Trap Line
Carl Hiaasen
Bill Montalbano
For Patricia Hiaasen
and Vincent F. Montalbano
TRAP LINE
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Prologue
MIAMI, FLORIDA
THEY HAD AGREED to meet at the Omni Hotel, a double obelisk that rises on Biscayne Boulevard near the bay. The businessman had booked a suite for two weeks; bayside, as always.
Manolo flew up from Key West. He had been told to come alone, so he had. He took a Yellow Cab from the airport. It overheated twice on the short trip.
Inside the hotel complex, Manolo wandered like a rat in a maze for ten minutes before locating the right elevator. He stepped out on the eleventh floor and strode across a thick amber carpet to the businessman’s suite. Manolo knocked twice, then shifted the briefcase to his right hand.
The Colombian, lithe and bronzed, answered in bare feet and white shorts with a royal blue stripe. The two men shook hands and exchanged greetings in Spanish, their accents as distinct as Boston and Biloxi.
Manolo followed the businessman along a trail of scuffed sneakers and sweaty socks to a chilled bucket of champagne. He lay the briefcase on a marble coffee table. The Colombian poured two glasses. Manolo, who hated champagne, paid no attention to the extravagant label.
He noticed four new graphite tennis rackets on a toffee-colored sofa.
“For my backhand,” the Colombian explained. “If I improve my backhand, I am unbeatable, I assure you. I have a lesson in one hour.”
Manolo glanced at four large boxes piled haphazardly in a corner.
“Por Dios, Jorge, more Betamaxes? Didn’t you buy three the last time you were here?”
“A primitive model. These are truly sophisticated.” Jorge set his glass on the coffee table next to the briefcase. “Everything is here, no?”
Manolo nodded. The briefcase contained exactly one million two hundred thousand dollars in neatly stacked twenties and one hundreds, nonsequential.
“Good. There are no problems?” The question was rhetorical. The Colombian would have known about problems.
“Things are going smoothly,” Manolo answered, gesturing toward the city’s infant skyline. “The market continues to be magnificent.”
“Did you have a good flight from Key West?”
“Ah, twenty minutes: nothing.”
The Colombian slipped into a canary yellow pullover and attached a gold Piaget to his left wrist. A young woman with coffee-colored eyes and small breasts appeared briefly, nude, in the doorway to an adjoining room. The Colombian waved her away.
“I need a favor,” he said, sipping slowly.
Manolo knew there were no favors, only debts. He also knew that his side of the ledger was perpetually red.
“I have some friends,” the Colombian continued, “who will be needing some reliable transportation.”
“Oh?”
“In about two weeks they will be on an island in the Bahamas. They will need a boat to the mainland. Key Largo will do …”
Already Manolo was shaking his head. “It’s no good, Jorge. My people won’t run aliens.”
“You mean Colombians, don’t you? Your people won’t run Colombians. Not long ago, if I recall, your people brought a hundred thousand aliens into this country from a port in Cuba. Mariel, wasn’t it?”
“That was different,” Manolo said, reddening.
“Oh, no, my friend. A lot of your people did that purely for money, not out of decency or love of family. Is that not so?”
“That was different.”
The Colombian picked up one of the tennis rackets and ran strong fingers across the strings.
“Think of this as a family mission, Manny. Like Mariel, but perhaps a bit less heroic, more private. These friends are important to me. I need them here, and, therefore, you need them, too.”
“But…”
“They will help assure that we do not lose any of this magnificent market.”
Manolo squirmed. The hotel room suddenly seemed small, terribly hot.
“You don’t understand. The boat captains who work for me will not do it, no matter what I offer them. Grass, pills, coke—anytime, by the box or the ton. Even guns, if you like. But not people.”
“But I do not understand. And I dismiss the distinction as irrelevant.”
“Look. People are not bales or boxes. You can’t heave them over the side when the Coast Guard shows up and turns on the blue light.”
The Colombian slammed the racket against the edge of the coffee table.
“Basta!” he commanded. “I need one man for one run. That is all. We will take precautions to see that there are no questions afterwards.”
“No!” Manolo urged. “This isn’t the Guajira. Key West is a small town where dead people still attract a certain amount of attention.”
The Colombian shrugged. It had been an uneven struggle, and it was over. He reached for the champagne.
