“Where’s the toolbox?” he demanded. “And the bag from the sports shop? Where’d you stash ’em?”
“Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Albury placed a booted foot on the man’s neck and shifted his weight slowly until the face turned red and a grimace bared every tooth. “You’re a prick,” Albury said. “And I’ll snap your goddamn neck if you don’t answer my question.”
The thief flailed on the pavement and directed his bulging eyes across the parking lot, to where a battered red VW sat alone. Albury hauled the young man to the car. In the back seat were his toolbox and the bag containing Ricky’s new spikes. He retrieved them and walked back to the Pontiac, the thief in tow.
“You gonna call the cops?”
“Where you from?”
“Atlanta.” The young man began brushing off his jeans and picking the gravel off his shirt. He thought it was over.
“What are you doing down here?” Albury asked evenly.
“Visiting.” The young man used his hands like a comb, straightening his hair and sweeping it out of his face.
“Visiting,” Albury repeated.
The kid nodded. Albury wordlessly slammed him in the stomach with a straight right, then cracked him in the nose with an abbreviated left cross. The kid fell, blubbering, the dark blood shining in the pale lumination of the streelights.
Albury locked the toolbox in the trunk of the Pontiac and hurried back to the ball park with the spikes. The game was already over. The Padres had won, 6-2.
“Nice game, champ,” Albury said to Ricky as he came off the field.
“Yeah. You see the slider I got Buddy with in the seventh?”
“Naw, I missed it.”
“So did Buddy.” It was Enos, laughing. “Breeze, I got worried about you, so I polished off the six-pack.”
“Some dirtbag broke into the car. I caught him before he got away. Here.” Albury handed Ricky the spikes. “I should have brought ’em with me in the first place.”
Ricky opened the box. Buddy Martin looked over Ricky’s shoulder as he inspected the new spikes.
“Dad, these must have cost forty bucks.”
“It’s OK,” Albury said. “Had a good catch today.”
Enos gave him a doubting glance. Albury wondered, could he know about the traps already?
“Get your jacket on, champ. Let’s get going before the whole car gets stolen. Enos, Buddy, we’ll see you.”
It took Albury ten minutes to reach Whitehead Street, after dropping Ricky at the trailer with an injunction to let his arm dangle a long time in the hot shower. Albury was supposed to pick up Laurie in an hour. Time enough.
IF THE GREEN LANTERN had any distinction at all, it was as the only bar in Key West that never claimed to have fueled Ernest Hemingway. The bar was a chintzy dive of plasterboard and shadows in what was supposed to be a nautical motif.
It seemed like every time Albury went in, there was a different parrot harping in a bamboo cage over the cash register. The regulars would sometimes turn the nightly dart games on the birds, when things got loose.
Albury nursed a beer and looked quietly around. “Have you seen Winnebago Tom?” he finally asked a bartender named Pete.
“He was here. Probably out back.”
“Out back” meant upstairs in a supposedly private room reached by a stairway guarded by a tough, tattooed young Cuban. People said he had once been a commando.
Albury gestured toward the stairs with his head. The guard nodded slightly and let him pass without a word. Upstairs, about ten men formed a smoky circle on the linoleum floor, playing poker.
Winnebago Tom leaned nonchalantly against the wall, watching the action with almost scornful disinterest. Albury knew he was the house. Tom was wiry, slick, one of those savvy Key West Cubans whose family had been around so long they had all but forgotten Spanish. Tom worked for the Machine. A linkman, they said.
“Well, hey, bubba.” Tom prised himself off the wall. He gestured toward the knot of men on the floor around a nucleus of dirty ten-and twenty-dollar bills. “Looking for a game?”
“Can we talk?”
Tom shrugged. “These are my friends.”
Albury lit a cigarette to camouflage his dislike. “It’s business,” he said.
“Business!” Tom exclaimed with artificial brightness. “Why didn’t you say so? Why don’t you go down and wait for me in the camper? Help yourself to a drink. I won’t be long.”
