Tropical Depression (6 page)

I was still sitting when Charlie Shea, my partner that year, showed up to see how I was doing.

Charlie took the pistol out of my hand and made coffee. He even got me to drink some. Charlie was very persuasive. He was a lousy cop but a very nice guy.

I drank a cup of coffee with Charlie while he talked about precinct gossip, the Dodgers, and the latest from Putz Pelham. Putz had been undercover, looking into kiddie porn. He’d gotten carried away and screwed about two dozen “actresses.” Now he was scared to death he’d caught something and was dying. Charlie thought that was pretty funny.

Charlie never said a word about the forms I was supposed to sign, although I was pretty sure he got some heavy pressure to talk to me about it. But he was a good enough cop to know what it means to be a partner, so he just talked about nothing for a while.

Outside, the recycling truck came. I heard them collect my stuff and I thought about the forms and the check I had left in with the old newspapers. But I was tired. I sipped my coffee. That seemed to make Charlie happy.

It was after that morning I started to find my feet again. I don’t know if it was the release of finally crying, or the realization of how close to the edge I had been, or even Charlie Shea’s soft and pointless talk. Maybe it was the combination, perfectly timed. In any case, I was starting to come back.

I still gargled my gun from time to time. I would work up my nerve to go out somewhere—the grocery store, even a movie—and something would remind me of Jennifer or Melissa. I would see a box of a particular brand of cereal and my hand would start to shake. I would go past a swingset where Melissa had played, or the place where Jennifer had her hair done, and my whole body would feel numb. I’d be filled with that pointless energy again, and often as not, I’d end up fondling the barrel of my weapon and looking down into the chamber, thinking about inhaling.

The walls of the house began to close in on me. It was Jennifer’s house, after all. We’d figured out together what we could afford and she had searched until she found this place. It was small, but it was in Venice. Jennifer said that meant the air was better, which was important with kids to think about. The schools were good here, too, and if it wasn’t really safe to walk the street at night—well, it wasn’t really safe anywhere, was it?

Now I found it impossibly small. Everywhere I turned I found some small reminder of my dead family. I couldn’t stay in the house, but I couldn’t go out too long, either.

Everything was a reminder to me. I slowly started to realize that if I was going to live I had to get out of L.A.

Even that thought caused panic in me. I had no idea how to start doing that.

Luckily, I was still having episodes of manic energy. Fugues, I think they are called. In one of them I sat down with a calculator and a stack of real estate ads. Comparable houses in my area had increased in value tremendously in the last three years. With what I could get for this one, I would be pretty close to rich. I could go anywhere, do anything, live the kind of life every man wants to live.

Whoopee.

In another of my fits of manic energy, I mailed in my resignation from the LAPD and put my house on the market. Soon after that Roscoe McAuley came to see me.

I know why they picked Roscoe to come talk to me. I don’t know why they thought it would do any good.

Roscoe got the job because he was slicker than anybody else in the precinct that year. I knew him as well as anybody did—but nobody really knew him. We’d been at the Academy together. A few years back he’d gone on some ride-arounds with me because Captain Spaulding thought that was the best way for Roscoe to learn the turf. The captain hoped some street smarts might rub off on Roscoe, but if they did nobody noticed.

I guess it made more of an impression than I thought at the time. Roscoe had remembered and come all the way across the continent to see me when his own kid got killed.

Anyway, Roscoe had a long talk with me. He said I still had a future with the force and I was throwing it all away. I told him I knew I was throwing it away. I told him I was throwing it away because it was garbage and that’s what you did with garbage, you threw it away. He looked at me with those Command College brown eyes and said he could understand that I felt that way now, but in case I changed my mind I might want to leave a door open.

I told him thank you but I had other plans. And it came to me, right as I said it, that it was true. I did have other plans. I was going to move back to Key West and go fishing every day.

I guess I thought of Key West because I had lived there at another troubled time in my life and found some peace of mind there.

When I was fourteen my parents divorced. I went to live with an uncle when the infighting got dirty. I had stayed for almost a year. My Uncle Mack had taught me about fishing, and every summer after that I spent in Uncle Mack’s battered Whaler, learning the waters and habits of the fish. When Uncle Mack died I knew enough people to get a job as a mate on one of the charter boats, and I’d put in enough time to make getting my captain’s ticket pretty easy if I ever wanted to.

