sheaths of her nerves scraped raw by toxic ethanol metabolites, but at the same time exhausted, lacking even the energy to stroll through a fictive garden. She spies the school notebook on her desk, puts the novel aside, fetches it back to the lounger. Emmylou’s confessions now sprout a shrubbery of Post-its. She thumbs through to one in particular, examines the page. Emmylou’s writing is large and bold.
This has happened to you too, hasn’t it?
Underlined, directed at the reader, at Paz obviously, some relationship established there already. Why? A Catholic thing? Exterior voices a common enough phenomenon, she knows, particularly in childhood, here we had an extreme case, the impulses of the id projected out and turned into an imagined figure, this shiny man. Why shiny? Some early visual hallucinations too, fading with age. Fascinating. There is a whole line of therapy that she can generate from this. Lorna goes to get a pen and her own notebook.
The phone now rings. Twice and the machine picks it up. A voice, distorted by the cheap speaker: “Lorna… Jimmy Paz here, hope you’re okay. Look, I need you to give me a call?”
“Hello?” She has flown across the room and snatched up the receiver.
“Oh, good,” says Paz. “You survived. I’m not going to ask you how you feel.”
“That’s very considerate of you. I assume you got me home last night. I’m sorry, I don’t usually act like that.”
“Like how? Get drunk at a party and have fun?”
“Did I have fun? I can’t remember.”
“You were laughing a lot. That’s usually an indication.”
“Well, it was nice of you to take the trouble.” A little pause here, both of them in the embarrassment of forced intimacy, waiting for the other to make the first move, which eventually Paz does, saying, “I hope you don’t mind about me getting that dress off you. It looked uncomfortable to sleep in. I didn’t realize about the top. The no-bra aspect.”
“That’s okay.”
“I kept my eyes closed the entire time, I want you to know.”
“That was very considerate of you. Was it hard?” Guffaw, shared. “No, I mean was it difficult getting it off….”
“Not at all. It was like skinning a mackerel.”
Lorna thinks this is the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to her. She tries to think of a rejoinder, but all she can do is breathe stupidly into the mouthpiece, like a telephone tormentor.
“Look, um, another reason I called is I need a favor.”
“Sure, what is it?” she asks.
“Could you, like, come over to my place?”
“You mean now?”
“Yeah, if it’s no trouble. I’m in sort of a jam and you were the only one I could think of to call.”
“What kind of jam?”
“Um, it’s hard to explain over the phone. It’ll just take you a minute.”
Lorna agrees right away. He gives her the address and tells her where a key to the back door is stashed, under the near-left foot of the picnic table. He thanks her warmly before he hangs up. She dresses in haste, the crisp look today, khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt, like a camp counselor. She drives to Little Havana, SW Nineteenth off Calle Ocho, lets herself in, feeling a little odd but not uncomfortably so. Anticipatory, even.
“Jimmy?”
“In here. The bedroom.”
She follows the voice. Jimmy Paz is lying in a brass bed, covered from the waist down by a light quilt and showing from the waist up an impressive expanse of buffed musculature coated in smooth dark golden skin. Gold chain and crucifix too, and another small dark object on a thong. That was strange and a little exciting in a scary way. Lorna can almost feel her pupils expand.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. “I did something really dumb.” He wiggles his foot, and she sees that it is fastened with handcuffs to one of the bed’s pipes. “I had the key right here on the table, and to be extra sure I didn’t lose it I had it inside my watchband, right? So, of course, I wake up in the middle of the night and the first thing I do is check the time, and the key kind of hooks on the band and skitters off across the floor. Over there.” He points. “Can you locate it?”
She can and hands it to him. He unlocks the cuffs.
“Thank you.” He gives her the grin. “Free at last, free at last, great God almighty…”
“And so on,” she says. “Well, it looks like my work here is done.”
“Time for play, then. You doing anything today?”
“I’m free more or less except for some errands. What were you thinking of? It can’t involve alcoholic beverages.”
“Of course. Yet numerous teetotal experiences are available here in Miami, it being the sun and fun capital of the world. Do you like the water?”
“To drink?”
“To float upon. To dip into. The sea. Boating.”
“You mean sailboats?”
“No, I mean a Cuban workboat with fish scales all over it. We could run down to the reef, throw a line over, get lucky maybe, catch some redfish.”
“You know all the good places, I bet.”
“Some of them. You up for that?”
“Sure, if I can go by my place and get some stuff.”
“I’ll come with you,” he says, “or I would if I could figure out a way to get dressed with you in here.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” she says. And she does, nearly, while he slides naked and truly terrific-looking from under his quilt and pulls on a pair of faded cutoff jeans and a black T-shirt that says GUANTANAMERA COMIDAS CRIOLLAS on it, and a baggy plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped off over that. Then he clips on his pistol and slides a shield wallet into his rear pocket.
He catches her stare. “Regulations,” he says. “Does it bother you?”
“I don’t think so. But I never spent any time with a man who had a gun.”
“You did last night, with about fifty of them.”
“I mean consciously. It must be weird.”
“You get used to it,” he says shortly and leads her out.
They take his car, a Datsun Z of a certain age, in sun-faded orange. At the curb in front of her house she tells him that she’ll just be a minute. As she opens her front door she stops for a second as it strikes her that her hangover is quite gone, and more interestingly, that she has not had a hypochondriacal, neurotic, or self-conscious thought since the minute Paz called her. She feels terrific, in fact, better than she has in ages. She is arranging her beach bag in her mind as she turns the key and enters her front room. She needs a tube of industrial-strength sunblock and a towel, and yes, she intends to wear an electric blue bikini she purchased on Antigua and has never summoned up the nerve to wear locally.
She barely sees the man before he clubs her aside with his fist and races out the front door. Paz is leaning against the driver’s side of his car, staring contentedly after Lorna, and so he has a perfect view of what has just happened. The man trips slightly on a little rag rug Lorna keeps inside her front door, and when he is halfway down the path, just building up speed again, Paz is already leaning over the top of his car with his Glock out, yelling, “Freeze, freeze, police! Get down!”
The man slows, startled, staring. Paz sees that he is a thin Latino man dressed in satiny black warm-up pants and a black tank top withHeat written on it in red cursive letters and big white Air Jordans, with his head wrapped in a shiny black cloth. Maybe twenty-something, Paz figures, and he’s got a dark flat object in his hand that Paz can’t quite identify, because he is focused on the man’s face, and all of a sudden he can see what the man’s going to do and ice enters his belly. He fills his lungs with air to shout again.
The man’s right hand snakes behind him and comes out with a dark angular shape that could be anything, a toy, a knife, a Walkman, but Paz doesn’t wait to see what it is. He fires twice, and the man sits down at the head of Lorna’s walk in that cut-string-marionette way of shot people, with dark leaking punctures above and below thea inHeat. Paz rushes to the man, sees he isn’t breathing, plants his mouth over the blood-filled mouth, feels the
