Milburn didn’t move for a few seconds; then he made a little shiver, a wheeze. Some other noise that could’ve been him trying to say Irv’s name. His head dropped forward, jerked, and the sack of shit tumbled onto the rug.
The secretary kid jumped up, knocked his chair over.
“Sit down, Randy.” Irv aimed at his face.
Milburn twitched on the rug, a dog having a dream.
“Sit,” Grayson said. He glanced back over his shoulder out his window. Irv moved over there quickly to check the view. Just backyards. Everybody mowing and a stereo playing some rock and roll. Sixties acid rock. Key West, twenty years out of it, and holding.
Irv felt something new. Killing Milburn, it wasn’t like the others. There was this feeling, queasy and hot rising inside his gut. Nothing like that before. It was a revelation. All those others had been strangers. He’d known them five minutes tops, basically strangers, and when they were lying there, seeping out onto rugs and decks, they were still strangers, and the thrill had been cold and white.
But this one was complicated. He felt the usual race in his heart, but there was this new acid zing of regret as Milburn collapsed forward onto the pale blue rug. A brand-new emotion. It was this whole new thing opening up to him, this full-bodied thing. This thing had been there all along, and now he’d discovered it, a continent of unexplored pleasures, killing acquaintances, family. Irv beamed.
“What the fuck are you thinking about!” Grayson’s face pumped full of blood.
“I just made myself a half million dollars,” Irv said.
“Good God.”
“Hey, and what it is is you need to see it in person. You want to be Casey Stengel, you got to stand up close and watch the guys hit the home runs. Where you can hear the crack of the bat. Otherwise, man, you might think what I do is not worth the price. Hitting it out of the ball park, man, this’s what you just saw. Hitting the long ball.
“And hey, let me warn you two. I didn’t see the exit holes for those slugs. I think they’re still in there traveling through all that blubber. I’d stand back away from this heap for a while, I was you.”
“You need help, man,” said Randy. The kid had lost his tan. His asshole probably wouldn’t ever come unpuckered.
“What I need is a time, a date, and a place where a mutually beneficial transaction is to take place. That’s all I need.” Irv stepped across Milburn, avoiding the blood spreading through the carpet. All that IQ spilling out. Man, Irv was sailing, literally come loose from the earth.
20
RICKI LAY DOWN on the water bed, still in her Leonard’s Lobster House clothes, white shorts and a T-shirt that said KISS OUR CRUSTACEANS. Tired but wired. It’d been busy for a Sunday night. Lots of Miami assholes, dawdling over their Key lime pie, trying to milk one more night out of their weekend. Getting drunk for the three-hour drive home. Ricki got most of her orders wrong, lost a credit card, and spilled minestrone soup on a woman from Oregon. Her hands had trembled so bad all day it was a wonder she’d held on to anything.
The bathroom light was glaring in her eyes, but she was too tired to get up and turn it off. She twisted around for a comfortable position, but the damn water bed kept shifting with her. It was good for some things, bouncing your hips back up, giving you a little thrust, even if you didn’t have it in you to thrust back. But not so good when what you needed was a foxhole.
She sniffed her fingertips. Garlic and fish. She listened to the rattle of palm fronds at her window. Closed her eyes and pictured Tahiti, Eleuthera, Martinique, a smoky bar from a fifties movie. Black-and-white, about expatriated Americans. Sidney Greenstreet, Jane Russell, lots of bamboo furniture and louvered shutters, marble columns, and lazy paddle fans. All shot at night, about love and sin and danger. Usually this worked, made her mind go hazy, brought on sleep.
Ricki pulled herself up and poured some spiced rum into a plastic glass she kept beside her bed. She sat on the edge of the water bed and slugged half of it down. No. No. No. It wasn’t guilt. She didn’t feel a ripple of that, not a twinge, not a hint. Let Thorn mourn. Kate had been his mother, not hers. There was no doubt about it now. The will spelled it out. Thorn ate at the table; Ricki got what fell on the floor.
