Key West Luck

  Key West Luck

  LAURENCE SHAMES

  Copyright © 2015 LAURENCE SHAMES

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13: 978-1519553188

  DEDICATION

  To Marilyn, with love and Sno-Cones and dreams come true

  BOOKS BY LAURENCE SHAMES

  Key West Novels—

  Tropical Swap

  Shot on Location

  The Naked Detective

  Welcome to Paradise

  Mangrove Squeeze

  Virgin Heat

  Tropical Depression

  Sunburn

  Scavenger Reef

  Florida Straits

  Key West Short Fiction—

  Chickens

  New York and California Novels—

  Money Talks

  The Angels’ Share

  Nonfiction—

  The Hunger for More

  The Big Time

  PART ONE

  1.

  “So here’s what I think the name should be,” said Nicky Angelo. “Phoebe’s Hawaiian Shave Ice.”

  Phoebe Goodyear answered without looking at him. She was admiring her newly purchased though slightly ancient truck. “I’m calling it Sno-Cone.”

  “Shave Ice sounds more upscale.”

  “Upscale doesn’t interest me. Look, it’s frozen water in a paper cone with some sugar syrup squirted on it. It melts. It drips. It costs a dollar and a half. How upscale can it sound?”

  Pursuing his own line of thought, Nicky said, “And Hawaiian makes it sound, like, more exotic.”

  “We’re not in Hawaii,” she pointed out. She said this in a very neutral tone, every syllable having pretty much the same pitch and volume. Sometimes this radically mild intonation made her sound wiseass or sarcastic, but that wasn’t her intent. It was just the way she spoke. “In fact,” she went on evenly, “we’re, like, five thousand miles from Hawaii.”

  “Wha’ does that matter?” Nicky protested. He said it emphatically. He said everything emphatically. Ask him the time of day, he’d answer emphatically. “Look at restaurants,” he said. “China Dragon. Siam Noodle House. Are we in China? Are we in Siam?”

  “I’m calling it Sno-Cone,” Phoebe said.

  She was on the tall side and so thin that there was something poignant about her slightly in-turning knees in their cut-off denim shorts. She wore a loose shirt that didn’t quite reach to her waist; the narrow swath of tan skin on her stomach seemed as taut and smooth as if it had been varnished. Her hair was very short, brush-like in its texture, different colors during different stages of her life. Lately it had been magenta, a shade that set up a kind of oscillation with the dark blue, nearly violet, of her wide-set eyes. Her lean but finely muscled arms were lavishly tattooed from wrist to elbow with pink and lavender swirls suggesting paisleys. She sported one small silver stud at the outside edge of her right eyebrow, and this tiny asymmetry hinted at something wry and skeptical, as though the eyebrow itself were perpetually lifted.

  “Too plain,” Nicky pressed. “Call it Phoebe’s Sno-Cone, at least. Or wait. Even better: Phoebe’s Original Sno-Cone. Give it some whaddyacallit, some distinction, some personality.”

  “It has personality,” said Phoebe. “Its personality is that it’s really simple. Besides, I’ve only got one can of spray paint.”

  “So use it up at least.”

  “I don’t want to use it up. What if I need it for something else?”

  “What else ya gonna need it for?”

  “You never know. I’m on a pretty tight budget, Nicky. Don’t have much masking tape, either. It’s gonna be Sno-Cone.”

  They were standing on the promenade that flanked Smathers Beach in Key West, Florida. An odd beach, Smathers was, plumped up with sand brought in from other places and dumped on top of the jagged and uninviting coral of which the Keys were actually made. Arbitrarily, the beach went on for maybe half a mile, then just stopped, pinched off by some bulkheading that was like the wall of a gigantic sandbox. During season, the stretch of A1A that paralleled the beach would be lined with vendors selling pizza and conch fritters or renting lounge chairs and umbrellas or blaring music to advertise local radio stations and bars.

