Florida Straits

by SKLA

  "It'll work," Joey said softly. He looked out through the open side of the Paradiso quadrangle, across the bustle of A1A to the imported sand of Smathers Beach and the green Atlantic beyond. "But I'm gonna need some help."

  "Like?"

  "Like I need you to drive about twelve miles up the Keys and meet me at dawn at this little bridge between Big Coppitt and Saddlebunch."

  "That I can do," Bert said. "It's not like I sleep good anyway."

  "Then I need you to take Gino and Vicki to Marathon airport and get 'em onna first flight out. But not to Miami. I think it'd be better to avoid Miami. Where else they fly to outta there?"

  "Prob'ly West Palm, Tampa."

  "Yeah," said Joey, "someplace like that. Soon as possible. Then fuck it, we're done."

  Bert scratched his chest through his cheesecloth shirt, and with his other hand he scratched the dog's. "Joey, ain'tcha forgettin' something?"

  "Whassat?"

  "What about the emeralds, Joey? Gino have the emeralds?"

  Joey drummed his fingertips on the white enamel table and slowly shook his head. "The two guys that got whacked? They stashed 'em. And my genius brother, the night he almost got us killed, he went to cop 'em and couldn't find 'em."

  "So that's that?" said Bert the Shirt. He was retired, more than comfortable, he had no use or even desire for extra money, but still, the idea of three million dollars going unexploited seemed to offend him profoundly. "So the stones'll just sit somewhere and rot?"

  "Emeralds don't rot," said Joey. "That's the beauty part."

  Bert paused. Back when he was active in the business, he'd been one of the better pausers in New York. He'd squint, toy with his collar, reach ever so slowly into his monogrammed pocket for a smoke. So supple were his pauses that they were equally suited to exuding menace or concealing knowledge or simply shaving parts of beats off the rough jazz of his speech. "Giovanni," he said at last to the dog, "you think this kid's holdin' out on us?"

  Joey patted the chihuahua's head as a way of placating its master. "Bert, I ain't said one thing that isn't true. But hey, listen, coupla other things. Ya know where I can get a sleeping bag?"

  "Sleeping bag? Joey, what're you runnin' here, a fucking Boy Scout camp? There's an army surplus on Stock Island."

  "Great. And I need a rowboat. You got any idea where I can get a rowboat?"

  "Prob'ly right in Garrison Bight," said Bert the Shirt. "Along the embankment there. There's always some winos, they sit in these old boats, sleep in 'em, I guess. Offer 'em twenty bucks. They'll take it, get drunk, and steal the boat back tomorrow."

  Joey nodded, rapped the metal table with his knuckles, and started to get up. "Sounds easy enough. But ain't that what you tol' me, Bert, that in Florida everything should be easy?"

  The Shirt nodded, a little bit uncertainly. He hated getting tripped up on what he did or did not remember saying.

  "And money comes outta the water here," said Joey, pressing the old man's bony shoulder. "You tol' me that, too, didn't ya, Bert?"

  Here Bert felt himself more firmly in the grip of recollection, and he smiled his loose-lipped long-toothed smile. "Always has," he said. "It's, like, tradition."

  —

  Sandra was in the pool.

  Now that the evenings were staying hot, this was her favorite time at the compound. Steve the naked landlord had disappeared, taking his beers, his ash-tray, and his nakedness with him. Peter and Claude had left for work; Wendy and Marsha had gone inside to eat either brown rice or pepperoni pizza; Luke was off playing music somewhere, and Lucy the mailman was in front of television with her feet up. Sandra had the place to herself, under a dimming sky that was still greenish yellow at the western fringe, with the palms and poincianas losing the last of their daylight color and turning black and flat as etchings overhead. She stood midriff-deep in her chaste two-piece and breathed in the jasmine and the chlorine.

  Then she grabbed on to the edge of the pool and started doing her kicking exercises.

  That was when Joey came through the gate. Sandra was facing away from him, and he watched her as he approached. She craned her neck to keep her pale short hair out of the water. She pointed her toes, probably the way she'd once seen in a magazine. And while she was kicking furiously, she barely made a splash or a sound. Sandra, Joey thought. This is Sandra. Quiet, private, disciplined, precise. The little kid who would always find something worth doing if stuck in her room, who would always have a project for a weekful of rain. He watched her firm and narrow back, her skinny and determined shoulders, and a strange thing happened: he realized he truly was in love with her. He did not prime himself to feel this, and there was no such thing as readiness for the feeling when it came. It started at his feet and swelled upward as pure, sore, and irresistible as a sudden welling of graveside grief, and it left him with a closed throat and a milky feeling at the backs of his knees.

