Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  Sam thought that over for a while. The music changed to some insane disco cha-cha.

  Bert continued, "Somethin' that y'oughta know."

  "Lotta things I oughta know."

  "Your Walkman," said the Shirt. "It picked up a conversation."

  There was a pause, then Sam Katz sat bolt upright on his stool, moved so briskly that the stool's feet chattered on the floor. He'd almost forgotten about the Walkman. All that fooling with the tape machine, the hearing aid, it seemed a long, long time ago. "It worked?" he said at last

  "Worked good enough," said Bert, "that anybody finds the tape, those bastards're goin' to the chair."

  "It worked," said Sam, with wonder. "It worked. Ya see, I could still think up a gizmo."

  Bert wriggled higher against the cardboard box. "How'd ya plant it, Sam?"

  Sam started to answer, then stopped. He'd been smiling but now the smile went away and he fell back into his S-shaped slump. "Was supposed to help, though," he finally said. "Help Aaron and his lady-friend. Who'd it help? Wha'did it accomplish?"

  "Sam, hey, the gizmo worked," said Bert." Ya can't ask more than that."

  "Why not?"

  Bert considered. He missed his dog, didn't seem to think as clearly without the small quivering creature in his lap. He wondered vaguely how long the dog could live after he himself was dead. He said at last, "'Cause sometimes ya do your very best and still it don't accomplish nothin'. That's just how it is."

  Sam opined, "That stinks."

  Bert squirmed like he was set to disagree. But he couldn't disagree. "Okay," he said. "It stinks."

  They sat there a moment. The hideous music throbbed like a clot.

  Bert couldn't disagree but he couldn't leave it right there either. "Stinks," he said again. "But still, ya gotta try."

  Sam kept a pouty silence.

  "Am I right, Sam?" Bert kept on. "Can ya tell me I'm wrong? I'm sayin' it stinks sometimes, but still, ya gotta try-."

  Sam just fixed him with his soupy eyes that turned down at the outside corners.

  Chapter 52

  Aaron Katz had been posted at the front desk like everything was hunky-dory, as if it were a normal business day.

  He sat among the potted palms and promotional brochures, shuffling papers, sorting keys, trying to keep his hands from trembling as the three invaders came trundling up the stairs; trying not to glance at Carol Lopez, who was crouched on a low stool below the level of the counter, her revolver in her hand; trying not to be furious with Gary Stubbs, who hadn't made it back in time.

  The Russians came up single file, the shirtless Abramowitz leading. He moved thickly through the office door, took a couple steps along the sisal rug. Almost shyly, Markov and Cherkassky slipped in behind him and for a breathless moment no one spoke.

  Aaron tried to swallow back the quaver in his voice. "May I help you?"

  The Russians stalled, took time to get their bearings. Narrowed eyes flashed toward the doorway to the kitchen. "Please," said Markov, "you have a room?" The h spent a long while in his throat.

  Aaron, compelled by some grotesque logic, answered the question straight. "For three?"

  Then the brief charade was over and Abramowitz had pulled the gun from the back waistband of his pants. No one saw him draw it; it was just there in his hairy hand. It was pointed at Aaron's chest. He said, "Where is she, Katz?"

  A bubble of sweat broke at the nape of Aaron's neck and trickled down his back. "Who?"

  "Who," Cherkassky mocked. "Lazslo's whore. Where?"

  In the kitchen, Suki heard it all. In her mind she fled; in her heart she surged to Aaron's side, offering up herself to save him; in fact she didn't, couldn't, move at all. She looked at the new cop, her protector; his gun was shaking in his hand like he was mixing paint.

  Aaron said, "I don't know what you're—"

  "Tell us or you die," said Tarzan.

  "Look—" said Aaron.

  And Carol Lopez picked that instant to spring up behind the counter. Her revolver cocked and poised, her shoulders broke the counter's plane the way a leaping dolphin breaks the surface of the water, and she yelled out, "Drop it!"

  Tarzan Abramowitz didn't drop it. He wheeled toward the motion and he fired. The shot cracked and whistled and Carol Lopez crumpled, a red stain wicking through torn threads at the front of her shirt.

