Thorn said that would be all right.
“People borrow this from time to time,” Jerome said. “I never ask what they want it for.”
“Good.”
“But if it helps any,” he said. “A good thing to tell somebody comes to the door is that you’re out to spray for cement-eating scorpions. That scares the shit out of them six ways from Sunday. Scorpionida concreticus is what I say.”
Thorn nodded. He gave Jerome the keys to Kate’s VW.
“Oh, the hat,” Jerome said. He dug around underneath the passenger seat and came up with a green baseball hat. A black cloth replica of a scorpion, its tail curled to strike, was sewn on top of the cap, its front pinchers hanging over the bill.
He handed the cap to Thorn.
“The Bash-a-Bug shirt’s there on the backseat. In case you want to give the whole thing a little class. And the sprayer is in the trunk.”
Thorn thanked him.
He drove the VW back out to the highway. Cut across the median to Sammy’s Liquors. Before he got out, he had to smack the motor for the ears. He could hear them up there, waving frantically. It took another smack to kill them.
As he walked into the liquor store, the last of his hangover flared up. His stomach grumbling, wondering what the hell was up, coming into a place like this.
Sammy came down from his mirrored cubicle as soon as Thorn entered. Another guy Thorn had known at Coral Shores High. Back then Sammy used to amuse his gang with a pick-pocket routine. Bump you from the rear, fish out your wallet, and then, while his buddies stood guard around him, he’d read out your love notes in his thespian voice or open your Trojans or anything personal you had in there while you tried to climb over his buddies to shut him up. Funny guy.
Sammy stood in front of Thorn, drooping his head a little.
“Sorry to hear, man,” he said. “They found the fuckers yet?”
“Not yet,” Thorn said. He pretended to be interested in a pyramid of vodka bottles. The four o’clock construction crews were arriving. A couple of them lining up at the cash register with their six-packs.
“I heard it was Cubans. A drug deal, that she walked into the middle of something.” Sammy got a confidential tone, put his hand on Thorn’s back, and maneuvered him into the corner with the cognac.
“Might’ve been that,” said Thorn. “Listen, Sammy ...”
Sammy called out hello to a couple of new customers. He straightened his guayabera and gave Thorn what appeared to be his complete attention.
“I heard some talk,” Thorn said, “that you were planning on putting a new store up at Port Allamanda.”
Sammy narrowed his eyes, caught himself, and tried to soften the look into a grin. “I’ve given it some consideration.”
“I wanted you to know,” Thorn said. “I’m taking over for Kate. Port Allamanda’s dead on the drawing board.”
Sammy laughed. He picked up a feather duster that was lying on a case of wine and began to dust the tops of bottles. He said, “Thorn, you’re one hard-to-figure son of a bitch.”
“It’s dead,” Thorn said. “I got a deal working, and when it’s finished, Port Allamanda’s gone. History.”
“Wood rats, Thorn? You worried about wood rats?”
“This isn’t speeches, Sammy. This is right down in the dirt. A cash transaction. Hand quicker than the eye. This is going to be final, no appeals from anybody, no bulldozers, nothing.”
“You shouldn’t shit people, Thorn. You shouldn’t walk into people’s place of work and give them a raft of shit. I don’t care if your mother was killed or what, it doesn’t make it OK, walking around doing your loony shit.”
“It’ll be dead inside two weeks,” Thorn said. “I wanted you to know so you could start changing your retirement plans.” Thorn made a show of patting for his wallet. He walked back to the front door, stood aside as another construction crew came into the store.
Sammy stared at him, holding that feather duster at his side.
Thorn sat out in the lot in the bash-mobile a few minutes watching Sammy in there. Watching him go on with his hail-fellow world.
Maybe it wasn’t a billboard along U.S. 1, maybe not as effective as hiring a skywriter to put it up there on a cloudless noon. Still, in Key Largo, if you wanted coverage, you didn’t need to call a press conference.
Thorn made it to Key West by six-thirty. The sun in his eyes for the last fifty miles. He managed not to think the whole trip, did that by driving like a maniac, cutting in and out of the passing lanes. Flashing his lights, honking. Letting those ears go crazy.
