Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10)

by Laurence Shames

  The man waved the .44, gave Lydia a quick prod with the muzzle, started nudging the captives over the last few feet of squishing ground toward the waiting boat.

  But before they reached it there was an abrupt clattering in the mangroves and a tall figure burst through. His clothing was buttoned up from head to toe as though for jungle combat and his gun was braced across his wrist. He shouted, “Drop it!”

  The man with the magnum didn’t. They faced off, one on one, not much more than a stride apart.

  Frank Fortuna said, “And who the fuck are you?”

  “Special Agent Andrew Sheehan, FBI.” He said it without ever moving his eyes.

  “FBI,” Fortuna said, as though naming a disease. It seemed to take him just a heartbeat to size up the situation and then he threw a look of quiet fury at Carlos. “You set me up, you little prick?”

  Carlos blanched, his perfect clothes seemed suddenly to wilt. “No! I swear to God.”

  The silver-haired man spun his gaze toward Lydia, looked at her with utter hate. “So it had to be the bitch. Sure, you weren’t about to turn—“

  “I didn’t turn,” she said. “I told you that.”

  The two men with the guns kept their eyes glued to one another and their fingers gradually grew more taut around the triggers.

  “Everything that’s happened, Frank,” Lydia went on, “you know why it happened? It all started because you called a hit on me. And why’d you do that? Because you lost your nerve.”

  “Bullshit, I lost my nerve.”

  “You lost it, Frank. I asked for a raise, you got all paranoid. Paranoid and cheap and selfish. You’re so selfish, so puffed up with your stupid pride, you’d kill your own daughter’s husband.”

  Fortuna was unmoved by that. He glanced dismissively at Benny and said, “So what? I found her this bum. I’ll find her someone better.”

  “Like hell you will.”

  The shrill and simple words came disembodied from the mangroves, and in the next instant, accompanied by the snap of breaking twigs, Glenda came hurtling through the foliage, her eyes wild and inflamed with bug bites, her tall shoes muddy, her hair matted here and there with cobwebs. “You’re done running my life,” she shouted at her father. “There’s one man who’s important to me. Benny. Not you. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you.”

  Trying not to show that he was stung, Fortuna said, “You’re out of control, Glenda. We’ll talk about this when you’re calmer. When you understand the world a little better.”

  “We’ll talk about it now,” she said. “I don’t care if I ever see you again. Not even in prison.”

  That was an unspeakable word in the Fortuna family. Saying it now was meant to wound, and it did. Glenda’s father absorbed it and frowned down at the soggy ground a moment. But then, after several heartbeats, the frown curled itself into a very nasty hint of a smile and his eyes slid away from Glenda, back toward the far end of the clearing. At last he said in a softly gloating tone, “Prison? I don’t think we need to talk about prison here. Look behind you, Mr. FBI.”

  41.

  Too experienced to be decoyed, Sheehan swiveled only slightly, always keeping the first shooter in view. But it turned out that Fortuna wasn’t bluffing. Two more men, stubby revolvers drawn and wagging, were stepping gingerly but relentlessly across the coral slabs and knobs. One of them was Mikey Ferraro, Benny’s former pal. The other was the goon who’d thrown Peter off the seawall.

  With quiet satisfaction, Fortuna watched his allies approach, and as soon as he was sure the advantage had swung his way again, he reverted to his usual stance of taunter and bully. “You’re outgunned, my friend,” he said to Sheehan. “Three to one. They teach you how to deal with that in cop school?”

  Sheehan didn’t answer, just slowly panned his weapon back and forth among his adversaries.

  To Carlos, Fortuna said, “That tub of yours. Room for one more body?”

  “No problem. Short ride.”

  “Strange,” Fortuna mused to Sheehan, “that the Bureau would put you out here all alone. No snipers? No helicopters? No SWAT team? What is it, a budget issue?”

  “No, it’s a do the right thing issue.”

  The words seemed to come forth from the night itself but the voice that spoke them was vaguely though hauntingly familiar to Fortuna.