“Handle it however you must. Go home and get me a captain. The best one you can find. Persuade him, if necessary.”
“I will try.”
The Colombian smiled, and his new American teeth gleamed like perfect ivory tiles. “You will try, my friend, and you will be successful. You are an honorable man, a valuable man.”
Manolo forced an appreciative sigh.
“It has been a good month for us, no?” the Colombian said brightly. “I’m not even going to count what’s in the briefcase. That is how much I trust you.”
The preposterous lie amused Manolo. The cash, he knew, would be sifting through an electronic counting machine within the hour.
“Call me soon,” the Colombian ordered at the door.
“Of course,” Manolo replied. “Good luck with your backhand.”
In the lobby, he patted his jacket to make sure the airline ticket was in his pocket, then walked out into the suffocating heat to hunt for an air-conditioned taxi.
Chapter 1
THE DIAMOND CUTTER, a forty-three-foot Crusader, Key West-built with an 892 GMC diesel, cleared Stock Island twenty minutes after dawn. Albury, splay-legged at the helm, drank bitter coffee from a chipped white mug. Jimmy ran a rag across the wheelhouse windshield.
“Engine sounds good, Breeze. Real good.”
“After five days’ work, it ought to,” Albury said. The parts alone had set him back a thousand dollars.
“Well, it sounds fine,” Jimmy insisted. “Gonna be a good day.”
“I hope so. Anybody needs a good day, it’s us. Won’t be long until the end of the month.”
Jimmy laughed through the new gold beard that dwelt like peach down on his sunburned face. Reflexively, Albury turned the Diamond Cutter to the southeast, where the first line of crawfish traps rested on a shelf of coral. He could have found it blindfolded. The fine porcelain sky, the rising white sun, the hot and cool sea hues of the Florida Straits; these were Albury’s birthright. He had first made the trip in another era, with his granddaddy sitting on a sun-bleached whiskey crate steering an old one-lunger with no winch and hardly a wheelhouse. And, since that morning, how many times, in how many boats? And how long since the excitement had died? Too long.
The end of the month. Surely it had not weighed so heavily on his granddaddy, like the massive, unsheddable shell of a loggerhead. Albury could not imagine the old man fretting in his pine cabin, neatly stacking the bills as they piled up like driftwood.
But now, with his boat cutting a clean vector toward the crawfish waters, Breeze Albury mentally riffled the accounts due that awaited him in the sagging trailer that his granddaddy would have rightfully spurned as a chicken coop. Boat payment, dockage, fuel, parts; then there was the rent—pure robbery—car payments, the electric, and, of course, the installment on the TV.
Against these he weighed the account of Albury, William Clifford. This month it came out worse than usual. Fishing had been good, until the engine quit. The parts had taken cash, plus he still owed for the cypress on two hundred new traps.
And spikes. He had promised Ricky a new pair. Pitching was hell on spikes. His mind held the image of Ricky’s arm flashing, the streaking ball a white pea as it flew to the plate, the foot slamming down hard in a balanced follow-through.
Albury smiled. He leaned back from the waist and let his belly steady the wheel, gentling the lobster boat through the quiet morning sea. He would buy the new spikes, pay on the boat and whatever else he could, then let the unpaids chase him. Wouldn’t be the first time. Let them take back the color television if they wanted it bad enough.
Albury lit a cigarette and nudged the Diamond Cutter on a course that would intersect up-current with the first trail of orange-and-white buoys that marked his trap line.
“Hey, Jimmy,” he called down to the deck where the young mate was coiling rope. “The captain needs a cold beer.”
A few minutes later, Albury jockeyed the boat with unthinking precision as Jimmy hauled the traps. He would snare the pumpkin-sized buoy with a swoop of long practice, fix it to the winch, and watch expectantly as the cypress trap spun to the surface. Albury only half-heard Jimmy’s running count as he stripped the traps, rebaited them with a strip of cowhide, and sorted the catch.
“Breeze,” Jimmy said, “what say we keep a few of these shorts today?”
“No shorts: Toss ’em back.”
