sitting at the Eclipse Saloon, in a booth under a big stuffed marlin and a faded photograph of a novelist who used to be world-famous in that bar and regularly got stewed there. A loop of fried onion was dangling from the underside of Sandra's roll and, fish-like, she approached from below to snag it between her teeth. 'I mean,' she said, 'it's not like it's a regular job. All you do is talk to people, schmooze 'em up. You work outside. It's straight commission. You don't really have a boss.'
'That part's bullshit,' said Joey. He absently dredged a french fry through a puddle of ketchup. 'There's always a boss. I'd still be depending on some suit to hand me a paycheck.'
'Joey, what can I say? Life is bosses. That's how it works. Your pals from New York-don't they have bosses? Your buddy Sal, he has a boss. Your brother Gino has a boss.'
'At least their bosses aren't citizens,' Joey said, but the argument sounded thin even to him. His resistance was fading, diminishing in direct proportion to his bankroll, and in proportion, as well, to his growing if still unadmitted awareness that it was no easier to launch a criminal career than any other kind, only more dangerous.
Then, too, as jobs went, what Sandra was suggesting didn't really sound so awful. OPC, it was called- Off- Property Contact. What it meant was that he would hang out on a corner of Duval Street, button-hole tourists as they drifted past, and try to persuade them to take a tour of a time-share resort. If they took the tour, Joey got forty bucks a couple, and that was the end of it. Didn't matter if they bought, didn't matter if they'd never buy in a million years. His job was only to talk them past the door. The fellow who had the job now was this guy named Zack, the husband of Claire, who was one of Sandra's fellow tellers, and supposedly he was pulling in eight hundred bucks a week. A real go-getter, this Zack. He'd just passed his real estate test and was ready to move inside, to sell. No doubt Sandra, whose circuits were wired between the opposing poles of practicality and dreaming, imagined that Joey would get on that same track.
'Joey, you'd be great at it,' she coaxed. 'It's exactly what you like to do. Don't be pigheaded just because it happens to be legal. It's a hustle.'
Joey wavered. The last thing he had in mind was an ongoing entanglement with the world of pay stubs and file cabinets, sales meetings and company picnics. But as a temporary thing, very temporary, well, maybe he could salt away a few dollars while planning his next moves. 'I don't know, Sandra, standing there all day, having to be nice to these jerks-'
Sandra played her trump card. 'Who says you have to be nice? That isn't how this guy Zack makes his eight hundred a week. He browbeats. He needles. Joey, the idea isn't to be nice, the idea is to capture these people. You use anything that works. Guilt. Jokes. Fibs. Crazy promises. It's a con, Joey. It's a game.'
'And it's legal?'
'And it's legal. It's real estate. Joey, think of it as a legal way of taking hostages.'
Across the street from the Eclipse Saloon was a bank, and in front of the bank was a sign that blinked out the time and the temperature. Other places, those thermometer signs tended to exert the morbid fascination of an accident scene: How bad was it? you asked yourself as you drove by. Would it hit one hundred in July? In January, would the frigid numbers skid through zero into the awful minus? In Key West it was different. There was something smug about the temperature sign. It made you feel like knocking wood, as if you'd caught yourself gloating about your own good fortune. In the daytime the sign always seemed to read eighty-two degrees, though on occasion the mercury would plummet to seventy-eight or a heat wave would raise it to a steamy eighty-four. When the sun went down, the temperature went down with it, and just as gently. By full darkness the reading had settled into the middle seventies, and there it stayed until after mid-night. By dawn it was just cool enough so that, many mornings, you woke up with a dim but pleasurable recollection of having groped for a cool sheet to pull under your chin.
When Sandra and Joey emerged onto the sidewalk, the sign said seventy-six degrees and a moon just shy of full was throwing a cool white light that broke into red and blue fragments in the smashed glass of the Eldorado's windshield.
'Beautiful out,' said Sandra.
'Drive to the beach?' said Joey.
The Caddy's top had not been up in weeks, and the open car held the smell of sunshine and limestone dust. Through what was left of the muffler, baritone pops issued forth, steady as the beating of a drum. Joey slipped through the narrow residential streets and onto A1A, the fabled road that traces out the very rim of Florida, separating land from water with a line hardly more substantial than a layer of skin. He drove past the Paradiso condominium, almost to the airport, then pulled off the pavement on the ocean side and pointed the car toward Cuba.
Sandra slid closer and put her hand on Joey's knee. The feel of it made him realize that they hadn't touched much lately. 'It's been tough for you, huh?' he said. 'With the move and me not earning and all?'
'A little. I'm O.K.'
For a while they sat in silence. Traffic zipped by behind them, and ahead moonlight played on the shallow water, tracing a rippled white line from the horizon to the seawall in front of them.
'You know what I love about moonlight on water?' Sandra said. 'No matter where you are, it points right to you, like the moon knows you're watching and is picking you out for something, something special.'
'Yeah, but it points to everybody,' Joey said.
'O.K., O.K., but I don't have to think about that. I just see it pointing to us. Look. Right at us.'
Joey put his arm around her. Sandra usually wore clothes that puffed her up-fuzzy sweaters with big outlines, blouses with built-in shoulders-and after almost four years, Joey was still sometimes surprised to feel her narrow bones and thin skin in his hands. He squeezed the small knob at the top of her arm, rubbed the spare flesh between shoulder and elbow. 'Sandra,' he said softly, 'what if I just can't do it?'
'Do what?'
'This job.' He took his arm away, put both hands on the steering wheel, and looked absently at his zeroed- out speedometer. 'I mean, Sandra, I think I'm pretty bright. I got confidence. But I also got this lousy feeling, it makes me mad, like there's all kindsa things that everybody else knows and I don't. Dumb stuff. Filling out forms. What ya say onna telephone. When ya use a paper clip and when ya use a staple. I mean, these stupid little things that people know if they have a job. Me, I've never done that. To me it's like a big mystery.'
'You're a little scared, Joey. That's O.K.'
The word was like a lance, and after the flash of pain and the squelched rage of denying it was so, there was relief. Joey stared out across the flat and moon-shot water of the Florida Straits and let out a long breath that whistled slightly between his teeth.
'You can do it, Joey,' Sandra said. 'I know you can. Things are gonna get better for us.'
— 12 -
Zack Davidson was thirty-two, had sandy-brown hair, hazel eyes widely spaced, horn-rim glasses held on with an elegant elastic cord, and Joey Goldman hated him on sight. He hated the way his hair fell onto his forehead in a seemingly casual yet perfect arc, like a spent wave crawling up a beach. He hated the confident pinkness of his knit shirt, the perfect way the ribbed cuff neither hung loose nor pinched his arm. He hated the cheap but perfect cotton belt holding up his khaki shorts, and the conceited inexpensiveness of his Timex watch. Everything about him said yacht club, golf course, prep school, WASP, and gave Joey a feeling in his gut as if a hot fist were yanking at the inside of his navel. It didn't help at all that Zack had right away gone into the question of Joey's sunglasses.
'Eye contact is real important,' he was saying.
'Tough shit,' said Joey. 'The glasses stay.'
He said it as if throwing a punch, and like a punch, the remark caused the receiving party to pause and reconsider who he was dealing with. Zack put down the pencil he'd been twirling and stared at Joey across the narrow desk. They were sitting in the downtown office of Parrot Beach Interval Ownership Associates, next to a scale model of the development. Immaculate under Plexiglas, the model featured pastel duplexes with dainty
