Welcome to Paradise (19 page)

Squinting, straining, he studied the bed as
though there were some mystic pattern in the rise and fall of the
ripples in the cotton blanket. He knew there were two bodies there.
He knew that any second the dog would start to yelp and time would
shrink to a twitch and he'd have to take his shot. But meanwhile he
could see no more than one inchoate lump between the sheets, one
heap suggesting tangled limbs and loins.

Readying the fish, he edged closer, his knees
nearly touching the foot of the bed, close enough to hear the
whoosh of breath. And from this new perspective, the geometry of
the bedclothes told him there was just one person on that mattress.
Was it possible? It made sense that the chippy would do her
business and then slip out. So much the better. But how had she got
past them, watching in the Jag?

No time to think about it now.

He inched up along the bedside, following the
cocoon that swathed Big Al from heel to head, passing knees,
thighs, waist, measuring the distance to the victim's rib cage, to
the heart and lungs that would be pierced. He started lifting the
fish. Its lacquered skin had gotten sticky from the heat of his
gloved fingers.

He raised the tail above his head. He
balanced the abdomen against his other hand so that the death-spike
pointed toward Big Al's torso at an angle like a falling bomb. He
caught a sharp breath through the nylon that deformed his face,
hitched his arms a notch higher, then locked his bandy muscles,
fixed his gaze on the lump of flesh about to die, and brought the
stuffed fish hurtling down with all his might.

At that instant Katy Sansone twitched the
sheet back from her face.

Squid Berman saw the spiky hair, the forehead
that was not Big Al's, and was horrified.

The harpoon was heavy, was descending with a
dread momentum. This was a debacle. There was nothing artful about
killing the wrong person, skewering a chippy. But the spike was
coming down and he didn't have the strength to stop it. All in a
heartbeat he was wrestling against the very motion that he'd
started, his limbs contending wildly against themselves. He clamped
down with his arms, tried to suck back gravity with the muscles of
his chest, and managed just barely to deflect the grim trajectory
of the spike.

It sliced through the blanket and grazed Katy
Sansone's flank before sticking eyes-deep in the mattress, impaled
as though it had fallen from the sky.

Squid Berman, his balance thrown off in the
grotesque and desperate effort to change the course of wrongful
murder, fell flat on top of Katy, pushed off again and started
running even as she screamed.

Her scream, at last, woke up the dog, which
had been insulated from sound and foreign odors by her master's
blanket and his breathing and the safe smell of his chest. But now,
hair on end, with no thought whatsoever for herself, the valiant
shih tzu sprang down from the sofa and lit out on ticking, sliding
paws toward the intruder. She caught up with him as he was escaping
through the bathroom door. He paused just long enough to shoot
pepper at her nose and eyes, then crawled beneath the shower and
was gone. Fifi yelped and ran in circles.

Al Tuschman bolted up as well, as quickly as
his cramped legs would allow him, and ran the short length of the
alcove. Groping for the switch, he turned the light on and
discovered, through the rude and sudden glare, a bizarre and
inexplicable tableau: a painted sailfish having done a face-plant
through his mattress, and Katy quivering like an outsized butterfly
freshly pinned in wax.

"Jesus. You okay?" he asked.

She couldn't answer right away. She was
trembling and she badly needed to slip out from under the pole-axed
blanket, to persuade herself she wasn't really trapped there.

The dog, in torment, found Al's feet,
whimpered piteously against his ankles.

He picked her up and stroked her head, and
watched the pale and quaking Katy wriggle toward the edge of the
sheet.

To no one in particular he said, "God
Almighty. And I really thought my luck was changing."

Al Tuschman stood inside the thatch
enclosure and held his dog high up beneath a tepid shower. Fifi
didn't like the splash and dribble of the water but it was better
than the burn of pepper. She trusted that her master was doing the
right thing.

Katy Sansone was leaning against the counter
by the sink. With a pale green washcloth she dabbed at the thin
line of drying blood that stained her right side, just above the
waist.

It was three-thirty in the morning.
Adrenaline had rendered them wide awake and almost sober. Calamity
was intimate but not immediately sexy; they felt hardly any
discomfort now, standing in their underwear.

