Tuesday, September 4
1930 hours
Islamorada, Florida
The crowded room was full of palm trees and Caribbean Flotsam and Kenny G. on alto sax.
Keogh’s wife was sitting at the long bar looking out over the water and talking to one of the bartenders. She was playing with a long jade-colored drink.
Sonny took an empty stool a little down the bar.
The kid in the Hawaiian shirt brought him a Beck’s beer so cold it hurt his hand when he poured it and he spilled a little on the wooden surface.
The boy looked at his left hand as he wiped up the spill.
“Looks nasty, sir.”
Sonny looked at it. He could feel Keogh’s wife following the conversation and made damn sure he didn’t look at her.
“Gaffed it.”
“Jesus,” said the kid, wincing. “Gaffed it yourself?”
“No. Just got in the way.”
He turned his hand under the narrow downlight above the bar. There was some pink showing under the white bandage. It had been weeping for a couple of days now. His forearm was hot and a thin red line marked a vein running up it.
“You get some attention for it, sir? It looks pretty bad.”
Great. He was here two minutes and already he was a topic of discussion. What the hell was he doing?
“Yeah. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
He’d have this beer and then he’d get up without looking at her and he’d go back to his room and lie down.
Men and women came and went around him. He had two more Beck’s and he hadn’t turned around on the stool. Out in the blue velvet bay, islands of glittering light drifted past. The music swirled like smoke around the bar. He could feel a vein in his neck like a hot wire but the Percodans and the beers carried him above the pain on a soft wave.
He knew, in a way, that what he was doing by not looking at the woman, by just sitting there under the pinlight spot and drinking quietly, was making it safe for her to think about talking to him.
In bars, the only man a woman alone wants to talk to is the only man who looks as if he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
Now the bar was clearing and there were two empty stools between them. He could hear her voice, low, saying something to the barman. His ears were still ringing—from the stun grenade or the Percodans.
“Excuse me.”
He was thinking about another beer and wondering why the room was so hazy. Someone touched his right shoulder. She was standing beside him, looking down at him. She had lines around her eyes and the irises were a deep sea-green with slivers of hazel and her scent was spicy … something familiar.
“Opium.”
“What?”
“Your perfume.”
She took her hand off his shoulder and her eyes changed.
“Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you, but you don’t look well and I was … Well, I’m a nurse and I asked the bartender about your hand.”
Sonny had a little trouble focusing on the hand.
“Hey. A flesh wound. I’ll be fine.”
Get out now. Get up, say thanks, and walk out. He put his hands down on the bar top. Pain sliced up his left arm.
She saw the effect.
So did the bartender. “Sir, if you like I can call you a car.”
Sonny stood up and pulled himself together.
“No. No, thanks. Look, I appreciate it. I’ve been mixing my medicines some. I’ll just walk home.”
The woman shook her head.
“Will you have a coffee? Chris, will you get the man an espresso?”
She held him lightly with her left hand. Now that he was standing she was looking up at him with the same worried solicitude he had seen on her face when she was talking to her punk son. It warmed him to see the look from this angle.
“Yeah. Yes, ma’am. I guess a coffee. A double espresso.”
She didn’t even look at Chris. He went to fetch it.
“That hand. You know what those red lines are?”
She traced one on his left forearm. Her fingertip was cool and dry. She followed his vein up to his bicep, leaning across him to do it. Her hair smelled of sea salt and shampoo and cigarette smoke. Her blue dress floated on her body like a mist over a pool and one soft arc of tanned breast caught the downlight.
“No ma’am.” He knew damned well. “What are they?”
She pulled back and gave him a clinical frown.
“They’re a sign of infection. I think you should go to a clinic. I can drive you, if you don’t feel up to it.”
“I appreciate it, ma’am. But I can’t allow you to trouble yourself. I’ll have a coffee and I believe I have some penicillin in my room. I’ll go along directly and take it. I’ll be just fine.”
He had to be reading this wrong.
She put out a hand. “I’m Tricia Keogh.”
“Bolt,” he said stupidly. “Dennison Bolt.”
Her hand was strong and a little cold.
“You’re southern?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Why was he calling her “ma’am”?
“That’s how I could tell. You’re calling me ‘ma’am.’ ”
The espresso came. Chris set it down and moved away.
No. He was not reading this wrong.
“You’re down here on business?”
“No, ma’am—”
“ ‘No, Tricia,’ please.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. Ahh … no, I’m here for … pleasure.”
She smiled and sipped at her jade drink.
“And you? Tricia.”
