Florida Heatwave (35 page)

Maura lifted her daughter and ran to the front room, where Lizzie still stood stunned, the gun in her hand by her side.

“Mom,” said Maura. “We have to get out of here.”

But then she looked out the window and saw an old man walking across the circular drive. He looked off into the distance, then he turned back around to look at the building. There was someone pounding the door. But Maura just watched as the old man continued walking, then climbed into the black El Dorado and drove off. There were no thugs waiting downstairs to kill them and take the money. There never had been. That moment of connection she sensed between them, where she thought Jake was trying to spare harm to her and her family, was a lie. She almost laughed. Jake was a really good liar. So good, he didn’t have to say a word.

Emma was clinging to her like a spider monkey, whimpering into her hair. Maura looked at Jake’s lifeless body on the floor. He was already going pale. It was her second corpse in twenty-four hours. Still, she felt nothing. Not fear, not revulsion. It all had the cast of unreality, a foggy sequence of events that were so far out of her frame of reference that she almost couldn’t get her head around it.
You’re new at this, aren’t you?
She
was
new at it. But she had a feeling she was going to learn the game pretty quickly.

The pounding at the door was frantic now. She could hear someone calling her mother’s name. But she found she couldn’t move. Once she opened that door, it was all real.

“Who was he?” Lizzie asked. She put the gun on the table beside the chair and sank heavily down.

“I don’t know,” Maura said. It was the truth. Now the knocking on the door was a heavy pounding.

“What did he want?”

She felt her mother’s eyes on her as she started moving toward the door.

“Is he dead?” Emma asked in a whisper.

“Yes, baby. He is.”

And then she did it. She turned the knob and let the world in.

“Is he dead?”

“He’s dead, honey. He can’t hurt us.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Can he see us like Grandpa? Grandma said that even though Grandpa is gone and I never met him, he can see me. He’s with God and he can see me. That’s what she said.”

“It’s not like that with the bad man. Bad people don’t get to see us.”

“But why not?”

“Those are just the rules.” Lame answer, sure. But Maura was at a complete loss. A week had passed. In the daytime, they were all okay. But when the sun went down, things were hard, especially for Emma. Maura wished she had something to say to her daughter to allay all her fears. But she didn’t.

The truth is a funny thing. It moves like a river though the path created for it; it changes with each perspective. And Maura did tell the truth. Or most of it. She’d read somewhere that someone who is lying, or not telling the whole truth, tends to say too much. They offer too many details, explain things that don’t need explaining, answer questions that weren’t asked.

So she simplified her story. She finished her shift and needed to talk to Bill, so she went to his office. Jake cornered her with a gun and told her he couldn’t let her leave but if he helped her, he’d let her go. She had no choice; she went with him. But she’d noticed he wasn’t comfortable around the water and when she had her chance, she pushed him and took the boat back to shore.

At first they asked a lot of questions, like why didn’t she call the police after she got away, and why did she think he came looking for her, how did he survive, how did he know where she lived and how did he get into the condo building? She told the detectives that she had been terrified, maybe even in shock. She probably would have called the police when she came to her senses. And she didn’t know why he came looking for her, probably to kill her. He told her he’d found her address at the bar. He said something about wanting money. She could hardly remember it, she’d been so afraid for her daughter and mother. She’d told Jake (if that was his name) that he could have her car, that he’d find some money in there, which was a lie; she didn’t keep money in her car. (She purposely used the word
some,
instead of
the,
just in case Lizzie said something about Jake looking for money.) She told him he could have that too if he would just leave them alone. That’s all she knew. And how could she know how he survived or got into the building? How could she possibly know?

It was all true. But not quite true. And, of course, there was one big omission. Still, the words came out smoothly, she never hesitated or changed a thing, even though the older detective asked her all the same questions a couple of different ways, trying to catch her in a lie. But she wasn’t lying. And she cried a lot. That was real, too. She was shaken to her center and every so often she just broke down. The police handled her gently. And the money sat in her trunk, undiscovered. Unclaimed.

