“Maybe you ought to get Lonnie Neese’s job,” he said to Driscoll.
“Naw,” Driscoll said, taking him seriously. “It’s politics anywhere you look down there. Even old Lonnie has to take shit. Try and cover everybody’s ass.” Driscoll shook his head. “Naw, between the politics and the guys on the take, you don’t know who to trust. You’re on your own any way you look at it. I might as well be on my own for real.”
Deal knew Driscoll was referring to the private investigation agency he’d proposed, even before the ink was dry on his retirement papers. He’d been high on the prospect at first, had even shopped various neighborhoods for office space, but he seemed to have lost interest in the project lately.
Deal glanced at him, noticed that the veins in the big man’s nose were more prominent than ever, the flush high in his cheeks. Maybe it was just the laughter, but he doubted it. There was a nick on Driscoll’s chin where he’d cut himself shaving, another patch of stubble where he’d missed altogether.
He heard the last sighs of the coffeemaker as it finished cycling. “You want to come in, have some coffee?” Deal asked.
“Thanks,” Driscoll said, but he was shaking his head. “I took up enough of your morning as it is.”
Deal nodded. He hadn’t heard any sounds from Isabel’s room yet. Maybe he could go back down the hallway, snuggle in with Janice, they could pick up where they’d left off last evening. The shock he’d felt yesterday had ebbed away for the most part once they’d come home, cuddled their daughter, settled in. Maybe Janice felt the same way.
“Okay, Driscoll,” he said. “I’ll talk to Tommy…” Then he broke off. “Damn, I almost forgot.” He looked at Driscoll, expectant. “About Boca.”
Driscoll stared at him blankly.
“You know,” Deal said. “We’re going to dinner tonight.”
Driscoll’s face fell. “Oh hell, Johnny. I don’t know about that…”
“What, you’ve got other plans?”
“Naw, I just…”
“We’ve been promising Barbara for months now. Homer’s coming, she’s got it all set up with her boss.…”
There was a thud from the direction of the flower beds. They turned to see Tommy stretched out on his back in the grass, a big clump of nut grass clutched to his chest. He must have been tugging full out at the clump when it gave way, sending him flying backward.
He lay there for a moment, then rolled to his hands and knees, shaking his head like a woozy fighter. When he realized Driscoll and Deal were watching, he gave them a smile, then got up, dusted himself off, and went back to the impatiens.
“That boy’s got a day job, huh?” Driscoll said.
“He’s older than I am,” Deal said.
“Whatever,” Driscoll said.
“He buses dishes,” Deal said. “At Doc’s, in the Gables.”
“Well, good for him,” Driscoll said, heading for the stairwell.
Deal heard a noise behind him. He turned, staring in surprise. It was his daughter, Isabel, rubbing the dark curls out of her eyes, tugging at the hem of the T-shirt that couldn’t cover the curve of her belly. She tottered across the kitchen floor toward him, braced herself at the doorway, and thrust an empty bottle upward. “Bah,” she said.
Deal shook his head. “How did you get out of your crib?”
“
Bah
!” Isabel said, more firmly.
So much for his plans, Deal thought, scooping his daughter up in his arms. “Come down about six, Vernon,” he called to Driscoll. “We’ll drive.”
Driscoll waved his hand dismissively as he disappeared around the corner. “I dunno. I don’t have anything to wear.”
“It’s casual,” Deal said.
“It’d sure as shit have to be,” Driscoll said. And then he was gone.
“Whas in the bag, man?”
Coco Morales adjusted the Manatees baseball cap he wore, ignoring the rail-thin black man who slouched in the bus seat across from him. He had his attention fixed on the tiny TV he held in his palm, was fighting the glare from the sun that splayed through the filthy windows.
Two men in Mohawk haircuts and Halloween makeup were in the ring, pummeling a tall figure in black tights back and forth between them. The tall man’s face wore the pallor of death beneath an artist’s slouch hat. One of the big men tore the hat off and ran his fist through the top of it. If there was a referee involved, Coco could not see him.
“Yo. Whas in the bag, man?”
The bus whisked under a freeway overpass and the TV image wavered, then gathered itself. There was a small man in a tuxedo who had been trussed up in the ringside ropes; he hung there with his feet off the ground like something caught in a spider’s web. One of the Mohawk men left the middle of the ring and strode over to drive a forearm into the throat of the small man, who sagged as if in death.
Coco studied all this with detachment. There was professional wrestling where he had come from, but nothing quite so ludicrous as this. He knew. He had participated himself. After his mother’s death, after one tour in the regular army, another in the pay of the insurgents, he had had a chance encounter with a former
comandante
. It was a moment of relative peacetime in his revolution-weary country. A crowded bar. The former officer now an important man with a shirt pocket full of cigars and a woman on each arm. He remembered
gigante
Coco, as who would not, stood him to a drink, had one more look at his remarkable face.