She stood up, took the rum over to the chrome sling chair in front of her little black-and-white TV, and switched it on. Abbott and Costello, test pattern, some nature show about African drought. She turned it off. Sipped more rum as she walked over to the front window. A good breeze off the water tonight. Of course, in Key West everything was off the water. She could see a narrow patch of it from the window, glazed with moonlight. Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico, she could never tell.
She lay down again on the water bed, balancing her glass of rum on her stomach. Let Thorn mourn her while he still could. This puny kid, two years older than she was, who’d already had a good, solid grip on Kate by the time she was born. She’d never had a chance. Let Thorn mourn. Fuck if she would.
Someone was in the house, coming upstairs. Probably Lillian home from the Pier House, wanting to shoot the shit, or maybe wanting a tussle in the water bed. Not tonight. Ricki was beat, worn to shit. And still frazzled by Thorn and those two goons in uniforms.
She had it on her lips, “not tonight,” as the door opened. But it was Randy. The blond stud that clerked for Grayson. Well, maybe she did feel like a quick frolic after all. I mean, come on, look at the guy.
She smiled at him, though it did strike her as mildly impolite that he hadn’t knocked. Impolite or sexy, she wasn’t sure.
She told him to come in, asked him how he’d been.
He just stood in the doorway.
He said, “He wants to see you.”
“OK, that’s cool.” Ricki set her rum on the bedside table. “You tell him I’ll come in about ten. Whenever I manage to untangle from the sheets.”
“He wants to see you now,” Randy said. Guy had no sense of humor. She remembered it now, why she didn’t like him. One of those gays who liked men in direct proportion to how much they hated women.
“I’m too tired, Randy. Tell him I’ll be in first thing.”
“Get up,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Right now.”
Grayson’s yacht was a fifty-two-foot Hatteras. Bar was stocked with nonalcoholic beer and wine. The damn stuff tasted like Kool-Aid, and who could stand the taste of that stuff without the buzz? But Grayson didn’t seem to notice, drinking one phony beer after the other. Ricki sat on the couch, and Grayson, wearing dark slacks and a navy Windbreaker, stood beside the bar. His eyes skimmed over hers, not locking on anything like they usually did. That, as much as anything, made her scared.
Randy had the yacht going flat out.
“Martinique?” Ricki asked. “Eleuthera?”
“Like that,” Grayson said. “More exotic, though.”
“Come on, man. Just tell me if you’re mad at me or what.”
“I’m not mad. I don’t get mad at you, Ricki. I save mad for when I need a little extra boost, for when the competition gets stiff. Mad gets the adrenal gland humping. But I’m not mad with you, Ricki. It’s not necessary.”
“What did I do?”
Grayson smiled. Not a pretty sight.
“What did you do? What did you do? How to answer a question like that.”
“I paid those guys. I got some money from a friend and paid those guys, if that’s what this is all about. You were worried I hadn’t paid them.”
“I know you paid them.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Can you guess how I know?”
“They came over afterwards, yesterday. To see you.”
“I’m impressed, Ricki. You impress me with your deductive reasoning.” All this without meeting her eyes.
Grayson paced the thick blue carpet, staring at his spotless Top-Siders. Ricki didn’t like how fast they were going, how straight. She kept waiting for Randy to circle back.
“I understand you enlisted their aid again. That
you instructed them to subtract another relative of yours from the list of the living.”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” she said. “But they’re going to do an accident. Like he was so torn up by Kate’s dying that maybe he lost control of his car, something like that.”
“Hey, babe, you’re missing the point. The point is that you asked these gentlemen to remove a person I want to stay alive for a little longer.”
“Thorn?” Ricki said. “Why?”
“You see?” said Grayson. “You’re acting without the complete picture. You’re sending people off to kill other people without the big view. But worse than that, Ricki, if somebody else from your family gets dead, I don’t care how stupid or lazy the cops down here are, they’re going to get a very big hard-on if something like that happens.”
