Florida Straits (30 page)

"Stop hangin' on to your girlfriend,
faggot," said the other thug. It was Bruno, the huge one who liked
to rip things apart. He was standing in the dimness between a bad
painting of birds and a bad painting of seashells. He'd taken off
his blue suit jacket and he looked even bigger without it. "Come
ova heah," he said, pointing down at the sisal rug.

Joey went. He knew the rituals. He knew he
was to get hit, he just wondered whether it would be face or gut.
His blood turned thin and sour and he stood at loose attention like
a tired soldier. Bruno took a moment to size him up, then slugged
him in the belly. Joey doubled over, his empty chest folded down
across his trembling thighs. His eyes were open but everything was
black, with streaks of phosphorescent green. He thought he heard a
little shriek but couldn't tell if it was Sandra giving a
sympathetic wince through her duct tape, or his own wheezing as he
struggled for air. Before he could straighten up, Bruno grabbed him
by the head and pushed him backward onto the settee. "Where's your
fucking brother?" he asked.

Joey couldn't answer because he couldn't
breathe. He tried to use the time to think, but he found he
couldn't do that either. "Fuck should I know?" he finally
managed.

"You helped him get away, ya little
cocksucker," Tony said.

"I don't know nothin' about it," Joey
said.

There was a pause. The two thugs looked at
each other. Sandra squirmed. Outside, there was a splash from the
pool. The motor of the hot tub clicked on and hummed. The easy life
of Florida was proceeding. Tony reached slowly into his jacket
pocket and pulled out a silencer. Very deliberately, he fitted it
onto the muzzle of his gun.

"You and your girlfriend, kid," said Tony.
"You're nine-tenths dead."

He leaned over Sandra and tucked the gun
under her chin, pushing it into the soft place between her jawbone
and her throat. Her head was rigid against the back of her chair
and she tried not to go cross-eyed staring down at the threatening
hand.

"Don't fucking touch her," Joey said. He
found himself getting to his feet.

"Ain't he brave?" said Bruno. As he said it,
he bashed Joey across the ribs with his forearm. Joey's chest
rattled, his heart seemed to shake off some juice, like a thrown
sponge. He sat back down.

"Mr. Ponte wants his emeralds," Tony said.
He hadn't moved the gun away from Sandra's chin. His finger was on
the trigger and he didn't seem to be paying very close attention to
whether or not he was squeezing. "He's tired of waiting and he's
tired of being dicked around by little shitasses like you."

Joey looked at Sandra and suddenly he wanted
to cry. It was less out of fear than out of frustration and
remorse. He wanted to crawl across the floor and tell Sandra he was
sorry. Sorry he'd taken her away from Queens, sorry he couldn't
really take her away from Queens, sorry that Queens seemed to
inhabit his life like a virus.

"So where's the fucking stones, kid?" Tony
went on.

Joey said nothing. Bruno leaned down and
smacked him hard with the back of his hand. The pain went from
Joey's cheek to his gums, then lodged behind his eardrum.

"Kid," the shorter goon resumed, "I gotta
tell ya somethin', no offense. Your brother Gino, he's a cunt. He's
a dumb twat who don't know what he's doin'."

"You hear me disagreeing?" Joey said.

"Then why the fuck are you protecting
him?"

"I'm not."

Tony seemed to consider this. The effort
made him cranky, and he tapped the silencer against the underside
of Sandra's chin. It made a morbid sound, not quite a slap and not
quite a click. A vein was pulsing in Sandra's neck. "Awright, kid,
you're not protecting your brother. So maybe you'd like to protect
your pretty little girlfriend heah." He pulled back the hammer.
"I'm gonna ask ya one more time: Where's the fucking emeralds?" He
was dimpling Sandra's neck with the gun.

"They're innee ocean," Joey heard himself
say.

Tony and Bruno consulted with their eyes.
They didn't seem to like the answer. It struck them as an insult
and a lie.

Bruno bent down and stuck his face in
Joey's. His eyes were like puddles of oil and his breath smelled of
old seafood. He butted Joey's forehead with his own, and Joey's
skull rang like a Chinese gong. The shock wave ran from the bridge
of his nose to the top of his spine and back again, it felt like
his brain was being sliced with a serrated knife. But the thing
about pain is that beyond a certain point it stays the same, it
lodges just this side of insanity, and the thing about fear is that
after a while a person's terror glands get all wrung out, and panic
levels off to a kind of jungle alertness. Through his dizziness,
Joey felt the old lunatic readiness returning, felt it filling him
the way air pumps up a tire.

