Virgin Heat (29 page)

Even to himself it sounded lame, and no less because it happened to be true. But it was what every parent felt when looking at his child and seeing the wounds, the disappointment; when looking at the world and knowing that one had done nothing to make it any less unkind, any less fickle or grudging in its comforts. Paul Amaro looked at his daughter and understood that for every pain he thought he'd spared her, another had been heedlessly inflicted; for every opportunity he'd yearned to give her, some other path had been closed off. Suddenly he felt very very sorry. Not for her, exactly. Not for himself. Not even for anything he'd done. Just sorry, like regret was taking him over the way spores and lichen take over the fibers of a tree that's dying from the inside out.

He tried to smile. It came out wrong— tormented, cloying. He said, "I have this stupid daydream. I had it every day in prison. That I'd come home and things'd be like they used to. You'd meet me at the door, we'd hug. We'd go for rides, remember? Restaurants, parties, everybody'd make a fuss over you, blue dress, you were so pretty."

Paul Amaro nodded, almost calmly. But with every labored heartbeat, calm regret was losing ground to sorrowful fury, to reckless desperation. If he'd truly lost his daughter, if he'd repulsed forever the one person who really mattered to him, then he had to cling to something else, to business, or danger, or oblivion, or revenge. In a moment his expression hardened, the jaw clenched, there was a tightness at the corners of his eyes. He said, "I'm going to that meeting now."

Angelina wasn't ready for the sudden change of subject, didn't answer.

Blood was roaring in Paul Amaro's ears, there was a searing glare at the edges of his vision. He said, "A bust. That's crap. You don't understand nothing, Angelina."

She'd almost forgotten the gun was in her lap. She remembered now, her fingers clenched around it.

Her father went on with a defiant rage he half-knew was aimed at self-destruction. "Sal Martucci's with Lucca now. I see it. They're tryin' to cut me out, put me inna wrong."

The gun was in Angelina's lap and the door was at her back and she barely had time to swallow as she watched him rise. She measured the distance between them with her eyes, and wondered exactly how much time she had, and exactly how much nerve.

*

Lucca's limo and the seafood truck arrived first.

Mendez and Lucca stepped out into the clearing, next to the abandoned marina building that was being swallowed up in vines. Lucca took a leak in a shallow puddle ringed by mangrove roots.

His hand was still on his zipper when Ziggy's rusted Oldsmobile came hulking down the road, its pitted paint and faulty muffler at one with the general decay. He parked. With the engines all turned off, the place seemed very quiet for a moment but then grew loud with the noises of frogs and locusts, the burble of doves and the peeps of warblers.

On the edges of the clearing, the Feds in camouflage hunkered lower in the muck, pulled in cautious breaths, steadied weapons at their sides.

Ziggy and Carmen Salazar got out of the car. Tommy Lucca stared at them, counted them, and the first thing he said was, "Fuck's Amaro?"

Eyes flicked around the clearing, like maybe the New York mobster was lurking in the shadows. People looked back up the road but there was no other vehicle approaching. Mendez glanced at his watch, then at Salazar. Salazar looked at Ziggy. Ziggy blinked and shrugged.

Johnny Castro had strolled over from his boat, his odd freckles big dark ovals in the moonlight. He didn't care about the differences among the men on land. He cared about conditions for the crossing to Havana. He said, "Come on, we gotta load. We fuck around, it's daylight before I make the harbor."

Pacing among the mangrove roots, Lucca spluttered, "But the fucker said he'd be here."

As soothingly as he could manage, Carlos Mendez said, "We don't need him here, Tommy."

Lucca paced until he found a victory in this. "Fuckin' A, we don't," he said. "Isn't 'iss what I been sayin' all along?"

They started transferring the crates of guns.

The driver of the seafood truck dragged them to the edge of the trailer. He shook off watery ice that had slipped down from the pompano and conch, and handed the boxes to Ziggy, who carried them as far as he dared along the rotting pier, then hefted them over the gunwale to Castro, who stashed them in the hold.

On U.S. 1, the agents in charge of the dark sedans counted off ten minutes, then started driving very slowly down the unpaved road, blocking off escape.

Keith McCullough watched as the crates of guns moved steadily past in the moonlight. He, too, was wondering where Paul Amaro was, why the group was incomplete. But he was running low on time.

Boards creaked on the dock. The truck emptied and the boat filled; it rocked just slightly with Johnny Castro's movements, water lapped against its sides. McCullough understood that if he wanted the full symmetry of the smuggling—guns moving, guns in smugglers' arms, the bosses gazing on—he had to grab it now.