He came over the bridge onto Key West, turned left, and went around by the beach, the motor for the ears grinding away. He found a place to park outside Ricki’s house. It was on Southard Street just a couple of blocks off the main drag. A Haitian art gallery across the street. A health food store and restaurant on the corner.
Thorn got out of the car. Bongo music was playing loud from somewhere nearby. He smelled fried plantains. The twilight was tinting the old wood houses on the block a vague pink.
As he was climbing the stairs to her house, the front door opened and she was there. Coming out in a T-shirt and white shorts, sandals laced up her ankles. Her step stuttered for a second when she saw him, but she caught herself and came on down the stairs with her usual bulldog look. She had Kate’s boxy face and Dr. Bill’s wide mouth and dark, weary eyes. She was so close to pretty that you had to take a second look to see she wasn’t. It was the eyes, something sickly there, a lack of luster, tarnished by bile.
“You come all this way to see me?” She moved up next to him, making him taste her rum breath. “Somehow I’m not moved to tears.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I wanted to tell you something.”
“I got a phone,” Ricki said. “Next time phone me. The less you’re around, the happier I get.”
“I wanted to see your face when you heard this.”
Ricki made a smartass frown. “Sugarman called me, bozo. Kate got herself dead.”
Thorn said, “Not that. Something better. Something that’s gonna eat you up.”
Ricki hmmphed and began walking, heading toward town. Thorn followed, caught up with her in a few steps. They passed by a bearded man in overalls, barefoot, slumping on the front steps of the Haitian art gallery. He drew himself up when they passed and shuffled after them.
“Leave me alone, Thorn,” Ricki said. “Go on back up there and leave me alone. You’re out of your element down here.”
Thorn said, “I know why you had her killed.”
She stopped and turned on him.
“Are you crazy! Have you finally totally freaked out?”
The bum was beside them now, grinning at Thorn, his eyes zooming in and out. He kept wetting his lips, rubbing his finger against his thumb.
Thorn looked at him. Shook his head.
Ricki set off again, and Thorn and the bum followed.
Thorn said, “And I also talked to the lawyer for Kate’s estate.”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips, pretending to fume, but Thorn could see a spark of excitement in her eyes.
Ricki stepped over to the bum. She said, “Dr. Leery, go find me a lizard. I want a lizard right away.”
“OK, OK,” he said, full of delight. Smiling at Thorn. “You want one, too? You want one, too?”
Thorn told him no, he was fine the way he was.
They were in front of a scuba shop, the street empty, the last light dwindling. To the west, downtown, Thorn could hear the faint bass beat of a jukebox. Dr. Leery was scrabbling about in someone’s lawn a few doors up.
“Say it, Thorn, if you have anything to say.”
“I know why you had her killed,” he said.
Ricki shook her head in disbelief, staring at Thorn.
“Tell me, then. You came all this way, so tell me.”
“It’s not for hate, and it’s not for the money,” he said. “That’s what you think at first. But it’s not
that. It’s because you think you can’t keep living as long as this other person is alive. You’d rather die. You think you’re going to be happy for the first time in your life when this person is dead. The voices’ll stop, the insomnia. However it gnaws at you.”
“What game is this, Thorn? What kind of weird game?”
“Kate left all of it to me. All but twenty-five thousand dollars. Vacation Island, the house, property, all of it. You get twenty-five thousand.”
She closed her eyes briefly. When they came open again, they were narrowed and mean and fixed on him.
“Twenty-five thousand.” Thorn gave her back her look. He said, “Before it happens, you think you’d rather die than keep living with this other person alive out there. But then, when they’re gone, it’s all just how it was. And that makes it even worse.” He bore in on her eyes. “That started happening to you yet? Started feeling any of that?” He saw something alive in there. A worry. Her eyes shifting back and forth between his.
“I’m late for work,” she said in a small voice.
“I haven’t decided yet what to do about you,” he said. “I know what you’ve done, Ricki. I didn’t know when I came down here. But I know it now.”
“You never were very smart, Thorn. And you sure haven’t gotten any smarter lately.”
