Trap Line (22 page)

Albury turned to meet him with a savage smile.

“I knew you’d be coming, Willie. It’s better that way. What is it you’ve got,
macho
, a gun? No, a tire iron. Is that what you used to cripple my boy, Willie? Come and cripple me, motherfucker.”

With a ferret’s scream, Willie Bascaro lunged, the iron pointed like a sword. He was younger and too quick for Albury. The metal rod caught him in the gut. He felt something tear.

Albury staggered back against the wheel, winded.

“Cobarde de mierda,”
he gasped.

Bascaro attacked again in a frenzy. Albury ducked under a roundhouse, the tire iron grazing his ear. He caught the Cuban with a left hand to the face and a right above the heart. Bascaro sagged against the curved coping where the open wheelhouse ran toward the deck. Albury got inside his next weak swing. He seized Bascaro’s arm with all his strength and pushed it back against the coping. Back, back, until finally, with a sickening snap, it broke. The iron fell into the sea. The Cuban screamed. Albury released him to slide onto the deck and poked gently at his own belly. It hurt like hell.

When his head cleared, Albury pulled in Teal’s boat and tied it off close to the stern. From it he took two jerrycans of gasoline. Bascaro lay moaning on the deck.

Albury went into the cabin and came back with a life jacket. It was covered in mildew. He threw it at Bascaro’s feet.

“Put it on or not, it’s up to you.”

Methodically, Albury drenched the engine compartment and the wheelhouse with gasoline. Bascaro watched from the deck with dead man’s eyes.

Albury stepped over the rail into the skiff.

“Adios
, Willie.”

“No, no, par favor. No quiero morir. Por favor.”

The Cuban scrambled to his feet and staggered toward the skiff, beseeching. A trickle of urine ran down his pant legs and onto the deck.

Albury watched him coldly for a full minute.

“No, I’m not going to kill you, Willie. Not yet. Come aboard.” He gestured to the bow of the skiff. Willie Bascaro stumbled into the skiff. He fell heavily onto his broken arm and screamed. Then he cowered quietly in the bow, like a beaten dog.

From twenty-five yards away, Albury fired
El Gallo
with a shell from Teal’s flare pistol. It burned like a wrecker’s beacon on the dark sea. Then he turned the skiff toward shore.

“Policia
, Willie,
mucha policia,”
said Albury. He put a hand around his neck and squeezed. A noose.

Six miles off the coast, the skiff came abreast of a drumstick-shaped island. Albury reduced speed as the water shoaled to less than two fathoms. Albury saw that his prisoner had noticed the shallow water and was gauging the distance to shore. Albury left the wheel and bent in the stern, fiddling with the outboard engine.

Willie Bascaro went overboard in a clumsy dive. He found his feet and began slogging toward the beach.

Albury laughed out loud. Willie had snapped at the bait the way a crawfish tears at horse meat.

“One more monkey,” Albury grinned.

The island was called Loggerhead Key. The University of Miami ran it as a research center for the study of the rhesus monkey. There were at least a thousand of the noxious, quarrelsome beasts on the mangrove island. And nothing else. They had taken over.

Every third day, Albury knew, a boat would come. Young researchers would quickly shovel a mountain of dog food onto the beach and hastily retreat. The monkeys would gulp the food and remain with nothing to do but fight and fornicate until the next boat came. Willie Bascaro would be a diversion.

With a phone call from Christine’s apartment, Albury had learned that the next food boat would not come for two days. That was time enough. For two days Willie Bascaro could grovel in the sand for leftover dog chow and battle one-handed with the monkeys for his clothes.

Unsuspecting, Willie was in knee-deep water now near the beach. He looked back, as though disbelieving his good luck.

“Adios
, Willie,” Albury called. In the instant before he opened the throttle, Albury heard the monkeys shrieking their hatred for the intruder.

Chapter 20

LAURIE RAVENEL
urged the old Pontiac down Whitehead Street, one eye on the temperature gauge. Breeze had often warned her about the radiator, which leaked itself dry every couple of days.

She parked across from a laundromat and brushed her auburn hair in the rearview mirror. The Cowrie was only two blocks away, and Laurie was early, an hour at least. But she knew that Bobby was already there, setting up for lunch. She checked her lipstick.

Suddenly the passenger door swung open and a bundled-up man slid into the car. Laurie instinctively grabbed for her purse. Then she saw who it was.

