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  "Thanks," said Tuschman. "Thanks for everything. You'll see, I'll come back tan and sell my ass off."

  He turned to go. He was not yet forty, but these days, when he pivoted, he felt old tackles in his knees; the small bones in his ankles remembered rebounds when he didn't land quite right.

  He was just rounding the wall of frosted glass when he heard Moe Kleiman chuckle. "The dog. Hey, Al, ya know something?"

  The salesman took a step back toward his boss.

  The boss lowered his voice. "The other guys, it drives them nuts, they constantly wonder why you're always top banana. But I know. I could give it to you in a word."

  Al Tuschman did not ask what the word was. He didn't want to know. Like everybody else, he had his superstitious side. Something worked, you didn't jinx it.

  Moe Kleiman told him anyway. "Relief."

  "Relief?"

  "Relief. People see you, Al—big shoulders, chest hair up to the Adam's apple—they figure, Oy, I'm dealing with a tough guy. Their guard goes up. But it soon comes down, and then you've got 'em. Why does it come down? I'll tell you: because they're relieved to see you really are a softie."

  Pleased with his analysis, Moe Kleiman smiled.

  Al Tuschman tried to, but it didn't work. His mouth slid to one side of his face; he looked down at a swatch book, shuffled his feet. A softie. Softie as in pushover? As in coward? Was it really that obvious? Did everybody know? He briefly met his boss's gaze, made another bent attempt at smiling, and steered his aching legs toward the partition.

  Moe Kleiman watched his best salesman edge around the frosted glass, and understood too late that he'd barged in on a secret, that he should have kept his mouth shut. A note of pleading in his voice, he said, "Al, hey, I meant it as a compliment."

  2

  "But Nicky," said Charlie "Chop" Parilla, "I don't even know the guy."

  "Perfect."

  "Perfect? What perfect? Hol' on a minute." He pressed the phone against his hairy, sweating stomach and screamed across the garage at the two workmen who were using giant hammers to bang the doors off a brand-new BMW 740i. "Ya see I'm onna phone. Try a fuckin' wrench." He dried the receiver on his pants leg, put it back against his ear. "What's perfect, I don't know the guy?"

  "Motive, Chop," said Nicky Scotto. He was calling from a pay phone down on Broome Street. It was starting to snow. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, and thin, defective snow like a confetti of waxed paper was already blowing sideways through the street. "Ya don't know the guy, ya got no reason to torment 'im. No one's gonna suspect."

  Chop Parilla scratched his ample belly, flicked moisture from his fingers. In Hialeah it was eighty-six and muggy. The doors of the garage were closed. Had to be when you were doing unrequested autopsies on other people's cars. Lifting engines out like guts. Scalpeling away spare parts until sometimes nothing but the drive train sat there on the lift, forlorn as the excised backbone of a chicken. "I don't know. Sounds like trouble."

  "Trouble?" said Nicky. Wet snow was tickling his Adam's apple and putting evanescent sparkles in his hair. "Think of it as fun. Twenty grand for a week a trailin' someone you don't care about one way or the other, and fuckin' wit' his head."

  Chop watched as the wheels were lifted off the Beemer. Very handsome wheels. Aircraft-grade aluminum. He said, "If this guy's a big cheese in New York ... I don't know what you're puttin' me inna middle of."

  "There is no middle," Nicky said. "This is strictly unofficial. A small, personal matter . . . Look, Chop, I know the fuckin' shithole where you work. Wouldn't you like a paid excuse to get outa there awhile?"

  Parilla thought that over. It was true that Hialeah got depressing. All those sunburned beggars with signs around their necks, sitting at intersections clogged with smoking cars blasting "murder-Castro" call-in shows. But on the other hand, in Hialeah, Chop was doing what he was put on earth to do. Stealing cars. Taking them apart. Sometimes putting them together again in changed configurations. Gaskets; fuel injectors; the snaking cables of clutches. He loved them all; they spoke to him. If a couple of breaks had fallen differently, he might have ended up a smiling, legit mechanic with a computerized wheel-alignment gizmo and his name embroidered on his pocket, a regular Mr. Goodwrench.

  Nicky Scotto broke into his reverie. "Go down to the Keys? Sunsets. Margaritas. A little poontang, maybe?"

  This made it pretty tempting. But there were problems. "Nicky, how I even find this guy?"

