Double down, p.21
Double Down, page 21
“It’s very Florida. All the glass and tropical greenery, the water, your lighthouse over there. Do you come here often?”
“Now and again. Not often.”
“Why tonight?”
“So I could dazzle you with my lighthouse lecture. Also because you’re not likely to run into any of your Palm Beach friends up here. It’s out of their orbit.”
“I guess finally I’m not all that worried about it anymore. Actually, if you want the truth, I was more worried you wouldn’t call. Your friend didn’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“He doesn’t approve.”
“That much I gathered. That was plain.”
“You have to understand, he’s got worries of his own. Principally me.”
“Tell me, Tim, why did you call?”
He thought about that a minute. No good answer occurred to him, but the question triggered a cluster of blurry memories. One of them, a curious echo of this very moment, separated itself from the rest and came into sharp focus behind his eyes. A spring day, their last year in college, Robbie off somewhere—a track meet, debate trip, somewhere out of the picture—and she called him and they spent the day together: tennis (her game, she trounced him), a fast-food dinner, some beers. And talk. He remembered lots of talk. She and Robbie were to be married that summer, and the inevitable second thoughts were setting in. And as he listened, trusted friend but less than comfortable, he thought he sensed an undertone to all that talk, something a little more than the shared confidences of friends, something more on the order of an invitation, or maybe even an appeal. Skirting the edge of an unspoken alternative, she seemed to be pleading: Say the right words now and everything can be different, for both of us, but you have to say them now.
What he’d said then were all the tired commonplace bromides of reassurance, and what he said now, a decade and a half later, was just as uninspired. “Who knows. Better to leave it unexamined. It defies all reason. We’re here, maybe that’s enough.”
Her intense gaze faltered. The smile wilted. “So we are,” she said.
There they were, all right, stirring their drinks silently, almost wistfully. There they were, conscious, both of them, of tampering with an unalterable past. And looking at her there, her spare elegant body, her hair a corona of golden light, her sad lovely private face with its distressed smile and its eyes full of the dark troubles of the heart—seeing her that way, Waverly felt a portentous sense of time hovering like a phantom above their heads, and all the promise and resilience of their shared youth dried up and gone.
As if to scatter the melancholy that had settled over the table, she said brightly, “Maybe it will cheer you to know that Robbie says Jock says you’re the best card player he’s gone up against in years.”
“That’s very gratifying. I’ll try to keep my ego in check.”
“You must have impressed them. Which is quite a feat. You’ve probably noticed neither of them is easily impressed.”
“I was lucky.”
“From the way Robbie tells it, it was more than luck.”
“You don’t want to believe everything you hear. As I remember, Robbie was always given to hyperbole.”
“Wasn’t he, though. Still is.” A short bitter laugh seemed to die on her lips. “He says you’re going to play next week, when the long-awaited gentleman from Arabia arrives.”
“That’s my intention.”
“And you intend to win again?”
“You always go in intending to win. But who can ever predict? Cards are unreliable. Did you know the Puritans called them the devil’s picture books?”
Caroline laughed again, only this time mirthfully and without a trace of bitterness. And with only a touch of irony she said, “Lighthouses, card lore—it’s very instructive talking with you, Timothy. Very edifying.”
“Just one nugget of intelligence after another.”
“Well, here’s one for you to consider,” she said, her voice flat, earnest, gone back to serious. “Jock may be impressed by you, but he doesn’t like you. In Robbie’s phrase, he’s gunning for you, lining you up in his crosshairs.”
“Appreciate the caution,” Waverly said, trying with his own inflections to restore some of the lightness.
Without success. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” she said, somewhat impatiently. “This is a mean-spirited man. The kind who defines low animal cunning. He’s capable of anything.”
“That sounds ominous. You’re not suggesting cheating here? Nobody cheats at this level of play.”
“I’m telling you what I heard. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. But I do know Jock Appelgate. And he passionately hates to lose. At anything.”
“Don’t we all.”
Caroline shook her head and sighed. Long, helpless sigh. “I thought you ought to know. I can’t pretend to understand what it is you do, Tim. Or why you’re doing it.”
Waverly turned over empty palms, a show of concession, disclosure. “Nothing to understand,” he said. “I’m grateful for your concern, but it’s how I make my living these days. It has its risks.” The direction of this talk made him acutely uncomfortable. He didn’t want to take it too far.
He didn’t have to. She said, “Time for a new topic, correct?” Way out in front of him, as she’d always been.