  But now it was November and season hadn’t started yet; the beach and the road in front of it were almost empty. November in Key West was a time of labored reawakening, and, like all reawakenings, it was sometimes exhilarating and sometimes grumpy. The enervating heat of summer was finally breaking; the humidity, some days at least, was dropping from the stupor-inducing level to the merely sensuous and muzzy. Now and then a scrap of almost cool breeze carried with it a subtle goad to activity, a sometimes gentle and sometimes nagging reminder of all the things that one had put off doing through the torpid months since springtime.

  Locals tended to wait until November to do things like fixing shutters that had broken in an April windstorm or nailing down a porch plank that had lifted back in June. For those who loathed and detested tourists, November was a time of slowly mounting dread; for those dependent on tourists for their livelihood, the month had a suspense as of waiting for the Nile floods to sweep in and restore prosperity. And for those who, like Phoebe Goodyear, were newcomers to the island, who had for various reasons staked their hopes on Key West without being able to say exactly why, November was a kind of prelude, an intro, a time for making preparations, but without the benefit of knowing precisely what they were preparing for.

  So she stood next to the ocean and looked lovingly at her truck. It was a classic 1987 Chevy Step-Van, the P-30 model, GM diesel engine, air conditioning unit sitting squatly on the roof. The gearshift was located on the steering column, and the driver’s seat, the only seat, was propped on a steel stem, its baked red vinyl upholstery patched at the seams with duct tape. The body was painted a lumpy, sort of eggy white with drips and blisters here and there. On the curb side there was a big window that slid wide open and could be shaded by a plywood awning that swung up or down on rusty hinges.

  The truck—complete with icemaker and grinder, shelving, sink, narrow sleeping cot, tiny camper-style bathroom, and bike rack that held a heavy old red clunker—had cost eleven thousand dollars, which was nearly ten thousand more than Phoebe had in the world. Leaving herself barely more than grocery money, she’d plunked down a grand as an initial payment and signed a note promising to pay off the rest at five hundred a month. Taking on the debt was a slightly terrifying gamble, but by a series of very sketchy calculations she decided that if she lived in the truck, found a place to park it for free or close to free, cooked very modest meals on the two-burner hot plate, and worked her ass off, she could probably make the payments. While others would be hanging out on the sand or getting silly in the bars, she’d be spending most of her waking hours at the sliding window, dispensing frozen refreshments, taking in small bills and change, trying to build a new life one Sno-Cone at a time.

  She was deciding how to space the lettering and how thick to make the hyphen when Nicky spoke again. “I still think it needs another word or two. Island Sno-Cone. Southernmost Sno-Cone. Something.”

  Phoebe didn’t answer. If Nicky had known her a little better, known her nearly as well as he hoped to know her, he would have understood that the more he urged her to change her mind, the less chance that her mind would ever change.

  She started to unroll the masking tape. It came off the spool with a raspy sound. She climbed up onto a little step-stool and Nicky finally got it that Phoebe was determined to do this job, every part of it, alone, without his help or anybody else’s. Oddly, though it was her life and not his own that he was mainly thinking about, this made him feel sort of lonely. He said a goodbye that in her concentration she barel
y heard, and pedaled off on his bicycle to get ready for another shift at his own strange job.

  2.

  A few hours later, at a dim and sparsely populated joint called the Eclipse Saloon, Nicky Angelo, hunched over his guitar, was playing his heart out and nobody was listening.

  It was near the end of the evening’s second set and he was singing his break song—his favorite, his signature—an old Paul Simon tune called “Gone at Last.” He’d played that song hundreds of times, maybe thousands, never exactly the same way twice. The reason he kept messing with the tempo and the phrasing was that he was still trying to figure out if the song was about hope or more like a sly anthem of resigned failure. I’ve had a long streak of that bad luck/ But I pray it’s gone at last. Gone, gone at last. Gone at last…

  So the question was: Did the guy really believe his stinking luck was just about to change, any second now? Or did he know, deep down, that his overdue shift of fortune was still a long way off and that it might never come at all? Nicky couldn’t decide, so he played the song sometimes faster and sometimes slower, sometimes with a confident lilt, sometimes with a quietness suggesting deep misgivings.

