Suitcase City (30 page)

He landed soft and burrowed hard. He did not stop worming and digging until his hands hit the rusted metal of the truck bed. He lay there panting, feeling the trailer rocking on its old leaf springs, feeling the cool wet of the palm fronds which had been cut and stacked when the dew was heavy. Teach held his breath, waiting for the truck to stop, to hear the cop’s order:
All right, Mr. Teach, you can come out of there now.
Teach imagining himself crawling out from under the pile of cuttings, his clothing soaked with dew and palm sap, his face covered with sawdust and the embarrassed expression of a feckless ass.

All he heard was the song of the tires on the asphalt, the
crank-clank
of Angel double-clutching as the truck accelerated. Teach tensed when it stopped a moment later, but he heard the whistling of traffic and knew they were at the intersection of Sunset and Westshore. And he knew that if the cops were going to stop Angel they would have done it by now. Teach lay happy in the cool and dark of getting away with it. Of running and breaking out. He lay as the miles rolled under the trailer, wondering where Angel would dump the cuttings. He lay in the cool, the rumbling, the engine sound, wondering what he was going to do now. Now that James Teach was a fugitive from justice.

THIRTY-NINE

When Angel Morales stopped his truck at the Manhattan Avenue yard-waste dump, Teach scrambled out and hid in a stand of Brazilian peppertrees. Angel and his son unloaded and left. Teach watched from hiding as the commercial yard-work rigs came and went. Finally, he caught a ride in the back of an empty one with a Pinellas County tag. At the traffic light on the Gandy Causeway by the Derby Lane greyhound race track, he jumped out and waved to the surprised driver. “Thanks, Bobby. See you at Susie’s wedding.” A little method acting for the commuters waiting at the light.

Teach called Bama Boyd from a phone booth in front of an adult bookstore. He was exhausted and dirty and every car that passed made him turn his face away as men did in the movies. Men on the run. Men who might be recognized and ratted out by decent citizens.

The receptionist at the Isla del Sol Yacht and Country Club told Teach she’d have to page Ms. Boyd. Teach waited, exposure cold on his hunched back, listening for the crunch of tires, the crackle of a police radio.

“Samantha Boyd. How can I help you?”

Bama’s voice was good to hear. “Hey, Bama, it’s Teach. Whaddya say, darlin’?” He waited.

He needed a friend. Right now, all he had were the few dollars in his wallet, half a sandwich, and a soggy envelope full of photographs. And an old friend, Bama Boyd.

Finally, Bama said, “Hey, how’s it going?” Her voice was professionally warm. Golf-professionally so. People were listening.

Teach looked out at Gandy Boulevard. The stream of cars, and beyond, a couple of shabby seafood restaurants and a bedraggled driving range. He had never phoned that apology to her. “Look, Bama, I’m . . . I’m in a bit of a tight. I need your help.”

Again the quiet. A murmur of talk in the background. The pro shop? Bama standing there trying to sell the latest driver to some fool who didn’t know a tee box from a pot bunker.

“Hey, Bama, you there?”

“I’m here, Jimmy. Where were
you
?”

“Darlin’, I’m feeling kind of . . . exposed where I am right now. Can you come get me? I need a ride.”

“
Get
you? Right now? Hey, buddy, I’m in the middle of—”

“Bama!” Teach said it too loud. A man had stepped out of the adult bookstore with an unsatisfied expression on his face. He looked at Teach. The guy wondering if Teach was, well, fun. Teach gave the guy a fuck-off look, dug his face farther into the plastic cube of the phone booth, and whispered, “Look, Bama, I’m in trouble. I know you’re pissed at me. You’ve got every right to be. I’ll apologize for a long time somewhere else. You pick the place.”

Bama sighed into the phone. “Sorry, Jimmy. If you’re in trouble, I’m there for you. Just like you always were for me.”

Teach gave her his location and went inside to hide among the rubber penises, vibrators, and a very large selection of movies. He eyed the merchandise and not the people, and they, kindly, did not look at him. Where better to hide a fugitive face than a porn shop?

* * *

On the twenty-minute ride from Tampa to St. Petersburg, Teach apologized for stranding Bama and her two friends at the Terra Ceia Country Club. He explained his trouble as best he could and asked again for help. “I need a place to stay for a while. I need to use a phone. I need to borrow your car if you can let me do that. And Bama, more than anything else, I need you to be—” Teach quit. He was about to say,
quiet, discreet, trustworthy.
All insults to the past they shared.