“I’ve exhausted lighthouses. Maybe if we have another drink something will come to me.”
“That sounds right.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Approaching them, drinks in hand, was their waitress. “You read minds,” he said to her as she set the two glasses on the table.
For a moment she looked puzzled. Then, waitressly beamish, she said, “Oh no, sir. These are compliments of the gentleman over there.”
Waverly suddenly stiffened. “Which gentleman is that?”
“The fellow with the shades,” she said, nodding toward the bar, “one with the nice build on him. He said to tell you enjoy, so you do that now, y’hear?”
She bustled away.
“Friend of yours?” Caroline asked.
Waverly shifted in his chair for a better look. The generous fellow with the shades and the nice build on him sat by himself at the end of the bar. Under a mint green, form-hugging sport shirt his torso was kite-shaped from the wedge of latissimus muscles and the steep slope of trapezius. His slicked black hair was glossy as a coat of fresh enamel. He appeared to be staring at them. A thin, carefully selected smile creased his chiseled face. He lifted a hand, fashioned a pistol out of thumb and forefinger, aimed it at them and slowly, very slowly, depressed the thumb trigger.
“In a manner of speaking,” Waverly said. “Excuse me a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He got out of the chair and started across the room. The blank, opaque stare seemed to follow him. The smile widened a little, not much. Waverly came around the bar and came up alongside him. “Thanks for the drink,” he said.
D’Marco turned slightly and arched a quizzical brow. “You didn’t have to take the trouble, come all the way over here just to thank me.”
“It was no trouble.”
“Anyway, it’s your friends in Chicago you want to thank. They said be sure and buy the man a drink.”
“Very thoughtful of them.”
“Oh, they’re thinking a lot about you, Mr., uh, Waverly is it?”
“That’s right.”
“For instance, they’re hoping the cards were good to you last night.”
“Tolerable, tell them.”
“Tolerable,” D’Marco repeated doubtfully. “Guess that’ll make them happy, hear that.”
“Anything else bothering them?”
D’Marco leaned back in the barstool and crossed bulgy arms under a pectoral shelf. Seemed to deliberate. He had the iron slinger’s nervous habit of flicking his muscles, making them dance, as if to certify their substance and presence. “Well,” he said finally, “come to think of it, they did say remind you to keep an eye on the calendar. Said time’s running down. About a week left, if I got it right.”
“You got it right. Now, is that it? Anything else you have to say to me?”
“That pretty much covers it.”
“Then I have a message for you. Back off. Stay out of my face. Keep a distance. When the week’s up we’ll talk again, you and I will.”
D’Marco produced a scrimp of a laugh. “Sounds like a threat. You threatening me, Mr. Waverly?”
“Think of it as a commitment.”
D’Marco cocked his head. He inspected him, this scarecrow in the floppy jacket, looked about three sizes too big, and the shirt and tie loose around a scrawny neck, standing there ballsy and badass, facing him down. Inspected him in the amused tolerant way one inspects a feisty toy terrier straining at a leash, growling menacingly, innocent of its powerlessness. “This commitment,” he drawled, “how you planning to make good on it?”
“I’ll think of something,” Waverly said, speaking slowly and in a voice clear and considered, every word measured. “Trust me.”
He could feel the first gusts of a storm of fury gathering in his chest, rising through his throat. He spun on his heels and walked away. And trailing after him came the sneered maledictory: “I’ll be looking forward to our little chat next week.”
They were parked in one of the spaces reserved for guests of the Tropicaire Efficiency Apartments. A shattering rain, come up out of nowhere, thumped the Jaguar’s roof. Through the streaked windshield a dim light was visible in a window of Waverly’s unit, though Bennie’s Cadillac was gone. Where and for how long was anybody’s guess. Behind them the Tropicaire sign, shimmery in the rain, winked its persistent assentive YES. Across the street the abandoned Collonades Beach Hotel loomed like a wall of shadow on the depthless sky.
Waverly had said nothing on the drive back, letting the impotent fury subside, letting it go. He said nothing now.
“Why is it,” Caroline said quietly, breaking the silence, “whenever I’m with you we always seem to be ducking?”
Waverly stared morosely at the dash. He took in a deep breath. “That’s one of those things you really don’t want to know.”
“Oh, but I do.”
He shrugged. “You say do, I say don’t.”
“It’s that trouble you’re in, right?”
“Yes.”
“And that man at the bar, he’s part of it?”
