approached. She craned her neck to keep her pale short hair out of the water. She pointed her toes, probably the way she'd once seen in a magazine. And while she was kicking furiously, she barely made a splash or a sound. Sandra, Joey thought. This is Sandra. Quiet, private, disciplined, precise. The little kid who would always find something worth doing if stuck in her room, who would always have a project for a weekful of rain. He watched her firm and narrow back, her skinny and determined shoulders, and a strange thing happened: he realized he truly was in love with her. He did not prime himself to feel this, and there was no such thing as readiness for the feeling when it came. It started at his feet and swelled upward as pure, sore, and irresistible as a sudden welling of graveside grief, and it left him with a closed throat and a milky feeling at the backs of his knees.
He walked lightly around the pool's damp apron and crouched low in front of her. 'Hello, baby.'
'Hi, Joey,' she said, still kicking. 'Thirty more makes four hundred.'
'I love you,' he said.
Sandra, the banker, had never before lost count. But now her scissoring legs fell out of their forced march and fluttered softly downward until her feet found the bottom. Joey, kneeling on the wet tiles, kissed her and tasted chlorine.
'I mean, Sandra, I think you're terrific. The best. The way you are. The way you've stuck with me. Hey, Sandra, you want friends? We're gonna have friends, Sandra. I promise. Lotsa friends. And salads. Friends and salads, all you want. And, like, we'll do stuff. I don't know what, whatever you like. Ya know, regular stuff that people do. Movies, picnics, I dunno. But we'll like go out, we'll have, like, a life. You and me. O.K.?'
— 33 -
Viewed from even a little distance out at sea, the life of the land looks small and slow, cozy but at the cost of being locked into lines and lanes, blocks and clusters. Compared to the tireless movement of water, things on land look stunned; it seemed to Joey that they could practically be under glass. Houses seem bolted to the earth. Cars crawl, pushing their meager lights ahead of them. Trees clutch the ground, rooted desperately as teeth.
At eleven fifty-five, Joey Goldman, alone at the wheel of Zack Davidson's little skiff, veered in from the open ocean toward the Flagler House dock. He was towing behind him a paintless plank rowboat with rusty oarlocks and mismatched oars, a broken stem seat, and a cut-off bleach bottle for bailing. He'd offered ten dollars for it and bought it for twelve.
In front of him, the hotel windows were nearly all dark; a few flickered with the fugitive light of television. Outside, orange floodlights collided with the blue shimmer of the pool and gave a mottled desert aspect to the beach. On the far side of the building, Charlie Ponte's thugs sat in their Lincoln scratching their bellies, yawning, talking about Italian food and parts of the female body. Their landlocked brains traveled predictably down marked roads; they could not conceive of a getaway on the wide, dark, and laneless water. Joey idled at the end of the pier and waited.
His view to the top of the service ramp was blocked by the shaggy thatch of the poolside bar, and by the time he saw the silhouettes of Gino and Vicki, they were winding their way through the ranks of vacant lounge chairs near the beach. Gino had his hand in the small of Vicki's back, a gesture not of gallantry but of bullying. Shadowy and forward-leaning, the couple bore, for all their attempted nonchalance, the unmistakable stamp of people fleeing, and when Gino stepped onto the thick boards of the dock, his heavy tread seemed to pass along an edginess that shuddered through the nails and down the pilings until it was smothered by the muck at the bottom of the sea. Halfway along the pier, one of Vicki's high heels caught between two planks; she took her shoes off and scurried the rest of the way with mincing steps.
'So you made it,' Gino said. He managed to muster some of his former high-spirited sarcasm, maybe because Joey was now literally beneath him, hugging a piling to keep the boat close and not looking especially dignified. But it was also true that Gino had made a brave attempt to pull out of his nosedive on this, his last evening in Florida. He'd eased off on the bourbon and just let Dr. Greenbaum buy him one final bottle of champagne with dinner. He'd shaved, cut his toenails, and even managed to find a clean shirt and a silk sports jacket. Like many people who have been humiliated in a strange and distant place, he seemed to imagine that going home would be sufficient to erase the episode, that since none of the neighborhood guys had witnessed his shame and the baring of his weakness, it hadn't really happened.