Shorts were the undersized crawfish that measured less than five and one-half inches from bony carapace to tail. Get caught with them and it could cost a couple hundred dollars, except that no self-respecting crawfisherman would get caught. If the Marine
Patrol happened by, all you had to do was cut the weighted sack from a line on the stern and let the delicious evidence sink. There weren’t many Key West captains who could resist the shorts now and then; easy to sell and good to eat. Albury could have gotten away with it, but Laurie would have lectured him for sins against the ecology. Risk was another factor. A fine was the last thing he needed, especially with the end of the month coming. You could never tell about the Marine Patrol. One morning they wave hello, next morning they get nasty and board you.
“Hey, Breeze, you been to Miami a lot.” Jimmy had climbed into the wheelhouse with two fresh cans of Bud. Albury drank deeply as the Diamond Cutter plodded dutifully, like a milkman’s horse, toward the second line of traps.
“Sure, I spent some time in Miami. Why?”
“I just wanna know if it’s safe up there.”
“Safe for what? Christ, don’t tell me you never been.” Albury was incredulous.
“Sure, with my dad, a few times. But it’s been a couple years. I want to know is it safe for Kathy, if I take her up there with me. You read about all these murders and crazy shit …”
“How old is Kathy?”
“Almost seventeen.”
“And you’ve been married …”
“About three months. She wants to go up there and do some shopping.”
Albury laughed. “Sure. It’ll be fun.”
“Well, I asked her what’s wrong with shopping on the island, but she says everything’s too ugly or too expensive down here.”
“Sounds like she wants to see Miami.”
Jimmy ran a calloused hand through his bleached-out hair. “Maybe so,” he said.
Albury drained the beer, squashed the can, and tossed it neatly into a broken lobster trap on deck. He gestured toward the windshield. “Trap line comin’ up.”
Jimmy turned for the deck, but Albury stopped him with a question. “You got enough money for a shopping trip to the city?”
“No, I ain’t, Breeze. Not yet. But I figure you and me gonna pull us some fat fucking crawfish out of the Cobia Hole this morning, and I’ll be fixed just fine.”
“OK,” Albury said. “You got it.”
The second line of traps bore decent fruit. With Jimmy happily babbling a soon-to-be-rich aria for the very young, Albury aimed the Diamond Cutter out to sea, toward the final trap line, the new and private one he and Jimmy called the Cobia Hole.
Albury had discovered the improbable underwater ridge two years earlier. It was four hours southeast of Key West, further than lobstermen normally ventured on a one-day trip. If you believed the charts, the water in this area was too deep, but a good hard look at the color told Albury there was a ledge below. Intrigued, he had investigated, patiently tracking a long and narrow ridge where none should have been. Jimmy, who was new on the boat then, spotted a huge school of cobia churning crazily in Diamond Cutters wake. On a lark, he had tossed a couple of short crawfish into the hungry swarm of brown, half-blind game fish, which had fallen into a frenzy and milled behind the boat for more than a mile.
From then on it was the Cobia Hole. A gamble, too. Albury needed extra fuel to make the trip, longer lines for the deep-water traps. There had damn well better be crawfish, he had warned Jimmy. And there had been. The first two seasons had been bountiful, and somehow the hole had remained Albury’s secret. God bless Jimmy for keeping his mouth shut.
This year it was too early to tell if the gamble would pay off. The first catches had been good, but in twenty-five years, man and boy, of crawfishing, Albury had seen more than one bonanza dry up overnight. And it was only a matter of time before other boats moved in at this hole, too, and then Albury would move on.
On the docks at Stock Island, everybody knew Breeze Albury liked to fish alone. Or not to fish at all: a few knew that, too, the ones who had gone to school with him and watched over the decades as he had dulled from a rakehell all-state fullback into a thickening, middle-aged fisherman who rolled with life’s punches. It was easy to surrender to the potbellied, parboiled ennui of the island.
If you were a Conch, you were a Conch. Simple as that. You could run a bulldozer in Georgia, fell trees in Oregon, drive an eighteen-wheeler cross-country, fix fancy foreign cars in Atlanta … even work for a year in a New York brokerage house, management trainee, for Christ’s sake, suit-and-tie, sorry-you-are-leaving, Mr. Albury … do it all until the Conch called you home in excitement and dismay to the broiling rock where your granddaddy hauled crawfish and ran rum; where your daddy died drunk in his hardware store, slumped across the counter clutching a ball of brown twine at forty-three; and where those goddamned motherfucking orange-and-white lobster buoys danced with false promise in the morning sun.