She looked away and some emotion ran through her.
“No histories, okay? I’m a little drunk and I’m tired.”
She pulled her shoulders up and a barely perceptible tremor went through her. She looked at him again. Sonny felt the look.
“Listen, I’m sorry. That was rude,” she said, pushing her drink away. “I really do think you should get that hand attended to. It’s been nice talking to you … Dennis.”
She was leaving. It eased his mind and he smiled at her.
“Ma’am, it was my pleasure. You have a car here, or would you like me to call you a cab?”
She stood and looked at him for a long time.
“Very southern, aren’t you? Too bad you don’t give lessons. I’m from New York and the men there … aren’t like you.”
“Well, ma’am, there are days when I’m not like me either.”
For the first time, her laugh was simple and uncomplicated.
Her breath was sweet and wine-scented.
“Sometimes, ma’am, it’s good to be someone you’re not.”
Her smile flickered and dimmed and then it came back.
“Well then …” she said, her eyes darkening and her hand settling on his right wrist as soft and cool as snow. “Let’s be someone we’re not tonight.”
No, he thought. Not a chance.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
“Yes. Yes, ma’am.”
In his pale-green room in the indigo night with the sea sounding along the breakwater and the night wind rolling in through the open glass doors, Sonny remembered very clearly how the blue dress had slipped away over her shoulders, and how round and heavy her breasts were, the nipples violet and hard as jewels under his palm.
When she came he thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t and she came out of the bathroom with a new bandage for his hand. She dressed it in the half-light, saying nothing, her head down and her breathing steady.
He watched her get dressed and listened to the whisper of the cloth as it slipped over her body. She came over to the bed and leaned down to kiss him, and while she did, while he felt her long hair around his face and her soft hands on his chest, he thought about the Heckler in the room like a thin black barracuda.
“You told me the truth tonight, didn’t you?”
He didn’t know what she meant.
“About not being who you are sometimes.”
That was true.
“Why?” he said.
She touched his cheek and stepped away. “Why? I told you I was a nurse, remember?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I don’t know a bullet wound when I see one?”
Oh, Christ.
“Oh, don’t worry. My husband is a policeman. I’m used to it. I just think it’s funny.”
“How? How is it funny?”
She laughed once, and sighed, and walked to the door.
“Oh, God, I don’t know. It seems funny to me. Even when I have an affair, I have it with a cop.”
She tugged open the door and stepped out into the light.
In the aura around her from the hall, she turned and smiled back at him. To Sonny she looked like something burning with a soft blue flame. Her body showed through the thin dress.
“That hand. It’s very bad. And you have a fever. If you don’t do something about it now, you’re going to get very very sick.”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“No,” she said, her face hidden in the dark, her voice a soft vibration. “No, it’s not.”
She closed the door.
A sea breeze fluttered the curtains, and the cry of gulls floated into the room. He closed his eyes and lay back on the bed. In the darkness behind his eyes the gull cries glittered in his mind like kerosene flames on water, and an artery in his left arm burned like a coal seam underground. Hot, shaking, he felt the room rising and falling on the tides of his breathing. He tried to see Lyle the way he had been, but all he could see was Lucas walking in Old Town by the water.
“Emergency.”
What was she doing?
“Emergency … hello?”
“Yes. A man needs an ambulance.”
“Where are you calling from, ma’am?”
“Ah … the Ramada Inn at Bahia Mar. There’s a very sick man in room two-eleven. He has a septicemic wound and possibly blood poisoning. He needs medical attention now.”
“He can come in to the Emerg—”
“Dammit, I said he needs help now! He can’t come anywhere! How about he dies on the way to the E.R. and they sue your ass off for it—how would that be?”
That did it. They always jumped when you got legal.
“What’s the wound, ma’am?”
“I think it’s a gunshot wound. In the left hand.”
A pause and some muffled background talk.
“We’ll send an ambulance and the police right now, ma’am.”
“Police? He doesn’t need the police. He needs a doctor.”
“Any gunshot wound, ma’am, we have to send the police too.”
God. Dennis would be furious.
“Well …”
“Can we have your name, ma’am?”
Tricia slammed the receiver down and walked away from the pay phone. She was almost down to the dock when she heard the sirens.
Well, she thought, he’ll be angry at me. But he’s a cop. They’ll take care of him. Cops take care of one another.
The bastards.
When she reached the Madelaine, Frank was sitting on the taffail gate with a fistful of dahlias and a cold bottle of Dom and a hopeful expression on his bulldog-Irish face.