Tropical Freeze Read online

John’s line jerked, his pole having that little spasm of a yellowtail, maybe six, seven pounds. He hit it hard. Got it, and started reeling it up, feeling Benny staring at him.

  “You caught a fucking fish, man,” Benny said.

  John turned and offered him the rod. Benny looked at it, at the tip bobbing.

  “I don’t know how to do it,” Benny said.

  “Just crank.”

  Benny dropped his rod on the deck and took John’s. He leaned way back like he was hooked to a great white, tried to crank with his left hand, looking at John with his feeble-ass grin. He switched hands finally, got it around about two turns, and the fish broke off. Benny stumbled back, almost going over the port side.

  “You lost it.” John took his rod back.

  Benny going shew, whew, wiping at sweat on his face. Give him a real fish and his heart would explode.

  “Hey, I liked that. That was good. I wondered what all the fuss was about. All these years, I wondered. But that was good.”

  “That was shit,” Papa John said.

  Benny took a few minutes getting his breath back, leaning against the fish box, gazing back toward land. John bit off the tail of a shrimp, spit it overboard, and fixed the rest of it to his jig. Let it back down into the chum slick.

  “See what I got in mind is,” Benny said, a slight pant still in his voice, “I rent a barstool at your place. I pay you a little something every month and you introduce me around. I shake some hands, do some magic tricks. If somebody’s got a problem, needs a variance, a canal dredged out, whatever, then Benny’ll switch into action, slice through the bureaucracy.”

  “That’s Key West,” Papa John said. “You’re off by a hundred miles. Down there’s where the Bubbas are, where the county’s run from.”

  “That’s exactly my point, John. There’s a power vacuum here. See, I know you used to be head pirate down here, you had some influence. You mounted some heads on your wall and all that. I go in your bar, I see all those pictures. You with this guy and that guy. And I think, man, that’s sad. That’s a fucking shame. ’Cause things progressed and you didn’t keep up.”

  Benny was standing beside him then. John felt a bump on his line, or maybe it was just brushing against the rocky ledges.

  Benny said, “I’m here, my man, to save your ass, help you retain, retool your skills, and move into the electronic age. You teach me, I teach you. One hand jerking off the other.”

  “I already got myself a lackey,” John said. “I don’t think I could train two morons at once.”

  Benny shook his head, looking down at the deck.

  They had about an hour of light left, and about that long till slack tide. Siesta time down below. For that hour between tides, you could dump a ton of shrimp in the water and those fish would just watch them rot. If the tide wasn’t moving, they weren’t eating. Fish were programmed like that, not able to adjust. They’d gotten hard and fixed after a million years of evolution.

  Yeah, John thought, like me. Ordering the same goddamn thing off the menu at Mrs. Mac’s diner for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past five years. Christ, look at him. The most excitement in his life lately, the most change, was this fuckbrain Ozzie. Then all of a sudden here was Benny, a jumbo shrimp snapping in front of his face. Well, what the fuck.

  John turned to Benny and said, “I could sell you a barstool. Wood-burn your name on it. I could take a one-time token of respect.”

  Benny raised his head, a horse-trading light in his eyes.

  “I was thinking more of the virtues of renting, like a trial thing,” Benny said. “Month to month, till we could see how we fit, how things were shaping up.”

  “I got more confidence than that,” said John. “I’m willing to risk that you aren’t going to turn into a bigger asshole. Anyway, you get any bigger, we’ll have to widen the stool.”

  “There you go,” said Benny. “I like a guy who can joke.”

  Benny watched John jig his line, tried to copy it. He said, “So what would it cost me, this one-time payment?”

  “A hundred thousand would be about right. Though I’d take it in installments of twenty-five.”

  “What? Dollars?”

  “You wouldn’t want to hold court in the bar like it is. The roof caving in, the foundation slipping back into the bay.”

  “I wouldn’t want that, no.”

  “So, let’s say you ante up twenty-five quarterly for a year. You got yourself an authentic pirate hangout. A base of operations. I glue my place back together. Time to time I might even take you out fishing.”