Eighteen years Albury had been back. Eighteen years: three boats, all owned by the bank; one wife, a slut pickled in alcohol long since; two kids, one nightmare and one dream; and Laurie, sometimes.
At least the boats had served him well. He had had this one—what?—nearly nine years now. She rolled a bit and skittered in a bad following sea, but Diamond Cutter was a hell of a crawfish boat. Albury had commissioned her the Peggy, and she had fished with that name until one night he had walked into the trailer to find the old lady in bed beside an empty bottle and a bald stringbean who drove tourists around on the Conch Train.
Probably it was just as well Albury had been half-lit himself. At first he had resolved to burn down the trailer with the two of them inside, but all he had had was a disposable lighter, and, lying there green on his belly in the musty living room, he couldn’t get the carpet to catch. So he had stormed out, fallen asleep on the boat. In the morning, he got a can of red paint and changed the name of the boat. For two years Albury had fished as captain of the Peggy Sucks, mocking her every time he had motored out of the harbor. Everybody had understood.
The boat had stayed that way, its crooked name in red and black, until Albury had repainted her in a fit of off-season energy. Diamond Cutter was a perfect name. Even then, Ricky was just getting out of Little League, but you could tell he was going somewhere.
Boog Powell made it off the Rock. So would Ricky. Good size, a blazing fastball, and good stuff to wrap around it. He pitched smart, picking at batters the way a heron speared glass minnows.
A good kid, too. Last summer he’d hung around the boat constantly, wanting to help. Albury had refused, although he had been more tempted than he’d ever let on.
“Look, champ, let’s make a deal. I fish, you pitch. Fishing is for bums, and you’re going to the majors. If you don’t make it, then I’ll teach you how to catch crawfish. In the meantime, if I catch you pullin’ traps, I’ll break your fucking arm—the pitching arm.”
Ricky had laughed and found himself a job at the Burger King down on Roosevelt Boulevard.
An internal clock snapped Albury’s reverie. He looked at his watch, then at the sea. He could feel the ridge. The boat had to be over it now. So where—? His eyes narrowed, his jaw muscles tensed. He checked the compass by flicking it with an index finger. He turned on the fathometer, and in moments the Cobia Hole rose in graphic relief on the screen. With fists like claws, Albury spun the wheel until Diamond Cutter turned south-southwest to follow the ridge.
The motion awakened Jimmy.
“Hey, Breeze,” he called without rising, “ain’t we there yet?”
“We’re there.”
Jimmy unfolded and stood up. “Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?” he said groggily, peering out across the bow. “Where are the traps?”
“No traps.”
Jimmy either didn’t hear or misunderstood. He stretched luxuriously, hands high above his naked chest, staring ahead where he knew the orange-and-white buoys would soon be bobbing. He stood like that for what seemed a long time, and then he knew.
Jimmy leaned over the side. “Breeze?” he cried. “Breeze, we’re over the ridge. Where are the fucking traps?”
Albury’s voice snagged somewhere in his throat.
“Breeze?”
“No traps, Jimmy. Not one.”
Jimmy ran to the bow and pressed himself against the rail. “The whole line’s been cut!” His voice cracked. His eyes fanned the water. Under the noon sun, the secret ledge sketched a faint indigo seam, eighty feet down. Albury idled the engine and climbed down to the deck.
“Who?” Jimmy asked. “Marine Patrol?”
Albury shook his head. “This was a legal line. Besides, they’ll just bust the slats out of a few traps, as a lesson. They won’t cut your pots off like this.”
Albury felt sick. Mentally he cataloged a list of his enemies. Nobody hated him bad enough to cut his traps. He couldn’t take his eyes off the water.
“Shrimper,” Jimmy murmured. “Motherfucker probably did it last night. Never looked, just dragged the goddamned nets over the traps.”
Albury slowly guided Diamond Cutter in a wide arc around the ridge, then began tacking back, against the tide, to the north. A shrimp boat is sloppy. The odds of one raking all fifty-five traps were remote. A few of the severed markers should be floating loose, Albury thought. A copper taste rose in his mouth as he scanned the bridge.
“Breeze?”
“It was no shrimper, Jimmy.”
“Shit.” Jimmy sagged back onto the ice chest. “Who? What for?”
“I don’t know.”
