Tropical Freeze Page 8

  Ozzie said nothing, trying to decide how to retaliate.

  Bonnie said, “You never even had an old coon dog. You’re just lying to make yourself sound redneckier than you are.”

  He picked up the clippers, looked at his own nails. “There’s a whole hell of a lot you don’t know about me.”

  “I know more than I want to already,” she said.

  It sounded like a title to Ozzie and that made him calm down a bit. I Know More Than I Want to Know Already. About a man who was a loser from the age of fourteen. Living with whores, knife-fighting at the pool hall, and some woman, a good church woman, gets hold of him and tries to turn him around, give him good white-collar love, but he doesn’t have the disposition for it, seen too much split fuck already to believe in that innocent bullshit. Beer diluting music. Yeah, yeah.

  He sat there for a few minutes, and Bonnie was painting her nails some awful color of purple, stuffing little cotton balls between her toes, and did she know what he was doing over there? Did she give a rat’s ass about his talent? Hell, no.

  Ozzie went into the back bedroom, threw some of Bonnie’s dirty clothes off the bed into the corner by where the TV was sitting on a Jack Daniel’s box, and he settled onto the bed in an Indian squat.

  He got one line into it, “He dropped out of school in the seventh grade, graduated to a rusty switchblade,” and Bonnie was stomping down the wooden outside stairway, shaking the whole house.

  Jesus, did Johnny Cash have to put up with this shit? Here it was less than a week till Old Pirate Days, and the talent contest, and he had just that one song, Papa John’s ballad.

  First prize in the contest was 250 bucks. But it wasn’t the money that had his blood warm. It was the exposure. It was standing up in front of God knew how many people, on the stage at the Waldorf Shopping Center, and letting them hear what was seething inside him. Blowing the rest of the local phonies right out of the water. That is, if he could get over his stage fright in time.

  Ozzie stood up, went over to the window, and looked out at the ocean. Pretty damn nice view for free. Papa John was letting him off on the rent, using that as his pay, plus a twenty once a week for walking-around money.

  There was a yacht maybe a mile out, heading south, slicing along like that, leaving that zipper of white suds behind it, white against all that blue. It gave him a hollow ache in his gut. Almost like seeing a beautiful woman walking toward him on the street. He wanted it awful bad. All of it.

  But he was the kid in his song. Dropped out of school at fourteen, fifth grade. And those women on the sidewalk, they knew. They knew from the way his eyes looked, how he parted his hair. Hell, Ozzie didn’t know how they knew, but they knew. And they were switching and swaying to the goddamn docks to climb onto that yacht so it could slide by out there like the white peak of a fiber glass iceberg. And here he was, stuck with the likes of Bonnie.

  Bonnie, shit. Bonnie was history. She’d just been phase one. The third week in town he’d met her at the Caribbean Club. He’d gotten her drunk with his very first twenty dollars from Papa John. He’d sung to her there at the bar. Christ, now he couldn’t believe he’d ever sung to that bitch. Then let her move her stuff into his house the next afternoon. No, Bonnie was nothing. She was just the gutter he was going to rise out of.

  Phase two was Darcy Richards, maybe even three and four. And he was nearly there. Talk about luck. Here he’d been in town for two months and already apprenticed to Papa John Shelton, learning the ropes from the dark prince himself. And then it turns out that living just fifty yards away in John’s trailer park was a genuine TV star, a woman with every single ingredient on Ozzie’s dream woman list.

  She had bozooms for one. Nice round ones. He’d even gotten a peek at her nipples. One afternoon, when he was cutting the grass in the little lots in the trailer park for John, she’d come outside her trailer and given him a Coke. He’d hung around, not saying anything, not wanting to blow it, drinking the Coke, while she pulled up some weeds growing around her driveway slab, stooping over in a loose white blouse. Ozzie angled for the right shot, finally got it, both nipples. Pink and small. Perfect.

  He liked her voice. Even better in person than on TV. It warmed up something inside him. She had a flowery smell to her. And she had blond hair, with a good bit of red in it. He even liked her name, though it was a damn hard name to find rhymes for. Larceny was about all he’d come up with. So he hadn’t used it in a song yet. But he would.

