Key West Luck Page 2

A bit testily, Ponte said, “So enlighten me.”

  The young man crossed his legs, straightened the crease in his trousers, and hugged an ankle. “This piece of paper. Okay, maybe to you, that’s all it is. It happens to be a very valuable piece of paper. What’s it worth? Twenty million? Fifty? A hundred? But for Cubans, the money is just a small part of its value. It’s about history, birthright, status. Brothers have killed brothers over this piece of paper. Sons have turned on fathers, friends have murdered friends. I myself have lost relatives and allies to this piece of paper. You ask why I can’t trust a Cuban? I can’t trust a Cuban because this little piece of paper makes Cubans go crazy. My closest guy, my bodyguard, I’ve kept him totally in the dark on this. I trust him with my life but not this piece of paper. You see? I need someone who doesn’t know or care about this paper, someone who didn’t grow up hearing stories about it, someone who’s just doing a job for a payday.”

  “A very generous payday,” Ponte said. “Half a million is a lot of dough for the little bit you’re asking me to do.”

  The younger man took a moment to indulge his tic about straightening out his pants. “Well, it is and it isn’t. You asked why I needed you. I said there were two reasons. One is trust. The other is that the man you provide is going to be the fall guy.”

  The phrase didn’t sit so well with Ponte but he said nothing. Benavides read the unease on his face and went on.

  “Look, the guy who runs the boat has to think he’s just smuggling cigars. Way too risky otherwise. Sorry. So the boat gets seized, my inside guy at Customs, also an Anglo, picks up the paper. Your guy does a little jail time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that.”

  Ponte looked out the window at a huge swath of cloudless Florida sky. Keeping his eyes away from his visitor’s, he said, “You think I’ve stayed in business all these years by sending my guys to prison?”

  Benavides, of course, was ready with his answer. “I admire the way you do business, Charlie. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. But come on. You saying you never offered a guy a payday in exchange for taking a rap?”

  Ponte didn’t feel like answering that, so he didn’t. Benavides ventured farther.

  “Like if, say, the guy needed money for his kid’s school or an operation for his wife? Like if he’d be happy to go to jail to help his family? Word on the street is that you’ve been known to quietly arrange that kind of thing.”

  Ponte was reluctant to admit it. This was one of the difficulties with being a lifelong tough guy. There was no shame or disadvantage in being credited among one’s colleagues for any sort of mayhem, scams, double-crosses, rubouts; but if you let it show that you had mellowed even a tiny bit and come around to being a little bit human now and then, you ran the risk of seeming weak, letting other bosses imagine that maybe you had lost your edge. Stalling for time, Ponte stood up slowly and walked over to the window. Finally he said, “Luis, how old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Me, I’m sixty-four. I’ve seen a lot of changes. I’ve seen a lot of guys get old, get obsolete, get useless, to tell the truth. What do these guys still have? Their families and their pride. If I can help them help their families and not feel like they’re taking charity, then yeah, I’ll do that now and then. That’s strictly between you and me.”

  Benavides stayed silent for a moment and tugged thoughtfully at his beard in a show of respect for Ponte’s crooked but apparently heartfelt brand of philanthropy. Not that he thought much of it himself. Unsentimentally, he said, “You got one more guy like that around?”

  The blunt question irritated Ponte. “No, I don’t. It’s not like these situations pop up every day.”

  This, in turn, made the young Latin feel suddenly impatient. “Then how about a fall guy who’s just a fall guy, pure and simple? A sucker. A loser.”

  “I don’t deal with suckers and losers. If a guy’s down on his luck, that’s a different story.”

  Benavides, who was at an age when people still imagined they could control their destinies, disagreed. “Come on, Charlie. Luck is bullshit.”

  “Luck is real,” the older man quietly insisted.

  Benavides ignored that and continued. “People make their own luck. Good, bad, it comes from inside, it’s who they are. But listen, let’s not argue, let’s keep it business. There’s half a million bucks in this for you. Will you find me a guy?”

  4.