  Time stopped for an instant. In that silent and airless hiatus, Aaron Katz had somehow gotten to his feet. He'd reached out for the silver service bell atop the counter. Grabbing it, he'd slung his arm back, coiled every sinew in his gut, then rocked forward, hips and chest pulling through the average arm; mechanics and control, things learned from his father, standing in for strength. The bell sprang from his hand, turning like a satellite, ringing softly as it flew. It hit Tarzan Abramowitz in the triangle between his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose, wedged briefly in a soft seam of the skull. Sinus bones knifed inward at the impact, and the huge and hairy man was stunned.

  He fell back half a step, his narrow eyes lost focus behind a wall of reflex tears; and the trembling rookie ventured into the doorway from the kitchen and shot him through the heart.

  He would have been a hero if he had kept on shooting but he didn't. Amazement at his own boldness made him indecisive. He watched the dead man fall, and by the time his furry back had hit the rug, Markov and Cherkassky had drawn out pistols of their own.

  "Bravo," said an unshaken Cherkassky to the rookie. "Now throw the gun away."

  The new cop blinked, counted weapons, blanched at the arithmetic, and did as he was told.

  Cherkassky turned to Aaron. "Enough. Give us the girl or everybody dies."

  Aaron looked down at his hands. He could faintly hear that Carol Lopez was still breathing. She was breathing through the hole in her shirt, and the wet sound of it made Aaron want to vomit. He looked up at Cherkassky. "Go fuck yourself."

  Markov's flubbery lips were working, he licked them with a hound-like tongue. "Is only a woman. You cannot save her anyway."

  "Where's my father?" Aaron said.

  Cherkassky wagged his pistol. With his other hand he tugged his lumpy face. "Your father. Ah," he said. "Perhaps you like to trade? Your father for the whore."

  The rookie trembled in the doorway. To get to Suki they would have to go through him, and he had no doubt that they would.

  "Where is he?" Aaron said.

  Markov smiled a salesman's smile. "Fifteen minutes you could see him, have reunion."

  There was a pause. Carol Lopez gurgled softly from deep down in her punctured lung. Tarzan Abramowitz's right foot gave a slight but ghastly flick as some dead nerve finally shut down.

  "A trade would be just fine."

  It was Suki talking. She was standing barefoot at the bottom of the front porch steps. She'd slipped out the back door of the kitchen and come down the walkway with its ranks of new shrubs still waiting to be planted. No one saw her till she spoke. She could have kept on going—through the gate, onto the street, out of town, to the ends of the world. But she didn't. She stood there. Her voice was calm and her face serene.

  The Russians wheeled cautiously at the words.

  Aaron said, "Suki, please—"

  She put a foot on the bottom stair and looked at him, her gaze slicing in between the Russians. Her hair was black and coarse, her eyes an unlikely violet. Her upper lip, disconcertingly, was lusher than the lower. She said, "Aaron, it's the only way. We should've seen that long ago."

  "It's not the only way," cried Aaron, though he didn't see another.

  To the Russians, Suki said, "I'm ready."

  Markov and Cherkassky shared a glance. There still were witnesses to be disposed of.

  Aaron, desperate, stalling, searching for a way to be by Suki's side, said, "Wait. You said a trade..."

  A mocking twitch pulled at one end of Cherkassky's mouth. He quickly erased it. So trusting, these Americans. So stupid. A trade. Of course. A most convenient way to get all these
insufferable and meddling people together to be killed.

  Solemnly he said to Aaron, "We will bring you to your father, yes." With a gracious Old World sweep of his arm, he gestured for the man behind the counter to come join them.

  "Aaron, don't," said Suki.

  But Aaron's feet were moving. They didn't feel like his own feet and they didn't recognize the texture of the sisal rug, but they carried him around the counter and past the sprawling body of Abramowitz.

  When he was close enough to grab, Markov seized his arm. And Cherkassky opened fire on the disarmed rookie, making, he believed, for two dead cops.

  The Russians ushered Aaron through the office door and down the stairs. The sun was shining. Fronds were gently rustling. Suki waited patiently. Aaron could see the freckles on her neck, the rise of muscle in her shoulder. He wondered if the murderers would let them touch.

  At the bottom stair he reached out for her hand. Their fingers twined, nobody dared to stop them. Ivan Cherkassky stepped across and put the muzzle of his gun against her ribs. Aaron felt it. He knew the flesh of her side where the gun was pressing in.

