Mortal Sin

by Paul Levine

  I looked him the question.

  “The killer instinct,” he said.

  I drew my fist back to smack him again, but a pain stabbed me in the side. I looked down, my mouth hanging open in surprise. Nicky’s hand was driving a sharp piece of cane into my flesh just below the bottom rib. He was twisting it, trying to dig deeper. It felt like a sword had gutted me. I reached down to wrest him away, and he used his free hand to yank me sideways. I toppled off him, the cane stalk still stuck in me.

  He rolled over and got to his feet, his eyes searching for the gun. Behind Nicky, I saw the harvester approaching. The sight froze me. No more than thirty feet away, headed straight at us, stalks of cane disappearing into its mechanical maw.

  Nicky saw it, too.

  The gun was directly in the path between the machine and us. If we both dived for it, we’d be struggling there when the harvester chomped everything in its path. If one of us dived for the gun, he’d likely get it and roll out of the way.

  One could live.

  Or both could die.

  I didn’t like the odds. But then I wasn’t a god.

  I backed up, stumbling over severed stalks of cane. Nicky Florio dived into the row, sprawling headfirst in the mud. He speared the gun by the butt on the first try. He made his own rules and his own luck.

  Ten feet away, the harvester boomed like pealing thunder, the tracks clinking, the blades clop-clopping through the wood-like stalks.

  Florio had timed it just right, but with no room to spare. Gun in one hand, he braced himself with the other and tried to stand. His leather-soled loafers slipped in the mud, his legs churned, and his feet slid out from under him. He fell headfirst, both hands in front of him. He wriggled backward, his body moving, snakelike, getting his torso and head out of the path of the swinging steel blades.

  Twisting like a corkscrew.

  Backing out of harm’s way.

  Making it.

  Everything but his hands.

  Nicky Florio’s hands were caught in the path of the V-shaped snout. He tried to pull back, but the steel held fast, yanking him higher toward the blades, dragging his body through the mud.

  Clop-whomp-clop.

  I never heard him scream.

  On the conveyor belt, amid stalks and leaves, were two bloody hands, severed just above their knobby wrists. One hand still gripped a .38 revolver. The conveyor carried the hands higher, where they disappeared into the chopper drum. A whirring sound like wood through a sawmill; then, along with billets of sugarcane, bite-sized pieces of his fingers were ejected into the following trailer.

  Nicky Florio lay facedown in the mud, his body twitching. He tucked both stumps under his armpits, trying futilely to stanch the blood flow.

  He said something to me, but the words were drowned out in the noise of the harvester as it continued down the row. I leaned down next to him with the ear that could still hear. His face was in a puddle, his nose and mouth barely above the water.

  “Tourniquet,” he pleaded. His eyes were glazing over. “Bleeding to death.”

  I straightened and looked down at him on the soggy ground. “No, you’re not. You’re going to drown first, Nicky. The water level’s been increasing ever since we got here. It’s your water, Nicky. Enjoy it. Lick it up. Savor it as you would the finest French Bordeaux 1961.”

  “Stupid fuck,” he said, his voice dying. “You could have been my partner. You could have been my friend.”

  He tried to stand, but he didn’t have the strength. The effort sank him deeper into the puddle, and water began filling his nose. Blood pooled out from under him in the mud. He exhaled sharply, tried to hold his breath, then after a long moment, inhaled and choked, spitting out water colored with his own blood.

  “Help me,” he sputtered.

  Again he swallowed water. The arms came out from underneath, the stumps spurting blood, and he struggled, trying vainly to flop onto his back. His face sank into water again, and his body went into convulsions.

  I didn’t help him.

  I just watched him die.

  I couldn’t have saved him anyway. That’s what I planned to tell myself later when I would ask the tough questions. Like what was I really feeling then? Joy? Relief? I would try to convince myself it didn’t make me happy—it didn’t make me anything—to see his blood stain the brown earth. But beneath the glib reply was something else, another question I couldn’t answer. What was I really feeling then? Was it that I was safe from harm? Was it that Nicky Florio deserved to die? Or did it have something to do with Gina? Just what was it that made me want to see Nicky Florio die, and die hard?