  Benny said, “What kind of assurance do I get you don’t throw me out like you did before?”

  “You got Papa John’s sacred word on it.” He shot Benny a smile.

  “Shit,” Benny said. “For that kind of money, you don’t treat me courteously. I’ll have my taxidermy guys take a look at you.”

  “Not to worry, Benny.”

  “There’s another thing,” Benny said, “you might be able to help me on. This Old Pirate Days thing. I pretty much got my ducks in a row already, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt, having you put in a word here or there.”

  “What Old Pirate Days thing?”

  “I decided I want to be King Pirate, Captain Kidd, or whatever the fuck it is. The guy that rides at the head of the parade. You know, wave at the public. It’ll be like my coming-out party.” Benny picked up the twenty-pound rod, leaned over, and reached into the live well and chased a shrimp around. “I heard you used to do that,” he said, looking back at John. “So, you could give me some pointers.”

  Papa John said quietly, “That’s the Rotary Club. They choose whoever the hell they want. It’s their parade, their festival.”

  “I know that,” Benny said. “You think I don’t know that? They’re voting this Thursday night. Like I said, I got everything set already. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a past Captain Kidd say a word or two around town in my behalf, now would it?”

  Papa John blew some smoke out his nose. He looked back at the horizon, bobbing with the moderate chop. The sun starting to silhouette the treeline. From this distance it might be an uninhabited chain of islands. It might be paradise. You come ashore, stretch a hammock between two coconut palms, doze in the breeze.

  He said, “OK, tell you what. I’ll do even better than that. I’ll throw you a party. Tomorrow night. I’ll make a major production. How’d that be?”

  Benny smiled. A little unsure, but the idea growing on him.

  “Yeah, that’d be good. Drink with the goombas, let ’em see the cut of my jib.”

  “Yeah,” said John, smiling to himself. He wanted to see that. Benny flapping his asshole mouth for the Rotary Club boys.

  Papa John felt a flurry in his heart. Yeah. All he had to do was snap his fingers and just like that he was in the middle of things again. If it meant kissing the devil’s ass, then what the hell. He would’ve traded both nuts to feel a little power again.

  “One other little thing,” Benny said. “I had an unhappy encounter with a young man over the weekend. I wondered if you knew him. Name of Thorn.”

  “Sure, I know him.”

  “So tell me,” Benny said. “Which side of things is he on?”

  “Which things?”

  “He a Boy Scout? A do-gooder or something? Somebody I should consider neutralizing?”

  Papa John stopped cranking his line.

  “Kill Thorn?”

  “Kill him, or buy him off, send him on a trip, whatever.”

  “What’d he do to you?”

  “Pissed me off, made me look very bad in front of my men.”

  Papa John said that didn’t sound like reason enough to kill a guy.

  “Isn’t just that,” Benny said. “Him and the Benedict Arnold I mentioned, well, they were mixed up in some sensitive business of mine lately. So I’m thinking, maybe this Thorn is out to do me some kind of personal harm, maybe it’d be circumspect to unplug the boy’s life support.”
r />   “From what I know of the boy,” Papa John said, feeling a fish nudging his bait, “you won’t have any luck buying that boy off, and I don’t believe he likes to travel.”

  “Yeah, those were my exact thoughts.” Benny smiled and said, “I’d handle it myself, but truth is, I’m getting such a high profile lately I’m going to have to start farming this dirty stuff out.”

  “Tell you what,” Papa John said, then stopping to think about it a minute. Yeah, OK, what the hell. He said, “My boy Ozzie’s been itching for some work of this sort. How ’bout we pad out that first twenty-five thousand to, say, forty, and I’ll have Ozzie perform the procedure?”

  Benny smiled again. He aimed a stumpy finger at John and said, “Thirty-two five.”

  John pretended to consider it for a few moments, then said, “Deal.”

  They fished till the tide died out. Papa John caught a dozen yellowtail. Benny held firm at zero.