  In the next instant there was a scuffling in the mangroves as of a small stampede, branches slapping, feet sloshing through shallow stagnant puddles. Shakily but without hesitation an old man emerged from the thicket. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that was splattered with guano and a monogrammed teal silk shirt pricked here and there by thorns; he had wispy streamers of absorbent cotton protruding from his ears and nose and an M-14 was braced against his stiff and bony shoulder.

  Seeming to be caught between believing and disbelieving in a ghost, Fortuna said, “Bert? You old bastard. You’re still alive?”

  “Just barely. Alive enough to know that no one but a cheap punk from Staten Island would call a hit against a woman. You oughta be ashamed.”

  “And you oughta be embalmed. Stay out of this, old man. It’s no concern of yours, and anyway, you’re still one gun too few.”

  “Says you.”

  He moved a half-step aside and two more spattered and bug-bitten figures spilled out of the mangroves. One of them was Meg, who was brandishing an Uzi. The other was Peter and he was tracing little circles with an AK-47. “I count four to three,” Bert went on. “Ours are automatic.”

  Fortuna blinked toward the new arrivals in their preposterous jungle get-ups. “Jesus Christ. Who the fuck are you people?”

  Peter shrugged so that the muzzle of his gun bobbed up and down. “Um, we’re here on a home exchange.”

  “A home exchange? A fucking home exchange?”

  Meg hardened down with her trigger finger. “But we’ll do what we gotta do. Don’t fuck with us, Frank.”

  He made a mollifying gesture, just a small one, not to be mistaken for surrender.

  Bert said, “Listen, we’re not here to bust your balls. All we want is a fair shake for Lydia and Benny. We’re gonna offer you a deal.”

  Fortuna said, “A deal? A deal from an ancient has-been and two nobodies with cotton up their nose?”

  “It make you feel better, insulting people?” Bert asked him. “You wanna hear the offer or you want we start shooting?”

  Fortuna did a quick scan of his forces. They didn’t look too eager to face the automatics. He said, “Go ‘head, let’s hear the deal.”

  Bert started to speak, then swallowed instead and said somewhat sheepishly, “Shit, I can’t remember the details. Peter here is gonna lay it out.”

  Peter said, “I am?”

  There was a silence. It stretched on as hard shoes began to paw impatiently at the soggy ground.

  Lydia said, “Come on, Peter, like we talked it through this afternoon.”

  He was trying but he couldn’t quite get his voice to work. He looked at the man with the magnum and the men with the revolvers and he couldn’t help feeling extremely worried. The worry formed a dense mass that lodged in his throat like a too big bite of steak.

  His wife whispered to him, “Come on, honey, you can do it. I know you can.”

  She lightly leaned her shoulder against his. The familiar contact unfroze something and the words began to flow. “Okay,” he said, “okay. So here we are, Frank.”

  “Right, asshole, here we are.”

  Peter soldiered on. “There’s you, there’s us, and the way I see it, there’s three choices here. Choice one, we have a bloody, gory, messy shootout and everybody dies. But that doesn’t have to happen.”

  “Go on,” Fortuna said.

  “Choice two. No one shoots. Sheehan takes you into custody and you go to jail, probably for quite a while. That doesn’t have to happen either.”

  “I’m listening,” said the silver-haired man. “So what’s behind door number three?”

>   Peter stalled a beat, but now it wasn’t because he was afraid to speak. It was because, to his own amazement, he was suddenly savoring the confrontation. What the hell was going on? He was living on the very edge and he found he sort of liked it. Softly, but in a firmer tone, he said, “All right, choice three. First off, absolution for Benny. You don’t touch him, ever. You never ask anything of him again. For all intents and purposes, he’s no longer in the Mob.”

  “I can’t just do that. He took the oath—“

  “Fuck the oath!” Bert the Shirt put in. “All of a sudden the woman-killer’s a stickler for the rules. You let him go, unofficially of course, he’s gone. Agreed?”

  Before Fortuna could answer, Peter shocked himself further by improvising. “And he gets a year’s free rent on a gallery. Courtesy of Carlos. To make up for being a double-crossing scumbag.”

  Carlos said, “Now wait a second—“

  “Shut up,” said Fortuna. To Peter he said, “Go on, let’s hear the rest.”

  Peter made him wait a little bit. “The rest is that you pay Lydia and Sheehan to keep quiet and to leave the country. Two million bucks should do it.”

