Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “Cheeseburger,” the other girl said. “You have cheeseburgers, don’t you?”

  “It’s a fish joint, Angie,” her double said. “You should order fish.”

  “I hate fish. It smells funny.”

  “Your name?” The man was in his mid-thirties, about Anne’s age, and had a coarse black beard he hadn’t bothered with that morning, bristles glinting in the harsh sunlight.

  “It’s there on her shirt, the little tag,” one of the girls said. “Anne Bonny.”

  The man turned his head to the blonde.

  “I see the tag,” he said. “I’d like to hear her say her name out loud.”

  The blonde’s lips wrinkled into a practiced pout.

  “My name is Anne Bonny Joy. Can I take your order?”

  “That’s a weird name,” the other girl said.

  “It’s an illustrious name,” said the man. “Legendary.”

  “Never heard of it,” the pouting girl said. “I think it’s stupid.”

  “Three hundred years ago,” the man said, “Anne Bonny was the most famous woman in the world. Bigger than a movie star.”

  “There weren’t any movies three hundred years ago,” the blonde said. “Were there?”

  He was watching Anne’s face. His voice was dark and liquid and his blue eyes were fastened to hers, stealing past her usually impenetrable shield. She held her ground, her pencil poised above her pad. It was all she could manage. Seagulls squealed overhead. On the other side of the patio the reggae band started their version of “I Shot the Sheriff.” The bell in the kitchen rang, another order up. Garlic and shrimp and coconut suntan oil floating on the breeze.

  “Anne Bonny was the greatest pirate of the Caribbean, ruthless and daring, the equal of any man.”

  “Big deal,” the sulky one said.

  “My mother named me,” Anne said. “It’s just a name.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  The man touched a fingertip to the lip of his water glass, smiling down.

  “And your boat?” Anne said. Irritated now, wanting to push back.

  “My boat?”

  “The Black Swan.”

  “Oh.” He glanced out toward the docks, then let his eyes drift back to her. “It’s the name of an old movie with Tyrone Power.”

  “And Maureen O’Hara,” said Anne.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, giving her a more careful look. “Who could forget Maureen O’Hara?”

  “Hey,” said the sulky blonde. “Are we having lunch or what?”

  In the Lorelei kitchen, Vic Joy made an offer. Seven million dollars.

  And Milton Stammer, who owned the joint, said sure, sure, he’d think about it and get back to Vic real soon. Blowing Vic off.

  “What’s to think about?” Vic said. “It’s two million more than the goddamn place is worth.”

  Milton Stammer was a short balding man with a formidable paunch. He kept smoothing his hands across his bloated belly like a pregnant woman trying to get used to how big she’d grown.

  “Okay, so I sell you the restaurant, what am I going to do then, Vic? Move to Boca, sit in a golf cart all day, cocktails at four, early bird at five, sit around, talk about how everybody did on the back nine? I’m a blue-collar guy; I’m too freaking old to pick up golf.”

  Vic glanced out the serving window and watched Thorn and his group sitting in the sun, waiting for their lunch. In his free time for the last few months, Vic had made Thorn his project. Shadowing him, asking around about the guy, trying to get a feel for what would motivate the asshole.

  Today Vic had tagged along two cars back and wound up at the Lorelei, where his own sister worked. His estranged sister. Two of them hadn’t spoken in years.

  When Thorn and his gang pulled into the Lorelei, Vic parked a few spaces away facing the sprawling restaurant and bar. He sat there for a moment watching Thorn and his friends walk into the place. Vic must’ve driven by the Lorelei a million times, but he’d never given it any serious real estate scrutiny. It had a nice ramshackle feel. A laidback, outdoorsy vibe. A nice fit with the rest of his holdings. Five minutes after pulling into the parking lot, he was inside the noisy kitchen, waving seven million bucks in front of the owner’s face. That’s how Vic Joy worked, relying on his creative juices. Weaving and bobbing as events took shape. He’d built a damn nice empire that way.

