Suitcase City (4 page)

At sunrise, Teach had drunk enough whiskey to numb the pain under his arm. He went out and stood on the Cedar Key docks looking west to the Gulf. Out there somewhere was a mother ship steaming in circles, searching for the offspring she had birthed six hours ago, a black-sided shrimper carrying a saint’s name and three men with calm smiles and big pistols.

FOUR

1997, Tampa, Florida

James Teach, forty-five and feeling it, vice president of sales for Meador Pharmaceutical Company, lifted his Wild Turkey and water, peered through its amber lens at the glittering bottles across from him, and said, “God, that was a good day. That . . . maybe . . . was the best day of my life.”

The man sitting next to him smiled at the mirror across the bar. A fat man with an odd name Teach had now forgotten.

It was the end of a long week, and Teach was tired. Here he was in a pretty good bar, Malone’s, in an unfamiliar part of Tampa, lifting his fourth bourbon—or was it his fifth?—and talking to a stranger about the good old days. The days when Jimmy Teach, a walk-on from little Cedar Key, Florida, had quarterbacked the Gators to an SEC championship and two bowl games.

On his best day, against Auburn in Shug Jordan Stadium, Teach had thrown for three touchdowns and rushed for one. Everything had worked for Jimmy Teach that day. His feet dancing the backfield, his arm a gun firing tight spirals through the crisp fall air into the hands of his fast friends in Gator blue and orange.

He finished the story: “So, I called a quarterback sneak and just put my head down and prayed to my Jesus, and the next thing I know I’m lying in the end zone with my ears ringing, and the ref’s hands are reaching straight up to heaven.”

The fat man’s smile applauded the story. Teach shrugged and threw in some humility. “Hell, what was it that guy said?
Half of it’s just showing up?
” He grinned, noticing the man’s pricey olive-green suit and tropical tie. Teach’s wife, Paige, would have known the three places within a hundred miles where you could buy the suit and probably the name of the designer. Would have known. Paige had been dead a year now, and thinking of it, remembering that next week was the anniversary of her death, Teach felt guilty about the best day of his life. Why wasn’t it the day of his marriage? The day of his daughter’s birth? He shook his head and said, “Who was it said that thing about showing up? You remember?”

The guy smiled again, showing his teeth, a little rabbity on top, the lower jaw undershot. “No, I don’t. But I do think it was a rock star.” The accent was Savannah or Charleston. The man had said,
Rock stahhh.

In his present state, Teach liked the accent. It was funny. He tapped the bar with his glass for another bourbon. “Hell, enough about football. No great deed goes unpunished.”

He examined his right hand, the one that had thrown the bullet passes, the one with the half-moon cleat scar on the back. The hand had been stomped by an Ole Miss linebacker, a stomp applied with purpose and glee. “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

The fat man said, “Trey McLuster.”

McLustuh.
Teach liked it, that old Charleston music.

McLuster looked at Teach and smiled the fan smile. That knowing, loving smile. The guy wanted to touch him. Teach knew it from years of times like this, though not so frequent anymore. The guy wanted to squeeze the arm that had thrown the high tight spiral that had settled as soft as cotton fluff into the hands of Digger Dupree in the FSU end zone with three seconds on the clock and bookies dying of cardiac arrest all over the Great Republic.

Then McLuster said, “Screw rock stars. Tell me about the time you beat Miami in that hellacious rainstorm. That must have been something.”

So Teach told it. How the ball was heavy with the rain, and slick as a Suwannee River catfish, but he’d completed nineteen of twenty-three and led the Gators to a squeaker 14–13 victory over a team that bettered them in size and speed. Bettered them on paper. But football games, he told the man next to him, weren’t played on paper. They were played on grass in real weather against men whose skill and courage equaled yours or didn’t.

Teach lifted his glass and gazed into it. Christ, he’d had more to drink than he’d intended. More than he was used to. His companion was quiet now, appreciating what he had said. “Gentlemen,” Teach whispered, including the bartender now, “it’s consistency that wins, not the brilliant thing you do only once. It’s doing the job day in and day out, and knowing you can do it.” It was what Teach had always had, the thing that got it done. The thing you called upon when the contagion of defeat crept into other men’s eyes.

