Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  She looked at him for a long time out of those big, dark eyes, a little mischief sparkling around in them. “I wish I had a male colleague in there. But it’s just us ladies.”

  Again, Aimes didn’t know what to say, damning himself for coming over here, bothering her if he wasn’t going to do it.

  She helped him: “I see you checked out the book.”

  He looked down at it, heavy in the hand that was sweating again. He looked up at the high royal palms that bordered the parking lot. A warm wind from Tampa Bay was blowing up there, making the palm fronds rustle and rub together. It sounded like a man rolling over alone in bed, groaning, an unhappy man. What was it Delbert had told him? You ought to get out more, get your nose in the wind. Aimes looked into the woman’s eyes and said, “How would you like to walk over to CDBs with me and get some pizza?”

  She pulled her key out of the ignition and opened the door. “Detective Aimes, I thought you’d never ask.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Dean waved from the coppery water. “Dad, I’m gonna swim to the beach.” She tossed back her hair and gave him that wet devil grin.

  Teach called after her, “Careful. And be back before dark.”

  The Fortunate was anchored off Caladesi again. Continuing north in the morning. Teach was taking his daughter to Cedar Key, and on from there to wherever the wind blew them. He had quit his job. The house in Terra Ceia was up for sale. Somewhere up north where the coastline bent to the west, a new life waited for them. Maybe it was Panama City, maybe Pass Christian, maybe it was all the way to Corpus Christi or inland somewhere from there. America was full of cities, and there were phone books full of names to choose and lawyers enough to make the changes legal.

  Teach and Dean had decided to leave after Teach had shot Blood Naylor dead in his bedroom, but not because they had to. Their names were in the papers and would be for weeks to come. Teach was persona non grata at the club, and most of Dean’s friends had drifted away, though Tawnya Battles had remained fiercely loyal. Teach was pretty sure Mabry Meador would fire him if he didn’t quit first. He and Dean couldn’t go to the grocery store or to a restaurant without seeing heads dip into whispers. They had lost almost everything, and James Teach felt better than he had in years. There were no more secrets. They didn’t have to leave; they wanted to.

  The first night after Teach had shot Blood Naylor, he had sent Dean to sleep over with Tawnya because that was where she had asked to go. The Battles had taken her in without question. It was a kindness Teach would never forget. When he got back from the emergency room, he slept in his study and in the morning went upstairs to clean up the blood and sweep up the feathers and the plaster dust. The neighborhood was quiet. Teach could hear televisions murmuring the morning news through open windows. Somewhere a mother called to her children to come inside. A few streets over, a dog barked at the whining of a garbage truck. Since dawn, there had been a steady stream of Teach’s neighbors, gawkers driving by in their Benzes and Jaguars to look at the house, but it had slowed. From the outside, there was nothing much to see.

  As Teach worked, ignoring the pain from his second superficial gunshot wound, he repeated to himself the simple instructions of a physical act: Sweep the floor, collect the fragments in the dustpan, put them in the plastic bag. Sometimes his hands shook on the broom handle, then they steadied. He was living one simple act at a time. When he had the place clean, he called the Battles’s house and asked Dean to come home. He had to talk to her. Tell her.

  * * *

  Dean stood in the bedroom doorway staring at the stained oak floor, the bloody Persian rug folded on the little balcony that overlooked the walled garden, the wall above the bed riddled with bullet holes that revealed sixty-year-old wood lath.

  She said, “Jesus, I . . .” She sagged against the door frame, and Teach hurried over to fit his hands under her arms and steady her. When he did it, the pain in his own ribs made him grunt. Dean looked up at him. “Look at us, Dad. A couple of basket cases.”

  He let go of her and felt the pain ease under his right arm. She stood in front of him, using both sides of the door frame for support. “Dad, you’re bleeding.”

  Teach looked at himself. The mopping and sweeping had started the bleeding again. Maybe he’d ripped out a suture just now holding Dean. It hurt.