El Comandante
leaned closer, ordered another round, and began to explain. The next day, Coco was working for
El Comandante
once again, in the business sport of wrestling.
In Coco’s country, there were the intended victors, the heroes, as here; and there was also the lesser class, the opponents, recruited principally as victims.
The difference was that in his country, the victims were paid to absorb actual punishment. The more you were willing to undergo, the more you might earn. You would be hit, tossed, clubbed with chairs or anything else that was handy. Something extra for a bloodied nose, a split lip. And if a tooth or two happened to fly across the canvas, if you somehow broke a bone, there would be some compensation for that as well.
Coco had earned quite a good living as a victim, for pain did not greatly distress him. He
felt
pain, and did not enjoy the sensation, of course, but it did not frighten him, nor greatly inconvenience him, for he was physically quite resilient. No, the difficulty had come with his dissatisfaction at his place in the hierarchy. Coco’s features were distressing enough before he began to be beaten on a regular basis. After a few months of traveling through the provinces, he was absolutely frightful to look at. Though it made him a compelling victim for the moving picture types who played the heroes, it only confirmed the fact that Coco would always be the loser.
Even that Coco could have withstood.
He
knew that he was not the pitiful representation of cowardice and powerlessness the scripts called for, but the problem was that certain of his opponents could not maintain the distinction between appearance and reality.
Eduardo Herrera, or
El Matador
as he was billed, was the worst. Herrera was the most handsome of the troupe and seemed to take personal offense at Coco’s appearance. He made fun of him with the others, was always whispering to him in the clinches—
soccer head, freak, monstro
—often ridiculing him in front of fans as he stood with his foot pressing down on Coco’s chest.
One night in a small fishing village not far from Coco’s own home,
El Matador
had puffed out his chest for a row of local girls at ringside. “
Campesino
,” he jeered. “
Pendejo estupido
!” He leaned over Coco’s prostrate form and spat a greenish glob between his eyes.
Coco had, to the amazement of the crowd, revived suddenly and miraculously, had risen up to beat
El Matador
senseless. He battered the handsome one’s face with his sharp fists until blood was flying beyond the ropes, then dropped him to the canvas and ground the wounds into the grime until it was certain nothing could obliterate the scars.
Before the
comandante
and his entourage could get into the ring to stop him, he’d driven a fist into
El Matador’s
throat and dragged him to the center of the ring, had left him a choking, shitting hulk under the spotlights, all this to the thunderous cheers of a crowd who took it for part of the show.
Coco lost the week’s pay he would have collected that night. Lost his promising career in wrestling. But it had opened up many new vistas. He had hardly left the arena, for instance, when two of the women
El Matador
had played to at ringside threw themselves upon him.
Strange, Coco thought as the bus bounced through a series of potholes. How cruelty could transform a physical shortcoming into beauty, how the willingness to exhibit it had so improved his life.
Scarcely a week had passed before a man who called himself Torreno sent an emissary Coco’s way. Now he worked in America, and had honed his craft into an art.
“Ugly fucker bringing a weirdass bag onto the bus, don’t wan’ to talk about it.”
The skinny man had staggered up from his seat to lean across the aisle. Coco felt a scrawny hand clutch his wrist, smelled the disgusting odor of wine, of other, unknowable things on the man’s breath. His own hand flashed out, covered the filthy claw on his wrist, squeezed.
The man would have cried out, but the pain was too great and too swift for that. He could only writhe about, his eyes watering, his awful teeth bared in a speechless grimace.
Coco eased him back across the aisle into his seat, careful that the bus driver should not become too curious. It was a Sunday afternoon and they were the only passengers.
“
Cabezas
,” Coco hissed into the man’s ear, then pointed at the sturdy woven
bolsa
that rested on the floor by his own seat. Soft and yet strong. Perfect for the things he carried. “Heads,” he repeated in a whisper. “
Human
heads.”
The man whimpered, his eyes growing larger as Coco increased the pressure. “A finger. A liver. Other things.”
Coco gave a final squeeze, felt something snap, then released his grip. The man sagged back against his seat, his hand limp across his chest, a thing he seemed to disown. His lips were clamped together in pain, in terror. A dark stain spread down his pantlegs and the smell of urine hovered in the close air.
Coco sat back down, slipping his TV into a pocket. He glanced toward the front of the bus. The driver had his attention focused on an aging sedan in the turn lane in front of them. “Let’s go, let’s go,” the driver shouted, leaning on his horn.