  He walked lightly around the pool's damp apron and crouched low in front of her. "Hello, baby."

  "Hi, Joey," she said, still kicking. "Thirty more makes four hundred."

  "I love you," he said.

  Sandra, the banker, had never before lost count. But now her scissoring legs fell out of their forced march and fluttered softly downward until her feet found the bottom. Joey, kneeling on the wet tiles, kissed her and tasted chlorine.

  "I mean, Sandra, I think you're terrific. The best. The way you are. The way you've stuck with me. Hey, Sandra, you want friends? We're gonna have friends, Sandra. I promise. Lotsa friends. And salads. Friends and salads, all you want. And, like, we'll do stuff. I don't know what, whatever you like. Ya know, regular stuff that people do. Movies, picnics, I dunno. But we'll like go out, we'll have, like, a life. You and me. O.K.?"

  — 33 —

  Viewed from even a little distance out at sea, the life of the land looks small and slow, cozy but at the cost of being locked into lines and lanes, blocks and clusters. Compared to the tireless movement of water, things on land look stunned; it seemed to Joey that they could practically be under glass. Houses seem bolted to the earth. Cars crawl, pushing their meager lights ahead of them. Trees clutch the ground, rooted desperately as teeth.

  At eleven fifty-five, Joey Goldman, alone at the wheel of Zack Davidson's little skiff, veered in from the open ocean toward the Flagler House dock. He was towing behind him a paintless plank rowboat with rusty oarlocks and mismatched oars, a broken stem seat, and a cut-off bleach bottle for bailing. He'd offered ten dollars for it and bought it for twelve.

  In front of him, the hotel windows were nearly all dark; a few flickered with the fugitive light of television. Outside, orange floodlights collided with the blue shimmer of the pool and gave a mottled desert aspect to the beach. On the far side of the building, Charlie Ponte's thugs sat in their Lincoln scratching their bellies, yawning, talking about Italian food and parts of the female body. Their landlocked brains traveled predictably down marked roads; they could not conceive of a getaway on the wide, dark, and laneless water. Joey idled at the end of the pier and waited.

  His view to the top of the service ramp was blocked by the shaggy thatch of the poolside bar, and by the time he saw the silhouettes of Gino and Vicki, they were winding their way through the ranks of vacant lounge chairs near the beach. Gino had his hand in the small of Vicki's back, a gesture not of gallantry but of bullying. Shadowy and forward-leaning, the couple bore, for all their attempted nonchalance, the unmistakable stamp of people fleeing, and when Gino stepped onto the thick boards of the dock, his heavy tread seemed to pass along an edginess that shuddered through the nails and down the pilings until it was smothered by the muck at the bottom of the sea. Halfway along the pier, one of Vicki's high heels caught between two planks; she took her shoes off and scurried the rest of the way with mincing steps.

  "So you made it," Gino said. He managed to muster some of his former high-spirited sarcasm, maybe because Joey was now literally beneath him, hugging a piling to keep the boat close and
not looking especially dignified. But it was also true that Gino had made a brave attempt to pull out of his nosedive on this, his last evening in Florida. He'd eased off on the bourbon and just let Dr. Greenbaum buy him one final bottle of champagne with dinner. He'd shaved, cut his toenails, and even managed to find a clean shirt and a silk sports jacket. Like many people who have been humiliated in a strange and distant place, he seemed to imagine that going home would be sufficient to erase the episode, that since none of the neighborhood guys had witnessed his shame and the baring of his weakness, it hadn't really happened.

  "Come on," said Joey, "get in. Step inna middle of the boat."

  Vicki's behind was in his face as she lowered herself down the wooden ladder. Her butt was clothed in mauve-colored capri pants and seemed to be perfumed. Vicki had tried to fix her hair in honor of her reemergence into the world, but she couldn't duplicate the skill, patience, and apparatus of the beauty parlor. Like a failed soufflé, the rough teased do held its own around the edges but caved in in the center; in silhouette it was as if her scalp had been cleft by a hatchet. She lurched around the cockpit until she managed to grab a rail. Then Joey stepped well back as Gino lumbered in. The skiff rocked under his weight, and once he was safely in the boat he cast a sneering glance back through the hotel to where his colleagues were intently but stupidly waiting to kill him. "Assholes," he said.

