McNally's caper

‘Got it.’

We started out at noon, paused to gas up, then went south on Federal Highway #1. Jack was driving, leaning forward to peer through the murk. Traffic was moving very slowly; most of the cars had their lights on.

After we got below Golden Shores, I couldn’t follow the twists and turns Donohue was taking, except that I knew we were off Federal and generally heading eastward. There were no road markers. We seemed to be passing through an area of tidal flats, vacant fields, and fenced lots choked with palmettos, scrub pines, and yellow grass.

‘You’re sure you know-’ I began.

‘Don’t worry,’ Donohue said tensely. ‘I know.’

He did, too. We finally turned into a single-lane road. It might have been tarred originally, but now it showed bald patches of sodden earth and weeds sprouting from cracks. We followed the lazy curves going slowly. Then, on the right-hand side, I saw a chainlink fence, bent, dented, and rusted.

‘That’s it,’ Jack said. ‘This is the only road in, the only road out.’

We came up to the sagging gate and stopped.

‘Take a look,’ he said.

I looked. In that swirling fog, the hotel was a ghosts’ mansion. It was silvered with age, glistening with damp, and it loomed. That’s the only way I can describe it: It loomed through the mist, enlarged and menacing. I saw black birds circling and darting into upper windows. I saw the nude grounds, puddled, still shining from the past two days’ rain.

I tried to imagine how it had been, white and glittering, a place for ladies in long gowns with parasols and men with straw boaters and high, starched collars. People laughing and moving slowly along brick walks under lush palm trees. I tried to imagine all this but I couldn’t. It was all gone.

‘Think they’ve got a suite for us?’ I said, laughing nervously. ‘Two rooms with a view?’

‘Let’s go take a look.’

We got out of the car and crawled carefully through a cut in the fence. We tried to avoid the puddles, but the ground squished beneath our steps. My shoes were soaked through before we got to the porch.

We stepped up the rotting stairs, keeping close to the sides where the sag wasn’t so apparent. Then I smelled it.

‘Jesus!’ I breathed.

‘Yeah,’ Donohue said. ‘And it’s worse inside. Breathe through your mouth.’

We went in through one of those broken French doors. It was just as Jack had described it: soaked garbage, offal, all the detritus of a dwelling place abandoned and left open. We went up to the fourth floor, the top except for an attic that appeared open to the lowering sky.

We sent colonies of birds into a flurry of activity. I was certain I heard the scamper of rats. And once I did see a small snake slither behind a baseboard.

We looked hastily into every room, not a difficult job since most of the doors had been removed. There was evidence, as Jack had said, of pot and bottle parties, of fires and wanton destruction, of the terrible inroads age makes. On buildings. On people. Everything goes.

Back on the ground floor, we wandered about until Jack selected a large, high-ceilinged chamber that had probably been the dining room. Broken French doors opened out onto the sagging porch and a side terrace. Most important, from two sides we had a good view of the access road. We could see our own car dimly, parked at the gate.

‘This is where we’ll meet,’ Donohue decided. ‘I’ll do the talking. I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘if you want to say anything, you say it. But mostly you keep an eye on that road beyond the gate. You see another car pulling up, or anything fishy, you let me know.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll scream.’

‘Good.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We got a little more than an hour. We’ll go back to the junction and park where we can watch who comes in.’

And that’s what we did, retracing that cracked road until we came to the paved junction that, Donohue told me, led eventually back to the Federal Highway. We were in a neighborhood of one-story cinderblock homes, some with front yards of green gravel, a few with boats on trailers in their garage driveways.

We parked there, settled down, lighted cigarettes, and waited. Jack had brought his binoculars, but they were of no use. That misty fog was still so thick we could see no more than twenty or thirty yards. But we could make out the turnoff to that road leading to the deserted hotel.

Sitting there, closed around by the fog, swaddled in silence, we talked slowly in murmurs. Jack wanted to know all about my life. Mostly my childhood. Where I had been born, where I lived, the places I had visited.

But mainly he wanted to know how I had lived when I was growing up. How many rooms did our various homes have? Did we have servants? How many cars did we own? Did we belong to a country club? Did I attend private schools? How much money did my parents spend on my clothes? What kind of presents did I get for Christmas?

It wasn’t just curiosity, I knew; it was a hunger. He wanted a firsthand view into a world he coveted, a vision of moneyed ease. He saw it as a life in sunlight. Beautiful women and handsome men sat around on a seafront terrace, sipped champagne and nibbled caviar served by smiling servants. It was class.

I didn’t have the heart to disabuse him. So I embellished my descriptions of what childhood was like when there was money for everything, people were polite and kind, and life was a golden dream in which every wish was granted. He kept smiling and nodding away, as if what I told him was no more than he had envisioned. I wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t imagined a thousand times. There was a world like that; he knew it, and he couldn’t get enough of it.

But then, a few minutes after three, he straightened up behind the wheel.

‘Car coming,’ he said in a tight voice.

We both leaned forward, squinting through the fogged windshield. It was a big black car, a Cadillac, and it came to the access road, slowed, then made the turn.

‘How many men did you see?’ Donohue demanded.

‘Two. In the front seat.’

‘That’s what I saw. We’ll follow them in.’

He started up. We turned into the tarred road leading to the hotel. The black car ahead of us was lost in the mist. We found it parked outside the gate in the chainlink fence. We saw two men picking their way across the littered grounds to the hotel.

Jack grunted with satisfaction.

‘The short guy is Garcia,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of that. The tall gink must be the paperman. We’ll wait till they get inside.’

When the two men disappeared into the hotel, Jack pulled up ahead of the Cadillac. Then, with much backing and hard cramping of the wheel, he turned the Cutlass around until we were heading back the way we had come, away from the hotel. Then we got out of the car. Donohue left the key in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

‘Just in case we wish to depart swiftly,’ he said with a thin smile.

We walked back to the Cadillac, inspected the back seat. Empty. Jack tried the trunk lid. It was locked.

‘Looks okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll go in now. You all set?’

‘Sure.’

He gave me one of his flashy grins, pulled me close, kissed my lips.

‘Win, lose, or draw, babe,’ he said, ‘it’s been fun.’

‘Hasn’t it?’

‘Let’s go.’

We stooped through the cut in the fence. We started toward the hotel. We both had right hands in our raincoat pockets. We must have looked like a pair of assassins.

Donohue paused a moment on the porch. He took a final look around. No one in sight. Nothing stirring.

‘Remember what I told you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Keep an eye on that road. If I make a play, be ready to cover my back. And be ready to run.’

I nodded dumbly. Suddenly I needed to pee.