Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 9

  Trying to get back to his own work, Duncan said, “Ask your young friend the computer whiz. He’s got the best database.”

  “I wouldn’t ask him for a toothpick,” Sheehan snarled. He paced a few more laps, then said, “But say it was a kidnapping. Why is someone from Florida suddenly in the middle of a scam that’s totally New York?”

  Duncan’s only answer was to square up some papers. Sheehan didn’t take the hint.

  “I’m tempted to go down there and find that car,” he said.

  “It’s not your case,” Duncan told him again.

  “I’ve got some sick days saved up,” said Sheehan. “Quite a few of them in fact. All of a sudden I’m feeling kind of ill. Fluey, sort of. Achy. I think some warmer weather would do me good.”

  19.

  To get to Mikey Ferraro’s house in the drab blue-collar suburb of Iselin, Benny took the Turnpike down to Exit 11 then transferred to the Parkway north for just a couple miles. Pulling in to his colleague’s asphalt driveway, he took a moment to collect himself. He looked down at the stiff brown winter grass. He noticed that the shutters of the small split-level were in need of paint and that there were a couple of gaps in the row of bare shrubs around the front door, no doubt where some sad azaleas had died the season before. He took a deep breath and got out of the car.

  Mikey’s two kids had recently got home from school and they greeted him at the door as Uncle Benny. They wanted to show him a science project they were working on. Benny tousled their hair but told them he didn’t have time just then. Mikey’s wife called out from the kitchen, offering coffee and Danish. Benny politely declined. Then Mikey appeared from a hallway, wearing a New York Giants sweatshirt with the sleeves cut short. He led Benny into a small room he called the den. It had colonial style furniture with itchy looking nubby cloth upholstery. There was a football on a chair and a soccer ball on the floor. Mikey closed the door behind them and sat down lightly on the arm of a settee. “So?”

  Benny chose to remain standing. “Where’s my cat?” he said.

  Mikey crossed his arms and pushed out his biceps. “We’ll get to that. What about the job?”

  “It’s done,” said Benny. In his own ears his voice sounded like the voice of someone whose soul had all leaked out of him.

  “Tell me.”

  “The body’s in a car compactor. Flat as Gumby by now. The gun’s at the bottom of the bay.”

  Mikey took a moment to let that settle in. Then he said, “I didn’t think you had the balls.”

  Benny said nothing to that.

  Softening a bit, Mikey said, “Y’okay? Want a Scotch?”

  Stoically, maybe even showing off a little, Benny said, “I’m fine. I don’t need a drink.”

  Mikey looked down at the carpet and rearranged his feet. Seeming a touch embarrassed, he said, “Benny, listen, I don’t doubt you, but given some of the bullshit that led up to this, the big guy says he needs some proof.”

  “Proof?” said Benny. He lifted an eyebrow and managed a tone of quiet but extreme bitterness. “I thought he might. Come out to the car.”

  The two men left the den and walked through the house with its clamor of kids fighting and the clatter of pans in the kitchen. Outside it was early dusk and a flat sky that had been drained of color was dimming moment by moment behind the rows of matching dwellings. Benny reached for the handle of the passenger door. The handcuff was still attached to the armrest and it made an almost musical tinkling sound as the door swung open. He reached in and came out with Lydia’s cloth coat. He said nothing, just handed it to Mikey.

  Mikey positioned his big body to hide the coat from the possibly spying eyes of his children and proceeded to examine it. There were two small, neat holes in the front left panel not far from the lapel. The material around the holes was singed from the heat of the muzzle and around the burn marks were narrow ragged haloes of crusted blood. Mikey handed back the coat and Benny tossed it into the car. Then he said, “Now where’s my cat?”

  Without a word, Mikey walked toward his garage, bent to grip the door handle, and yanked it open. Tasha, her taupe fur gleaming and yellow eyes hoarding the faint light, was sitting just inside the door and from her posture it seemed she’d been sitting there for days. She blinked once, meowed, and then leaped from a standing start into Benny’s arms. Her body was against his ribs and he could feel her purring. Benny said, “She’s fat.”

