Crime

need a beer, he informs Trudi, pointing at the bar, — my throat’s gaunny close up in a minute. Want one?

— That’s the last thing I want, Ray Lennox. You’re supposed to be in recovery! We’re supposed to be planning our wedding! What if the waitress comes?

— Get me a margarita.

Trudi looks contemptuously at him, then tuts and goes to her white shoulder bag. She produces the copy of Perfect Bride and her small notebook.

Lennox hits the bar and orders a pint of Stella. He is astonished and relieved that they have it on draught. That red background with the white font: it’s like meeting an old friend. Just a sip first, in order to feel that dry, alcoholic taste in his mouth. Then he downs half in a gulp. One of the guys in the football tops catches his eye. They have English accents. West Country. A little bit drunk. The strips are Exeter City Football Club. He asks them if they’ve gotten any scores. They tell him Exeter have won. They hadn’t heard any Scottish results. They chat, the Exeter lads expressing goodwill towards his team, Hearts. Lennox is surprised to hear that Exeter are no longer in the Football League. It’s the Conference now. A crazy chairman. A financial crisis. These things happened.

He traverses back to the table where they are served corn chips and salsa. Then, to his astonishment, two frosted margaritas appear. — Well, we’re on holiday, Trudi informs him, a terse, defeated smile coming as close as she would surely get to levity. The main courses arrive: seafood fajita for her, a steak burrito for him.

Lennox watches her construct the fajita with care. The cheese and refried beans omitted, pushed to the side. The rest wrapped in a low-carb South Beach tortilla. Trudi eats in small, economical bites. He, conversely, bolts down huge chunks of his burrito. At one stage it burns his throat so intensely that he almost blacks out.

At the bar the group from Devon have obviously hit drunken critical mass. They burst out in chant: — OOH, AAR, EX-I-TAHR! AH ZED OOH-AAR, EX-I-TAHR!

A waitress and barman dispense indulgent smiles, before a flustered manager approaches the group, diplomatically pointing out the other customers. The West Country lads gracefully drink up and take their party elsewhere. One gives Lennox a wave, which he returns. — Nice guys, he tells Trudi. — Exeter boys.

— Bet you wish you were with them, she scowls, reading his mind as the Devon crowd depart, — football lads getting pished and acting the goat.

— Don’t be silly, Lennox says, squeezing her hand with his good one.

The meal sits rock-heavy in his belly as they turn on to Ocean Drive. Trudi wants to see the beach but Lennox objects: — Let’s spend a full day at the beach the morn, he proposes, as they pass a jungle-themed dance-bar. The girls outside are clad in leopard-skin bras and pants, dancing on the pavement, trying to entice people in. Lennox doesn’t need much encouragement. He needs another drink.

He wanders in, Trudi reluctantly following him. They find a table and two stools and Lennox orders a couple of Sea Breezes.

— I don’t want to sit around drinking all the time, Ray, I—

— You don’t come to a place like this for culture.

— You don’t come anywhere for anything, other than drinking. You could have stayed in the BMC club!

Lennox’s excited head fills with the notion that our bodies and souls desire the poison, crave the superhuman promise and temporary madness it offers; the chance to throw off all the shackles of decency, surely the prerequisite to real intelligence and love. — At least I’m trying to enjoy myself.

— Is that what you call it?

And it hits him, in her look and tone, just how desperate he really is. He wants to say, ‘I’m dying, help me, please,’ but it comes out in a monotone shrug as, — I’m just doing what I want to do on holiday. If you don’t like it, fuck off.

She looks at him in wide-eyed horror. As he watches her features shrink in tight malevolence, he wishes he could suck the words back into him. — Naw, you fuck off, ya prick! She springs up and, grabbing her bag, charges away.

Lennox sits stuck to his chair, his limbs heavy, watching her incensed departure. He looks at the table, noticing that she’s left her notepad and Perfect Bride behind. A gentle gust of wind flips its pages over in a measured manner, one at a time; it’s as if her spirit remains at the table. But he thinks: she’s not fucking about. One puny consolation pulses in his brain: at least I didn’t criticise her job at Scottish Power. She hates it when I do that.

