Sunburn (23 page)

The animals looked up without much fear; then they moved off at a leisurely pace, down a path that made a low tunnel through the mangroves. Debbi tucked away the loose end of her scarf, took Arty's hand, and went to follow. Arty, reluctant, resisted the tug for a fraction of a second, then gave in.

They crouched low, held mangrove branches away from their faces, stepped gingerly around the raised and grabbing roots. Mosquitoes hummed around them; spiders swung on half-completed webs. The path wound away from the water; after a dozen steps, scrub pines began to mix in with the mangroves, and under the denser canopy it was dark enough so that colors disappeared and only shapes existed. Fallen pine needles mingled on the ground with limestone pebbles. Up ahead, the deer made the softest rustlings as they ambled.

Debbi paused a second, looked back at Arty, grinned. In that moment of stillness he thought he heard sounds coming from behind them. A jolt of adrenaline put a milky feeling in his legs. Debbi, trusting and excited, pulled him onward.

They came to a small break in the woods. Two miniature bucks were there, their antlers like winter-bare azaleas. Three more does were nibbling at the spiky bushes. Debbi and Arty stood very close together; he felt a warmth like that of fresh-baked bread pulse off her. But he couldn't savor the feeling and he didn't watch the deer; he was listening. There were sounds that were foreign to the woods and he knew now they were footsteps. He tried without success to keep the panic out of his voice. "Someone's following us," he said.

Debbi looked at him in the dimness. Her smile seemed to float free of her face, then shattered like a breaking window; in a heartbeat she had caught the infection of his fear. Mosquitoes swarmed; the metallic groans of toads grew maddening. The two of them stood paralyzed a moment, then bolted across the clearing, scattering the deer, groping with the instincts of the desperate for a path on the far side.

Arty dove through a gap in the twisted pines, Debbi scrambling behind. Low branches lashed their faces; cobwebs wrapped them in appalling gossamer. Their breath came harder in their flight, the sound of it slammed back against their ears. They moved randomly, wherever the woods would let them go. At some point they understood that they were looping back toward water: the pines thinned, the mangroves thickened, a sick salt smell like spoiled oysters weighted the air. Now and again they stepped in slick shallow puddles simmering with rot. Arty wrestled vines, bushwhacked with torn and bleeding elbows.

Then he fell. A mangrove root had grabbed his foot, twisted it as he tried to step. He toppled onto his side; warm muck slapped against his flank, his cheek. He groaned, then tugged his leg like a bear caught in a trap. It came free but his ankle didn't feel right.

Debbi was crouching over him. Her face was close, mosquitoes swarmed between them. "Go," he said. "Don't wait."

She didn't answer. She didn't go. She put her arms in Arty's armpits and helped him up. For a second he stood on one foot, and in that instant they heard the rustlings behind them, the sharp recoilings of swatted foliage. She threw Arty's arm across her shoulder and they trundled on together.

The ground was getting softer underfoot; there were fewer dry places between the slimy puddles. The mangroves got lower, snakier; flashes of sky broke through here and there, and by the most gradual of increments the woods became a swamp. The puddles merged into an unbroken shallow ooze. The ground beneath melted to an infernal batter, a dense sucking slop like loose cement. Arty's hurt ankle screamed with every step; Debbi's knees ached as she pumped them to lift her sinking feet.

Their progress now was inches at a time. Against the muted splashes of their dire steps, they heard the ever-closer sounds of their pursuers. They heard mumbled curses, gruff breathing fearsome as the wheeze of dragons.

The foul water got deeper, the muck became all-possessing. Debbi sank down past her calves; she struggled to lift herself and tumbled with an awful slowness to a half-sitting posture against a crotch of branches. Arty didn't so much fall with her as reach a certain point of leaning from which he could not deviate. He held a mangrove with both hands, strained every muscle and felt nothing but a stalemate, registered a helplessness more galling than any failure he could ever have imagined.

"Debbi," he whispered, "I'm sorry."

