“God, I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “I just want to have the life we planned when you got here, loafing and writing. No more of this blood and thunder nonsense. No more killing.”
“I feel the same way, deep down,” Hector said. “Though I did wire ahead to tell Beau how things stand. Wanted to let him decide on his own precautions. This man will kill Beau without thought to get at Connie, we both know that.”
Hector thought about what Beau had earlier said about Nash. About not leaving an enemy breathing to stew and ulcerate, to try and kill again. To borrow one of Beau’s phrases, Connie had, in her way, sent Miguel to the river. She’d left Miguel a sense of having no future, with no prospect for happiness, and therefore, no eye to consequences. For Miguel, anything was acceptable. Hector’s strong instinct was to go to Miami and find the man and put him down like the rabid dog he’d become.
Brinke said, “Where’s Vogel?”
“Off to Texas. Some plan about being the king of Galveston Bay or the like.”
Hector drew Brinke out of the sun and deeper into the shade. He kissed her and said, “Go below, make me a drink and get that lunch ready, won’t you?”
“What are you going to do while I play galley slave, oh, He Who Must Be Obeyed?”
“Cast off and put to sea pronto,” Hector said. “Get a little distance between us and this bloody Key so we can finally really relax.”
***
Brinke was astride Hector. Her back arched and she screamed, her nails digging into his chest. She hung her head, then slowly stretched out atop him, careful that they remained joined.
“That was a little reckless wasn’t it?” Hector said, panting. “Not complaining, mind you. It’s so much sweeter coming inside you. Beyond intense. But it’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
“My risk,” Brinke said. “My gamble. Life is short and I don’t want to leave this world regretting anything.”
Hector’s eyes narrowed. He remembered then that she had seen the doctor. His voice thick, he said, “Is everything okay, darlin’? Did the doctor tell you something bad? You’re not sick are you?”
He waited for it.
There were tears in Brinke’s eyes. She said, “He didn’t die, Hec.”
“Who? Who didn’t die?”
“The rabbit.”
Hector tilted his head, searching her wet black eyes. “You thought you were pregnant?”
“I did. I wanted to be, so much. Convinced myself I was.
Getting sick in the morning, those cravings. But I’m not pregnant. Just a virus, I guess.
Only cravings.”
“But you wanted to be pregnant,” Hector said softly.
Brinke smiled sadly. “Desperately. Maybe this time, after this just now, I will be. Guess that’s selfish though, just keeping you inside me like this. Deciding for both of us. Don’t you want children with me, Hector?”
“What I don’t want is to put you at risk. You said other doctors told you that—”
“My choice, Hector. So can we try again in a little bit?”
“Sure,” he said softly, feeling this knot. “Anytime you want.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “But I want you to be sure. Because you are the one at immediate risk.” He couldn’t conceive of losing this woman, yet Hector couldn’t take the dream of a child away from her. Not seeing now how much Brinke wanted it and would gamble to have her way.
“I’ve made my choice, whatever comes.” Brinke looked around. “Made our choice, really.”
“There’s no hurry,” Hector said.
“I’m over thirty, Hec, so yes, there indeed is very much of a hurry.” Brinke looked around. “It’s getting dark, darling. Can we sleep on this boat like this, out here?”
“Sure we can.”
“I want to do that, then.”
“All right,” he said. “Anything you want. Anything at all.”
Independence Day, 1925
“Never’s just the echo of forever.”
—Kris Kristofferson
48
It was raining hard on Matecumbe Key and the rain pounded the roof of the church.
The confession was concluding. Margarita Pagón said, “Your voice sounds different, Father.”
“I’m not who you think I am. Father Romano was called away. His sister is quite ill. I am Father Santiago. Now, you’ll keep your promise? You’ll follow through and tell this man the truth at last, sí? Lies, even little ones, murder parts of the world. The older they are, the more destructive they become. It’s always their terrible way.”
“I will tell him, Father.”
