Tropical Freeze Page 17

  “You know him?”

  “I talked to him once or twice.”

  Ozzie watched this, flicking his eyes back and forth between them, cutting to the .25, away from it.

  “He threw another shell?”

  “I caught him before he had a chance. I was outside.”

  Thorn searched her face. Her expression was bland, but she was admitting it in her eyes. They were blazing, suffused with anger, but she was holding it off. Performing calmly for this guy.

  “Where’s Gaeton Richards?” Thorn said to Ozzie, standing over him. Ozzie didn’t look up. He glanced across at Darcy for a moment, a sheepish look, then looked into this lap. “Where is he, you son of a bitch?” Thorn gripped him by his short, thick hair and lifted his face up.

  Ozzie had a fine sprinkling of stubble on his cheeks, his eyes unfocused, dulled from within. He wasn’t looking at Thorn; he wasn’t looking at anything.

  “Easy does it, Thorn. He’s scared. He’s too scared to talk.”

  “He sure as shit better be scared.”

  Thorn let his hair go. Ozzie’s face fell forward again.

  “What the hell’re you doing, Ozzie Hardison? Writing a note like this. The hell’re you thinking about?”

  “I already asked him that?”

  “And?”

  “Sit down, Thorn. Just cool off, relax.”

  Thorn hesitated a moment, staring at Ozzie, then pulled out the third dinette chair and turned it around and straddled it.

  Darcy touched a finger to her bottom lip, rubbed it the length and back again, looking at Thorn, considering all this.

  She said, “He thought this was an act of kindness. He meant it that way.”

  “An act of kindness,” Thorn said. “That’s a good one.”

  “I’m trying to tell you, Thorn. Who we’re dealing with here, how he arrives at things.”

  Thorn rubbed his hand over the lump in his pocket. Gaeton’s knife. Just touching it seemed to freshen his blood. He imagined holding its keen blade against this guy’s throat. Carve him a new Adam’s apple.

  A loud rapping came at the door. Thorn jerked.

  “It’s the pizza man,” Darcy said. “We ordered a pizza.”

  “You ordered a pizza.”

  She rose and took her purse from the kitchen counter and stepped out the door.

  “We were hungry,” Ozzie said.

  Thorn stared at this guy, listening to Darcy outside with the delivery man. Bouquet of pizza already floating into the room.

  “We didn’t know if you liked anchovy or not,” Ozzie said. “So we got half with anchovy, half just extra mushroom.”

  “You knew I was coming?”

  “She said you probably were.”

  Thorn shook his head. Not believing this.

  “You her brother, too?” Ozzie said. Just shooting the shit, an everyday thing tied up with dark stockings, waiting for the pizza.

  Thorn said, “Now listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m about a split second from cutting off your air supply. So just stop the mouthing, and sit there till I say you can talk. That clear?”

  Ozzie nodded. No anger showing, no malice of any kind, just a schoolboy agreeableness.

  She brought the pizza back inside and got some cheap china plates down from the cupboard, napkins, asked Thorn what he wanted to drink. Whiskey, he said. Asked Ozzie, and Ozzie was about to speak, caught himself, and looked to Thorn for permission.

  “He’s not thirsty,” Thorn said.

  She brought Thorn a bottle of Early Times and a glass with ice. Set it down in front of him, tore off a wedge of pizza, and sat back down to eat. Ozzie watched this, licked his lips cautiously, staring at the pizza.

  “When we’re finished, Ozzie,” Darcy said, “you can have a piece or two.”

  Thorn sipped the bourbon. Finally the hunger moved his hand forward, and he tore off a slice and ate it.

  Darcy was staying inside herself. One quick, light look for Thorn, warning him to cool it, then saying, hmmm, as she ate her pizza. Tapping her fingers as if a tranquil tune played inside her. Thorn tried to bring her eyes to his, but she seemed to sense it and kept her gaze floating around the room.

  Ozzie said, “This guy your other brother?”

  “No,” she said, “I only had one.”

  Ozzie blinked, swallowing, looking down, but Thorn could see he’d been nut-kicked. A flush coming to his cheeks.