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  Playing with Pain

  I LET CHARLIE RIGGS DO THE DRIVING. FOR THE PAST THREE WEEKS, I let him do everything. He had patched up my shoulder, front and rear, changed the dressings, shot me full of antibiotics, and slapped a patch on my ear. He had cleaned the wound in my gut and stitched it closed with needle and thread given to him by Betsy Ross. As far as I can tell, I’m his only patient who lived.

  Charlie tossed some fishing gear into the back of his pickup, and we headed down Useless I to the Keys. First stop, Granny Lassiter’s old house with faded yellow shutters and hard pine floors on the Gulf side of Islamorada. Granny crouched on the back porch hosing down a mess of grouper she’d caught just after sun-up. She wore khaki shorts with six pockets and a T-shirt emblazoned IF IT HAS TITS OR TIRES, YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TROUBLE WITH IT.

  Granny was suntanned the color of mahogany bark. She hadn’t worn makeup or a dress in thirty years. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank a fifth of her own moonshine a week. Without looking up from her filleting knife, she announced how damned fortunate that two strong men had arrived just when she needed some fresh coconut milk for a fish sauce. When neither Charlie nor I moved, Granny gestured at me with the head of a two-pound grouper. “Tree’s right out yonder, Jake, in case you forgot where you once fell and broke your collarbone.”

  “I remember,” I told her. “I was nine years old.”

  “Gave the boy a dose of my likker and set the bone myself,” Granny said proudly, “and he don’t seem no worse for wear.”

  For some reason, I wasn’t in the mood to climb a tree. “I came here expecting tea and sympathy, and you want me to pick coconuts.”

  “Such a crybaby,” she said, turning to Charlie. “I remember the first time he got his nose broke playing junior high football. Caterwauled like a newborn can’t find the teat.”

  “As I recall it, I stuffed cotton up my nose and played the second half. I always played with pain.”

  “That night,” Granny said, staring off into space, “I had to give him a pint of the home brew to get him to sleep, he was whimpering so much.”

  “I said I always played with pain, not that I didn’t complain about it.”

  Granny snorted her disapproval. “Jes’ look at you now. Face scratched up like you spent a night with a she cat, arm in a sling, tummy bandaged, and here you come, lookin’ for pity. What you need is some honest labor, ‘stead of pushing paper and telling lies, which is what I figure lawyering’s all about.” She studied me a moment. “So climb that tree, boy, unless you’re still afraid of heights.”

  Granny always taught me to confront my demons. “I’ve never been afraid of heights. It’s falling that scares me.”

  Charlie harrumphed and told us to bicker all we wanted, he was going to sit in a rocker on the front porch and rest his bones. Granny went back to cleaning the fish, so I did what I was told. I wandered into her sandy front yard and took a look at the coconut palm, a healthy Jamaica Tall. The husks were tawny yellow, the nuts thirty feet off the ground.

  I started shimmying up the coconut tree using one arm and both feet. Halfway there, I heard Granny yelling from the back porch. “Machete’s in the tool shed, Jake. You remember how to use a machete, don’t you?”

  I remembered.

  Charlie was snoring in the roc
king chair when I set about making the coconut milk. I didn’t use the watery liquid found inside the nut. That I just drank straight from the cracked shell. Then I dug out the white meat, poured hot water over it, and squashed the mixture into a thick cream. By this time, Granny was marinating the fish in a mixture of lime juice, pepper, chopped onion, and crushed garlic. When Granny was mixing the graham cracker crust for the Key lime pie, I made the fish sauce by heating the coconut milk with flour, butter, salt, and pepper. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee cup filled with Granny’s white lightning. It singed the throat on the way down.

  After she spooned the topping onto the Key lime filling, Granny sat down next to me. As she had done forever, she handed me the spatula and watched as I licked off the whipped cream.

  “I was worried about you, son,” Granny said. That was about as much of an endearment as you get from the old battle-ax.

  “I love you, too, Granny.”

  She borrowed my cup for a sip, closed her eves as it went down, and said, “C’mon, now. Wake up that old coot so we can eat. I’m not getting any younger.”

