Hooker looked at the doorjamb. “I was here around four o’clock yesterday and again this morning. I rang the bell, but I didn’t try the door. I was so pissed off I could barely see. No, it wasn’t me.” He followed me up the stairs and gave a low whistle at the mess. “Bill’s not much of a housekeeper.”
“Do you think I should call the police?”
“If something’s been stolen and you need a report to put in an insurance claim, yes. Otherwise, I can’t see where it does much good. I don’t see the boat police out searching for my Hatteras.”
“I can’t tell if anything’s been stolen. This is the first time I’ve visited. The television and DVD player are still here.”
Hooker strolled into the bedroom and gave another whistle. “That’s a lot of condoms,” he said. “That’s a NASCAR amount of condoms.”
“How about giving the NASCAR thing a rest,” I said.
He returned to the living room. “Why don’t you like NASCAR? NASCAR’s fun.”
“NASCAR’s boring. A bunch of idiots, nothing personal, driving around in circles.”
“What’s your idea of fun?”
“Shopping for shoes. Having dinner in a nice restaurant. Any movie with Johnny Depp in it.”
“Honey, that’s all girl stuff. And Depp’s done some pretty weird shit.”
I was going piece by piece, picking through the clutter on the floor. I was torn between wanting to put things away and restore order, and feeling like I needed to keep the integrity of a crime scene. I decided to go with restoring order because I didn’t want to believe something terrible had happened.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be touching this stuff,” Hooker said. “Maybe there’s something bad going on.”
“I’m doing denial,” I told him. “Try to be supportive. Help me look.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. A place to start. An address book. A name scribbled on a piece of paper. Matchbooks he picked up in bars.”
“I don’t need matchbooks. I know the bars Bill liked. We went out drinking together.”
“Do you know any of his friends?”
“It looked to me like Bill was friends with everyone.”
An hour later, I had everything put away. Couch cushions were back in place. Books were neatly shelved. Knives, forks, assorted junk, and condoms were returned to drawers.
“What have we got here?” I said to Hooker. “Did you find anything?”
“A black lace G-string under his bed. Your brother is an animal. What have you got?”
“Nothing. But he made that phone call to me and he cleaned out his refrigerator. The only thing left is a can of Budweiser.”
“Barney, that doesn’t mean he cleaned his refrigerator. It means he had to go shopping for more Bud.”
“These days most men call me Alex.”
“I’m not most men,” Hooker said. “I like Barney. Tell me about the phone call.”
“Bill said he had to leave Miami for a while. I could hardly hear him over a boat engine. He said if some guys showed up looking for him, I shouldn’t talk to them. And, he said I should tell you to kiss his exhaust pipe. I heard a woman scream and the line went dead.”
“Wow,” Hooker said.
It was six-thirty, and it was getting dark. It was still raining, I didn’t have a car, and all that was standing between me and starvation was a single can of Bud. What’s worse, I suspected if I opened it I’d have to share it with Hooker.
“Do you have any ideas?” I asked Hooker.
“Lots of them.”
“About how to find Bill?”
“No. I don’t have any of those ideas. My ideas run more to food and sex.”
“You’re on your own with the sex. I wouldn’t mind hearing your ideas about food.”
Hooker took his car keys out of his pants pocket. “For starters, I think we should get some.”
I did a raised eyebrow.
“Some food,” Hooker said.
We went to a diner on Collins Avenue. We had beer and burgers, French fries and onion rings and chocolate cake for dessert. There was healthier food on the menu but we weren’t having any of it.
“The all-American meal,” Hooker said.
“Did you ever eat here with Bill? Do you think anyone knows him here?”
“Pick out the prettiest waitress and I bet she knows Bill.”
I had a photo with me. A picture of Bill smiling, standing beside a big fish on a big hook.
The waitress dropped our check on the table and I showed her the photo.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“Sure. Everyone knows him. That’s Wild Bill.”