  “Place like this,” Vic said, staring up at the ceiling, “all this wood. Must be a bitch to insure.”

  Milton closed his eyes and shook his head solemnly.

  “A grease fire,” Vic said. “Or maybe a smoker flicking his butt in the bathroom waste can, or bad wiring, overloaded circuits. Shit, it could start a hundred different ways. All this old timber, about twenty minutes all you got is ash and rubble. Then you’d be sorry as hell you didn’t take the six million.”

  “What happened to seven?”

  “Did I say seven? Well, I meant six.” Vic watched the hubbub of the kitchen. Steam rising from the dishwashing machine. A darker steam coming from the deep-fat fryers. The Lorelei was a busy place, and prickly hot. Kitchen staff hustling back and forth, sending uneasy looks their way. Everyone knew Vic Joy, how he worked. “Actually, Milton, now that I take a careful look around, I’m going to have to back down to five mil. All this wood. This place is a fucking fire trap. I don’t know how it’s lasted as long as it has.”

  Milton’s stubby arms hung at his sides. The man’s eyes were grayish and bulgy. A large man’s large eyes. Pry them out of their sockets, they’d fill your palm. For a second Vic flashed on an image of a couple of gray eyeballs floating inside a glass jar, suspended in formaldehyde. Make a nice addition to his collection.

  He smiled at the big man, but Milton wasn’t in the smiling frame of mind.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Vic. I’m taking all that fire shit as a threat. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it, but that’s how I’m taking it. Now I want you to get the hell out of here. If I ever see your sorry ass around my restaurant again, I’ll call the cops. You got that? Tell them you been threatening me.”

  “The cops?” Vic shivered and wobbled his hands in the air. “Be still my heart. Not the cops.”

  Milton gave Vic a bitter glare, then about-faced and tramped across the buzzing kitchen to his office and shoved the door closed behind him.

  Vic stepped over to the fry cook, a tall thin man with a hook nose. Guy’d been eavesdropping, sneaking looks.

  “You know who I am, kid?”

  “Vic Joy,” the hook nose said.

  “Bingo.”

  With a wide spatula the cook slid a burger onto a plate, then settled a fish sandwich onto another. Lettuce, tomato, pickle on the side.

  “Let me see that ticket.” Vic reached out and snapped the order slip from the clip. A few minutes earlier he’d watched Anne Bonny hang it there. When she’d appeared, Vic swung around and kept his back to her. Didn’t want to give his little sister a cardiac right there at work, bumping into her long-lost brother after all these years. Vic studied the order slip. In his sister’s scrawl, Thorn was written out next to the guy’s order.

  “Which one’s the grouper with Swiss?”

  Vic nodded at the six plates lined up in the window.

  The hook nose took a careful look at Vic.

  “Which one?” Vic said again.

  The fry cook reached out his spatula and tapped one of the sandwiches.

  Thorn’s lunch. Fried fish with a layer of melted cheese. Guy was going to choke on cholesterol if he wasn’t careful. Which suited Vic fine, as long as the jerkhole waited till after Vic was completely done with him.

  “Guy’s a friend of mine,” Vic said. “We do this, me and him. Little pranks back and forth.”

  “Whatever.” The fry cook got busy with the dressing on a cheeseburger.

  Vic peeled back the bun on the grouper sandwich and laid it on the plate. He reached into his pocket and drew out his penknife and flicked open the blade. Ou
t on the sunny patio Anne Bonny was taking the order at another table. Two blondes and a dark-haired guy. Vic craned forward and squinted into the sunlight.

  Dark-haired Romeo smiling up at Vic’s little sister. Batting his eyes and Anne batting back.

  Vic laid the blade against the palm of his left hand. He looked over at the fry cook, but the guy was focused on his work.

  Vic gritted his teeth and sliced the blade across his palm, an inch, another inch, just deep enough to get a trickle of blood rising from the seam, spilling into the web of creases.

  He reached out to Thorn’s open sandwich and made a fist and watched the dark fluid dribble out. Six, seven drops spattering against the melted Swiss.

