Under Cover of Daylight (22 page)

He led them down a hallway lined with photographs. Ground-breaking ceremonies, ribbon cuttings. Same young stud in every one. Dark-haired, trim little guy with a haircut from Princeton or Yale or somewhere like that. Irv decided he would like this guy, like doing business with a person with a good haircut like that. Not some stringy, greasy-haired college dropout like Milburn.

The secretary said, “I’m sorry, Philip. Guy’s got a gun.”

“It’s Philip, is it?” Irv cooed.

The four of them stood around and stared at each other. Finally Milburn sat in one of the green leather chairs, and that seemed to break the spell.

“If you’re who I think you are, I am pissed off. I am very pissed off anyway. But if you are who I think.”

“We’re the guys you have your friends call up. That’s who we are. We’re the kind of people, things usually get messy when we’re pissed off.”

“Randy, go sit in the den,” Grayson said.

“Randy stays,” Irv said. “Right here. I don’t want him to call up his doubles partners or anything like that.”

Grayson was in tennis togs, too. His were more colorful, though. Dark green shirt, yellow wristband. Off-white shorts. Thick, hairy legs. He went about five-nine. Kind of guy you expect to see delivering the six o’clock news. Hell of a haircut.

He sat down behind his desk. It was a long teak thing, modern, completely bare. Not even a phone. Behind him there was a computer terminal, screen, printer. And the place was full of palms, the same kind Irv had watered in the other room. Five or six of them. Air smelled of fresh dirt.

“You stupid sons of bitches,” Grayson said. Elbows on his desk, grinding the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other. “Put that stupid gun away.”

Irv slid it into the front pocket of those pants.

“Now what do you want here?”

“Nothing much,” Irv said.

“The bitch didn’t pay you, I suppose.”

“She paid us,” said Irv.

Grayson seemed surprised.

“OK, then what?”

“It’s about this deal. This lady, what’s her name, Truman?”

“Kate Truman,” Grayson said, closing his eyes briefly and exhaling through his nose. The topic was a direct hit.

“My associate and I are phasing out of the liquidation business. Too much bad karma associated with it. Take lifetimes to purify all we done already. We’re on the lookout for other opportunities. Work with less of a hemoglobin factor. You see what I’m saying?”

Grayson said, “I think I do.”

“And we were putting two with two the other day, and it kept coming up with your name. Like this woman, Kate Truman, and how she had to get buried on account of something that’s to your advantage. Of course, the daughter just wants the inheritance. But we were real curious about how it was a cost-effective thing for a man like you. I mean, we figured this girl didn’t just get our phone number from the yellow pages, and when we asked her about it, she said well, yes, it was you.

“So, it seemed like a natural coincidence. Synchronicity and all that. Us looking for a new career and you expanding your horizons all at the same time.”

Grayson had propped his chin on his right fist.
The Thinker,
giving Irv the full magnetism of his attention. Guy must have girls oozing under the doors at night. He sat up and pulled a red bandanna, of all the crazy things, out of his tennis shorts and wiped the sheen off his forehead. Some kind of cowboy nut probably, a saddle sniffer.

“Before I say anything else, let me make this clear. I think you two are scum. You’re worthless asshole trash, and you’re going to wind up as pet food.”

“He doesn’t like us,” Milburn said. “Boo-hoo.”

Had to hand it to that Milburn.

“But I think I can use you. I think I can take advantage of your greed and stupidity and make an arrangement here that might be of mutual benefit. That’s my idea of good business. Where everybody walks away happy.”

“Everybody screws everybody else at the same time. Daisy-chain economics,” Milburn said. Man, the guy was really working, huffing along, trying to pull even. But no, Irv had already decided about Milburn.

“I was just on the phone,” Grayson said. “With a friend of mine. A man from up in your neck of the woods in Key Largo. A nice old gentleman who is maybe slightly confused from not having enough blood running through his brain anymore.”

“He must’ve been talking to my daddy,” Irv said to Milburn.

“This gentleman is going to be a wealthy man soon. One way or the other he is soon to receive a million dollars. A million cash dollars.”

Irv smiled. Yeah, he’d known there was something like that happening. He looked over at Milburn. The guy had a tit in his mouth he was so happy.

