oil-puddle eyes and seemed to be daring him to speak. He didn't.
'Get inna bedroom, Romeo.'
'Lay down,' Tony ordered when they were all assembled.
Joey and Sandra got into bed, and the thugs stood over them in some hell-born parody of putting the kids to sleep. Bruno had loops and scraps of rope slung over his shoulder like a cowboy. Tony slipped his gun in his pocket to free up his hands. He tied their outside ankles to the legs of the bed and their outside wrists to the comers of the headboard. Their inside wrists he tied together.
Then he brandished the gun. 'Listen, you pains innee ass. One of us is gonna be sittin' right outside heah. Any noise, any aggravation, we break heads. Got it?'
The thugs turned off the bedroom light, and half closed the door behind them as they left.
For a few moments Joey and Sandra lay silent, trying to let some of the fear seep out of them. It was a moonless night and dim suggestions of starlight came in blue slices through the louvered windows.
'I hate sleeping on my back,' Sandra whispered.
'Baby, I'm so, so sorry,' Joey said. 'I never meant-'
'I know you didn't.'
She rubbed the back of her hand against his. It was almost the only thing she could move. There was love and forgiveness in the gesture and it put a lump in Joey's throat.
'If they killed us,' Sandra went on, 'they'd get away with it, wouldn't they?'
Joey nodded.
'Will they? Will they kill us, Joey?'
'I don't know.'
'Why? It's not gonna get them their money, their jewels, whatever.'
'It's not about that, Sandra. It's about not being made a fool of. It's about winning. They wanna win.'
Sandra considered this, then tried without success to turn onto her side. 'And you, Joey, whadda you want?'
He looked up toward the ceiling. It seemed very far away. He felt the back of his hand tied against Sandra's. It was hard to tell whose veins, whose pulse, was whose. What did he want? He wanted an honorable truce with his old life, and something like a fair start in the new one. He wanted a kitchen like Peter and Claude's, one that didn't look like the last tenants had bolted an hour ago leaving their dishes still in the sink. He wanted, he admitted now, a normal job, some normal friends who did normal things. He lay there trying to figure out how to explain all this to himself, how to sum it up to Sandra, and suddenly the thread, the cord that held the whole package together, seemed utterly clear to him. 'I want you to marry me,' he said.
For a while Sandra said nothing. She was not the type who fantasized about marriage proposals, and if she had been, she would not have fantasized being proposed to while her limbs were tied to bedposts and her free hand was bound with a greasy rope to that of her betrothed. Besides, was Joey full of love or just remorse? Maybe, for him, a proposal stood mainly as the biggest apology he could think of.
'Joey,' she finally said, 'I've been waiting a long time to hear you say that.'
He gave a little laugh that was full of sad, sudden, and useless knowledge. 'I been waiting a long time to get ready to say it.'
'But listen,' said Sandra. 'Not tonight. Not with the state we're in. I'm not gonna hold you to what you say tonight.'
'Hold me to it, Sandra,' he said, and there was a note of pleading in his voice. 'I wanna be held to it. This is what I'm telling you. For once I wanna be held to it.'
At two a.m. Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia was still sitting in his recliner sporadically looking at television with the sound turned off. But mostly he was thinking out loud, talking to his dog. 'This is not good, Giovanni. Not good at all.'
The chihuahua did a little pirouette on its velvet bed. The flickering TV picture made kaleidoscopes in its stuck-open pupils.
'Fucking Gino gets away clean, Joey gets grabbed. Ponte's gotta be very frustrated, very pissed.'
The dog lay down and licked its private parts.
'Ya know what bothers me, Giovanni, what gets to me? In like the backa my mind, I can't help wondering if maybe it's my fault.'
The dog gave a little whine of disagreement, or maybe it was in pain.
'Maybe I gave some bad advice,' the Shirt went on. 'Did I? I really can't remember. Sometimes, I'll tell ya the truth, Giovanni, I don't even notice I'm givin' advice. That's the scary part, huh? Sometimes I'm just yakkin' away, and a kid like Joey, he sees the white hair, he figures, hey, this old guy must know somethin'. Ha. Fuck do I know? Poor kid, he listens to me.'
The old man shook his head. The chihuahua shook its whiskers. Then Bert spent a long moment climbing out of his recliner and the two of them walked stiffly to the bedroom.
— 45 -
Joey did not think he'd slept. He was too scared, too uncomfortable, too weirdly proud of himself for proposing marriage, and besides, he'd been keeping a weather vigil. He wanted to believe that by paying close attention, he could usher in a calm dawn, could keep away the winds or squalls that would prevent Clem Sanders from going to the reef. He lay still and silent, sniffing for airborne salt and iodine. The back of Sandra's hand was against his, his left ankle was chafed from the rope that held him down. Over and over again, he'd rehearsed what he would say to Charlie Ponte, how he would explain his plan for turning three million dollars into four. For what seemed like many hours he stared at the grooves in the louvered windows, searching for the first pale slices of saving light.
But he must have dozed at least, because suddenly the objects in the room had sharp outlines, people were talking on the other side of the half-closed bedroom door, and he was extremely confused. He gave an involuntary yank of the wrist that was bound to his fiancee's. Sandra let out a little grunt of protest. Then they both blinked themselves more or less awake.
'Lazy sacka shit,' came a voice from the other side of the door. It was followed by some slaps. 'I pay you to sleep, or what? Stupid fucking dagos I got heah. Where's the fucking kid? I want my stones.'
There was a scuffling of chairs being pushed away, sounds of big bodies springing out of furniture, and within a couple of seconds Joey and Sandra's bedroom was invaded. Charlie Ponte himself led the charge. He was wearing a silver jacket, his eyes were wild above their liverish sacs, and the little man did not look as faultlessly neat as Joey remembered. It was the hair, which was now windblown, almost spiked, peaked a little like a crown around the balding place on top. Ponte was full of a manic, savage cheer that was first cousin to bloodlust. He circled the bed and grabbed Joey by the front of his pink shirt. 'Rise and shine, scumbag,' he said. 'Today's the day I get my emeralds.'
He seemed not to notice that Joey was tied, and he started slapping him for not getting up fast enough. The slaps made the bed bounce and Sandra started to cry.
'Shit,' said Ponte. 'Shit. I ain't heah to deal with assholes, and I ain't heah to deal with crying broads.' Only then did he see the ropes. 'O.K., O.K.,' he said over his shoulder to the two thugs who'd accompanied him from Miami. 'Untie these losers and let's get out onna fuckin' water.'
On the water? The two goons leaned over the bed and started wrestling with Tony's bizarre knots. The mattress rocked, Sandra whimpered. On the water? The new thugs took out knives. The steel got hot against Joey's ankle as they sawed away. He tried to think but things were moving way too fast for him. His eyes were crusty. He had to piss. He hadn't so much as yawned and already he'd been smacked across the face, pummeled around the nose. This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. He'd rehearsed his pitch to Ponte; he'd thought the whole thing through. It was supposed to be civilized, a sit down where people could work things out. This was just mayhem. One of the new thugs slipped with his knife and poked Joey in the calf. He started to bleed on the sheet. On the water?