She tried to burn him with a last look, then walked away.
Thorn watched her go. She had Dr. Bill’s smooth gait, without bounce or sway. Dead serious. How you might walk through hip-deep water.
Thorn ate in a diner near the southernmost point in America. He ordered the southernmost burger with extra tomatoes. His hunger was back, and he devoured that one and ordered another when the waitress brought him his beer.
“You been away from food for a while, honey?” she asked him as she set his Budweiser before him.
“I have,” he said. “For quite a while.”
He picked up a leftover morning paper from the chair beside him and tried to interest himself in the miseries there. Everywhere there were eruptions, plagues, radical rearrangements. Better, worse. It was hard to tell that. But the stories were all about that one thing, how much it hurt for things to be suddenly different.
After eating, he left his car near the diner and walked five blocks to Sandpiper Bay Club. He had passed it on his way into town, and now he wanted a closer view of it.
Until a year or two before it had been the Sands Piano Bar. A restaurant and bar, a place where grit always covered the floor, tracked in by the beach crowd. At night a piano playing quietly in one corner of the room. It was always a place tourists had skipped because the bathrooms smelled and there was no air conditioning.
That place had been bulldozed. Now it was Sandpiper Bay Club, a condominium, five stories high. A gate out front with a security checkpoint. Some serious men in uniforms in the booth, seemed ready to do whatever was necessary.
Thorn walked the perimeter of Sandpiper Bay. He stayed on the sidewalk across the street from it to get a view over the twelve-foot wall. Lights were coming on. Up on the penthouse terrace there seemed to be a party. The place was pink, trimmed in white, and spotlights shone on royal palms planted beside the building. Like all the new buildings in Key West, it tried to convince you it belonged here, that it wasn’t concrete block, that it had the same graceful airiness and gingerbread charm of the authentic Conch houses. It looked like a goiter to Thorn.
He found a jetty that hadn’t gone private and sat out there in the strong southeaster. He took off his boat shoes and let his toes touch the water. Voices blew in from a sailboat anchored a mile out.
After a while two drunk couples discovered the spot. They were having an argument. They stood about ten feet away and took turns being articulate. It seemed to be about a friend of theirs who had turned gay. To one couple it was a devastating tragedy; to the other two their friend seemed unchanged by it. Was it possible, someone asked, for anyone ever truly to change? Or weren’t all changes in personality just the outer layers, a kind of molting? Nothing fundamental. They were talking loud and seemed to be impressed by their conversation, by its philosophical merit. They kept glancing at Thorn as if they were about to poll him about it. He rose and left them there, out in the hard wind, shreds of their conversation following him for a block.
When he got back to the bash-mobile, he let the passenger seat all the way back, wadded Jerome’s work shirt into a pillow, and closed his eyes. He could hear the tide washing against the seawall at the southernmost point. He fixed his mind on that, picturing Ricki’s face when he’d lied to her that he knew she’d killed Kate.
He saw again that day’s hundred miles of bridges and Winnebagos and rental cars, Jerome in his wig, Sammy in his guayabera, Amos Clay. Thorn lay still and felt the hot wind coming into the car. A wind that rose from the deserts in Africa, flooded across thousands of miles of oceans. Bringing with it the scent of parched grasses, the bleat of extinct animals. Trade winds that carried to Key West the topsoil of another land, delivering it to Thorn’s windshield, to his tongue.
Thorn kept his eyes closed. Southernmost insomnia.
17
IRVING MCMANN MARCHED the length of his ten-foot closet. Milburn watched him from the closet doorway, rubbing the raw skin around his flesh-colored eye patch.
“Come on, man. Let’s just do tourists.”
“You do tourists,” Irv said. “That’s how much imagination you got.”
“All there is in Key West is tourists, Conchs, and fags. I’d rather do tourists.”
“I knew I remembered this thing,” said Irv as he reached in among the tight-packed clothes and withdrew a hanger with leather shorts pinned to it. “I bought it in Provincetown, this great queer store. Man, it’s just right.”
Irv slipped it on over his red bikini underwear. He turned and modeled it for Milburn, jutting out a hip and pressing his chin to his shoulder. Fluttering lashes.