  Joey pushed off, took the wheel, turned the boat toward open water, and jammed the throttle forward.

  The breeze was light, the water only slightly rippled like a washboard, and no one spoke until the skiff was half a mile out from land. Then Joey slowed the engine and said to Gino, "Gimme your guns."

  A late half-moon was just coming up. Its dim red-dish glow mixed with the silver blue of starlight to make a spectral gleam that seemed good for telling lies. "I didn't bring em," Gino said. "I mean, Christ, we're goin' to the airport, ain't we?"

  Joey turned off the motor. It was a gesture intended to remind his passengers of their essential status as captives. Amid the violent silence of the ocean, the only sound was the lapping of water against their hull; it was a noise at once delicate and full of threat, like a lion licking its chops. "Gino, I known you a long time. Gimme the fucking guns."

  Gino seemed to be considering, though in an eighteen-foot boat a person does not have a lot of options as to where to go or what to do. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his pistol, and with a resentful pout on his jowly mouth handed it to Joey. Then he pulled his second gun out of his pants at the small of his back and surrendered that one, too. Joey glanced at the weapons for just a second, and tossed them over his shoulder into the Florida Straits. They somersaulted through the red moonlight then landed with a slap-slap followed by a baritone kerplunk as they broke the skin of the water and dove pin-wheeling toward the bottom.

  "Fuck you do that for?" Gino asked.

  Joey restarted the engine. " 'Sgonna be a long night, Gino. It could get, like, emotional."

  At the eastern end of Key West, the airport beacon raked the water, and through the cut of Cow Key Channel, the weird mass of Mount Trashmore could momentarily be seen. Then came the low, dark sweep of Stock island, with its trailer parks and oil tanks, then the barricaded expanse of Boca Chica, where navy pilots learned to fly. The skiff planed along the ripples, two miles out from shore; the towed rowboat sledded along in the flat water between the rays of the wake.

  "This is nice," Vicki yelled over the roar of the motor. She sounded surprised, innocent, and girlish, as if the salt air had blown away her years of bimbohood, swept her back to the younger verge of an adolescence marked by wonder at the mystery of ballooning breasts and their hypnotic effect on certain sorts of men. The wind had yanked her hair straight up and back and made her look unprecedentedly stylish. "Gino, how come you never took me boating?"

  "Shut up, Vicki," he shouted. Was he still sulking over the loss of his gun, or was he just that thoroughly sick of her?

  "No, you shut up, Gino," she yelled back. Then she started cackling. Had she truly lost her mind, or was she just so tickled to be standing up to him? "I'm sicka you bossin' me around."

  "Shut up the botha yuhs," said Joey. "I gotta find the spot."

  He slowed the boat and peered toward shore, wondering if the contour of the land would look anything like the image he'd carried away from the nautical chart. He was looking for the place where the bulge of Big Coppitt gave onto the cluster of mangrove outcrops called the Saddlebunch Keys, where Highway 1 hopped and curved from one dry place to another over a series of short low bridges. Turning landward, he rode the current that was streaming toward the Gulf, filtering through the islands and the trestles as through a giant sieve, and when he could just make out the hum of traffic from the pavement, he cut back to idle speed and drifted. The raised road loomed ahead like a low black rainbow. Widely spaced streetlights lit up globes of vapory air; the occasional car pushed its meager beams straight in front of it.

  "We gettin' off here?" Vicki asked as they floated toward the stanchions.

  "You are," Joey said. He didn't look at her but kept his eyes on the bow of the boat.

  Vicki swallowed, blinked, licked her thin dry lips. She'd thought the kid brother was her ally. That made it O.K. to stand up to Gino. But would an ally drop her off all by herself in the middle of nowhere with lizards and bugs and maybe even alligators all over the place? She pointed her chest toward Joey and inhaled. "Hey," she purred.

  By way of answer, Joey reached down and handed her a neatly bundled sleeping bag. "Ever been camping, Vicki?"

  She looked at the quilted parcel like it came from Mars. "You gotta be crazy," she said. "I'll get raped. I'll get murdered."

