by Cap Daniels
There was no time to wait for his reply. I handed the receiver back to the clerk and thanked her. I tossed the Porsche keys onto the counter and headed off toward our room. While I’d been talking with Jack, Anya had hurried to our suite and packed everything. We headed for room one-oh-four where we found the door propped open and Clark sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for us.
He stood when we came through the door. “Let’s go,” he said, “but you’re paying for the gas.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
* * *
The four-hundred-mile flight was uneventful and took less than two hours. Clark turned out to be a competent, if a little overly cautious, pilot.
On the ramp at Key West International Airport, I asked the lineman to top off the King Air with fuel and find a place to park it overnight. I slid my credit card across the counter to the young lady at the FBO and told her what I had asked the lineman to do. Pointing toward Clark, I said, “This is Clark. He’s the pilot, but charge everything to my card and find him a place to stay for the night. He and the airplane have to be back in Virginia tomorrow.”
I thanked Clark for the ride and turned to leave.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing down here, I can probably help.”
I thought it was kind and ambitious of him to offer, but I refused. “I appreciate the offer, Clark, but this one’s personal. It’s not company business.”
“Okay,” he said, “but if you change your mind, I can be back down here in three hours.”
* * *
Anya and I had changed clothes on the plane. She wore a new summer dress, and I wore a tropical print shirt.
Anya eyed me questioningly. “You look like tourist.”
“That’s the idea,” I said.
We hailed a cab and climbed into the back seat.
“Hey, welcome to Bone Key, folks. Where we headed tonight?” the cabbie asked.
“We are looking for girl,” said Anya.
The cabbie grinned. “Oh, so that’s how you guys get down. Party on. It’s cool. I know just the guy. He can get you any kind of girl you want . . . redhead, blonde, Brazilian, whatever. I mean, this guy’s the real deal.”
When Anya realized what the cabbie was saying, she blushed, and the angry Russian started to emerge. I put my hand on her leg to stop her from lashing out.
“Cool,” I said. “We partied with a girl from somewhere up in Georgia once last time we were here. I think her name was Skippy or Skipper or something like that. She was tall and skinny, maybe six feet, long brown hair, Southern accent. It’d be hot to hook up with her again.”
The cabbie squinted at me in the rearview mirror. “Hey, man, I don’t know nothin’ about that. I just know the guy. That’s it, man. It ain’t my gig, you know.”
“I didn’t mean to imply you had anything to do with it,” I said. “I was just saying we liked the girl. So, where does this guy of yours hang out?”
The cabbie’s voice was getting shaky. “Hey, man. He ain’t my guy. I just know who he is. That’s it. He’s always at the Green Parrot. He goes by the name Micky. I don’t know if that’s his real name or what. Like I said, it ain’t my gig, and he ain’t my guy. Cool?”
We pulled up in front of the Green Parrot Bar at the corner of Whitehead and Southard, and I paid the cabbie with a fifty-dollar bill.
“Man, I ain’t got change for this,” he said.
“It’s cool,” I said. “Keep it. Thanks for the ride and the hookup with your man, Micky.”
“He ain’t my man. I done told you that. He ain’t my man,” he said as we walked away.
Anya was already getting looks from the drunken frat boys and middle-aged fat guys on the street. She laced her arm through mine so everyone would know she wasn’t looking for a boy toy that night.
“Damn it,” I said. “I should’ve gotten a picture of Skipper from Coach.”
Before I could finish beating myself up for such a ridiculous mistake, Anya pulled a wallet-sized picture from her clutch. It was Skipper’s senior picture.
“I asked Laura, and she gave to me.”
What would I do without her?
I took the picture, slid it into my shirt pocket, and we pushed our way through the crowd and into the bar. It was loud and hot inside and took a great deal of effort to make it to the actual bar.
An overworked bartender came over to us. “What can I get you?”
“We’re looking for Micky,” I yelled over the noise.
