by J. M. LeDuc
“Tell me about Maria and the orphanage.”
“Prophet Heap. . .”
“Don’t call him that.” Sin looked at Carmelita. “You don’t believe he is a prophet, do you?”
“Of course not. It is just habit. If we don’t refer to him as Prophet Heap, we are scolded and punished.”
“Punished?” Anger filled Sin’s words.
“Not physically, we are just shunned by the community and treated like an outcast. When I first refused to call him by that name, my electricity was turned off. I paid my bills, yet I had no electricity.”
Sin nodded. “The bastard owns the island.”
“Si. Once I referred to him by that name, my electricity was miraculously turned back on.”
“And my father? Did he too call him prophet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Carmelita smiled. “Your father went to Key Largo and bought the biggest generator he could find. This home is run by generator and propane, not electricity.”
Sin smiled.
“I told your father that I would do the same, but he told me not to. He said that he believed Heap to be an evil man and that it was better for me to just play along, so I acquiesced.” Carmelita’s expression darkened. “It feels like acid burning the back of my throat every time I have to call him by that name, but I do so out of respect for your father.”
Sin stared out at the moonless sky.
Carmelita took her hand. “Your father is a good man. He has his faults like all of us, but in here,” she placed a finger over her chest, “in his heart, he is a good man. He has spoken many times of how he regretted the way he treated you. Of how he didn’t believe you when those boys called you those awful names.”
Sin blushed with feelings of sadness.
“When he became sick, you were all he could think about. He no longer cared about Heap and what he had done to this community, he only cared about you and prayed for your forgiveness.”
A tear slid down Sin’s cheek. She could taste the salty sting as it passed over her lips. “Does he know I am back?” she whispered.
“No.”
Sin knew what she had to do. Before the mission could go further, she needed to see her father.
The two women walked back into the house and found Maria curled up and sleeping on the couch.
“You and Maria will spend the night here,” Sin said. “And tomorrow, you will tell me about the orphanage.”
“Si, mi hija.”
7
Sin pulled her Harley up to the guard gate at the Navy base on Key West. The guard smirked in her direction, and she was about to say something sarcastic when she remembered why she was there and that she was full-fledged enlisted. Before the MP could say anything he would regret later, she flashed her military ID. His demeanor did a one-eighty when he realized she outranked him. He stood a little taller and looked upon her with respect.
Sin stifled a grin as she rode away from the guard gate. She parked her bike and proceeded into the hospital.
Making her way through the corridors of the hospital, Sin was amused at the looks she garnered from those she passed. She wondered if it was because she was not in uniform, or was it the fact that she was wearing low rise, tight jeans, and an even tighter long sleeve tee-shirt that said ‘Bite Me’ on the back? Maybe it was the sound that the stiletto heels of her black leather boots made on the linoleum floors as she sauntered past.
Sin had stopped trying to please others with her style of dress or her attitude the day she left Tumbleboat. She had been shunned, ridiculed, and lied about while she lived here because of her physical attributes, but in the years since, she learned to use those attributes in her favor. The truth was, she was a curvaceous woman with a take-no-prisoners attitude. That was the way God made her and that was the way she planned on going about her life. She wasn’t about to reign in her sexuality for the military or anyone else.
She stood outside her father’s room, surprised at what she saw. Her father was frail, not the man she remembered. What surprised her even more was the person he was talking to: Troy Stubbs, the deputy she ran into yesterday.
They looked up when she knocked on the doorframe. Her father sat a little straighter, mouth agape when he saw her. Sin, too, was speechless. It had been seven years since they had seen each other, and Sin suddenly felt self-conscious.
Troy took a step toward her and held out his hand. “Sin, it’s nice to see you again. I was just mentioning to your father that we had run into each other last night when you arrived.”
“It’s always nice to see old friends,” Sin replied.
Troy looked back at her father. “Thomas, I have a few people to say hello to and then I will come back to say goodbye.” He tipped his ball cap at Sin and walked out of the room.
An awkward silence seemed to swallow both father and daughter as Sin tentatively walked toward the bed.
The moment was broken by the sound of a female voice. She was looking at his medical chart as she spoke. “Thomas, I have good news. Your blood results are improving and you should be able to go a rehabilitation facility tomorrow.” When she saw Sin, she smiled. “Hi, I’m Dr. O’Rourke, Mr. O’Malley’s oncologist.”
Sin reached out and shook her hand. “I’m Sin—Sinclair O’Malley, his daughter.”
Dr. O’Rourke sat in the only chair in room. “Please, call me Deborah. Your being here changes everything.”
“And you can call me Sin. How does my being here change everything?”
“Well, I am assuming that you will be staying for a while and if so, your father can go home instead of a rehabilitation facility.”
Sin looked at her father. He seemed a shell of the man she had last seen. “Doesn’t he need special care or . . . something?”
The doctor’s voice took on an edge as she spoke. “No, what he needs is to go home and heal up from the therapy he went through. Are you capable of taking care of him at home?”