  Joey maneuvered the skiff so that it was drifting broadside toward the bridge. Current parted around the concrete pillars; the pavement sang under the weight of a truck. Off to the left, the land was low, dark, and overhung with tangled trees. "Vicki, this ain't New York. The worst that's gonna happen is you'll get mosquito-bit. Gino, get onna side and get ready to grab the bridge."

  Gino Delgatto compressed like a squeezed beach ball as he absorbed the impact between fiberglass and concrete. He held the skiff fast while Joey hoisted Vicki onto the small front deck. The roadbed was just at the level of her face, and under it was an I-beam that was pocked with rust and had the texture of a nutmeg grater. Vicki grabbed it and leaped about six inches into the air. "Hold on, now," Joey said. "Lift. Come on, lift."

  The boat was rocking, current was slapping against it, and Vicki was trying her damnedest to pull herself onto the bridge. In her mauve capri pants, her long legs kicked and jerked like those of a hanged man. Finally Joey put his hands on her perfumed backside and shoved for all he was worth. It was satisfying, this vigorous handling of his brother's girlfriend's ass, and it propelled her to where she could swing a leg onto the pavement and scrabble up to the shoulder of the road. She stood, monumental from the perspective of the men below, and glared down at them accusingly. Joey tossed the sleeping bag up to her, and she clutched it to her bosom as though it were her last friend in the world.

  "Go over by the trees there," Joey said. "We'll be back around dawn."

  She looked down at Gino, who was still hugging the bridge stanchion, and for a moment it appeared she might spit on him or burst into tears. Instead, she just walked away. After a few steps she turned around. "Some vacation, Gino," she hissed. "I shoulda stood in Queens."

  — 34 —

  "So Gino, it's just you and me."

  Joey Goldman had turned seaward again, and was a mile offshore by the time he spoke, or rather, yelled over the grind of the engine and the hiss of water shooting past the hull. The moon had gone from red to yellow to eggshell white, and spilled an endless beam that glinted over the water and seemed to single out the little skiff.

  "Yup," yelled Gino. He was suddenly rather giddy, made so by too much freedom and too little control. Being sprung from his hotel room was about as inv
igorating and disconcerting as getting out of jail. Being rid of Vicki felt, for the moment at least, as good as waking up to find that a throbbing boil had vanished in the night. But then again, he had no gun, no car, no crew, no plan, and no idea what Joey had in mind. "So kid, what the hell we doin' now?"

  Joey smiled without parting his lips. His thick hair had been pressed back by the wind, his eyes were narrowed against the spray, his forearms were ropy from clutching the wheel. Gino almost noticed that his bastard half brother had become a grown man. "We're gonna find your fucking emeralds," Joey hollered. "What else?'

  "You can do that?' Gino screamed.

  Joey did not immediately answer but gave himself a moment to savor the hope, need, and doubt in Gino's tone. He thought he could do it. He'd studied his chart. It seemed to him there was only one place Sand Key Marina could be. Straight out from a radio tower, behind the arc of a narrow peninsula that curved away like the bone on a lamb chop, there should be a narrow channel marked by unlit buoys. If there wasn't, well, that was that.

  "I can find 'em," Joey yelled.

  Gino suddenly felt tears of greed welling in his windblown eyes—greed and amazement, as if he'd stopped believing he would ever see the three million dollars' worth of Colombian stones. "Great, kid," he screamed. "We'll go partners." Then he realized that the word implied a fifty-fifty split, and he quickly recovered from his spasm of generosity. "I mean, I'll cut you in."

  Joey let that slide, and continued with his own line of thought. "But Gino, ya gotta do everything I tell you."

  "Sure, kid, sure," Gino shouted.

  "Before, during, and after," Joey pressed.

  "Whatever."

  "Swear on your mother, Gino. Whatever I say, you do."

  Gino looked away. Water was flying off the side of the boat like it was shot from a fire hose. "Christ, Joey. We gotta start with this mother shit again?"

  "Yeah, Gino, we do. Swear."

  He did, and Joey eased back on the throttle. He scanned the shore for the radio tower. There seemed to be lots of radio towers, but most of them were probably electrical pylons. From a mile away, by moonlight, it was hard to tell. Joey steered closer to land, waiting for the low shapeless ribbon of limestone and shrubs to show some useful feature. For some minutes no such feature appeared; the land showed blank as an oil slick, and Joey choked down the thought that he might yet have to admit to Gino and himself that once again he'd failed, that just like the jerks from the neighborhood, he'd talked big and could not deliver.