The bartender reflexively eyed a man in a Panama hat and a linen shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front. He wore a gaudy golden eagle pendant on a thick chain around his neck.
“Sorry, man, I don’t know no Micky. What can I get you to drink?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me right.” I slid a hundred-dollar bill onto the bar. “I said . . . me and my friend Benjamin here are looking for Micky.”
He peered at the hundred. “Oh, you said Micky. Sure, I know Micky. That’s him in the hat at the end of the bar.”
“I thought you might know who I was talking about. It wouldn’t have hurt so bad if you’d answered my question the first time,” I said.
“What wouldn’t have hurt so bad?”
With my left arm, I trapped his hand over the hundred on the bar and held it firmly in place while I delivered a sharp blow to the back of his elbow with my right hand. I didn’t hit him hard enough to break the elbow, but it was definitely hyperextended and would cause a lot of pain. He lashed out, swinging wildly with his remaining good arm. The punch came in slow motion, and I blocked it with my left forearm. When I was certain I’d stopped the punch, I shoved my hand behind his head and grasped the back of his neck. I pulled his head forward and down in one swift motion, driving his nose and chin into the top of the bar hard enough to leave him seeing stars. To his credit, he didn’t go down, but with blood pouring from his nose, he staggered backward and into a wall of glasses.
I lifted my hundred from the bar and nudged Anya toward Micky, who had watched the whole episode. He started for the door, but Anya wasn’t going to let him get away. She shoved her way through the crowd, crouching low as she set a course to intercept Micky before he could make it to the door. A bouncer, who had watched the scene unfold, stepped in front of Anya and grabbed her by the right shoulder. I cringed, thinking how dearly he was going to pay for that mistake.
Anya stood erect while extending her right arm up and behind the bouncer’s shoulder. She stuck her left foot in front of his right shin and turned in a violent one-hundred-eighty-degree arc while capturing his arm with her right hand and driving him to the floor with her left. His forehead hit the floor first, and his lights went out. She stepped on the back of his hand and continued her rotation. I could almost hear the bones in his hand breaking.
The bouncer hadn’t stopped us, but he had slowed us down enough for Micky to disappear. Anya scanned the room and then pointed toward the front door. I shoved my way to the door and out onto the street. She did the same and came out the other side onto Whitehead Street. I ran around the corner just in time to see her sprinting into the alley a few hundred feet down the block. I followed her and saw a pair of bright headlights coming toward us and picking up speed. The alley was just wide enough for the car, leaving Anya no place to escape being run over.
I saw her look quickly left then right as she realized her predicament. With nowhere else to go, she leapt straight up a millisecond before the front bumper of the car would’ve plowed her over. She tucked her arms in against her chest and rolled onto her side, landing on top of the car. With the headlights in my eyes, I could barely see what was happening, but it looked like the roof had caved in from the force of her impact. I lost sight of her as she rolled off the back of the car, but I was confident she’d survived, probably unscathed.
Running out of ideas and time, I pulled out my suppressed Walther and pointed it at the driver’s side windshield. I stood defiantly in front of the
car, but the driver kept accelerating. I lowered my pistol and put three rounds through the radiator and into the engine block. The next two rounds busted the headlights as the car coasted to a stop inches in front of me. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw why the roof seemed to collapse under Anya’s weight—it was a ragtop Cadillac.
Anya was pulling her knife through the heavy fabric of the convertible top, opening an enormous hole in the roof. Micky leaned across the front seat in an obvious panic and reached for the glove compartment. I was sure he was going for a gun, but Anya was too quick. She slid through the hole she’d cut in the top of the car and landed on her feet behind Micky’s seat. She grabbed the thick gold chain around his neck and pulled with all of her strength, burying the wings of the eagle pendant into his meaty throat. His hands flew to his neck then he grasped at Anya behind his head. She dodged his grasp while continuing to pull the chain like a garrote. His flailing persisted until his face turned blood red and his eyes bulged. His arms collapsed limply to his sides, and his tongue fell out over his bottom lip.