  “I’m her friend,” Thorn said. “Her good friend.” And that did it, a three-point play. Ozzie lifted his eyes to Thorn’s, a dead look, his mouth fighting off a sneer.

  Darcy chewed her pizza peacefully.

  They ate all but the last piece. Thorn looked at it, reached out, then looked at Ozzie. The sneer solidly there now.

  “It don’t matter,” he said. “I’m not hungry anyway. So eat the damn thing.”

  Darcy wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, said, “Ozzie says he found Gaeton in his shed. He’d been shot. He didn’t know what to do with him, so he took him out in the Glades and dumped the body. But he took off the ring first, thought he’d make a few dollars out of it. Then he changed his mind, decided it was too cruel. So he wrote this other note.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Somewhat,” she said.

  “It’s true, just like she said it,” Ozzie said.

  “Where in the Everglades?”

  “In a canal I know about, up on nine-oh-five.”

  “I’m calling Sugarman,” Thorn said.

  “No,” Darcy said. “Not yet.”

  “You believe this, this act of kindness bullshit?”

  “I believe Ozzie has become enamored of a media personality, and he considered this an appropriate courtship gesture.”

  Thorn looked at Ozzie. He’d missed it all. A foreign tongue.

  “I know who done it,” Ozzie said. “And why.”

  “Tell us, Ozzie,” Darcy said, using a voice Thorn hadn’t heard. Maybe it was her TV voice. Stiffer than her real one, sounding like a second-grade teacher, sweet but full of iron.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “But I’m planning on setting things right. You’ll see.”

  Darcy stood and came around to Ozzie and untied his left hand.

  “Go on, have that last piece,” she said.

  Ozzie looked at it for a moment, then took it and began to eat it, keeping his eyes down. It only took him a minute to get it all down. Darcy brought him a Budweiser, opened it, and set it in front of him.

  Ozzie drained about half of it and set it down and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his work shirt. Now he looked at Thorn. Narrowing his eyes to make himself look tough.

  “You know what, Ozzie?” Darcy said. “You can convince us you’re telling the truth by describing exactly where my brother’s body is.”

  Ozzie thought about it. His face softened as he looked at her. Darcy gathered her hair with her right hand, lifted it off her neck to let her skin breathe. Dropped it. She stroked the blond hair on the back of her wrist, breathed through her nose. She scratched lightly at the edge of her collarbone. Ozzie watched all this, slumped forward, his throat working. Breathing visibly.

  It was sexual theater. Darcy’s basic movements, the power she was radiating, bristling this guy’s short hairs, charging the air with her heat and spark. Something in Thorn sagged. Was that all this had been between them? The con of sex. A tango of lust. One more twitch and countertwitch between woman and man. Was that all it ever was? Fine arts. Had she summoned this same candescence for him, drawn them together fluidly and inevitably?

  Ozzie said, “I’m a songwriter. I’m a lover, not a killer.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Thorn said. “Would you listen to this.”

  “All right,” Ozzie said. “I’ll tell you just where you can find the body, but I’m not going out there again. I don’t like that place.”

  “That’s a start, Ozzie,” she said. “That gets us going.”

  Thorn was d
riving the 1963 Ford tow truck. He’d called up Shep Daniels at Largo Texaco and settled on twenty dollars and a dozen bonefish flies as payment.

  It was almost nine o’clock, and Darcy and he were creeping through the deep dark, down a narrow sandy road that went west off 905. They’d flushed a rabbit and two possums, a squalling white heron.

  “We should’ve kept him tied up, Darcy.”

  “I think he can help us more if we let him stay loose.”

  “What’s to keep him here? What’s to keep him from hitching up the road right now?”

  Darcy looked out at the narrow roadway, the underbrush almost concealing their way. Headlights so dim on this old truck that you couldn’t make out more than ten feet ahead.

  She said, “He’s not going anywhere, Thorn. You saw him. The boy’s dead in love. As long as he thinks he has a chance of that, he’ll be close by.”

  “A lover, not a killer,” Thorn said. “Good God.”

  “As if he couldn’t be both,” she said.