  “Two million bucks! But that’s, that’s—“

  “I think it’s called a shakedown, Frank,” said Meg, making little circles with her gun.

  “It’s actually a bargain,” Peter said. “Very fair. Solves everybody’s problems.”

  “I don’t see where it solves dick,” Fortuna said.

  Calmly, Peter said, “That’s because you haven’t thought it out. I have. Sheehan need six more months to get a pension He can use that time to have you put away and go out in a blaze of glory. Or he can quit next week if the same money happens to appear in a lump sum. Say, in a safe deposit box in New York.”

  “Right. I’m out two mil and this bullshit’s still hanging over me.”

  “No, it won’t be,” Peter said. “Here’s the nice part. You get a receipt--”

  “A receipt? A fucking receipt? Why am I even listening to this crap?”

  “--In the form of some very incriminating photos that Sheehan took of Lydia with your crooked broker.”

  “Great. They get two million. I get some snapshots.”

  “Frank, I don’t think you’re paying your best attention right now. You’re missing the nuances.”

  “Don’t tell me what I’m missing.”

  “The pictures, Frank. Evidence. They’re selling you evidence. You can prove it. So you’ve got Lydia for blackmail and Sheehan for soliciting bribes. Just like they have you for insider trading and murder conspiracy. Nobody can squeal because everybody’s guilty. Life goes on. Tidy, right? Whaddya say, Frank? Deal?”

  42.

  It was after 2 am by the time the unlikely allies had all straggled back to the Bufano house, but no one even thought about sleeping. They were too wired from the face-off and too itchy from the mangroves. Except for Bert, they’d stripped down to their underwear and jumped into the pool. Bert sat on the apron with his pale feet and scaly shins dangling in the water. With one hand he rather apologetically caressed his dog, which had been left alone for an unusually long time, and with the other he rubbed his aching joints. “Man,” he said, “I’m getting a little old for this shit.”

  “Like hell you are,” said Glenda, and reached him the bottle of their very best aged tequila that was being passed from wet hand to wet hand.

  He took a swig and smacked his big lips in appreciation. “Worth it, though,” he said. To Benny, he went on, “You’re a free man now, my friend. No more nasty errands, nothing you can’t say no to. How’s it feel?”

  Before he answered, Benny pinched his nose, dunked full-length, and came up sweeping back his sparse hair so that droplets flew like shooting stars in the soft blue light. “Feels amazing. Feels about a hundred pounds lighter.” He took his turn with the bottle and then, in an upwelling of good-fellowship, he said to Sheehan, “And you’re a free man, too. No more bosses, no more bullshit politics. How’s it feel for you?”

  The agent’s reaction wasn’t nearly so effusive. “The truth?” he said. “The truth is I’m all mixed up. I just let a bad guy get away. Twenty years, I’ve never done that. How’m I supposed to feel? Pass that bottle over here…You know what it is? I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty. I should feel guilty, right? I just let myself be bought.”

  “And you got a damn good price,” said Lydia. “Two million bucks and me and a whole new life in Paris.”

  “Paris? I thought we were going to Havana?”

  “I changed my mind. Get used to it, Sheehan.”

  A moment passed, then, as sometimes happened, Bert’s mind wandered back to a subject that others in the conversation seemed finished with. “Guilty, not guilty,” he said. “Ya did right, ya did wrong. It’s a whaddyacallit, a paragon—“

  “Paradox,” said Peter.

  “Right, there’s different ways ya can look at it. By the rulebook, okay, ya did wrong. Get over it. ‘Cause say ya did the boy scout thing and Fortuna got sent away. Ya don’t think guys call hits from prison? Ya don’t think there woulda been revenge? Besides, there’s the family thing. Never overlook that. The guy may be a bastard but he’s still Glenda’s father.”

  “You had to remind me?” she said.

  “And I don’t care what an awful guy he is,” Bert went on, “I just don’t think anybody wants to see their old man go to jail. Do you, Glenda? Tell the truth.”

