Red Sky at Night, page 20
Echeverria walked up to the door and tapped on it twice with the butt of his Colt. He kept tapping till the overhead light came on and a voice sounded through the door.
“What?”
“There’s been a problem, ma’am. Mr. Everly is hurt, we need to use a phone.”
“Mr. Everly?”
“Your neighbor, Mr. Everly. Hurt bad. Please, ma’am. We have to act fast.”
The door swung open and a woman stepped out holding a little black-and-white terrier in her arms. She wore a yellow silk nightie and her hair was in curlers under a net. There was white war paint on her face. She was six hundred years old, and still doing everything she could to look four hundred.
Echeverria stepped back from her, a safe shooting distance.
“You a friend of Roy Everly?”
“Who you want?” The woman had Cuban mush in her mouth.
“Is your name Monica?”
“Monica?” The woman saw the pistol. “No, you make mistake.”
“I don’t think so,” Echeverria said.
“I no Monica. She young girl. Live there, in house. Blond chica.”
She raised her arm, pointing at a house across the canal, while she clutched the dog tight against her breast with the other arm. Echeverria lifted his pistol and shot the woman in the face. She fell backward and the dog spilled out and his nails spun on the cement as he charged. Echeverria shot it too. Took two slugs to stop the thing from yipping.
“You sure that was her?”
Echeverria was still pointing the pistol at the terrier.
“It’s what Everly said. The house next door. You see another one?”
“Maybe you should check her ID, make sure.”
“You don’t think it’s her, then you check her ID.”
“All right, all right. Let’s get out of here. That’s about all the fun I can stand for one night.”
“Aw, fuck, maybe you’re right,” Echeverria said. “We should check that house, the one she was pointing at.”
***
Monica watched the tall man and woman stride back down Sandpiper Drive. From her window she could see Mrs. Benitez and Pepito lying side by side on the cement floor of the carport just across the canal.
Monica didn’t have a phone. No one in the world to call but Thorn and he didn’t have one, so she hadn’t bothered. She stood at the window and tried to think. She knew what she’d just seen was no dream. Happening with all the sloppy, helter-skelter rhythm of a normal event. Brutal and quick and ugly.
Monica stood at the window and watched the moonlight spread like the golden sheen of a swelling tide, rising up the gravel drive until it lapped near the two fallen bodies. A minute, two. Trying to breathe. Trying to reconstruct what she’d seen. The woman dressed in black, the tall man with the potbelly showing through his white shirt. The man shooting Mrs. Benitez, then Pepito, then turning around and walking away. All of it, twenty, thirty yards away across the narrow canal. That close.
Trying to put it together, what she should do, her brain was buzzing with static.
Rover whined at her leg, wanting to go out.
Monica went over to the door and swung it open. She was wearing her cotton pajama shorts and a white T-shirt and the night air felt suddenly cool on her flesh. She reached back into the apartment and grabbed her purse and keys from the desk and walked out to the Impala.
She could drive over to Roy’s, try to rouse him, use his phone, or she could drive to the Food Spot, call the police from there.
Rover jumped into the front seat, wagging his tail hard, sensing her edginess.
She started the car and the noise and vibration of the big V-8 finished waking her. She slid the car into gear, backed out, turned up Alamanda Lane toward the main entrance road, and her headlights lit them up. The tall girl in black and the bald man in a white shirt and black trousers striding down the middle of the street. Like they were going house to house, shooting whoever they found.
They halted, the woman saying something to the man, the man waving her away.
Monica shoved Rover to the floor and told him to stay. Stamping the high beam button, she flattened the accelerator, let go of the clutch, and fishtailed toward the two killers.
The woman jumped aside, but the big man held his position and lifted his pistol with one hand and fired twice. She saw both spits of flame from his barrel and felt the spray of windshield glass against her cheek, but she kept the wheels burning down the asphalt, swerving a little but holding the big car on the street, flashing past them, hearing another two sharp pops as she passed and feeling an icy numbness at the back of her neck. She skidded left onto Poinciana and raced toward the highway.