Now I wanted to. Now I wanted to run to that forgiving sea and rock in the comfort of the slow salt waves. I wanted to wake up every morning in a place where I’d been happy once and fish with strangers, never seeing a face that might remind me of what had been.

In a frenzy of decision I got the house sold, held a massive garage sale to get rid of the furniture and household stuff, packed away a few things important enough to keep into a small self-storage box, and left. In a brand-new Ford Explorer I drove slowly across the country by back roads, stopping frequently, and arrived in Key West in late summer, a time when the town is taking a nap and the jacaranda trees are littering insanely bright flowers in the streets.

I found my little falling-down cottage and leased it for a year, with an option to buy. I bought my battered bicycle and nosed around for a few weeks until I found the
Windshadow,
a sixteen-foot guide skiff.

And here I was. I thought I was safe and sound and tucked away from all the crazy-making people and places. Free from memories, a new man.

Until Roscoe McAuley showed up and brought it all back, to fall on my unprotected head like a piano dropped from the fourteenth floor.

I didn’t want to go back there. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to do anything that would remind me of that terrible place. I wanted to stay here in the sun and worry about nothing more complicated than where my next charter was coming from. Maybe that wasn’t a whole lot to do with my life, but it worked for me. It had kept me from squeezing the trigger. I could still taste the barrel but I had not squeezed the trigger, and if I went back there, back where it happened, I might want another taste and this time I might not be as strong.

I realized I had been standing in the kitchen without moving for some time. I didn’t know how long, but the shadow slanting in the window was longer now. My first thought was of Roscoe, of how he had looked as he climbed into his rental car. Maybe he felt the same way now. Maybe the thought of going back to L.A. where somebody had killed his kid, too, froze him up and made him want to slump onto a shady bus bench and let it all pass by. Maybe he was thinking of me now, a little jealous that he didn’t have a place to hide like I did.

Except I wasn’t sure I had a hiding place anymore, either. Roscoe had found me, and he had brought ghosts with him.

The beer wasn’t appealing anymore. I took a shower.

Mallory Square faces the sunset. A lot of places do, even in Key West. But through some loony magic you can only find here Mallory Square has become the capital of sunset.

It’s not much to look at in daylight. It’s no more than a parking lot with a deepwater dock on the far end. Cruise ships have started tying up there in the last few years. There are desiccated cigarette butts stomped flat and patches of ancient gum with all the sticky pounded out of them. There are oil stains and empty beer cans and weeds growing up in the corners.

The area closest to the water is concrete and slightly raised. Originally built as a wharf, it now provides a natural stage about twenty feet wide. Every night the stage fills with street performers and tourists and as the sun goes down they celebrate.

Maybe Key West, or what Key West has turned into lately, doesn’t need much excuse to celebrate. Maybe the party would happen even if the sun didn’t go down. It’s still called sunset and it’s still the biggest single draw in town. There are theaters, museums, shops, restaurants and bars, T-shirt emporiums, biplane rides, strip joints, and whorehouses on the island. People come to see the sunset.

Even in Los Angeles we’d heard of Sunset at Mallory. I thought maybe Roscoe would go there. He might want to see it since he’d come all this way anyhow. He might figure the place would be so full of people nobody would notice him. Anyway, it seemed like a good place to look for him.

By the time I got to Mallory the carnival was going full blast. Considering the savage mood all that carefully packaged gaiety was putting me in, I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Roscoe. If Roscoe
was
here—I only had a half-hunch to go on, a little rabbit of an idea that poked its head up and then disappeared. Since there was nothing else to tell me where Roscoe might be, I followed the rabbit. Sometimes these ideas are right, for whatever subconscious reason.

Sometimes they’re wrong, too. I let the crowd push me all the way through the open-air nuthouse one time; past the fire-eater, the jugglers, and the cookie lady, all the way down to the far end of the dock where a guy in a kilt stood torturing a bagpipe. Then I worked my way back again, back towards the big stucco wall that keeps the peasants away from the pool at the Ocean Key House. I saw no sign of Roscoe. There was no reason I should have, just this feeling I’d had as I stood there in the shower and realized I had to try to find him.

