Tropical Freeze Read online

  Benny stepped close. Gaeton drew in a quiet breath.

  “Oh, hey, Benny, it’s you. Jesus, how’d you find me? Let me tell you, man, it’s good to see you.”

  “Cut the shit,” Benny said.

  “What?”

  “You know what, you Benedict Arnold.”

  “Well,” Gaeton said up into the dark, “at least I tried.”

  “That you did,” Benny said.

  He had imagined this moment, pictured it in different ways. But never like this. It was Ozzie. Poor stupid Ozzie stumbling into it. That unpredictable swirl of weather that fouled up even Darcy’s forecasts. You could see the big patterns, shifts in the jet stream, fronts, and make probable calls based on them, but it was the little local dips and eddies in the atmosphere that might just lash up a tornado that would scatter a mobile home park. Hard as hell to see them forming.

  “You’re a real smoke blower, you know that, Richards,” Benny said. “From day one I knew what you were doing. You came in here, smiling and winking and thinking you’re putting one over on me, finessing Benny Cousins. But from the first fucking minute you proposed it to the bureau, I knew. I always thought of you, Gaeton, as my pet. My pet mole.

  “And then Larry, guy I had keeping tabs on you, he tells me you were knocked over the head by a guy in an ice cream truck and had taken up occupancy in this shed. And I’m like, what? This a special recipe for Eskimo Pie or something, grind up FBI undercover guys? Tell me, man. The fuck is going on with you? You in some kind of neighborhood dispute here? Some kind of sex thing? Man, it’s too weird even for me.”

  Benny nudged the linoleum again, brought it back.

  “How’d it happen, Benny?” Gaeton said. “You get some slime in an open sore? What flipped you?”

  “Jesus, Richards. I thought more of you than that.”

  “So what did it then? Tell me. You weren’t always a crook. Were you?”

  “I’m still not,” he said.

  He sat down on a wooden keg and sighted the pistol at Gaeton. He sighed and brought it back down.

  He said, “See, Richards, you’re like most people, you got no sense of history. You never sat down and thought about what it is we’re doing, like in the big march of time.” Benny leaned his shoulder against the workbench, setting the pistol there. He said, “I’m a student of history. I read about crime. How it was, how it’s changed. How it is now. I mean, everybody acts like it’s all still ‘Honey, excuse me, I’m going to lift your money.’ Andy Hardy bullshit.

  “Yeah, maybe there was a time back a hundred years ago, it was please and thank you, raise your hands, no profanity. There were rules. Everybody knew them, everybody used them. Cops could afford to be polite back. Make our nice little laws, all that goody-goody horseshit.”

  Gaeton was quiet. His throat had almost closed anyway. And there didn’t seem much point to smart-mouthing.

  He could hear a lawn mower, a baby crying. He held on to those sounds. He drew in the cut-grass smell, the aromas of the shed, oily concrete, something mildewing.

  Benny said, “But come on, man. The dope czars, they got Silkworm missiles in their trunks, they got more people praying at their knees than the pope, and whatta we got? A piddling Smith and Wesson? The worthless fucking Bill of Rights?

  “These guys got auras the size of New Jersey. They got armies and satellites and more money than the Saudis. This isn’t happytime Eliot Ness shit. You don’t Boy-Scout these fucks. What we need these days is guys on our side as big and bad and dangerous as their guys. And as rich. We been castrating ourselves with our decency and our Judeo-Christian this and that. But what we need, man, is good guys as big as they are. And ready to do whatever the fuck ugliness it takes. Guys like me.”

  Gaeton said, “Tell me the scam, Benny. What the hell it was I died over, huh?”

  “Fuck that noise,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you jackshit.”

  Gaeton dragged in some air.

  Gaeton said, “It’s just you, isn’t it? Joey, Roger, the other guys. They don’t know from shinola what you’re into, do they?”

  “I’m a loner,” Benny said. “Those guys are plumb lines, man. Fastest route between two points, every one of them.”

  “OK, so what is it, Benny?” Gaeton said. “You supplying hitters for the Italians, playing with wise guys, is that it?”