  19

  As she rolled her wheelchair down the ramp, Priscilla Spottswood grinned at Thorn as if he were her own lost son come home at last. She was wearing bib overalls and a yellow T-shirt and a blue-and-white-striped railroad engineer’s hat. Her white hair loose and long, still full of luster. Three cats chased after her, swatting at her rubber wheels, as she rolled over to him across the concrete driveway.

  It was midmorning Tuesday. The sky clear except for some cumulus along the horizon. Like distant, misty Himalayas. It had warmed up now to the middle sixties, low humidity, a light northern breeze. Good breathing weather.

  As Thorn crossed the yard to her, she brought her chair to a stop, shook her head, smiling, and said, “Goddamn you, boy. Goddamn you all to hell.”

  He bent down and gave her a hug, her bony arms clenching him hard around the neck, her parched lips on his cheek. He took in the chalky, chapped smell of her.

  Priscilla had been head librarian for the upper Keys for forty years. Retired now and just in time, because her hearing was shot. Her voice so loud, she would’ve rattled the card catalog.

  Her blue eyes had grown milky. And there was a long corridor behind them where she disappeared every now and then, coming back with a secret smile.

  “I’ve been guilty of neglect,” Thorn said. “Not hugging the ones I love.”

  “If your excuses aren’t full of passion and drama, I don’t want to hear ’em.” She rolled backwards a couple of feet. “Well, stand still and let me look at you.” She took him in up and down, stayed on his face for a moment. “You’re in love again, now aren’t you?”

  “A little, maybe.”

  “Foshkatosh,” she said. “A little, nothing.”

  Her houseboat, the Miss Priss 5, sat up on concrete blocks twenty feet from the shore. A wide gangplank ran down from the deck. In the middle of the starboard wall a five-foot gash had been cut out and was sealed over with a plastic tarp.

  Thorn nodded at the boat, asked her what had happened to it.

  “I’m putting in a fireplace and chimney.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yeah, I am. I always did want a chimney and fireplace, a mantel to put all my bric-a-brac on. So I thought, well now, old woman, you haven’t got but about thirty seconds left to live, you better get on with doing what you’d always wanted to do. So now I got to make myself live one more winter so I can enjoy the goddamn thing.”

  A black and white kitten jumped up in her lap and circled a couple of times and curled up. Priscilla petted it, smiling at Thorn, shaking her head, looking him over some more.

  “Who is she, the lucky girl? Do I know this one?”

  “You know her. Darcy Richards.”

  “Little Darcy Richards? Well, she’s had a crush on you for just the last twenty-five years. And you just noticed.”

  “I’m a slow learner.”

  “You keep letting them slip through your life, you’ll end up like me, married to a hundred cats and waking up at three in the morning dreaming somebody just called out your name.”

  “I never set out to be a recluse,” he said. “It’s just turning out that way.”

  “Well, come on inside, and see the rest of my tribe.”

  Thorn pushed her up the ramp and onto the deck. As they went through the sliding door into the galley, the harsh reek of ammonia made his breath falter for a moment. Cats everywhere. There might have been forty or so. And a pelican with one wing was standing on the dining room table, watching a calico that was sleeping on top of the TV. The pelican turned and stared impassively at Thorn, then Priscilla.

  Priscilla took a green squirt gun, a translucent Luger, off the sink counter and fired a couple of shots at a white cat sleeping on the sofa. It woke and shook its head and slid quickly down to the rug.

  “I’m training them to stay off the furniture,” she said. “It’s goddamn hard to train a cat. They got brains smaller than the fleas that live on them. But I love ’em anyway, ’cause of their hearts. Now, their hearts are up to size.”

  She fired another burst at a black torn that was just about to jump up on the couch.

  “I better start coming to see you more often,” Thorn said. “You’re getting damn eccentric.”

  “I always been eccentric. Actually, I been getting better. I haven’t been grocery shopping in my mermaid suit since I can’t remember when.”

  Thorn sat on the couch. She offered him a Löwenbräu, and he took it. She had one, too. Rolled up to face him, knee to knee.

