Then there was a clearing in which the still water gleamed black and flat as a lake.
At the edge of this cove was a falling-down dock.
Its outermost pilings had crumpled like the forelegs of a crippled horse, and its planks had come unhinged like the keys of a broken xylophone. On shore, half grown over with vines and shrubs, was the rotting structure of what once had been an office or store; next to it was a gas pump with no paint left on it, then, propped on cinder blocks, a rusty mobile home with smashed windows and a guano-caked TV antenna.
'Here's your marina,' Joey said. 'Don't feel bad you couldn't find it. And there's your boat.'
He pointed to a black hulk tied up to the far side of the dock. Made of ancient planking, with thick sides and a small, square pilothouse that had lost both its windshield and its roof, it seemed to be floating only out of habit. Joey pulled the skiff closer. In small flecks of brittle paint caught between splinters of wood, he could just make out the vessel's name: Osprey.
If Gino Delgatto had had a tail, it would have been slapping wildly against his buttocks. As it was, he paced the skiff with avid steps, making it rock as though in a gale. 'Holy shit, Joey! Tree million bucks. There it is! It's mine! Oh baby, I can taste it! Come on, willya, move the boat closer, lemme get on there and grab the fucking stones.'
Joey didn't. He idled some twenty feet away and held steady at that tantalizing distance while a cloud of mosquitoes formed around them and his brother tried to jerk the skiff closer with body english. 'Hol' on a second, Gino. We're not just grabbin' the emeralds. We're takin' the whole boat.'
On Gino's red and beefy face, the features all pushed forward, as if his mouth and nose were racing to the stones. The more his blood rushed to the surface, the better the mosquitoes liked it. 'Joey, what I want with the fucking boat? Just lemme get the emeralds and let's get the fuck outta here.'
Joey crossed his arms. 'Gino, did you or did you not just swear we're doing things my way?'
'Sure, kid, yeah. But I don't see the fucking point-'
'Gino, use your head. The guys that got whacked- you got no waya knowing what Ponte got out of 'em before he clipped 'em. Am I right? Ya gotta figure he squeezed 'em pretty good. So maybe they gave it up that the stones are on a boat. Maybe they even told 'im where, and Ponte couldn't find it, just like you couldn't.'
'So?' Gino crushed a mosquito that had landed in his ear; it squirted some of his blood. He never once took his eyes off the junked fishing boat.
'So, what if sometime Ponte does find the boat, and the stones ain't on it? Who's he gonna figure got there first? You, Gino. So you'll be fucked all over again. This way, we take the whole boat, there's nothin' to find, it's done with.'
Gino scratched, thought, and let out a deep breath that blew some bugs around. 'O.K., kid,' he said. 'You're right.'
'I know I'm right,' Joey pressed. 'I been thinkin' this through for weeks. So Gino, willya do me a favor? Stop questioning every little goddamn thing and do like I tell ya.'
Gino nodded through a faceful of mosquitoes. Anything to get his hands on the emeralds. Besides, what did it cost him to take orders from Joey in a place where no one could see and no one would ever know?
'Awright,' Joey resumed as he clicked the engine into gear and edged closer. 'So here's what we're gonna do. The skiff, we're gonna leave it here. We're gonna take the little motor off the back, put it on the junker, and use it to get the junker outta heah. We're gonna tow the rowboat, then put the little motor onna rowboat to get back, then pick up the skiff. Got it?'
Gino hadn't got it. He wasn't listening. He was thinking about emeralds and swatting mosquitoes, and had no attention left for other things.
Joey mustered a tone of command. 'So Gino, don't just fucking stand there. Take the little motor off.'
Gino unclamped the auxiliary engine and hoisted it over the Osprey 's splintery gunwales as Joey softly clunked the skiff against its side. But once Gino actually reached the treasure boat, his fragile patience let go all at once and he went blind with lust for the emeralds. He leaped out of the skiff, sending it scudding sideways, and clambered onto the Osprey 's damp and spongy deck. His soft imported loafers skidded on the slimy planks and he dove obliviously toward the roofless pilothouse. By the pale but steady light of the moon, he searched out the board on which an X had supposedly been marked. For some moments he couldn't find it, and seemed inclined to rip out his eyes for their failure.