Miguel waited until he heard the confessional door close, until he heard Margarita’s footsteps on tile fade to silence. Then he stood up inside the confessional and finished undressing the priest whom he had murdered. Miguel had strangled the priest to preserve the priest’s collar and coat.
As he tugged off the priest’s vestments, Miguel almost second-guessed his plan. All that black clothing in the Key West sun? It would be hot as hell. It was a good thing he lived by night.
Still, it was going to be an uncomfortable disguise, even at dusk. But a desperate man had to take the good with the bad.
Miguel let himself out of the confessional and moved quickly through the sanctuary, dashing from the low but painful light of the church’s interior and into the dark balmy night.
“Father?”
He smiled at his last confession. Saucy Margarita Pagón was smoking a cigarette on the steps of the church. She was blond, busty. She said, “You’re very young for a priest around these parts. They tend to send the old ones to the Middle Keys. Or it seems that way to me.”
“You’re very young, too,” he said. “And didn’t we just talk about smoking? About how you’re trying to quit?”
“Still trying,” she said with a sheepish smile. She hesitated, then smiled again and said with sloe eyes, “Would you like to go and get a cup of coffee, Father? My treat.”
“I have to be pushing on,” Miguel said. He tugged at his new, tight-fitting priest’s collar. It nearly gagged him. How did the true padres tolerate the things in this damned tropical heat? “I have to get south,” Miguel said.
“Where are you going? A new posting?”
“That’s right,” Miguel said. “In Key West.”
“I’ve always wanted to visit that island,” the girl said. Just a little innuendo in there, she thought. Just a tad—enough to maybe prompt an invitation, perhaps. It surely wasn’t a sin if he—if a priest—wanted it, too. Or so she consoled herself.
“It’s not so different than here,” Miguel said. “Same weather, same trees. The same ocean and sky. And wherever we go, our problems travel with us. We live between our ears, sí?”
“Sí, but there are people there, too,” Margarita said. “Real people, not like the ones here. There are streetlights and shops and entertainment. A movie theatre and pretty clothes on all the tourists who come from all over the world.”
“Quiet and dark is very nice, too,” Miguel said. “Maybe even better. You take what you have here too much for granted.”
“I have to walk through the woods to get home,” Margarita said. “It’s very dark there, and after the murder last night—that woman they found beaten to death? Beaten to death and, well, interfered with? I’m more than a little afraid.” The priest was very handsome and Margarita thought maybe she could steal a kiss from Father Santiago in her driveway, or better, somewhere in the woods where he could touch her, too. She sensed he was perhaps available in that way. There was something almost flirtatious in his manner, something she regarded as carnal.
She said, “You will walk me through to the other side, won’t you?”
Miguel looked around, saw no one. He smiled and said, “Certainly. I will see you to the other side. That much I can promise.”
49
Brinke said, “I’m really looking forward to this. Holidays haven’t ever meant much to me. Not beyond Christmas as a little
girl. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated Fourth of July.” She smiled and kissed them. “But there was this past Valentine’s Day…”
They were riding the streetcar to the docks. They shared a suitcase filled with little more than swimsuits, shorts and shirts. Brinke had packed a single dress and Hector dress slacks and a sports jacket for dinners out. From somewhere, Hector heard a banjo playing.
According to Beau’s wire, he expected to anchor his yacht at Mallory Dock by four. Hector and Brinke were going to stow their suitcases aboard Beau’s boat, then have dinner with Consuelo and Beau ashore. Hector had booked them into adjacent rooms at another of the Key’s newer hotels so they would be in short walking distance of the docks for an early start.
Crack of dawn, they planned to set off for three days of fishing, sunning and catching up on the Gulf Stream. An idyll for savoring the quiet life they’d been denied in the days before and after Hector and Brinke’s wedding. And they were celebrating another set of nuptials: Consuelo and Beau were two months married.
The sky was gray but doing little to dampen holiday spirits. Cuban boys in ragged shorts, their dirty faces and bare chests streaked with sweat, ran around, capering. They flung firecrackers at pedestrians and at fighting cocks. Red-white-and-blue bunting draped the Duval Street shops and their second-floor balconies. Old men waved little flags from lawn chairs as the streetcar passed them by.