  He’d liked her the first time he’d seen her, but then somebody had told him she was a weatherlady, and he’d started watching her every day, giving the Miami weather. But it wasn’t really till that day drinking her Coke, smelling her shampoo, that he was in love.

  He was at the point now, he’d been shadowing Darcy on the weekends, bodyguarding her, he called it. And thinking about her when he couldn’t be watching over her. At the point where if she said, swallow this bag of broken glass, he’d lick his lips.

  Four or five times now he’d cut her lawn. Always on Saturday, when he knew she was down for the weekend. Her lifeguard boyfriend, coming and going a couple of times, had taken a couple of hard looks at Ozzie, not saying anything but giving him the lifeguard stare. But Darcy always had a Coke for him and would talk to him. Talk to him like he wasn’t some creep, the way Bonnie did.

  Finally Ozzie had gotten over his shyness, and just last week he’d told her how he was a songwriter, just working at odd jobs till he got his break. And did she smirk at him, did she rag his ass like Bonnie? Hell, no. Darcy said, “That’s like me. Paying the bills with one hand, trying to be immortal with the other.” Man, Ozzie liked that. He thought maybe he could use that line in a song, if he could just figure out what the fuck it meant.

  Ozzie put on a green sweat shirt and went outside, walked down the rickety stairs. He stopped and looked in on Bonnie in the garage, bent over the workbench breaking colored glass into small pieces with a ball peen hammer. In a while she’d fire up her blowtorch and start to piece together her designs. Flowers mostly, but sometimes unicorns or fish, shit like that, out of that colored glass and melted lead or solder or something. Hang in your window, dress the place up a little. Tourist shop shit.

  Bonnie said she was trying to better herself. A businesswoman selling her glass things to the shops around the island. And now she was taking art classes at the community college. A fucking college girl, too, all of a sudden. She said it was in case she needed something to fall back on.

  Other than a mattress? Ozzie said.

  He walked across the straggly grass, sandspurs sticking to his frayed tennis shoes. He’d slung a painting tarp over the black Porsche. Last night he’d brought the lifeguard home in the ice cream truck and had to turn around and hitchhike all the way back to Islamorada in the rainstorm to pick up that car.

  Lifting an edge of the tarp now, Ozzie felt the shine come to his blood. That car, that fucking car. It made him shudder thinking of what he had to do to that car.

  Ozzie got out the key he’d locked the Yale with. And goddamn it, his hand was rattling around like it was him that was the prisoner. He glared at his right hand, took a breath, and brought the key to the slot. He slid back the double doors. It was almost noon, and the air temp was still in the seventies; but the stinking air that came rolling out of the shed must have been near a hundred. And it smelled like the smart guy’s five-day deodorant pad had shriveled up and rotted away.

  Shoo-ey. It didn’t matter how many years of college you had. Stink was stink. Ozzie smiled to himself and took a little suck of air from outside before stepping into the shed and drawing the doors closed behind him. His heart wallowed around as if it’d come loose.

  Ozzie had the guy rolled up in a ten-by-ten patch of yellow linoleum. The stuff had come unglued from the cement floor of the storage shed, so Ozzie had moved all the lawn mowers and wheelbarrows out into the yard and had just peeled up the linoleum the rest of the way.

  And last night, when he bro
ught this guy home, unconscious, all he did was lay him down on one end of it and roll him three turns, keeping the stuff tight against him. His chin was just barely out of one end, and the glue of the linoleum was sticking it all closed. Just to be safe, Ozzie had tied a length of nylon rope around the middle of the roll.

  Ozzie stepped inside the shed. The lifeguard was awake, giving Ozzie his best evil eye. A yard of duct tape was keeping his mouth shut. And the linoleum was holding just fine. The guy’s feet were a good yard up inside there, and his arms were flat against his sides. Like a corn dog, getting plump and juicy inside there.

  About the only reason Ozzie could ever remember feeling sorry he’d dropped out of school so early was that he’d missed those frog classes. The ones where you cut its leg off and stuck some electricity to it and it twitched.

  10

  Gaeton Richards had crushed the palmetto bug with his chin, and now its yellow goo was running down his neck. But the roach’s head was still stuck to the edge of the rolled-up linoleum and the antennae continued to wave. Gaeton could identify.

  Truth was, he wasn’t even sure he could give his feelers a good wave at this point.