After only a second or two the warmth began to seep back into her neck, while something even warmer spread down her back. But she didn’t reach around to probe the wound. She knew she was in shock, feeling no pain; the golden glow of numbness might last the fifteen minutes it would take her to drive to Mariners Hospital. Let the emergency room people call the police. First things first, get down the road, get some medical attention, stop the bleeding. Her eyes were clear, she was thinking straight. She’d just been grazed. It was only fifteen minutes to the hospital, twenty max. She’d make it, no worry.
She was out on the highway, a half mile down, cruising at eighty through Rock Harbor when she leaned over and saw Rover on the passenger floor. She took her foot off the accelerator.
“Rover,” she said. “Rover.”
A bullet had gouged through the car just behind the wheel well and there was a bloody scoop gone from the top of the dog’s skull, his head cocked against the carpet at a hopeless angle. His mouth was open and his teeth were bared as if even in his last seconds he had been doing what he could to protect her.
CHAPTER 22
Sunday morning at eight o’clock Thorn parked his wheelchair across the street from the Casa Marina Hotel. It was a palatial Mediterranean structure, a Marriott update of a building where in an earlier incarnation congressmen and Hollywood rogues and rumrunners and lobstermen had swapped lies. Piazzas, loggias, black cypress ceilings, a full orchestra playing on the lawn. All those indispensable features of a 1920s resort, built by Henry Flagler, the man who single-handedly concocted Florida and made it safe for millionaires.
The Marriott people had decided the thick stucco walls of Flagler’s old beauty should be replastered and dabbed with hipper colors, fitted out with flimsy brass lamps and cutely painted Mexican tile. And they had continued to veneer and paint and tile with all the trendiest materials until by now every vestige of the graceful original had been concealed by a series of slapdash contractors who’d apparently served their apprenticeships decorating wedding cakes and Mardi Gras floats.
Thorn was waiting for Echeverria to appear. He was going to follow the son of a bitch through his Sunday routine, spy on the spier. See if he tried to butcher any more dolphins. And if the occasion presented itself, Thorn had decided to test the limits of his own physical condition, see if he could blindside the bastard, knock him into a side street, throttle him until he bleated out the truth. And if truth was not forthcoming, just keep throttling him till he was senseless.
That’s how he’d awoken this morning. Angry. Angry at the sky, angry at the trees and air and sidewalk. Angry at the people walking on two legs, angry at the joggers, angry at the cars and the dogs and cats, angry at the clouds and the herons and ibis and gulls, angry at the men hosing off the sidewalks outside the bars, angry at the paper cups tumbling in the wind up Duval Street, and especially angry, uniquely and particularly angry, at the two legs attached to his body. The two stupid, useless, empty reminders of the careless life he’d been leading, the healthy, vigorous body he’d been taking for goddamn granted.
Across from the Casa Marina, Thorn rolled his chair into the shade of a royal palm, and watched a series of taxis and Mercedeses and BMWs come and go, noting each of the walkers, the runners, the early morning golfers heading out for their play. Not a single Echeverria among them.
For the third time that morning he reached into the pocket of his blue work shirt and drew out the snapshot he’d found in the desk drawer of his room. A handsome blond woman was squatting beside an eight-or nine-year-old girl who looked very much like the woman’s daughter, both of them laughing wildly as a silvery wave crested above them, about to crash onto their backs. The woman was wearing a black one-piece and her daughter was in a polka-dot skirted two-piece. Blond pigtails on the girl, a cute nose, a splash of freckles across her forehead. Mother with beautifully muscled legs.
Thorn had decided it was Greta Masterson, the woman who’d preceded him in that dark narrow room at the Eaton Street clinic. The woman who Brad Madison had sent to get the goods on Bean, the same woman Brad had now lost contact with. Thorn promised Brad he would sniff around among the other patients in as quiet a way as he could to see if any of them knew what had become of the woman. He’d sworn to be extremely careful, agreed to relay everything he learned, no matter how trivial it might seem, vowed not to freelance this in any way.