  For Phoebe Goodyear, it was to be her first night of camping in the Sno-Cone truck, and since she had no other plan she thought she’d spend it in the mangroves just to the east of where the recently lengthened airport runway ended. She doubted it was legal to park the truck there; she had some qualms about whether it was safe. But it was free and it was worth a try.

  So she’d waited till just after dark and then she pulled the truck off of A1A just slightly beyond where it curved to accommodate Cow Key Channel. Behind her was an ever-expanding phalanx of motels and time-share projects; a quarter mile ahead was a freshly landscaped sprawl of yet more new pseudo-Caribbean condos. But on her left was a swath of low, blank salt marsh that had so far gone undeveloped, no doubt because it lay directly under the approach path to the airport, and at certain hours planes flew so low over it that you could count the rivets in the wings and see the hinges on the little doors where the landing gear deployed. That was where she pulled off the road.

  Beyond the pavement there was maybe twenty feet of trampled, scrubby grass and then the mangroves started. As in an old class photograph, the tangled plants seemed to be lined up with the shortest in front, the taller ones behind. Their humpy roots rose up like little teepees between chunks and slabs of pitted coral. Here and there were rutted tracks that suggested through-paths; Phoebe randomly picked one of those to follow.

  The truck swayed and rattled over alternating juts of rock and fetid puddles that would never dry. As the mangroves grew in height, their brittle twigs and waxy leaves scratched against the side windows, then the roof. The tallest limbs arched over and blotted out the stars. It took an astonishingly short time for the world beyond the mangroves utterly to disappear, for the little jungle to proclaim itself a separate island. Dead ahead, the truck’s headlights illuminated nothing but a narrow tunnel filled with dancing moths until the beams were defeated altogether by the riotous foliage. All traces of road noise had been smothered, replaced by a vague and general buzz of living things.

  At length, just when Phoebe was close to giving up and wondering how the hell she’d manage to back out of there, she came to a clearing.

  The clearing was maybe forty feet across, big enough to turn the truck around after three or four bouts of wrestling with the steering wheel and bouncing forward and back over hummocks and ruts. After that effort her thin arms were weary and she was beginning to admit to herself something that she had been trying hard to banish from her thoughts. She was admitting she was scared. A woman alone in the deepening dark, hidden away in a tangle of mangroves that drowned the light and suffocated sound. Her first night in the new truck whose squeaks and rattles and sharp edges she was just barely getting to know. Her first time sleeping in her hard and narrow cot.

  Suddenly she wasn’t quite sure she could do it. She was brave but she was unprotected and the world was full of weirdos. Bizarre crimes were known to happen in mangrove swamps, hideous misdeeds whose deranged and barely human perpetrators were seldom caught. Bloated corpses were occasionally found in places like this. There were stories of picked-over skeletons still tied to trees.

  Second by second she was skidding closer to flat-out panic, her breathing shallow, the skin clammy on her forehead. She badly wanted to flee, to stomp on the accelerator and somehow crash and clamber back to the open and well-lit roadway.

  And go where? Trailer parks cost money and she had no money to spare. Camping on the street would surely get her a ticket, and given her recent history, trouble with cops and magistrates was the last thing she needed. She begged her nerves to
stiffen. She forced in a deep breath that burned inside her chest. Letting it out slowly, she turned off her headlights and switched off the ignition.

  The abrupt blackness all around her was terrifying at first but then, to her surprise, it started to feel almost soothing. Faint shreds of moonlight filtered through the canopy above the clearing and as her eyes adjusted she was able to see the soft gleam of the white rocks and the rich luster of the waxy leaves. Without the rumble of the truck’s engine, the buzz of the forest took on complexity and nuance; frogs croaked and answered one another, toads bleated with a funny sound like miniscule soprano sheep. It was peaceful in the clearing and she silently upbraided herself for having been afraid.

  She climbed down from the truck to have a look around. Here and there plastic bags had gotten tangled in the mangrove roots, the occasional crushed and rusted beer can lay among the coral stones. The litter was actually reassuring; she was glad to know she was not the first person ever to spend a night there. Her nerves steadying, she went back into the Sno-Cone truck, heated up some chili, allowed herself a beer. Then, exhausted from the day’s excitements, she changed into an oversized t-shirt that was the closest thing she had to a nightgown and dropped down onto her narrow cot to sleep.