I squeezed alongside the Cadillac until I was standing beside the driver’s door. Anya released the chain and pulled his head back over the seat to ensure his airway remained open. I pulled the laces out of his shoes and tied his hands through the steering wheel. His chest rose and fell, and then the coughing came. He sputtered, gagged, and gasped as he returned to the land of the living.
When he opened his eyes, I jammed the muzzle of my suppressor against his left cheekbone. Anya simultaneously placed the tip of her knife beneath his right ear and applied just enough pressure to make him feel the razor-sharp tip piercing his flesh.
“Welcome back,” I said. “How are we supposed to have a conversation with you running away and passing out?”
“Who the fuck are you people?” he growled.
“We are nightmare,” Anya said calmly.
He turned his head to the right to see her, but she stopped him by slicing off a half inch of earlobe from his head. He bellowed in pain as the blood streaked down his neck and through the hair of his exposed chest.
“What do you want from me?”
I pulled Skipper’s picture from my shirt pocket and held it in front of his face. Anya pulled out a flashlight she’d lifted from the bouncer and shined the beam on the picture.
As soon as he started to speak, I stuck my muzzle into his mouth, past his teeth, and pressed it solidly against the roof of his mouth. Instinctively, Anya moved a few inches to the right to avoid the high velocity brain matter that could’ve been seconds away from spraying through the top of his head.
“Listen very closely,” I said. “There’s only one thing you can say that will keep you alive. You’re going to tell me exactly where she is. If you don’t know who she is, you are useless to me, and you die right here, right now. If you don’t know where she is, you die right here, right now. If you tell me a lie, I will find you—and you know I can—and I will kill you wherever you are.” I pulled the pistol from his mouth. “Now that we’ve established the ground rules, tell me where she is.”
The beads of sweat on his forehead and the twitching of his eyes showed the torment of his decision.
Anya was a little impatient. “Let me kill him and play in his blood.”
Panic filled his eyes. “Okay, okay. I’ve seen her around, but she don’t work for me. She’s a dancer at Three Sheets, a strip club over on Truman. Now call off your crazy bitch before she cuts my head off.”
Anya grinned. “I will not kill you yet, but you are right. I am crazy bitch, and you will learn how crazy if you lied to us.”
She tossed the bouncer’s flashlight into the air, caught the small end in her palm, then clubbed Micky in the temple, causing him to slump forward over the steering wheel. Anya slithered into the front seat and opened the glove compartment. Inside she found a .38 revolver and a pint of Jim Beam.
Using her knife, she removed the revolver’s spring that held the cylinder closed. She placed the revolver back in the glove compartment and poured the bourbon over the unconscious man.
We pushed Micky and his destroyed Cadillac down the alley and out of sight, and then we headed toward Duval Street.
9
Duval Street
Every night, the theme on Duval Street is Mardi Gras meets Animal House. From drag queens to the crazy cat man in Mallory Square, if it’s debauchery you’re looking for, you’ll find it.
When we turned the corner from Angela onto Duval, we came face-to-face with Darth Vader on a unicycle playing a banjo.
Anya froze in disbelief and then exploded into laughter. “What is this place, Chase?”
“This, my dear, is Duval Street at its finest.”
“It is carnival?” she asked.
“No, it’s just Saturday night in Key West.”
The banjo-playing, unicycle-riding Darth Vader was far from the craziest thing to see on Duval after the sun went down.
I hailed a bicycle cab and he pulled to the curb in front of us. Anya stared, perplexed by the strange, three-wheeled contraption with a bench seat only wide enough for two people. Reluctantly, she climbed aboard.
A fit young man was at the pedals. “Where to, guys?” he asked.
“Three Sheets on Truman.”
He peeked over his shoulder at me. “All right, man. Right on.”
He lifted his fist to offer me a fist bump, but Anya surprised him when she tapped his fist with hers, and said, “Right on.”
