Franchise restaurants and chain motels lined the highway; stacked traffic lights said whose turn it was to pull into the six-plex movies and the supermarket that never closed. License plates from everywhere made it plain that you were nowhere in particular. Bert stayed in the right lane and braked every time someone pulled off the road for a doughnut or a hamburger.
Key West is separated from Stock Island by the Cow Key Channel, such a narrow cut between the Atlantic and the Gulf that Joey barely noticed he'd gone over a bridge to cross it. Land is cheap on Stock Island; it is Secaucus, New Jersey, to Key West's Manhattan. The help lives there, in trailer parks and in half-painted cinder- block shacks that would not look out of place in the deep Caribbean. People get knifed in bars there, crack is sold on street corners, battered women now and then shoot the hearts out of their boyfriends. The parts of Stock Island not given over to squalor are given over to the public good. There is a junior college at which one can study the repair of outboard engines and get credit for scuba diving. There is the dump, Mount Trashmore, whose incalculable tons of garbage have been heaped into a weirdly splendid pyramid, the summit of which is the highest point in all the Florida Keys. Along the same road that skirts Mount Trashmore is the hospital complex, generously endowed by Key West's most prominent families, the proud descendants of pirates.
Bert the Shirt turned down this road, and Joey followed. In the dim glow of headlamps and moonlight, he noticed how the old man held his thin neck perfectly still, as though driving a car at thirty miles an hour required his most ferocious attention. Maybe it was this recognition of Bert's frailty that gave Joey a sudden queasy recollection of his mother dying and the smell of the hospital she died in. It was a smell at once overscrubbed and putrid, bracing as ammonia yet stained with the stench of unspeakable fluids and vomit. Please, Joey thought, don't let this hospital smell that way; give it a different brand of floor cleaner at least. Then he wondered if he'd actually see Vicki, and then he was assaulted by a lewdly gruesome image of Vicki's body going through the plate-glass window, and her wrecked and bloody clothes being peeled off her.
Then, in the shadow of Mount Trashmore and for no apparent reason, Bert the Shirt jammed on the brake, went into a tiny skid, and stopped just a few inches too short for Joey to avoid hitting him. Fenders collided, made a surprisingly soft sound, like the crumpling up of foil, and came away not destroyed but dimpled. The impact was not painful, just rude and startling, as when an unseen and unwelcome friend comes up and slaps you on the back. Joey barely had time to say What the fuck? and to put the Caddy in reverse, before he realized that he could not back up because a dark blue Lincoln had pulled snugly in behind him.
A big guy in a blue suit was standing next to Joey, and he held a gun that glinted dully in the moonlight. 'Get out and hug the fucking car,' he said.
Joey found he couldn't move, and so the big guy helped him. He yanked open the door of the Caddy, grabbed Joey by the front of his shirt, and pulled him up into the street. He turned him with a slap of the gun muzzle across the ribs, then pushed him down across the hood of the car and ran his hand along his sides and up his crotch to check for weapons. Joey just lay there. He supposed he was terrified, but mostly he was confused. The car engine was hot under his chest, and he found this strangely comforting. Lying there, his cheek against the warm gritty steel, he could see another dark blue Lincoln pulled across the road in front of Gino's rented T-Bird, and he could see that Bert the Shirt was also being frisked. Yes, it was very confusing, and all the while Bert's chihuahua was baying and howling like a very small and very shrill coyote.
— 24 -
The equipment shed did not smell like garbage, exactly. It smelled worse than that. It smelled like what garbage is on its way to becoming as it rots, as the brown bags soak through with the ooze of putrefying vegetables, as gristle falls off meat bones and turns to a yellowish paste, as bacteria eat through the membranes that have been holding the stink inside of things, letting the foulness into the air like a filthy secret. Added to the humid fumes of decay were the bitter tang of gull shit and the chicken coop reek that came from the riled and oily feathers of the carrion birds. Joey glanced around the room and tried to figure out if anyone else was on the verge of gagging.