The sedan finally lunged forward through the intersection, belching a huge cloud of blue smoke behind it. The driver wrenched at the wheel, flooring the bus right after, although the light had already changed. There was a blare of horns, shouts from outside, but the driver seemed not to hear.
Coco read the sign that dangled across the thoroughfare before them. Unlike most of the storefronts around them, this one actually bore an English translation:
WELCOME TO LITTLE HAVANA
.
Yes, Coco thought, welcome. He lifted up his bag and stood, scanning the brightly colored storefronts for the street numbers. It looked a bit like his country, too, out there. And the driving was much the same.
He glanced at the cowering figure across from him. A few distractions to endure on these American buses, but he was just as happy that he did not drive an automobile. Think of all that he would have missed. He saw a number then, an address that meant he was drawing near.
The black man watched him warily, his eyes leaking tears. Coco reached up to pull the signal cord. The bus veered obediently to the curb. Coco gripped his bag of parts tightly and stepped out into the heat, ready to go back to work.
“She’s got a crush on you, Deal.”
It was Janice, glancing at him from behind the wheel. He wasn’t sure if she was smiling. He was in the passenger seat, feigning sleep, didn’t want to open his eyes wide enough to see. It was restful being driven for a change, even with Driscoll snoring in the backseat.
They’d spent the evening in Boca Raton, having dinner with Barbara Cooper. She’d helped them out of trouble back when, had stayed in touch even though she’d moved north, “out of harm’s way,” as she put it.
She was a hostess at the Sea Timbers now, a huge place on the water, massive beams and smoked glass, ship’s brass everywhere you looked. Not a bad place to work for a woman who’d seen her share of hassles. Tucked into the dunes and sea grape like a little castle. The kind of place, Deal thought, you’d want to finish your meal even if nuclear war broke out.
They’d had a good time comparing notes, passing Isabel’s baby pictures around, careful always to skirt the worst parts of their common history. Funny thing, Deal thought. They’d stumbled into the path of men intent on killing them all, and though they’d survived it together, they found themselves less and less willing to talk about it, even among themselves. Maybe they were as superstitious as tribesmen, unwilling to name an evil god for fear of calling it back into existence.
Still, it had been a good evening, the oblique references and unspoken camaraderie gluing them together in spirit. Plenty of toasts, plenty of food, desserts you couldn’t see over. Though Janice insisted she’d seen where Barbara’s eyes had been. That’s what this was about.
They were whisking down Florida’s Turnpike toward home, boring through tunnels of tall slash pines, the southbound lanes divided from their northerly cousins by a hundred yards or more in this long stretch. No light save the glow from the dash, the moon breaking through the distant thunderheads from time to time…
It had finally relaxed him, set Deal remembering the grand road trips of his youth, long hauls through the night to the Carolinas, to New England, through the West, his mother and father in the front seat sharing a jug of coffee, Deal on a bed made up in the back, not a care in the world, so electric with anticipation he’d never go to sleep.
“We ought to take a vacation,” he said, stretching luxuriously. All the glum feelings he’d had at the restaurant seemed to have drifted away. Maybe he’d just been tired.
“There’s an answer for you,” Janice said mildly.
Deal cocked one eye open. A smile there. Good sign. “Barbara’s a good person,” he said. “She’s just adjusting to life in the normal, noncriminal world.”
“What’s that have to do with you?”
Deal wriggled around in the seat. Driscoll’s snores picked up a notch. Evidently
he
found the drive restful.
“I am the very essence of normal,” he said, settling deeper into the cushions. “It’s like being attracted to a father figure.”
“You are full of shit, that much I know.”
He reached out, found her leg. “You think I’m interested in Barbara?”
“I think you’re going to cause a wreck.”
“We could pull over, find a place in the pine trees.”
“Hmmmm-mmmmm,” she said. “We’ve got company.”
It sounded as if Driscoll was trying to snorkel a tray of flatware down a metal drainpipe. “He’ll sleep right through it,” Deal said. “Unless we play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
She burst out laughing. “What are you talking about?” She pushed his hand away from her thigh, but there wasn’t much force in the gesture.
“Tommy,” Deal said. “He plays his TV too loud right through the sign-off. Driscoll says it wakes him up every night.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“How do you think I found out about it?”
She pushed his hand away again. “I mean Tommy. You need to speak with him. I’m sure if you explain it in the right way…”
“I promise,” Deal said, shifting in his seat.
She gasped, clutching his hand in her lap. “I’m serious, Deal. I can’t drive with you doing that.”
“Maybe if you said ‘Can’t you wait until we get home,’ something like that. It might give me hope.”
She moved his hand down to her knee, patted it.
“Wait till we get home, then,” she said. “How’s that?”
“Hopeful,” he said, squeezing. “Just drive fast.”