“He was supposed to meet us here,” I said. “Did we get the time wrong and miss him?”
“No. I haven’t seen him in days. I haven’t seen him hanging out at the clubs, either.”
We left the diner under clear skies. The rain had stopped and the city was steaming itself dry.
“You’re getting better at lying,” Hooker said, when we were belted into the Porsche. “In fact, you were frighteningly convincing.”
He turned the key in the ignition and the car growled to life. When you grow up in a garage you learn to appreciate machinery, and I got a rush every time Hooker revved the Porsche. As vocal as I was about hating NASCAR, I’ve been to a couple races. Last year I was at Richmond. And the year before that I was at Martinsville. I wouldn’t want to admit to anyone what happened to me when all those guys started their engines at the beginning of the race, but it was as good as any man had ever made me feel in bed. Of course, maybe I was just sleeping with the wrong men.
“Now what?” Hooker wanted to know. “Do you want to flash that photo some more tonight?”
It had been a long, exhausting day with a whole bunch of terrifying moments, starting with the takeoff from BWI. Nothing had turned out as I’d hoped. My sneakers were wet, my skirt was wrinkled, and I needed a breath mint. I wanted to think that the day couldn’t get any worse, but I knew worse was possible.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
We were on Collins, heading south. The art deco buildings were lit for the night and neon was blazing everywhere. There were surprisingly few people on the street.
“Where’s the nightlife?” I asked. “I expected to see more people out.”
“The nightlife doesn’t start until midnight.”
Midnight! I’d be comatose by midnight. I couldn’t remember the last time I stayed up that late. It might have been New Year’s Eve three years ago. I was dating Eddie Falucci. I was a lot younger then. I pulled the visor down to take a look at my hair in the mirror and shrieked when I saw myself.
Hooker swerved to the right, jumped the curb, and skidded to a stop.
“Ulk,” I said, flung against the shoulder harness.
“What the hell was that?” Hooker asked.
“What?”
“That shriek!”
“It was my hair. It scared me.”
“You’re a nut! You almost made me crash the car! I thought there was a body in the road.”
“I’ve seen you drive. You crash cars all the time. You’re not going to pin this on me. Why didn’t you tell me my hair was a wreck?”
Hooker eased off the curb and cut his eyes to me. “I was worried it was supposed to look like that.”
“I need a shower. I need to change my clothes. I need a nap.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At Bill’s apartment,” I told him.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ve thought it through, and it’s perfectly safe. It’s already been searched. What are the chances of the bad guys returning? Low, right? It’s probably the safest apartment in South Beach.” I almost had myself convinced.
“Do you have club clothes with you?”
“No.”
“I can probably come up with something.”
Hooker eased the Porsche to a stop
in front of Bill’s building. “I’ll be back at eleven,” he said.
The last thought in my head was of Hooker scrounging a dress for me. He probably had a bunch of them under his bed, rolling around like dust bunnies. It was still in the front of my mind when I woke up. It didn’t stay there for long.
I opened my eyes and stared up at a very scary guy. He was at the side of the bed, snarling down at me. Hard to tell his age. Late twenties to midthirties. He was maybe six foot four, and his muscles were grotesquely overdeveloped, making him look more science fiction creature than human being. He had a thick neck and a Marine buzz cut. A ragged white scar ran from his hairline, through his right eyebrow, down his cheek, and through his mouth, ending in the middle of his chin. Whatever had slashed through his face had taken out his eye, because his right eye was fake. It was a big shiny glass orb, larger than his seeing eye, inexplicably terrifying. His mouth was stitched together in such a way that the upper lip was always held in a snarl.
I stared at him in stupefied horror for a heart-stopping second, and then I started screaming.
He grabbed me by my shirtfront, picked me up off the bed like I was a rag doll, and gave me a shake.
“Stop,” he said. “Shut up or I’ll hit you.” He looked at me dangling at arm’s length. “Maybe I’ll hit you anyway. Just for fun.”
