Florida Straits(55)

Stay between the red and green markers, Zack had instructed, but Joey hadn't realized that at night, with only starlight on them, red and green channel markers look very much alike. Joey had expected two ranks of beacons, pointing the way as clearly as the reflectors on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What he found was a seemingly random array of unlit pilings hammered into muck, winding through grass flats and scattered coral heads. He throttled back, rubbed his eyes, and took a thin comfort from the sound of his engine. The motor noise sounded a lot like a car; it had become the only thing still linking him to the world of the familiar.

He picked his way to the mouth of the harbor, where the vast Atlantic collides with the huge gyre of the Gulf, and the clapping currents raise ripples whose foamy tops stand in the air like cake frosting. Joey didn't understand why the boat was bouncing so much all of a sudden, why every instant his knees had to find a different angle to stand at. He didn't grasp why he was going more sidewise than forward. He fed more gas to plow through the rip; warm spray hit him in the eye and a big splash soaked his sneaker.

Then he was past the harbor entrance and out into the Florida Straits.

Here the water was empty and the shoreline black with the drooping shapes of the Australian pines. Small waves were pushed toward Joey by the breeze, and the boat did belly flops over them, the hull taking off like a low-launched rocket, then smacking back down with a spanking sound, the engine whining as the prop lifted into the foam, then stabbed back into the solider water below.

For some minutes Joey sliced ahead through the sameness of the waves, and from moment to moment a change was coming over him. There is a wide-awake drunkenness that comes from doing something new and finding that it is not impossible. In the grip of that brave giddiness, nothing seems impossible, and people look for ways to prove this joyful lunacy to themselves. They take dares, jump from rooftop to rooftop, surpass themselves and usually survive but sometimes die excited. Joey suddenly remembered a conversation he'd had up north, sitting over an espresso with his buddy Sal. Joey, you're gonna be like all alone down there, Sal had warned. Maybe I like that idea, Joey had said, with swagger, but in his own mind the accent was on the maybe. But here he was, in a boat, in the ocean, at night, without even experience for company, about as alone as a person can be, and whaddya know, he did like it. He liked it the way some people like icy showers or large amounts of hot sauce. It set him up. It got him ready. Ready for what? He couldn't have said and it didn't matter. Just ready. Ready was enough.

—

A few minutes before eleven o'clock, Joey climbed onto the private dock of the Flagler House with two lines in his hand, and tied four different attempts at knots in each of them. Then he took a moment to get his land legs back and look at the hotel. The building was long, squat, and heavy, a checkerboard of lights turned on and lights turned off. A cool blue glow hovered over the swimming pool, and on the palm-strewn beach torches were still burning, the remnants of a Caribbean Night cookout or some such entertainment. Joey did not yet have a plan of approach. Something inside him knew that in a place where most people arrive by car, rented cars no less, the man who arrives by boat is marked as special and should stroll in like he owns the joint. But he could not be sure that Charlie Ponte had not put a lookout in the lobby; or that his thugs outside didn't have a sight line to the elevators, or that Ponte hadn't bribed someone on the staff to do his watching for him. Getting caught consorting with Gino—with Dr. Greenbaum—would no doubt win him another and final trip to Mount Trashmore.

So Joey slowly and vigilantly walked the length of the pier. On the beach, busboys were still clearing chafing dishes from long tables whose cloths were splattered with barbecue grease and melted sherbet. Their soiled uniforms tinged orange by torchlight, they loaded the glinting pans onto trolleys and wheeled them away. Joey watched where they went: along a narrow concrete path that lost itself in a clutch of palms, then reappeared at the back end of the poolside bar and curved off again toward what seemed to be a descending ramp near the far end of the building.

Discreetly, trying to look like any other tourist who hoped not to appear lost, bored, or caged, Joey meandered toward the ramp. Skirting the pool, he heard vapid hotel lounge music filtering through beaded curtains; under the thatched roof of the poolside bar, a blender, sounding very much like a tiny, frenzied outboard, was frothing up some dubious milk shake of a cocktail for what seemed to be the only couple left outside. The bartender gave Joey a friendly nod, an offer of conviviality in sympathy for his being all alone. Joey smiled the shy smile of a passerby who knows that he will be forgotten the moment he has passed.