They checked four more trap lines on the way back to Key West, all sabotaged. By the time they reached the reef where the last one should have been, Albury had figured out the marauder’s course. He was not surprised to see whitecaps where he should have seen the buoys; he watched unblinking as Jimmy retrieved a single orange-and-white buoy, examined the limp tail of rope, and pronounced it hand-cut with a fishing knife.
“What did you do, Breeze?” Jimmy asked wanly. “Are you screwin’ somebody’s wife?”
Albury shook his head sourly. Jimmy palmed the orphaned buoy like a basketball. “This ever happened before?”
“Years ago when I was fighting with one of the Cubans. He got mine. I got his. But that was only a dozen traps, not three hundred.”
“Three hundred and twenty,” Jimmy said. He hurled the marker as far as he could. A gust of wind caught the styrofoam ball and slapped it gently into the ocean.
They rode home in heavy silence, Albury nipping liberally from a bottle of Wild Turkey he kept on board for times when beer would not do. Was it the twenty-second or twenty-first? he wondered. Didn’t matter, really, the end of the month was now.
Fifteen minutes out of Stock Island, Jimmy could no longer contain himself. “Breeze, I’m scared,” he blurted.
“Well, I’m pissed, but I’m not scared.”
“It’s Kathy,” Jimmy said, embarrassed, fighting tears. Albury stared out the windshield. The island was taking shape on the horizon.
It came with a rush. “She’s pregnant. It wasn’t supposed to happen with the pills, but it did anyway. We can’t have no baby, not livin’ with her folks. Not on what I make. Shit, Breeze, she ain’t old enough. I needed the money from today to take care of it. From the Cobia Hole.”
Albury ran a half-numb hand across the stubble of his cheek. “That was your shopping trip to Miami.”
“Yeah, I got the name of a doctor up there who does the whole thing in his office one afternoon and you go home the next day.”
“That’s the most sensible way to handle it,” Albury agreed.
“But I got no money.”
“That makes two of us, son.”
Jimmy whined, “What am I gonna do?”
“Let me think on it.”
At the fish house, Jimmy cleaned the boat and hauled the iced crawfish onto the scales. Only about two hundred pounds, a quarter of what it should have been. In disgust, Albury joined a small group of fishermen drinking outside the small commissary. There was a tribal likeness among them: faded baseball caps above lined and sunburned faces, slick white fishermen’s boots, powerful legs and muscled torsos betrayed by bellies swollen from too much beer.
“See you got your eight ninety-two fixed,” said a fisherman named Spider.
“Finally,” Albury said with a grimace that told what it cost.
“Do any good today?”
“Started out real good,” Albury replied, popping a Budweiser. “Then it got real bad. I lost five trap lines way down south.”
“Robbed?”
“Cut.”
The fishermen clustered around to question Albury closer.
“How many traps?” demanded a crawfisherman named Leech.
“More than three hundred. Cut by hand.” Albury’s voice was rising. The agony of the day finally was settling in his stomach.
“We got to find out who,” Leech said.
“Little Eddie,” Spider declared. “Didn’t you get in a fight with him over at the West Key Bar?”
“A year ago,” Albury said. “He wouldn’t have waited a year. Shit, he loaned me some tools last week.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
The men fell quiet. The mental arithmetic was familiar; three hundred traps at thirty bucks apiece, not to mention the loss in crawfish catch. By the time Albury spoke, each of the men had figured out in dollars how badly he was hit.
“Well, I better go help Jimmy.”
“How you fixed, Breeze?” Spider asked as gently as he could. A couple of the fishermen looked away, pretending to watch another crawfish boat unload three slips away.
Albury said, “I’ll be OK.”
“I got some old traps at the house. Maybe a hundred,” Spider offered. “A couple need slats, but that’s all.”
“Thanks. I might take you up on it.” Albury slapped Spider on the shoulder. He lobbed his empty beer can into a garbage dumpster.
“If you hear anything about this … I’d appreciate it.”
“For sure, bubba,” Leech said. “Somebody’s bound to talk.”
His friends watched Breeze Albury leave in silence. They were Conchs and they were fishermen. They knew how bad off he was, and they understood his dilemma. They knew he would die before he let the bank or the fish house take his boat. You could usually hold them off for a couple months, especially if it was a Conch you owed. Everybody got behind; that was life on the Rock.
