streaming toward the Gulf, filtering through the islands and the trestles as through a giant sieve, and when he could just make out the hum of traffic from the pavement, he cut back to idle speed and drifted. The raised road loomed ahead like a low black rainbow. Widely spaced streetlights lit up globes of vapory air; the occasional car pushed its meager beams straight in front of it.
'We gettin' off here?' Vicki asked as they floated toward the stanchions.
'You are,' Joey said. He didn't look at her but kept his eyes on the bow of the boat.
Vicki swallowed, blinked, licked her thin dry lips. She'd thought the kid brother was her ally. That made it O.K. to stand up to Gino. But would an ally drop her off all by herself in the middle of nowhere with lizards and bugs and maybe even alligators all over the place? She pointed her chest toward Joey and inhaled. 'Hey,' she purred.
By way of answer, Joey reached down and handed her a neatly bundled sleeping bag. 'Ever been camping, Vicki?'
She looked at the quilted parcel like it came from Mars. 'You gotta be crazy,' she said. 'I'll get raped. I'll get murdered.'
Joey maneuvered the skiff so that it was drifting broadside toward the bridge. Current parted around the concrete pillars; the pavement sang under the weight of a truck. Off to the left, the land was low, dark, and overhung with tangled trees. 'Vicki, this ain't New York. The worst that's gonna happen is you'll get mosquito-bit. Gino, get onna side and get ready to grab the bridge.'
Gino Delgatto compressed like a squeezed beach ball as he absorbed the impact between fiberglass and concrete. He held the skiff fast while Joey hoisted Vicki onto the small front deck. The roadbed was just at the level of her face, and under it was an I-beam that was pocked with rust and had the texture of a nutmeg grater. Vicki grabbed it and leaped about six inches into the air. 'Hold on, now,' Joey said. 'Lift. Come on, lift.'
The boat was rocking, current was slapping against it, and Vicki was trying her damnedest to pull herself onto the bridge. In her mauve capri pants, her long legs kicked and jerked like those of a hanged man. Finally Joey put his hands on her perfumed backside and shoved for all he was worth. It was satisfying, this vigorous handling of his brother's girlfriend's ass, and it propelled her to where she could swing a leg onto the pavement and scrabble up to the shoulder of the road. She stood, monumental from the perspective of the men below, and glared down at them accusingly. Joey tossed the sleeping bag up to her, and she clutched it to her bosom as though it were her last friend in the world.
'Go over by the trees there,' Joey said. 'We'll be back around dawn.'
She looked down at Gino, who was still hugging the bridge stanchion, and for a moment it appeared she might spit on him or burst into tears. Instead, she just walked away. After a few steps she turned around. 'Some vacation, Gino,' she hissed. 'I shoulda stood in Queens.'
— 34 -
'So Gino, it's just you and me.'
Joey Goldman had turned seaward again, and was a mile offshore by the time he spoke, or rather, yelled over the grind of the engine and the hiss of water shooting past the hull. The moon had gone from red to yellow to eggshell white, and spilled an endless beam that glinted over the water and seemed to single out the little skiff.
'Yup,' yelled Gino. He was suddenly rather giddy, made so by too much freedom and too little control. Being sprung from his hotel room was about as invigorating and disconcerting as getting out of jail. Being rid of Vicki felt, for the moment at least, as good as waking up to find that a throbbing boil had vanished in the night. But then again, he had no gun, no car, no crew, no plan, and no idea what Joey had in mind. 'So kid, what the hell we doin' now?'
Joey smiled without parting his lips. His thick hair had been pressed back by the wind, his eyes were narrowed against the spray, his forearms were ropy from clutching the wheel. Gino almost noticed that his bastard half brother had become a grown man. 'We're gonna find your fucking emeralds,' Joey hollered. 'What else?'
'You can do that?' Gino screamed.
Joey did not immediately answer but gave himself a moment to savor the hope, need, and doubt in Gino's tone. He thought he could do it. He'd studied his chart. It seemed to him there was only one place Sand Key Marina could be. Straight out from a radio tower, behind the arc of a narrow peninsula that curved away like the bone on a lamb chop, there should be a narrow channel marked by unlit buoys. If there wasn't, well, that was that.
'I can find 'em,' Joey yelled.
Gino suddenly felt tears of greed welling in his windblown eyes-greed and amazement, as if he'd stopped believing he would ever see the three million dollars' worth of Colombian stones. 'Great, kid,' he screamed. 'We'll go partners.' Then he realized that the word implied a fifty-fifty split, and he quickly recovered from his spasm of generosity. 'I mean, I'll cut you in.'
Joey let that slide, and continued with his own line of thought. 'But Gino, ya gotta do everything I tell you.'
'Sure, kid, sure,' Gino shouted.
'Before, during, and after,' Joey pressed.
'Whatever.'
'Swear on your mother, Gino. Whatever I say, you do.'
Gino looked away. Water was flying off the side of the boat like it was shot from a fire hose. 'Christ, Joey. We gotta start with this mother shit again?'
'Yeah, Gino, we do. Swear.'
He did, and Joey eased back on the throttle. He scanned the shore for the radio tower. There seemed to be lots of radio towers, but most of them were probably electrical pylons. From a mile away, by moonlight, it was hard to tell. Joey steered closer to land, waiting for the low shapeless ribbon of limestone and shrubs to show some useful feature. For some minutes no such feature appeared; the land showed blank as an oil slick, and Joey choked down the thought that he might yet have to admit to Gino and himself that once again he'd failed, that just like the jerks from the neighborhood, he'd talked big and could not deliver.
Then, finally, he spotted what seemed to be the peninsula shaped like a lamb chop bone. It was nothing more than a finger of mangrove and showed only as a brief interruption in the gleam of moonlight. He made toward it. Gino started pawing around like a dog that hears its food bowl being filled.
' 'Zat it?' he asked. ' 'Zat it?'
Joey just shrugged. Then, a couple of hundred yards off the tip of the peninsula, he thought he saw a channel marker. It was unlit, stood crooked in the water, but was dabbed with a reflective paint, and for just an instant it caught the moonlight and sent back an improbably bright flash. Joey realized that his heart was pounding. This had nothing to do with emeralds, but with finding what he was looking for, studying a picture that stood for the world and discovering that the pieces fit, that both the picture and his ability to read it could be trusted. The radio tower was dead ahead. Joey idled forward.
Now, what passes for a harbor in the Florida Keys would not be called a harbor most other places. There is no deep water, not much shelter, just skinny passages where the limestone muck has been dredged away and boats have a reasonable chance of making it to shore. The channel that Joey hoped he was following soon narrowed to a swath of flat water barely wider than the skiff. On either side, little tepees of mangrove popped out, their greedy roots already capturing nests of land. Mosquitoes swarmed and buzzed at the nearness of fresh meat. Toads croaked, night herons screamed out their ugly clicking screech. The moonlight was swallowed up as the foliage closed in, and something that sounded like giant crickets made a noise like sandpaper scratching bone.
Gino fanned invisible bugs from in front of his face. 'Joey, man, this can't be right. It's like we're halfway inna fucking jungle.' Black leaves and low branches drank up the sound of the engine.
Ahead, on a nubbly, tilted wooden stake, was what might have been another marker. Joey edged toward it. Behind it loomed a seemingly endless wall of mangrove that gave off a smell of sulfur and anchovies kept too long in tin. But at this second stake, the channel took a sudden dogleg left, and the new angle revealed an overhung cut between two islets. The cut was so narrow that waxy mangrove leaves scratched against the skiffs hull as the little craft slipped through.