He heard Tony saying, "I cannot believe you
are still givin' us bullshit."

"It isn't bullshit."

Tony ignored him. "We could blow you away
right heah. We could take you to the gahbidge. We can do anything.
You know that, right?"

Joey nodded. He grew up with it, he knew it.
"Wha' does it getcha?"

Bruno bent low and hissed in his face.
"Satisfaction."

"Four million dollars' worth?"

"Fuck you talkin' about?" said Tony.

Joey just sat. If he knew anything about
staying alive, it was that your chances were better if you made
people curious.

"Fuck you talkin', four million?" Tony
pressed. Absently, he moved the gun an inch or two from Sandra's
throat. It was enough space for idiot hope to inhabit.

"I'll tell Mr. Ponte all about it," Joey
said.

The remark offended Bruno, who reached down
and pressed his thumbs hard on the soft place under Joey's
collarbones. A sharp pain arced down clear to the bottom of his
lungs. "You ain't in no position to tell Mr. Ponte nothin'. Got
that?"

Joey stayed silent and the silence caromed
off the walls. Outside, there were water sounds, breeze sounds. Out
there the air was the temperature of skin, and life, sweet life,
felt good.

Tony and Bruno consulted with their eyes
again. Bruno scratched an armpit. "We could bring 'em to Miami," he
said. "We gotta ice 'em, we could; ice 'em just as good up
there."

Tony frowned, his scarred lip puckered. "But
if the stones are down heah ..."

Another pause. Joey tried to decide if
saying something more would get him slugged again. He tried to
decide if it mattered if he got slugged again.

"Guys," he ventured, "I'm telling you, I got
a way to work this out. Whyn't ya call Mr. Ponte? Tell 'im if he'll
come down heah, he'll see his stones tomorrow."

Tony and Bruno locked eyes. Then, oddly,
Bruno broke into a crooked and horrific smile. "No phone," he said.
"I yanked it outta the wall."

"Little, like, precaution," said Tony.

Joey pointed out toward the compound. "So
use a different phone. We'll borrow one."

Bruno and Tony considered.

"Look," Joey said, "the naked guy, the
landlord, you told 'im you were friends a mine from Miami, right?
So that's the story. I'll play along."

"We got the broad," Tony reasoned. "He don't
want we should hurt the broad."

As a reminder, he stroked Sandra's neck with
the silencer and a sound came out of her like the squeaking of
kittens in a cardboard box.

"No," said Joey. "I don't."

"And," said Tony, "we gotta ice 'em, what
the fuck if it's tomorrow or today?"

"Yeah," said Bruno. "Tomorrow, what the
fuck. Just as dead as like today."

—
43 —

It was dusk when Joey and Bruno emerged
through the sliding door of the cottage.

The western sky was green and mauve, the
trees had already gone black. A light breeze barely rattled the
palm fronds, and there was a sense, as always at the close of a hot
south Florida day, of the world exhaling a clenched and overfull
breath and deflating slowly into a grateful languor. Luke the
reggae musician was sitting at the far edge of the pool, his
Walkman on and his feet in the water. Lucy the beautiful Fed was
swimming silent laps in a flowing pair of boxer shorts. Steve had
finished his beers and vanished. Wendy and Marsha passed by arm in
arm, walking their cat on a leash.

Joey's head throbbed and his knees were
stiff with fear. Bruno loomed over him like a building, and he
tried to hold his face together as he nodded his hellos. He felt a
rush of weird affection for these neighbors he barely knew, a flash
of ferocious nostalgia for this life that seemed to be receding
from him as fast and unstoppable as a comet. He could not help
wondering if Tony was sitting close to Sandra, breathing on her,
and the thought made him nauseous. He led Bruno across the damp
tiles toward Peter and Claude's bungalow. Lights shone through the
bougainvillea on the trellis. The front door was open, opera was
playing. Joey poked his head in. "Anybody home?"

Claude came around from the kitchen. He
walked toward them like he was modeling a mink, though in fact all
he was wearing was a tiny pair of pink bikini briefs that stopped
around three inches below his navel. "Oh, hi, Joey," he sang out
above the music.