He hesitated. He wanted Paul Amaro. Amaro was target number one. But finally he filled his lungs, screamed out above the frogs and the birds and the bugs, "Freeze, assholes!"

In the next instant the floodlights came on, called forth from the night a crisply etched tableau of guilt and shock. Johnny Castro ducked by reflex into the cockpit of his craft. Carlos Mendez wheeled, cringed, sought anonymity behind the halo of his hat. Ziggy made a point of dropping a crate of guns, they bounced off the dock's edge and spanked through the skin of the water.

McCullough's voice rang out again. "Hands way up in the air."

Everybody's hands went up but Tommy Lucca's.

Lucca, heroically paranoid, obsessed more with betrayal than with life itself, lashed out at the darkness. "Amaro!" he screamed. He made it sound obscene, a curse that coated the night like oil stains water. "Where the fuck's Amaro? Cocksucker ratted us out."

"Hands up in the air," McCullough yelled again.

"Fuck you," said Tommy Lucca, and though he was blinded by the floodlights, had no chance of seeing his tormentors, he pulled his pistol from his pocket, insanely confident that in a world filled with enemies, a bullet anywhere would find one.

Terry Sykes, not a bright fellow but a fine marksman, was sighting on the mobster's chest.

Maybe Lucca meant to fire, maybe his hopped-up finger twitched around the trigger. His bullet whined and scratched through mangrove leaves and lodged somewhere in mud.

Sykes, with the unhurry of the practiced, squinted down, held his breath, and shot the mobster through the heart. The frogs fell briefly silent as the dead man stumbled back a step, then paused, as though to reconsider, to call for time, a replay. At last he pitched forward, facedown in the marl at that undramatic edge of Florida that was not quite land and not quite sea.

The others sleepwalked into custody, bleakly stoic at the demise of Lucca, unsurprised in the face of getting caught.

When they'd been patted down and handcuffed and herded into a small tight group against the ruined building with its grasping vines, Keith McCullough took Ziggy aside into a shadowy knot of mangrove and said, "So where the hell's Amaro?"

Ziggy said, "Who?"

"Don't be cute with me. I don't find it cute."

Ziggy stared at the agent's blackened face, his eyes that seemed yellow and bulging in the moonlight. "I don't find your makeup cute."

McCullough swatted at bugs, said, "Where the hell is he, Ziggy? We have a deal, remember?"

"Fuck you, G.I. Joe. You got Tommy Lucca dead. Be content with that."

Air whistled through Keith McCullough's teeth, he kicked at a coral rock with the toe of a boot that fine, gray mud was drying on. He said, "Don't be an asshole, Ziggy. With you or without you, I'm pulling Paul Amaro into this."

McCullough turned away, watched moonlight gobbled up by foliage, nibbled leaf by leaf till there was nothing left but shadow. Hands on hips, he wheeled slowly back around, said, "Ziggy, don't overplay your hand. You were carrying the guns. You were handing them aboard. Lucca's dead. Who else you got to trade away?"

Ziggy listened to frogs and bugs, thought that over. Then he said, "Jeez, you caught me touching guns? Now you got me very scared. Paul Amaro, okay, you might try his hotel room."

"Hotel room?" said McCullough. "But he's supposed to be—"

"You
thought
he was supposed to be. You were mistaken."

"If you're jerking me around—"

McCullough broke off because the dark sedans were coming down the road, headlights crazily rocked and panned across the clearing. The cars stopped. An agent sprang out of one. He ran over to where Keith McCullough stood and said in a breathless whisper, "We got 'im."

McCullough said, "Bring him over here." He smirked at Ziggy. Ziggy tried to smirk back but he couldn't. He was scared. Scared for Angelina. He'd given her a gun. The gun was supposed to keep Paul Amaro away. Bad things sometimes happened when guns were brandished by people who weren't prepared to use them.

Uncle Louie didn't answer right away. His thin hair was plastered down with sweat. He was a little bitten up and nervous but also sort of proud. He'd never been handcuffed before. He'd never been interrogated. He glanced at Ziggy. Then he said, "Just out for a walk."

*

When they had a moment alone, Ziggy whispered to Louie, "What the hell were you doing walking down that road?"

"The cabbie," Uncle Louie said, "he wouldn't bring me off the highway. God knows what he thought I had in mind."