“That’ll be seven bucks if you’re in a hurry, and it’ll take about seven or eight minutes, but if you want the scenic route, it’ll be twenty bucks for about a thirty-minute ride and I’ll show you the sights.”
“We’re in a hurry,” I said, “And it’ll be an extra hundred for every minute you get us there under six.”
He stood on the pedals and started pumping like his life depended on it. We rolled up in front of the Three Sheets strip club less than five minutes later with our pedaler sweating and panting like a dog. He yanked a squeeze bottle from a pouch beneath his seat and shot a long stream of water into his throat.
I checked my watch. “Well done, my man,” I said as I handed him two hundred dollars.
“Cool, man. Thanks,” he said breathlessly as he stuffed the bills into his shorts pocket. “I can pick you up later if you want.”
“No thanks. We’re meeting a friend here, so we’ll catch a ride with her.”
We walked through the front door and paid the cover charge. Anya got in free since it was ladies’ night . . . whatever that meant. I had a feeling every night was ladies’ night at Three Sheets. As we made our way through the second set of doors, it took a couple minutes for our eyes to adjust to the near darkness of the room in contrast with the bright stage lights where the girls were dancing, most of them devoid of clothing, and the others soon on their way to the same degree of undress.
We found an empty table in a corner where we could sit with our backs to the wall and watch not only the people coming and going through the front door, but where we could also see down the dimly lit hallway into what appeared to be back offices on one side, and the dancers’ dressing room on the other.
We hadn’t been at the table thirty seconds when a young, raven-haired waitress materialized. In an unmistakably Eastern European accent, she asked, “What you will have?”
“Jack and Coke,” I said.
The waitress turned to Anya.
In her natural accent, Anya said, “For me, same.”
“You are working?” the waitress said, implying Anya was a prostitute.
Anya laughed and grabbed my hand. “No, we are on honeymoon.”
“Congratulation,” she said, and turned away into the darkness of the dingy club.
“She is Kazakhstani, I think,” Anya said.
“Do you speak Kazakh?” I asked.
She shook her head and tried to yell over the blaring music. “No, but she will speak Russian. All Kazakhs speak Russian.
It is official language of Kazakhstan.”
“I learn something new every day with you.”
“Today, I learn from you about Duval Street.”
Dr. Richter was right. She could teach me tradecraft, and I could teach her how to enjoy being alive.
“Do you think she’ll talk to us?” I asked.
Anya peered at the bar. “No, she will not talk to us, but she will talk to me.”
When the waitress returned, she placed my drink in front of me, then slowly slid Anya’s across the small table to her.
Anya reached out, gently touching the back of the waitress’s hand, and said, “Spasibo, krasivaya.”
The girl kissed Anya’s cheek, leaving a lipstick smear, and said, “Spasibo,” before she walked away again.
“Yes, I think she is Kazakh, and I think she is not old enough to be working in this club.”
“I don’t know about the Kazakh part, but I agree with you about her age. Do you think you can get her to tell you about Skipper?”
“No,” said Anya. “I do not think so. She is young and only waitress, not dancer. If she knows anything, she would be afraid to tell anyone, even a Russian like me.”
“Maybe we can just wait and see if Skipper’s here. It’s Saturday night. Surely most of their girls will be working.”
Anya frowned. “You are on honeymoon. You are not to be looking at dancing naked girls . . . only looking at me.”
I thought she was kidding, but I wasn’t certain. We nursed our drinks and watched a dozen girls come and go down the hallway. None of them were Skipper.
“I don’t think she’s here. I think we’ve seen all the dancers. We need to find someone who’ll talk to us, one way or another. Do you have any ideas?”
Anya surveyed the room. “I think you are right. If I try to talk with Kazakh girl, she will tell bouncer, and we will have to fight again. I think I have idea, but I think you will not like.”
“Let’s hear it,” I said. “I’m willing to try almost anything at this point.”