Turning off the shower, wrapping the wet dog
in a bath towel, Al said, "Didja see anybody? Anything?"

Katy shook her head, kept dabbing at the
blood. The thin red line would disappear and then re-form, a little
fainter every time. "Someone fell on top of me. That's all I felt.
Didn't even feel the cut. Didn't see a thing."

Rubbing the dog in the towel, Al said, "Maybe
the clerk."

They retreated to their separate corners,
retrieved their clothes, and dressed. The stuffed fish was still
poised in its improbable headstand on the bed, its spined fin
spread proudly open like a winning hand of cards. They left it
there as evidence.

Outside, the layer of blue light still sat
atop the pool. Giant leaves secretly savored the hours of dripping
dew. Al carried Fifi as he and Katy crunched over the gravel to the
office.

They found the desk clerk dozing with his
elbows on the desk. A tiny muted television threw an anemic glare
on one side of his face. With a considerate softness, Al said,
"Excuse me . . ."

If the clerk heard him at all, he heard him
in a dream. A mouth corner tightened, ruby studs moved on his
eyebrow.

Louder, Al said, "Excuse me!"

The clerk blinked himself awake.

"Did you just see someone sneak in and out of
here?" Al asked him.

"Hm?"

Al put his hands flat on the counter, leaned
across them. "Look. Someone just broke in here with a giant fish
and tried to kill her. I'm asking if you saw anyone."

Sleepily the clerk said, "Giant fish?"

Al said, "You are really worthless."

People are sensitive when they first wake up.
The desk clerk flushed and for an instant seemed about to cry. "You
don't have to get nasty, Mr. Tuschman. I've worked eight straight
shifts."

"I know, I know," said Al, feeling guilty
now. "Rents are high. How 'bout you call the cops for us, at
least."

The clerk stifled a yawn then reached stiffly
toward the phone. His hand was lifting the receiver when Katy
softly said, "No."

Al looked at her in her pink shorts and
lime-green blouse and high-heeled sandals. "No?"

Katy's near-demise had focused her attention,
and she'd been thinking hard. She'd been thinking about nicknames.
About license plates. About how that other Al was treated in the
seafood restaurants they used to go to in the city. "Tusch," she
said, "I think we better talk."

*

"Mafia?" said Alan Tuschman. The word felt
odd in his mouth, felt like a stranger had borrowed his voice to
say it.

Katy blew steam from the surface of her
coffee. "I mean," she said, "you never know for sure. But,
hey."

She broke off with a shrug and Al looked out
the window, checked on Fifi, tied up to a parking meter. They were
sitting in an all-night diner on Duval. The bars had just closed
and there was something bleakly, forsakenly transitional about the
scene outside. It could almost have been quitting time in a mill
town somewhere. People wandered, glazed, unsatisfied, wondering
what was left for them to do with the dregs of time until they
slept. Cop cars cruised by slowly, waiting for the sluggish,
drunken fights to start.

Katy went on. "This much I know—he was having
business troubles in New York. That's what all of a sudden put him
in such a rotten mood. Whoever he works for, they put his worst
enemy in charge. That bent him really outa shape."

Al played with his spoon and thought it over.
"I just don't see what this poor bastard's business troubles have
to do with you almost getting murdered."

Katy sipped her coffee. Out in the unnatural
twilight of the sidewalk, two guys started cursing at each
other.

Softly, she said, "Tusch—or should I say Big
Al?—who was supposed to be in that bed?"

Al blinked. He plucked at his shirtfront,
twisted his neck from one side to the other. He ran his hands over
his torso where the spike would have gone in. "Now wait a second
..."

Katy waited several seconds, but Al could not
continue right away.

Finally, with the brittle logic of someone
trying to convince himself, he went on. "Look. He's from New York,
I'm from Jersey. He's in seafood, I sell furniture. He's like
five-foot-two, I'm six-foot-three. Someone mixed us up? . . . Nah,
it's too ridiculous."

"Okay, it's ridiculous," said Katy. She
paused as a waitress went by with a cinnamon roll. The cinnamon
smelled great. "Mind I get a Danish?"