Ricki said, “It’s my business. You don’t have anything to say about my business. I helped you make out pretty good, and I got left with practically nothing. Twenty-five thousand fucking dollars.”
Grayson opened another of those phony beers. Poured it into a fresh frozen mug. It foamed up like the real thing. Ricki watched him sip it, the head leaving him a momentary mustache. Not that she wanted one, but the jerk hadn’t even offered her anything.
“Unfortunately, your business and my business have become intertwined. If you’re ever in some sheriff’s interrogation room, all of a sudden I’m feeling very uneasy.”
“Come on, Gray, you think I’m going to give the police your name? You think I would put you in any danger?”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think you will.”
“Well, good,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if it was good at all, the way he’d said it.
“I want you to see something, Ricki. Meet somebody.”
He held his arm up, beckoning her into the forecabins.
Ricki took a breath, stood up, and let him lead her down the stairs and into the narrow hallway. He stopped at the first cabin door, unlocked the door, and swung it open.
“This. This is what you were dealing with.”
Ricki looked into the cabin and saw Milburn, lying on his back on a tarp in the middle of the floor.
She sucked in a breath and turned away.
When they were back upstairs in the salon, Grayson paced the rug in front of her.
“I don’t like loose ends, Ricki. And you are an appalling loose end.”
“You’re taking me out here to shoot me.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re taking me out here and you’re going to shoot me and throw me to the goddamn sharks. Along with that body. Jesus Christ.”
“Ricki, Ricki.” Like he was offended. “I wouldn’t do something like that. You obviously don’t know me very well.”
“Well, good,” she said, relieved but still wanting to sound peeved.
“That’s not my style.” Grayson leaned against the bar, cocking his mouth into another smile. About as real as that beer. “All that talk about an island. You know, Ricki. It made an impression on me. I have a soft spot for islands, too.”
Ricki stared at him. The bastard was getting off on this.
“I think I’ve found the perfect island for you. Deserted. Tropical. Nobody to disturb your meditations, your pursuit of higher consciousness. No tourist trains or high rises. Great water view. Excellent location to work on your latest mantra.” Grayson was trying awful hard to sell her on that smile.
“There’s only one thing about this island, Ricki. A minor drawback, actually, but it would be dishonest of me not to mention it.” Grayson put his mug down on the butcher-block counter. “It’s only an island about twelve hours a day.”
Now he looked at her, square on, flat and lightless eyes.
Randy cut the engines and came down into the cabin, Ricki caught his eye and gave him a starving, helpless look.
“We’re here,” he told Grayson, his voice hard.
“OK. Take her out on the deck, put her onshore, and cut her.” He was rummaging through a drawer behind the bar.
“Come on, Gray.” Ricki stood and came across to him. Her voice was catching in her throat. “I’m no threat to you. I’ll disappear.”
Grayson held out a thin fillet knife to Randy.
“No way,” said Randy. “This is sick. All of it. You, those guys, all of it.”
“Do it, Randy. Do it now.” Ricki stood back, looked for her cue, watching the knife catch the dim cabin light. She saw the reflection of this stiff little group in the cabin window.
Randy shook his head and turned away from Grayson.
Grayson glared after Randy as he walked out to the cockpit and climbed the chrome ladder back to the upper deck.
“All right,” said Grayson, his eyes still on the path Randy had taken. “Come on.” He gripped Ricki’s upper arm and half carried her out to the aft deck.
It was like a seizure when it hit her, something giving her a strength she didn’t have. Just outside the cabin door she wrenched her arm from Grayson’s hold, thrashed her arms for a second, made a lunge for the knife. But Grayson had danced back from her. She moved quickly to the transom and screamed for Randy to help her.
She could see him up there, moonlight spilling over the tower. Ricki screamed his name, her voice tearing in her throat, but he didn’t turn to look. She called out to him again, bleakly this time, “For godsakes, Randy. Do what’s right.”
She saw Grayson edging closer to her, the knife in his left hand. She bowed her head, tried to recall a prayer from all those years with Kate and Dr. Bill, but only a mealtime grace came to her: “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful.”