  He’d been inside this roll since just after midnight last night. It felt like early afternoon now. The dehydration was weakening him badly. He was dizzy and his throat hurt. He’d lost touch with his arms and everything below the sternum sometime early this morning.

  Gaeton wondered if the palmetto bug was having an after-death, out-of-body experience. Moving toward the bright light, a transfusion of serenity, the blue doors of heaven swinging open, all those angelic feelers waving: hello, come on up, it’s great up here, always dark, crumbs everywhere.

  Ozzie shut the door. He was a blocky guy, big teeth, black hair cut in a burr. Large bones that carried a little extra meat without making him seem fat. And there were those eyes, a foggy gray. They probably came from his low-protein diet, Budweiser and Twinkies. He looked as if it wouldn’t take a full moon to set him off. A sixty-watt bulb might do just fine.

  Ozzie stepped across the linoleum roll, bringing with him some of that crisp outside air. Ozzie said, “You’re stinking this place up.” He unwrapped the silver duct tape from Gaeton’s head and drew the white sock out of his mouth.

  Gaeton dragged in a few breaths, stretched his mouth, worked his jaw. He waited till his pulse had slowed to a jog and said, “Oswald Daniel Hardison of Quincy, Florida.”

  Ozzie jerked around as if somebody’d goosed him.

  Gaeton went on, “Worked for three months at Golden Years Retirement Home in Panama City and got eighteen months at Loxahatchee for stealing rings from old ladies there. And bills from their change purses. Ozzie, come on, man. Grandmothers’ wedding rings? Ten-dollar bills folded up to squeeze in a rubber change purse?”

  “Where’d you get this shit, you slut?”

  Gaeton took a deep breath and tried to blow the roach head off the edge of the linoleum. Didn’t faze it. The feelers still twitched, trying to locate the crack it had come in through.

  “Papa John’s going to be pissed when he finds out what you’re doing to me.”

  Ozzie put his jacket on a sawhorse. He bent and scooped up his dumbbells, began working on his biceps, right arm up, left arm down.

  “You take all this time just to think that up? Scare me with what Papa John might do, that old man? Shit, that’s lame, dingleberry.”

  “Now look, Ozzie? You know why I got the skinny on you? You know why that is?”

  He shifted to shoulder shrugs now. What little cockiness he’d summoned had evaporated. He was quiet, but the machinery of his thinking was almost audible in the tiny room.

  The fact was, Gaeton had noticed Ozzie hanging around, taking an unusual interest in Gaeton’s comings and goings. He was always glancing at Gaeton’s trailer when he was cutting somebody’s yard. Darcy even spoke to him some. That was when Gaeton got serious and found out his name from one of the neighbors, had Adamson run the boy through the FBI computer.

  He’d checked out normal. Normal for a sleazeball.

  Gaeton said, “It’s because where I work, it’s our business, knowing about people, looking things up on them. You have any idea who I’m referring to here? Who you’ve got rolled up here.”

  “Yeah, right. You’re Mafia. You’re Al Capone’s little brother. Right, right. I’m not as dumb as I look, dingleberry.”

  “Not mafiosi, Ozzie. The other side. The good ones. The guys with the morals and the tin stars. You’ve just waded hip-deep into shit here, buddy.”

  “What a crock,” Ozzie said. “Listen to me, dickbrain, you’re fucking with my woman, and I’m pissed,” Ozzie said, his eyes out of gear, concentrating on pumping that iron.

  “Who we talking about here?” Gaeton said. “Your woman.”

  “You know fucking well who we’re talking about.”

  Something in Gaeton sagged. This had nothing to do with Benny. Some relief there. This was something else. This looked to be some serious miswiring in the kid’s medulla oblongata.

  “Could that be Darcy Richards?” Gaeton said. “Your woman?”

  “You got it, corn dog.”

  “She aware of this? That you’re her boyfriend?”

  “She will be,” Ozzie said. “Soon enough. When I’m ready.”

  “Hey, Oz. You better find yourself another roll of linoleum for her then.”

  Ozzie sat down on the roll, about where Gaeton’s knees would be, set the weights aside. “Jagoff like you, in the position you’re in. Me, I wouldn’t be in a talking mood.”

  “So I’m supposed to be your rival?”