  Ozzie was in his bedroom rubbing his wrists where the stockings had burned them. Shit, he could’ve stayed there for days. Tied up with her own stockings, having her wait on him like that.

  Now all of a sudden he had a real hunger to look at his Johnny Cash collection: the newspaper photos he’d torn out, the headlines, and a couple of photographs from shiny magazines. He kept them all stored inside a liquor box in his closet.

  He got it down and sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at each of those photos. Getting his fix. The man had had a rough life. He’d hung in there, gotten out of prison, taken his dose of shit, and then he’d climbed right up on top of the whole world and sung his lungs out. The man dressed in black. The black hair, those eyes that just said everything about being dirt poor and hating it, and fistfighting his way past all the losers. He’d gotten way out there ahead of them all, his picture in every magazine, his name on the lips of beautiful women. All because of his voice, because he could take what was burning in his heart and bring it up into his mouth.

  Ozzie took each and every article out of the box and gave each one a long look. First time he’d needed to do that in about a year, since he’d come to town feeling lonely and out of it.

  And at the bottom of the box were the three fancy pistols. The two he’d taken from the dingleberry lifeguard and the one he’d picked up off the shed floor. And the box of cartridges he’d bought a couple of days ago. He held up the one with the silencer on it and found a good comfortable grip on it. Aimed it around the room.

  Thorn was soaked. He shivered now as the wind came into the tow truck’s broken window. The sour funk of canal water filled the cab.

  Darcy said, “You’re sure it’s him?”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “It’s him.”

  She was staring out her window at the dark sky.

  “OK, we got him out of the water. Where’re we taking him?”

  “Maybe to Benny’s place,” she said. “Just drive up and dump the body on his front steps.”

  “Yeah, I could beat my fists on his chest, demand a confession.”

  “You still don’t believe this has to do with Benny, do you, Thorn?”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “But it’s a lot of damn guessing, so circumstantial.”

  “Judge Thorn,” she said. “He’s got to have proof.”

  He drove down U.S. 1, towing that Porsche past the new K Mart, the old shopping center, a couple of miles south of that, and turned into the Bomb Bay Trailer Park.

  She said in a quiet voice, “How’d he look, Thorn?”

  He shook his head, looking straight ahead.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind.”

  She showed him which house was Ozzie’s. Thorn parked in Ozzie’s backyard, got out, unhooked the Porsche. Darcy stayed in the cab of the truck. When he’d run the towline back onto the spool, he walked over to the Porsche.

  The water had all run out now. Strands of algae hung from the chrome strips around the window. Gaeton was in the passenger seat. His face was puffy, and his flesh was gleaming rubber. His hair had been sliced back from the water. A dark ragged cavity in his forehead.

  Thorn looked across at the tow truck, at the back of her head. Darcy waited, looking ahead out the windshield at an empty lot across from the water. She didn’t need to come back there to look. She had him in her head, in that vision inside her, which seemed more accurate and reliable, maybe even more vivid than what Thorn could see, standing there before the fact itself.

  Thorn spit. He sent it across the gravel lot. He hardly ever spit. He couldn’t remember the last time. And now he felt like kicking something. He hadn’t felt that in a long while either.

  He rolled the Porsche backwards into a ramshackle garage, and found a white painting tarp in there, and tossed it over the car, then came back around to the passenger door. The neighborhood was still, a northerly breeze flickering through the coconut palms. It sounded like a smoldering fire in the dry underbrush. It must have been near two, three in the morning.

  Thorn opened the door and stuck his head in the car and slid his arms around Gaeton’s body, hauled him out. He was stiff but soggy. Thorn carried him like a bride across the threshold over to Ozzie’s ice cream truck. He didn’t look at his face again.

  He opened the double rear doors and hefted Gaeton up onto the steel floor of the truck. A long yellow extension cord ran from the compressor on the side of the truck to the side of Ozzie’s house. As Thorn was climbing into the truck, the generator switched on.

  Inside one of the bins was the ice cream. In the smaller cooler on the left side there were plastic Baggies full of joints and uncleaned marijuana. He closed the double doors behind him and stood there panting, eyes burning. He blinked them clear.