Then he spotted a smudge as of damp powder. He fell to his knees in front of it and tried to pry up the plank with his fingernails. A soft unwholesome grit of moldy wood and the remains of ancient ants and spiders covered his fingers. Then, from a hole at the base of the steering console, not two feet from where Gino knelt, there emerged a rat the size of a dachshund. For an unspeakable moment the rodent's beady red eyes met those of the mafioso from New York. Gino could see the gleam of mucus on its pointy black nose, which was twitching in terror. The rat scratched at the floor, hunkered low as a snake, then, with desperate courage, it charged along the only escape route it had. It darted over Gino's hands, its damp, rank fur obscenely tickling his wrists. Gino, recoiling, flicked his arms and caught the rodent in the underbelly. It rose in a macabre claws-out somersault, landed on Gino's Achilles tendon, and scampered away. Gino went back to pawing at the plank.
Finally it lifted. Nothing was visible in the dark, narrow gap, but far down in the bilges, fetid water was dully gleaming. Gino plunged his hand in, and slime stretched out along the sleeve of his silk jacket. The slime had a skin on it like burned milk, it clung to his wrist like a condom. His fingers found a small burlap sack, and squeezed it hard.
Still kneeling, his pulse throbbing in his mosquito- covered neck and his lips stretched tight across his teeth, he tugged at the sack's drawstring, then poured into his palm a sampling of uncut, unpolished Colombian emeralds.
They didn't look like much, just green rocks that didn't shine, and were coated with a rough white dust that seemed to have bubbled out from inside them. They varied in size, the biggest like brazil nuts, but nubbly as potatoes. Gino closed his hand around them and shook them softly like a favorite set of dice.
'You happy now?'
Joey was standing on the deck, leaning against the rickety frame of the pilothouse. He'd secured the skiff and put the small outboard on the Osprey's rotting transom. 'You got your stones. You happy?'
The words seemed to bring Gino out of his trance of avarice. He glanced up over his shoulder, and for an instant he seemed abashed, as if it had dawned on him that he must look like a real horse's ass, kneeling like in church, slime all over his hands, elbow-deep in crud. Only now did it register that a rat had run on him, that he had touched its fur and felt the yielding of its gut, and he choked back a sudden nausea. But what the hell, he had the emeralds, it was worth it, worth everything. He grinned. 'Fuck yeah, Joey. Hell yeah.'
'Good,' the younger brother said. 'Now put 'em back, and put the plank back on.'
Gino swiveled on his knees. 'Fuck for?'
Joey showed him the tired look of a teacher stuck for too many years with the dumb kids. 'Coast Guard, Gino. They patrol. For drugs. But a bagga emeralds on a crummy old fishing boat-Gino, how's it gonna look?'
— 35 -
'So Joey, wha'?'
The sodden hulk of the Osprey had scratched its way through the narrow cut and lumbered out of the Sand Key channel, Zack Davidson's little eight-horse motor laboring mightily to push it through the lapping water and pull the paintless rowboat behind. It was two a.m. The Big Dipper, dimmed by a bright moon, loomed in the spring sky. It was the only constellation Joey recognized because it was the only one piercing enough to have occasionally penetrated the gummy and overlit summer air of Queens. He and Sandra used to go up on the roof sometimes to look at it and neck.
' 'Bout five miles out,' Joey said, 'there's a little island. We're gonna ditch the boat there, scrape the name off, bust it up as good as we can. Then we come back and you're outta heah.'
Gino nodded, though he was paying only half-attention. His body was on deck but his brain was in the bilges. He tried to recapture the feel of wet emeralds in his palm.
For some minutes they didn't speak, then Gino asked absently, 'How you know that?'
