Virgin Heat (27 page)

The agent wanted to believe the banter was part of the seduction; he managed an uneasy laugh.

His mouth was still twisted from it as Michael rose and headed for the door. "About tomorrow," he said as he left. "Someone'll be in touch."

At Coral Shores, the next day went as slowly as a boat becalmed. Time flattened out like water stained with oil, the sun labored across the sky as if pulling an enormous train behind it.

The rituals of the guest house moved with a deliberateness almost Japanese. Carefully, the breakfast buffet was trundled into place; unhurriedly it was removed again. Men who'd been out very late settled, yawning, onto lounges, finishing up their short night's sleep in sunshine. A few people swam languorous laps; their arms rose and fell in a mesmerizing pattern like a dream of cresting dolphins.

But beneath the uneventful calm, everything was changing for the hostages. For good and for ill, old patterns were crumbling, old habits of the body and the heart seemed quite suddenly archaic.

Uncle Louie no longer got up before the sun. His eyes sprang open early, but now he lingered near his sleeping wife, savored the familiar smells of hair spray and old cigarettes. When he finally arose, it was to bring juice and coffee back to the room. Wife and husband plumped each other's pillows, then talked with the earnestness of newlyweds about what their life together should be like.

For Angelina, too, sitting on her lounge, nibbling mango off its skin, the contours of the universe seemed altered. Ziggy and her family—those were the two fixed points her life had long revolved around. Now she was moving, inch by inch, away from them; the process was as draining as a climb against some multiple of gravity. But did she dare, did she want, to break loose into something altogether new, or was she only testing the outermost limits of her orbit, waiting with hope as well as resignation for the moment when the only life she'd ever known would reach the end of its elastic and pull her back?

Through that hot slow day, Ziggy fell again into the outward semblance of a sulk—but what seemed to be old grouchiness was in fact a new kind of concentration. He was painfully aware that he'd never gotten anything exactly right in his life—in either of his lives. He'd done okay on certain things, he'd gotten by. But at every crucial juncture, every moment when he was truly tested, he'd fallen short. He'd blamed it on distraction; or on fatigue; or on lust for Angelina's neck. But it was something else as well: He'd screwed up because he knew that he'd screw up. That knowledge had always been the trigger of his failure, and he spent the day trying to sweat it out, to lose it and the other self-made poisons that went with it.

For Michael, the afternoon was a befuddled meditation on the dangers of the vicarious. He felt like he'd been watching someone else's movie and a giant hand had come out of the screen and grabbed his throat and pulled him in. Cops and robbers. Smuggling and vendettas. Murderous fathers and bisexual Feds. Somewhere along the line, watching had been transfigured into doing, and he couldn't shake the feeling that if he was in this far, he'd be called upon to get in farther still.

He was right. Around four o'clock, Ziggy, speaking for nearly the first time all day, said to him, "Michael, couple more things. Can I ask you to help with a couple more things?"

Michael nodded. He'd been yanked into the screen, he couldn't help but nod.

Ziggy said, "My car, it's on the side street. Underneath the dashboard, taped up, like, there's a gun. Can you bring it here?"

Michael's eyes got wide, he swallowed and his Adam's apple shuttled in his ropy neck. His voice congested, he said, "God Almighty, you're gonna need a gun?"

"No," said Ziggy. "You are."

*

Manny Links had been dubious as ever when Keith McCullough called that morning to ask for reinforcements.

"Lemme make sure I have this straight," the supervisor had said into the phone. "You have Amaro there. You have Lucca. You have Lucca and Amaro together. You have an informant right smack in the middle of Lucca and Amaro. And yet you have no idea what it is that Lucca and Amaro are up to."

Somewhat sheepishly, the undercover man had said, "That's right."

Links's chair squeaked, through the wires came the faint sound of fingers drumming on the desk. "And I'm supposed to send you six men, heavy weapons, infrared, to intercept this activity that you don't know what it is."

"Right again," McCullough said.

"And this course of action," Links went on, his teeth now grinding against his unlit pipe, "was suggested by a source who you acknowledge hates your guts and presumably would take great pleasure in making you look like a horse's ass."

"Probably so," the agent said.

There was a silence. McCullough could picture his boss's eyes flicking here and there around his office, the way they did when he was feeling most beset, like he was scouring the universe for some shred of sense or solace. "Sykes have a hand in this?" the supervisor had asked at last.

*

It was almost six p.m. when the produce truck arrived at the address in Hialeah.

The place turned out to be an auto shop, up near Opa-Locka airport, that specialized in the dismantling of stolen Lexuses and Jaguars. The Italian guy and the Spanish guy pulled into a vacant bay then watched through road-bleary eyes as a giant red sun went down beneath the muffler and transmission of a half-stripped car that was raised up on a lift.

Carlos Mendez was gracious as he paid the northerners. But he was so excited to get his guns, and so accustomed to hearing Spanish, that he noticed nothing remarkable about the New York mob guy speaking in his native tongue; he didn't even acknowledge it. Crestfallen, the Spanish guy decided he wouldn't say a word the whole way home.

While the weapons were removed from underneath the vegetables and fruits, and repacked in a different truck under iced crates of pompano and conch, Mendez retreated to the chop shop's small office and called Tommy Lucca at his hotel suite in Key West.

"Now that's more fucking like it," Lucca said. He was even more excited about the guns than Mendez was, because to him it wasn't just a piece of business but a victory, a triumph over all the sneaky bastards that were always trying to do him out of what was his. "How long till they roll?"

