Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  So eager was he to get that first hit of booze into his bloodstream that he didn’t immediately notice the acquaintance who was sitting three stools away, his fat and hairy elbows spread around a bacon cheeseburger and a giant mound of fries. “Well, whaddya know?” said Gus Delios. “You’re still here.”

  Meara said nothing, just drank some beer to extinguish the whisky that was now burning in his stomach.

  “Thought you had some big deal going on,” Delios resumed, slipping without effort into his usual mocking tone. He lifted the burger, bit off a dangling slice of bacon with a quick twitch of his jaw, and spoke again before he’d swallowed it. “Miami, wasn’t it? Thought you were never coming back here. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Little glitch is all,” said Meara. “Brief delay.”

  He tried to sound casual but it was clear that he was crestfallen. His misfortune and disappointment made Delios happy, and with that secret gloating that can sometimes pass for sympathy, he offered to buy the red-haired man a round. Meara accepted, of course, and Delios gestured to the barkeep without putting down his burger.

  By the time he was halfway through the second boilermaker, the red-haired man was feeling a bit less dreadful. That’s when a hooker with titanium-blue hair sashayed into the place.

  The hooker, rather incongruously, had pulled up on a bicycle. She was wearing a lacy black blouse with long sleeves that tapered down to points on the tops of her hands and suggested something Transylvanian. Her thighs were thin and bare beneath a tiny red skirt; she wore enormous plastic sunglasses whose frames extended well beyond her temples.

  She went into the bar and, while appearing to be searching out a promising spot to offer her wares, she scanned the room for a red-haired man in very wrinkled clothes. Spotting him, she took a deep breath and moved that way on shaky legs. Canned music was playing. Blenders were clattering as they ground up ice. The noise somehow took on physical weight and made the air difficult to move through.

  She labored toward an empty barstool and pulled it out to sit. When Teddy Meara swiveled just slightly to see who his new neighbor was, she flashed him a suggestive little smile.

  He blinked his tired but suddenly avid eyes, then looked at her differently, shamelessly, lewdly. He looked at her mouth, her shoulders, her adequate if unremarkable chest. He looked down at her thighs to where the short skirt ended.

  Choking back disgust, dialing up her moxie, Phoebe said, “Buy a girl a drink?”

  The question flattered Meara. Women didn’t usually bother with him much. True, this was just some floozy. Still, the attention was exciting. He said, “Sure, hon, what’ll it be?”

  “Margarita. Lots of salt.”

  He ordered the cocktail and during that supremely awkward interval of waiting for it to arrive, he said, “Don’t think I’ve see you in here before.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. I’m sort of new at this, to tell the truth. Sort of down on my luck. Know what I mean?”

  Meara couldn’t hold back a short and bitter laugh. “Yeah, I know how that is.”

  “Still waiting for my ship to come in. Know what I mean?”

  The red-haired fellow flinched at that, and it was only when he dropped Phoebe’s eyes that she looked past him and saw the fat man who was sitting three stools away, finishing up a greasy burger, folding thick clusters of French fries into his glistening mouth. For a moment she just froze. The whole room seemed to tilt toward the massive bulk of Gus Delios, and in that instant she came close to losing her nerve and walking away. Not that she was afraid of Delios; what she was feeling was more insidious than that. There was something about the fat man’s particular species of evil that called forth helplessness and depression rather than outrage and action. It was an evil without grandeur or sweep, an evil of petty injustice and unfair advantage, and it sort of made you want to give up. How could you fight back against all the nasty little cheats and connivers in the world?

  In a moment of secret struggle behind her preposterous sunglasses, Phoebe wrestled with that question and came around to a very simple answer: You fought back against them one asshole at a time. Or in this case, maybe two.

  The margarita arrived and the room came back to its usual geometry. Keeping her face turned down against the small chance that Delios might look beyond his food and recognize her, Phoebe licked some salt from the rim of the glass, took a quick sip of the watered-down booze, then said to Meara, “Look, hon, time is money. Can we get down to business?”

