Virgin Heat (28 page)

"You see?" said Rose. "You see? No matter what, he's gonna wanna go."

Louie felt his courage leaking away, he clamped his throat to hold some in; his voice got very pinched. "Alla more reason—"

"Louie, I didn't track you down just so you could—"

She was silenced not by a word but a gesture.

Angelina had been sitting very still, seeming to fold within herself, her expression blank, her gaze turned downward. Now her hand came up slowly, resolutely. It came up before she raised her eyes and before she spoke. At last she said, "I'll go. It's my place to go."

He looked at the ground, sucked hard at an elusive breath, then very gently placed the pistol in Angelina's outstretched palm. As he did so, his fingertips raked lightly over hers. It was the first time that they'd touched in days.

*

Six Federal agents, dispatched amid misgivings from North Miami, had driven down the Keys in two bland cars. They'd passed the afternoon at the cheap motel where Keith McCullough stayed, and at dusk they dressed in camouflage fatigues. They blackened their faces with shoe polish and headed for the ambush site near mile-marker twelve.

Off the highway, they drove along an unpaved and slowly disappearing road that wound among encroaching mangroves. Panicked lizards scuttled across the headlight beams that rocked crazily as the vehicles bounced through potholes filled with fetid water. Twigs poked out from both sides of the path, wasps' and hornets' nests hung on them like Chinese lanterns.

Where the road was finally smothered, just before a ruined building blanketed in vines, the agents got out of the cars. They unloaded floodlights and rifles with infrared scopes. Then two men drove the vehicles back to the highway, and the others took some time to orient themselves.

The clearing had been a going business once. It featured corroded gas tanks caked in guano, some shreds of awning still stuck on random sections of rusted frame, a dock warped and crumpled like a mangled xylophone. The whole sad enterprise was subsiding now, being patiently reclaimed by shifting waters and the obstinate progress of the mangroves.

Looking for good sight lines, for nests where they could hide and shoot, the agents plodded over coral rocks and tented roots, splashed through puddles and dragged their feet through traps of muck along that uncanny edge of Florida that was neither land nor sea. They took up positions in a spacious ring around the old marina's pier. The moon got higher, rained milk down on the unmoving water of the inlet.

They waited. It was still but not quiet. Mosquitoes found them, buzzed in greedy swarms around their eyes and ears. Spiders dropped from waxy leaves, then rode their own threads home again. Frogs croaked, confused by human legs pegged in the ground like pilings where no pilings were before. The air smelled of anchovies and rotted seaweed and iodine.

After a time a boat was heard. Its engine noise was at first a low and steady groan, barely distinct from the seldom-noticed murmur of the surfless ocean. But then the sound resolved into the steady beat of pistons, cylinders popping one by one as the craft crawled, unseen, through the winding, unmarked channel.

When it hove into view around the last barrier islet, Terry Sykes whispered to Keith McCullough, "Hot damn, first guest at the party."

McCullough kept his eyes on the water as Captain Johnny Castro expertly idled toward the dock. He said softly, "Lucca and Amaro, Terry. You're gonna get a citation, you know that? Frame and everything, hang it right up in your den."

Sykes said nothing, but McCullough felt him smiling, felt the moonlit whiteness of his goofy teeth between his blackened moustache and his painted chin.

Paul Amaro was getting ready—standing in front of the mirror, brushing back his silver hair and trying to summon up the old square and cocksure set of his jaw—when the knock came at the door.

It was a soft knock, not quite timid, but polite. It was probably the housekeeper; it was nothing to worry about. But Paul Amaro worried. He had reached that state of gloom and disillusion where dread bypassed the brain and burrowed directly into the pit of the stomach. It had become impossible for him to imagine that anything that happened could be good, and if nothing happened, that was bleak as well.

He put down his hairbrush, made one last try at firming his expression. He took a half-step toward the door, wondered if he should speak before looking through the peephole, decided what the hell. In a weary growl he said, "Who is it?"

"It's Angelina."

He heard it clearly but he didn't quite believe he had. His footsteps stalled a moment; a readiness to cry sprang up behind his eyes. Somewhere in his gut, hope was crawling like a crushed bug that would not stay dead, that roused itself for one more wingless and pathetic stab at getting off the floor. His daughter was okay. She was coming back to him. They would be reconciled.

He lunged toward the door, he was winded by the time he got there; blood was singing in his ears. He undid the locks, pulled the portal open. He saw her, his daughter. She was unharmed; unchanged. Her forehead, in spite of everything, was still unfurrowed, placid, blameless. Her violet eyes were clear and deep, the eyes he loved coming home to see.

He said her name. Some bashfulness or guilt took hold of him, he found he couldn't step toward her, but only leaned across the threshold to embrace her. She let herself be leaned toward, although her father seemed suddenly a stranger. She felt his cheek against her hair.

Then she fell back half a step. Paul Amaro grew very confused. He saw her hand in her purse, he saw it come out with a gun.

"Pop," she said, "I'm really sorry. You have to step back now. You have to step way back into the room."

*

Feeling for the moment safe, feeling unaccountably on top of things and confident, Ziggy didn't notice the pink taxi that followed his hulking Oldsmobile as it slowly plied the streets of Old Town. He didn't see it stop half a block away when he parked in front of the candy store on Bertha Street.

He climbed the cracked step, strode past the filthy fan, the torn seats leaking sisal, the fat silent man behind the counter.