  Benny laughed, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s what you think? You work almost a year, and that’s what you come up with? Jesus, no wonder the FBI dumped you out here in a no-win situation. Guy as dumb as you, they were probably glad to get you out of the office.”

  “Well, what then? You’re going to do me, what’s the harm? Tell me.”

  Benny rose from the wooden keg. Picked up his silenced .38.

  “You know, this is real convenient for me. You being rolled up like this. This is a real lucky circumstance. Because I been wondering just how I was going to step you across. But I like this, this is weird, rolled up like that. Some guy is working his own vendetta on you, and I’m just fortunate enough to be able to assist him. Man, sometimes, your karma kicks you out something like this, you know it must be from all the good you been doing. You see what I’m saying, Richards?”

  “You’re a goddamn disease, Benny,” Gaeton said, trying to find Benny’s eyes in the darkening room, to give him a look to remember. But all that was left of him was a gleam from his bald head, another glint from that gold earring. Gaeton said, “You’re standing there giving me a twisted history lesson and I’m supposed to smile and nod my head. Get enlightened from a bag of self-righteous rat puke like you. A guy with a spine full of pus, a guy, he screws his country, and has delusions he’s a goddamn hero.”

  The first shot tore into the edge of his belly. And Gaeton began to sink away into a gray sea inside himself. Then slowing, stopping, beginning to rise, coming up into his body again.

  Benny looked down at him from a mile away. And with blood rising into his throat, Gaeton said, “Higher, asshole.”

  The next shot crushed his sternum, knocked the breath from him. And he flickered on the edge of consciousness.

  “Jesus Christ,” Benny said. “Those fucking checks. You’re still holding those, aren’t you? Huh, asshole?”

  Then Gaeton could dimly make out Benny bringing his head down, reaching his arm into the linoleum roll, his hand slipping farther in, wiggling the fingers into Gaeton’s shirt pocket.

  Gaeton collected his dwindling strength, focused it, let it gather as Benny dug the checks out. And as he was pulling his hand out, Gaeton grunted and jerked his head off the cement and bit into Benny’s ear. Snagged the earring in his teeth and gave his head a final twist. Benny screamed, fell onto the cement beside Gaeton. And Gaeton sucked the earring into his throat.

  Far away he heard Benny cursing. And in a moment he felt the burning circle of the barrel press against his forehead. Branded. The Circle O Ranch.

  And then it was cool and exquisitely dark, and for the first time in a very long time, he wasn’t thirsty.

  Benny, fighting back the pain, dropped the pistol onto the cement floor. He tore off the yellow rubber gloves. Once again keeping his hands dishwater safe. He wadded them in the pocket of his crumpled white coat. Then he squeezed his ripped earlobe tight in his right hand. Blood on his sleeve, on his shoulder. He stood there cursing himself, cursing the dead jackoff.

  With his other hand, he slid the cashier’s checks into his inside jacket pocket. His goddamn earlobe was pulsating with about a hundred megawatts. Benny chanted his curses, a twisted mantra of goddamns and shits.

  He stooped over the body again and opened Gaeton’s mouth. He stuck his fingers in there, probing between gum and cheek, under his tongue, down into his throat. A fucking first, giving a guy a postmortem mouth feel.

  There was nothing in there. Benny stood up, wiped the saliva on his pants legs. Maybe he should slice him open. A little work shed autopsy. But shit, what was the point? He’d like to see the medical exa
miner who could match up earlobe samples.

  Benny Cousins looked down at the shadowy figure of Gaeton Richards. Then he bent forward and cleared his nose, one nostril at a time over that stupid man. Dead men were always so stupid. Even worse than the living.

  13

  “I’m not riding with some fucking corpse,” Bonnie said.

  They were in the shed. Bonnie had rolled out of bed wearing a black sweat suit. She was standing there holding a Budweiser, looking down at this guy, some of his forehead gone. It was about two-thirty in the morning. Dead calm. Some sand fleas chewing on his neck, but Ozzie couldn’t even work up strength to brush them off. There in that shed, the one yellow light bulb was showing this guy’s brains stuck to rakes and hoes.