“He’s one part. There’s considerably more.”
“Is this how it always is for you, Tim—dodging, ducking, running?”
“Not always. Just lately.”
“I wish there were a way I could help you,” she said in a small, mournful voice, as though some of his gloom had infected her.
“Being here, that’s help enough.”
She reached over and covered his hand with hers. There was another silence.
After a while she murmured, “Do you remember what you said when I asked why you’d called?”
“I said I didn’t know why. Something like that.”
“You said it defied reason.”
“And so it does. Neither of us should be here.”
“The other day you said the past was a season in our lives. Remember that?”
“I remember.”
She squeezed out from behind the steering wheel and leaned over and put an arm around his neck. She stroked his cheek gently, kissed him tenderly on the forehead. “There’s a line from a Cummings poem that goes, ‘Love is a deeper season than reason,’ ” she said, and then, almost violently, she kissed him on the mouth. A cascade of her perfumed hair fell across his face.
“Do you want to go inside?” he said. “My partner’s gone, it ought to be—”
She laid a finger on her lips, a silencing gesture. “No more words. I want to finish what we should have finished in another car, twenty years ago.”
Waverly surrendered himself to her touch, and in the awkward threshing and the dizzying accelerating spiral the scroll of time seemed momentarily, miraculously, to roll backward; and after a long violent surge, violent as her kiss, a peace seemed to settle over and between them, while the rain beat a steady tattoo on the roof of the car.
SEVENTEEN
Mr. Badass. Trying to do a Bogart on D’Marco Fontaine. What a hoot.
D’Marco watched him march back to the table, hustle the fluff out of her chair, and steer her to the door. He let them go. No reason not. It wasn’t like there was anyplace they could get to where he couldn’t find them. Anyway, the lines were drawn now and the clock was running and he meant it, every word, when he said he was looking forward to next week. This one, better than most, he was going to enjoy.
In the meantime, though, there were a couple of other nagging problems to ponder. Not that there was a whole lot he could do about either of them. That waste case he’d left back at the hotel, couldn’t tolerate another evening of whiny questions and bitching and general mush-brain talk—what could he do about him? Answer was not a dog-fucking thing; until this arrangement was wrapped, Sigurd Suckwad Stumpley wasn’t going to go away. And then there was the more urgent—more alarming, when you thought about it—matter of the message on the answering machine. And thinking about it now, he scanned the faces around the bar, searching for a shooter’s empty expression or a chilly eye sliding over him. Takes a pro to mark a pro. But he saw nothing other than a collection of jolly, noisy, juicers, out-of-season-tourist types mostly, whooping it up in Florida on the cheap. No, when that one came it was going to come fierce and sudden and blindside, the way he’d do it himself. Cover your back, boy.
D’Marco finished the last of his vodka-free Bloody Mary and sauntered out to the parking lot. He glanced about warily, side to side and over his shoulder. All clear. He got behind the wheel of the LX and took it out onto the street and over to Highway One. Pointed it south, driving at good-citizen speed. Cars zipped past him. Periodically he checked the rearview. Nothing out of order back there. Around Juno Beach the sky opened up. The highway blurred in the furious downpour. He drove on, slower and more cautious than ever.
And so it was easily half an hour or better after he left Harpoon Louie’s before he came through the door of the Sea Spray Room. And when he did, the sight that greeted him was so stunning, so utterly unnerving, so invincibly repellent that for an instant all his studied cool deserted him and his jaws unhinged and his stomach churned under a sudden rush of nausea.
He saw: two swollen blimps, locked and coiled in a classic goatish sixty-nine, jiggly white flesh writhing twitching squirming, shameless in the glare of the harsh overhead light.
He heard: a symphony of grunts, delirious groans, rude slavering noises.
He inhaled: a monkey stink of sweat, assorted body fluids, some cheap vile perfume, a musky aftershave, and other nameless aromas rising from the bed and filling the room like a pestilent gas.
He felt: apart from the nausea, cold rage.
You want to talk about your mountain peaks of disgust, this was Everest.
Sigurd lifted his head and twisted it enough to take in D’Marco. A half-moon grin lit the simpleton face. “Hey, champ, you remember Maylene? Greenhouse?”
D’Marco didn’t answer. His mouth had recompressed, the skin drawn tight at the corners.
Sigurd, speaking now down the length of the grotesque coupling, said, “Maybelle, honey? Sugarlips? Say hello to my partner.” By way of explanation he added, “We’re cellin’ together here.”