  On this particular evening, with his new friend Phoebe on his mind, he was playing it tentatively hopeful. The rhythm was crisp, the words came out undimmed by irony. He strummed the final chord, held the last note, and waited for the applause.

  For what seemed a long time there wasn’t any.

  Then it started, but it was quite thin, maybe four or five people clapping. One of them was Nicky’s buddy Ozzie Kimmel, who had to clap because they were roommates—houseboat-mates, actually—and because Ozzie drank for free when Nicky was performing. Of the other eight or ten people arrayed around the Eclipse, most were not applauding but this was neither here nor there on the question of whether they’d liked the music. Either they were talking about fishing or football or were just too stewed to notice that the music had stopped. Anyway, it wasn’t like someone famous was playing. Nicky was just a tavern act.

  He propped the guitar on its stand and shuffled down the two scuffed steps from the stage to join Ozzie at the small dim table where he sat alone.

  “Nice set,” his buddy said.

  “Yeah, right,” said Nicky, “went over huge.” His brief spasm of optimism had quickly vanished into the dark and empty corners of the bar, a place whose décor—dark-paneled walls hung with archaic trophy fish, high barstools vaguely reminiscent of the fighting chairs on charter boats—might generously have been called retro. Except it wasn’t retro, it was just an old semi-dive that hadn’t been spruced up.

  “Hey,” said Ozzie, “it’s a Tuesday. What can you expect?”

  He was trying to help but it backfired.

  “Tuesday. Right,” said Nicky. “And what nights do I get? Tuesday. Wednesday. Fucking Thursday.” He said this with an expression that started as a glare but soon lost its edge and retreated into a kind of shrug that came mostly from his eyes. His eyes were a shiny black, set deep under glossy brows on either side of a broad and somewhat flattened nose.

  The bartender brought over a round of beers and the two friends were quiet for a moment as they drank some. Then Nicky glanced over at his tip jar that was propped on a stool beneath a corner of the stage. It was empty except for the fiver that he himself had dropped in to prime the pump. He frowned with restless lips that were nearly always shifting slightly whether he was talking or singing or even just thinking to himself. Then he said, “How many bars you think there are in this town?”

  Without hesitation Ozzie said, “Two hundred and ninety-three.”

  “Bullshit. You just made that up.”

  “No I didn’t. I googled it the other day. It’s the kind of factoid people like.”

  “It isn’t possible,” Nicky said. “The whole island’s like two miles long.”

  “I’m not talking geography,” Ozzie said. “I’m talking bars. Two hundred and ninety-three.”

  “Okay,” Nicky conceded. “Two hundred and ninety-three. And I end up playing this one. Weeknights. Not even on Duval Street.”

  Ozzie shrugged, drank some beer, and spoke from behind his glass. “Maybe it’s that your act is nothing special.”

  This was the kind of thing that only Ozzie would say and only Ozzie could get away with. He had zero tact, he was utterly without a social filter, but there was no malice or ill intent in his running commentary on the life around him. He just said what he thought at the instant he thought it.

  Nicky didn’t bristle but he did stand up for himself. “Hey, I’m as good as ninety per cent of the musicians in this town.”

  “My point exactly. These local acts, they’re all the same. One guy, a guy on the old side usually, with a guitar. Maybe a harmonica. Same songs, year after year after year. Jimmy Buffett. Bob Marley. Welcome to Key West, here’s your Tourist Board songbook. Plus, let’s face it, your guitar playing isn’t all that clean. You get that buzz sometimes, that plink.”

  “That I can’t help,” Nicky said, and he held up his hand, the left. The hand was connected to a seriously muscled arm that led, in turn, to a ropy set of shoulders and a formidable neck and chest. Nicky was not the willowy musician type. When he held his guitar, the instrument looked small and fragile in his grip and yet he played it gently, tenderly, with the exaggerated care of a very strong man who’d just been handed a baby. “These two fingers,” he explained, “the ring finger and the pinky, they never healed up quite right.”

