Nacho Unleashed

by Laurence Shames

  L uckily for Rita and Max, Shintar had been so wigged out that his sense of time was severely distorted and he’d seriously underestimated how long it would take to poach his captives. When they were freed from the still, the alcoholic broth in which they’d been simmering had barely reached the temperature of a backyard Jacuzzi. They were freaked and terrified and tipsy from the intoxicating fumes; their skin was rubbed raw where the ropes and duct tape had been applied; other than that, they were unharmed.

  The reunions were ecstatic. Max and Rocco hugged, and even though the man with the squashed nose could only squeeze with one good arm, it was clear that this was no mere bro-hug but an embrace of lovers. A strange time and place to be outed, but no one batted an eye.

  Nor did anyone seem the least bit surprised when Rita and Anthony wafted into one another’s arms and united in a kiss as long and hungry as most you’ll see in the movies. Lost in the bliss of the moment, neither seemed bothered by the smell or feel of the half-distilled rum that squished out of her blue jumper and pooled at their feet.

  Bert was holding Nacho, rubbing his head, carefully checking him for injuries and bragging about his remarkable courage to anyone who’d listen. Which, at that moment, was no one. Carlo and Albin, brothers with much to catch up on, stood a little off to the side, their arms hooked together at the elbow, chatting very softly between themselves, patting each other’s hands.

  It was a sweet and hard-earned interlude but there was still work to be done.

  Stepping gingerly over Shintar’s lifeless body, Max reclaimed his crowbars and chisels from where he’d left them in the hallway and broke into the safe where the chemist kept his precious notebook. There was no disagreement about what to do with the diagrams and notes describing the deceased’s experiments with drugs; Costanza fired up a Bunsen burner and incinerated them. But Anthony kept the pages that dealt with flavorings. Shintar himself had despised that work, had seen it as beneath him. But maybe there was value in it. Who knew? The man may have been a miserable failure as a human being, but you couldn’t deny that he was handy with a test tube.

  On their way out of the ravaged lab, the distiller spotted a shelf with a row of sealed jars on it. The jars were labeled with numbers that matched those on the flavor diagrams. He opened one to sniff it, then suggested Rita do the same.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Amazing. Nutmeg. Hint of cinnamon. Something tart—passionfruit, I think.”

  “And tarragon,” said Anthony. “I get tarragon. Jesus, so complex.”

  “Maybe we should throw it into the last batch.”

  “Maybe we should,” said the distiller. “I mean, what the hell we got to lose?”

  

  Later that night, the police received an anonymous tip about an incident on Stock Island. Two officers investigated when they finally got around to it; there were many incidents on Stock Island, after all. The crime scene was puzzling. A steel door had been smashed; gunshots had been fired; yet the sole victim seemed to have died by his own hand, the only sign of a struggle being a severely lacerated scrotum. A half-hearted dusting for prints revealed a pattern of paws on the tiled floor close to the body. But the paws suggested a dog far too small to have inflicted such extensive damage. Flummoxed, the cops passed the case along to the coroner. The coroner pronounced the cause of death to be a self-administered overdose, though he’d never before seen the specific drug or drugs involved. He was mildly curious about this, but as there was a steady stream of OD’s demanding his attention, he soon forgot about the outlier drug and moved on to the next slab in the morgue.

  

  Rocco was healing nicely, but his arm was still in a sling when, a couple days later, he and Max went to have a chat with Carlo at his rented house in South Miami. They sat on the porch that looked out at the neglected avocado trees. Costanza passed out beers. After some small talk, Rocco said uneasily, “Boss, I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t get mad, but Max and me, we’re quitting.”

  “Mad? I’m not mad. In fact, I’m happy. If ya didn’t quit, I woulda had to fire ya.”

  “Fire us?” said Max, his squeezed voice revealing hurt feelings. Not even people itching to quit much liked being fired. “You unhappy wit’ us?”

  “No, not at all. You guys been great. But this is no life for you. Maybe it’s not a life for anybody anymore. Besides, I’m leaving Florida.”