“I’m not going anywhere with you like that.”
“I’m just starting, man.”
“I’m not dressing up,” Milburn said, there with his hairy gut hanging over the edge of a pair of tennis shorts. Tennis shorts! What a joke. Milburn swatting at a tennis ball, trying to get from here to there. They called him Earthquake at the Health and Racket Club.
Milburn said, “What’s the idea anyway? You think this girl’s going to come up with the money faster for some leather freak? Either she has the three thou or we wet her. It doesn’t call for any big drama club thing.”
“You see, Milburn. This is exactly the difference between us. You’re thinking in a straight line: The broad owes us, so we collect, one, two, three. This linear shit, man, that’s what’s crippled you up. I’m over here jumping, like quantum leaps, a jump here, a jump miles further ahead.” Irv loosened the spiked bulldog collar around his neck. He tried different angles with the leather Greek sailor’s cap, found one he liked, cocked over to the side, almost touching his ear. Just right. Fruity but frightening.
“This Ricki person. She’s gonna be a rich lady. She’s gonna need some serious financial counseling as I see it. Like from this kinky Merrill Lynch guy, specializes in resort management.”
“Man, you’re batshit. Total certifiable batshit. Nobody, I don’t care how flaky the broad is, nobody is going to hand over a resort island to some stranger buys his clothes at the pet store. You’re slipping beyond the edge here.”
“OK, Joyce Brothers, what do you recommend?”
“I say we go down there, get our three dollars, or smack the broad. Either way, doesn’t matter shit to me. Dress like boat captains or something halfway normal, hit a few bars, hang out at the nude beach tomorrow, catch the Sunday crowd, tan our hard-ons, and come on home. Nice relaxing trip. Nothing kinky. Cut the Hollywood bullshit.”
“Yeah, OK, buddy. Whatever you say.” Irv hatching an idea, taking off his collar, the hat, the leather vest. “You may have a thought there. I just may see a point to that.”
Milburn staring
at him now, a little nervous he was getting his way. Seemed to be sorry for a moment. Then shaking his head firmly and snorting. Like it’s about time Irv paid more attention to his point of view.
The loran flickered in the dark, Sarah steering jerkily, overcompensating as she went off course by a few degrees and then overcompensating back the other way. Wonderful little gadget that loran, a computerized compass. It told her just where she was, but hell if that made her feel better.
At least she was away from shore. That had worried her most, running aground on the flats just offshore. Kate had shown her how it was done, aiming at the Carysfort light, keeping the dock light dead astern. But there wasn’t much margin for error, and Sarah had plowed the bow into the edges of the channel twice, saving herself only because she was going so slowly.
The meet was at 2:00 A.M. as usual. Tonight the coordinates were 14201 and 30718. Not coordinates; what had Kate called them? Time delays, lines of position. Places where the radio signals crossed. Every place on earth had a loran coordinate, every place on earth woven through with a tight fabric of radio signals. Impossible to be truly lost, as long as you could afford that seven-hundred-dollar little computer. But there was a hell of difference between knowing exactly where you were and knowing exactly where you wanted to be.
It was six and half miles from Garden Cove to the Elbow and then about twenty more miles out, keeping the course by lining up the glowing center line with the boat position line. Like a video game, giving the whole thing a sense of unreality. Moving into what she knew was deeper and bluer water, out to about twenty-four hundred feet, four hundred fathoms. Four hundred fathoms. Impossibly deep. About half a mile above the earth’s surface, kept aloft by the powerful, capricious Gulf Stream.
She had given herself an hour fudge factor. Leaving at ten-thirty, she could make the trip, if made without a hitch, in two and a half hours at fifteen knots. She would arrive and wait, starting up only to correct for the drift. No way to anchor at that depth, of course. It would take a half hour to load. That put her back at around five, if she chose to come straight back. But she wouldn’t. She would stop at Carysfort Reef, throw over some chum, and set out a couple of lines. Fishing for mutton snapper, hog snapper, whatever. Smile for the cameras. And then come back in under cover of daylight.
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