How far behind was Albury? his friends wondered. Not one of them could have survived such a catastrophe, to have nearly half your traps cut in one day. Something terrible had happened, and it was only the beginning. The fishermen understood this. They watched Albury clump to the end of the dock, chat quietly with Jimmy, then wind up his perforated old Pontiac.
The headlights snared the brown men in their white boots and glinted off upraised beer cans. Albury decided he had done the prudent thing by not mentioning the phone call of two days before. He honked at the fishermen sitting in the white penumbra. He wondered how many of them had paid everything off. In one bundle. Wearily, he thought: it must feel so damn good to get it off your shoulders. Too bad there was only one way.
Chapter 2
“ANGLER’S HAVEN,” announced the peeling wooden sign above the gravel drive. Only a few clumps of Australian pines and the occasional tang of the sea made the trailer park bearable. Years ago it had been mapped out as an inexpensive colony for winter tourists, but the trailers had gone to hell and the tourists never came anymore. Albury’s neighbors were servicemen from the Navy base, fishermen, bartenders, store clerks, and newlyweds. Albury’s trailer, as far as he knew, had been sitting on the same set of concrete blocks for twelve years; it was largish, for a mobile home, and in its own way comfortable, like a dusty old coat. There were three bedrooms, separated by tissue walls of phony wood. At one end was Ricky’s; the largest was where Albury and Laurie slept; and the one in the middle was a study, up for grabs. Breeze agonized over his accounts here, Ricky his homework, and, when the fancy struck, this was where Laurie laboriously pecked out the poetry she never sold.
The place was empty. Albury twisted the dial on the air conditioner and held his face to the grill until the air turned cold. He imagined a shower, but two notes on a coffee table intercepted him. Neither was signed. Neither had to be.
The first came right to the point, scrawled in big, half-forgotten schoolgirl letters on the back of an envelope: “I took them glass flawers, and that pink ashtray that was mine.”
The second note, written cursively in blue felt-tip, was equally blunt: “She also took my watch and seventy-six dollars of my tips from the dresser. ‘Them weren’t hers.’ Get them back, please.
“And for the LAST FUCKING TIME, CHANGE THE GODDAMN LOCK!”
Albury groaned, threw the notes away so Ricky wouldn’t see them, and stormed into the tiny bathroom. He jerked three of Laurie’s panties and a pair of support stockings from the shower rod and let the water run cold.
It was too early for Peg to be in the shack she shared with the Conch Train driver, so Albury went looking for her in the crowd of tourists and freaks who gathered nightly at Mallory Docks to watch the sun drip into the sea. Peg wasn’t there, but Albury found her by a strip of beachfront at the island’s tip that was a magnet for tourists.
When Albury had married her, she had been a good-looking woman, a little hefty maybe, but solid; blond and solid. Her family had never been much good, but—well, Albury hadn’t paid much attention then. He parked the Pontiac a half-block away and walked back to where Peg sat on a three-legged campstool, fingers running idly through the coarse sand. Next to her was a canvas bag, a pile of bleached conchs, and some woebegone starfish. “Southernmost Queen Conchs $3,” read the hand-scrawled sign jutting from the sand at her feet.
Time had been cruel to Peg Albury. She was only forty-three or forty-four, but sitting there alone in a shapeless housedress, waiting for a sucker from Michigan or Pennsylvania to buy her shells, she looked twenty years older. Her eyes under the floppy straw hat were dead. Sun and whiskey, a lethal combination, and in Key West an epidemic. Albury felt sorry for her, as though for a stranger.
“Evenin’, Peg,” Albury called softly.
She rose to her feet, wheezing. Sand cascaded from her lap. “Don’t you go beatin’ on me, Breeze Albury. I only took what was mine.”
Albury almost smiled. He had never beat her, even when he should have. It had been almost four years since she’d left. Now she was a sandy and pathetic stranger.
“The watch wasn’t yours, Peg. Neither was the money.”
“How do you know? Is that what she said, your tramp? Who do you believe, your wife or a tramp?”
“The money and the watch, Peg, now.”
“Now, now, now,” she snarled. “Like you were boss.” Her eyes drilled him from under the brim of the hat. “What are you gonna do if I say no? Go to the cops? They’ll believe me, not you, Mr. Convict.”
Albury suppressed a sudden gout of anger.
“I won’t go to the police, Peg. I will tell Ricky.”