He looked at Bama’s pretty, earnest face, permanently blushing from hours on practice tees. Her strong, slender hands guiding the ancient Alfa Romeo along Interstate 275. She had bought the car with money from her first WPGA victory, and she had never won again. She had not become the next Nancy Lopez, or the next anything but a club pro, a woman in a man’s profession. Teach knew she would never give up the car, and that she would give him what she could and more.

She looked at him with those wide, bright blue eyes. “Hey, Jimmy, maybe they weren’t going to arrest you. Maybe they really did just want to talk.”

Teach took the half sandwich out of his pocket, ate it with the hunger of fear and exhaustion. Maybe she was right. Aimes just wanted to sweat him again with pictures from Thalia’s apartment. Maybe he and Delbert would do another charade with a knock at the door, Delbert coming back like a good dog with a mysterious paper in his paw. Teach didn’t want to sweat for them anymore.

“If they just wanted to talk, why’d they put a cop at the back door?”

Bama thought about it, squinting into the sun. “Maybe the guy was just checking things out back there?” She laughed. “Then you come through like Mike Alstott and the guy just reacts.” She looked over at Teach. “You really go up the middle of that cop’s face?”

Teach nodded. “And then some. The other one fell in the neighbor’s pool. Or jumped in to avoid the rottweiler.”

“You’re a piece of work, Jimmy. Always were.”

“Christ, maybe you’re right. Maybe they just wanted to talk.” But he didn’t think so, and he had a promise to keep. Justice for Thalia. He had promised Mary Lena Liston. His own justice, not the state’s.

Bama parked in the lot between the golf course and the marina. They waited until a foursome teed off and a big Bayliner pulled away from the dock hauling a party of retired inebriates. Bama hustled Teach along the dock and aboard a Morgan 45.

Below deck, she said, “The owner’s gone till November. I’ve got maintenance contracts on a lot of these boats. I keep the ACs running, start the engines once a week, and get the bottoms cleaned when they need it. The extra money comes in handy.” She looked at Teach and pinched her nose. “Man,
you
need some maintenance. There’s a shower in the head. I’ll bring you some clothes from the pro shop.”

Reflexively, Teach reached out to hug her.

She stepped back. “Don’t go there. That would confuse both of us.”

Teach showered. Bama returned briefly with clothes and the promise of food at nightfall. He found a couple of bottles of Pilsner Urquell in the galley refrigerator, crawled into the V-berth in the bow, and lay there listening. The air conditioner hummed along, fed by a cable from the marina. Boats passed on Boca Ciega Bay to the north. He heard voices from the marina, hands who worked for the dockmaster, an occasional owner checking his boat. Cars came and went in the parking lot by the first tee. But mostly he heard his own heart beating and what he imagined to be the fuddled sound of his brain trying to think.

He watched the falling sun through the frosted glass of the hatch above his face and listened for the first cop’s foot to hit the deck. He tried to think about his problems, tried to make a plan, but the more he tried to think the more he remembered. Thalia, the spicy scent of her cinnamon skin, the way he’d let himself plan a life with her. Paige and the love they’d made, the daughter they’d made, and the slow increments by which a good life had begun to slip away. And lying in the V-berth with only a few feet of space between his body and the hatch, he remembered the shrimper
Santa Maria
and the fetid few inches of bilge where he had hidden three bodies.

Teach had left Cedar Key the morning after sinking the
Santa Maria
. He had gone back to Atlanta and lived rough, worked landscaping, worked off the books when he could, never staying in a job long. He’d changed addresses when he’d changed jobs, and he’d kept a packed suitcase by the door of his motel room or trailer or apartment. He’d planned to live as a permanent transient for six months. If nobody showed up at his door in a tight suit speaking Spanglish through a smoke-stained smile, he would go back home, dig up his money, and start thinking about real life again.