Introductions going around.
Maylene disengaged her head and peered out from under a chunky Stumpley thigh. Damp tendrils of paste-colored hair fell across her eyes. She swiped at them irritably and glowered at D’Marco. Her cheeks glowed like live coals. Her droop-jugged chest heaved up and down, whether from the lingering aftermath of arrested heat or from animus at its untimely breach—certainly not from shame—was impossible to tell. “Nice timin’ he’s got,” she mumbled crossly, thickly.
In a voice icy with control, layer on layer of control, D’Marco, addressing Sigurd directly, said, “Speaking of timing, you got exactly three minutes to get this whale out of here.”
“Who you callin’ a whale?” Maylene sputtered.
“I’m payin’ half on this room,” Sigurd protested. “I got rights, too.”
“Three. And counting.”
Sigurd heard the low rumbling menace in the voice. And no mistaking the storm clouds in those eyes. His indignation faltered and he scrambled off the bed and began pawing feverishly through the heaps of discarded clothing on the floor.
D’Marco wheeled around and went back into the hall, banging the door behind him. He stood there ticking off the seconds on his watch, listening to the muffled voices, one low-toned, placating, the words unintelligible, and the other a ranting repetitive squawk—“Where’s he get off callin’ me a whale?”—punctuated by a coda of curses.
In just under the appointed three minutes the door swung open and Maylene, disheveled but more or less dressed in baggy blouse and circus-tent jeans and spike heels that impelled her into a top-heavy crouch, came stomping through it. Sigurd, wearing only his boxer shorts and a grin gone slack, peeked around the corner and called after her, “Don’t be a stranger, hey.” Without looking back she elevated a hand, bird finger extended, and kept on flouncing down the hall.
“Look like she got a case of the serious red ass,” Sigurd allowed.
D’Marco pushed past him. Sigurd waited in the entrance, watching the frigid eyes sweep the war zone room, the hard jaw tighten, the head nod slowly, wondrously. He guessed maybe the best thing to do or say was nothing at all. Not just yet. Let the ice thaw a little first. Eventually, of course, the eyes fell on him. He gave a helpless shrug.
“Shut the door,” D’Marco ordered.
Sigurd shut the door.
“Lock it.”
He locked it.
“Now and again. Not often.”
“Why tonight?”
“So I could dazzle you with my lighthouse lecture. Also because you’re not likely to run into any of your Palm Beach friends up here. It’s out of their orbit.”
“I guess finally I’m not all that worried about it anymore. Actually, if you want the truth, I was more worried you wouldn’t call. Your friend didn’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“He doesn’t approve.”
“That much I gathered. That was plain.”
“You have to understand, he’s got worries of his own. Principally me.”
“Tell me, Tim, why did you call?”
He thought about that a minute. No good answer occurred to him, but the question triggered a cluster of blurry memories. One of them, a curious echo of this very moment, separated itself from the rest and came into sharp focus behind his eyes. A spring day, their last year in college, Robbie off somewhere—a track meet, debate trip, somewhere out of the picture—and she called him and they spent the day together: tennis (her game, she trounced him), a fast-food dinner, some beers. And talk. He remembered lots of talk. She and Robbie were to be married that summer, and the inevitable second thoughts were setting in. And as he listened, trusted friend but less than comfortable, he thought he sensed an undertone to all that talk, something a little more than the shared confidences of friends, something more on the order of an invitation, or maybe even an appeal. Skirting the edge of an unspoken alternative, she seemed to be pleading: Say the right words now and everything can be different, for both of us, but you have to say them now.
What he’d said then were all the tired commonplace bromides of reassurance, and what he said now, a decade and a half later, was just as uninspired. “Who knows. Better to leave it unexamined. It defies all reason. We’re here, maybe that’s enough.”
Her intense gaze faltered. The smile wilted. “So we are,” she said.
There they were, all right, stirring their drinks silently, almost wistfully. There they were, conscious, both of them, of tampering with an unalterable past. And looking at her there, her spare elegant body, her hair a corona of golden light, her sad lovely private face with its distressed smile and its eyes full of the dark troubles of the heart—seeing her that way, Waverly felt a portentous sense of time hovering like a phantom above their heads, and all the promise and resilience of their shared youth dried up and gone.
As if to scatter the melancholy that had settled over the table, she said brightly, “Maybe it will cheer you to know that Robbie says Jock says you’re the best card player he’s gone up against in years.”
