by Lou Berney
Idaba snapped her fingers again anyway, right next to his ear, like a gunshot going off.
“Hey!” he said. “What was that for?”
She was like one of those old nuns he’d known as a kid, growing up in New Orleans, who could read your mind like a book.
“You think I don’t see?” she said.
She took his empty cup and headed back up to the restaurant. Shake stretched his legs out. It was true that he’d been suffering from more than bad huevos rancheros when he first arrived on Ambergris Caye. But that was two years ago. If his heart had been broken then, that didn’t mean it was broken now. He no longer felt a stab of pain, for example, every time he thought about Gina. Every time he thought he smelled her shampoo on the pillow next to him. Every time he stepped onto the veranda of the restaurant and imagined how much she’d love the killer view.
Not every time.
He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d had a woman in his bed. Six months? He had opportunities. He was a decent-looking guy, he took care of himself, he owned a restaurant on the beach of a tropical island. A lot of the women he met were on vacation, far from home, ready to live and let loose.
But he could never work up much enthusiasm for it—a one-night stand with some divorced recovery-room nurse, too much makeup and a fresh dolphin tattoo on her ankle, she and her girlfriends three sheets to the wind and flying back to Louisville in the morning.
Shake called over the little Kriol boy with the rake and told him there were some homemade cinnamon rolls in the pantry, and to make sure he took a few home for his family.
“Thank you, Mr. Shake,” the little boy said. Shake guessed he was about seven or eight years old, skin almost the color of the ironwood floor in Shake’s apartment.
“I think she can read minds,” Shake said. “Idaba.”
The little boy shrugged, as if to say, Of course she can, don’t be foolish. And then he went running up to the kitchen to get his rolls.
SHAKE TOOK THE BOAT INTO town, an eighteen-foot Wahoo that had come with the restaurant. The old Mercury outboard broke down on a fairly regular basis—usually when Shake had some expensive grouper sitting on ice—but today he made it to the municipal wharf without incident.
He tied up and walked to the market. A lot of visitors were underwhelmed by San Pedro, the only town on Ambergris Caye. Three streets, a few restaurants and bars, a layer of white sandy grit covering everything. Shake liked it. San Pedro felt like a real place to him, life going on, not like some of the other places he’d been to in the Caribbean. In San Pedro there were plenty of tourist traps selling T-shirts and scuba trips, but also places where you could buy plastic buckets or used bicycle parts or old romance novels written in Spanish. You could get your hair cut by a guy who worked out of his garage.
Shake located the fisherman he liked to use. The snapper looked good, so Shake took that and some lobster, some conch. The fisherman was about to make a run up to the northern resorts and agreed to drop off the fish on his way.
When the Garifuna ladies with the fruit carts saw Shake coming, they started clucking and cooing. In their brightly colored head wraps and skirts, they were like a flock of naughty tropical birds.
“Shake!”
“Come taste my fruit, boy!”
“Taste how sweet!”
“Shake, what’s shaking?”
That last one always cracked them up. It never got old.
Shake bought mangoes and papayas. On second thought he also bought some plantains, thinking he might fry them up with the snapper tonight. He felt good about that until he remembered they had only seven reservations on the books for tonight, and not much hope of any walk-ins.
Shake paid for the plantains and walked over to his buddy Pijua’s joint. It was early for lunch, but Shake hadn’t eaten breakfast and Pijua turned out the best food on the island, probably the best in Central America.
Pijua’s daughter sat him at a table inside, by the window, with a view of the marina. Shake tried not to guess what kind of phenomenal walk-in business Pijua did. He was shouting distance from the wharf, from all the bars, a quick golf-cart ride from the fancy resorts south of town. To get to Shake’s restaurant from town, you had to take a taxi boat or the island ferry. Twenty minutes each way, minimum.
“Perfect spot,” the guy who’d sold Shake his restaurant had assured him. “Quiet, romantic, secluded.” Then the guy was on a flight home to Orange County before the ink on the deed was dry. Shake supposed that should have given him pause.