Brad and he had shaken hands on the bargain. Thorn, suddenly a deputized DEA agent. But already he’d violated his oath. He’d found the photograph of the woman he believed to be Greta, and he’d told no one about it, nor did he intend to. He’d rolled out of the clinic this morning as soon as he’d received his steroid injection from the morning nurse, without questioning a single other patient. And now here he was, positioned outside the Casa Marina, determined to freelance the hell out of the situation.
For the next half hour he watched the hotel and took occasional peeks at the photograph. There was something haunting about the beach scene that kept bringing his eyes back. The woman was beautiful, but that was only part of it. She had the delicately balanced features and immaculate skin Thorn associated with Alpine milkmaids. All the elegant angles of her face were measured out with the classic precision of a Swiss watch. But there was something complicated about her exuberance in the shadow of the crashing wave, her arm locked securely around the shoulders of her child, as if she were trying to show the young girl how to defy the ocean’s strength without losing sight of its danger.
Brad had told him almost nothing personal about Greta Masterson, but what he saw in that photograph he liked a great deal. This was a woman for whom surrender was not an option. And it struck him now, that most likely she was also a woman with sufficient foresight not to have left behind such a snapshot unless her departure was sudden and unforeseen.
“Cute, huh?”
Thorn jerked to his right and there was Ginny, the young blond woman from the clinic. She was wearing gray leggings, purple running shorts, a halter top with a Nike logo, and a black baseball cap.
“That’s Greta Masterson,” she said. “But I guess you knew that already.”
“I found it in my room.”
“Yeah, that was Greta’s room. Till she left.”
Ginny smiled at him, and repositioned her wheelchair so she was in the sunlight. A man walking a rottweiler down the sidewalk had to step into the street to get around them. He looked away as if he expected them to try to hit him up for a dollar.
“I’m taking my morning roll. You too?”
Thorn nodded.
“Want to learn how to do a wheelie?” Ginny said. “It’s harder than it looks. Helps build up your arms.”
She tipped herself backward, got her footplates up in the air, and held the wheelchair steady with tiny movements of her push rim.
“Maybe later,” Thorn said. “At the moment I got my hands full just rolling along, point A to point B.”
“What’re you doing out here?”
“Taking a breather.”
“Waiting for somebody?”
“Just a breather,” Thorn said.
“Bet you’re waiting for your contact.”
Thorn looked at her.
“Contact,” she said. “As in pharmaceuticals.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not waiting for my contact.”
“I got a pretty good connection myself, if you’re interested. Just grass, but it’s good shit. Hydroponic stuff. I can give you a joint, see if you’re interested.”
“My drug days are long gone.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Drugs are the name of the game around here.”
Wearing blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, Echeverria came striding out the double front doors of the hotel and walked briskly down the driveway. Thorn swung his chair out of Echeverria’s line of sight, and backpedaled behind the shrub.
“Hey,” Ginny said. “Where you going?”
Thorn waited till the big man turned the corner and started down a side street, then he rolled forward and out across the broad avenue. Ginny tagged along.
“I lied when I said I was out for my morning stroll. Actually, I been following you since you left the clinic. You interest me, Thorn. You’re not like those other guys.”
There was no ramp on the opposite sidewalk, so Thorn stayed on the edge of the street, a few inches out of the gutter.
“Truth is,” she said, “I got a thing about older guys.”
“I’m not interested, Ginny. Drugs, romance, any of it.”
“What I find is, older guys take their time. They’re more appreciative. They don’t have so much to prove. Of course, I like younger guys too. They have their virtues. And then there are guys my own age, they aren’t all that bad either. In general, I guess you could say I just like guys.”
Echeverria turned the next corner and headed toward Louie’s Backyard and the Reach, Waddell Avenue, a shady street that was rank with mildew and expensive garbage.
“You gay, Thorn?”
“No.”