  On the snowy New York corner, Nicky Scotto smiled. "Easy."

  "Easy for you to say easy."

  "He's a little guy wit' a big dog—"

  "Oh, great," said Chop. "That really narrows it—"

  "—and a vanity plate."

  "Vanity plate?" said Chop. "The asshole's got a vanity plate?"

  "Did I tell ya he's a putz or what? Tells all the world, BIG AL."

  Chop Parilla shook his head. It was a small head on a large body. At the back, neck became skull in one straight line; in front, the jaw barely lifted clear of the collarbones—it looked like he'd have to jack his chin up to shave beneath it. Vanity plate. "Make it thirty grand, I'll do it."

  "Thirty," said Nicky. "Now you're gettin' greedy."

  "No," said Chop. "In fact I'm takin' a cut. Ya want this job done like it oughta be, I need a second guy."

  On Broome Street the snow was getting drier. Nicky brushed flakes of it from the lapel of his camel-hair topcoat. "Have someone in mind?"

  The guys in the garage had started hammering again. In syncopation with the tapping, Chop said, "Only the perfect guy for this job. Sid the Squid."

  Nicky Scotto smiled, narrowing his piggish eyes. Snow- flakes tickled his gums. Squid Berman. Nicky knew him by reputation only. But what a reputation. A warped, perverted, morbid, and sickly artful madman; perhaps a genius. "But wait," he said. "I thought I heard that Squid was inna slammer. Heisting a racehorse or something."

  "Not a racehorse. Couple greyhounds. Got caught red-handed with a can of Alpo. But that was like three hitches ago. He just got out again."

  "Wha'd they get 'im for this time?"

  "Stealing letters," Chop Parilla said.

  "Letters? Squid? That's stupid. Federal."

  "Not letters," said Chop. "Letters. Big, gigantic letters offa hotel signs. Ya know, South Beach, deco. Wanted to make a huge, gigantic billboard that said YOU TOO."

  "You, too?"

  "Don't ask me," said Chop. "He got it in his head. Anyway, he could use some dough and he could use some entertainment."

  "Squid Berman," Nicky said with satisfaction. Why hadn't he thought of him himself? "Okay, Chop. Bring 'im in, ya got your thirty grand."

  *

  Big Al Marracotta spent that night in a Holiday Inn near Santee, South Carolina. By the time he drove across the Florida line next day, Ripper's rawhide bone had been masticated into a gooey mess, the Jerry Vale and Al Martino tapes had been listened to so many times that even the harp parts had trickled into memory, and Katy Sansone was nowhere to be seen. Her face finally came up from underneath the steering wheel somewhere north of Cocoa Beach.

  Around Daytona, polishing her toenails, which rested on the glove box with the little gun inside, she said, "I hate long car trips."

  "Relaxing," said Big Al. He gestured left and right. "Look at the palm trees."

  "I'd rather watch the license plates," she said. "Michigan. Ontario."

  Alan Tuschman, meanwhile, was lagging a state or so behind, driving a cruise-control seventy in his leased silver Lexus, and mostly talking to his dog, Fifi.

  "Feef," he said, scratching her behind the ears, "dogs have it pretty good. You realize that?"

  The dog luxuriously lolled her head from side to side, blithely entrusting her knobby little skull to her master's enormous hand. She was a shih tzu with an attitude, immaculately groomed and wholly the coquette. Arching bangs lent mystery to her black and glassy eyes. Her small pink tongue, not much wider than an anchovy, was an organ of flirtation. H
er walk was proud and bouncy— a cheerleader's walk; she had a way of looking back across her shoulder that created a distinct impression of Bacall. But for all her apparent frippery, she had reserves of steadfastness and courage that had never yet been tested, but simmered at the ready nonetheless. Now, at ease and intimate, she lay on her back and let herself be stroked.

  "You're a dog," said Al, "people don't expect that much. Don't gotta be strong just because you're big. Don't gotta keep winning the same game over and over again. What ya gotta do? Not pee on the floor. Roll over. Sit down, ya wanna biscuit. 'Course, ya gotta be loyal."

  He stopped petting her just long enough to wag an index finger in her face. She licked the finger then bit down lightly on the bulbous knuckle.