“That’s very gratifying. I’ll try to keep my ego in check.”
“You must have impressed them. Which is quite a feat. You’ve probably noticed neither of them is easily impressed.”
“I was lucky.”
“From the way Robbie tells it, it was more than luck.”
“You don’t want to believe everything you hear. As I remember, Robbie was always given to hyperbole.”
“Wasn’t he, though. Still is.” A short bitter laugh seemed to die on her lips. “He says you’re going to play next week, when the long-awaited gentleman from Arabia arrives.”
“That’s my intention.”
“And you intend to win again?”
“You always go in intending to win. But who can ever predict? Cards are unreliable. Did you know the Puritans called them the devil’s picture books?”
Caroline laughed again, only this time mirthfully and without a trace of bitterness. And with only a touch of irony she said, “Lighthouses, card lore—it’s very instructive talking with you, Timothy. Very edifying.”
“Just one nugget of intelligence after another.”
“Well, here’s one for you to consider,” she said, her voice flat, earnest, gone back to serious. “Jock may be impressed by you, but he doesn’t like you. In Robbie’s phrase, he’s gunning for you, lining you up in his crosshairs.”
“Appreciate the caution,” Waverly said, trying with his own inflections to restore some of the lightness.
Without success. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” she said, somewhat impatiently. “This is a mean-spirited man. The kind who defines low animal cunning. He’s capable of anything.”
“That sounds ominous. You’re not suggesting cheating here? Nobody cheats at this level of play.”
“I’m telling you what I heard. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. But I do know Jock Appelgate. And he passionately hates to lose. At anything.”
“Don’t we all.”
Caroline shook her head and sighed. Long, helpless sigh. “I thought you ought to know. I can’t pretend to understand what it is you do, Tim. Or why you’re doing it.”
Waverly turned over empty palms, a show of concession, disclosure. “Nothing to understand,” he said. “I’m grateful for your concern, but it’s how I make my living these days. It has its risks.” The direction of this talk made him acutely uncomfortable. He didn’t want to take it too far.
He didn’t have to. She said, “Time for a new topic, correct?” Way out in front of him, as she’d always been.
“I’ve exhausted lighthouses. Maybe if we have another drink something will come to me.”
“That sounds right.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Approaching them, drinks in hand, was their waitress. “You read minds,” he said to her as she set the two glasses on the table.
For a moment she looked puzzled. Then, waitressly beamish, she said, “Oh no, sir. These are compliments of the gentleman over there.”
Waverly suddenly stiffened. “Which gentleman is that?”
“The fellow with the shades,” she said, nodding toward the bar, “one with the nice build on him. He said to tell you enjoy, so you do that now, y’hear?”
She bustled away.
“Friend of yours?” Caroline asked.
Waverly shifted in his chair for a better look. The generous fellow with the shades and the nice build on him sat by himself at the end of the bar. Under a mint green, form-hugging sport shirt his torso was kite-shaped from the wedge of latissimus muscles and the steep slope of trapezius. His slicked black hair was glossy as a coat of fresh enamel. He appeared to be staring at them. A thin, carefully selected smile creased his chiseled face. He lifted a hand, fashioned a pistol out of thumb and forefinger, aimed it at them and slowly, very slowly, depressed the thumb trigger.
“In a manner of speaking,” Waverly said. “Excuse me a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He got out of the chair and started across the room. The blank, opaque stare seemed to follow him. The smile widened a little, not much. Waverly came around the bar and came up alongside him. “Thanks for the drink,” he said.
D’Marco turned slightly and arched a quizzical brow. “You didn’t have to take the trouble, come all the way over here just to thank me.”
“It was no trouble.”
“Anyway, it’s your friends in Chicago you want to thank. They said be sure and buy the man a drink.”
“Very thoughtful of them.”
“Oh, they’re thinking a lot about you, Mr., uh, Waverly is it?”
“That’s right.”
“For instance, they’re hoping the cards were good to you last night.”
“Tolerable, tell them.”
“Tolerable,” D’Marco repeated doubtfully. “Guess that’ll make them happy, hear that.”
“Anything else bothering them?”
D’Marco leaned back in the barstool and crossed bulgy arms under a pectoral shelf. Seemed to deliberate. He had the iron slinger’s nervous habit of flicking his muscles, making them dance, as if to certify their substance and presence. “Well,” he said finally, “come to think of it, they did say remind you to keep an eye on the calendar. Said time’s running down. About a week left, if I got it right.”