I was so freaked out my mouth felt frozen. “Wha do wha whan?” I asked.
He gave me another shake. “What?”
“What do you want?”
“I know who you are. I know lots of stuff and I want your brother. He has something that belongs to my boss. And my boss wants it back. Since we can’t find your brother, we’re going to take you instead. See if we can’t swap you out. And if your brother won’t deal, that’s okay too, because then I get you.”
“What does Bill have that belongs to your boss? What’s this about?”
“Bill has a woman. And it’s about fear and what it can do for you. And about being smart. My boss is real smart. And someday he’s going to be real powerful. More powerful than he is now.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. And you should cooperate or you’ll end up like that night watchman. He didn’t want to tell us nothing, and then he tried to stop us from going into the dockmaster’s office to get the occupancy list. What a dope.”
“So you killed him?”
“You ask too many questions. I’m gonna put you down now, and you’re gonna walk out with me, and you’re not gonna give me any trouble, right?”
“Right,” I said. And then I kicked him as hard as I could in the nuts.
He just stood there without breathing for a couple beats, so I kicked him again.
The second kick was the home run because the big guy’s glass eye almost fell out of his head. He released his grip on my shirt and went to his knees. He grabbed his crotch, threw up, and then went facedown into the mess he’d just made.
I fell back on my ass and scrambled away crab style. I got to my feet and bolted, out of the bedroom, through the living room, down the stairs. I was on the sidewalk, ready to start running and not stop until I reached Baltimore, when Hooker pulled to the curb in the Porsche.
“B-b-big guy,” I said. “B-b-big guy in Bill’s apartment.”
Hooker felt under his seat, brought out a gun, and got out of the car.
This did nothing to make me feel safe. If anything, it added to the panic.
“Don’t worry about the gun,” Hooker said. “I’m from Texas. We give guns as baptism presents. I knew how to shoot before I could read.”
“I don’t like g-g-guns.”
“Yeah, but sometimes you need them. Lots of people need to shoot varmints in Texas.”
“Like coyotes?”
“That would be in the country. In my neighborhood it was mostly pissed-off husbands shooting guys in their naked ass as they jumped out bedroom windows.” Hooker looked to the open door and then up to the windows. “Tell me about this big guy.”
“He was big. Real big. Like he didn’t even fit in his skin. Like the Hulk, except he wasn’t green. And he didn’t have a neck. And he had a scar running down the side of his face into his mouth where he was all drooly and snarly. And his eye…his eye. Actually he didn’t have an eye. Only one. The other one was fake, but it was a cheap fake. Like it was sort of too big for the real eye. And it didn’t move. No matter what the real eye did, the one big cheap fake eye just stared out at me. Didn’t blink, or anything. It was…frightening.”
“Did he have a name?”
“I’m calling him Puke Face.”
“Did Puke Face say anything interesting? Like why he was in Bill’s bedroom?”
“He said Bill had a woman who belonged to his boss, so he was going to trade me. And that his boss was smart, and that this was all about fear and what it can do for you.”
A blind was slightly pulled aside at one of Bill’s windows. Hooker aimed his gun at the window. The blind dropped back into place, and a moment later we heard a crash from the other side of the apartment building. “Unh,” someone said. And then there was the sound of receding footsteps. Ka thud, ka thud, ka thud.
“Sounds to me like he just jumped out Bill’s window,” Hooker said. “And he’s limping.”
“I kicked him in the nuts.”
“Yeah, that might make him limp. Do you still want to do the club scene?”
I nodded. “I have to find Bill.”
Hooker beeped the Porsche locked, and he tossed a shimmery scrap of material at me. “I hope this fits. It was the best I could do on short notice.”
“It’s still warm.”
“Yeah, you probably don’t want to know all the details.”
I held the dress up by its little string straps. “There’s not much here.”
