by Mandy Miller
He wrinkles his nose. “Shit, that is ugly.”
When I respond by spitting in his face, he strikes me in the shoulder with the butt of the gun.
Gritting my teeth, I stare down at Oscar, lying on his side like a fallen soldier, foot still inside my running shoe. I’ve spent months hating the damn thing, and now I want nothing more than to strap him back on where he belongs.
When Sonny snatches the contraption from the deck and hurls it into the water, I know without any modicum of doubt I could kill again—if I had to.
He double checks the line securing a Zodiac inflatable boat to the stern, unties the mooring lines from the pilings, and fires up the engine. “At least those six years in the Navy weren’t totally useless.” He glances overboard at Oscar bobbing like a piece of driftwood. “And at least I came back with all my parts.”
“You bastard!” I scream, my voice breaking into as many pieces as my heart. “If you’re going to kill me, why don’t you just do it here?”
He eases the throttle forward. “Because that would be messy. And I don’t like messes.”
We slide through the no-wake zone in silence, the moon a golden gong high in the night sky, the warm breeze like silk drawn over my skin. A school of dolphins rises in arcs alongside the boat, their slick, silver faces grinning as they surface and dive again and again.
“There’ll be other lawyers who’ll take my place and they’ll find out the truth too.”
“Not a chance. This time the good doctor will make sure to find a hack who’ll be a little more cooperative with his…” he raises his hands off the wheel to make air quotes with his index fingers, “his goals.”
“Money can buy anything these days, right?”
He sniffs the salt air. “I see it as a win-win-win. I get rich, Slim gets richer, and his Botox babes with big boobs are none the wiser.”
As he pilots the boat through the channel between two skyscraper-sized cruise ships docked in Port Everglades, the seemingly unconnected details—everything I know and what I don’t—assemble themselves in my mind, into the whole truth, as obvious now as the fact that I’m not getting out of this alive.
Sonny and Slim are partners.
An involuntary gasp escapes my mouth.
“You got it now? I knew you could figure it out. And that’s why we’re taking this little cruise.”
Choking back the impulse to vomit, I focus on the towers of swaying royal palms encircling John Lloyd State Park, an isthmus of land lapped by shallow azure waters where manatees like to play, and teenagers get up to no good.
“And you know where we’re going, don’t you?”
I do, but I’m not about to give him the satisfaction.
At the cut of the Intracoastal and the open ocean, he slams the throttle forward and we surge ahead, leaving behind a bubbly, chevron-shaped wake. This boat’s nowhere near as fast as the monster cigarette boat Manny bought without telling me, but it’s plenty fast enough for what Sonny has in mind.
I yank on the steel cuffs, hoping the chair rails might detach from the seat back, but knowing they won’t give an inch. What good would it do anyway? Even if I were able to launch myself off the side, I’d be fish food in no time. They never tell the tourists about the sharks, but they’re out there.
Keep your wits about you. Keep your wits about you!
I repeat the mantra again over and over in my head. It had been my father’s advice for almost any occasion. New school? Keep your wits about you. New job? Keep your wits about you. Backpacking through the Himalayas? Just keep your wits about you, and don’t eat anything from a street vendor. Going to a war zone? You know how to keep your wits about you, Grace. You’ll be fine. Percy’s wits had kept him alive in more than one dark corner of the earth, a topic he rarely spoke of, even when I begged. But then, I came to understand his own shadowy time overseas was why he replaced “Keep your wits about you” for “Stay in your trench and keep your helmet on,” when I enlisted in the Army.
When we round Cape Florida, the southernmost tip of Key Biscayne, just off the coast of downtown Miami, my heart seizes. Stiltsville. The coordinates on my tattoo.
“You are an asshole, Sonny!” I shout into the void, futile, like one hand clapping.
“Yeah, but you know what, Grace? I’m the asshole with the gun.”
Chapter 33
It’s surreal. I’m en route to my death, yet I am still enthralled by the dreamy mirage on the horizon.
