The rain eased into a gentle tapping against the roof, and the thunder diminished to a distant echo. I lost track of the time and place. Sometime after midnight, somewhere near hell.
Nicky Florio hadn’t stopped talking. About progress and loyalty, friendship and women, politicians and bribery, money and power. The sight of the blood, of Rick Gondolier’s twitching body, must have opened the spigots on his adrenaline flow. It did the opposite to me. I was a 223-pound slug. Florio’s words were a sticky blob, a recording played at half speed. Time flowed like a languid river, the Everglades itself.
I thought of Jim Tiger, his shirt soaked with blood, as he hoisted the headless body of Rick Gondolier over his shoulder and carried it to the porch. Florio motioned for me to follow. Diaz stayed half a step behind, watching me. Tiger put the body down by the rail.
“Help him,” Florio ordered me.
I didn’t understand.
“Take his arms, Tiger’ll take his legs. Swing him over the rail.”
Jim Tiger could have done it himself. He was thick through the neck and shoulders with powerful wrists. But Nicky told me to do it, and like an obedient dog standing in the gentle, cooling rain, I obeyed, grabbing Gondolier’s lifeless arms. I had been spared, and something made me want to please Nicky Florio, to thank him for his benevolence. If I had a tail, I would have wagged it.
Below us, the outdoor spotlights cut narrow shafts toward the black water. “Hey, Jake, look at this.” Florio was pointing with a three-foot Kel-Lite, the kind the cops use to peer into cars or beat you over the head. “You can’t even see those beautiful bastards; they blend into the mud.” He gestured toward the soggy bank. “There, look for the eyes.”
I followed the shaft of light.
At first I didn’t see a thing. I was concentrating on holding on to Gondolier, conscious of the still-warm blood, tacky on his arms.
Then I saw them, staring up at us, half a dozen sets of greenish-yellow eyes. “You see any red ones?” Florio asked. “They’re the bull gators. Don’t know why, but the mamas and the children have yellow eyes, the males red.” He stopped the beam and moved it back a few feet. “There! Can’t tell his size, but look at those eyes, like the Devil himself. Five’ll get you ten, he’ll be the first one there. Okay, let ’em rip. On three.”
Florio counted, and we swung the body, letting it fly on the count of three. It hung in the air at the top of its arc, then dropped straight into the inky water where it hit with a smack, submerged, then popped up again. On the bank, the red eyes, glowing like the fires of the bottomless pit, moved toward the water, the bull gator slipping below the surface, swimming powerfully but silently toward the splash. Only the fearsome eyes and the tip of the snout were visible in the beam of the flashlight.
It crossed fifty yards of water in a matter of seconds, striking first at the legs. The first chomp snapped the femur, maybe both of them, with a clearly audible crack. The body seemed to break in two, and in a moment a second gator was there, seizing the top half and dragging it under the water. Now the water was alive with the animals, thrashing about, scavenging for torn flesh, a meaty bone, an overlooked morsel.
I leaned on the railing, the rain pelting me. From behind me, there was movement, and for a split second I thought Tiger was going to push me over. I whirled and saw a blur of motion. Rick Gondolier’s head. It fell to the surface and plopped off the back of one of the gators before sliding into the water, faceup. A distant flash of lightning illuminated the sky. Gondolier’s face was frozen in a death mask, his eyes black holes. A second later, his head disappeared into the maw of one of the yellow-eyed females, which swallowed it in one gulp.
Back inside the house, I was cold and shivering, the fatigue crushing me. I was vaguely aware of sounds and smells. The swish of a mop across the floor, the sharp sting of disinfectant, the crackling oak logs in the fireplace where bloody rags went up in smoke.
Nicky Florio poured scotch into a fancy Scandinavian glass that seemed to be made of icicles. I held the glass in my hand and swirled the bronze whiskey into a whirlpool. I sank into a soft-cushioned sofa of Haitian cotton near the fireplace. Florio grabbed a straight-backed chair, swung a leg over it, and leaned on its back, facing me, like a cowboy in a western saloon. Tiger was still cleaning up. Diaz stood to the side, two feet behind his boss, the gun back in its holster under his jacket. He had an unobstructed view of me, as he had ever since Gondolier was killed.
“I confronted Gina,” Florio said, “and she swore she didn’t tell you anything about the project, but I didn’t know whether to believe her. I still don’t. But it doesn’t matter anymore, because you’ll know soon enough.”
I tossed down the scotch. It burned my throat and closed my eyes. “Know what?”
“I’m going to be honest with you. I told Gina I was going to kill either you or Gondolier. It didn’t make any difference to me just so it was one of you.”
“Why only one?”
“One guy disappears, no big deal. Happens all the time. Two guys with connections to me disappear, it gets a little hairy. Besides, I wanted to find something out from her.”
He looked at me to see if I caught on. It took a second. “You gave Gina the choice…”
He smiled at me. He approved. I was a good student.
“…and she chose to let me live.”
Florio poured me another scotch, shook his head, and said, “No, she told me to spare Gondolier. Kill the lawyer, she said. Just like Shakespeare, huh, Jake?”
The wind went out of me. Maybe it was the accumulation of tension and exhaustion, horror and fear. Maybe it was a lot of things I’d seen and heard and done and had done to me. Maybe it was the image of Rick Gondolier’s floating head disappearing into the mouth of a yellow-eyed dragon.
Peter Tupton was dead, and unless I was wrong, the murderer was sitting three feet away, pouring me booze. I had used perjured testimony to help him win a lousy civil case. I was close to being tossed out of my profession, and I didn’t seem to care. A few hours ago, I nearly pissed my pants when a poker table turned into a butcher’s block. I watched a man decapitated, then helped dispose of the body, then watched as prehistoric beasts disposed of his carcass. And now this…
I fought through the numbness and looked Florio in the eyes. “She told you to kill me and to spare Gondolier.”
I sounded lame, feeble.
“That’s what she said, Counselor. What do you think of that?”
Nothing.
Emptiness.
Loss.
“Don’t look so damn sorry for yourself. How long have you known Gina?”
“Forever,” I said.
“And what mistake do people always make with her? I mean, when they see her. All blond, all boobs. What do they think?”
“They think she’s a bimbo. They think she’s stupid.”
“Right. Is she stupid, Jake?”
“No. She has great instincts. She can read people.”
“Damn right! She thought if she told me to kill you, I’d do just the opposite. I’d spare you and kill Gondolier. And she was right. Until I thought it over. Like I said before, Jake, you and I have something in common. We both know Gina, and lucky for you, I know her better than you do. I knew that if I killed you, I’d lose her, because I would have killed a piece of her. You’re part of her history, you’re part of her. Why do you think she broke off with you?”
“I don’t know. It’s happened before.”
“Because she was in conflict. She cared for you. You made her life more difficult, and what does Gina do when life gets difficult?”
“She runs away. Always has.”
“Right. Now Gondolier was another story. She had no feelings for him, so she could screw him without messing up her head, and at the same time, she could hurt me, because he was my partner.”