Parked behind the bar, Tom’s Winnebago was the most luxurious in all Monroe County. It was cool and quiet, the air conditioner barely audible. It smelled of wood and real leather. Albury counted eight stereo speakers inset into the walls. He poured himself a stiff scotch from one of two dozen bottles in a long cabinet behind the bar. The glass was crystal, Albury noted. Tom liked to boast that his camper had cost fifty thousand dollars.
After fifteen minutes Tom came in, humming “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” He poured himself three ounces of Chivas, drank off half of it with a smack, and smiled at Albury.
“Yessir, business. What can I do for you, Breeze?”
“What do you know about my traps?”
“Orange-and-white. Everybody knows that. Family colors, always have been.”
Albury stood and helped himself to another scotch.
“I heard you lost a few,” Tom ventured.
“A few hundred,” Albury said harshly. “Tom, you lived here your whole life. You know what this kind of thing means. You know the rules.”
“I know there’s a law against cutting traps.”
“You know the rules. Forget the fucking law.”
Tom ran a manicured finger around the edge of his glass until it squeaked.
“You called me two, three days ago,” Albury said.
“Did I?”
Albury slammed down his glass.
“OK, I called you. I’m a businessman. You said no. I said OK. A man can say no,” Tom said. “Even in this town, a man can still say no. I respect you for that, Breeze. Lots of fishermen woulda jumped at the chance for that kind of money. You said no. I respect that. ‘Course, you weren’t hurtin’ then quite as badly as you are now.”
Albury’s eyes flashed. “Three hundred traps.”
Tom whistled unctuously. “Damn! I’m really sorry, Breeze. But why you tellin’ me about this?”
“Because I’m considering whether to kill you.”
Tom laughed thinly. “Oh?”
Albury sat down in a leather chair that swiveled. He toyed with a set of stereo headphones. “That’s right, Tom. If you had anything to do with it.”
“I didn’t, Breeze.”
“It would have taken a boat a day and a half to cut all those traps off,” Albury said. “The real mystery is how they knew about one of my spots. It’s a lot of miles out, Tom. No one but me fishes there. Of course, if someone were to follow me one day, at a safe distance, they could figure it out. With radar and Loran.”
“I suppose,” Tom said enigmatically. “Not many crawfish boats have radar, Breeze.”
“Not many need radar, Tom. Just a few. Fact, I can tell you the names of a half-dozen fishermen who do. And they all worked for you, one time or another.”
Tom fingered a thick gold chain on his left wrist. He stared at Albury through hooded eyes. “I said it wasn’t me. I got work to do now.”
Tom was at the door when Albury stopped him.
“Tom, if you say you didn’t, I’ll accept that.”
“Good.”
Albury was standing now, and he had a good six inches on the taut little Cuban. “When we talked on the phone the other day, you said the offer was good for a week.”
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll make the run.”
Tom stepped back and played at fixing another drink. He said nothing for several minutes. Albury stayed by the door; he felt hot and vaguely sick to his stomach.
“One min
ute you threaten to murder me and the next you want to do business,” Tom said reproachfully.
“It’s the nature of things.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know anymore.”
Albury said, “Tom, your people need a boat as big and fast as mine. That’s what you said the other day. More than that, you need a captain who’s not going to spook or run aground. These waters are my business. What happens afterwards is yours. You’re in charge of delivery.” That was how Winnebago Tom had gotten his nickname. Pack the stuff in campers, five and six tons each, and send it to Miami on U.S. 1. State troopers don’t often stop a Winnebago; got to be nice to the tourists. Tom was a clever man.
“I’ll let you know. What’s the name of your boat again? The Peggy—Peggy something?”
“Diamond Cutter,” Albury corrected. “And she’ll do twenty-eight knots.”
“You got in trouble a few years ago, didn’t you?”
“Not right away.” They hadn’t caught him until the stuff had been unloaded. Albury stung at the memory.
“Yeah, I remember. But if you have trouble one time, it’s real easy to have trouble again.”
“It was real quiet trouble, Tom.” In jail he had not told them anything, and Tom knew it.
“Yeah, I remember that, too, Breeze.”
Albury felt soiled, like he had wet his pants or sicked up in church.