Stiltsville. A clutch of pastel colored wooden stilt houses erected atop pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay, floating like a floral wreath in the nascent glow of dawn. Seabirds hovering all around, their wings gilded by the rising sun. If you’ve never seen Stiltsville, you might try to blink away the image, dismiss it as the product of one too many umbrella drinks, but throughout my life, Stiltsville has been my refuge. Until now.
It’s one of those “only in Miami” kind of phenomena. Made up of a dozen stilt shacks which functioned as social clubs, fishing huts, and speakeasys in the 1930s. An offshore oasis where booze, bikinis, and gambling were the name of the game and rules didn’t apply. A Prohibition-era hub for wreckers, rum runners, and all manner of rascals, where ne’er-do-wells mixed with lawyers, bankers, politicians, and anyone else looking to escape the scrutiny of their landlubber life.
I count and recount the remaining shacks not yet destroyed by hurricanes, seven in all, and cast my mind back to happier times. Winter vacations from boarding school at the family estate, Miramar, on Key Biscayne, with ready access across the Bay to this place, my secret place. As a teenager, I’d motor across in my father’s Zodiac, not unlike the one tied to the stern now, to hang with friends, to drink beer and smoke. And, on one muggy night, to lose my virginity to a boy named Chad. Once, on a dare, I swam across.
Sonny steers the boat alongside the Jimmy Ellenberg House, a yellow stilt shack with a wraparound porch, a haven for pelicans and people, like me, willing to violate the trespassing ban in place since 2003, when Stiltsville was taken over by the National Park Service. He eases back on the throttle, cuts the engine, and hops out to secure the bow line to a piling covered in a stucco of bird droppings.
“It’ll look like you rowed your little boat out here, like you used to,” he says, tying the Zodiac to an adjacent piling.
A furnace of fury ignites in my gut, the kind of rage I haven’t felt since Reilly said he’d found pills in the glove compartment of my car.
Sonny jumps back on board, grabs a duffel bag from the back of the boat. He unlocks the handcuffs from the chair and pulls me upright. An instinctive attempt to kick back at him with my good leg leaves me sprawled on the deck, looking up into his eyes, bottomless pits drilled into his tanned face.
He motions with the gun for me to get up.
Unable to get my balance on one leg, I pitch forward onto the dock, scraping my face against the rotten wood reduced to splinters by eight decades of relentless tropical sun. One arm hooked under my armpit, he yanks me up like a sack of flour and, disgusted as I may be, I have no choice but to lean on him to steady myself.
“Upstairs!”
Gun at my back, I hop up the stairs, one at a time, holding onto the handrail for balance. At the top, he reaches around me and flings open the flimsy door, its busted screen flapping in the breeze.
The shack is as I remember it—one large room with a bare board floor, ringed by windows, most of which were broken out decades ago. The only thing in the place now is an old-fashioned wooden desk chair.
As he secures my leg and arms to the chair with zip ties from the duffel, I sense the healing power of this place draining from my soul, its magic gone for me now. This was the one place that had given me hope, renewed me, time and time again. A safe place, when I was a gawky teenager bullied for my bookishness. A hideout with bad boys my parents considered “unsuitable mates.” A refuge, when I came back from Iraq, broken and lost, with nothing but bad memories and worse habits.
He squ
ats in front of me, hands clasped. “It’s either me or you. And, given that choice, you lose.”
I turn my head away. “It’s like Reilly says, murder always comes down to the same three things.”
“Money, jealousy, or just plain evil. That’s about the only thing that old-timer ever said that made any sense at all, except no damn way I’d ever kill for anything but money. No upside in the others.”
“Why kill at all?”
He’s walking in circles around me now. “You tell me, why don’t you? You’re Miss Ivy League.”
As loathe as I am to comply with any order he might give me at this point, I’ll be damned if I’ll go to my grave not knowing for certain what I’ve spent months trying to figure out.