  They walked slowly toward the picket gate. Foliage thinned and the noises of Key West intruded. A motorcycle revving somewhere; the bellow of a cruise ship's horn. They saw the blue Camaro at the curb.

  Ivan Cherkassky said, "Very nicely, all together now, we get into the car."

  In a clumsy cluster they moved across the sidewalk. There were people all around, heartbreakingly oblivious in silly hats and sunburns, licking ice cream, reading maps. No one, so it seemed, paid particular attention to the odd quartet, the couple being escorted to their deaths.

  Ivan Cherkassky opened the passenger-side door, bundled Aaron, then Suki, into the backseat, and finally climbed in himself. Markov lumbered around the front of the car to get in behind the wheel. He did not notice a barefoot, ragged man sitting on the curb a little distance away, his beard scraggly and translucent, his face medieval, his mouth a mere dry slot.

  Nor did he realize right away that the Camaro's engine was no longer running.

  He put the car in drive. Nothing happened. For a moment he was utterly confused. He looked down at the ignition switch and found it vacant.

  Cherkassky's pinched voice said to him, "Please, Gennady, why you wait?"

  Markov's fat hand fumbled on the floor mat, underneath the seat. "Abramowitz," he muttered. "The key he took."

  "Car was running," said Cherkassky.

  A siren, faint at first, cut through among the sounds of moped horns and biplanes pulling banners through the sky.

  "Big scientist," Cherkassky hissed. "Find a way to start the car!"

  Markov sat there sweaty and helpless. "Is bad, Ivan," he said.

  Aaron and Suki squeezed each other's fingers, their hips were pressed together on the seat The siren grew louder, its whine began to fill the leafy tunnel of Whitehead Street.

  "Fool!" Ivan Cherkassky said. Disgusted, persuaded to the end that only he could do things right, could ensure his own survival, he threw open the Camaro's door, stepped outside, and started walking round to start the car himself.

  Piney watched him. Without the others clustered up against him, the skinny Russian could not hide the gun. Pineapple saw it and quick as a crab he scuttled across the warm stone of the curb. By the time the Russian was crossing the front fender, the ragged and devoted man was close enough. He swung his parking sign with all his might and caught Cherkassky right behind the knees. The thin man buckled to the shape of a Z. His head clanged on the car's hood, then he slithered off the bright blue paint like egg.

  Gennady Markov, baffled, fired blindly through the tinted windshield. Glass shattered; naked daylight, searing white, streamed in through the spiky gaps between the shards. Neither Cherkassky nor his assailant got up from the pavement.

  The siren was growing ever louder. Bystanders, oblivious no longer, hunkered behind trees or bolted down side streets. Markov sat behind the wheel of the useless car and he started to whimper dryly. He was totally alone at last. There was no one to take responsibility for him, to prop him up, to tell him what to do. He listened to the siren. He wondered if his blind shot had killed his only comrade and his enemy.

  He panicked. He opened his door and he began to run away down Whitehead Street. His shirt was soaked, his weirdly dainty shoes flopped and stretched under his weight. Fatly he ran, twisting his neck and brandishing his gun, using it to clear away a swath of the world wide enough for him to hide in.

  Aaron rocked forward in his seat and took off after him. There was no time to think about what it was that called forth courage—whether it was mere circumstance, or love; no time to wonder about the transformation that brought a father's son to readiness on his own. He just took off, running hard and low.

  Markov looked back across his shoulder, saw him closing fast. Still lumbering and straining, huffing and off- balance, the Russian fired. Aaron flinched but kept on charging. The shot went wide and low, it raised a long welt in the asphalt.

  Aaron sprinted, measured, and a heartbeat later he left his feet, dove headlong at the fat man's churning thighs, and clawed and dragged him to the pavement

  Air came out of Markov when he hit the ground. His elbow slammed down on the street; the impact sprung his fingers, and his pistol skidded off just beyond his reach. Moaning, he tried to slink and crawl to it, kicking out his legs like a giant wounded insect. Hand over hand, Aaron climbed up the man the way one scales the last vertiginous reaches of a peak, dug determined fingers deep into his flesh and held on for dear life, for several dear lives, till Gary Stubbs's tardy unmarked car screeched to a halt some three feet from where they lay.