  He milked out a few more drips, then closed up the sandwich and set it back under the warming lights just as the fry cook smacked the signal bell.

  A few seconds later Anne headed back toward the window to pick up her order. There was a tiny smile on her lips. Probably nobody else would’ve noticed, but Vic was her brother and he’d spent years studying the looks that came and went on Anne Bonny’s face. He’d never seen that exact smile before. Not once.

  Vic ducked away from the window. He rubbed his bloody hand on the leg of his jeans and tried to shape his lips into a replay of Anne’s smile, but it felt slippery and uncertain on his face.

  When he looked back, Anne was at Thorn’s table dealing out the plates. Vic stayed in the shadows to the side of the window and watched until finally Thorn picked up his sandwich and held it for a moment near his mouth while he laughed at something one of the little girls said. Then he took a bite and munched on the fried grouper seasoned with Vic Joy’s blood.

  Vic grinned, watched Thorn swallow, watched him take another bite. Swallow that one, too. The lumps of food snaking down Thorn’s throat and into his esophagus, heading toward his belly. Wouldn’t be long until Vic Joy was slipping inside the fucker’s bloodstream, mingling, festering. Taking root.

  “That’s some weird prank,” the fry cook said.

  Vic turned to the cook, then fixed his eyes on the hand holding the spatula.

  “Think you could still flip burgers with a metal hook on the end of your arm?”

  The guy stared down at his right hand, then back at Vic. His Adam’s apple jiggled.

  “Hell, Mr. Joy, I wouldn’t say anything. Not a goddamn word. Really.”

  Vic winked at the kid and headed for the parking lot.

  Two

  Three weeks after their meeting at the Lorelei, Daniel Salbone and Anne were having breakfast on the outside patio of the Cheeca Lodge.

  Overnight a late-season cold front had muscled in and the sky was hanging low—as heavy and ominous as a slab of slate. A few yards away from their table the Atlantic thrashed and foamed against the resort’s white beach. While they sipped their coffee Daniel’s gaze kept drifting out toward the end of the long dock where a white sportfishing yacht was moored. For the last half hour several men had been rolling dollies down the dock, then heaving the supplies aboard.

  Anne’s mind was whirling, her body inflamed from the three-week frenzy of sex and extravagant food and full-throttle cruises on the Black Swan, both of them naked, racing the moonlight. Except for the boat rides, they’d not left their room at the Cheeca Lodge. DO NOT DISTURB on the doorknob. Room service trays piling up in the corner, their sheets growing funkier by the hour. They’d switched off the air conditioner because they wanted to marinate in their own juices, breathe the other’s true scent. They opened the windows to hear the ocean and the gulls, inhale the marshy breeze. Lying in the black night or at noon, feet tangled in the sheets, skin glistening, she trailed her fingertips across his long stretches of muscled flesh.

  A few nights ago in the dark, Daniel said, “Is this love?”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “This is sex, plain and simple.”

  He laughed and she laughed with him.

  A moment later he said, “You don’t want it to be love.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You want something flimsy, something you can control, something you can walk away from when you’re ready.”

  “This isn’t real,” Anne said. “It’s heat lightning on a summer evening.”

  “You’re worried, aren’t you? You’re scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “That it’s real. That it’s solid.”

  She was silent. Staring up at the darkness.

  “I don’t scare easy,” she said.

  “Then you’re a rare woman.”

  “You’re just noticing?”

  The ghostly curtains stirred with a warm breeze.

  “So who was that guy at the restaurant?”

  “Restaurant? What guy?”

  “The Lorelei, that day we met. I saw you kiss some guy. Your boyfriend?”

  “Oh,” she said. “He’s nobody. A local I went out with for a while. It was finished centuries ago.”

  “What’s his name?”

  She hesitated a half-second and said, “Thorn.”

  “First or last?”

  “That’s what he goes by. I don’t know which it is.”

  “So it’s over, is it? He won’t be wondering where you’ve gone off to these last three weeks?”

  “Stone-cold over.”