And suddenly it hurt, what Teach was saying. It hurt because he was forty-five and his best days were behind him. It hurt because he had used the words he had just whispered, the truest words he knew, to sell pills to physicians all over the state of Florida for so many years now that he couldn’t say them anymore without seeing himself in some family-practice doc’s waiting room with a display case on his knees.

He swallowed the last of his bourbon and remembered that Dean’s ballet recital would start in two hours. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter turning and toeing and sweeping her flower-petal hands in gestures so gorgeous and graceful that they brought tears to his eyes. Well, the football stories had pushed the pills that earned the money that bought the toe shoes and the tutus. Teach caught his reflection in the mirror. It was time to pee and leave.

The front door opened and sunlight slanted across the floor of Malone’s Bar and a black man stepped in. He was tall and moved with an easy, athletic grace, and this made Teach watch him sit at a table near the men’s room door.

Teach pushed away from the bar and stretched. “Well,” he said, “time to point Percy at the pavement.” He glanced at his watch. “And then off I go to perform the duties of a father.” He looked at McLuster, inviting him into the age-old complicity of fathers. The man nodded, and it seemed to Teach like a good way to end this pleasant interlude.

He knew, and he supposed McLuster did too, that he could never share Teach’s understanding of what it was to rise to the top of something. But any man could know the warm arms of a wife, the sweetness of a daughter’s kiss, and the two of them could part in that knowledge.

As Teach started for the men’s room, McLuster said, “Hell, I guess I’ll bleed the monster too.”

They were at the urinals when the black man came in. Teach had it out and flowing. His head thrown back, his knees flexed, he was thinking about pulling himself together for the ballet recital. He’d cinch up his tie, drive through rush-hour Tampa to the Women’s Club, get the old Minolta out of the trunk of the Buick. A mint for his breath. Lord, he’d forgotten to buy film. He’d have to find a drugstore.

Paige’s society friends would all be there in pearls and boutique dresses. Their faces would be made up perfectly, which meant imperceptibly, and they’d smell delicately of Chanel, and their necks and shoulders would be flushed with worry for the girls about to dance. And they would watch Teach, the widower, enter. The man not quite of their station, whose wife had been one of them. Beautiful Paige who had died so suddenly and in such an ugly way.

“Well, look at you nasty white motherfuckers.”

The voice, its threat, its confidence, made Teach quickly holster his cock and turn to face the men’s room door. He heard McLuster at the next urinal mutter, “What the . . . ? Oh Jesus.”

Teach could see now that the black man was no man. He was tall and filled out—Teach made him at least 220 and all of it muscle—but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. That Teach had taken him for a grown man said something for the confident way the boy moved. Teach remembered giving the boy a friendly nod on his way to the men’s room. And hadn’t the boy nodded back?

The boy took another step into the room. There was no mistaking the threat of his stance, legs wide, arms ready at his sides.

The boy wore black jeans and a white silk shirt. He pointed at them with his left hand. “Give it up, bitches.” The white shirt opened at his waist, and Teach saw it in the waistband of the black jeans—the shiny black handle of a straight razor. McLuster started to pant, and Teach thought,
Heart attack,
then McLuster moaned, “Oh no,” and Teach saw the dark stain spreading around the man’s clutching fingers.

The boy laughed quietly. “You bitches better give it up. I ain’t gone say it again.”

Teach held his eyes on the boy’s face and made himself smile. His salesman’s smile. The smile that ate shit if shit got the purchase order signed. He willed the boy to look at him, apply those cold, coffee-bean eyes to his. When the boy did it, Teach let his smile flow into his eyes, ten years of schmoozing receptionists, accommodating assholes in white lab coats, and closing, closing. He had to close the distance here. He reached out a careful hand and eased McLuster to his right. Teach had to talk but didn’t know what to say. There was a razor in the boy’s waistband.

He saw the headlines:
Local Businessman Slashed in Bar. Motive: Robbery.
But headlines were ink and there was going to be blood here. Teach imagined the boy grasping the black handle of the razor and flipping out the gleaming blade. The smallest touch of such an instrument, Teach knew, could bring forth the red gush that ended life in seconds. And for what? Some cracked-out kid wanted money.

Teach said, “What do you want? Our wallets? Is that it?”