“Trust me, you don’t want a lot of dress. This is Miami. They really mean it when they say less is more.”
I followed Hooker back into the apartment, and we cautiously looked around.
“I’m a little flustered,” I said.
“Perfectly understandable. If you need help getting into the dress…”
Yeah, right. Not that flustered.
“This is disgusting,” Hooker said, upper lip curled at the mess on the rug.
“He threw up after I kicked him the second time.”
Hooker instinctively put his hands to his package. “I could throw up just thinking about it.”
I dragged myself and the dress into the bathroom. I did some deep breathing and got myself calmed down enough to keep going. Hooker was out there with his gun, and I was safe in here, I told myself. Just get changed and get out.
I stripped my clothes off and exchanged my bikini undies for a thong. I dropped the dress over my head and tugged it down. It was silver metallic with some spandex. It had a V-neck that plunged halfway to my doodah, and the skirt fell two inches below my ass. I swiped some mascara on my lashes, sprayed my hair into a style that looked like maybe my brain had exploded, and I tarted up my mouth. I’d brought two pairs of shoes with me…the sneakers and a pair of silver strappy sandals with four-inch stiletto heels. Shoes for every occasion. I slid my feet into the sandals and swung out of the bathroom.
“Holy cow,” Hooker said.
“Too short?”
“Now I’m flustered.”
Hooker had his hair gelled back. He was wearing black linen slacks, a short-sleeve black silk shirt patterned with fluorescent purple palm trees, and loafers without socks. He had a Cartier watch on his wrist, and he smelled nice.
“Easy to see how Puke Face got in. The door is completely broken,” Hooker said. “If there’s anything of value here, you should hide it or take it with you.”
I gave Hooker the photo of Bill to put in his pocket. “The only thing of value is the television, and it’s not that great.”
I followed Hooker down the stairs and out to the Porsche. Hooker drove a block and a half over to Washington and v
alet parked the car in front of a club.
“We could have walked,” I said.
“Boy, you don’t know much. You probably think owning a Porsche is about power and bling. Okay, power and bling is part of it, but it’s mostly about valet parking. It’s about the sucking up and the ogling and the envy. It’s about the arrival, baby.”
He was being funny, but there was some truth to what he said. There were about a hundred people milling around outside the club. These were the people who weren’t thin enough, young enough, rich enough, or famous enough to get on the A list. None of them had arrived in a Porsche. And none of them had given the doorman enough money to compensate for their shortcomings.
The doorman smiled when he saw Hooker and motioned him forward. I guess being a famous NASCAR guy has its compensations. The smile widened when he saw me attached to Hooker. I guess having legs that went from my ass all the way down to the ground had its compensations, too.
We took a moment to adjust to the dark and the lights and the pulse from the DJ. The women dancing onstage were all wearing feathers. Big feather headpieces, feathered G-strings, feathered bikini tops on their big fake boobs. The feathers were peach and aqua and lavender. Very South Beach avian.
“You do the men,” Hooker yelled at me over the music, pressing the photo of Bill into my hand. “Hit up the bartenders and security guys. I’ll do the women. I’ll meet you at the exit in a half hour. If you see Pukey, get up on a table where people can see you and start dancing.”
If you want to chat with someone in a club you have to yell in their ear or hope they read lips. I found a bunch of guys who knew Bill but none who knew where he was. A bartender gave me a cosmo. I felt a lot more relaxed after I slurked it down. I even started to feel a little brave. I met Hooker in a half hour and we left together.
“Did you get anything?” he asked.
“A cosmopolitan.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope. That was it.”
“I didn’t get a lot either. I’ll fill you in later.”
The valet brought the car around. We got in and drove three blocks to another club. The experience was almost identical, except this time the women performing were dressed like Carmen Miranda. Lots of fruit on their heads, colorful rumba ruffles on their G-strings, and rumba ruffles on the bikini tops that held up their big fake boobs. I drank another cosmo. And I found out nothing.