  “I want to look at it.” Dean put her hand on his chest and pushed him back toward the bed. She went to the bathroom for gauze, scissors, some hydrogen peroxide, a roll of surgical tape. With the scissors, she cut away the bandage they’d applied in the emergency room. When she saw the wound, she drew back a little, her brow knitted, her lips locked tight. She looked hard at Teach. She reached out to him, but she didn’t touch the new furrow torn by Blood Naylor’s bullet.

  She touched the old wound, just above it. She rested two fingers there like she was closing someone’s lips. Someone who must not speak now. “Dad, what is this? Tell me. I have to know what it is.”

  Teach remembered the first night he and Paige had been naked together in his shabby apartment, back in the time just after prison, the time when he was humping boxes of drugs on the loading dock and talking to a lawyer about burying his old life. Teach had figured maybe the first time it should be dark, but Paige had asked him to leave a light burning while he took off her clothes. Teach had liked it, thought it was bold, sexy.

  So he’d gone to the kitchen and found the stub of a candle he used when the big thunderstorms came through and the power went out. He put the candle in one of his mismatched saucers and brought it out to the bedside table. When Paige took off his shirt, she placed both hands flat on his chest and kneaded him a little, her discoveries making her sigh. Then she gave a sharp little gasp, and one of her hands went to the scar under his arm. The scar was a word Esteban had written on him, the first word of a story Teach could never tell.

  “What’s this?” the young, naked Paige asked him.

  Teach told her it was something that had happened to him on his father’s fishing boat. An accident with a gaff. He had practiced telling her the story, knowing he’d have to answer this question. He had even stood in front of a mirror looking into his own lying eyes until they seemed natural, truthful. He had invented details of weather and fish and people to give the story a needed authenticity. The young Paige had believed him, sighing for her lover’s old pain. Saying in her sweet, sexy voice, “You poor, poor boy. It must have been so awful. Out there on the ocean so far from land.” She had leaned forward and kissed his scar and told him she loved him, and then James Teach, lucky Jim, had bent to take one of her nipples into his mouth.

  Now his daughter touched the old scar three inches above the new wound and repeated, “Tell me. I have to know.”

  Teach had to tell. There was a map somewhere that led out of the land of secrets to the new place where they would live if they were to live at all. And he knew the thing would pull out of him like a hook buried deep in the guts of some savage ancient fish yanked up from dark cold depths. It would pull out with a lot that was rotten and a lot that hurt.

  Teach told her his father’s death and his mother’s poverty. He told it lean and cold, how he’d done the smuggling as a kid trying to stop some deep, deranged sorrow in his mother’s eyes, and later as a young man with a broken compass and a fatuous belief that losing a good life entitled him to a crooked one.

  Then he told her about Thalia. The story stuttered and almost stopped. But Dean, listening with her eyes closed, put two fingers on the old wound again and pressed them there, and Teach disgorged the time in prison and brought up the outlaw love affair, and once it started it came out fast because he was afraid he would start to lie again. The savage old fish would dive deep, even with half his guts pulled out, and die down there alone and rotting in his secret hole.

  He told Dean about Thalia, about his past with Bloodworth Naylor. He told all that he could surmise, and all that he had learned from Aimes about what Blood had done or tried to do to James
Teach and his daughter. He finished with the day Aimes had called him in for a friendly talk, and his own pursuit of Blood Naylor and what Dean had guessed already about Blood’s revenge invasion of this bedroom. His daughter cleaned and bandaged him while he told the last of it. Finished with her work, she stepped away from him and went to the window that overlooked the garden he had built for her mother.

  “I knew it,” she whispered. “I guess it was when you read the newspaper after we sailed up to Caladesi. Or maybe even before that. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Did Mom know?”

  “Yes, I think so. We never talked about it. I want you to know something, Deanie. I chose your mother for my life, for you, and I never would have left her.”

  “I know.” She turned back to him. “I know that too. But did you love her?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. He hoped she wouldn’t ask him how this could be. How a man could love two women. No one could answer that question.

  “Was she a good person?”

  “Until I made her a bad one.”