  Ozzie said, “Maybe you shouldn’t’ve gone around hitting people with left hooks. Maybe that wasn’t a real clever thing for a guitar player to do.”

  “Did a lot of things that weren’t clever,” Nicky admitted, mostly talking down into his beer. “But that was a long time ago. Never thought the guitar would end up being my livelihood.”

  “It kind of isn’t,” Ozzie pointed out, his gaze flicking toward the tip jar.

  Nicky had no reply to that. His eyes panned vaguely around the dim tavern. Two fat men in Hawaiian shirts were rearranging their bunched-up shorts as they stood to leave. They hadn’t been listening to Nicky anyway; still, it was disheartening to see the room get even emptier before his final set.

  At last he said, “Shit, Ozzie, I’m just not sure I can do this anymore. I mean, really, what’s the point?”

  “There’s supposed to be a point?”

  “I mean, I’m practically broke,” Nicky went on. “Plus it’s depressing sitting up there playing to the walls. Try it sometime, you’ll see. Sometimes I think I should just give it up.”

  “Great. Great idea. Quit. And do what?”

  Nicky hesitated, then, by old habit, glanced cautiously around the room before saying very softly, “I dunno. I dunno. Maybe get back into the life.”

  In a far less modulated tone, Ozzie said, “The life? That life? The one that could’ve got you killed before? That could’ve landed you in prison? Are you crazy?”

  Nicky didn’t answer. He sipped some beer. The bartender caught his eye and tapped on his wristwatch. Nicky wiped his lips on a napkin and got up to play his last set of the evening.

  3.

  “Cuba,” said Charlie Ponte. “Cigars. Nice ruse. I like it.”

  “I thought you would,” said Luis Benavides with evident satisfaction. He was a tall and cocky fellow in impeccably pressed trousers and a gleaming white guayabera. His face was long and concave, handsome yet somehow unpleasant, with a sallow complexion suggesting aristocratic genes and/or bad digestion, and a neat, pointy van Dyke that gave his profile the shape of a crescent moon.

  “It’s simple,” Ponte mulled. “It’s a natural. It’s obvious.”

  “That’s what the idiots in Customs will think.”

  The two men were chatting in Ponte’s Miami condo, a full-floor waterfront penthouse overlooking Biscayne Bay. Far below, in a warm soft breeze, motor yachts rocked gently in their berths and the masts of sailboats tipped deferentially toward one another like snobs exchanging
greetings at the opera. Ponte was seated, or rather sprawled, on a white leather sofa, his meaty arm resting on the back of it as though encircling some babe. Contemplatively, he rubbed the squarish, balding head that seemed perched almost directly on his shoulders, barely separated by a stem of bullish neck. Then he said, “But there’s one thing I just don’t understand. Why do you need me for this?”

  Benavides had his answer ready. Benavides always had his answer ready. For someone so young, he was already developing a precocious statesmanlike polish, an aura of ruthless, calculating calm. “Two reasons,” he said. “The first is that I need someone I can trust.”

  “You can’t trust your own people?”

  Stiffening just slightly, the young man said, “Which people do you mean?”

  “The Cubans. I mean, you’re Cuban—“

  “I’m American,” corrected Benavides. “Born and bred in Miami.”

  Ponte stifled a shrug of exasperation. These Latin expats. As a longtime South Florida crime boss, he’d worked with them for many years and they still sometimes baffled him. Sometimes they acted like an aggrieved lost tribe, the only bona fide Cubans. Other times they took Cuban as an insult and wanted to be seen as gung-ho U.S. patriots. How could you tell which shoulder a given Cuban would wear his chip on? Mollifyingly, Ponte said, “Okay, excuse me, you’re American. Of Cuban extraction. But in the meantime, there’s a certain piece of paper currently in Cuba that you want to smuggle out of Cuba in a Cuban boat. So what I’m asking is wouldn’t it be simpler to get a Cuban to run the boat?”

  Trying without complete success to keep the condescension out of his voice, Benavides said, “Maybe you just don’t understand. Maybe no outsider could.”