*

Lucca called Salazar, and Salazar set the details of the rendezvous.

Ten-thirty, at a place that had once been called Sand Key Marina. You took an unmarked right just past mile-marker twelve; drove five or seven minutes down an unpaved road half closed in by mangroves. Where the road ended there was a cement block building overgrown with vines, some rusted gas tanks on the water side. The boat would be there, tied up at the end of a dock half-fallen in the ocean.

Lucca said he understood, he had it. He told Salazar to contact Mendez. He himself called Paul Amaro, still holed up at the Flagler House.

It was a terse unfriendly call. "You tried your best to fuck it up, Paul, but you couldn't," Lucca said. "Be there at ten-thirty. You've done dick t'earn it, but you'll get your other hundred and a quarter."

Salazar, meanwhile, gave directions to Mendez, assured him that the unpaved pitted road looked like it couldn't possibly be the right road, but it was.

Then he hung up the phone, stared off at his violated garden, and absently rubbed duct-tape scum from the metal tubing of his chair. He wondered what it would be like to change careers, to segue out of crime, with its uncertainties, its maniacal colleagues, its double crosses. He took a deep breath, called up Coral Shores, got Ziggy on the line.

"Good luck, Bigtime," he said to his old errand boy after he'd conveyed the forbidden information. "Just leave me fuckin' out of it."

At nine p.m. the moon was going from egg yolk yellow to eggshell white as it topped Key West's metal roofs and put a silver sheen on the limp fronds of the palms at Coral Shores. It was bright enough so that the gingerbread on balconies threw shadows, and pool water glinted blue and viscous with every random ripple.

But the hostages were hiding from the light. They huddled in the dimness of the overhang next to the room that Michael shared with Ziggy. They sat on low chairs that made them hunch; their backs defined a snug circle that blocked outsiders' eyes. They spoke in soft and furtive voices.

Ziggy was saying, "Okay people, here's the night it either works out or it doesn't."

Louie was sitting hip to hip with Rose. He ran a hand over his head, raked a few bundles of sparse and stringy hair. He said, "I'd feel better, I knew more what you had in mind."

Ziggy said, "The details, they wouldn't do you any good to know." Saying it, he felt odd, like he was faking, just mouthing things he'd heard other leaders say. He'd never been in charge before. There was an excitement in it that he could not deny, but also a burden, a dull weight between his shoulder blades; he didn't think the one was worth the other.

After a pause he said, "A little while from now, there's somewhere that I gotta be. If I'm there, that means Paulie can't be there. That's all you really have to know."

He glanced left and right behind himself, then reached beneath his shirt flaps, into the waistband of his pants, and came out with the gun that Michael had brought him. The weapon somehow drew a moonbeam that made it glow obscenely, made it stand out from everything around it and seem to leave a phosphorescent track as it moved in Ziggy's palm.

It moved inexorably toward Michael, and when it was in front of him Ziggy said, "What you gotta do for me, Michael, you gotta keep him in his room."

Michael didn't answer, he was staring at the gun. His green eyes had gotten very big and it seemed they could neither blink nor move away.

"Can you do that for me?" Ziggy coaxed.

Michael licked his lips, gave a very small nod, but at that moment Uncle Louie said, "Now wait a second, that's not fair."

Ziggy said nothing, just lifted up an eyebrow.

"It's not his problem," Louie said, "It's not his family."

Across the courtyard, the Jacuzzi switched on. There was the sudden whine of the compressor, the faint hiss of exploding bubbles. Ziggy considered, then moved the gun in the flat of his hand like he was passing hors d'oeuvres around the table. He said to Louie, "So
you
wanna go?"

Louie stammered, but only for an instant. Then he said, "The poor guy just got outa jail. We're supposed to help you send him back again?"

"Did I say I'm sending him back again?" asked Ziggy.

"You didn't say you weren't," Angelina said.

"All you said," Rose added, "you said you didn't want him where you were. And let's face it, that's 'cause you're scared of him."

With his free hand Ziggy pulled down hard on his synthetic face. "I'm scared of 'im. Sure I am. We're
all
scared of 'im. Why the hell else are we sitting here like goddam refugees?"

The word stung; Ziggy felt a futile impulse to argue it away. Instead he said, "You don't trust me. Fine. You think I'm trying to save my own sorry ass. You're right. But one thing's for sure. Paulie shows up where I'm goin', he's headed right back to the slammer."

Louie said, "And if he doesn't show up, you could whaddyacallit, implicate him anyway."

Ziggy said, "That's absolutely true. I could. Nothing would be easier .. . Now, is someone gonna take the goddam gun and keep him in his room or do I carry it along for self-defense when he tries to murder me in front of half the cops in Florida?"

There was a pause. Streetlamps hummed. Toads answered one another's rumblings from shrub to shrub.

Uncle Louie looked down at his shoes, saw instead the road signs that had hovered over him on the morning that his steering wheel had turned itself and sent him careening toward Key West to be a hero. "Okay," he said at last. "Me, I'll go."

His hand started moving toward the offered weapon, but his wife's forearm came down like a board and clamped him at the wrist. "Like hell you will."

"Understand," said Ziggy, "you'll be standing between him and a payday. And one other thing— his paranoid nutcase of a partner is gonna be extremely pissed if he doesn't show."