  She’d drenched her hair to get the bugs and cobwebs out of it; it lay flat against her head and framed her face, which had been rinsed of all but a few random smears of make-up. She looked young. She looked like someone’s daughter. She said, “No, I guess not. Would’ve made things easier in a way, given me an excuse to cut him off. But I don’t think that would’ve felt right. Where’s that tequila?...Thing is, something really strange happened while we were standing there in the muck. I realized something, sort of for the first time. He’ll be an old man soon. I don’t need him anymore, he’s gonna need me. Man, it’s weird the first time you look at your father and think that.”

  There was a quiet moment then. The pool pump softly hummed. A scrap of breeze folded back the palm fronds and let them fall again, pinpricks of starlight being revealed or blotted as the foliage was rearranged. Crickets rasped and paused, and during one of the pauses Bert the Shirt could be heard gruffly chuckling and talking to his dog.

  “The bit with the fake guns, Nacho, ya shoulda seen it. That was really pretty good.”

  “They weren’t fake,” said Meg, “just a little bent and rusty. Some shoe polish and WD-40, they looked just fine.”

  “Yeah, they looked great,” Bert said. “Who’s arguing? But the others guys’ guns could shoot. I mean, for instance, they had bullets. Pulling off that bluff, that took balls. Stroke’a genius, Peter.”

  Peter tingled at the compliment but said nothing.

  “Always thought of you as kind of a nervous guy,” Bert went on. “Jumpy. A little neurotic, no offense. Then you stand out there and pull that off. That showed me something. Were you worried?”

  “Worried? Nah. Not at all. More like scared shitless. My turn with the bottle.” Fearful of germs, he discreetly wiped the rim before he sipped. “Terrified,” he went on, “except for around two minutes, when I totally wasn’t. Wish I knew how it happened. Some people have anxiety attacks, right? Me, I had a fit of calm. Perfect calm. Didn’t last, of course. When Fortuna finally drove away I just about fainted. But while that feeling lasted it was amazing.”

  “You had a glimpse of Nirvana,” said his wife.

  “Let’s not push it. I didn’t soil myself, that’s a win.”

  “Come on,” said Bert, “give yourself some credit. Scared, not scared, it doesn’t matter how ya felt. It matters what ya did. And what ya did out there was very brave.” The bottle had come his way again and he lifted it toward Peter as a toast. “Salud.”

  Muffled echoes of the festive word came from all a
round the swimming pool, but then Benny said in a darker tone, “But wait. Just wait. I got one big problem with all of this.”

  The group hushed. The little splashes and gurgles in the water subsided.

  “I mean,” he went on, “look, everything’s great. I got my life back, I’m with Glenda, I even get a chance to see if anybody likes my drawing. But what’s really bothering me right now is that, Meg and Peter, you’ve done so much for us and I have no idea how I can ever pay you back.”

  “Pay it forward,” said Meg, then added a little tipsily, “Does anybody actually know exactly what the hell that means?”

  “I’d just feel better,” Benny said, “if there was something I could do for you, something I could give you. Something. Anything. Name it.”

  Peter looked at Meg. Meg looked at Peter. They shared a wonderful moment of realizing there was nothing that they lacked, nothing that they craved, nothing that was missing from their life together. Then, over his wife’s shoulder, Peter saw Tasha the Burmese cat crouched under a lounge chair, looking at him adoringly, her yellow eyes gathering up an improbable intensity of starlight and sending it back his way. He said at last, “Um, maybe there’s just one thing.”

  “Name it,” Benny said. “Anything. It’s yours.”

  “Nah,” said Peter, “I couldn’t ask.”

  Epilogue

  He didn’t ask, but as soon as they got back to New York Peter started calling shelters, looking for a Burmese cat. One of the shelter workers said to him, “It has to be a Burmese?”

  “Yes. They’re hypoallergenic.”

  “No they’re not. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  Peter looked at Meg. Meg sort of shrugged. Peter said to the shelter lady, “Well, it has to be a Burmese anyway.”

  Eventually they got one, a neutered male. In honor of Tasha they named it Sasha. At first, Peter made the fundamental error of trying to befriend the cat, and the cat, heartbreakingly, seemed to despise him. Peter then forced himself for some days to ignore the animal and even lightly to kick at it and hiss if it came nearby. Sasha was soon drinking water from the kitchen faucet and purring in its master’s lap as he sat reading in the little alcove with the globe in it.