  After dinner, we sat on the porch, feeling the breeze, sipping whiskey, and talking. Charlie had heard it all, so he sat quietly while I told Granny everything, starting with Peter Tupton dead in a wine cellar and ending with Nicky Florio dead in a cane field. I told her how I dragged myself back up and down levees, through burning fields and into open spaces, before finding the overturned Bentley. Guillermo Diaz lay on the ground, moaning and praying in Spanish. Hank Scourby stood nearby, leaning on his helicopter, patiently waiting.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he said. “This one’s got two broken legs, and he’s none too happy about it.”

  I walked over to Diaz and leaned down next to him. “Nicky’s dead. We’re going to get you to a hospital, and after they glue you back together, I’m going to bring a court reporter into the room. You’re going to go under oath and tell who killed Rick Gondolier and the circumstances of my killing Jim Tiger. Then when Abe Socolow comes to visit, you’re going to do it all over again. Got it?”

  His eyes were glazed over with pain. Spittle had dried in the corners of his mouth.

  “Or,” I continued, “we can toss you into an irrigation canal right now and leave you for gator bait.”

  “I’ll talk,” he said. “But you gotta do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  He winced with pain as he spoke. “They’ll revoke my probation, won’t they?”

  “First thing, and if Abe Socolow’s in the mood, you’ll get charged with accessory to murder.”

  “That’s why I need you.”

  “What for?”

  “To be my lawyer, naturalmente.”

  We left early the next morning, again heading south on U.S. I, the road that starts in Maine and ends in Key West, or is it the other way around? We stopped at a gas station in Marathon, where I bought some live grunt for bait and Chap Stick to lubricate the knots in the leader. I try not to be one of those guys who grumbles about the Keys being swallowed up by fast-food emporiums and hokey swim-with-the-porpoise shows, but there’s no denying the truth. The drive numbs you with discount motels, T-shirt shops, and other touristy gewgaws and gimcracks lining each side of the highway.

  Still, despite our best efforts to destroy the environment, Nature hangs tough. Bulldoze the trees, and the ospreys build their stick nests high atop our ugly telephone poles. Dredge ugly canals to cool nuclear power plants, and you’ve provided honeymoon suites for warm-blooded manatees. We think of man destroying Nature, and man does his level best to try. But Nature preceded us, withstands us, and probably will outlive us.

  We rumbled over the seven-mile bridge. To the east, we call the water the Atlantic Ocean. To the west, it’s the Gulf of Mexico. But under the bridge, it all looks the same.

  We stopped at the Bahia Honda Bridge, unpacked our gear, and prepared to drop lines in the channel in pursuit of the great silvery tarpon.

  “Megalops atlantica,” Charlie said, wistfully. “What a fish. Hope you’re prepared for a fight today. You going to use those grunts?”

  “That’s why I bought ’em.”

  “I’ll stick with a four-inch George-R-Shad rubber fish.”

  Charlie hauled out a couple of six-foot bait-casting rigs with twelve-pound line. Standing on the catwalk, I tried a few practice casts with my good arm, dropping the bait near some pilings that looked like tarpon condos. If I got a bite, Charlie would have to help me with the reel. The wind was picking up, the clouds scudding across a gray-blue sky. A nasty gust nearly put my back cast into my ear. Behind us, cars were humming over the bride, headed for Key West.

  We fooled around for an hour or so, doing no damage to the fish population. Even if we caught one, we’d cut it loose. Tarpon are too bony for eating, so the only use is to mount one and hang it in your den. I don’t believe in killing animals for sport, and anyway, I keep my walls bare of diplomas, trophies, and plaques from the Kiwanis.

  The sun had burned off the clouds by the time a school of the big ones came lazing into view, slicing through the pilings. They were rolling in the water, mouths open as if pleading to be fed. I dropped my grunt in the middle of the pack, and the strike came so suddenly I nearly lost the pole. When I got a grip, the pole was bowed toward the bottom of the channel, the tarpon diving, then running toward the open sea. The reel was whining, and I was giving line so fast, I imagined I had hooked an invisible speedboat. I dug my left arm out of the sling and held on with both hands. The pain was icy-hot, deep in the meat of my deltoid.