  “Leaving?” said Rocco. It was a funny notion once you thought about it. Everybody came to Florida. Nobody left.

  “Place never really worked for me. Never felt at home. I miss New England. Don’t laugh—I miss the cold. Plus I miss the seafood business. Only thing I really know about. And life feels better when you’re doin’ somethin’ where you have some idea what the hell you’re doin’. That much I’ve learned. How ‘bout you guys? What’ll you do next?”

  Max looked at Rocco. Rocco looked at Max. They realized they should have rehearsed this more. Finally, Max said, “Um, well, we’d like to open up a florist’s shop.”

  If Costanza was surprised he didn’t let it show. “Florist shop. Nice. Where?”

  “Key Largo,” Rocco said. “Location we had our eyes on just came available. Right onna highway.”

  “Northbound or south?”

  “Both. Right on the median.”

  “Beautiful. Got parking? Make or break ya, parking.”

  “Plenty.”

  “Got a name?”

  The two big men looked at each other again. Max cleared his throat and shyly said, “Buds in Bloom is what we’re thinkin’.”

  Costanza sipped some beer and pondered it a moment. “Buds in Bloom. Just like you guys, buddies finally comin’ into flower.”

  Rocco blushed. Even his squashed nose turned pink. “Yeah, like us. But Carlo, we got a favor t’ask. Upfront expenses. Pretty steep for us. We’re wonderin’ if maybe…if maybe…”

  “If maybe you could lend us a hundred grand,” said Max. “Just till we get rolling.”

  Costanza looked out at the avocado trees and shook his head. “Sorry guys, I just can’t do that. I don’t make loans. Especially small business loans.”

  Stung by the abruptness of the reply, abashed at having exposed themselves to a refusal, the two big men looked down at the porch planks.

  “But,” their boss went on, “I have had the honor of helpin’ people out a little bit from time to time, and I do have a policy of givin’ bonuses. Which you guys have definitely earned. So we’ll call it a hundred grand in bonuses. No strings. Think a me sometime when you’re trimmin’ roses.”

  

  Costanza was too much of a gentleman, or maybe just too accustomed to being a bigshot, to mention that a hundred thousand dollars was most of what he had left in the world. But he didn’t mind the prospect of being nearly broke and starting over; in fact he found it bracing. It was almost like being young again, though with less time to bounce back from mistakes.

  Before leaving Florida, he went to Key West to visit with his brother. Over tea and anisette in Albin’s Balinese-inspired living room, they talked about things that happened half a lifetime before.

  “I hope I did the right thing,” Carlo said. “About Anthony, I mean.”

  “Right, wrong, who can say?” said Albin, shrugging with his eyebrows. “I know you did what felt right in your heart.”

  “Marjorie didn’t want you to know about the baby. She wanted to keep it. She was afraid that if you knew, you’d feel you had to marry her.”

  “I like to think that’s exactly what I would have done.”

  “It woulda been a lie,” said Carlo.

  “We would have worked it out. We were dear friends, Marjorie and me. I would’ve been a gay man with a wife and son. Not exactly unheard of at the time.”

  “And you woulda missed your chance to go to college, go to New York, live the life you were meant to live.”

  “I wonder about that sometimes,” said Albin, sippin
g anisette. “Whether there’s one particular life we’re meant to live, or if there’s a whole wide range of them and we just happen to live the one we land on. Like in a carnival game. The wheel stops and that’s the prize we get. But anyway, it’s all fine, Carlo. I’m getting to be an old man and I suddenly have a son. It’s really kind of wonderful.”

  “And Anthony all of a sudden has a Dad.”

  “No, that’s not sudden,” Albin said. “Not at all. Anthony’s always had a Dad. You, Carlo. He’s had you. And you’ve been terrific to him.”

  Carlo bit his lip, looked down at his teacup. “I did what I could. And I loved every minute. I hope I did right. I hope I wasn’t being selfish. Anyway, he’s a good kid, Alvino. I know you’ll be proud of him.”