  “You kissed him. I saw that. You still have feelings.”

  His body stiff, Daniel stared up into the dark.

  “Hey, what is this? You store away a meaningless kiss from weeks ago. Are you some kind of green-eyed control freak? Tell me now. I don’t want any big surprises later on.”

  Her words hung in the darkness. When he answered, his voice was solemn, almost apologetic.

  “All right,” he said. “I won’t lie to you. I suppose I can be fiercely protective of what I care about. Is that a crime?”

  “Well, there’s nobody to be jealous of, Daniel. Nobody at all.”

  He took her hand and shifted beside her. As he fit his length more snugly against hers, the tension seemed to drain from his body.

  “So you’ve been saving yourself for me,” he said. “For this.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not at all what I had in mind.”

  “What about now? Do you have me in mind?”

  He touched her in the dark and she made an uncertain groan.

  “You’re not happy? This doesn’t make you happy, Anne Bonny?”

  “Two inches lower and it will.”

  Anne called in sick one day too many and the Lorelei let her go. Three weeks together, she and Daniel had talked easily, focused on the moment, but without sharing history on either side. Now it was over.

  This morning while Anne lay in bed, Daniel’s cell phone rang for the first time since they’d met and he stepped out on their balcony and spoke quietly for a moment, then came back inside and told her that he was going to have to leave.

  “For the day?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “And do what? Go where?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Oh, you can’t talk about it. I see.”

  Anne rose from the bed and went to the closet and yanked her clothes off the hangers. Large structures were collapsing in her chest. Her vision muddy.

  “Not right now.” Daniel waved at her, then motioned her to the far wall.

  Naked, she hesitated at the closet door, then stalked across the room. Daniel tipped the table lamp to the side and tilted its golden shade. He pointed at the white plastic disk mounted there. Hardly larger than a bottle cap, with a tiny aerial sprouting from its edge. Anne stared at it and was about to speak, but Daniel pressed a finger to her lips.

  He pointed to his ear, then pointed to the lamp.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  “Breakfast?” he said in a normal voice, settling the lamp back into place.

  Now, outside on the patio of the Cheeca Lodge, their waitress brought the coffeepot and topped up their cups.

  Whe
n she was gone, Anne said, “Is anyone eavesdropping out here?”

  “Not likely,” he said.

  “So you’re dirty?”

  “Dirty?”

  “Crime,” she said. “A bad dude.”

  Daniel smiled.

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  He looked out at the yacht. One of the men was standing by a piling watching the others heave boxes aboard.

  “For years I worked for my father,” he said. “Vincent Salbone. Have you heard that name?”

  It took her a moment to place it, then another moment to absorb the fact.

  “On TV,” she said. “Always surrounded by lawyers, always gets off.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “He always has.”

  “So you grew up in the Mafia. A little prince.”

  His smile faded.

  “Hardly a prince,” he said. “I’ve always been a disappointment to my father. Especially these last few years.”

  Daniel scanned the patio. A family chattering two tables away, another young couple with a noisy toddler. The other tables were empty.

  He reached out and took her hand and cradled it in both of his. His voice was quiet and resolved. But his words came haltingly, with awkward edges, as if he’d never pronounced these exact phrases before.

  “The family business, I struggled to make it work for a few years, but I was restless, impatient. Doing things the same way they’ve always been done, I felt trapped. Not a good match. Drugs, gambling. I was confused. I felt tainted and unnatural. So I cast around for a while until I found something different, more stimulating. Cleaner. An old-fashioned form of commerce that died out a while back but is making a return. Something that suits me better. More adventurous.”

  Anne fixed her eyes on him.

  “What’re you saying, Daniel?”

  “My father was from the streets. Philly, a city guy. But I was born here. I’m South Florida through and through. Boats, water. I’m more at home when I’m out of sight of land.”

  “You don’t look like a fisherman to me.”

  “I think you know what I am. I think you’ve known since the first time we spoke. Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara. All that.”

  The toddler screamed and threw a handful of silverware onto the patio.