There was a crack of thunder. The rain came suddenly in billowing gusts that tamped down the street dust and quickly overwhelmed the drainage ditches.
Brinke crowded closer to Hector, shivering in the sudden chill. He kissed her and said, “Are you sure about this? Days on a boat with your morning sickness?”
Brinke smiled. “Sick on a boat, or sick in a hotel or at home? What’s the difference? And it’s fleeting—the nausea, I mean. Let’s talk about names again. You still haven’t told me your ideas.”
“I want to hear your thoughts on this,” Hector said.
The doctor had confirmed Brinke’s pregnancy the previous weekend.
Hector was still of two minds, delight and inchoate dread.
Based on everything he’d heard about Brinke’s risk from carrying a baby to term he felt a little like their baby growing inside Brinke was some kind of lethal time bomb.
And deep down, he had to confess, he wasn’t certain he was ready to be a parent himself. Brinke was right in some ways, Hector felt there was still too much kid left in him.
“I think if it’s a boy, it’s already a done deal,” Brinke said. “We have to name him Beau, yes?”
Hector said, “It would mean the world to Pap. And I like the name well enough.”
“Agreed, then. Beau Lassiter it is. So we just have to think about middle names for a boy.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
Brinke scooted a little further from the window. A chilly drizzle was blowing in through the windows of the streetcar, dampening their backs. “I had a grandmother on my mother’s side I was quite fond of for a fleeting time,” she said. “In a lot of ways, Grammy was more like my mother than my own mother was.”
“What was your grandmother’s name?”
“Dolores,” Brinke said. It was the Spanish for “pain,” but Hector didn’t volunteer that.
“Then it’s settled,” Hector said. “Dolores it is. Either way it goes, one of our grandparents gets honored.”
***
Miguel had run into Pablo in a bar on Miami’s South Beach in late June. Three drinks in, Pablo, a bellboy at the hotel where Consuelo had worked, confessed that he and several others of the hotel employees had conspired to lie to Miguel about his lover having fled to Miami.
Seething, Miguel had continued to pump drinks into Pablo. Miguel was repaid with revelations: Consuelo had begged her friends at the hotel to lie to Miguel. She had convinced them she was certain Miguel would eventually kill her. Consuelo believed Miguel’s violent streak since the accident had been growing stronger and more unpredictable each day.
Then came the most terrible disclosure: Consuelo had taken up with some old sugar daddy and run off to Texas with the old man to become the geezer’s wife. Word had trickled back Consuelo was not only now married to the old man, but—and this last sickened Miguel—was carrying the wrinkled-up old codger’s baby.
Miguel listened to the rest in a haze of anger and pain. While Miguel had roamed the darkened streets of Miami seeking a woman who wasn’t even there, Consuelo had in fact been living it up on the far side of the Gulf of Mexico. Hell, to hear Pablo tell it, Consuelo actually had snuck back to Key West a couple of times, usually coming over for birthdays or to visit the old man’s grandson who was now himself a noted Key Wester, some writer or something.
Sipping his drink, Miguel had taken it all in. Then, when Pablo rose on shaky legs to walk out back and relieve himself in an alley, Miguel followed. He throttled Pablo with his own belt and then cut out the man’s tongue and slung it across his chest.
Two night later, Miguel began his slow, incremental voyage by night, south down through the islands, killing and stealing along the way to fund his passage back to the last Key.
Miguel had a vision. He’d confront Consuelo a last time. He’d rape her, then kill her while the old man watched. After, he’d cut out the old bastard’s heart and show it him before the codger’s eyes went dark.
After that?
Well, that was thinking too far ahead. Miguel tried to stretch his legs in the cramped confines of the steamer’s hold.
The really nice thing about being a priest?
Hardly anyone denied you anything, not even last-minute, overnight passage to Cayo Hueso.