  “I’m proud of him already.”

  Then the brothers hugged and promised they would see each other soon, each secretly wondering if it would really happen, and Carlo headed north.

  

  “And this is our newest rum,” said Rita, as she served up a small glass in the tasting room. “We call it The Alchemist and we think it’s totally unique. More complexity than you’ll find in any ordinary rum. More natural-tasting than any other flavored rum. Why? Because all the secondary tastes are derived from the sugar cane itself. Nothing added. Just pure juice handled with a lot of care and skill.”

  The taster looked only moderately interested. Like he’d heard it all a thousand times before. He nodded, lifted his glass, swirled it around. He took a sniff from a foot or so away then put it down and swirled again. Finally he took a close-up sniff and drank a thimbleful. After sucking air through it and rolling it around his tongue, he finally perked up and said, “Wow, that is really extraordinary.”

  Rita said thank you.

  “Some of the best stuff I have ever tried.” He sniffed and sipped and sucked and rolled again. “How do you make it taste like that?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s proprietary information.”

  He drank some more and made a few notes on a napkin. Rita had no way of knowing that the man at the bar, traveling incognito as always, was the chief wine-and-spirits critic of The New York Times.

  It was Blake, sleepless as usual and perusing the paper in the pre-dawn hours, who first spotted the article when it appeared the following week. “Your basic home run!” he crowed by phone to Rita barely after sunrise. “Here, listen to this opening: ‘Who would have thought one of the world’s most intriguing rums was being poured at a hole-in-the-wall tasting room in Key West, Florida, and being made according to a secret process by a distillery you’ve never heard of?’ Well, they’ve sure as hell heard of us now. This is going to be huge. No idea how we’ll keep up with demand.”

  “I do,” Rita said. “For one thing, we’ll need to take on a new co-chief distiller.”

  “Just like that? Not an easy hire.”

  “It is if it’s someone already in the company. Like me, for instance.”

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  “So you’ll be leaving the tasting room?”

  “Leaving’s what I do, Blake. I told you that right from the start.”

  There was a brief silence on the line. Then with his usual mix of resignation and lack of resignation, he said, “And you’ll be working right next to Anthony.”

  “Every day. And that’s one way you could spin it. A workplace romance. Or you could also say I’ll be learning stuff, and growing up, and making this suddenly famous rum that just put us on the map. For a kid from Jersey, I’m not doing too bad.”

  “Badly,” said Blake.

  

  Some days later, at breakfast, Albin poured a cup of tea from his beautiful enameled pot, and while it was cooling he picked up his pen and jotted something in his big leather suicide book.

  At the other end of the compound’s swimming pool, Rita sipped coffee from a chipped mug and said, “So whatcha writing about this morning, Albin?”

  “Fatherhood,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I have no idea. I know nothing whatsoever about the subject. Tabula rasa, as they say.”

  “Nobody says that, Albin.”

  “Yes they do. Or at least they used to. In any case, I scrawled down the heading and now I don’t know where to start.”

  “So you could say it’s a whole new chapter.”

  He frowned with his eyebrows alone. “One could say that, I suppose. Rather literal for my taste, but one could.”

  “But what I mean is, if you don’t even know how to start this chapter, you obviously don’t know how it turns out, so that means your suicide note is way farther away from being finished.”

  “Very astute, my dear. Now that I have a son, the story definitely feels a much longer way off from being done. I mean, suddenly I have responsibilities.”

  “And who knows?” Rita said. “At some point you might even have that unimaginable grandchild and you could go through all the things you missed first time around. Changing diapers. Teething. Tantrums.”

  Albin sipped some tea and said, “Sounds distasteful. And disruptive. And really sort of wonderful.”

  

  Well, I guess that pretty well wraps it up. Everyone accounted for, story told. Happy ending, mostly. The good guys find love, fulfillment, peace of mind. The bad guy gets what he deserved. It’s how things ought to be in life, though, from what I’ve seen from my low angle, not usually how they turn out, don’t ask me why.