  Chapter 53

  Piney hated keys—those guilty emblems of things coveted and hoarded, things one would get in big trouble for messing with. He could not meet the lieutenant's eyes as he handed over the pilfered key to the electric blue Camaro. But the cop didn't scold him. He patted his shoulder. Then he turned his attention back to the two old Soviets who were spread-eagled across the hot hood of his unmarked Ford.

  Cherkassky had a ripening bruise on his forehead; his manner was stoic and sullen. Markov was shaking; his pants were torn. He saw no virtue in enduring pain; in response to the discreet pressure of a thumb behind the ear, he quickly revealed where Sam and Bert were being held.

  Stubbs radioed for a beat patrol to go there. The Duval Street cops met Aaron and Suki on the sidewalk, just in front of the same dim and recessed doorway where Aaron had first accosted Tarzan Abramowitz. Together they went in, and Suki took a quiet, chastened satisfaction in being there as the cheesy business was shut down.

  Sam Katz, captive in the stockroom, did not immediately understand that he was being liberated.

  He hardly noticed when the music in the T-shirt shop was suddenly turned off. Braced for death, he flinched and nearly toppled backward off his high stool as the locked door to his ugly chamber was kicked in. Seeing his son in the vacant frame, his first words were, "It isn't safe here, Aaron. Go away."

  "It's okay, Pop. It's okay."

  "What?"

  "It's safe now," Aaron shouted. Shouting it brought it home to him, and the beginnings of tears burned the corners of his eyes.

  "Really?" shouted Sam.

  "Really."

  Sam got a little happy then. "My gizmo worked. It worked."

  "Your gizmo?" Aaron said.

  Sam explained as Suki un-taped his ankles. His legs and spine had forgotten how they fit together; for a while Aaron had to hold him up.

  Bert, hostage for a shorter time, was in much better shape. He clambered to his feet as soon as he'd been untied; he had the presence to straighten the placket of his shirt He didn't want to intrude on the family reunion, but he wanted very badly to go retrieve his dog.

  So the four of them drove to Key Haven.

  On the way there they were passed by the ambulance that carried Carol Lopez. The bullet that hit her had shattered a ri
b, missed her heart by an inch or so, and lodged in her right lung. She was conscious off and on, and she seemed to understand that the rookie cop, her partner for an hour, had been slain. His was the vague sad glory of the soldier killed in his very first foray, who went down with hardly a moment to savor what he'd done or to contemplate exactly why he'd done it. Carol Lopez, by contrast an old campaigner, would soon rejoin the force. With a decoration on her shirt and a dented bullet carried in her pocket, she would be taken seriously at last.

  In the crazy tiled house where Bert and Sam had posed as golden age lovers, the chihuahua was still curled around the yellow Walkman. Its blind eyes panned the room when people entered, then it dragged itself along the tiled floor. Its whiskers probed, its tail flicked, and, at the perfect instant, like one half of a long-established dance team, it arched its creaking back to accept its master's hand around its belly.

  Sam reclaimed his souped up Walkman, the proof of his abiding competence, with hardly less affection than Bert lavished on his dog. The cassette inside explained much that was otherwise obscure—the circumstances leading to the murder of Lazslo; the pathetic revenge attempted in the killing of Ludmila; Ivan Cherkassky's coolly premeditated plan to eliminate everyone who might testify as to his larger crimes, then to lie and bargain toward clemency.

  But the full extent of the Russians' Key West empire could not be grasped until warrants were obtained to search the T-shirt shops. In various stockroom stashes, police found roughly fourteen million dollars in American cash. Paintings from Leningrad and lapis jewelry from the Caucasus. Tiger skins from Siberia; a Faberge egg smuggled out of Moscow; sapphires that had once been worn by czars.

  And even then, the real root source of all that wealth was not revealed until Pineapple had mustered his nerve and his composure, and asked Lieutenant Gary Stubbs to drive out to the hot dog and look at some things that he and Fred had dug up from the old fallout shelter in the mangroves.

  Stubbs had never intended to call in the Feds, not if he could possibly avoid it, but when he saw the stacks of dusty, lead-lined tubes and boxes arrayed around the clearing, he admitted to himself at last that this was something that could not be handled locally. He called the FBI.