"Hi, Claude, how ya doin'?" Joey's voice
sounded metallic and false behind his ringing ears. The whole world
felt suddenly foreign to him and he wondered if he could possibly
be fooling anyone. "I want ya to meet a buddy a mine from Miami.
Claude, Bruno. Bruno, Claude."

The two men regarded each other like
ambassadors from countries fourteen time zones apart. They nodded.
It was impossible to figure which one decided they would not shake
hands.

"Claude," said Joey, "my phone's onna fritz
and Bruno needs to make a call. Any chance—"

"Come on in," Claude said. "We're just
making some eggs before work."

He led the way back to the kitchen. Unlike
Joey and Sandra's, the bartenders' kitchen didn't look rented,
transient. It had white tile, plants, copper pots, and Joey felt a
pang at such settled domesticity. Peter was hunkered over the
counter, neatly dicing scallions. He was wearing briefs exactly
like Claude's, except his were lime green. Joey introduced Bruno.
Claude pointed to the wall phone. Then he broke eggs and hummed
along with the music.

" 'Scuse me," Bruno said, in a voice
surprising by its bashfulness, "is there a phone that's, like, more
private?"

"Sorry," Claude said. "That's the only
one."

Peter stopped his dicing and looked up from
under his eyebrows to flirt. "No secrets in this house," he
said.

Bruno tried a smile that didn't quite work.
Teeth came out, but more like he was going to bite. He dialed
Charlie Ponte's Miami club and tried to figure out a coded way of
telling his boss the situation. This messed with Bruno's
confidence. Talking was not what he was best at.

A flunky answered the phone in Miami. Ponte
was in but of course he wouldn't take the call. No self-respecting
mobster ever took a call the first time. Bruno was given another
number and told to call it in ten minutes.

"Hope that's not a problem," Bruno bashfully
announced.

"Don't be silly," said Claude. "Want some
eggs?"

Bruno in fact looked hungry.

"No, Claude, no thanks," said Joey.

There was a silence, a long one. Joey stood
in the foreign fluorescent light of the kitchen and watched Claude
whipping eggs, Peter slicing mushrooms. He couldn't shake off the
image of Sandra tied up in the chair, her pretty midriff ringed
with rope, her mouth taped like a tear in the upholstery. And it
was gnawing at him that there was nothing more he could do. He
couldn't accept that.

"That opera you got on?" he said at last. "
'Zat
Don Giovanni?
"

Peter and Claude glanced at each other and
seemed to be deciding whether they should laugh. Like a lot of
people Joey had met in Florida, they sometimes couldn't tell when
he was kidding.

"It's
Porgy and Bess
," Peter
said.

"Ah," said Joey, "I thought it was
Don
Giovanni
. That's my favorite,
Don Giovanni
is."

Peter and Claude shared a wry look along the
countertop. A funny kid, this Joey. Claimed to love opera, but
couldn't tell Gershwin from Mozart. Or Italian from English.

"Bruno," said Claude, "how's the opera up in
Miami?"

Bruno's mouth moved but nothing came out. He
fumbled for a place he could put his giant hands without smashing
something.

"Miami," Joey cut in dismissively. "Miami's
nothin'. For opera, theater, New York is the place. Paradise.
Paradiso." He reached for the bartenders' eyes the way a drowning
man reaches for a log. But their attention was riveted on the
omelette. Claude handed Peter the bowl of eggs. Peter poured them
into the frying pan on top of the scallions and mushrooms. They
gave a homey sizzle and started immediately to blister at the
edges.

Joey went on, casual as cotton. "Yup, for
all that culture stuff, paradise. Course, this is paradise too, but
down here paradise is different, right? It's onna beach, by the
water. Hey, when you guys go to work, you drive up along
Smathers?"

It was a screwball segue, but not screwball
enough to tear Peter and Claude away from their bubbling eggs.
Bruno brought his eyebrows a quarter inch closer together, and Joey
wondered if that quarter inch of displeasure meant that he'd get
beat up some more.

"Usually we cut through town," Peter said
blandly. He gave the frying pan a gentle shake. "It's shorter."

"Yeah," said Joey, "but if you're talkin'
paradise, that ride up A1A, along the water . . ."

Peter reached for a spatula. Claude
stretched toward a high cabinet where there was a big stack of
plates. Maybe a dozen, all of them matching, enough for lots of
friends. The plates broke Joey's heart.