"Get a Danish."

She ordered it and then resumed. "So, Tusch,
okay, it's ridiculous. But lemme ask you something. Do you have
friends or enemies who are the kind of people who would put rotten
calamari in someone's car?"

"No."

"He does."

The Danish arrived. She cut it into wedges
and started eating one.

"Lemme ask you something else. Among your
circle of acquaintances, are there guys who specialize in finding
weird new ways to murder people in their beds?"

Al pulled on his face. It had been a long
night and the skin felt very loose. Absently, he picked up and
chomped a piece of Danish, swallowed it along with the conclusion
he could no longer fend off. "It's one big fat mistake?" he
murmured. "The whole thing's been one big fat mistake?"

Katy shrugged and sipped her coffee.

Al sipped his, then suddenly brought forth a
quick and honking chuckle. He tried to put some sportsmanship in it
but that didn't work. "I don't know whether to laugh or be really
pissed."

She looked at him over the rim of her cup.
"Be pissed. It might come in handy."

She said it as an ally. He knew she did, but
still, the comment worried him. She saw the worry in his face.

"Look," she went on, "I know a little bit
about these people. They're bullies. Real tough till you stand up
to them."

"Stand up to them?" said Al. "They're
killers. Me, I haven't had a fight since junior high."

"Come on. You're big. You're strong."

"I'm chicken."

He tried to say it lightly, blithely, but at
four A.M. things have a way of coming out truer than they are
really meant to. Katy's face told Al that his joke had failed but
his revelation had succeeded. He prepared to flush with
embarrassment. But he looked at Katy's unmocking eyes, and the
embarrassment didn't come. He felt relief instead. He heard himself
keep talking.

"I've always been chicken. Playing sports.
The pressure, the contact, you could get wracked up any second.
Always scared. Never admitted it. Can't admit it if you're big.
Some people see right through it, though. Like my boss. Ya know
what he told me just as I was leaving to come down here? Told me,
'Al, you're big, you're strong, but deep down you're a softie.'
Killed me with that."

Katy said, "I think it's nice."

"Nice," said Al dismissively. "Nice for
selling dinettes. Less nice for dealing with the Mafia."

Katy started picking up another piece of
Danish, put it down again, and placed her hand on top of Al's. Her
hand was a little sticky but he liked it. "Tusch," she said,
"everyone's afraid. Doesn't matter you're afraid, matters what you
do."

It mattered to him. He looked at her and
frowned. Outside, a patrol car had turned its beacon on; cold blue
light raked across the diner window. Fifi had started barking.

"You'll do what needs doing," she told him.
"I know you will."

He doubted it. He said, "How's your side? It
hurt?"

"No big deal," she said. "Hey—how 'bout we
find someplace to watch the sun come up?"

On Long Island, dawn was on a dimmer the sun
thwarted like an unlucky performer who couldn't find the break in
the curtain. Light barely trickled through a chilly haze the color
of weak tea. It was an hour before there was brightness enough to
quell the streetlamps and throw the first, faint shadows from
basketball hoops and minivans crouched in asphalt driveways.

In his four-bedroom split-level, Nicky Scotto
woke up nervous. He tried to convince himself that it was a happy
nervous, the nervousness that came with triumph. Big Al Marracotta
should be dead by now. If everything had gone well, that is. His
own control of the fish market should be secure—assuming he'd
rightly interpreted Tony Eggs' sphinxlike advice.

But what if he hadn't?

Too late, the rashness and the riskiness of
his strategy was getting through to Nicky. He'd unilaterally called
a hit on a powerful and well-connected man. Cagey old Tony had
stopped well short of saying anything that would make him party to
the call; he could totally disclaim it with a shrug, a lifted
eyebrow. What if something went wrong? What if it was only his
ambition that made Nicky imagine that he'd got the go-ahead?

He tried not to think about it. He showered
and shaved and dressed for work.

But at the fish market office, his antsiness
only increased. Big Al's things were still around. The edges of his
family portraits stuck out from underneath the phone books. His
calendar had a dentist's appointment marked down on it. This gave
Nicky the creeps, brought home to him the enormity of what he'd set
in motion.