  Pineapple walked home the couple miles from downtown and when he got back to the clearing he found Fred and Nicky nailing boards together and sealing the seams with a caulk gun. “What’cha doing?” he asked.

  Fred looked up. His left thumb was double its normal size where it had been smashed by the hammer. “What’s it look like we’re doing? We’re building a raft.”

  “Isn’t much of one,” Piney said mildly.

  “Doesn’t need to be,” said Fred. “Just needs to get the two of us out into the channel.”

  “Channel?”

  “We’re going camping. You and me. Out on the little islet where the boat is sunk. You okay with that?”

  Before Pineapple could answer, Nicky said, “Look, things go according to plan, it might get a little wild out there later on. Wild, like dangerous. Might be good to have a couple extra guys around. Then again, this is totally not your problem. I already said that to Fred. He spit on the ground. So I’m saying it to you. You really sure you wanna do it?”

  Piney looked at Fred. Fred looked at Piney. Neither said a word. Fred put a couple nails between his teeth and Pineapple went back behind the hot dog to find more boards.

  37.

  Teddy Meara hadn’t expected the hooker to be quite so abrupt or quite so forward, and her brazenness made his mouth go dry. Struggling to sound composed and in control, he said, “Sure, babe. What’s the deal?”

  “Hundred bucks and we do what you want.”

  “Where?”

  “How about the men’s room? I’m not picky.”

  Grasping for courage as usual, Meara took a last nip of his whisky then motioned for Phoebe to walk ahead of him through the saloon atmosphere that was thick with music and laughing and the crossfire of leering eyes. He couldn’t resist a wink back at his buddy Delios and a gesture at Phoebe’s behind.

  The men’s room had no lock on its outside door. Inside, the place smelled of beer and cologne and disinfectant. On a wall next to the hand-dryer there was a dented vending machine selling seventy-five cent condoms. A man in plaid Bermudas was standing at a urinal. Without being prompted, Phoebe led on to a stall whose walls were etched with phone numbers and solicitations and phallic drawings of improbable size.

  Meara followed her in and pulled the dead-bolt snug. He had just started to unzip when Phoebe said, “Forget about it.”

  “Huh?”

  Sweeping off the big sunglasses, she said again, “Forget about it. You really think this is about sex? It’s about money, and way more than a hundred dollars. We need to talk about your boat.”

  Rather numbly, his hand still on his fly, his mind clouded by arousal and lack of sleep and a fresh infusion of alcohol, Meara said, “My boat?”

  “The one that never got to Customs.”

  “Fuck you know about that?”

  Rather than answering, Phoebe said, “The one that has you in big trouble with your boss.”

  Meara looked down at his feet.

  “Your boss is awfully hot to find that boat. Maybe I know where it is.”

  “Tell me,” he said. He tried to sound threatening, but his clothes were horribly rumpled and his zipper had gotten stuck and the commanding tone just didn’t work. Phoebe ignored it.

  “Your boss,” she said. “How much is he paying you to deliver the goods?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  She tried a different question. “And you know how much that payload is worth?”

  He didn’
t want to admit that he had no idea, but his blank face showed that he was in the dark.

  Phoebe had no idea either, but momentum was on her side. “A lot,” she said. “And I’ll offer a better deal for the grab-and-go.”

  “Yeah? And who the fuck are you?”

  The simple question brought Phoebe very close to the end of her bluff. She stalled. Then Meara helped her out. “You with that Nicky guy?”

  “That’s right. I’m with that Nicky guy. So you’ve heard about Nicky?”

  “All’s I know is he’s the guy that took off with the boat.”

  Winging it, Phoebe said, “And you think he would’ve done that on his own? Without help? Without backing? Without some important connections?”

  Meara narrowed his eyes and begged his sluggish mind to click into a higher gear.

  “I’ve had you watched,” Phoebe went on. “I’ll tell you a couple things about your afternoon. You got off work. You were grabbed and taken to a waiting car. Inside the car were your boss and two other men. Those other men—did you happen to figure who they are?”

  “Yeah,” Meara said sourly. “Some pushy little scumbag and a guy at death’s door with a dog.”

  “Bosses. Both of them. Old-school Mafia. Way more powerful than your guy.”