“You got it right. Now, is that it? Anything else you have to say to me?”
“That pretty much covers it.”
“Then I have a message for you. Back off. Stay out of my face. Keep a distance. When the week’s up we’ll talk again, you and I will.”
D’Marco produced a scrimp of a laugh. “Sounds like a threat. You threatening me, Mr. Waverly?”
“Think of it as a commitment.”
D’Marco cocked his head. He inspected him, this scarecrow in the floppy jacket, looked about three sizes too big, and the shirt and tie loose around a scrawny neck, standing there ballsy and badass, facing him down. Inspected him in the amused tolerant way one inspects a feisty toy terrier straining at a leash, growling menacingly, innocent of its powerlessness. “This commitment,” he drawled, “how you planning to make good on it?”
“I’ll think of something,” Waverly said, speaking slowly and in a voice clear and considered, every word measured. “Trust me.”
He could feel the first gusts of a storm of fury gathering in his chest, rising through his throat. He spun on his heels and walked away. And trailing after him came the sneered maledictory: “I’ll be looking forward to our little chat next week.”
They were parked in one of the spaces reserved for guests of the Tropicaire Efficiency Apartments. A shattering rain, come up out of nowhere, thumped the Jaguar’s roof. Through the streaked windshield a dim light was visible in a window of Waverly’s unit, though Bennie’s Cadillac was gone. Where and for how long was anybody’s guess. Behind them the Tropicaire sign, shimmery in the rain, winked its persistent assentive YES. Across the street the abandoned Collonades Beach Hotel loomed like a wall of shadow on the depthless sky.
Waverly had said nothing on the drive back, letting the impotent fury subside, letting it go. He said nothing now.
“Why is it,” Caroline said quietly, breaking the silence, “whenever I’m with you we always seem to be ducking?”
Waverly stared morosely at the dash. He took in a deep breath. “That’s one of those things you really don’t want to know.”
“Oh, but I do.”
He shrugged. “You say do, I say don’t.”
“It’s that trouble you’re in, right?”
“Yes.”
“And that man at the bar, he’s part of it?”
“He’s one part. There’s considerably more.”
“Is this how it always is for you, Tim—dodging, ducking, running?”
“Not always. Just lately.”
“I wish there were a way I could help you,” she said in a small, mournful voice, as though some of his gloom had infected her.
“Being here, that’s help enough.”
She reached over and covered his hand with hers. There was another silence.
After a while she murmured, “Do you remember what you said when I asked why you’d called?”
“I said I didn’t know why. Something like that.”
“You said it defied reason.”
“And so it does. Neither of us should be here.”
“The other day you said the past was a season in our lives. Remember that?”
“I remember.”
She squeezed out from behind the steering wheel and leaned over and put an arm around his neck. She stroked his cheek gently, kissed him tenderly on the forehead. “There’s a line from a Cummings poem that goes, ‘Love is a deeper season than reason,’ ” she said, and then, almost violently, she kissed him on the mouth. A cascade of her perfumed hair fell across his face.
“Do you want to go inside?” he said. “My partner’s gone, it ought to be—”
She laid a finger on her lips, a silencing gesture. “No more words. I want to finish what we should have finished in another car, twenty years ago.”
Waverly surrendered himself to her touch, and in the awkward threshing and the dizzying accelerating spiral the scroll of time seemed momentarily, miraculously, to roll backward; and after a long violent surge, violent as her kiss, a peace seemed to settle over and between them, while the rain beat a steady tattoo on the roof of the car.
SEVENTEEN
Mr. Badass. Trying to do a Bogart on D’Marco Fontaine. What a hoot.
D’Marco watched him march back to the table, hustle the fluff out of her chair, and steer her to the door. He let them go. No reason not. It wasn’t like there was anyplace they could get to where he couldn’t find them. Anyway, the lines were drawn now and the clock was running and he meant it, every word, when he said he was looking forward to next week. This one, better than most, he was going to enjoy.