  “Of course she’s fat,” said Mikey. “You think I’m the kind of person who could starve a cat? You think my kids would let me?”

  Benny said nothing, just petted Tasha, held her snugly and headed for his car.

  A little tentatively, almost sheepishly, Mikey said, “No hard feelings, huh? We’re cool now, right?”

  In that flat and empty voice that was not his own, Benny said, “Yeah, Mikey, we’re cool.” But he got into his car and drove away before the other man could embrace him or even shake his hand.

  Peter had mostly dried off on the bike ride home, but being pushed into the ocean by a giant thug had given sharp new focus to his inchoate and perennial worrying. In fact, as was often the case with chronic worriers, the longer he thought about the incident the more worried he got, even though the immediate danger had passed. Halfway through the cemetery, just a block away from Poorhouse Lane, he stopped his bike and told Meg they had to talk.

  They sat down on a low barrier that surrounded someone’s mausoleum and he said, “Honey, listen, I know you were really looking forward to a Florida vacation but, let’s face it, this is not relaxing. Hiding behind the bed with a lamp in my hand in the middle of the night. Babysitting a Mafia princess. Now this Humpty Dumpty routine with some kind of Latino death squad. This isn’t vacation, it’s a panic attack waiting to happen. I really think we need to get out of here.”

  Meg said nothing, just sat there looking composed and optimistic and making Peter feel guilty for cutting short their winter getaway and cowardly for wanting to bolt.

  He said, “Look, maybe we can find a place in Boca, Orlando, just some normal boring town where stuff like this would never happen.”

  Meg considered that as she gazed rather wistfully around the graveyard, at the sweet and compact pastel houses that were clustered along its perimeter, at the flowering trees she hadn’t yet had time to learn the names of and the beckoning lanes and alleyways she hadn’t yet explored. But to her husband’s surprise, she sighed and said, “You’re right. This is getting a little too crazy. I’ll get on the computer and we’ll try to make a different plan.”

  So they pedaled back to the Bufano house, intending, first of all, to tell Glenda they’d be leaving. This became extremely awkward when they found her curled up in the fetal pose on the living room sofa, whimpering like a small wounded animal.

  On the coffee table in front of her was an empty bottle of pinot grigio and an array of damp and crumpled hankies. She was sniffling extravagantly and when Meg asked her what was wrong, all she could manage to say at first was, “He’s a monster!”

  “Who?” said Meg. “Who’s a monster?”

  “My father,” said Glenda. “My Benny. Both of them.” And she burst into a fresh torrent of wracking sobs.

  Meg sat down on the edge of the sofa and held her bawling new friend by the shoulders but had no idea what she should say.

  “My Benny, I’ve wanted so badly to believe he was different,” Glenda sniffled on. “That he wouldn’t really hurt anybody. Now he’s got to kill someone. A woman, no less. A woman! And I still love him. How is that even possible? I’m supposed to sleep with a killer? Kiss him? Scratch his back? But if he doesn’t kill her, he pays the price, and I’m a widow. I almost think that would be less bad…No, God forgive me, I don’t think that. I don’t think that even for a second. I want him back no matter what. With blood on his hands I want him back! How horrible is that? Maybe I’m just as bad as they are. Or maybe I’d never let him touch me again. Maybe I’d just be too disgusted. Jesus, I’m just so co
nfused. Thank God you’re here. If you weren’t here I just don’t know what I’d do.”

  Peter had been standing off to the side, near the sofa but not too near, just beyond the radius of Glenda’s misery, his hands protectively crossed against his solar plexus. Even before his wife shot him a look from underneath her eyebrows he understood that they would not in fact be fleeing Key West that evening or probably anytime real soon. Leaving Meg to commiserate with Glenda, he quietly went upstairs to change out of his salt-crusted and rather clammy clothes.

  Part 3

  20.

  It wasn’t until dawn of the next day that Lydia finally threw away the ruined cloth coat. She and Benny, having spelled each other driving through the night, had crossed into Florida by then, and she tossed it into a dumpster behind a Cracker Barrel restaurant near St. Augustine. She’d finally warmed up enough to do without it.