  Dean said, “Do you love me?”

  “More than ever.”

  “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  Teach thought about it. He had no right to any knowledge of her secrets. Not now, not yet anyway. He said, “I want to know if you want to go on. With me. I don’t know where it goes from here. But I want you with me if you’ll come.”

  She smiled, moved toward him. She didn’t hesitate. “I’ll come. I don’t care where it leads. As long as I’m with you.”

  * * *

  Fifty yards away, on Caladesi Beach, Dean was a tanned torso and legs, bisected by two bright yellow pieces of cloth, walking a slice of sand so bright that it burned Teach’s eyes. He knew that she could feel the protection of his eyes on her and liked it.

  Teach dozed and then awoke to the boat sway of Dean pulling herself aboard. When it was almost dark, he lit the charcoal cooker that swung out from the rail and put on two tuna steaks. He opened a bottle of good chardonnay and poured two glasses. He looked at Dean. Still in her bathing suit, she sat with a towel around her shoulders. He said, “This is not to getting away with it. It’s to starting over.”

  She touched her glass to his. “To starting over.”

  They drank and Teach said, “So, you’re not going to be a cheerleader now, I guess.”

  Something complicated, a thing he supposed would always be there, happened in Dean’s eyes. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll have cheerleaders where we end up. Wherever that is. Anyway, my ultimate goal is to become a lawyer or a policeman. I know that, at least.”

  Teach looked out at the robe of purple spreading along the horizon. He saw a quiet, somber curtain coming down on their old life. The high-dollar life no one ever leaves. He and Paige had built walls between them because they’d had too many things to protect and only secrets to protect them with. Behind their walls, they had built separate lives. Those lives were over now. Two people had died to end them. Maybe where he and Dean were going, somewhere beyond that purple curtain, they would not tell people who they had been. They would try to answer better questions. Who do we want to be? What do we really want to do?

  * * *

  At midmorning, they were off Cedar Key, and Teach could see the low shapes of the pier, old clapboard houses, and the hotel he had known in his youth. And the newer, taller buildings, condos and apartment houses. He gave Dean the wheel and stood behind her. He leaned close so that she could hear him in the wind.

  “We’ve got to decide. We can dig it up, use it for the new start, or leave it where it is. Hell, maybe it’s not there. Maybe somebody found it.” Teach doubted it. Like the pirate he had been told was a distant relative, he had buried the money carefully and deep.

  Dean glanced back over her shoulder at him, happily steering. “I thought about it all night. I still don’t know what to do. Who knows how long it’ll take you to find a job you like?”

  “Tell me what you want to do.”

  “No,” his daughter said. “It’s up to you.”

  Teach had thought about the money all night too, lying in his berth unable to sleep. A night of pictures: the Santa Maria, rotting sticks and bones now in a mangrove hole somewhere not far from here, the faces of the three Guatemalans, Blood Naylor, and those nights of running contraband on a moonlit sea. Teach had left prison and worked for money to buy a clean record from the state. He’d left the stash buried to prove something to himself: that he could work his way up from a loading dock to the good life on sweat and invention. That he was a good man, after all. He didn’t know, now, if digging up the money, using it for a new start, for Dean, was right or wrong.

  “I don’t know,” he said to Dean. “I’ll decide when we get there. When I see the place.” He looked at the resolving shapes of his hometown. “They know me here, you know. There’ll be somebody who’ll walk up to me in a bar or a restaurant and say, Why, ain’t you Jimmy Teach? Why, I remember when you thrown that pass that beat Auburn back in—”

  “Promise me something, Jimmy Teach.”

  He leaned back in the wind and sun and said to his daughter, “What’s that?”

  “Don’t tell any more stories.”

  Teach laughed. “All right, baby. I won’t.”