“You got tired of seeing the low-life dealers driving all over town in their Ferraris and Bentleys, going home to their mansions on the water.”
He keeps pacing, head bobbing back and forth like a professor evaluating a student’s theory.
“You couldn’t let Joe tell the truth, that Zoe couldn’t have killed Sinclair, because you were involved.”
“Go on.”
“You and Sinclair already had a connection—you’d arrested him for dealing and turned him into a rat.”
He snaps his fingers. “I prefer the term ‘confidential informant.’”
“Not only did you use him for information, you also made him cut you in on his profits in exchange for turning a blind eye to his dealing.” I pause. “How am I doing so far?”
“Not bad, not bad at all.”
“Thing was, Sinclair got popped again. This time at Sunshine Pain. By FDLE, not FLPD, so you had no control over him. Once a rat, always a rat, correct? You we’re afraid he’d sell you out, and maybe even cough up the fact that Slim’s running the pill mills as a highly profitable side hustle to his fancy plastic surgery practice. Joe did see Sinclair there arguing with Slim. Maybe he wanted Slim to pay him to keep his mouth shut. Maybe too much.”
“Well done. But how do you think I figure in this operation?”
“The ‘we’ you talked about back at South Beach, that’s you and Anton Slim.”
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
“You said it yourself—money is your only motivator. And where’s the money in this picture? In Slim’s deep pockets. And where does that money come from? His cash cow – his pill mill empire. You took a page out of Sinclair’s book and extorted Slim to keep hush-hush.”
“So clever of you to figure all that out.”
“The one way to keep the gravy train running for everyone was to get rid of Sinclair. And you kept it all in the family and took care of him yourself.”
“And was rewarded handsomely, I might add.”
He strolls to the window and gazes into the distance. “Greed is such an unappealing quality in a business partner. Sinclair kept wanting more and more, until it was no longer sustainable. So, neither was he.”
He shoves the gun in his waistband and pulls a baggie of blue pills and a syringe filled with water from his pocket along with a length of rubber tubing. “But you’re missing one crucial piece of the puzzle.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” I say, straining against the ties, which causes the chair to fall on its side and me to hit my head.
“You’re forgetting about the lovely Serena,” he says, looking down at me on the floor.
“She knew about what Sinclair was doing, given she was sleeping with him. You killed her too.”
“Close, but not exactly. That one was Slim. Do you know why?”
I buck my shoulders, trying, unsuccessfully, to right the chair.
“You’re a little pale. You feeling okay? Don’t worry, you’ll feel all better soon enough. Now Serena, there was a smart girl. Didn’t even take time to mourn the poor fool. Just took over Sinclair’s business right where he left off. But, as tends to happen, when there’s lots of cash flying around, she got greedy too.”
I focus on a pelican outside, suspended in midair by the thermals high over the pulsing Gulf Stream. “What made you go bad, Sonny?”
“I was always bad. Bad’s in my blood. I’m just better at hiding it than the rest of my family. You just couldn’t see it. You were blinded with your nemesis, Reilly. And he did make for a nice distraction.”
“You’re despicable.”
He kneels down beside me, his lower lip in a pout. “You know what you get for all your big words and high-minded bullshit about the truth? You get to be dead.”
My vision narrows to the tubing being stretched around my left arm to make a tourniquet above my left elbow, under my tattoo.
“This’ll look like just another unhappy ending for one more junkie.”
He licks several of the blue pills to remove the time-release coating, so they’ll take immediate effect, crushes them to a fine dust on the window sill, and sweeps the mound of powder onto a spoon.
My grip on reality slipping away like an outgoing tide.
Squirting the water from the syringe onto the powder.
Mixing the powder with a pinkie finger.
Dipping needle into liquid.
Pulling the plunger back.
Chamber filling.
Syringe gripped between his teeth.
Flicking the flesh to find a willing vein.
Needle piercing skin.
Overwhelming sense of warmth and well-being.