He was halfway through the door frame at the back when his progress was arrested by a turnstile of an arm that slammed across his chest then clawed into his shoulder. In the next instant the muzzle of a gun was pressed against the hollow just behind his ear. He didn't go limp, exactly; he went extremely cooperative.

He was walked through the vines to where Carmen Salazar was sitting in his lawn chair, rubbing his chin so feverishly that the sound of beard mingled with the crickets and the rasping leaves. Standing before his sometime boss, Ziggy managed to say, "Carmen, what the fuck?"

Carmen didn't answer right away. The thug who held the gun on Ziggy pressed it in a little harder; the muzzle found a nest among the sinews. "Ziggy," said Salazar at last. "I have a question for you. You ever been afraid of me?"

Ziggy wondered if there was a right and a wrong answer to this. Being unsure, he told the truth. "No," he said. "Not really."

"I thought this might be a good time for you to start."

"But, Carmen, hey, we're onna same side—"

"This is where you're wrong," said Salazar. "This is why we're having this discussion, to impress upon you that we're not on the same side."

"Your word means shit," said Salazar. "And leaving me out of it isn't nearly good enough. This is why my colleague here is poised to blow your head off."

"We'll go through it nice and slow," said Salazar. "I'm telling you to rat me out. Turn me in. Sing. Make sure everybody knows it. But only on the gun deal. Nothing else. You understand?"

Ziggy blinked. It was a confusing world. Some guys would kill you if you squealed on them, some guys would kill you if you didn't. "Okay, Carmen, sure, " he said. "Any way you want it."

"I want it that I don't end up like you," said Salazar. "I want it that I keep the face I have. I want it that I can stay in my town and not wet my pants whenever a stranger walks into the room. You see? Now let's go get this over with."

They left the garden together, climbed into Ziggy's car. Uncle Louie, now the shepherd of his sundered family's interests and its tremulous defender against betrayal, told the driver of the pink cab to follow, not too close behind.

*

Carlos Mendez didn't like the smell of fish, and even with the windows open wide he was queasy in the seafood truck.

On the long ride down the Keys, he hadn't watched the moonlit pelicans that swooped from bridge to bridge, hadn't noticed channel buoys leaning in the current like palms bent back by heavy wind. He'd only watched the mile markers tick past, and it had seemed a long time between one marker and the next.

He was relieved to see Tommy Lucca's limo parked at the appointed place, the little semicircle before the mock-important gate that closed off Shark Key from the highway.

But as soon as he'd stepped down from the truck and slid into the backseat next to the Miami mobster, he could see that Lucca wasn't right. His pupils were opening and closing, his hand kept plucking at his collar, his tongue was too busy in his mouth, looking for a place to rest. He started saying something emphatic but impossible to follow about swamps and bugs and real estate swindles, and Mendez thought, What a stupid time to get hopped up.

The car and the truck eased back onto the highway to drive the last few miles. There had been vehicles parked all up and down the Keys—people fishing, drinking, groping under steering wheels; no one paid particular attention to the two dark sedans stopped on a bridge a few hundred yards north of mile-marker twelve.

Just past the agents, Lucca's driver slowed, threw his high beams at oncoming traffic, until at length he found the break in the low canopy of mangroves that gave onto the unpaved road. He turned hard, skidded briefly on the gravel shoulder. The truck with its payload of fish and weapons clattered behind, its boxy trailer leaning.

The car bounced and squeaked through puddles and ooze and a sulfurous stink, and Carlos Mendez wasn't feeling well at all. He held the strap above his window and tried to keep his gorge down. Lucca seemed not at all bothered by the battering, the jerks; in fact he seemed to like them. He gave forth little yips, like he was at a carnival or imagining that he was riding on a horse.

Mendez ignored the giddy and demented sounds; with his free hand he calmly rolled and unrolled the Panama hat that was cradled on his lap. But when Lucca actually spoke, Mendez turned to face him, saw that he had pulled a pistol from his jacket and was slapping it lightly against his leg. "That has-been fuck," he said. "He's done nothing on this deal. Nothing but stall and fuck things up and try to screw me. Am I right?"

The car was pitching like a storm-tossed ship. Lucca's finger was toying with the trigger, he was a mass of tics and twitches, his synapses were firing at random. Carlos Mendez thought it politic to offer no opinion.

It made no difference to Lucca, he paused an instant then rolled along. "And I'm supposed to share the payday with this fuck? Balls to that. I'll show 'im."

The car bounced, Lucca's neck swayed like that of a spaniel on a spring, his spastic finger was wrapped around the trigger. "The guns get loaded," he said, "I'm gonna kill that has-been fuck. Leave 'im right there in the slime. You give a shit?"

The deliberate Mendez tried to frame a tactful answer.

Lucca saved him the trouble. "I don't care you give a shit or not. I just thought you oughta know."

He raised the pistol, aimed for practice at the back of his driver's head, narrowed down his eyes and made a popping sound with his dry and twitching lips.

"Sal Martucci," said Paul Amaro.

He was sitting on the bed, maybe twelve feet from the door. His knees were wide apart, his elbows rested on them. His head hung down between his shoulders, and he was shaking it, but he did not seem angry at that moment, more bemused, bewildered, like a beaten fighter who's the last person in the stadium to realize that he's lost. "The bitch of it?" he resumed. "I think, deep down, I knew it all along."

"Deep down," said Angelina. She'd pulled a chair over, right next to the door. The gun was in her lap, her right hand absently rested over it. "Where no one ever looks if they can possibly avoid it."