“I’ll be going now, Tom. You know where to find me.”
“Right, Breeze. I’ll let you know.”
Wearily, Albury backtracked down Whitehead and parked the car outside the Cowrie Restaurant. When Laurie got off work just after eleven, she had to wake him up behind the wheel.
Chapter 3
HUNCHED CROSS-LEGGED on the rumpled bed, Laurie distractedly ran the pencil along the side of her neck. Deep in thought, she scratched the underside of her breast.
“Aha!” she exclaimed at last. “Got you. ‘Russia’s foe is not the land of the rising sun.’ Four letters, Breeze.”
“Hmmm.” He was buried in the box scores.
“It’s ‘West.’ Japan is the land of the rising sun, but the sun rises in the east; and if it isn’t the east it must be the west. Russia’s foe is the West. Got it?”
It looked to Albury as though the Orioles would not catch the Yanks.
Laurie swiped at his ribs with her elbow. “Breeze, pay attention. Improve your mind.”
Of course, if the Red Sox could ever put their pitching together it could make a difference. That would cause some trouble.
“Goddamnit.” Laurie snatched the sports page away and levered up to sit crossways on his chest, pencil poised. His horizon shrank to one chunk of milky thigh, more Rubens than Modigliani.
“Get off, willya?”
She stared down at him sideways, not a beautiful woman—too heavy for that—but definitely not homely either.
“Now don’t get cross.” She tossed the paper onto the floor, jettisoned the pencil, and pivoted ninety degrees to deliver a slurpy kiss to his dong. Her knee, coming over, clipped his jaw. He saw stars for an instant, and then only an ample bottom cleft by frizzy red hair. He swatted her on the ass.
“Breakfast,” Albury demanded.
“Later,” she called. “Besides, we’re both too fat, and anyway”—a suckling pause— “Sundays make me very sexy.”
“You’ve already been very sexy. Twice. Once on the top, once on the bottom.”
“Complaining?”
“I’m kind of hungry.”
“No,” Laurie said firmly, embarking on a longer, more tingling pause. “You want eat? I’ll give you eat.”
“What the hell,” Albury said.
Later, the smell of frying bacon roused him. He lit a cigarette and assayed the sounds from the tiny kitchen. Laurie was a tolerable cook. She came in after a few minutes with a cup of fresh coffee and tweaked his nose gently.
“I’m cooking up a half-dozen eggs. With garlic,” she announced. “The Sunday is young.”
She was the hungriest damn woman he had ever met. Ate like a horse and fucked like a dream. She had been with him almost a year and never once let him imagine that he was the only one. Some nights she didn’t come home. But then again neither did he, some nights.
Albury had met her in a bar and they’d screwed for the first time twenty minutes later in the backseat of the Pontiac. Like two horny kids.
She never talked much about herself, but as the year went by she let more and more show, the way a hermit crab slips out of the shell to see if it’s safe to dash for another. Laurie Ravenel, South Carolina girl, victim of one of those fancy New England colleges where they’d pruned her accent, straightened her hair, and filled her head with so much useless drivel that she had graduated a well-groomed zombie—poised, fashionable, and neurotic. A stockbroker had wooed her, married her, bored her, and caught her in bed with his best friend in quick succession.
She had stopped in Key West because that was where the road ended. A bright girl, but awful empty-headed sometimes. She was a sucker for causes. One week she collected petitions to build a refuge for sooty terns, as though Miss Ravenel, going on thirty and a Key West expert for all of six months, would know a sooty tern to say hello to if one nested smack between her big boobs. The gay crowd down at the Cowrie was where she picked up that kind of bullshit. It was like a virus. With each new cause—Save Fort Jefferson, Protect Our Beaches, Ban All Fishtraps—Albury seesawed between amusement and anger.
Laurie had been the first woman Albury had brought home since Peg had left. He had thought about it a long time before deciding it wouldn’t hurt Ricky. He was old enough to know which end was up. And they hit it right off, Laurie and Ricky. She might not have been the mother he needed, but she did fine as kind of an older sister. She cut his hair; washed his clothes; helped him with his homework, particularly when the math was beyond Albury; and one night, when he had come home with a savage crick in his pitching arm, Laurie had spent more than an hour working on it.