“Breeze! God, oh my.” They hugged each other in silence, awkwardly bunched on the front seat. Laurie kissed him wetly, lightly, on the lips and held him back by the shoulders. “I love the hat.”

Albury sheepishly snatched the blue knit cap off his head. “Borrowed it from a shrimper at the West Key Bar.”

“And the jacket? Looks like it might have fit you back in junior high school.”

The navy slicker belonged to Christine’s ex, though Albury didn’t say so. “I’m not much on disguises,” he said. “But I needed something so I could walk around town without being noticed.”

Laurie burrowed into his shoulder. The Conch Train clattered by, canary-colored boxcars loaded with children and tourists, lobster-skinned, bandoliered with Nikons. The driver was giving an animated monologue on the Hemingway House.

“Breeze, what happened to Ricky?” Laurie’s words were muffled in the folds of his jacket.

“A couple of the Cubans busted his arm.”

“Why?” she cried. “What for? He’s a boy.”

“He’s my son. They wanted to get back at me.”

“God,” Laurie sat up and fished in her purse for a Kleenex. Her eyes were moist, her voice tiny. “I spent an hour with him today. He’s a strong kid, thank God.”

“I’ve got to settle this. Then I’ll be leaving Key West.” Albury took her hand. “I won’t be able to stay.”

“Breeze, I won’t be able to go.”

He had seen the look before, not often, but enough to know it. This time he felt nothing but tired.

“Things are starting to happen, honey. Bobby’s getting a group together. Businessmen, shop owners, professionals. They’re going after the core of all this. Bobby says they’re going to work with the Governor’s office, the federal people, anybody who needs help down here. Eventually, I think they’re going to clean up the island. Think of it, Breeze.”

“You and Bobby gonna clean it up, huh?”

“It all started when Beeker got beat up and that cop just stood there, watching—”

“I remember,” Albury said. Laurie and Bobby, lovers. A soft touch and a fair-weather faggot. Why not? They were hopeless reformers, both of them. Maybe Laurie needed someone like that; together they could Save the Whales.

“You wouldn’t consider going with me?” Albury asked.

“Breeze, I love this place. It’s gorgeous. You … well, you’ve been here too long. You walk down Duval Street and all you see are the hustlers, bikers, and bums—”

“And who do you see? Mother Teresa? A dozen budding Picassos, maybe? Poppa’s ghost?”

“Breeze!”

Albury sighed. “You knew I was ready to get out.”

“And now I don’t blame you,” Laurie said gently, “but I can’t go. I think what Bobby’s doing is exciting. I know you don’t; you think it’s fanciful and naive.”

“Nothing will ever change here,” Albury said. “Nothing ever has.”

“You’ve been poisoned by the place,” she said. “You’ll never be able to see it, but it will change, honey. It will go on and change without you.”

Albury sat quietly for a time, his hand resting on her knee. Then he laughed.

“It’ll have to, Laurie, I’m through with the Rock. But maybe before I go, I can come up with a little present for you and Bobby.”

“What, Breeze?”

They talked across the car for fifteen minutes; Laurie got out a notebook and scribbled seriously. Albury, the knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, hunkered down in the car seat, explaining everything slowly and twice.

“Can he marshall the troops today?” Albury asked finally.

“For something like this? You bet.”

“Good. Now, I gotta go before somebody recognizes me in this car.”

“Breeze, why can’t you tell me what’s happened?”

“Not yet, Laurie.”

“I saw Christine Manning.”

“Me, too,” he said quickly. “Ran into her at the hospital when I was up with Ricky.”

“Oh.” Laurie smiled fondly and touched his cheek. “You’ve been out on the boat, haven’t you? I can always tell, Breeze. Your face is shining, burnished.”

“It’s the summer sun off the water.”

“More than that,” she said, tidying herself for the walk to the Cowrie and fighting back words. “It’s more than just the goddamn sun, Captain Albury.”

IT WAS FIVE MINUTES
to two in the afternoon when Drake Boone, Jr., sauntered into his office, a tall young woman on his arm. His timing could not have been worse.

“Long lunch?” asked Christine Manning, rising from a pillowy chair in the lobby.

“Did you have an appointment?” Boone demanded.

Suzanne, his secretary, wore a vaguely helpless expression. “I thought your afternoon was clear, Mr. Boone,” she said, thumbing with mock concentration through the day’s mail.

“Drake, you’d better ask your friend to leave us alone,” said Christine, as if it were merely a suggestion. Boone followed her anxiously into his office. This was not good, not good at all. He closed the door hurriedly.