  He couldn’t goddamn believe it. It made his head swirl. At the bar that Sunday night he’d waited till Papa John went to take a piss and he’d asked Crump Berry about Darcy, if she lived with her brother. Crump drove a shrimp truck out of Tavernier. He came into Papa John’s Bomb Bay Bar every night. Crump said, yeah, sure, the brother was FBI or something like that. Straight as they come. And his sister used to be a Miss Florida beauty contest girl. Everybody knew those two.

  Ozzie had to put his hands under the bar, they started shaking so bad. About then Papa John came back and said he’d gotten a call from some lady down in Islamorada about Ozzie insulting her and her kid last night when all they wanted was some ice cream and a few joints. Ozzie said, yeah, yeah, all his fault. He’d gotten his period or something. Sorry, never happen again.

  Ozzie finished cleaning up the bar, a zombie, and wobbled out of there somehow. He sprinted through the cold the two hundred yards back home. The whole way thinking, well, the lifeguard offered me a deal, right? Let him go, forget the whole thing.

  And then Ozzie got to the shed panting. He couldn’t believe it. The fucking door was jimmied open. And as he opened it, right off he smelled the gunpowder. And something worse. But he stepped in anyway, reaching up for the string to the light, feeling the stickiness on his flip-flops. Jesus.

  Then he’d run upstairs and shaken Bonnie, rattled her eyes around. Ozzie thinking, that bitch offed this guy just to trip him up. But she’d barked at him. Man, Bonnie could turn Doberman, snarling, snapping, clicking out her claws. And then Ozzie had to tell her the whole story. Who this guy was, why he was out there rolled up in linoleum. It woke her right up and got her to quit snapping at him.

  She said, “You pathetic dickhead.”

  Ozzie said, yeah, yeah. Agreeing, taking her shit. Ready to take everybody’s shit tonight.

  He led her down to the shed, showed her the stiff. He picked up the Colt lying on the floor and looked it over. Nice pistola. That made three of them he’d gotten out of this. A .357 Smith in the lifeguard’s shoulder harness. On the front seat of the Porsche, a ten-millimeter Colt, looked like a midget .45. And now this one. Ozzie was thinking, man, you shake one of these lifeguards and guns come clattering out.

  Ozzie by then was wondering, what the hell, maybe he’d killed him. He could’ve blacked out, walked in, and shot the guy. But no, that morning he’d driven around the neighborhoods in Key Largo selling ice cream till late afternoon, working his way down to Tavernier and back. Then he got some hedge clippers out of the toolshed and walked through the trailer park, pretending to clip this and that, but actually circling in closer and closer to Darcy’s trailer, trying to work up the stomach for going in there and asking her … but what? What the fuck could he say? Is it your brother or your boyfriend I got rolled up back of my house? So he clipped and snipped and wound up doing nothing.

  Then he spent the evening trying to write a new song, used up ten sheets of paper and got nowhere. Then, at one in the morning, he went to work. He took his raft of shit from Papa John and asked Crump about Darcy. That was the whole day. Nobody killed in there anywhere. Much as he wished, he couldn’t claim this one.

  Ozzie said, “I’ll be right behind you in the truck.”

  Bonnie said, “Eating Fudgsicles while I have a date with a dead guy.”

  “It’s ten miles is all it is. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

  “Some cop stops me, what am I going to tell him?”

  “Go the speed limit, who’s going to stop you?”

  “I’m going to say what? This bozo sucked on a forty-five ’cause I wouldn’t come across for him.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Ozzie.

  “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  But Ozzie could hear it. A little respect in her voice. The woman was starting to see who he was. What he was made of.

  “Hey, I’ll buy you breakfast afterwards.”

  “Yeah, sure, right. Maybe a nice rare steak.”

  Ozzie started to unroll the guy. God, he hoped the lifeguard was still limber enough to wedge him into that car.

  Out there in alligator country, the lights of Miami made a reddish haze in the sky off to the north like the city was on fire. Probably was. They were in north Key Largo, down one of those rutted roads that led west off 905. The place was crisscrossed by canals back there. Ozzie’s hands still herky-jerky.

  Bonnie pulled up to the edge of the canal and killed her headlights. Ozzie got out of the truck, came around to look. It was colder out here, with a raw wind stinging right through you. And shit. The canal was full there, too. Cars, stoves, refrigerators. The Porsche would be sitting up out of water. The canal must have been twenty, thirty feet deep, and it was brimming over.