Pijua delivered Shake’s pulled-pork empanadas and sat down across from him. Shake took a bite.
“What’s a guy gotta do,” Shake said, “to get the recipe for these?”
Pijua laughed. “Grow up in my mama’s kitchen. Have her whack you on the head with a wooden spoon every time you fuck up.”
Shake took another bite. “Small price to pay.”
Pijua’s real name was Manuel. He had been born in the Cayo highlands, on the border between Belize and Guatemala. Up there they had a little river shrimp that people called a pijua. A delicacy, hard to find and hard to catch. When Pijua was six or seven years old, it became his goal in life to catch one of those shrimp. When he finally caught one, he was so excited he ran through town yelling, “Pijua! Pijua!” That’s what he’d been called ever since, Pijua, shrimp, the guy a head taller than Shake and built like a truck.
Shake glanced around the restaurant. There wasn’t an empty table and it was barely eleven-thirty. Pijua read him.
“Give it time, amigo,” he said. “Your food’s good. Took me three, four years, my first place, before it really got going.”
“Is that all?” Shake said.
Pijua put his palms up, conceding the point. “Everybody I know,” he said, “I always send them up your way.”
Shake knew it. “I appreciate it.”
“Even though they come back and say, ‘Why you can’t do lobster like that, man?’ ”
“Now you’re just bullshitting me,” Shake said. “Which I appreciate as well.”
Pijua let Shake eat for a minute.
“At least you didn’t borrow no money from Baby Jesus,” Pijua said. Watching Shake as he said it.
“Is that what you heard?” Shake said.
“Because you don’t want to borrow no money from Baby Jesus.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.” Which was true.
Pijua let it drop. His daughter hollered at him from across the room.
“Shit, man,” Pijua told Shake. “Like I said, your food’s good. Stick it out, you’ll see. The wind turns around.”
“The wind turns around.”
Pijua slapped him on the shoulder and headed back to his kitchen.
ON HIS WAY OUT, SHAKE passed a woman seated on the outdoor deck. At a table by herself, going over the menu. She was in her late thirties or early forties, somewhere around there, and pretty. The paperback book next to her purse was one Shake had read when he first moved to Belize.
He walked past her, made it down the wooden steps to the street, and then stopped. He sighed. It was like he could feel Idaba watching him, with that carved-rock expression of hers that he could never interpret.
He turned around and climbed back up the wooden steps. What the hell.
“Hi,” he said.
The woman glanced up from her menu. Shake decided that maybe her face was more interesting than pretty. Or maybe interestingly pretty. Her eyes were dark with a vaguely exotic tilt, like there was an Asian branch of her family tree. But she also had the rosy cheeks of a Minnesota farm girl and a square, all-American jaw.
“Not interested,” she said. “Thanks.”
Her bluntness took him by surprise. And then after a second he remembered the plastic bag of fruit he was holding.
Shake smiled. “I’m not selling anything.”
“Awesome. ’Cause I’m not buying.”
She smiled back at him, a helluva smile, like the s
un sliding out from behind a cloud and lighting up the sky. Shake stood there like an idiot until Pijua’s daughter rescued him by coming out to take the woman’s order.
“Try the pulled-pork empanadas,” Shake said, finding his footing again. “You won’t be sorry.”
“The fish tacos, please,” the woman said. But when Pijua’s daughter started to write the order down, the woman said, “Wait.”
Pijua’s daughter gave Shake a wink and headed back inside.
“My name’s Shake,” he told the woman. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”
The woman considered. She was wearing a UC Santa Cruz T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts that showed off a nice pair of legs.
“Evelyn,” she said. “Shake?”
“A nickname.”
“I hope so.”
She hadn’t asked him to sit down, but she hadn’t asked him to leave either. Well, not in so many words. Shake decided to stay until she told him to leave, in so many words. He nodded at the paperback by her purse.
“So where do you stand on the scarlet macaw?” he said.