Most Sundays, Albury didn’t go out on the boat. Now he dozed on the black vinyl sofa. He dabbled with the newspaper, poked at a western. Laurie had appropriated the bedroom to write, so he made himself a scotch, quietly. It had been one week since his edgy conversation with Winnebago Tom. Albury had stopped by the Green Lantern a few nights before, and the arrogant asshole had waved at him and sent over a drink. A rum punch, whatever the hell that meant. Albury had left it on the bar.
The end of the month was on him. The bills were stacked up in the middle of the room, but they would keep.
Laurie emerged at one point in search of a verb. She was predictably disheveled in one of Albury’s boat shirts and a pair of her favorite lime panties. Poetry really took it out of her.
“You know the word ‘shirr,’ like shirr eggs?”
“So?”
“Do you think I can use it as a verb, to describe time? Like time ‘shirred’?”
“Sure.” He pronounced it to mock her.
“Don’t be stupid. I think it’ll work.”
Albury asked lightly, “Hey, lady, when are you going to sell one of them poems?” He rhymed poem with comb.
“Soon. Sooner than you think,” Laurie said. She slammed the door so hard that the windowpanes rattled.
Albury went back to his western. He would give Tom another week to run up the flags. If not, Albury would drive up to Marathon. There was a guy up there he knew in the same business. An Anglo, too.
When Laurie next appeared, she was composed and contrite. “Breeze, what are these?”
Albury glanced at the fistful of bills. Change-up followed by a fastball. She had gone, lickety-split, from impassioned poetess to hard-eyed business manager.
“Bills,” he said. “What the hell do you think?”
“Jesus, why haven’t you paid them?”
“No money.”
“No money?”
Christ, she was slow sometimes on the practical things. “It was a bad month. I had to overhau
l the engine.”
“I remember.”
“And fishing was shitty,” Albury said.
“Breeze, there’s enough lobster around that we could serve it for breakfast down at the restaurant and still have a full freezer. Everybody’s loading up.”
“Not me.” It was time to find a reason for going down to the boat. He swiveled to his feet, growling.
“You haven’t been gambling or anything?” Laurie asked.
Albury laughed bitterly. “No. Since you won’t shut up, I’ll have to tell you. I lost a couple hundred traps. Somebody cut ’em off. Brand new crawfish traps, gone just like that.” He snapped his fingers in her face. She winced and took two apprehensive steps back. Her eyes began to flood.
“Oh, Breeze, I’m sorry. Baby, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Albury’s anger evaporated. He ran a tired thumb and forefinger across his eyes. “It’s just one of those things. Nothin’ you can do about it. I’m just telling you so you won’t ask about the money. When you’re down three hundred traps, there’s no way.”
“Three hundred.” Laurie took a deep breath. “Who would have done it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find out.” He walked to the bar and refilled his scotch. “If Ricky finds out about any of this—any of it—”
She nodded dumbly. “He’s bound to, Breeze. The kids at school are bound to be talking.”
Albury grunted. She was right.
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t know.”
“You act like you do.”
“I’m thinking is all.” Albury didn’t feel like talking anymore. He told Laurie he needed to go down to the fish house. She took two Amazonian steps forward and crushed herself to him, taking his wind away and tipping three ounces of fresh scotch onto the floor.
“Oh, Breeze,” she murmured against his chest. “This is terrible.”
“Exactly,” Albury said, taking her shoulders and moving her back so he could look at her face. “When this is settled, I’m taking off with Ricky.”
“Out of Key West?” Laurie asked.
“Exactly,” he said. “I’m finished with it.”
THE PRELIMINARIES of the run began that night, simultaneous with the start of the nine o’clock movie. Laurie had taken to bed with a yellow legal pad and three crisply sharpened number-two pencils. Ricky lay on the floor, torn between John Wayne and an English essay. On the sofa, Albury had no pangs: he had seen the movie before; he would watch it again.