Tubing falling away.
Door slamming.
Fade to black.
Chapter 34
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Dear Jesus, please let her live.”
I will my eyes to open.
“Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe!”
The voice—familiar, comforting.
Lids apart. A face. Familiar, like the voice, but it’s shape-shifting like an image in a fun house mirror.
Must get up!
“Relax, Gracie, relax,” says another face.
Bongo beat pounding in my chest.
First voice: “What’d you give her?”
The second face: “Narcan.”
“Stay with me, Gracie.”
“M— Manny?”
“Yes, it’s me. And Vinnie, too,” Manny says, easing me to a seated position.
Vinnie in my peripheral vision, grabbing my hand. “It’s me, sweetheart, everything’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna get you out of here.”
I blink hard to clear my vision.
The busted-up screen.
“No!”
Oscar bobbing in the ocean.
“Where’d he go?” I mumble.
“Who?” Vinnie asks.
Arms around me, Manny supports my weight as Vinnie rights the chair.
Tubing tied tight, veins distended like tree roots bursting out of the ground.
“He left me…he…here to die,” I rasp, my throat parched.
“You’re safe now.”
“No. Need to go!”
“We’re going, okay? We’re taking you to a hospital.”
Manny pulling me close. “You’re alive. That’s all that matters.”
The scent of him, woody, calming.
“I didn’t,” I say as he unties the tubing. “It was him.”
Vinnie in my face. “Who? It was who? Who did this to you?”
I gag, a wave of nausea churning in my gut. “Sonny.”
“The blond cop?”
I manage a nod.
“We’ll get that rat bastard!”
One on each arm, we hobble to the door. “How…How’d you know I was here?”
“When I stopped by last night, Vinnie was in a panic. Said you’d been gone way longer than usual on your run.”
“Miranda was going nuts. Wouldn’t stop barking. We searched everywhere for you. Called everyone we could think of.”
“You came by?” I ask Manny.
“You said I could come over, remember?”
“Thank God he did! He thought he might know where you’d go if—”
“I didn’t…relapse.”
Manny brushes my hair back. “We know.”
“Why’d you need to see me?”
Manny hooks an arm under mine and hauls me up onto my good leg. “Not important right now. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“How’d you? I w…wa…was gone. Supposed to di…”
Manny jerks his chin at the empty spray bottle of Narcan. “Had it in my car, from before. Brought it out here. Just in case.”
Vinnie leading the way, we shuffle into the blinding sunlight. Limp, suspended like laundry on a clothes line, they maneuver me down the rickety staircase. A Zodiac, like my father’s, sits tied up, abandoned.
“I— I didn’t…” My vision turns hazy. My eyelids are lead weights.
Manny shakes my shoulder. “Stay awake, Gracie! We need you to stay awake.”
Everything spinning. Images swirling above the crystalline water. Sonny crushing pills. Tubing tightening. The needle sliding in…
They prop me up like a mannequin in the back of the boat.
My stump, the gauze filthy and tattered. “He threw it…”
“Hurry, Manny! Hurry! She’s fading!”
A stinging slap to the face. “Don’t go to sleep. Stay with us!”
Engine revving.
Sea spray stinging my face.
Manny screaming, “Keep her awake! If she loses consciousness again, she’ll die!”
Acceleration like a jet-powered roller coaster.
Chapter 35
“That’s one hell of a story,” Marcus says, squeezing my hand so tightly I wince.
“I wish it were a story,” I say, extracting my hand from his death grip. “And where do you fit in?”
“These two called me to notify the authorities, to make sure Sonny Sorenson and Anton Slim never take a breath as free men again.” His voice cracks. “I…I wish I hadn’t mentioned the Statewide case. I had no idea I was—”
“You were trying to help an old friend.”
“Thank God you’re okay,” Marcus says. “And you’re not old, by the way.”
I sink back into the pillows. “Yeah? Well, I feel like I’m a hundred.”