Emma was back in school now. Lizzie was over it, she said. She said she was only sorry that she couldn’t have killed the bastard twice. Maura had heard her say that sentence a dozen times over the phone, and to her customers in the shop, to her friends. But on the few nights they’d spent at Lizzie’s, Maura had heard her mother cry out in her sleep a couple times. Lizzie never said a word about the money. If she heard or remembered the exchange between Maura and Jake, she never brought it up.

Maybe it was because Maura had quit the Rockin’ Iguana and reenrolled in classes starting next semester to finish up the twenty credits she needed for her degree. Or maybe it was because Maura was working in the flower shop every afternoon, with Emma playing happily with her toys or watching television in the back, or helping out … pretend sweeping, handing customers their change and saying, “Thank you! Come again.” Maybe Lizzie was just happy that they were all together and not fighting, that things were exactly the way she wanted them to be, at least for now.

There was exactly $82,000 in that bag—not hundreds of thousands, like she thought. And Maura hadn’t touched a cent, just had it sitting on the highest shelf in her closet.

The truth was she was afraid. What if the money was marked (even though she wasn’t completely sure what that meant)? Or what if someone was still looking for it? She was going to let it sit for a while. Just knowing it was there, for Emma, for emergencies, relieved some kind of pressure she didn’t even know was bearing down on her. Plus, keeping it was one kind of wrong. Spending it was another. People were dead. She’d hid that money from the police. It had to do some good, or she was a bad person. So she’d hold onto it for a while.

Lizzie had offered to pay for school and to pay off her credit card, and Maura accepted with a promise to pay her back by working in the shop. She was still looking for another bartending job, but she’d work afternoons for her mother. Lizzie declined Maura’s offer to pay her back with hours in the shop. “You’ll get the money when I’m dead. Might as well have it when you need it.” Maura had a new gratitude for her mother, a new level of respect. She was starting to see something in her mother that she’d missed—a formidable mettle, a hardcore strength.

Sometimes Maura dreamed about that night. Sometimes, lying in bed, she thought about Jake and how he died, wondering who he was, and what he would have done if her mother hadn’t shot him. There was a lot she didn’t know. Bill’s murder was still unsolved. She’d never found out anything more about Jake or who he was, what he was involved in. She supposed she could call the detective working on the case, but she didn’t want to push her luck.

Maura and Lizzie didn’t talk about that night at all. The carpet and some of the furniture in the living room had to be replaced. And once it was all gone, they both knew they shouldn’t bring it up unless Emma needed to. She was having bad dreams, wouldn’t let Maura out of her sight except to go to preschool. She kept telling Emma that everything was going to be all right, that a bad thing had happened, and now everything was okay. And she hoped that it was true. She really did.

Sometimes, like tonight, when she tucked Emma into bed and kissed her hair, she thought of the fading tattoo on the dead man’s arm, the wild card. And Maura wanted to believe that this time, when it came her way, she’d played her hand well.

BY JONATHON KING

It was his love of silence
that made him kill them, and why that sweet cone of quiet, that wondrous calm feeling of a total enveloping quiet, was such a driving need, he did not know.

It might be construed as a strange miasma for someone whose beloved grandfather was a demolition expert and who’d taken his favorite grandson out onto Alligator Alley during that highway’s construction to let him watch the blasts that turned ancient limestone into rubble and made a bombing range out of an incomparable meadow of grassland beauty. He could still recall being a nine-year-old kid standing in the heat of a Florida summer next to his towering grandfather and hearing the patriarch of his family call out in his booming voice: “Fire in the hole!”

The explosion that followed that order seemed to begin as a rumble, a vibration that would start in one’s heels and travel up the ankle and leg bones and somehow settle in a young boy’s chest, tickling his small heart. He would cover his ears, knowing from experience the rip of noise that would then assault them. His grandfather, like all the other men on the job, would simply shade his eyes and look out to the blast site to witness the WHOOMP and the following dirt cloud that signified success. He and the others would smile. But no one would speak. They would instead all go quiet, remarking nothing, until the moment had passed. And it was that moment, that silence after such an insult to the air, that the boy coveted. God he loved that quiet.