“Whew,” she said. “In this town, that makes you eligible for minority status. You can park in the special zones. But then, you can park there anyway, what with the fucking wheelchair, right?”
Losing sight of Echeverria around the next corner, Thorn wheeled himself faster. Ginny stayed with him.
“So you’re not a vet, huh?”
“No.”
“You got the phantom pain?”
“No.”
“Wow, a lucky guy.”
Echeverria halted at the corner of South Street and Vernon. He stood for a moment staring down South. A moment or two later a red Cadillac swung to the curb and Echeverria got inside. Unless there was a candy-apple red hearse dealership in Key West, it was the same car he and Bean had been driving in the day before.
“That was nice, what you did yesterday.”
“Forget it.”
“I bet that’s the kind of guy you are. Find a bird with a broken wing, you stop what you’re doing, take it somewhere to get it fixed. I bet you’re like that, huh?”
“Not usually.”
“No, really. It was nice. Above and beyond the call. Hardy can be one mean son of a bitch. If Pepper hadn’t stepped in, man, I wouldn’t want to see the mess you two would’ve made. I don’t care what kind of kung fu you know. Hardy’s got some heavy-duty hours in that chair, and he knows how to fight. I’ve seen him take on two guys at once, two healthy guys. Beat the ever-loving fecal matter out of them.”
A shirtless guy on a rickety red bike was coming down Vernon. Big blue milk crate fastened onto the back of the bike, a white terrier riding inside it. Thorn rolled forward down the incline and into the street and the guy on the bike steered wide around him.
“I need a ride,” Thorn called out to the guy. “It’s an emergency.” He had long reddish hair and a scraggly Chinese mystic’s beard that looked like he’d been working on it for years. He brought the bike to a squeaking stop a few feet away and looked back. Thorn rolled over to him.
“What kind of emergency?”
“Catch up to that car, the red hearse.”
“What car?”
“Just go,” Thorn said. “Take this right, then the first left. Come on, we’re losing him.”
He gripped the blue basket. And the guy shook his head and made a little sigh like he’d been waylaid like this a few times before—price you paid for living in paradise. He stood up on the pedals and muscled the bike forward. Skinny guy, looked like he might be surviving on one grain of rice a day. As they picked up speed, the white terrier stared at Thorn’s fingers curled over his blue basket. The bike weaving a little from the strain of pulling the wheelchair.
“Left here,” Thorn said. “Left, left.”
The guy wheeled the bike onto Simonton. He was breathing hard, still standing up on the pedals. The wheelchair bumped over a couple of smallish potholes and Thorn nearly lost his grip.
“We’re losing him,” Thorn said. “Come on, man, pump. You can do it.”
The terrier was licking Thorn’s fingers, brown bulging eyes fastened to Thorn’s as if maybe he liked the way Thorn tasted so much, he was toying with the idea of switching masters.
Thorn saw the hearse turn left a half dozen blocks ahead.
“Faster, man, faster.”
The guy was working now, sweat running down his bare back. The dog rested his chin on Thorn’s knuckles. Thorn didn’t see it coming and neither did the guy: a big limb in the street, a couple of feet long, probably fell off somebody’s lawn service truck. The front wheel hit it and the bike veered hard to the left into an oncoming station wagon. The skinny guy sailed right, tucking and rolling onto the grass beside the sidewalk, and Thorn kept on going straight for about ten feet, tilting up on one wheel, then slamming back down before he brought the chair to a halt.
On the roof of the station wagon, the terrier was barking furiously at the young girl in a white uniform who stood beside her door looking at Thorn, at the bicycle, and at the bearded guy in the grass.
Thorn stared down Southard, the hearse long gone. If he was going to tail Echeverria, he was going to have to get a turbocharger for his goddamn chair. He rolled over to the guy in the grass and asked him if he was okay, and the guy mumbled that he was fine, Jimmy crack corn, fine and dandy. He didn’t seem to be bleeding, no bones poking through, so Thorn left him there and rolled back into the street.