The book was a true story about the fight over a rare kind of bird. The government of Belize wanted to lower the cost of electricity by building a dam on a river where the scarlet macaws lived. Don’t worry, the government said, the birds will be fine. A group of environmentalists called bullshit on that and said the scarlet macaws would not be fine. They suggested that eco-tourists would pay a lot of money to go watch the scarlet macaws, if the government would just be smart about it.
“Definitely pro-macaw,” the woman said. “But don’t ruin the ending for me.”
The way she said it, the corner of her mouth turned up, Shake could tell she’d seen enough of the world to know how the story ended. The government built the dam, some government ministers made a whole lot of money, electricity prices went up, not down. And the scarlet macaws in Belize had disappeared.
“If you want to have dinner tonight,” Shake said, and then stopped when he realized how that sounded.
“Most people do,” she said. “I feel like I’m pretty conventional in that way.”
“What I mean,” Shake said, smiling again, “I mean I own a restaurant. I do the cooking there. If you’re looking for a completely unbiased recommendation.”
“I see.”
“The Sunset Breeze. It’s up north a little bit. You can take a taxi boat.”
Pijua’s daughter brought the pork empanadas. The woman pretended to reach for the bottle of ketchup on the table and Shake laughed. And then he realized she was serious. And then she laughed.
“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d fall for that.”
“You’d be surprised what I fall for,” Shake said.
She hit him again with that flash grenade of a smile.
“Good to know,” she said, and Shake felt the back of his neck flush with heat.
WALKING BACK TO THE WHARF, Shake saw a thirty-six-foot Esprit cruiser slide by on its way to the Cut, between San Pedro and the north end of Ambergris. It had flames painted on the side and a couple of big Rasta bruisers lounging on deck. Baby Jesus’s boat, the one he used to run product up to the Yucatán.
Shake didn’t let the sight of the boat bring him down. He was still thinking about the woman back on the deck at Pijua’s, that smile of hers. Evelyn. Whatever happened from here on out, Shake decided, his day had already turned out better than he’d hoped.
Chapter 3
Special Agent Evelyn Holly had been at the table for twenty minutes, nursing a diet Mountain Dew and keeping an eye on the shithead inside. She knew that she couldn’t lurk around the restaurant much longer without ordering food, but she was on her own dime this trip, not Uncle Sam’s, and everything on the menu seemed to cost twice what it should have.
She ducked behind the menu when the shithead walked past. But then he turned around and came right up to her table. Charles “Shake” Bouchon, smiling right at her. Evelyn almost burst out laughing. He’d already made her, less than half an hour after she’d begun tailing him? But she stayed cool and realized that the shithead was just hitting on her. That almost made her burst out laughing too.
Well, no time like the present. She’d been planning to approach him in a day or two anyway, strike up a conversation.
“I’m not selling,” he said.
“Awesome,” she said. “ ’Cause I’m not buying.”
She hoped that might catch him on the wrong foot and it did. But Bouchon didn’t get flustered like most guys would have. He didn’t flee or try to force a clever comeback. Instead he just stood there, amused, and seemed to appreciate that she’d caught him on the wrong foot.
The waitress appeared. Evelyn bit the bullet and ordered one of the pricey entrées. And then realized, as she handed over the menu, what a knucklehead she was. Everything seemed to cost twice what it should have because the prices were listed in Belizean dollars. There were two Belizean dollars to every U.S. dollar.
“My name’s Shake,” Bouchon said. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”
Be honest, he was kind of a nice-looking guy for a shithead. Evelyn hadn’t guessed it from the California Department of Corrections mug shot that she’d studied on the plane down from L.A. Grim stuff, that. Here in person, though, she saw that he had good sharp angles, chin and cheeks and brow. But the angles not too sharp, softened just so by the wry smile, the warm eyes, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had a touch of an accent that sounded like it had a little Brooklyn in it, but Evelyn knew it must be New Orleans, where his sheet said he’d been born and raised.