  E-Book Extra

  Excerpt from Fighting in the Shade

  Excerpt from Fighting in the Shade

  by Sterling Watson

  ___________________

  ONE

  Oleander, Florida, 1964

  The huddle broke. Heaving, staggering boys, too tired for the touch of fists at the center of their ragged circle, scattered to their positions. Billy Dyer trotted to the slot between right tackle and split end. He rested scraped palms on thigh pads so hot they scabbed the blood that oozed from a ripped thumbnail. He set his feet at shoulder width and leaned to measure the daylight between his face and the tackle’s right heel. Ted Street, the quarterback, stepped into Billy’s vision of hot white space and socketed his hands between the center’s legs. He glanced left and right at the lines of cocked bodies, boys made into bombs about to go off. Street looked at Billy Dyer, seeing him first as one of twelve verses in a violent song, then seeing him differently. Street’s eyes told Billy the ball was coming to him.

  Billy looked downfield, measuring the eight yards he would sprint before cutting left at a forty-five-degree angle between the cornerback and the linebacker. His calculations clear, he drew a deep breath of molten August air and stared off at the horizon. The haze. This time of year it hung above the city, smelling of orange peels burning at the juice plant east of town. Billy moved his gaze from the shimmering yellow sky and felt a moment of dizziness, of cold under the hot breastplate of his shoulder pads. His legs threatened to turn to water under him, so he did what the coaches told him to do. Shake it off! Shake it off, boy! Billy Dyer shook his head, sucked another chestful of scalding air through the cage of his helmet, and heard Ted Street call the snap count, “Hut! Hut-hut! Hut!” And everything was motion.

  The hard, metallic slap of the football into Ted Street’s hands. The inches of daylight between the lines violently ripped away, helmets striking with sharp reports, shoulder and thigh pads clashing with a deeper, more living sound, like slabs of meat colliding, and all of this to the song of the gasping, groaning, grunting throats of exhausted, straining boys. Billy Dyer loved these boys and what they did more than anything else in the world.

  Billy counted eight yards in strides he would bet against any yardstick and faked the cornerback outside, leaving the boy stumbling and cursing. Then, knowing he had wasted precious time on the fake to make the coaches notice, he cut inside, watching Charlie Rentz, the linebacker, change smoothly from high-kneed backpedaling to a sprint toward him. Billy glanced back at the scrimmage just as Ted Street disappeared into a collapsing pocket, taken down with a sickening smack by a fleet cornerback slicing in on a red dog. And then in the middle distance he saw it, r
ising and falling in the yellow haze, bouncing with each of his strides, a brown oval spiraling perfectly. He and the ball would converge somewhere in a terrain of danger. His only duty was to watch it, never them.

  He sprinted on, feeling the cold at his chest which was, he knew, an early warning of heat stroke. And now the first urging of fear in his belly. The voice of fear said, Stop running. It told his hands to protect his belly, his thighs to drop him to earth before the hit came. But Billy begged his failing strength for one last long leap, dug his left foot into the churned sand of the practice field, and lanced into the air, right arm leading for a one-handed catch. He took the spinning nose of the ball in his palm, killed the spin with twisting fingers, teased and begged the ball back to him. His body still rising, he cradled the hot leather into his right armpit and covered it with his left hand.

  CRACK!

  The hot yellow sky shrank to a black dot in Billy’s eyes, then groaned wide again.

  Head Coach Prosser was standing between the two formations, lecturing the offensive line. “Keep your feet under you! Keep ’em wide! Move your man to the outside! OUTSIDE!”

  Billy had lost time. He pushed himself up and let go of the ball. He had gone to sleep for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. To his right, the defensive backs chewed their mouth guards and waited for him to leave their turf. Their faces, shadowed inside helmets, were striped with a weird war paint, gray dust streaked white by sweat. Charlie Rentz watched Billy with nothing in his eyes, neither challenge nor concern. Billy gave back the same empty gaze, then let himself look at Coach Prosser, hoping for a good word. He wanted Prosser to say, Nice catch, son, or Way to take a lick, bud, but he didn’t expect it. Prosser was sizing him up. Maybe thinking of playing him this fall ahead of Sim Sizemore, the senior who never would have made that catch, who would have folded like a yellow flower at the sound of Charlie Rentz’s cleats cutting the ground.