Then his own father followed in the patriarch’s footsteps, also becoming an explosives man. But his father blew up suburbs instead of highways. He could recall those times too, accompanying his old man out to the tracts of land west of Fort Lauderdale on Saturdays when the blasting was underway. His father liked to say he was creating lakes, but even a teenager knew better. What his father did was blow the limestone crust of the Everglades to bits, which allowed the giant backhoes to roll in and scoop out the busted rock and vegetation that was once an untouched habitat and then deposit it in piles along a newly created shore. By digging a big hole in the earth, the surrounding water would flow in and thus lower the area water table. The big earth graders would then move in to level out the piles of limestone and sawgrass and black muck and voila! Dry land on which to build more houses!

And just like when he was out with his grandfather, the silence that followed each of his father’s eruptions was like some internal blessing to him. Maybe the shaking that followed the dynamite explosions caused every nearby person to stop for a second—stop talking or walking or clanking the dishes at the sink. Nearby homeowners would certainly stop to stare at the lengthening cracks in their own plaster walls as the earth shook. Whomever you were, whatever your reaction, all seemed to go quiet. And it was that blessed lack of noise that the boy, even as he grew to adulthood, would savor like a glorious taste on one’s tongue.

He loved silence. So why marry a woman who would not shut up?

He first saw her at a new employee induction meeting in the auditorium of the South Florida Investments Corporation. Across the room, she was the young woman with a smile that reached across ten yards of bobbing heads and flashing faces and through an air thick with apprehension and not a little anxiety. And it struck him, she was the one smiling, comfortable in the crowd. Yes, she was yakking, but also smiling that easy, fresh, beaming smile. It was a look that drew him. Charles Noland III, CPA had not become a dynamite man like his father and grandfather before him. He was an accountant. He liked numbers. They were quiet. He liked to sit with them in an office, even a pod office, because he could work with them, follow them, align them with the immutable rules of mathematics. And no, it was not lost on him that he might be strange. Yes, he had dated a few women, but he believed his silence scared them. He believed they thought his refusal to enter into mindless conversation and rattle over the newest sitcom or what Betty the receptionist was wearing on her nails or even last night’s fabulous score of the fabulous game indicated that he was inept, intellectually stunted, or somehow retarded.

None of that bothered Susan. She just talked right through it. If he had nothing to say on the matter, fine. There was all the more open air for her to fill. Now okay, that’s perhaps unfair. He did know, even after the first few dates, that she was a nurturer. He gave her credit for being the kind of person who wanted—no, had—to help others. She would save him from his shyness. She would introduce him to the social world we all must enter in order to function. She saw his weaknesses, and would make them right. Right?

On their wedding night they made love for the first time. Susan’s mouth seemed to have been going nonstop for days—oh, the planning, oh, the decisions, oh, the reception, oh, the humanity. But that night, the sex, the first true sex he’d ever had, was incredible. Susan was a screamer. He hadn’t known that from earlier, more muted explorations. But the noise and the sensation was to him not unlike the explosions he had witnessed as a boy with his grandfather, and forever more when the two of them reached orgasm he would think of his grandfather’s shouted orders, “Fire in the hole,” but would of course never repeat them. And when they were done, exhausted and spent, oh beauty of all beauties, Susan would fall immediately into a deep and completely silent sleep. He would stay awake in the quiet, listening for, but hearing nothing, his wife next to him, not uttering a word, for hours.

So it worked. For a couple of years anyway. Put up with the yak when you had to: when she got home from work, when she had to vent, when she was on the phone in the car, when she was watching television, when the family visited, when she was in the theater, and even when she was listening to music (once he had even played an old 1960 cut of Frankie Ford singing Joe Jones’s “You Talk Too Much,” but it went right over her head).