“You’re finished,” Christine announced crisply. From her briefcase she produced a thick manila file.

Boone laughed sharply. “Sugar, you been tryin’ to nail my ass since you first got to town. I told you then and I’ll repeat it now: it can’t be done. Not by you, anyway. Want a drink?”

“No.” She laid three legal documents side by side on his desk. One of them was fifty-seven pages; the other two were much shorter. The oral interviews had been completed by ten-thirty. Finding somebody to transcribe them so quickly had proved an ordeal.

“I think you ought to read Irma Clayton’s first,” Christine said, pointing to the thickest affidavit.

Boone shook his head. “Don’t need to, sugar. The woman’s obviously distraught. Her little girl is dead and she’s ready to blame it on somebody, so why not me? The only problem,” Boone continued, “is proof. She says that on the afternoon of August whatever-it-was, I stuffed her little girl with Quaaludes, right? Well, it so happens that a young fella from Key West High by the name of John Henry Russell was with Miss Julie that very afternoon, and it also happens that he saw her gulp down a dozen pills she had bought from some longhair during lunch hour. And in there”— Boone aimed a manicured finger toward a file cabinet—“I have a sworn deposition from young Mr. Russell himself.”

It was Christine’s turn to smile. “I’m disappointed in you, Drake. An old Conch fixer like yourself, and the best you can do is buy off some jock from the local high school.”

Boone poured himself a scotch. “You are wasting my time, Miz Manning,” he said icily. “You’re not gonna pin that girl’s death on me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sorry it happened—I
did
know the girl; she liked me, I guess. She’d come around to the office now and then, looking for a little action. I told her to go home, play with somebody her own age. I was nice about it.”

Christine waited placidly across the desk, listening with an expression of unbearable politeness. Boone sensed that he was talking too much.

“I’ll wait while you read the other affidavits,” Christine offered.

Boone set aside Irma Clayton’s and studied one of the short ones. “Kerry McEvoy?”

“One of Julie’s friends.”

Boone shrugged. “Never heard of her.”

“Her nickname is Daisy,” Christine said. “She was also in your office on the afternoon of August fifteenth. Tall girl, nice figure.”

Boone’s mouth turned to powder.

“Looks a lot older than fifteen,” Christine said pleasantly. “Her statement there is only about twelve pages, but she gets right to the heart of the matter. You’ll see that she even uses the proper terminology—fellatio instead of blow job. Right there on page three, Drake. And Kerry is also conversant about certain sadomasochistic practices for which you—by her account—recruited Julie Clayton.”

Boone smiled again, only this time his tile-square teeth did not show. “Christine, who is going to believe this? What jury in Key West is going to believe some junior-high whore?”

“Good point, Drake, and precisely the reason that I bothered with a third affidavit.”

Boone looked at the name and groped for the phone. “Suzanne, no calls.” He tried to pour himself a refill but splattered the desk blotter instead.

“Where the fuck did you get
this?”

“The Governor made a phone call,” Christine replied. “Judge Snow was at your little party, was he not?”

“I will fight this the whole way,” Boone snarled. “The jury will never hear a word of this. Not a motherfucking whisper of it. Judge Snow is a known drunk.”

“Is that any way to talk about your old friend?”

Boone wrung his hands under his desk. Every shred of common sense told him to clam up and get a lawyer, but he was a persistently curious man. And his adversary, for God’s sake, was a
lady
prosecutor. His blow-dried ego would not permit retreat.

“It’s all hearsay, Christine, but still, I am interested in knowing how you—how Judge Snow came to offer this affidavit.”

“Simple. He was there; he saw everything and was understandably appalled. When Julie died, he chose to tell us what he knew.”

“And I don’t suppose,” Boone snorted, “that the Governor threatened to yank his drunken ass off the bench if he didn’t cooperate in nailing ole Drake Boone, right?”

Christine returned the file to her briefcase. “Drake, trying to put you in jail with a big trial would be a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. There are easier ways to ruin you. You can scream and shake your fist and strut indignantly in your sappy little corduroy suits; you can do all that till you’re blue in the face. Go ahead and fight, put on a show. But I am telling you that this package is as good as in the mail to the Florida Bar, and that the Governor is prepared to pick up the phone and cash a few political chips with some buddies on the grievance committee. Tom Cruz and the rest of the sewer rats you represent better start hunting for a new lawyer, Drake, because your name is poison from now on.”