The boy looked at him, his head tilted sideways. He held up his left fist and loosened three fingers. “That’s three, bitch. I said I wasn’t gone ask you again.”

Teach glanced at McLuster and shrugged. “He wants us to give it up. You got any idea what he’s talking about?”

When the boy looked at McLuster, Teach did it: leapt across the space between them and delivered a sweeping right forearm to the side of the boy’s head. Even as Teach knew the sweet smack of contact, felt the boy’s body go limp against his, heard the whack and skitter of the razor hitting the tile floor, he thought it had been too easy. Somehow too easy, too lucky. The boy’s head hit the doorframe, and he slid unconscious to the floor, blood pouring from his split cheek.

Teach looked at what he had done. What he’d had to do. The thing, apparently, he was still ready to do after all these years. His right elbow ached where the shock of the blow vibrated. He turned to his companion. McLuster with his back against the wall, both hands clutching the urine stain that spread down his trouser legs. “My God,” he said, “look at this. I don’t
fucking
believe this.”

Then the boy on the floor groaned and Teach knew this wasn’t over.

He grabbed the boy’s collar and dragged him facedown through the men’s room door and into the middle of the bar. There he knelt beside the boy, pinning his right arm between his shoulder blades.

The bartender, a stocky bald man whose name tag said
Benny
, a man Teach had only vaguely noticed before, a man with the bartender’s gift for appearing with the needed thing and then returning to the status of furniture, looked across the bar at Teach and the boy who was bleeding onto the carpet. The bartender’s face said everything about the things we least expect.

Teach said, “Call the cops. This kid tried to rob us in the men’s room.” Then, to the man’s expression of disbelief, Teach said, “He had a knife. He was going to rob us. Kill us. I don’t know. Call 911.”

The bartender turned for the phone, and the boy groaned again. His eyes were foggy but clearing. Teach shoved his arm up to let him know his situation.

The bartender put down the phone and came over. “They’re coming.” He looked at the boy’s face on the carpet. “Jesus,” he said, “look at the mess you’re making. I gotta get Malone in here.”

Malone? Malone?
Teach thought.
Ah yes, this is Malone’s Bar.
He looked around now, out of the bright tunnel of violent energy that, for a few moments, had included only him and the boy and what had to be done. The bartender was on the phone talking to Malone. McLuster sat at a table against the wall, a wad of paper towels pressed to his crotch. The tunnel widened even more, and Teach heard him whisper, “Christ, I don’t believe this.”

Teach tried to think of a comforting word for the man. It seemed right even though he had, by his lights anyway, already saved him from a cut throat. The black boy gave a long, low moan. Teach tightened his grip and glanced up at McLuster. It occurred to him that he needed the man. McLuster was his witness.

A customer came in, an old guy in white Keds, khaki Bermuda shorts, and a Tampa Bay Bucs T-shirt. Bald head, hairless limbs, and tortoiseshell sunglasses with a white plastic nose cap. He took two steps into the bar, saw Teach and the black boy on the floor, pushed his sunglasses to his face, and tiptoed out.

Teach watched the door, hoping that McLuster would not leave. And what would you do? Would you wait around like he is doing? Be a stand-up guy for the man on the floor with the bad kid, the guy who saved your ass? Or would you haul ass out of here, write this off as absurdity and rotten luck? Let the guy on the floor deal with the cops. Hell, it was an easy enough story to tell. A straightforward tale of armed robbery thwarted by the decisive action of a man who knew what to do and had the wherewithal to do it.

The door opened again and two men in sport coats and ties came in. The first was black, about six feet tall, stocky, maybe in his early forties, carrying some ribs and corn bread around his middle but carrying them well. The man behind him was white, short, and rail-thin. They stood taking in the situation. Teach on the floor holding the boy, McLuster pressing the ball of towels to his crotch, the bartender on the phone giving Malone a play-by-play.

The black cop walked over and put his hand on Teach’s shoulder. There was a world of authority in the hard way the man touched him. Teach remembered this touch. He got up, stepped back, and took a deep breath because it was all over now but the talking. He took another breath and felt in his gut the dizzy ebbing of the tide of adrenaline that had started when the boy had stepped through the men’s room door and said . . . What was it? Teach couldn’t remember now.