  But sleep did not come quickly and she tried to mesmerize herself by counting the beats in the rise and fall of cricket sounds. There seemed to be a pattern in the rhythm of their rasping. The music started softly, gradually rose in volume, mounted toward an almost frenzied surge, and tapered off again. Then there was a brief silence, as if the orchestra of insects was deciding what number to launch into next. Then once again the soft beginning, the rise, the surge…

  Suddenly the pattern was broken. The crickets fell silent when they shouldn’t have. There was something shocking in the deviation, some wordless hint of wrongness or of warning, and Phoebe was instantly yanked back from the edge of sleep into full alertness. She listened hard, heard nothing, turned over in her cot. A moment later she thought she heard a soft shuffling as of furtive footsteps. A twig snapped. There was the dry crunch of stepped-on gravel. The toads and frogs went quiet.

  Phoebe’s pulse was roaring in her ears by then, her heart seemed to overfill her skinny ribcage. She clawed at the metal wall of the truck and dared to lift her face to the small square window above her bed. Painted across the dark floor of the clearing, she saw a smear of deeper darkness, the faintest of shadows, a human form contorted, stretched, made grotesque by the angle of the moonlight. After a moment she could make out the silhouette of the intruder, tall, lean, angular, fringed in long and unkempt hair and ragged clothes.

  For what seemed a long time she just stared, as if the sheer force of her gaze could chase the prowler from the clearing, could make him skulk away. But, like a curious animal, he moved slowly closer, seeming to sniff at the air as he sidled, not moving directly toward the truck but following the arc of foliage around it. Finally Phoebe could bear the stranger’s nearness no longer. Begging her voice to sound unafraid and firm, she yelled out, “Stay back. I have a gun.”

  This was a bluff. She didn’t have a gun. In an instant of panicked clarity, she took inventory of what she did have to defend herself. A dull kitchen knife. A frying pan.

  The intruder had stopped moving. He came no closer but he didn’t back off either. He just stood there, big hands limp but gnarly at his sides. He didn’t seem frightened, not even concerned, about the non-existent gun. His complete impassivity was an unnerving as if he’d crouched and charged the truck. Finally he said, “A gun. Oh. Okay.”

  But still he didn’t move away.

  Her voice quavering and going shrill, Phoebe shouted, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  There was a pause. The intruder moved one small, unhurried step closer to the truck and Phoebe felt cold sweat prickling at her hairline.

  “Name’s Pineapple,” he said. The voice was no louder than was necessary to be heard. The tone was calm and the syllables followed one another without hurry. “I don’t want anything.”

  “Then why the hell are you here?”

  “Just came by to say hello. See if you needed anything. I live next door.”

  “Next door?” said Phoebe. During the last several seconds she had begun to doubt that any of this was really happening. An apparition named Pineapple who lived next door? She was in a clearing in a salt marsh; there was no next door. She must be dreaming. She must have fallen asleep and her fears had brought on this crazy dream. Or maybe it was the chili.

  “Next door,” Pineapple said again, pointing vaguely past an opaque curtain of interlacing mangroves. “With my buddy Fred. In the hot dog.”

  “The hot dog,” Phoebe numbly echoed. “Next door. Next door in the hot dog.”

  “Daytimes, you can see it. Old vending wagon. Not a truck, just a trailer. Big red frankfurter, plastic mustard on top. Yellow bun. That’s where the door is, in the bun. Abandoned years ago. Me and Fred, we’ve made it pretty homey. You should come by and see it sometime.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Well, sorry if I bothered you. Didn’t mean to. Bye for now.”

  He turned slowly and began to walk away. He was carefully stepping over some mangrove roots at the edge of the clearing when Phoebe suddenly felt remorseful and embarrassed about how jumpy and un-neighborly she’d been. “Hey Pineapple,” she called out, “wait a sec.” She switched on a light and slid open the door of her truck. Stepping down, she held out her hand and said “I’m Phoebe.”