  "Loyalty's big," he went on. "Then again, it's big in people, too. But somehow it's more appreciated in a dog. . . . And look at the other advantages. Say it's the middle of the afternoon and you wanna go to bed. You curl up with a rubber hamburger and people say how cute. None of this wondering am I depressed, is something wrong? ... Or even, like, with sex. You're young, you have a fling or two, a good screaming hump across a couple of backyards, then boom, ya get fixed and your worries are over. None of this wondering do I still look good, am I hip, if I get somebody in the sack with me, how's it gonna go? I don't see where being a dog is such a bad deal."

  Fifi did nothing to change his mind. She scratched her supple back against the leather upholstery, kicked her manicured and carefree paws into the air.

  Al Tuschman stretched his dully aching legs and let out a deep, unhurried sigh that filled the car. He was thinking something that he wouldn't say aloud, even to the dog.

  He was thinking how odd it was to have worked so hard to win this contest, to have had to win this contest, when the truth was that he needed a trip to Florida like he needed a hole in the head. Oh, the sun would be nice. He'd enjoy people's envy of his tan. It would feel good to dunk in a pool, and maybe he'd get lucky in the bars. But he couldn't help believing, secretly, that all in all he'd be happier at home. In his neighborhood. In the store. Where he knew what he was doing and who he was.

  On vacation, who was he? One more aimless, nameless shmeggegi in boxer trunks, getting a headache from drinking in the afternoon sun, desperately pretending to be loving every minute. A disconnected guy waiting for life to throw him an experience.

  Whereas at home he was comfortable, recognized, embraced. A well-liked character who got warm hellos in diners. Who kibitzed with the car-wash guys, the cops. Everybody knew him, or as much of him as he wanted them to. Maybe as much of him as he knew himself. The schoolboy hero. The top salesman. The smiling, easy fella who'd started putting up big numbers at an early age, and was putting them up still. The kind of guy who had a nickname known even to people who hadn't actually met him.

  Big Al. Slightly famous in his town, a legend in his neighborhood.

  3

  There is one road leading to Key West.

  Like a muddy river draining many streams, U.S. 1 gathers up the suckers who feed the resort economy, and the seekers who refresh the town's battered and eroding soul, and funnels them into two thin lanes that hop from key to key between the ocean and the Gulf, between ranks of power lines and strings of pelicans, between dank motels and stalking egrets, salty bars and patient barracuda, porno stores and sweeping tides. There are exits from this road but they are all dead ends, incomplete, unsatisfying stoppings-short. Only one route leads through to the edge that is powerfully agreed upon as the finish to this part of the world. On that hurtling and constricted path there is nowhere to hide.

  Which is why Chop Parilla and Squid Berman had positioned themselves on the shoulder of the highway just where it crosses Cow Key Bridge and enters Key West proper.

  It was early afternoon when they took up their post. The sun drew steam out of the mangroves when it broke between the spongy clouds that were blowing westward, carrying with them some of the last of the prodigious summer rains. The day grew hotter and traffic rumbled on the bridge. Each sort of vehicle made a different noise. Mopeds buzzed like paper on a comb. Cars plunked over seams in the concrete. Trucks forced a groan from the trestles and sent forth walls of wind that whistled in the railings.

  Sid the Squid, morbidly sensitive to noises, as to most things, was made jumpy by the cacophony. He kept getting out of Chop Parilla's Jaguar—a mosaic of extracted, reassembled parts—patrolling some yards of Florida, and climbing in again.

  Squid was built to be jumpy. He was shorter than average, and small-boned, but with incongruously bandy muscles that swelled between his narrow joints; at moments it seemed like he might snap his arms and legs from movements too spasmodic. His elbows were pointy, like Popeye's, and his Adam's apple stuck out so far that it deformed the collars of his T-shirts. His eyeballs bulged, and an improbable expanse of white could usually be seen around his flickering hazel irises. Now he dove back into the idling, air-conditioned Jag and said, "Hey, Chop, y'ever do a job like this before?"

  "No." Truth was, Parilla's career had cleaved to the mundane. Besides stealing cars, he collected loans, occasionally set insurance fires, broke fingers and noses when it was unavoidable. Straightforward stuff, conventional.

  "Me neither," said the Squid. "But I like it. I'm psyched. Ya know what I like about it, Chop?"

  He paused what was, for him, a beat, but for most other people was a quarter beat. Chop did not have time to answer, and Squid went on in his chronically humid voice, the voice of someone with too much wetness seeping through the blue strands underneath his tongue.