  “You got it,” Ozzie said.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, barely a sound. “Ozzie, Ozzie.”

  “So what is this deep shit I’m supposed to be stepping in?” Ozzie gave the roll a little turn, rolling his butt back on it, and the linoleum revolved a quarter of a turn to the left. Gaeton got a sudden close-up of the cement floor.

  Gaeton said, “Ozzie, the lady you’re hot for, she’s my sister, man. My little sister.”

  Ozzie brought the roll back upright.

  “Sure she is,” Ozzie said. “What a bullshit artist.” But Gaeton could hear the last of the cockiness bleeding away.

  “Go ask her, Oz. See if she has a brother. She comes down to visit him on the weekends, stays in his trailer. Ask Papa John or anybody around here. You’re making a major fuck-up here.” Gaeton tried to keep his voice slack, not let this bozo see the anger.

  “You’d like that, huh? Me go over there and ask her and then everybody’d know who done what to who.” Ozzie rocked the linoleum roll back and forth, looking down at Gaeton, running all this around inside there.

  “Ozzie, you’re no murderer. I look at you and I see a guy trying to work his way up the ranks. You found yourself a great teacher, you’re probably learning some good scams. But I don’t see a murderer. That’s a whole different order of stupidity. People still care about that.”

  That got a slow turn of his head. A squint in his eyes and lift of eyebrow, theatrical slyness.

  Gaeton said, “Yeah, that’s right. I know a good bit about you. Heard it on the coconut telegraph. It’s an island, Oz. Somebody takes a deep breath on one side of this town, somebody’s eardrums pop on the other. You forget, man, I lived here all my life. I seen Papa John’s boys before, coming and going. I know what kind of shit he gets you boys to pull for him.”

  “What a lying sack.” Ozzie stood and picked up one of the barbells, dangled it over Gaeton’s face. “Don’t give me any more of this bullshit, or I’ll do you right here and now.”

  Gaeton said, “He have you popping Pirellis at the restaurant parking lots? Slapping bald ones on his rims, while the guy’s inside guzzling martinis. The Grander brothers still buying them off Papa John? Huh? He still into that?”

  Gaeton took a breath, swallowed. He could feel the quirkiness in this boy, his impulses clashing with what intelligence he had. The boy was teet
ering, and Gaeton wasn’t completely sure which way to nudge him. He wasn’t sure anymore if he was in more trouble or less of it than if Benny was behind this.

  Keeping his voice as mellow as he could make it, he said, “I want you to listen carefully to what I’m telling you. All you have to do is ask anybody in Key Largo. You find out I’m her brother, you come back here, unroll me. I’ll get up, and get back to the job I’m doing. Charge this up to an unfortunate mistake. But if you go ahead with what you’re planning, you’re going to get caught within twenty-four hours, and you’ll never see Darcy again. You won’t see your balls again either.”

  Ozzie’s eyes seemed to dim from the power drain of the thought.

  Gaeton said, “And hey, while you’re checking this out, you don’t want me to die, right?” Ozzie stared down at Gaeton with a sleepwalker’s bland face. Yes, master. What shall I do? No wonder Papa John liked this boy. “So, Ozzie. Go outside and bring me back some water.”

  Ozzie left and in a few minutes returned, dragging the hose into the shed. He aimed it carelessly toward Gaeton’s face, squeezed the trigger. Gaeton had to twist to take a bite out of the scalding jet. It’d probably been heating in the sun for a week. But hell, it’d keep him alive for a few more hours, and it washed away that damn roach head.

  It was Sunday afternoon, not much after one. Thorn watched the low, leaden clouds. They’d drained the blue from the water. The bay was a drab silver. No horizon line. The forward edge of the front had passed through last night. Today, as the drizzle stopped, the cold would settle in. Chapping weather.

  He watched from his stone picnic table as a pelican coasted at fifty feet. A slight dip of the wing to touch up its flight. Then the big bird scudded, backstroked to a stall, and plunged in a streamlined mass into a boiling school of bait fish. In a few seconds it bobbed to the top and tipped its head back, riding the small chop its splash had made. It floated there long enough to let the pinfish slip into its throat, then dragged itself into flight again. The water quickly calm, the sky empty. Nobody had screamed. No one was weeping, not that you could see.