They were seven altogether: Joey and Bert; the two toughs from Duval Street and two of their sturdy colleagues, all of whom, like players in a second-rate orchestra, had suits that almost matched, but not quite; and a small neat man who was clearly the guy in charge. He sat on a scratched metal desk in the middle of the shed. Above him was a single yellow bulb tucked into a dented metal cone, and at his back a frame without a door outlined part of the slope of Mount Trashmore. He wore a pale gray suit over a white silk turtleneck, and even in the feeble light his patent leather pumps could be seen to gleam. His feet were very small, and the shoes' tall heels made his arches look impossibly dainty and high, like the arches of a leprechaun. His black hair was swept straight back on the sides and stood in ridges like the gunwales of a boat; on top his hair was thinner and less perfectly trained. His face was unlined but his eyes looked tired; under them, there were sacs the color of raw liver and the texture of poultry skin.
' 'Lo, Bert,' he said. He said it almost fondly but distractedly, like someone running into an old acquaintance at the racetrack.
'Charlie,' said Bert the Shirt, 'where's my dog?'
'Your dog? Your fucking dog?' Charlie Ponte glanced at his crew as if to say, Didn't I tell ya? 'Jesus Christ, Bert, you really have become a fucking old lady.'
'You're right, Charlie. I'm a fucking old lady. But please, do me a favor, have my dog brought in.'
Ponte shrugged and nodded to one of his flunkies, who vanished through the doorless frame. 'And you're Joey Delgatto.'
'Joey Goldman.'
Ponte shrugged again. It was his most characteristic gesture, but it didn't mean for him what it meant for most people. For most people, a shrug suggested a kind of helplessness, a lack of knowledge or clarity that stymied them. For Ponte, the shrug meant simply that he didn't know, he didn't care, it made no difference, he would do what he felt like. 'I know who you are,' he said.
The flunky returned, carrying Don Giovanni at arm's length, as though he feared some exotic Mexican disease. At a nod from Ponte, he passed the quivering dog to Bert, and Joey could see that the old man's fingers were trembling. He hugged the animal to his belly, and the chihuahua flicked out a white- coated tongue and lapped at his wrist. Now that he had his dog back, Bert was bolder. 'Charlie, what the fuck is this all about?'
Ponte, the only one sitting, settled himself more comfortably on the metal desk, crossed his ankles, and said, 'Bert, I called the meeting, I'll ask the fucking questions. For starters, Joey whatever the fuck your name is, whyn't you tell me what the fuck you're doin' out heah, with your brother's car, going to the dump when the fucking dump ain't even open?'
Joey took a deep breath. He shouldn't have. The smell of rotting garbage became as solid as a piece of half- chewed steak sitting on top of his windpipe. 'I wasn't going to the dump,' he managed to say. 'I was going to the hospital.'
'The hospital,' said Charlie Ponte. He mugged toward his crew. 'O.K., let's try that one. Why were you going to the hospital?'
'Because my brother's there. His girlfriend got knocked through a window.'
Ponte folded his arms across his chest and turned a perfect deadpan toward his boys. They grinned on cue, four white Rochesters to his Jack Benny. 'Come on, kid, you're Vinnie Delgatto's son, you can do better than that.'
'Charlie, listen,' said Bert the Shirt. 'I was there when Gino called.'
'So now the old lady's chimin' in,' said Ponte. 'Shut up, Bert. And stop insultin' my intelligence, the both of ya. Gino's been in his hotel room all fucking day, that much I know. You think he's glued to the Weather Channel? I think he's hosing that top-heavy bim he's with. Either way, he ain't inna fucking hospital, and as for her, she's probably been gettin' knocked around all right, but not tru any windows. So cut the bullshit before I get annoyed.'
Joey gazed blankly at the dim yellow light bulb and tried to ignore the way the stench of garbage was poisoning his saliva. He tried to find a way to believe that his brother hadn't set him up. He couldn't.
Ponte drummed his fingers on the metal desk. The only other sound was the deranged laugh of a gull at the