She said nothing. Her eyes were wide, the lashes almost vertical. Tiny lines of blood traced out the scratches on her face.

A flash of blinding light knifed across the swamp. Behind it, two forward-leaning silhouettes could just barely be distinguished. Shoes sucked through the warm morass. One pursuer slowed; the other trudged on with the grim momentum of a dray horse. The beacon panned crazily across the mangroves as the man holding it inexorably approached. Arty's pulse pounded in his neck, he heard blood rushing in his ears. He thought of screaming but went as mute as some toothless thing going down before a lion.

The steps splashed closer, were maybe thirty feet away. The relentless silhouette took on a dreadful bulk and weight. The flashlight pinned Debbi against her branch; lines of black were running down beneath her eyes. Then the beam was turned on Arty. He wriggled like the flash was death itself, there was nowhere he could go.

He didn't know how bullets felt. He waited for them. He swallowed, tasted blood as though his insides were already punctured, gurgling. Then a voice came through the muck.

"What'sa matter, Mr. Magnus, guilty conscience?"

The bright light released his eyes, under-lit the face of the pursuer who was holding it. Arty saw a square jaw, a thickly muscled neck, a halo of sprayed hair.

"Jesus Christ," he hissed.

Ben Hawkins neared; his labored breathing wheezed and whistled amid the sounds of bugs and frogs.

"Bad things are happening," said Mark Sutton. "Maybe worse things are on the way. For you too, Miss Martini. I think maybe you could use some friends. Maybe now you'd like to talk with us."

Four

37

Debbi started up the Cadillac. Its headlights found swarms of milling termites and spiraling moths as she turned the car in front of the limestone boulders at the end of No-Name Key.

Her ruined leggings were rolled up above her knees; her shins were lightly coated with dried limestone muck. She drove barefoot, her cloth shoes thrown in the trunk of the convertible, heavy as if cast in concrete. She'd rubbed away the tear streaks beneath her eyes; left behind was a swirled gray smear. When they reached the little rainbow bridge, she broke the frayed silence with a sudden slaphappy chuckle. "The way you told them off, Arty—that was great."

"Left at the stop sign," Arty said. On Big Pine, crickets and tree frogs sang in the scrubby woods, the anemic gleam of television came through people's windows. "Did I tell them off?"

Debbi flicked the end of the thorn-shredded scarf she still wore around her hair and neck. "
Did
you? Arty, you were on a rave.
What kinda lunatic tactics? . . . What kinda crazy SWAT team mentality?
I mean, screaming at them even while they were dragging us outa the mud. ..."

"Ice," she said. She'd reached the intersection where Key Deer Boulevard meets U.S. 1, and she pointed the El Dorado toward Key West. The highway was tawdry with bunker like bars crouched in chalky parking lots and dim convenience stores that scraped along on sales of condoms, lotto tickets, and potato chips. After a while, she asked, "Arty, the FBI—why'd they wanna talk to you?"

He swiveled toward her, pressed down in his seat by the weight of secrets, of his promise to Vincente. "I don't think I can tell you that," he said.

She nodded, bit her lip.

A moment passed. Then Arty said, "That Sutton guy, he said maybe trouble was on the way for you too. You have any idea what he meant?"

Debbi kept her eyes on the road and said no. Then her hands fretted over the steering wheel and she glanced at Arty. "Maybe I do. It's not something I wanna talk about."

Arty didn't push; he rested his hurt foot and watched the long loops of the power lines strung next to the highway.

Debbi flicked her scarf. "This is crazy."

"Hm?"

"Here we are, the two of us, we almost die, we're alone on this weird road in the middle of nowhere, and there's all these things we're not supposed to tell each other. Like the secrets matter more than we do."

The question confused Arty. His connection was with the Godfather. It was the Godfather the Feds were asking about. He couldn't imagine what it had to do with Gino, and he mumbled out a no.