  “Didn’t look that way,” said Meara. “My guy seemed to be in charge.”

  Phoebe shook her head. “You still going by the way things look? I look like a hooker, don’t I? But I’m not a hooker. I’m a messenger. And the message is you’ll be way better off if you work with us.”

  Meara just looked down at the filthy floor.

  “What’s he paying you?” Phoebe asked again.

  The red-haired man dimly understood that if he answered the question the decision was already made, but he answered anyway. “Seventy-five,” he lied.

  “Now it’s one-fifty,” Phoebe bluffed. “Plus there’s one other big advantage. We know where the goods are. Your guy doesn’t. That’s significant, wouldn’t you say?”

  Caught between greed and fear, between tripling his long-awaited payday and having a very pissed off Benavides coming after him, he said weakly, “And you guys’ll protect me?”

  The rather pathetic question, its almost whining tone, made Phoebe pause a moment. A bluff was one thing, an out-and-out lie was another. “No promises,” she said. “You’re a big boy. You decide.”

  It didn’t take that long. “Whaddya need me to do?”

  “First off,” said Phoebe, “you need to get hold of a boat.”

  “Boat?” said Meara. “I don’t have a fucking boat.”

  She allowed herself just the smallest hint of a vindicated smile. “No, but you know someone who does.”

  Meara moved his head sideways but said nothing.

  “Your buddy from the bar,” she said. “Well-known around town. He has a boat. Lives on it, in fact. Wouldn’t be too surprised if he’d like to get in on a piece of this.”

  38.

  “D’ya get laid in there?” asked Gus Delios when Meara finally emerged from the men’s room and shambled back to the bar, alone.

  “Better than laid,” said Meara. “I just made a hundred grand.”

  “You’re full of shit,” the fat man said casually. He’d finished his burger and fries by then and had moved on to a giant wedge of chocolate cake. Crumbs of it were sticking to his moustache. He alternated bites of cake with swigs of beer.

  “Okay,” the red-haired man said mildly, “I’m full of shit. Fine. Let’s just leave it at that. Let’s not even get to the part where I offer you twenty to help me for an hour.”

  Delios had to laugh at that. Meara’s extravagant tales about his business dealings had worn very thin by now, his status as a bullshitter was firmly established, but still the little lush kept trying to sound like a bigshot. Humoring him, the fat man said, “Twenty grand. Really?”

  “Twenty for you, eighty for me. Tonight. It’s all arranged if you want in.”

  Not bothering to mask his unbelief, Delios said, “And this arrangement. It all got arranged while you were in the bathroom with that skinny whore?”

  “Except she’s not a whore.”

  “No? What is she, a movie star? An astronaut?”

  “Actually, she’s with the Mob.”

  The patent absurdity of this caught the fat man by surprise and he coughed a few cake crumbs onto the bar beyond his plate. “You’re full of shit,” he said again.

  Meara lifted his shot glass, discovered it was empty, and gestured for a refill. “Okay,” he said, “keep not believing me. Don’t believe me that she knows you, either.”

  Delios gave a world-weary shrug. “Lotta people know me. I’m a local.”

  “Or that she knows where you live. On a trawler up on Stock Island, right?”

  He said it with a certain insinuating lilt but Delios was not impressed. “Oh. She’s Mafia. She knows where I live. Is that supposed to make me paranoid?”

  “I don’t think you’re paying attention, Gus. What it’s supposed to make you is twenty thousand dollars. I need to run a little errand with a boat. You bring me where I need to go, get me back to land, we both make some easy money.”

  Delios had been pretty locked into his dismissive tone, but the prospect of easy money had a way of eroding skepticism, and he now found himself teetering on the edge of almost, not quite, believing. “And you’re really serious about all this?”

  “Serious as a spot on your lung.”

  “And it happens tonight?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Where?”

  Meara shrugged. “Don’t know yet. She’ll call. Twenty grand for a little boat ride, Gus. You in?”

  “Your hair,” said Nicky. “Looks good in blue,”

  “Think so?” Phoebe said. “I’d gotten pretty used to having it magenta.”