“In fact, I know the time and date that a transaction is to occur in which a million dollars in cash will be arriving at a particular address. I don’t want this transaction to be completed. It is important to me, very important that such a deal is not completed. In fact, it’s so important that I’m willing to deal with scum like you two to see that it does not reach fruition.”

“All right so far,” Irv said. Trying not to sound the way he felt.

“If the person or persons delivering the cash have to be hurt during this arrangement, then so be it. If one or more people have to be sacrificed, that’s acceptable to me. But the old gentleman I mentioned. He is absolutely not to be touched. Absolutely off limits. The two of you intercept this cash and disappear. Buy a ranch and raise pigs. Do anything. But don’t ever appear in my line of sight again. Ever.”

Irv was thinking maybe he’d find out which it was, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, this guy went to. What courses he took that made him such a hardass. It wasn’t too late; Irv could go back to school, turn himself into this person.

Or no, maybe take his cash and go out to Hollywood, take some of those acting classes he’d always heard about. Buy himself an agent, get a part opposite Jack Nicholson. No, not Nicholson. Much as he liked the guy, Jack would upstage him. No, some broad. How about Julie Andrews? Yeah. Clickety clickety. Let the cash from Vacation Island fill up his bank account while he used the million for his movie career.

Irv stood up. “This sounds suitable.” He walked over to Milburn, stood behind his chair. Put his left hand on Milburn’s shoulder. “I think I can work with you, Grayson, even though you’re clearly a shitty judge of character.”

Irv reached into his trouser pocket, drew out the nine-millimeter, took off the safety, and snugged the barrel against Milburn’s neck. Before Milburn could even wriggle, Irv aimed straight down into his body and fired twice. Just more hammers nailing more nails in more buildings. An inspired moment.

Milburn didn’t move for a few seconds; then he made a little shiver, a wheeze. Some other noise that could’ve been him trying to say Irv’s name. His head dropped forward, jerked, and the sack of shit tumbled onto the rug.

The secretary kid jumped up, knocked his chair over.

“Sit down, Randy.” Irv aimed at his face.

Milburn twitched on the rug, a dog having a dream.

“Sit,” Grayson said. He glanced back over his shoulder out his window. Irv moved over there quickly to check the view. Just backyards. Everybody mowing and a stereo playing some rock and roll. Sixties acid rock. Key West, twenty years out of it, and holding.

Irv felt something new. Killing Milburn, it wasn’t like the others. There was this feeling, queasy and hot rising inside his gut. Nothing like that before. It was a revelation. All those others had been strangers. He’d known them five minutes tops, basically strangers, and when they were lying there, seeping out onto rugs and decks, they were still strangers, and the thrill had been cold and white.

But this one was complicated. He felt the usual race in his heart, but there was this new acid zing of regret as Milburn collapsed forward onto the pale blue rug. A brand-new emotion. It was this whole new thing opening up to him, this full-bodied thing. This thing had been there all along, and now he’d discovered it, a continent of unexplored pleasures, killing acquaintances, family. Irv beamed.

“What the fuck are you thinking about!” Grayson’s face pumped full of blood.

“I just made myself a half million dollars,” Irv said.

“Good God.”

“Hey, and what it is is you need to see it in person. You want to be Casey Stengel, you got to stand up close and watch the guys hit the home runs. Where you can hear the crack of the bat. Otherwise, man, you might think what I do is not worth the price. Hitting it out of the ball park, man, this’s what you just saw. Hitting the long ball.

“And hey, let me warn you two. I didn’t see the exit holes for those slugs. I think they’re still in there traveling through all that blubber. I’d stand back away from this heap for a while, I was you.”

“You need help, man,” said Randy. The kid had lost his tan. His asshole probably wouldn’t ever come unpuckered.

“What I need is a time, a date, and a place where a mutually beneficial transaction is to take place. That’s all I need.” Irv stepped across Milburn, avoiding the blood spreading through the carpet. All that IQ spilling out. Man, Irv was sailing, literally come loose from the earth.

R
ICKI LAY DOWN
on the water bed, still in her Leonard’s Lobster House clothes, white shorts and a T-shirt that said
KISS OUR CRUSTACEANS
. Tired but wired. It’d been busy for a Sunday night. Lots of Miami assholes, dawdling over their Key lime pie, trying to milk one more night out of their weekend. Getting drunk for the three-hour drive home. Ricki got most of her orders wrong, lost a credit card, and spilled minestrone soup on a woman from Oregon. Her hands had trembled so bad all day it was a wonder she’d held on to anything.