When he asked about the book she was reading and then told her about the restaurant he owned, Evelyn thought: Wow, could this be any easier? She’d arrived in Belize without much of a plan. Take a few days and just get to know the shithead a little, let him think he was getting to know her. Develop a bond. And then, when Bouchon let his guard down, wham! Evelyn would put the screws to him.
Evelyn loved that saying: putting the screws to someone. She loved doing it.
But at this point, Bouchon definitely had his guard up. Evelyn didn’t let the wry smile and the warm eyes fool her. You didn’t stay alive as long as he had, in the kind of company he’d kept, without staying on your toes. He’d only done two relatively light stretches in prison, which in his line of work was evidence that he was one careful shithead.
She reached for the ketchup. He laughed because he thought she was kidding. She wasn’t kidding. The empanadas looked like something you might reasonably put ketchup on. He stopped laughing when he saw her face. So she laughed.
“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d fall for that.”
“You’d be surprised what I fall for,” the Shithead said.
Evelyn smiled. This would be so easy. It almost wasn’t fair. “Good to know,” she said.
SHE ATE THE EMPANADAS, ADMITTEDLY fantastic, talked herself out of dessert, and then drove her rented golf cart back to the resort.
From her bungalow, she called to check on Sarah. It was noon in L.A. Sarah told her that Andre had come by to take her to breakfast at the Farmers Market. Evelyn didn’t say the approximately one thousand things she had to say about that. About how the sneaky asshole waited until Evelyn was out of the country to show even the slightest interest in his own daughter.
“Send me a text later,” Evelyn said. “Tell me how much you miss me.”
“Mom!” Sarah laughed. “You’re such a dork.”
Evelyn had been gone less than twenty-four hours and already she missed Sarah so much it ached.
“Don’t text when you’re driving. Don’t borrow my yoga mat and lose it again. Don’t join a cult.”
“Check, check, oops,” Sarah said. “Too late.”
And don’t believe anything that your asshole of a father tells you, Evelyn thought but didn’t say.
“Does it seem like a
nice cult at least?” Evelyn said. “Do they have a cute secluded compound in the desert?”
Her daughter was, literally, the last teenager in California who would ever join a cult. Or text while driving. Evelyn knew that Sarah would probably spend the rest of her weekend studying for the SATs, practicing her jump shot, and downloading recipes for healthy, delicious, one-pot meals. Maybe taking a break to learn Farsi and help inner-city kids create a sustainable dairy farm.
She wouldn’t, in other words, be smoking pot or luring a skateboard punk rocker up to her bedroom or sneaking into a club to see Social Distortion. Nor any of the other myriad transgressions that Evelyn would have committed, sixteen years old and left more or less on her own for a week.
Sometimes Evelyn couldn’t believe that she and Sarah came from the same gene pool. If they didn’t have the same laugh, the same scowl first thing in the morning, the same gangly legs, Evelyn might have seriously wondered about some mix-up in the maternity ward, a nurse switching one baby for another.
“Text me,” Evelyn said. “Every fifteen minutes if it’s convenient, okay?”
“Mom!”
A few minutes after Evelyn hung up, there was a knock on the door. She took her firearm out of her purse, chambered a round, and checked the peephole. On the deck of her bungalow stood Cory Nadler, of all people.
Evelyn stuck the gun back in her purse and opened the door.
“Cory?” she said.
“Hi, Evi,” he said. He looked cranky and sweaty. “Can I come in?”
“Sure. Of course.” She took a seat on the edge of the bed. He sat in the wicker chair with the floral-print cushion. He was wearing a navy suit that looked way too hot for this climate. “What are you doing here, Cory?”
“I’m with DSS now,” he said.
“Diplomatic security?”
“Out of the embassy in Mexico City. But I’ve been doing liaison work in Belize the last couple of months. I happened to be looking through passenger manifests this morning and I saw your name.”
“Cory,” she said, “take your coat off. That suit looks way too hot for Belize.”