But in his own mind the question raised an altogether different matter—the matter of the odd and itchy twinge he'd felt at the mention of Gino's name. He looked at Debbi. The Caddy's top was still down; each passing streetlight unfurled a sheet of brightness over her, then snapped her into shadow until the next beam found her face. Wispy bangs escaped from the scarf and blew across her forehead; her eyes were soft and tired. Arty was amazed to realize that the archaic and almost forgotten thing he was feeling was jealousy.

He tried to keep his voice casual. "Gino—you worried about him?"

Debbi tapped the steering wheel. "Sure I am." Then she added, "But only like I'd worry about anyone in trouble."

"That's all?"

She crinkled up her eyebrows, began to let herself imagine that maybe Arty was angling for an assurance he didn't think he had the right to come out and ask for. She gave it like a Christmas present. "Gino and me," she said, "we're history. That's over, finished, good riddance. . . . You didn't know that either, Arty?"

Sheepishly, he shook his head.

"Sicilians," said Debbi. She gave a half-indulgent, half-exasperated frown. "Always playing us-and-them, whispering games, divide and conquer. . . . Think about it, Arty. With what you know and what I know, we almost know something. If we could tell each other."

He settled back in the seat, looked ahead at the snaking road that hopped from rock to rock to Key West at the end of the line. Gino was history. Debbi was here. Arty hugged his hurt foot and said, "Yeah, if we could tell each other."

———

Nassau Lane was not much wider than Joey Goldman's car, and when Debbi pulled up in front of Arty's cottage, tree limbs dangled over the convertible and there was barely room left over for cats to slink along the curb. Stars twinkled, were briefly erased by smears of moonlit clouds. Debbi cut the engine, and the sound of rustling fronds flooded in to fill the quiet.

For a moment they just sat there. Then Debbi gave a cockeyed smile and gestured toward her devastated clothing and slightly torn up face. "Do I say thank you for a lovely evening?"

They sat. Moonlight filtered down, hands fidgeted in laps, the faraway perfume of closed flowers came to them. When a man and a woman desired each other and were not lovers, there was no quite graceful way to end an evening, it never quite stopped being high school.

Wistfully, regretfully, Arty said, "Well . . ."and fumbled to open the door.

He looked up from his fumbling to see Debbi's face very close to his, moving toward him, silent, fluid, and mysterious. She kissed him very quickly at the corner of his mouth, at the puzzling cusp between friendly cheeks and amorous lips; then, just as quickly, she withdrew again. Arty, reluctant Arty, saw her retreating, saw her eyes slipping away, her wrapped hair being framed by night and distance, and without an instant's hesitation he reached out both hands to hold her face, to keep it near his own. He kissed her on the mouth, tasted lipstick and salt air.

Then he climbed out of the car, half turned away, and said good night. He felt light and happy but still he limped as he headed for his ravaged front door.

"Fuck is this supposed ta mean?" said Pretty Boy.
"Juicy pa .. . para ..."

"Paradox,"
said Aldo Messina, sitting between his minions at a six-sided table covered in green felt.

"Right," said the handsome thug. "Paradox.
Surest way to fail: aim higher than anybody realizes.
Fuck's 'at supposed ta mean?"

Bo, the philosophic thug, murmured thoughtfully, "I think maybe it means—"

"Or dis?" His partner cut him off.
"Common sense—not very common; does that make sense?"

"Dat one's like," said Bo, "ya know, a play on—

"A play on bullshit," said Pretty Boy. Aldo Messina, looking glum and bloodless, pressed the notebook shut, pushed it aside like a plate of food with bugs in it, and grabbed another from the stack.

This was at the Fabretti family headquarters—the San Pietro Social Club on Broome Street in Manhattan. The club had once been a hardware store; it had display windows covered by steel roll-down shutters that had not been opened since the Eisenhower years; its glass front door had been replaced by a metal one with a peephole. There was a small bar with an espresso machine and some bottles of anisette and Scotch. On the walls hung tilted pictures of Italian-American lounge acts: men with pompadours and bedroom eyes, women in sequined evening gowns with cleavage.