with the zipper on those pirate jodhpurs. When he had them right, he went to the door, slung it open. A big man in bathing trunks and a short T-shirt stood in the doorway.

“This better be goddamn good,” Benny said.

“Somebody here to see you,” he said.

“I told you, Roger, not to fucking disturb me.”

“It’s Myra something or other,” he said. “Lady used to be with the bureau, so I thought you’d want to see her. Says it’s urgent.”

“OK,” Benny said quietly, glancing back at Darcy. “Jesus, now what do they want?”

They left, and Darcy heard a bolt sliding into place.

She closed her eyes, watched the circus of lights on her eyelids again. She knew it would be better to keep them open. It was always better to get up and walk around. That did something. She wasn’t sure what. But usually you had to have somebody to help you walk around. You threw your arm over their shoulder and they talked to you and led you around in circles while you revived. But she didn’t have anybody. She’d had somebody not long ago, but she’d told him she didn’t need him. She’d been wrong. Now she needed him. Bad.

The lights were so spectacular. She could just watch them for a minute or two. That was a reasonable compromise. Just to keep herself entertained till Benny returned.

“You’re not going to die on me, are you?” Ozzie said. He was tying a knot in the yellow nylon cord that held the linoleum roll closed. “Leak to death all over the floor? You wouldn’t do that now, would you?”

He stood up and took the pistol from a wooden stool. He said, “What’s the problem, Thorn? Fucking cat got your tongue?”

Yeah, a whole tribe of cats. They’d crawled into his mouth, devoured his tongue. And they’d stayed in there, looking around for more. Down his throat, up into his cranium.

Ozzie said, “Well, now, I got to go get dressed. Do my thing for the talent show. Anyone asks, I should be back about one, two o’clock. If the groupies don’t steal me off somewhere.”

He picked up a roll of silver duct tape from the workbench and pulled out a couple of feet of it. Tore a gash in its edge with his front teeth. Ripped the piece off and did three tight turns around Thorn’s head, across his mouth.

Trapping the cats inside. All those cats. Or were they wolves? Now he couldn’t remember. Wolves? Cats?

He breathed hard through his nose. Drawing in the sugary aroma of rot.

Ozzie tested the tightness of the cord, then gave the linoleum roll a half turn so Thorn was staring at the concrete floor, an inch away. The gamy scent even stronger.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, dingleberry,” he said. “And if you do, name it after me, you hear?”

Thorn heard the shed door close, the snap of a lock. He stared at the cement. A column of ants was detouring around his nose, carrying particles above their heads. Hurrying back to their burrow. Or what was it, a hive? A nest?

A hive with a tin roof. Made of Far Eastern hardwoods. A nest with an open porch and a view of the sunset, the mangrove islands. Scurrying home with little chunks of meat. To grill, then eat, then lie in their hammocks and consider the prism of sunset, the crepuscular essence.

Crepuscular? Where’d he get that? He’d never heard anyone say the word. He had no idea how he even knew it. Or exactly what it meant. But the ants probably knew. Ants had a very wide vocabulary. He’d read that somewhere. They communicated with wolves. No, no. It was wolves that communicated. With ants? No, that was antlers. Wolves talked to the things with antlers. The things Benny had offered him a chance to shoot.

Crepuscular elk.

“For one thing,” Myra Rostovitch said, “there’re too many citizens mixed up in it.”

She was sitting across from Benny out beside the pool. The wind starting to pick up, sky turning blue-black to the north over Miami. Almost six-thirty. In an hour he had to be over at the Rotary, suit up for the kickoff events, the talent contest, a couple of speeches. Firing the cannons. Yadda yadda yadda.

Myra said, “And number two, it’s an election year. Paranoia’s going around again.”

Benny said, “I bet number three is somebody’s up for promotion and she doesn’t want anybody finding out she was running Murder Incorporated on bureau stationery.”

Myra looked at the six Styrofoam heads Joey had brought out. Toupees on each one. Benny was going to have a head of hair for Old Pirate Days. He hadn’t decided yet which look to go with.

She wore a loose white T-shirt and jeans. Dressed like a boy. Big round sunglasses with white frames. The things covered her up from eyebrows to cheekbones. She had her dark hair tucked up inside a man’s panama hat. The lady didn’t want to get too well known by his people.

She said, “I don’t know how we got into this in the first place, what anybody was thinking about.”

Benny tried on a John Kennedy. Checked himself out in the round chrome mirror. Naw. Made his face too round. Looked like that baby face Beatle, Paul what’s-it.

He said, “I’ll tell you, Myra, exactly how it happened. You came to me, you said, hey, we had an idea. There’re these guys, if we tried to extradite them, forget it, never happen. They’re in their fortresses. They got all the judges in South America pissing their pants.

“But somebody thought, why don’t we lure them here with this make-over bullshit? You remember now, Myra, what a great idea you thought it was? Everybody was smiling. This big trick on the dope sultans. Get some positive ink for the FBI for a change.”

She said she remembered that part just fine.

He said, “I like refreshing your memory. It sets this all straight. So we don’t have two different pictures of how this is.”

He tried on a blond wig. Down to his shoulders. Doris Day thing. When he set the black pirate hat on top of it, it didn’t look all that strange. But he could just hear what Roger would say. Going to have to start being careful with Roger. He might be losing the man’s respect. Once that happened, you could have trouble. It started to spread, and before you knew it, your guys wouldn’t squeeze the trigger when you yelled shoot.

Benny said, “Well, when the grand jury released that first cowboy, you knew what I had to do. If I didn’t snip him, he’d fly home and bad-mouth your little scam. Boomerang the whole thing back on me. And then, there, right at that moment, I was up to my nipples in the shit you guys created. So I did him.”

Benny picked up the hand mirror, checked out his profile. No, no, he had the wrong skin tones to be a blond.

He said, “And then I’m motivated. I’m there, forced to do some fast thinking. I figure out a plan. I get everybody together, a roomful of people, you remember those people, I don’t need to say all their names, and I make a new proposal. Bring the cowboys in, same as before, promise them the moon, whatever their weakness is. Say we’re going to set them up in a Manhattan penthouse if that’s what they want. Blonds, redheads, little boys, little girls. Tell them for a hundred thou we can give them the best fucking make-over money can buy. Give them the whole streets-of-gold bullshit.

“I mean, Myra, I thought all this out, very careful. ’Cause I’m running a legitimate business, doing just fine at it, too. I don’t want to endanger that, have some congressional committee chewing my balls. And there I am, finished with my pitch. And everybody’s looking at their fingernails, not saying anything one way or the other, lily livers that they are, so I assume this is the high sign.”

Myra said, “That’s not exactly how I remember it.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “All we wanted was one of them, a single big fish. It was to be a one-time-only sting situation. You offer one of the czars this identify change deal, work on him slow and easy, court him, get him one foot over the border, and slam, bang, he’s ours. Nobody ever had anything like this in mind. Never, not for a second.”