  When, in the parking lot of a shuttered video store a mile or so from Mikey’s house, Benny had first freed her from the trunk, her teeth were chattering, her lips were white, and the rest of her skin was slightly blue. He’d handed her the cat to warm her up but she’d wanted the coat as well, bullet holes and all.

  “It’s got ketchup on it,” Benny had warned. The condiment had come from a packet glommed from a fast-food restaurant on the ride north. “Still a little sticky.”

  “I want it anyway,” she’d said. Surprised to find herself still alive, she saw no reason to freeze to death or to worry about a little ketchup. She’d held the cat inside the coat for the rest of New Jersey and into Delaware. She and Benny barely spoke along that stretch. They were both trying to digest the brief, bizarre drama that had played out in the junkyard.

  Back in Bayway, Benny had walked Lydia to the hidden, clamorous spot where he meant to murder her. But even the way they walked there was weird and completely inappropriate for a slaying. Benny didn’t push her, didn’t have his gun out. He kept a hand on her back, but gently, almost as if they were on a date and he was steering her along a busy sidewalk. Lydia had been utterly calm—calm with the sort of merciful numbness that is said to settle on prey animals when they are caught in the jaws of lions or wolves, when death is a certainty but not a terror.

  Benny by contrast had become a mass of tics and twitches. His left eye blinked spasmodically. His right knee locked each time he took a step. When he took the gun out and released the safety his hand was shaking and his fingers were cramped. A sudden wave of nausea hit him as he pumped the slide and heard the bullet click into place. Knowing full well that it was cowardly, he closed his eyes as he pressed the pistol’s muzzle against Lydia’s side. He pressed just hard enough so that he felt the texture of human flesh beneath the clothing—the sliding yield of skin, the frail resistance of a rib--and at that moment killing her became totally impossible. For several heartbeats the two of them stood there absolutely still, he with his jaw clenched and his teeth aching, she almost languid in her posture. Then Benny lowered the gun and said, “Shit, I just can’t do it.”

  Lydia blinked at him but said nothing. The appalling atmosphere of the junkyard washed over them with its stink and noise. Finally the failed assassin, his eyes averted, said, “Here,” and he handed her the pistol. The butt of it was hot from his hand, the barrel was ice cold.

  Lydia’s fingers accepted the weapon before her mind had quite processed that she was doing so. She had never in her life held a gun before. She looked down at it with curiosity and horror, and said, “So what the hell am I supposed to do with it? Shoot myself?”

  “Or me,” said Benny wearily. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Lydia might have considered that, but only for a moment. She shook her head and said, “No way. I’m no killer.”

  Almost pleading, Benny said, “Look, one of us has got to go.”

  “You sure?”

  He gave a rather spastic, helpless shrug and nodded.

  Lydia said, “Well, okay, if you’re sure.” She calmly and deliberately raised the gun to her temple and curled her index finger around the trigger. Benny flinched and cringed in expectation of the shot but then sprang up and grabbed her by the crook of the elbow and pulled her hand away.

  He found himself breathless from the momentary scuffle but Lydia was smiling. “That was a bluff,” she said. “A total bluff. So I have a question for you. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why does one of us have to go? You don’t want to kill me. I don’t want to kill you. You wouldn’t even let me kill myself. So why does one of us have to die? Just because some bigshot says so?”

  “Well, yeah. Pretty much.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  Exasperated, miserable, Benny said, “Listen, Lydia, here’s how it works. If I don’t do you, someone’ll do me. Then they’ll do you anyway. We’ll both end up dead.”

  She put the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth and thought it over. “You play cards, Benny?”

  “Cards?”

  “It’s a simple case of doubling down. Look, think of it like this. You and me, we’re chips. The ante is one of us. We fold, game over, bye-bye ante. We double-down, maybe we lose both chips. But maybe we win. Or at least we get to play the game, have some action, see how it turns out. Don’t you like to gamble, Benny? Don’t you like the thrill of it, the rush? Come on, let’s play out the hand, at least. Whaddya say?”