“Will you two stop talking as if I wasn’t here,” Thomas said. “I’ll go to the rehab center. I don’t even know how long my daughter has for leave.”
The doctor removed her glasses. “Leave?”
“Let me give you a proper introduction,” Thomas said. “Deborah, this is Sergeant Sinclair Rachael O’Malley. Marine, Special Forces, last assigned to a covert ops group which worked with Seal Team Six in both Afghanistan and Iraq.” He beamed with pride and appeared to gain strength as he spoke in adulation of his daughter.
Dr. O’Rourke’s expression didn’t change. She just continued to eye Sin, waiting for an answer.
“My leave is indefinite,” Sin said. She pumped up her chest in defiance. No one was going to get the best of her. “When can he come home?”
Dr. O’Rourke stood to leave. “Depending on this afternoon’s blood results, Thomas should be able to leave the hospital tomorrow. I have a stack of paperwork you will need to sign, and I need you to meet with the case manager and Occupational Therapist and I . . .”
“Later,” Sin said. “I would like to spend some time getting reacquainted with my father.”
“I’m afraid we work on a strict time schedule here, Sergeant and . . .”
Sin took a step toward Dr. O’Rourke, cutting her off with her proximity. “I will find you when I am finished here.”
Dr. O’Rourke slammed the metal chart shut and stormed out of the room.
“Well, I see some things haven’t changed,” Thomas said.
Sin stood at his side, hands on hips, one arched out to the side. The same way she stood in front of him when she was a teenager while he was reprimanding her. “Why is it I can lead men into battle, but when I return home, I become an angry little girl?”
Her father became quiet. With a shaky hand, he took a sip of water. “What do you say, we start all over again.”
Sin relaxed her posture and nodded.
Thomas held out his arms. “Come here and give your dad a hug.”
Sin’s movements were wooden.
She bent over and gently gave her father a hug. One you would give a stranger. He pulled her in and squeezed tight, his arms shook from his weakened state.
“I’m sorry for how things were between us,” he said. “I’m sorry for not believing you—for not believing in you.”
Sin hugged him a little tighter and wondered how he would feel if he knew the truth about her life. “Me too,” was all she said.
They slowly became reacquainted over the next couple of hours. Thomas kept repeating how much she resembled her mother and how much he was sorry for everything.
Sin told him about seeing Carmelita and Maria, and she asked about Jeremiah Heap and his church. Thomas gazed from her to someone in the hallway. “We will talk about all that when we get home.”
Sin turned around and saw Troy walking into the room.
“I’ll be leaving,” he said. “I just wanted to stop by and say goodbye, Tom. I will stop by tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, you can stop by the house. Sinclair is breaking me out of here.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. If it’s all right with Sin, I’ll do that.” He held her gaze with a tentative, almost shy smile.
“That’s fine,” she said. “If you have a few minutes, I would like to talk to you.”
Troy tipped his hat toward Thomas and led Sin into the hallway.
“Dad, I’ll let you rest. I will come by tonight and sign whatever and meet with whomever Dr. O’Rourke needs me to.”
Once outside, she looked at Troy. “It seems I’m in the mood to try to fix old relationships. How about we start over?”
“Sounds like a plan. Follow me and we can sit and have a beer.”
Sin looked around as they cleared the front doors of the building and said, “Where’s your vehicle?”
His eyes shifted to the Harley Davidson Fat Boy parked next to her bike. “I rode in style today.”
Sin walked over and checked out his bike. His bike was stripped of everything but what was needed and coated in flat black paint. She squatted down and checked out the engine.
Sin could feel him staring at her as she looked over his bike. She rose from a squat position and turned towards Troy. “I see you made some modifications.”
The left side of Troy’s mouth curled up in an Elvis sort of way as he put his sunglasses on. “Yep.”
Sin pulled a small lipstick from her pocket and moistened her dry lips making them seem fuller in the process. She noticed the effect was not lost on Troy. She traced his leather seat with a fingertip as she slid her sunglasses off the top of her head and over her eyes, and ambled past him—their bodies brushing against one another, and straddled her bike. She kick-started her panhead and gave the throttle a quick twist. “Try and keep up,” she yelled over the growl of her bike.
Troy laughed as he started his bike and pulled out behind her.
8
They sat in a small Key West bar called The Rusty Anchor. It sat off Duval Street away from the tourist traps. Sin wiped the ice off her longneck beer bottle and brought it to her lips. She took a long pull, savoring the flavor. She hadn’t tasted a cold American beer in years. The only beer she had drunk had been in the jungles of Central America and Asia, where it tasted more like warm piss than beer. She closed her eyes and took another pull from the bottle.
Sin eyed Troy as he sat back and watched her drink. He seemed mesmerized by the way she brought the bottle to her mouth and caressed it with her full lips. In return, she watched him guzzle with a seemingly unquenchable thirst. To her, the intensity in which he drank was only matched by the way he appeared to stare at her. To break the ‘spell’ she unwittingly cast, she veered her attention elsewhere, looking around the bar. “I don’t remember this place being such a shithole,” she said.