The bathroom light was glaring in her eyes, but she was too tired to get up and turn it off. She twisted around for a comfortable position, but the damn water bed kept shifting with her. It was good for some things, bouncing your hips back up, giving you a little thrust, even if you didn’t have it in you to thrust back. But not so good when what you needed was a foxhole.

She sniffed her fingertips. Garlic and fish. She listened to the rattle of palm fronds at her window. Closed her eyes and pictured Tahiti, Eleuthera, Martinique, a smoky bar from a fifties movie. Black-and-white, about expatriated Americans. Sidney Greenstreet, Jane Russell, lots of bamboo furniture and louvered shutters, marble columns, and lazy paddle fans. All shot at night, about love and sin and danger. Usually this worked, made her mind go hazy, brought on sleep.

Ricki pulled herself up and poured some spiced rum into a plastic glass she kept beside her bed. She sat on the edge of the water bed and slugged half of it down. No. No. No. It wasn’t guilt. She didn’t feel a ripple of that, not a twinge, not a hint. Let Thorn mourn. Kate had been his mother, not hers. There was no doubt about it now. The will spelled it out. Thorn ate at the table; Ricki got what fell on the floor.

She stood up, took the rum over to the chrome sling chair in front of her little black-and-white TV, and switched it on. Abbott and Costello, test pattern, some nature show about African drought. She turned it off. Sipped more rum as she walked over to the front window. A good breeze off the water tonight. Of course, in Key West everything was off the water. She could see a narrow patch of it from the window, glazed with moonlight. Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico, she could never tell.

She lay down again on the water bed, balancing her glass of rum on her stomach. Let Thorn mourn her while he still could. This puny kid, two years older than she was, who’d already had a good, solid grip on Kate by the time she was born. She’d never had a chance. Let Thorn mourn. Fuck if she would.

Someone was in the house, coming upstairs. Probably Lillian home from the Pier House, wanting to shoot the shit, or maybe wanting a tussle in the water bed. Not tonight. Ricki was beat, worn to shit. And still frazzled by Thorn and those two goons in uniforms.

She had it on her lips, “not tonight,” as the door opened. But it was Randy. The blond stud that clerked for Grayson. Well, maybe she did feel like a quick frolic after all. I mean, come on, look at the guy.

She smiled at him, though it did strike her as mildly impolite that he hadn’t knocked. Impolite or sexy, she wasn’t sure.

She told him to come in, asked him how he’d been.

He just stood in the doorway.

He said, “He wants to see you.”

“OK, that’s cool.” Ricki set her rum on the bedside table. “You tell him I’ll come in about ten. Whenever I manage to untangle from the sheets.”

“He wants to see you now,” Randy said. Guy had no sense of humor. She remembered it now, why she didn’t like him. One of those gays who liked men in direct proportion to how much they hated women.

“I’m too tired, Randy. Tell him I’ll be in first thing.”

“Get up,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Right now.”

Grayson’s yacht was a fifty-two-foot Hatteras. Bar was stocked with nonalcoholic beer and wine. The damn stuff tasted like Kool-Aid, and who could stand the taste of that stuff without the buzz? But Grayson didn’t seem to notice, drinking one phony beer after the other. Ricki sat on the couch, and Grayson, wearing dark slacks and a navy Windbreaker, stood beside the bar. His eyes skimmed over hers, not locking on anything like they usually did. That, as much as anything, made her scared.

Randy had the yacht going flat out.

“Martinique?” Ricki asked. “Eleuthera?”

“Like that,” Grayson said. “More exotic, though.”

“Come on, man. Just tell me if you’re mad at me or what.”

“I’m not mad. I don’t get mad at you, Ricki. I save mad for when I need a little extra boost, for when the competition gets stiff. Mad gets the adrenal gland humping. But I’m not mad with you, Ricki. It’s not necessary.”

“What did I do?”

Grayson smiled. Not a pretty sight.

“What did you do? What did you do? How to answer a question like that.”

“I paid those guys. I got some money from a friend and paid those guys, if that’s what this is all about. You were worried I hadn’t paid them.”