  “So now,” she said. “This isn’t a social call at all, is it?”

  “No, ma’am, it isn’t.”

  “And you don’t want me to lend you a book. Renew your card.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You going to make me guess?”

  “I’ve got a problem. It’s like a research problem. I need to get some information.”

  “You want me to do something with my computer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something illegal?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Thorn carried three more coral stones the size of grapefruits over to the pile and dropped them. The gloves that Priscilla had offered him were too small, so he had trusted in his own calluses for protection. But it wasn’t enough. These stones were covered with barnacle edges. He’d been working for two hours, and both hands were puffy and bleeding.

  Priscilla had two hundred feet of rocky shoreline along the bay. The pile of rocks she’d mined from there so far was six feet high, ten across. He could picture her wheeling down and back, scraping them up with boathook and fishnet. So this run-aground houseboat could have a chimney. What Thorn could do in an hour probably took her a week.

  He’d looked in on her a couple of times. Type, wait, type some more. Thorn had told her that he wanted to make contact with Benny’s business computer. He said he wanted to use one of his company’s more obscure services, a service that was probably illegal, and had something to do with immigration or ID papers. That was all he could tell her right now.

  “The company’s name?”

  “Florida Secure Systems,” Thorn said.

  She raised her eyebrows, a mischievous spark coming into her eyes as she revolved her wheelchair, parked it in front of the screen, and fired up the machinery with a single switch.

  Thorn made another trip down to the water. There was a good chunk of stone showing at the edge of the mangroves. He pried at it with the small hand trowel she had given him. Rocking it, like a molar still rooted hard. The mud stirred, filling the water with brown haze. He should come back over later with a real shovel and a wheelbarrow and three other guys. Wrench these suckers out, one, two, three.

  But for now he needed to bloody his fingers, strain his back on something. To sublimate, give himself over to this, making it rougher and harder than it had to be. So he would not think of Gaeton, imagine where he was. So he would be doing something.

  It was nearly noon when Priscilla rolled out onto the rear deck. A gr
ay cat riding unsteadily on her shoulder, another in her lap.

  “You better get in here, Thorn,” she said.

  Thorn set the wide black stone he’d finally freed onto the pile. It must’ve weighed sixty, seventy pounds. It was some kind of shale or slate mixed in with that limestone and coral, probably an import from Georgia or the Carolinas, some settler bringing along a chunk of home for a hearthstone.

  Priscilla was sitting in front of the computer when he got inside. A message blinked in the middle of the screen. Thorn moved to her side, looked over her shoulder.

  Transmission interrupted. Fatal error.

  “I think somebody noticed me,” she said, almost a whisper.

  He glanced over the array of computer hardware. Her telephone sitting in the cradle of a modem, the high whine of the disk drive, and lots of other boxes and wires.

  She had taken off her railroad hat, coiled her hair into a bun. She was looking back at Thorn, not exactly a frown, maybe exasperation.

  “Somebody noticed you?”

  “Here’s what I did,” she said. “I wrote a program awhile back. A common hacker’s trick. You want to find the number of a company’s computer so you can talk directly to it. You find out the main number, usually some number that ends in three zeros. In this case, five-five-five-eight-hundred is Florida Secure Systems. Then the program begins dialing eight thousand and one, eight thousand and two. If it doesn’t get that violin screech of a computer signal, it hangs up.”

  She swiveled her chair around so she was facing Thorn. He stepped back and brushed a cat from the chaise and sat down.

  She said, “I suppose it’s something like going to a singles bar. You try this line, it doesn’t work. So you try the next one, and on and on till you make connection. It’s called handshake procedure. Anyway, so it took me a half hour to get their computer on the line.”

  “You did? You got it?”

  She said, “That’s nothing, Thorn. The first faint nibble.”

  She sighted her green Luger at a tabby that was flicking jabs at a shredded carnation in a vase on the dinner table. She got two streams of water on his coat before he registered it and jumped down.

  “The next stage is, you got to get the computer to talk to you. Same thing, the singles bar thing. Try this, try that.”