'Come on,' said Joey, 'get in. Step inna middle of the boat.'
Vicki's behind was in his face as she lowered herself down the wooden ladder. Her butt was clothed in mauve-colored capri pants and seemed to be perfumed. Vicki had tried to fix her hair in honor of her reemergence into the world, but she couldn't duplicate the skill, patience, and apparatus of the beauty parlor. Like a failed souffle, the rough teased do held its own around the edges but caved in in the center; in silhouette it was as if her scalp had been cleft by a hatchet. She lurched around the cockpit until she managed to grab a rail. Then Joey stepped well back as Gino lumbered in. The skiff rocked under his weight, and once he was safely in the boat he cast a sneering glance back through the hotel to where his colleagues were intently but stupidly waiting to kill him. 'Assholes,' he said.
Joey pushed off, took the wheel, turned the boat toward open water, and jammed the throttle forward.
The breeze was light, the water only slightly rippled like a washboard, and no one spoke until the skiff was half a mile out from land. Then Joey slowed the engine and said to Gino, 'Gimme your guns.'
A late half-moon was just coming up. Its dim red-dish glow mixed with the silver blue of starlight to make a spectral gleam that seemed good for telling lies. 'I didn't bring em,' Gino said. 'I mean, Christ, we're goin' to the airport, ain't we?'
Joey turned off the motor. It was a gesture intended to remind his passengers of their essential status as captives. Amid the violent silence of the ocean, the only sound was the lapping of water against their hull; it was a noise at once delicate and full of threat, like a lion licking its chops. 'Gino, I known you a long time. Gimme the fucking guns.'
Gino seemed to be considering, though in an eighteen-foot boat a person does not have a lot of options as to where to go or what to do. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his pistol, and with a resentful pout on his jowly mouth handed it to Joey. Then he pulled his second gun out of his pants at the small of his back and surrendered that one, too. Joey glanced at the weapons for just a second, and tossed them over his shoulder into the Florida Straits. They somersaulted through the red moonlight then landed with a slap-slap followed by a baritone kerplunk as they broke the skin of the water and dove pin-wheeling toward the bottom.
'Fuck you do that for?' Gino asked.
Joey restarted the engine. ' 'Sgonna be a long night, Gino. It could get, like, emotional.'
At the eastern end of Key West, the airport beacon raked the water, and through the cut of Cow Key Channel, the weird mass of Mount Trashmore could momentarily be seen. Then came the low, dark sweep of Stock island, with its trailer parks and oil tanks, then the barricaded expanse of Boca Chica, where navy pilots learned to fly. The skiff planed along the ripples, two miles out from shore; the towed rowboat sledded along in the flat water between the rays of the wake.
'This is nice,' Vicki yelled over the roar of the motor. She sounded surprised, innocent, and girlish, as if the salt air had blown away her years of bimbohood, swept her back to the younger verge of an adolescence marked by wonder at the mystery of ballooning breasts and their hypnotic effect on certain sorts of men. The wind had yanked her hair straight up and back and made her look unprecedentedly stylish. 'Gino, how come you never took me boating?'
'Shut up, Vicki,' he shouted. Was he still sulking over the loss of his gun, or was he just that thoroughly sick of her?
'No, you shut up, Gino,' she yelled back. Then she started cackling. Had she truly lost her mind, or was she just so tickled to be standing up to him? 'I'm sicka you bossin' me around.'
'Shut up the botha yuhs,' said Joey. 'I gotta find the spot.'
He slowed the boat and peered toward shore, wondering if the contour of the land would look anything like the image he'd carried away from the nautical chart. He was looking for the place where the bulge of Big Coppitt gave onto the cluster of mangrove outcrops called the Saddlebunch Keys, where Highway 1 hopped and curved from one dry place to another over a series of short low bridges. Turning landward, he rode the current that was