In the meantime, though, there were a couple of other nagging problems to ponder. Not that there was a whole lot he could do about either of them. That waste case he’d left back at the hotel, couldn’t tolerate another evening of whiny questions and bitching and general mush-brain talk—what could he do about him? Answer was not a dog-fucking thing; until this arrangement was wrapped, Sigurd Suckwad Stumpley wasn’t going to go away. And then there was the more urgent—more alarming, when you thought about it—matter of the message on the answering machine. And thinking about it now, he scanned the faces around the bar, searching for a shooter’s empty expression or a chilly eye sliding over him. Takes a pro to mark a pro. But he saw nothing other than a collection of jolly, noisy, juicers, out-of-season-tourist types mostly, whooping it up in Florida on the cheap. No, when that one came it was going to come fierce and sudden and blindside, the way he’d do it himself. Cover your back, boy.
D’Marco finished the last of his vodka-free Bloody Mary and sauntered out to the parking lot. He glanced about warily, side to side and over his shoulder. All clear. He got behind the wheel of the LX and took it out onto the street and over to Highway One. Pointed it south, driving at good-citizen speed. Cars zipped past him. Periodically he checked the rearview. Nothing out of order back there. Around Juno Beach the sky opened up. The highway blurred in the furious downpour. He drove on, slower and more cautious than ever.
And so it was easily half an hour or better after he left Harpoon Louie’s before he came through the door of the Sea Spray Room. And when he did, the sight that greeted him was so stunning, so utterly unnerving, so invincibly repellent that for an instant all his studied cool deserted him and his jaws unhinged and his stomach churned under a sudden rush of nausea.
He saw: two swollen blimps, locked and coiled in a classic goatish sixty-nine, jiggly white flesh writhing twitching squirming, shameless in the glare of the harsh overhead light.
He heard: a symphony of grunts, delirious groans, rude slavering noises.
He inhaled: a monkey stink of sweat, assorted body fluids, some cheap vile perfume, a musky aftershave, and other nameless aromas rising from the bed and filling the room like a pestilent gas.
He felt: apart from the nausea, cold rage.
You want to talk about your mountain peaks of disgust, this was Everest.
Sigurd lifted his head and twisted it enough to take in D’Marco. A half-moon grin lit the simpleton face. “Hey, champ, you remember Maylene? Greenhouse?”
D’Marco didn’t answer. His mouth had recompressed, the skin drawn tight at the corners.
Sigurd, speaking now down the length of the grotesque coupling, said, “Maybelle, honey? Sugarlips? Say hello to my partner.” By way of explanation he added, “We’re cellin’ together here.”
Introductions going around.
Maylene disengaged her head and peered out from under a chunky Stumpley thigh. Damp tendrils of paste-colored hair fell across her eyes. She swiped at them irritably and glowered at D’Marco. Her cheeks glowed like live coals. Her droop-jugged chest heaved up and down, whether from the lingering aftermath of arrested heat or from animus at its untimely breach—certainly not from shame—was impossible to tell. “Nice timin’ he’s got,” she mumbled crossly, thickly.
In a voice icy with control, layer on layer of control, D’Marco, addressing Sigurd directly, said, “Speaking of timing, you got exactly three minutes to get this whale out of here.”
“Who you callin’ a whale?” Maylene sputtered.
“I’m payin’ half on this room,” Sigurd protested. “I got rights, too.”
“Three. And counting.”
Sigurd heard the low rumbling menace in the voice. And no mistaking the storm clouds in those eyes. His indignation faltered and he scrambled off the bed and began pawing feverishly through the heaps of discarded clothing on the floor.
D’Marco wheeled around and went back into the hall, banging the door behind him. He stood there ticking off the seconds on his watch, listening to the muffled voices, one low-toned, placating, the words unintelligible, and the other a ranting repetitive squawk—“Where’s he get off callin’ me a whale?”—punctuated by a coda of curses.
In just under the appointed three minutes the door swung open and Maylene, disheveled but more or less dressed in baggy blouse and circus-tent jeans and spike heels that impelled her into a top-heavy crouch, came stomping through it. Sigurd, wearing only his boxer shorts and a grin gone slack, peeked around the corner and called after her, “Don’t be a stranger, hey.” Without looking back she elevated a hand, bird finger extended, and kept on flouncing down the hall.
“Look like she got a case of the serious red ass,” Sigurd allowed.
D’Marco pushed past him. Sigurd waited in the entrance, watching the frigid eyes sweep the war zone room, the hard jaw tighten, the head nod slowly, wondrously. He guessed maybe the best thing to do or say was nothing at all. Not just yet. Let the ice thaw a little first. Eventually, of course, the eyes fell on him. He gave a helpless shrug.
“Shut the door,” D’Marco ordered.
Sigurd shut the door.
“Lock it.”
He locked it.
