'Boss, I ain't never shot a dog before. A dog, it's, like, different. I kinda like dogs.'
'Fucking stinks in here,' said Ponte, as if he'd just now noticed.
'Charlie, lissena me,' Bert pressed. 'I don't give a fuck if you get your stones back or not. But if I was you, I'd be wondering where Gino is right now.'
Ponte shuffled his dainty shoes on the cement floor, then absently kicked at a scrap of the cosmetics case. Chinese newspaper came out.
'So really, boss,' said Tony, 'I gotta shoot the fucking dog, or what? Come on, it's making me, like, uncomfortable.'
— 25 -
'You O.K.?' asked Bert the Shirt.
Joey straightened up slowly and tried to work a kink out of his neck. His right ear was ringing from the press of the gun muzzle behind it, and his scalp felt as if he were wearing a very tight hat. He found a handkerchief and wiped his face. That was the only part of the episode that would really stay with him and rankle: that he'd been spit on. Pain, people didn't remember, not really; humiliation, they did. Humiliation changed people, for better or for worse. Either it beat them down so that they stayed down, pathetic but weirdly grateful to have their spirits killed and their hopes ended, or it whipped them into a froth of defiance, sent them skittering into realms of resource they didn't know they had. 'Me, I'm all right,' said Joey. 'How 'bout you?'
Bert was sitting on the desk. He'd half walked to it, half collapsed on it when Charlie Ponte, shrugging, had decided it would be beside the point to kill his captives just then, and the thugs had left the shed. Outside, the big tires of their two dark Lincolns had churned loose garbage; then they were gone. Now Bert was holding Don Giovanni in his lap. The dog was licking his hands and doing pirouettes around his thighs, looking for the most comfortable place to settle in. 'I ain't been so worked up since the day I died,' the old man said. 'I almost forgot what it was like to get that tunnel vision, to feel that pounding inna neck. But I think I'm all right now.'
'Then let's get the fuck outta heah,' said Joey. 'One more minute and I swear I'm gonna puke.'
They stepped over the remains of Vicki's beauty aids and went through the doorless frame into the orange- pink light of the dump. Overhead, cackling gulls wheeled, sharply silhouetted against the sky. A whiff of salt from the Gulf sliced through the stink of trash. Some twenty yards away on the flank of the garbage mountain, Joey's Caddy and Gino's T-Bird were parked side by side. The dented, rusted Eldorado, with its smashed windshield, corroded roof springs, cracked upholstery, and dimpled fender, looked like it had reached its consummation on the trash heap.
'Come on,' said Joey, 'I'll drive you home.'
'What about Gino's car?'
Joey, insanely glad to have some small outlet for his disgust, approached the Thunderbird and spat on its hood. 'Fuck Gino,' he said. 'And fuck Gino's car. Let Gino tell Hertz how their new T-Bird ended up inna gahbidge.'
Then he remembered that it was probably Dr. Greenbaum who would have to do the explaining. Getting even with Gino had never been easy.
On the ride back to Key West, Joey and Bert craned their necks toward the open top of the Caddy, trying to breathe in the night air rather than their clothes. When Joey turned off U.S. 1 and onto A1A, Bert worked his loose lips for a few seconds before he managed to form some words. Then he said, 'Joey. I'm, like, ashamed.'
'Wha' for?'
The old man rested his long hands on his bony knees, and his dog propped its chin on the inside of his elbow. 'Ya know,' he began. 'That I broke down, that I cried.' But then he changed his mind. 'Nah, fuck it, not that I cried. But that I was, like, selfish. Like, I made it sound like I care more about my dog than about your brother.'
'Well, you do, Bert. I don't blame you for that.'
'Yeah, but it ain't right. I mean, a human being, a relative.'
'He ain't your relative,' Joey said.
'Even so,' said Bert. 'Taunting Ponte like that. O.K., our ass was in a sling, it was a gamble. You and me, we ain't inna gahbidge. But I feel like I sold Gino out.'
'Bert, hey, let's keep things like in proportion heah. Gino sold us out. Besides, he has any brains, he's half- way back to New York by now.'
The retired mobster absently stroked his dog and looked out the window at the Florida Straits. There was just enough doubt in his face so that Joey said, 'You think he isn't halfway to New York?'
Bert shrugged. He was barely equal to the effort of lifting his shoulders. 'Me, I'm too tired to figure. My nerves are shot and I wanna go to bed.'
Joey drove. A line of mild moonlight tracked the Caddy as it lumbered along the water's edge, but Joey was damned if it seemed to him that the moon was picking him out for anything special. 'Shit,' he muttered. Then he pushed out a furious breath. 'Goddammit, Bert. I'm like finally gettin' my legs under me heah, finally gettin' a little bit comfortable-'
He shook his head, slapped the steering wheel, and left it at that.
At the front gate of the Paradiso condominium, Bert the Shirt got slowly out of the car, his dog nestled in the crook of his arm. 'Joey,' he said, 'what's goin' on, it's all fucked up, but it ain't your problem, don't let it poison your life. And another thing-I swear to God I hope I'm wrong, but I'm apologizing in advance. If your brother Gino gets whacked tonight, I'm really, really sorry.'
— 26 -
But Gino Delgatto did not in fact get whacked that night, nor did he head back to New York.
By the time Charlie Ponte and his boys retraced their steps from Mount Trashmore, Gino, for reasons known only to himself, was back at the Flagler House hotel. He'd let the valet park his second rented car, and had locked himself in his room, where he remained effectively barricaded for the next week. He saw no visitors and took no calls. He ordered room service meals three times a day, and kept his hand on his pistol in the pocket of his bathrobe when they were delivered. With dinner came a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He slept with the gun under his pillow, and kept a small revolver near the toilet.
After three days of nonstop television, paranoia, drunkenness, and Gino's increasingly perfunctory embraces, Vicki announced that she'd had enough and was going back to Queens. She did not believe Gino when he told her that she would surely be kidnapped on the way to the airport, and that, at the very feast, she would be strip- searched by a rough-fingered bunch who would diligently probe every orifice where emeralds could possibly be hidden, and would detain her until, with the help of strong laxatives, her lovely young innards had been purged of all precious stones.
'They'll make you shit in a strainer, Vicki. You wanna shit in a strainer with five guys watching?'
'This is some vacation, Gino,' she groused. 'I shoulda stood in Queens.'
He swilled whiskey and didn't answer.
'They wouldn't do that,' she resumed after a moment's pondering. 'You're just trying to get me to stay.'
'No I'm not,' said Gino. He was unshaven, jowly, his color was bad, his eyes were bloodshot, and he gave off the yellow smell of bourbon filtered through an overtaxed liver. 'I'm fuckin' sick of ya, ya want the truth. Ya wanna go, go.'
She got as far as the swath of shade thrown by the hotel awning. Then she saw the dark blue Lincoln. It was parked not more than thirty yards from her taxi. Ponte's crew wasn't even bothering to be stealthy anymore; in Key West, where private life was public and strange behavior was the norm, they didn't need to be. They were just waiting, and they had the whole world to wait in. Gino and Vicki had their hotel room, a cubicle maybe twenty feet