Finding somebody in Key West isn’t easy. There are too many hotels and they aren’t generally crazy about giving out too much information. By the time I could call around to the likely ones Roscoe might be gone. Other than that, I wasn’t sure where to look. If you can spare the time, the best way to find somebody is probably to stand on the corner in front of Sloppy Joe’s, and sooner or later whoever you’re looking for will pass by.

I didn’t have the time. I didn’t really know why, but I was in a hurry. Somehow I felt like my problem was linked to Roscoe’s. There were two dead kids, his and mine. I was feeling an urgent need to find Roscoe fast, almost as if finding him might bring the kids back from death. It wasn’t rational, I know, but it had gotten hold of me. I could feel my hands quiver with the need to find Roscoe and talk to him.

I still didn’t have any idea what I would say if I found him. All I had was a bad taste in my mouth at the way our talk had ended. I wanted to make him see that I’d help him if I could but there was nothing I could do. No hard feelings.

But mostly the encounter had left me on the edge of paralysis again, on the shore of that dark sea where I’d floated for seven months, and the thought of swimming there again filled me with a nervous energy that was almost desperate. I couldn’t go back there. I’d never get out a second time. Maybe if I could find Roscoe, talk to him, I could get rid of this feeling of dread that was rising up in my throat.

Just to be sure, I worked my way back through the crowd one last time. I saw a busload of fat Germans taking pictures of a guy balancing a loaded shopping cart on his nose. I saw another busload of Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other. I saw the leathery old woman I’d seen getting off the head boat this afternoon. She was eating a cookie the size of her head and watching the slack wire act with a grim expression.

I didn’t see Roscoe. I ended up back at the dark end of the dock, beside the bagpiper again. Suddenly, just as inexplicably as it took me over, the sense of urgency drained out of me. I sat on the seawall and looked out to Tank Island, hanging my feet over and just listening to the piper’s psychotic squeal. I felt so bad he started to sound good to me. I sat there and listened to him shriek through his four standard tunes a dozen times.

There were not a lot of donations dropped into his hat, but maybe money wasn’t the main reason he did this every night. Maybe he felt some kind of deep pride in his heritage or his music and felt that it had to be heard. Maybe just standing there night after night and watching the sunset while he made his blood-curdling din was enough reward and he didn’t even think about money.

And maybe if I clapped my hands three times Tinkerbell would be okay and the national budget would balance.

I sat there for a long time. The sun went down, just like it always does. The people cheered, flung their money at the entertainment, and everybody went away happy. It got dark.

Most of the tourists would take their bulging billfolds up Duval Street, stopping at random intervals to spend money. Judging from the stores along Duval, everybody who came here went home with at least two hundred new T-shirts and one king-sized hangover.

A lot of the hangovers would get started in Sloppy Joe’s. Nobody cared that the drinks cost too much, the floor was sticky, it was so crowded you couldn’t squeeze in without exhaling and there was no air-conditioning. It was loud, it was centrally located, it was famous. So the Germans and Japanese and Scandinavians, the schoolteachers from Jersey and the seed dealers from Iowa, all stopped for a drink, bought a T-shirt, and moved on.

I sometimes thought it would be neater all around if there were just some big machine that grabbed the tourists at the outskirts of our little island, held them up by an ankle, shook out their money, and then sent them home. The money would be evenly divided, without all the fuss and bother of pretending to sell them something they wanted, and the streets would be clean and quiet again, the way it had been when I was a kid here.

I sat on the concrete lip of the Mallory dock. The nervous energy that had driven me down here in the first place was long gone. I couldn’t think of anyplace to go. I couldn’t think of any reason to do anything. Even if I thought of something, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get up to do it. A tarpon rolled a few feet out. Mallory Square was quiet now. It was strange after the frantic screaming glitz that had been flopping and bellowing on the concrete only a few minutes ago. The party had moved on without me. In my fragile state, that seemed profound. It seemed like a perfect metaphor for my whole life. And I wasn’t even drunk.