Troy lowered his bottle and shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, O’Malley.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“What did you want to talk about?” he asked.
Sin downed the last bit from her bottle and waved it at the bartender. “I have a lot of questions, but let’s start with why you were visiting my father today.”
“To say hi.”
Sin twisted her mouth and rolled her eyes. “Do you really want to start down the ‘You’re still an asshole’ road?”
“I guess not,” Troy laughed. “I came back to Tumbleboat Key three months ago to take care of my mother. Like your dad, she had cancer. She needed around the clock care, but on a trooper’s salary, I couldn’t afford it.”
“You’re a statie?” Sin interrupted.
Troy nodded.
“You weren’t in uniform when I saw you yesterday. I just assumed you worked for the locals.”
Troy started to peel the label off his bottle. “Your dad took care of my mom before I got here and stayed with her while I was working.”
“How is she?” Sin asked.
“She passed away two weeks after I got here.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sin watched as Troy’s expression changed into a sad Mona Lisa-esque smile. His vulnerability began to break through the icy feelings she had for him.
“I think she was just waiting for me to get here before she stopped fighting the inevitable,” he said.
Sin watched as he bit his lower lip. He sat back, cleared his throat, and drank the last of his beer.
“I really am sorry. I liked your mom. She was one of the only people in this town I missed after I left.”
Troy waved toward the bartender for another round. He appeared to be avoiding making eye contact with Sin.
“So,” Sin continued, “you stayed after Ruth passed away?”
“No, I went back north. I have been working out of the Miami-Dade County office since I returned to Florida. I was transferred to the Lower Keys three weeks ago. When I came back, I went to say hi to your dad and that’s when Carmelita told me he was sick.”
They both remained silent as the bartender brought them another round.
Sin tipped her bottle towards Troy. “Thank you for watching over my father.” Troy reached over and ‘clinked’ bottles.
They drank in silence for a few minutes.
Each trying to size the other one up.
“What else do you want to talk about?”
“Huh?”
Troy leaned forward. “You could have asked Carmelita about me and Tom. What’s the real reason for this get together?”
Sin could see Troy’s curiosity in the twinkle of his eye. She decided to let him dangle for a while. “Why don’t you tell me how you became a cop? The last time I saw you, you were headed to the University of Miami on a full football scholarship.”
Troy’s shoulders slumped as he slouched back in his chair. “Not something I enjoy talking about.”
Sin swigged the rest of her beer and reached for her keys. “Well then, I guess our little time together has come to an end.”
Troy grabbed her wrist as she stood. “Why do you always have to be such a bitch?”
Sin shrugged. “Because being a bitch was ingrained in me growing up in a shit pile of a town where everyone thought you were something you weren’t.” She pulled her arm from his grip. “That’s why.”
Sin felt Troy’s stare as she stomped from the bar.
In fact, she felt everyone’s eyes follow her out of the bar.
9
Sin knew her anger and emotion got the best of her and she wasn’t happy about it. She screamed as she rode along the overseas highway. The growl of her bike more than drowned out her outburst.
She knew she needed to get back to Tumbleboat and start trying to make some sense of the little she had been told, but she needed time to clear her head. She needed time to come to grips with her life.
She didn’t even hesitate as she drove straight past the pier that led to Tumbleboat. She twisted her right wrist, upshifted into fifth gear, and flew past. Instinctively, she knew where she was headed.
Forty minutes later, she pull
ed into a small cemetery just to the south of Marathon. Marathon was considered the halfway point along the keys. Not a city or even a small town by most people’s standards, but to those who lived along the narrow strip of land known as the Florida Keys, it was a metropolis.
Sin drove into the cemetery and pulled her bike up to a grassy area that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean. She smiled when she gazed at the view. Her mother insisted on this plot site. She never insisted on much, but there was no denying her this one extravagance.
Her mother, Susanna Juanita Angelina Sanchez O’Malley had been born in Cuba two years before Fidel Castro took control of the island paradise by military coup. Although she left in nineteen eighty at the height of the Mariel Boatlift, she considered Cuba her first home and she insisted that her final resting place have a view of that home.
The memories of her mom regaling her with stories about the beauty of Cuba made Sin smile. Truth be told, Sin had been to Cuba many times during her ‘freelance’ days.
Walking to the gravesite brought back other memories. These were not as pleasant as the first. She remembered her mother’s own battle with cancer and how hard she fought the disease. Sin remembered her mother telling her that no matter what life threw at her, she was to always fight.
“Fight for everything, mi hija,” her mother would tell her. “When you know you are right, don’t you let other people tell you otherwise.”
Hearing those words in her mind brought Sin a sense of pride and a whole lot of guilt. Guilt for running from her home, guilt for running from the FBI, and guilt for trying to run from herself.
Sin wiped the dirt and leaves from the marble gravestone, knelt in front of it, and began talking.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here to see you in a long time. I saw Dad earlier. It was the first time we spent more than five minutes together in fifteen years without having an argument or knockdown brawl.” Sin smiled. “It felt nice. I wanted to come by and promise you that I will take care of him and . . .”