  Anyway, it was a great adventure and I relive it every time Master brags to someone about how brave I was, how perfect my timing at the crucial moment. Frankly, I’ve sometimes had the feeling that people

  think he’s bullshitting when he tells them how I grabbed the guy’s nuts and couldn’t be shook off. They look at Master, dubious like, they look down at me, they kind of smirk. But that’s okay, I don’t really care what other people believe or don’t believe. I know I did my best to help my friends and I know that Master’s proud of me. I couldn’t ask for more.

  And meanwhile, life goes on. Master and me, we’re back to our usual routines. We go to the beach. We watch the sun go down. He sneaks me into bars and restaurants where I’m not supposed to be. And we worry about each other. That’s also a regular routine with us. He worries about me, like if I sneeze or get a sharp stone in my paw. I worry about him every time he climbs into the shower or if his eyes go a little out of focus when he’s sitting in a chair. I don’t know that all this worrying accomplishes anything, but it’s part of loving, right?

  Anyway, our quiet daily pastimes are hardly what you’d call adventures with a capital A. On the other hand, every day’s an adventure if you approach it with the proper attitude. You never know when you might see or smell something you’ve never seen or smelled before. Or find a new friend, either on two legs or on four. Or when life might throw at you another chance to be a hero. Maybe that’ll never happen, but what if it does? The trick, I think, is to be relaxed but always ready, friendly but alert. Don’t go chasing after trouble, but don’t back down and don’t wimp out if trouble finds you. That’s my advice, at least, and if you take it you’ll usually come out okay.

  And by the way, this goes for big dogs just as much as small ones.

  IF YOU ENJOYED THIS KEY WEST CAPER, PLEASE TRY THE FOLLOWING BONUS CHAPTERS FROM:

  FLORIDA STRAITS

  BOOK ONE OF THE SERIES

  FLORIDA

  STRAITS

  LAURENCE SHAMES

  Part One

  1

  P eople go to Key West for lots of different reasons. Joey Goldman went there to be a gangster.

  His best friend Sal Giordano tried to talk him out of it. "Fuck is down there for you?"

  They were sitting in a green vinyl booth in Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. It was January. Outside, torn newspapers were stuck in dirty ice at the bottom of dented wire garbage cans. People walke
d past holding their hats, their coat collars pulled up to their ears. Skinny dogs squatted on the pavement and steam came out from under them. Joey turned the question around. "Fuck is there for me up here?"

  "Up here?" Sal seemed dumbfounded by the remark and gestured toward the grimy window as if pointing out what was obviously paradise. "Up here? Up here is everything, Joey. Up here you got friends, you know the ropes. You need money, you know where to get it. You want sausage, calamari, braciole, you know where to find it, eh? Down there? Down there it's like a little pissant desert island."

  "Sounds good to me," Joey said, but Sal kept right on going.

  He rubbed a thick hand over his blue-black jowls, then counted on his fingers the things that would be lacking. "There's no unions. There's no casinos. There's nothin' to fence, 'cause the spicks already stole it all. Drugs? You don't wanna fuck with drugs, Joey. The Colombians'll whack your ass. So fuck is in Key West? Fucking palm trees. Fucking coconuts. Joey, listen, you feeling down, you want a vacation, take a vacation. I'll front ya the cash if ya need it. But don't move there. I'm telling you, it is not for you."

  "I'm not feeling down," Joey said. "I feel terrific. And I like palm trees." He took a sip of his espresso and his dark blue eyes went out of focus, like he was already picturing the beach, the green water, the curled shrimps with their heads buried in cocktail sauce. "I like to be warm, Sal. I hate the fucking cold. All winter, that coughing, blowing your nose, your feet all frozen. Fingers like you can't even hold the god-damn steering wheel—"

  "Joey," Sal cut in, "I don't like freezing my ass off any more than the next guy. But I'm not asking for the weather report. I'm asking what you're gonna do down there."

  "I'm gonna, like, take over."