  21.

  A hundred miles behind on I-95, Special Agent Andy Sheehan had been driving alone, which was how he did most things. Juiced up on high-octane energy drinks that had been designed for younger people with less accumulated sludge in their liver and kidneys, he felt alert though irritable, and there was a dim but constant burning in his bladder. The burning had not been much relieved by stopping to pee near Fayetteville, North Carolina and it had gotten worse by the time he’d made another pit stop in Brunswick, Georgia. The simmering discomfort threatened to distract him from his musings about the case he was pursuing without permission or support.

  The woman in the cloth coat—she was clearly passing inside information to Orlovsky, but where was the information coming from? Were they equal partners in the scam or was the woman just a pawn? Was Orlovsky the mastermind or was there someone else behind him and above him, pulling the strings and setting the agenda? And if the woman had in fact been kidnapped…

  This last thought caught Sheehan by surprise and he tried to squelch it before it went any farther. But that was the problem with driving alone through the night, buzzed on caffeine and with an irritated urinary tract. Nerves were raw, discipline was strained, and troubling thoughts that normally could be caged by habit and routine now managed to slip through one’s defenses and run their own unruly course. What if the woman had been kidnapped and had been killed by now? And what if she was no real criminal but herself a victim who’d been blackmailed or conned into making a bad decision? What if she was just trying to raise some money for a sick mother or a dying friend? Was it possible that he, Sheehan, had been wrong not to put the woman’s safety ahead of his own glory-seeking, not to send an APB and have the car picked up?

  This moment of doubt was only that—a moment—and it barely left a nick on the hard and polished finish of the agent’s certainty. But something had registered, some tiny pinprick had marred the flawless surface, and as the dashed white lines of the highway and the ghostly silhouettes of southern pines kept streaking past, other unwanted notions were able to leak through that smallest of gateways. In some unformed and less than conscious way, the simmer in his bladder contributed to this new, grudging and unwelcome openness to questioning. The discomfort made him feel a little old; feeling old brought him perilously close to wondering if he was becoming obsolete; the merest hint at obsolescence made him feel a bit ridiculous. What the hell was he doing out here on an empty highway with his nerves frazzled and his plumbing angered in the wee hours of the morning? He pictured himself as a moving pinpoint on a giant map, a lone crusader in pursuit of…what? Of whom? Some
woman who hadn’t been playing by the rules. So what? The rules were often stupid, as Sheehan, an inveterate rule-breaker himself, readily admitted. And if he caught this woman rule-breaker, who would really benefit? Some banks? Some lawyers? There’d be some grandstanding about the Bureau’s fight against crime, and two hours later the world would look pretty much the way it looked before, the powerful guarding their bank accounts and their mansions, outsiders scuffling around like mice along baseboards to steal a bit of cheese. And guys like Sheehan brought in as paid and well-trained pets, hungry cats let loose to catch and punish the intruders in exchange for their keep and an occasional stroke of praise. Wasn’t that sort of what it came down to? For this he was trying so goddamn hard to play the hero? Maybe the younger guys—the computer cops—had it right after all. Take it a little bit easy. Let the software do the work, sleep in your own bed…

  Sheehan suffered these subversive whispers across the Florida line, but finally, mercifully, they were quieted by the sanity of daybreak, and by the time the sun had topped the crowns of the palms that had begun appearing among the pines and poplars, his frayed certainty had knitted itself together once again and the fault lines were largely hidden even from himself. At a Cracker Barrel restaurant not far from St. Augustine, he stopped for grits and eggs, and then continued down the flat straight highway toward the Keys.

  22.

  Hoping to distract Glenda from her quandaries and her hangover, Meg had invited her out for a grocery-shopping expedition to the Publix out on the Boulevard. Buying yogurt, selecting mangoes, waiting around for quite a while as the deli person very, very slowly unwrapped and sliced turkey breast and ham—these mundane activities, Meg hoped, would foster a soothing sense of continuity, would serve as a reassuring reminder that life, even at its most stressful moments, was largely a matter, after all, of basic needs and comforting routines.