  Pineapple strolled back over and they shook. His hand was huge and callused but his handshake was bashful and soft. In the arc of yellow light that leaked out of the truck, his face looked medieval, ascetic, with bony cheeks, kind but narrow eyes, and a mouth that was not severe, exactly, but almost fleshless, like a slot. His smile was shy and fleeting and seemed to pull his gaze down toward his feet. “Hey,” he said, “I know this truck. Happy Freeze, right? Makes sno-cones.”

  “Used to be Happy Freeze,” she said. “Now it’s just Sno-Cone. I like to call things what they are.”

  “Guy named Billy had it last November,” Pineapple recalled.

  “I just got it from a guy named Gus.”

  “Yeah, Gus had it for the busy season. Same thing happened year before. Guy named, what was it, maybe Iggy, had it for the slow months, then Gus had it for the season. Don’t know if he lent it out, rented it. Don’t know how it worked.”

  With a pride that she hadn’t quite got used to feeling, Phoebe said, “Well, I own it now. All year round.”

  “You own it?” Pineapple said. The fact seemed to take a moment to sink in. In his world, ownership was a rather exotic notion. He understood, of course, that many things—houses, sailboats, cars—were owned by people, but people who owned things did not tend to live in the mangroves and Pineapple didn’t have much occasion to get to know them. “You own it,” he said again. “That’s really interesting.”

  Phoebe just shrugged, lifting her skinny shoulders so that her skinny tattooed arms jerked as if on strings then dangled loosely.

  “Well,” said Pineapple, “nice meeting you.” He half-turned and pointed again in the direction of the invisible fiberglass hot dog that was just one mangrove cluster distant. “You need anything, you just come on by.”

  He headed out of the clearing and was almost gone when Phoebe spoke again. She hated going to sleep with a bluff or even a small fib on her conscience. “Pineapple?” she said. He paused and turned around. “I don’t really have a gun.”

  “I sort of didn’t think you did. Sorry if I scared you. Nighty-night.”

  5.

  Luis Benavides’ inside guy was a nasty, pink-faced, pig-eyed man named Teddy Meara, who for the past several months had been an employee of the U.S. government, specifically a temporary civilian adjunct to the Customs and Border Patrol, which in turn was an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

  As is well known, the CBP was the largest and most comprehensive l
aw enforcement body in the world. It employed over 60,000 dedicated, well-trained, and carefully screened men and women who were equipped with the most sophisticated gear available anywhere. As our stoutest line of defense against a dangerous encroaching world, they sealed our boundaries against terror threats, drugs and weapons smuggling, and human trafficking.

  But then there was the Key West branch, which was really a bit of a joke.

  It hadn’t always been so. Back when Key West was a more important place—the nearest target of a Soviet-backed Cuba and a hub for the almost sweetly amateurish drug trade of the 1970s—the Customs department had maintained a robust presence on the island. But in recent years the action and the funding had moved to places like the Mexican border and the biggest cities with the biggest air- and seaports. Key West had become a backwater, all but forgotten by the higher-ups, its materiel something of a museum display of quaint pursuit boats, aged gunships, and helicopters reminiscent of the departure from Saigon.

  As for the personnel still lingering, they were a hodge-podge drawn from different agencies—State Marine Patrol, DEA, Coast Guard. But the grunt work—and most of the very little there was to do was grunt work—was handled by civilians who had made it through the most perfunctory of security screenings. If you were born in the U.S. and hadn’t been convicted of a felony in the past ten years, you probably passed muster. That’s how Teddy Meara had got in.

  Originally from South Boston, Meara had drifted down to Florida a decade or so before, fleeing winter, a paternity suit filed by a woman he regarded as a slut, and the wrath of his bookie, whom he owed an amount of money well beyond his resources to repay. In Miami he’d soon put together a new version of the life he’d had before—slovenly girlfriend he didn’t much like, more gambling losses than wins, a livelihood cobbled together with odd jobs and petty crimes. It was on one of these illegal escapades, stealing and stripping cars in Hallandale, that he first heard of a guy named Luis Benavides.