  The tarpon jumped.

  An impossibly high, wriggling jump, its blue-green stripe shining iridescent in the glare of the sun.

  It smacked the water, swam and jumped, and swam some more. A five-footer, maybe eighty pounds.

  I was soaked with sweat, my shoulder was throbbing, the stitches were tearing loose in my abdomen, and we’d only been at this a couple of minutes.

  “You might want to start fighting him,” Charlie said.

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  We both saw it at once, a gray fin breaking the water, the smooth, swiveling motion of the fish powering its way toward its target.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “We’ve got competition.”

  “Quod avert at Deus!”

  If there is any animal as ugly as the great hammerhead shark, I haven’t seen it, With eyes at either end of a broad, flattened snout, the hammerhead looks like somebody rearranged its head with a shovel. This shark took the tarpon in one bite, snapped my line, turned, and was gone.

  I wound in the lifeless line, dropped the rod, and leaned against the catwalk rail. “Just when you think you’ve landed one, you lose it.”

  “There are other fish in the sea.”

  “Damn sharks. Did you see the size of him, Charlie? Eighteen feet, I’ll bet, fifteen hundred pounds at least, maybe a ton.”

  “No way.”

  “C’mon. That was the biggest shark I’ve ever seen.”

  “Non semper ea sunt quae videntur. Things are not always what they seem.”

  “I know, I know. You’ve taught me that before. But I saw it.”

  “You were excited. Your adrenaline was flowing. Your senses were distorted, much as a man hopelessly in love cannot accurately describe his lover. There is no objectivity in matters of passion.”

  “Charlie, this was a shark, not a woman.”

  “The distinction is, shall we say, de minimis.”

  We would have argued it out a bit longer, but just then, a black limousine with dark, tinted windows squeaked to a halt on the roadway just above us. A uniformed driver came around to the back, opened the door, and a woman stepped out.

  She wore a calf-length black suede dress with golden studs around the high neckline. It would have been a perfect dress for mourning, if you ignored the thigh-high slit up the side. I didn’t ignore it. Her long butterscotched hair peeked out from benea
th a broad-brimmed gray hat. Black sunglasses shielded her eyes. Her high heels clattered down the metal stairs to the catwalk, and the limo pulled to the end of the bridge.

  Gina Florio lowered the sunglasses and looked at me with those dark blue eyes rimmed in black. “I waited for you to call me, Jake. I waited a week and then another week. And then I thought about it, and I knew you wouldn’t. Whenever I’m available, you never call.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  Charlie Riggs cleared his throat. “I think I’ll go clean some fish.”

  “We don’t have any fish,” I responded, as he walked away.

  “Then I’ll go to the market and get some,” he called back.

  “Anyway,” Gina said, “I didn’t hear from you, so I made other arrangements, but I wanted to see you before I left town.”

  That caught me by surprise. “I figured you’d be tied up with the lawyers for a while,” I said. “The estate must be complicated.”

  Her smile was rueful. “Not really. When you have ten million in assets and twenty million in debts, it’s really quite simple.”

  “I don’t get it. I thought Nicky was loaded.”

  “Nicky was leveraged like you wouldn’t believe. Everything he had, the bingo hall, the raw land, the apartment projects, even our house, was tied up as collateral for his loans. He’d lost a bundle in commercial real estate. Empty shopping centers were a huge cash drain, and he’d signed personally on every loan. The gambling and the oil were supposed to turn it around.”

  “There must have been life insurance.”

  “Pledged to the banks to secure the lines of credit. So were the cars, the boat, even my jewelry. Hey, I’m back where I started, Jake, except I’m older and wiser.”

  “I’m sorry. Not about Nicky. Hut I was hoping you’d be okay.”

  “I am okay. A girl uses her wits, or whatever her assets may be.”

  A charter fishing boat chugged under the bridge, three sunburned tourists saluting us with beer cans.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “A long trip and short memories. I want to forget all about Nicky and his big plans.”