  The aluminum doors to the bin hinged in the middle. Thorn lifted the door out. The cooler was two, two and a half feet across. He had to do some rearranging, moving the Eskimo Pies, the ice cream sandwiches, the Popsicles to one side of the freezer case.

  When he’d cleared the space, he lifted Gaeton up onto his shoulder. A cup of cold canal water gushed down Thorn’s back, and something tinkled onto the metal floor behind him.

  Thorn settled the body as gently as he could manage into the case. Gaeton’s back rested against the icy bottom of the cooler, still in a sitting position.

  With his fingernail, he scratched the layer of frost off the temperature gauge inside the cooler. Thirty-four degrees.

  He had to rock Gaeton’s body upright. Then, one hand on his knees, one on his chest, pushing hard, trying to flatten the body a couple of degrees so he could fit the doors back in place. It took five minutes, all the strength he had. But he got him in there, burying him under Popsicles, fruit bars, Fudgsicles.

  Thorn turned and squatted, began to pat the floor to find the object. He took it outside the truck into the light from the streetlamps. Though by then he already knew what it was, rolling it around in his fingers.

  It glittered in the streetlamp. A gold queen conch earring.

  He took it over to the tow truck, got back inside. Darcy turned to him, and he held the earring out to her in his open palm.

  “What is it?” she said, taking it from his hand.

  He waited till she looked up.

  “Proof,” he said.

  22

  Sugarman came to his front door with a huge mug of coffee. He wore a red striped cotton robe and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

  Thorn said, “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

  “Since Christmas,” he said. He sipped the coffee. “You want to come in, or that all you wanted to know?”

  Thorn asked him if he still had that sixty-second Polaroid camera. Sugar said, yeah, he did. Thorn asked if he could borrow it for a couple of days.

  “Sure you can,” Sugarman said. “Even though I know you’re not going to tell me what you want it for.”

  “It’s spooky how well you know me,” Thorn said.

&n
bsp; Florida Secure Systems was in the Banco Nacional Complex on Biscayne Boulevard. The building was one of those postmodern things, brightly colored loops and spirals of concrete frosting the plain white granite walls. Tack some last-minute whimsy on the dead serious. The entranceway was the stark marble of a government building, but just inside the revolving door were murals of bright pouty lips, painted fingernails, red high-heel shoes. There was a whole wall of Marilyn Monroe touching her chin to her naked shoulder.

  Thorn rode the elevator, listening to the soft jazz Muzak, watching a Cuban woman in a tight green dress touching up her mascara. He had on a white button-down shirt, gray poplin pants, and his best deck shoes. Fifty miles south, in the Keys, he might be dressed for a wedding. Here he looked like a ragman.

  He carried the small leather pouch where he stored his fly-tying tools. The pliers, clippers, scissors of his trade. They rattled, and the Cuban woman turned to look at him. Thorn smiled, but she wasn’t having any of it. She’d met smilers before.

  The elevator was glass, running up the inside of the building, giving them a tour of the plumbing and electrical circuitry. Thorn had a pang, thinking of his house, of the stacks of timber lying out in the yard. That skeleton of wood, half done, much of it already graying in the winter sun.

  The woman got off on twelve, and Thorn rode up one more floor. The doors opened into the Florida Secure Systems suite. A chrome and Plexiglas desk blocked his way. Behind it was a wall of glass that showed a sweep of Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach beyond.

  Roger was sitting at the desk. He’d been working on his tan. He was wearing an aqua polo shirt with a bright blue marlin jumping over his pecs. He looked up from a copy of Vanity Fair.

  Thorn nodded hello.

  “Well, well, Mr. Thorn.” Roger folded over the page of his magazine and leaned back in the receptionist chair. “I got a bone to pick with you.”

  “What, did he cut off your rations?” Thorn said. “Just because I dumped him in that hot tub?”

  “Mister, you made the man’s major shit list.”

  “Yours, too?”

  “Fortunately, I’m not a grudge holder. But if you’re here to toss the man out the window or anything, I’m going to have to be more vigilant.”