  He told Bonnie and she cursed at him.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “It’s not my fault.”

  “Well, just take your flashlight and walk along the edge till you see an open spot, why don’t you?”

  So he did. Damn. This place had gotten so popular. Not like three years ago. He’d brought a Toyota out here and dumped it. In and out in five minutes. He’d gotten two hundred bucks for it. A Cuban he’d met in a bar at Vacation Island. That night Ozzie’d gotten out of the car, gone around to the back of it, rocking it back and forth to push it over the edge, and Jesus, then he knew what the deal was. The stench coming from the trunk. Whew.

  That time he’d had to walk the ten miles back down to Key Largo. But he’d learned things since then. Get a partner, even if she was a Doberman. This time things were going better. Except he couldn’t find a space. Another one of the goddamn problems with overpopulation. All the garbage.

  Ozzie walked along the canal edge. Cars, cars, trucks. Insurance, insurance. He felt like putting in a call to the TV people to expose this. Make the cops get off their fat asses. They were so busy ripping off cocaine dealers they ignored these canals out here. Oh, they knew about them, and every six months or so when they needed to get some press, they’d bring a fleet of wreckers out here and haul all the stolen vehicles out. But with half of them working part-time for the drug guys, things were getting out of control. It made it hard on everybody.

  Finally he found a spot. He blinked his flashlight at Bonnie, and she started up the Porsche and hauled ass down to him.

  She parked it right on the edge of the canal, put it in neutral, brake off, got out in a hurry, and right away she started trying to rock it into the water.

  “Wait a minute, goddamn it. Wait a minute.”

  Something had come to Ozzie as he’d been driving up from Largo. How he could maybe squeeze a dollar or two out of this. Long as he was in this far, what the hell. He went around to the passenger side and opened the door. He’d noticed the ring before, thought of just stealing it and trying to pawn it. There was some kind of blue stone in it, a wide gold band. It’d bring maybe fifty bucks. But no, this was better. Ozzie was learning. He was proud of himself, getting smarter finally.

  Ozzie took Gaeton’s hand out of his lap and twisted off the ring. It was the first dead guy he’d touched since that black field hand in the ditch. He kind of liked it. It put a zoomer in his bloodstream for a minute. He hadn’t felt his blood race like that
since Bonnie had squeezed off a couple of rounds at him last month.

  He slammed the door of that Porsche and looked over at Bonnie. She was cursing him, stringing together all the names she’d been calling him lately. Maybe he could get that into a song. Something about touching dead guys, living with a Doberman.

  You know your honey loves you when she aims too high. Something along those lines.

  The two of them pushed that car. They got it going fast enough to get it over the edge and splash into the canal. Ozzie almost lost his balance and went in with it. But Bonnie, goddamn her, caught him by the neck of his sweat shirt, yanked him back. They watched it settle into that water, find its spot, get comfortable, let go of a couple of bubbles. And that was fucking that.

  They were sitting in the ice cream truck in the dark parking lot of the Holy Fisherman Episcopal Church. Bonnie stood in the front of the truck. Ozzie sat in the driver’s seat, staring out through the window. She’d been heaping shit on him all the way back. At this point he needed a scuba tank.

  Well, if Ozzie hadn’t killed this guy, who had?

  He didn’t know.

  He didn’t know shit. He didn’t know what anybody in all of Key Largo could’ve told him. That these two were brother and sister. The weatherlady and the FBI agent. So come on, doofus, try thinking for once. Who did this guy? Who left him there for you to clean up?

  Fuck if he knew.

  Who? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he have the brains God gave a green apple?

  No, he guessed he didn’t.

  It was something the FBI guy was working on. Some case he was doing. And the bad guys some way or another saw what Ozzie did to this guy and came for him, did him and left him for Ozzie to fucking explain.

  That made sense. Or maybe not. He’d have to think this one out. Ozzie looking out at that church, wondering why she’d told him to stop here. What were they going to do? Pray? Repent? Oh, shit. That’s how far down he was right now, he was willing to consider that even. Whatever she said.