  “Looked good in magenta too. But the blue is nice, I like the blue.”

  “I think you’re kind of biased, Nicky,” Ozzie said.

  “Okay, I’m biased. What can I say?”

  It was dusk and they were gathered in the mangrove clearing. Phoebe had changed out of her improvised hooker outfit and was back in her more usual uniform of cut-offs and a t-shirt. Pineapple had built a driftwood fire that crackled and sent embers floating upward until their tiny lights went out and they fluttered down again as ash. Fred had broken out a six-pack and was passing it around. Only Ozzie took a beer. Phoebe looked at her watch and said to Nicky, “Might be time to make that phone call now. Whaddya think?”

  Nicky nodded but his throat was tight from nerves and his Adam’s apple hurt a little when he dropped his chin. The two of them got up and went over to the camp chairs by the Sno-Cone truck. Phoebe said, “Nice and cool, just like we rehearsed, okay? Do it like a song.”

  He gave a thumbs-up as he reached into a pocket for the scrap of paper with Charlie Ponte’s number on it. He dialed then took Phoebe’s hand.

  The phone rang in the Jaguar that was still parked across the street from the Customs gate. Gato had picked up some take-out Chinese and the four men were sitting with greasy cardboard containers in their laps. The car stank of soy sauce and undercooked scallions; Bert was feeding tiny morsels of egg foo yung to his chihuahua.

  At the first sound from the phone, Benavides put aside his twice-cooked pork and grabbed the 9 mm instead. Ponte felt a sickening sense of déjà vu when he was told to answer it and put it on speaker. “No secrets, right, Charlie?”

  The incoming number was not familiar, but even so Ponte picked up with trepidation. “Yeah?”

  “Hello, Mr. Ponte. It’s Nicky.”

  At the sound of the name chopsticks were dropped, containers almost toppled. “Nicky, where the fuck are you?”

  The question went unanswered. Instead, Nicky said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Ponte. Everything’s fine. I stashed the boat just like you told me to.”

  At that, Benavides raised the pistol a little higher. Gato swiveled in the driver’s sea
t, still clutching a spare rib.

  Ponte said, “Fuck you talking about? I never told you to—“

  “And the inside guy,” Nicky went on. “I found him. Took some doing, but I found him. He turned, just like you said he would.”

  “I never said—“

  “Said he didn’t like working with the spick any more than you did.”

  Benavides eyes bulged in their sockets at that. Gato’s lips pulled back to show some teeth.

  “So anyway,” Nicky went on, “no worries, it’s all worked out. Best thing, you meet me at the houseboat, say around eleven, then we head out for the rendezvous. Sound good, Mr. Ponte?”

  To Ponte it did not sound good at all. It sounded like a filthy and ruinous double-cross. But when he heard the slide pull back on Benavides’ pistol and saw that his captor was nodding at him strenuously, he said, “Yeah Nicky, sounds great. The houseboat at eleven. See ya.”

  39.

  The instant the call was ended, Benavides said, “So you don’t like working with the spick?”

  “Luis,” protested Ponte, “I never said that, I swear to God. I never said any of that shit. The little fucker’s setting me up. Ain’t it obvious?”

  Bert had gone back to feeding his dog a few more bits of the cooling and leathery egg foo yung. Quietly, he said, “Well, you set him up, Charlie. Fair is fair.”

  Benavides seemed to have no interest in the observation. He’d twisted farther in his seat and was bracing his forearm on the back of it. The muzzle of the gun was about a foot from Ponte’s face and from his perspective it looked like a narrow tunnel with no light at the end of it. The Cuban said, “I’m trying to think of one good reason why I shouldn’t blow your brains out.”

  Whether from terror or pride, Ponte didn’t try to talk him out of it.

  The moment stretched until Bert said, “Um, I can think of one.”

  “Shut up, old man.”

  “In fact, maybe I could think of two or three.”

  The truth was that Bert hadn’t thought of any yet and he wasn’t even sure if he was trying to save Ponte’s life or just spare himself an awful mess in the back seat of the car. Either way, he thought it best to keep on talking.