“Trash,” she hollered. From somewhere in the folds of her dress she extracted Laurie’s Omega and dashed it into the sand. She might have stepped on it, but Albury nudged it aside and stooped quickly to pick it up.
“Tell Ricky? Tell my baby? Why don’t you tell him his daddy’s a convict? Gonna tell him his daddy was in jail when his sister died? Tell him that, Breeze.”
“He already knows, Peg.” Just, Albury reflected, as he certainly knew what his mother had become.
“Now give me back the money.”
“No!” She lurched in the sand, dislodging with one foot a near-empty bottle that had been hidden by the canvas bag. “I need the money, Breeze. Charlie’s sick. Can’t work.”
“Drunk, you mean.”
“He ain’t. You think everybody’s drunk, don’t you? Charlie’s sick. It’s his heart. Doctor says he’s got to go up to the VA in Miami. It’s true, I swear it.”
Albury knew she was probably lying, not that it mattered. To get Laurie’s money he would have to wrestle her. It wasn’t worth it.
“OK, Peg, you keep the money. Just keep it.”
“It’s for Charlie, goddamnit.”
“Yeah. And stay away from the trailer. I’m changing the locks tonight, so your key’s no good anymore.”
Peg’s hand moved tremulously to her neck, where the key hung like a charm from a rusty necklace.
“God, Peg, you’re a mess,” Albury said in a whisper.
She was scrabbling in the sand for her bottle as he turned away.
ALBURY HAD a couple of stops to make, one at a sporting goods store, the next at the grocery. Then he parked at Key Plaza and hurried, six-pack under arm, across to the ball park. The lights were on already, and Albury was afraid the game had started. He arrived just in time to see Ricky walk to the mound.
It was a game of no particular consequence, and it had attracted only about a hundred people, mostly parents and girl friends. Albury slid into the bleachers behind home plate next to an angular black man in sandals and a white cotton shirt.
“Evenin’, Enos. How about a beer?”
“Thanks, Breeze. You cut it pretty close tonight, uh?”
“Been a poor day.” Albury gave a half-embarrassed wave to Ricky, who rewarded it with a big grin and a doff of his maroon cap.
Ricky didn’t look sharp. Some of his deliveries were higher than they should have been, the ball not moving as well as it might. Still, the first three batters went out weakly, and Albury felt himself beginning to relax. He leaned back, elbows propped on the bleacher behind him, savoring a tentative breeze that had sprung up off the Gulf.
“God, that feels good.”
“Yeah,” Enos said. “You know, that boy of yours is some kind of pitcher.”
“I think he can go all the way.”
“I believe you’re right.”
In the second, Buddy Martin, Enos’s son, stung Ricky with a sharp single off a curve nobody else on the field would have hit. Albury snorted.
“Maybe they could go all the way together. I’d rather have Buddy on the same team than hittin’ against Ricky.”
Enos laughed politely at the compliment.
“As long as he goes, Breeze. I don’t really care if it’s to baseball, to college, or to the Army. As long as he goes.”
“You and your boy fightin’?”
“Hell, no. I just don’t want him to grow up in this town, that’s all. There’s nuthin’ here, Breeze. It’s all the same as when we was kids, only less of it. And there wasn’t nuthin’ then. I don’t know why you came back. You had a good job.”
“Several,” Albury said.
“All places change, don’t they? It ain’t like we were still kids, fishin’ for grunts all day. You could live in this town then, Breeze. That was why I stayed. That was why you came back, too. At least you could live here, then. Now, well…”
“Now we got no excuse, Enos. No fucking excuse.”
They watched the game while they talked. Buddy Martin stole second, but died there as Ricky got the last out on a rifling fastball.
“You’re lucky, Breeze. You go out fishin’ every day. That’s all right. I wouldn’t mind that. But if you want to know what’s really happened to the island, come with me for a day, hauling the U.S. mail. Just one day. You’d see shit you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’m sure.” Albury felt like telling Enos about his traps, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.
They drank another beer in companionable silence as Ricky’s team, the Padres, scratched two runs off the chunky rival pitcher, a lefthander.
“You know the Fletcher place on Frances Street?”
“Near the cemetery.”
“Yeah, right,” Enos said. “Garrett sold it for a hundred and thirty thousand yesterday.”
Albury sat up.
“Cash,” Enos whispered bitterly.