On the thirtieth day of the sixth month, the FBI showed up at his door. The suits were from Brooks Brothers and the smiles were brief and very white. Bloodworth Naylor had been busted wholesaling weed. In Naylor’s car, the government had found an envelope with Teach’s name written on it. The envelope was full of money. The agents were clear about what they wanted from him. They wanted the story of Naylor’s life. If Teach gave it to them, the money was just money. Or it was Teach’s, and they might let him keep it. Yes, they might even do that. When he refused to give them the story, the money became drug-related activity.

“All you’ve got is money,” Teach told the government. “In an envelope with my name on it.” He thought a smart lawyer might argue the separation of the money and the envelope. Somebody had put money in an envelope with Teach’s name on it, but that didn’t mean the money was intended for or belonged to Teach. “Maybe the envelope with my name on it was just lying around and somebody needed an envelope.”

“That’s all we need,” the government said. “An envelope.”

Teach was charged, and on the advice of a public defender opted for a trial by judge alone. His lawyer figured that a sophisticated legal mind might see Teach’s argument about the envelope better than a jury who might remember Nate Means. The judge convicted Teach and sentenced him to two years in the Federal Prison Camp at Eglin Air Force Base. He never forgot the moment after the verdict, when the bailiff walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go, bud.” The man led Teach to a holding cell and ordered him to remove his tie, belt, and shoelaces. For a long time, Teach surrendered things to the state, but he never gave up Bloodworth Naylor. There were items in a few newspapers about Teach’s fall, but only a few. He was football trash, and trash was discarded.

His first day in the general population at Eglin, in the cafeteria line, Teach was approached by a big man with a whore’s smile. The man’s body was hard but his eyes held something soft, and Teach could see it. It was the thing he’d seen in the eyes of Carlos, the gangster who had loved boats. The man put one hand on Teach’s tray and the other on Teach’s ass. He said, “Both of these are mine. Now come on over and sit with me, sweet baby.” Slowly, Teach lifted the man’s hand from his tray, kissed it, and tore the forefinger from its socket. The man stumbled back, his eyes howling but his mouth closed.

Teach said, “Put some ice on that. To control the swelling.”

It wasn’t so much the finger as it was the kiss. After that, Teach was considered crazy, a bug. He chose his own friends and did his time as quietly as he could. With gain time for good behavior, he walked out of Eglin eleven months later. He was twenty-six years old. He’d done a lot of reading, some vocational rehabilitation, and a lot of thinking. He’d met a lot of men like him, men who’d suffered reverses and convinced themselves that evil luck was an entitlement to someone else’s money, some woman’s body, something in a bottle or a capsule, something at the other end of a fist or a gun. They were men who’d never read the maps of a moral landscape, or who, for one sorry reason or another, had decided to leave the maps behind on their way to money, women, or revenge. Teach believed he was the second kind, a man who knew the maps but had strayed from them.

Like an addict, he admitted to himself that he had loved being lost in the secrets. That he could relapse if he was not very careful. He decided to find the maps and follow them, never stray from the lines they gave him. And he knew what he wanted from life: to be a good man again. To make the good man as simple as he could be: a husband and a father.

Teach drifted down to Tampa and took the first job he could get, humping boxes on the loading dock at Meador Pharmaceuticals. When he had saved some money, he hired a lawyer.

At Eglin, in the jailhouse law school, he had learned about the Florida statute that allowed a man to expunge a criminal record. The lawyer did his job, took cash for the work, and after a year on the loading dock Teach was promoted to forklift operator, then warehouse manager, and then he moved to sales. His boss, Mabry Meador, took him out to dinner one night not long after Teach began selling. “Jim,” Meador told him, “you’ve risen fast in this company, and I think the sky’s the limit for you. I think you exemplify everything that’s right and decent about the free-enterprise system.”

The night before, Paige had accepted Teach’s proposal of marriage, and she sat across the table from Meador giving them both her cool, ironic smile. Where Paige came from, money was not discussed at the table. Teach knew that much. And he knew she was running from that place, and maybe even then he knew she would go back to it. He wanted to go with her.

Later that night, Teach took her home to his apartment and undressed her in the dark bedroom. He traced the hollow of her long, perfect neck with his lips, and told her he loved her. A tipsy Paige giggled and said, “Oh yes. The sky’s the limit, Jim.”

* * *

The sun was setting when a foot hit the deck and roused Teach from a half-sleep of dreams and memories. He lurched out of the berth and stumbled across the dark saloon feeling for a way out.