The embarrassed waitress, who’s observed the scene, arrives with the drinks, sets them down, and hastily departs. Picking up the cocktail designated for Trudi, Lennox quickly kills it. Then he slowly sips at his own. Contemplating its azure, murky beauty, he almost doesn’t want to touch it. A couple at an adjacent table briefly gape at him before turning away. I’m the nutter everybody wants to avoid, he thinks in desperate cheer. Then he summons the waitress and pays the bill. Lennox feels his shoulders shake in a nervous, mirthful laughter, but when he gets up from the table the tears – terrible, thick, salty tears – are running down his face from under the shades, drying on his cheeks in the heat, stinging him.

Scarcely realising he is carrying the magazine and the notepad, he walks down the street. All he can think of is the drink he needs. Not just the drink, the place to drink it. The sun has fallen behind the skyscrapers that line the Biscayne Bay, and murky particles of darkness accumulate in the warm air around him.

He walks on, without any real sense of what he’s doing or where he’s going. It feels good to walk. Look at things. People. Buildings. Cars. Billboards. Shops. Apartment blocks. He walks until he realises that fatigue is setting in with the heat, his leg muscles becoming knotted and cramped. It’s still a holiday and beach area, but he’s passed the colonial low-rise hotels of the art deco district, moved into a zone of uglier, more mainstream tourist accommodation. Big high-rise hotels and apartment blocks have sprouted up around golf clubs and beach complexes.

Lennox wonders how long it would take to walk to Ginger’s place up in Fort Lauderdale. A long time, if, indeed, it was even possible to do so. The whole place seems to be built around the car. Then it twigs that the numerous green-and-white posts he’s walked past are actually bus stops. Most people sitting on the bench by this particular one look non-white and non-rich; different to the occupants of the convertibles that stream by. They seem to regard him uneasily. It doesn’t bother him. A bus comes and he gets on, imitating the stick-thin black man in front of him by putting what he thinks is a dollar bill into a rolling slot.

— That’s a five, buddy… it’s gone thru, the driver purses in disdain, — and we don’t give change. You jus wasted three and a half bucks, man.

Lennox nods and takes a seat. He looks at the blacks on the bus with the same furtive, curious glances they steal at him. The few black people he’d known growing up in Scotland had hith-erto seemed exotic, but he now sees just how Scots they are. The blacks here fascinate him, the way their bodies move to a different rhythm. Their voices so different from the whites and Latinos, it’s as if they’re from Mars. He feels something deep in his bones and prays it’s curiosity rather than racism.

Feelings in the bones. Gut feelings. Instinct.

Procedure. Designed to scientifically eliminate bias. Follow the force of probability. Seventy per cent of murderers know their victim. Thirty-three per cent come from the same family.

The bus jolts over a rough piece of road. Lennox shudders. He needs to be safe. He needs to be dangerous. They are everywhere, the nonces. On this bus there’s bound to be one. He looks around at the suspicious eyes. He can smell them, the stink of them.

The vehicle is going nowhere; after a bit it turns round heading back the way he’s just come. He keeps his gaze hawklike. There is pain to be fought. To be drunk through. Then he sees it, on 14th between Collins and Washington. Where he knows he wants to be. It’s a bar. The Club Deuce.

He gets to the front of the bus, panic rising in him as it accelerates for a stretch, and seems to go a long way past the bar, before it slows down and pulls over at a stop. Lennox alights and walks back towards the cream bunker that is Club Deuce. Outside it, a shopping trolley full of a homeless person’s possessions. The bar blacked out with blinds he guesses are permanently shut. He passes through a wooden-and-glass door and enters the club. It’s so dark that it takes him a few moments to order the objects in his vision.

Club Deuce is dominated by a long bar which meanders like a Formica river with two island lips, snaking in a double horseshoe at the front and running right round the back of the room. In the corner hangs a big plasma screen. Near the pool table at the rear, a homeless woman sits, occasionally peering out from behind the blind,