was the only unarmed man in the room. Clarence Middleton had stayed outside with the car to act as lookout. He passed the time chatting with Bellamy’s driver about the best way to fish for snook.
Nelson Bellamy was tall and broadchested and hairy, and his suit coat was tight across his shoulders. Gold winked from his cufflinks, from his tie clasp, from a chain bracelet on his wrist, from a front tooth. He smoked cigarettes from a slim gold case he kept in his coat pocket. His right thumb was absent its forehalf. His eyes were dark and deep-set and moved constantly from one to another of the men across the table. One of the men with him was James White. On entering the room and seeing him at the table John Ashley had grinned and said, “Hey Jimmy, how you keepin?” White had smiled slightly and nodded but said nothing. The other two men with Bellamy were introduced as Bo Stokes and Alton Davis. Davis—tall, ropy, acne-scarred—was Bellamy’s “chief of import operations.” Stokes was larger even than Bellamy, thicknecked and heavyshouldered, his blond hair cropped almost to the scalp, the bridge of his nose off-center. His duties were not explained, but Gordon Blue now told the Ashleys that Bo Stokes had two-and-a-half years ago fought Jack Dempsey in the ring. John Ashley grinned at this information and said to Stokes. “That so? Did you win?” and Old Joe laughed but not Bill. Stokes turned to gaze out the window like a man profoundly bored. In the manner of their employer all three of Bellamy’s men wore well- tailored suits, but all three were sunbrowned and scarred of hands and were clearly not indoor types.
Bellamy’s voice was without accent and strained for sincerity. He said he wanted an end to their differences. It was costing him too much in lost product, he said, in lost trucks and reduced manpower. “You’ve run off a lot of my workers,” he said to Joe Ashley with a small smile void of all cheer. “A bunch more got scared just hearing the stories about your people and took off too. It’s all James here can do to put a truck crew together anymore.” He looked at John Ashley. “And you got a couple of my Brownings. I paid top dollar for those guns. They shoulda been enough to keep anybody off those trucks.”
“A gun’s only as good as the man to use it,” John Ashley said with a smile. Old Joe nodded like an approving professor.
“Looks that way,” Bellamy said. “Anyhow, they’re my guns and I’d be grateful if you gave them back.”
John Ashley laughed. “And I guess people in hell would be grateful for icewater. The thing is, I reckon we earned them guns.”
Bellamy’s smile thinned. White and Stokes and Davis wore no expression whatever. Bellamy turned to Gordon Blue and asked, “What do you think, Gordy? You’re an attorney-at-law. These boys got right to those Brownings?”
Blue seemed taken aback. “Well ah, I dont know, Nelson,” he said. “I guess so. I mean, your boys
“Who says they shot first?” Bellamy said, voice and eyes going tight.
“Well, actually,” Gordon Blue said—looking nervous now, ad-justing his tie—“he did.” He gestured at John Ashley, who smiled and nodded at Ballamy.
“Oh, I see,” Bellamy said. He nodded at John Ashley. “If
Joe Ashley chuckled and grinned at John and Bill, but Gordon Blue saw no humor in his situation. He gestured awkwardly and said, “No, Nelson, thats not what—I dont—what I mean is it seems like—”
Joe Ashley cut Blue off with a handwave. “Look here, Mister Bellamy,” he said, “I aint the least innersted in settin here watchin you scare ole Gordy who aint all that hard to scare anyways. All I wanna know is are you and me gone do business or aint we?”
Nelson Bellamy’s hard gaze cut to Joe Ashley and then back to Gordon Blue for a moment longer—and then his face abruptly softened and he leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. “By all means, Mister Ashley,” he said, “let’s do business.”
“Good. I guess Gordy told you what we want?”
“He did,” Bellamy said. “And I’ve given the matter some thought. The only question is, how much? What’s the percent?”
“Twenty,” Old Joe said without hesitation.
“That’s pretty damn steep,” Bellamy said. “I was thinking ten would be more like it.”
“I guess you
“I cant see twenty.”
“I guess we could set here the rest of the day and argue about it,” Old Joe said.
“What say we split the difference and put it to rest?” Bellamy said.
Joe Ashley affected to ponder this suggestion. “Fifteen percent?”
“It’s still damn steep but I’ll shake on it if it’ll put an end to the trouble between us.”
“It might could if we’re talkin fifteen percent of
“We are.”
“We got people who’ll be keepin count. Cant a load go through we wont know about it.”
“I’m sure thats true, Mister Ashley. I’ve heard about the grapevine you got up there. They say even the local cops cant get near you.”
“They say correct.”
“Well, we’ll be square with you on the count—trust me. What say to payment on the fifteen of every month, starting next month?”
Old Joe looked at Bill, who put the last bite of a doughnut in his mouth and licked the cinnamon sugar off his fingers and nodded.
Good enough,” Old Joe said to Bellamy and they shook hands on it over the table.
“See there?” Bellamy said. “It’s not hard for reasonable men to come to agreement. Most people have no idea.”
In truth he was seething about Gordon Blue’s siding with the Ashleys in the matter of the automatic rifles. And it had occurred to him that fifteen percent was probably the cut this redneck old goat Ashley’d had in mind from the start. Now the sonofabitch would go around telling everybody he’d got the best of Nelson Bellamy. He smiled and smiled at Joe Ashley across the table and hated him and all his trash kind.
He asked if they’d care for a drink but Joe Ashley politely declined for them all and the Ashley party took its leave. Gordon Blue went with them.
A few minutes later they were all in the Ford touring car and Clarence Middleton drove them out onto the Dixie Highway and headed for home.
“What you think, Daddy?” John Ashley said. “We trust Bellamy to pay us every month like he said?”
“I wouldnt trust him if he had one hand on a stack of bibles eight feet high and the other one glued to his dick,” Old Joe said. “We’ll just see. A deal’s a deal and we’ll hold to our end of it. But the first time he dont pay our cut we’ll be right back to jacking his damn trucks and every fucken boatload he puts down on our beaches is what we’ll do.”
That night John Ashley had a dream in which he saw Gordon Blue sitting crosslegged in some hazy setting. His suit was sopping wet and he was staring at him with unmistakable sorrow and then opened his mouth as if he would tell him something and his tongue became a fish and swam away on the air. The dream was still nettling him the next morning, but at breakfast Gordon Blue was in high spirits and joking with Ma Ashley and feeling very optimistic about the deal they’d made with Bellamy, and so John Ashley shrugged off his lingering unease. That afternoon Blue took his leave and Albert Miller drove him back to Miami.
Three days later as Gordon Blue came out of his office building at the end of the day, the man Stokes appeared at his side and took him by the arm and said, “We got business to discuss, Counselor.” A car was idling at the curb with Alton Davis at the wheel and its back door open wide. James White was seated in the back and beckoned Blue into the car. Gordon knew that to resist would be folly. Stokes could snap his arm like a broomstick if he took the notion—and he looked to have it in mind.
They drove west through the heavily trafficked streets and then the town buildings were behind them and the road turned to packed shell. They went through a few small but well-kept neighborhoods and then the road went to rutted dirt and now there were no more residences but for occasional shacks. Nobody made conversation. Now the road was flanked by dense palmetto scrub and slash pines and Davis turned south onto a rough narrow road hardly wide enough for one car. A few minutes later they came to a clearing on the north bank of the Miami River at a point about two miles from town. They parked in back of an empty fishhouse that looked out on a pair of rotted