When she woke, her jaw was very sore. She managed to sit up on the soft sand. Grayson had stripped her to her underwear. Gentleman to the end. She winced as she drew her throbbing left foot up to her lap like she might try a little midnight yoga. The gash he’d made ran the length of her sole. Maybe it was his idea of a final kindness, letting the blood leak into that rising water, calling the scavenger sharks.
The lights of his Hatteras were about a half mile off to the north now. She could hear voices out there, Grayson and Randy having it out. When the three gunshots came, a surge of energy woke in her, and she craned forward, focusing every nerve, every fiber of hope on those lights.
Five more minutes passed before the yacht’s big diesels came alive. She watched as the Hatteras swung around and headed back in toward her. It must have been making ten knots when it passed fifty yards from her island. Without the strength to call out, Ricki watched it pass. A sob strangling in her throat.
Her island was about ten feet long, five feet wide. Ricki scooted forward across the damp sand and brought her bleeding foot to the edge of the water. The tide was running fast to the north, piling up some foam near her foot.
As the tide rose, Ricki kept herself propped up, stiffened her neck to keep her head from lolling. A gull or some kind of white bird landed on the sand a few yards from her. When Ricki was a kid, Kate had always been after her to learn the differences between birds. But hell, she’d always had more important things to do than learn the goddamn names of birds. The water tickled at her foot as Ricki tried as hard as she could to remember what those things had been.
On Sunday Thorn took his time driving home. He was relaxed. He stayed behind a Buick from Wyoming the whole way, developing a relationship with the two kids in the backseat. Communicating with them with the mouse ears.
He’d spent the afternoon on Saturday walking around Key West behind the two guys in the Scarab. He’d gotten very interested in them because they had drunk down those beers and gone straight away to Grayson’s penthouse.
Thorn saying to himself, well, well, well. After they tried there, they walked back into the neighborhoods, seemed to be lost for a while, and eventually wound up at Ricki’s two-story house. Thorn not saying anything to himself then. His heart sounding in his ears.
They stayed in her house fo
r about an hour, Thorn sitting on the sidewalk down from Dr. Leery. Dr. Leery wasn’t happy about it. At about eleven they came out, smiling, talking loud to each other, and walked down Duval and had lunch. From there to Grayson’s office. Only the short one came out an hour later, and Thorn followed him to the beach at the Pier House, where the guy stared at topless women all afternoon.
At sunset the guy went over to Mallory Square and stood around with about fifty others watching the sun slip behind a mass of black clouds. He chatted up a tall, heavyset woman there who had a flame-swallowing act. After sunset the guy took her back to Captain Tony’s bar, where the two of them drank till about ten-thirty. Thorn followed them back to Sandpiper Bay Club then and watched as the guy had a hell of a time getting through security.
At that point Thorn had gone out on the public pier across the way from Sandpiper Bay’s marina and had watched them as they climbed aboard the Scarab and disappeared into the darkness. He’d gone back to his parking spot then and let the seat back in the southernmost bash-mobile and had a good, dreamless night.
At two on Sunday he was back in Key Largo. Jerome senior was in the office, watching a baseball game on the tube. He handed Thorn the keys to Kate’s VW without taking his eyes off the set, watching the replay of a stolen base.
“Junior said to tell you he wanted to borrow your cruiser this week. Figures he’ll survive I-95 in a Cadillac better than in one of the VW’s.” Jerome glanced over at Thorn for a second while the beer commercial played. “Why the hell you think he’d want to survive a crash in the condition he’s in?”
“Just stalling,” Thorn said. “Any way we can.”
Thorn stopped by the funeral home. He saw Sally Spencer with a family in one of the viewing rooms and went into her office to wait. The cardboard box was on the corner of her desk, a white gummed label on its lid with Kate’s name typed on it. He stood there for a moment looking at it, hearing someone weeping in the next room.
Under Cover of Daylight Page 18