“Shit. It’s full of termites. They couldn’t get seventeen five for it eight years ago.”
“The guy that bought it was twenty-two.”
Albury shook his head. “Say no more.”
“I hate all this, Breeze.”
“Yeah.”
“I want out. If I can’t leave, then my boy will. I swear.”
In the fifth inning, Ricky’s control deserted him briefly. He walked the leadoff batter and lost the second man to a crisp single. Then it was time to face Buddy Martin.
“Low and away,” Albury yelled.
Ricky threw a fastball, letter high on the inside corner. The bat slashed forward, and Albury felt the “crack” in the fillings in his teeth. The ball rocketed into the alley in left center and smacked the Merita Bread sign on the first bounce. Both runners scored, and Buddy Martin cruised into third with a stand-up triple.
Enos beamed. “Way to stroke, Bud,” he called to his son.
Ricky called time, and Albury winced in shame when he saw Ricky and his coach yoking Ricky’s right spike together with a piece of friction tape.
“Damn,” Albury said, “I got a new pair for him in the car. Be right back.”
“I’ll watch the beer,” Enos said.
Albury strode across to Key Plaza, where he had parked the car. He broke into a trot when he saw the figure inside the Pontiac, stretched across the front seat, probing the glove compartment. The man never looked up until he felt the huge hands around his left leg. Albury yanked once and spilled the thief onto the pavement, his shaggy head hitting the asphalt like a brick.
Dazed, the young man foggily surveyed his attacker: sharp, angry green eyes; nut-brown face capped with short salt-and-pepper hair; the mouth a thin, icy slash; the neck thick, veined with rage.
“Easy, grandpa,” said the kid. His long hair was thick, flicked with dirt and leaves. His face was milky and pocked. Albury scowled down at him.
“Where’s the toolbox?” he demanded. “And the bag from the sports shop? Where’d you stash ’em?”
“Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Albury placed a booted foot on the man’s neck and shifted his weight slowly until the face turned red and a grimace bared every tooth. “You’re a prick,” Albury said. “And I’ll snap your goddamn neck if you don’t answer my question.”
The thief flailed on the pavement and directed his bulging eyes across the parking lot, to where a battered red VW sat alone. Albury hauled the young man to the car. In the back seat were his toolbox and the bag containing Ricky’s new spikes. He retrieved them and walked back to the Pontiac, the thief in tow.
“You gonna call the cops?”
“Where you from?”
“Atlanta.” The young man began brushing off his jeans and picking the gravel off his shirt. He thought it was over.
“What are you doing down here?” Albury asked evenly.
“Visiting.” The young man used his hands like a comb, straightening his hair and sweeping it out of his face.
“Visiting,” Albury repeated.
The kid nodded. Albury wordlessly slammed him in the stomach with a straight right, then cracked him in the nose with an abbreviated left cross. The kid fell, blubbering, the dark blood shining in the pale lumination of the streelights.
Albury locked the toolbox in the trunk of the Pontiac and hurried back to the ball park with the spikes. The game was already over. The Padres had won, 6-2.
“Nice game, champ,” Albury said to Ricky as he came off the field.
“Yeah. You see the slider I got Buddy with in the seventh?”
“Naw, I missed it.”
“So did Buddy.” It was Enos, laughing. “Breeze, I got worried about you, so I polished off the six-pack.”
“Some dirtbag broke into the car. I caught him before he got away. Here.” Albury handed Ricky the spikes. “I should have brought ’em with me in the first place.”
Ricky opened the box. Buddy Martin looked over Ricky’s shoulder as he inspected the new spikes.
“Dad, these must have cost forty bucks.”
“It’s OK,” Albury said. “Had a good catch today.”
Enos gave him a doubting glance. Albury wondered, could he know about the traps already?
“Get your jacket on, champ. Let’s get going before the whole car gets stolen. Enos, Buddy, we’ll see you.”
It took Albury ten minutes to reach Whitehead Street, after dropping Ricky at the trailer with an injunction to let his arm dangle a long time in the hot shower. Albury was supposed to pick up Laurie in an hour. Time enough.
IF THE GREEN LANTERN had any distinction at all, it was as the only bar in Key West that never claimed to have fueled Ernest Hemingway. The bar was a chintzy dive of plasterboard and shadows in what was supposed to be a nautical motif.