  "It makes no sense. I mean, it's pure—it has no purpose. Not like, say, robbing something. Torching something. Vulgar ordinary shit. Where's the creativity in that? This is like . . . it's like getting paid to be a gremlin. Hired to direct a nightmare. Yeah! Ya see what I'm sayin'?"

  The statement was a little high-flown and abstract for Chop. He answered, "Can we steal his car?"

  Squid rolled his bulging eyes. "That ain't the job."

  "We're s'posed t'annoy him," argued Chop. "Wouldn't that annoy him?"

  Squid didn't answer. He sprang out of the Jag again, paced along the shoulder, listening to the orchestra of traffic.

  Shadows started to lengthen, silhouettes of palms were pasted on the roadway. The sun went from white to yellow and revealed the fine grain of the inconstant air. After a time Chop lowered the electric window and yelled out, "Squid, let's get a cuppa coffee."

  The bandy man hesitated. He was launched on a performance, bringing to bear on a campaign all his loony concentration. It bothered him to leave his lookout, and he bounced from one foot to the other, deciding whether he would stay or go.

  "C'mon," said Chop, and he gestured toward a pink and orange Dunkin' Donuts sign a quarter mile away, at the point where the Key West coastline bellied out and the dreary commercial strip began.

  Squid calculated. It would take ten, twelve minutes to get there, score some coffee and a box of doughnuts, and get back to his post again. What were the odds? Not without ambivalence, he climbed into the Jag.

  And while they were standing at the doughnut counter, discussing the merits of glazed and iced and Boston cream, Big Al Marracotta slipped unnoticed into town, his carsick rottweiler clawing at the windows of the Lincoln, his girlfriend refreshing her mascara, now that they had finally arrived.

  *

  Sunset approached.

  Clouds flattened into slabs, spikes of sunlight slashed orange and rose and burgundy between them, a different color for each latitude of sky. Downtown the event was being celebrated as the climax of the day and the harbinger of cocktails, but for Alan Tuschman, still on the highway, heading west, it was mainly just a nuisance. Stoplights disappeared against the glare. Cruel rays shot through the smeared and eggy corpses of a million dead bugs on the windshield. His sunshade just missed being where the sun was, as sunshades always did, and he had to pee so badly that his solar plexus burned.

  But at
least he was very nearly at the Cow Key Bridge, the stubby gangplank to Key West.

  On the far side of that bridge, Chop Parilla, bored into a trance, his Jag backed partway into mangroves, was looking toward the road, coveting selected vehicles, noting the tricks the red sun played on the pebbly reflective surfaces of the license plates.

  Sid the Squid, jazzed up on caffeine, grease, and sugar, was pacing along the boundary where road shoulder softened into muck, sniffing low tide and the residue of hot tires while he scanned the stream of traffic.

  Then, suddenly, at the moment when the sunshine went woolly in horizon haze, there it was: the long- awaited license plate, a hundred yards away, its shining letters filling up Sid's bulging eyes. BIG AL. NEW JERSEY. GARDEN STATE.

  Berman's neck locked and his haunches quivered like a pointer's. He dove into the idling Jag just as the target car passed by. Chop Parilla peeled onto the highway, compressing him against his seat before his door was even closed.

  "Hot shit," Chop said. "Lexuses I like. Best Jap car there is."

  But tailing Alan Tuschman turned out to be too easy to be fun. He was tired and he didn't know where he was going. He crawled in the right lane the whole way down the Boulevard, his brake lights flashing now and then for no apparent reason.

  At White Street, the boundary of Old Town, he pulled into a gas station, not up to the pumps, but to the curb next to the convenience store.

  Thinking fast, Chop Parilla nosed the Jag next to the air hose. Squid Berman, on the pretext of checking the pressure in the tires, got out and crabbed along the warm and oily ground. He stayed there, low, kowtowing, as Alan Tuschman unfolded himself from his Lexus.

  The tall man exited the car in stages. It took a long time. Big feet and fibrous ankles touched down on the pavement; a head of curly black hair dipped carefully beneath the door frame. Then he rose and the middle parts filled in: muttonlike thighs in snug black pants, a stretched thick torso that pulled at the buttons of a purple shirt. Rippling neck sinews festooned with gold; a strangler's veined and flexing hands, the furry fingers bearing rings.