50
Brinke held her hand up against sun, squinting at the yacht. Beau and Consuelo were sitting in deck chairs, fanning themselves. Beau was sipping sangria and tending a fishing pole. He had grown back his moustache and now had a goatee. He’d kept his hair tinted a light brown and maintained the silver wings above each ear.
Consuelo stood up and spread her arms. She said, “I’m pregnant!”
Hector and Brinke exchanged a look and Brinke, smiling and squinting against the sun, called up, “Me, too!”
Hector said to Beau, “That was supposed to be a surprise.”
“Ours too,” Beau said. He tucked the butt of his fishing pole into the seat cup of the fighting chair and extended a hand to Brinke. Hector wrapped his hands around Brinke’s waist and helped her on board. Hector vaulted over the side of the boat and shook his grandfather’s hand.
He said to Beau, “Get the hang of handling this fine craft?”
“It’s pretty intuitive,” Beau said. “And I have a new hobby as a result. Sport fishing. Ever try it, Mase?”
“Never,” Hector said. “But I’ve wanted to. Wanted to try and land a marlin or two. Looks like real work.”
Beau nodded. “I love it. Why haven’t you taken it up yourself or paid for a charter? Is it just money?”
“Again with the money,” Hector said. “That’s not it. There’s been no time. Not all of us are retired. I’ve still got to crank out five-thousand words a day.”
“That for a novel?”
“Two thousand a day for a novel, then three thousand more or so for a short story a day. Send out six stories in a week, you usually sell at least three. And the magazines pay in a more timely way than the book fellas back east seem to.”
“I don’t know how he does it,” Brinke said. “I struggle to do two thousand on a novel a day.”
Beau pressed a hand to Brinke’s belly. “You’ve got more going on inside you than telling stories. I’m delighted you’re expectin’.” Beau leaned into Brinke’s ear as he hugged her. Hector figured he was making some inquiry after Brinke’s health based on his reading of Brinke’s lips in answer: I’m okay.
Hector said, “You two pick a place to eat?”
Consuelo shrugged and Beau said, “You’re the island dwellers. Thought we’d leave that selection
up to you.”
“We know a good place,” Brinke said.
Hector stashed their suitcase under a bunk in the cabin. He heard Beau say, “I hope this place of yours serves acceptable hooch. You and Consuelo may be occasional milk drinkers now, but me and Mase? Not even close.”
***
Miguel knew the name of the boat he was looking for, “The Inside Straight.” He simply wandered the docks until he found her slip.
As he was approaching the yacht, a tall man in a white sports jacket leapt over the side. He held out his hands and grabbed a slender, black-haired woman around the waist and lowered her to the dock. He did the same for a Latina that Miguel could now see was Consuelo. Then the tall man held a hand out for an older, equally tall man who lowered himself over the side of the boat.
Miguel could barely focus his vision in the scorching afternoon heat. His head was pounding and he felt like being sick. He turned his back to the quartet as they passed. He scented Consuelo’s perfume on the sultry wind. Miguel watched them walk up the gangplank, then he leapt over the side of the Inside Straight to find a place to hide.
***
Brinke and Consuelo toasted one another with a couple of Shirley Temples. “We should do some shopping,” Brinke said. “Clothes, cribs. Those sorts of things.”
Consuelo said, “Yes. Absolutely. We must do all that and more.”
Fifteen minutes later, they both excused themselves to the lady’s room. Hector slammed back a shot of whiskey and said to his grandfather, “Christ, but our lives have gotten strange.”
Beau smiled. “This time last year, we were two and pretty uncertain for the count. This time next year, we’ll be at least six. It’s good to have family, sonny.”
Hector shook out a cigarette. “You were talking, not so long ago, about all the revenue Mom cost you when she was a mewling little baby. Ready for that next big wallet hit?”
“I’m retired and set for whatever comes,” Beau said. “You know that.”
“Really? You don’t keep a hand in the grift, not anywhere?”
Forever’s Just Pretend: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 2) Page 20