Florida Straits(57)

"Enough to get heah. It needed doing and I did it, didn't I, Gino?"

Gino sat slowly on the edge of the bed, as if something in Joey's tone had grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down. Absently, he noticed that his gun was still in his hand. He slid it along the sheet and tucked it under a pillow. "Drink, Joey?" He motioned toward a low table where the dirty dinner dishes were scattered and a two-thirds empty bottle of Jack Daniel's was standing like a monument. On the dresser next to the table, the television flashed the eleven o'clock news with the sound turned off.

Joey shook his head, settled into a vinyl chair, and took a moment to rearrange his damp trouser leg so the wet part wouldn't lie against his thigh. "You're a selfish prick, you know that, Gino?"

Gino absorbed the comment like an exhausted heavyweight eating one more jab. "You come here just to tell me that?"

"I come here to get you outta my town and outta my life. But first, we talk. You coulda got me killed the other week. You even give a shit about that?"

Gino wrapped his meaty hands around the edge of the mattress and looked down between his knees. "I'm sorry, kid. I was in a bind."

"In a bind?" Joey pulled himself forward by the arms of his chair. "In a bind? You fucking jerk. You're in a bind, so the whole resta the world can go to hell? What if Bert dropped dead? What if Sandra was with me?"

Gino took a deep breath that seemed to cost him a lot of effort. He couldn't help looking back over his shoulder at Vicki. Girlfriends were not supposed to hear this kind of thing. It messed with their respect. "Listen, kid, I'm sorry. I fucked up. 'Zat what you wanna hear me say?"

"Yeah, Gino, that's exactly what I wanna hear you say. And now that you've said it, I want some explanations. Like why the fuck are you still here? You almost get me killed so you can run away, then you don't even manage to run away."

"Joey, Joey," said Gino, in a tone the younger brother knew well. It was the tone he used when he wanted to make it clear that he, Gino, was the planner, the thinker, and Joey, like an army grunt, had neither reason nor right to ask the why of things. "There's more to it than you know about."

"Wanna bet?" Joey snapped. "It's about three million dollars in Colombian emeralds that disappeared from Coconut Grove."

A wave of slow surprise moved across Gino's swollen face. It pulled at his mouth and made him mumble. "Ponte tell ya that? Bert tell ya?"

"Never mind. But now I want your side of it. From the top."

Gino crossed his legs, uncrossed them, slapped his knee, and grunted. "Sure you don't want a drink?"

"You have one, Gino. You need it. I don't."

The older brother got up and lumbered toward the bourbon bottle. Joey looked at Vicki, lying just at the fringe of a yellow pool of lamplight. In some ways, oddly, she looked better than she had before. She'd washed the tease out of her hair, and while it was now lank, thin, and coarse as straw, at least it looked like part of her. Without the foot-high helmet on her head, her features looked less pinched, and without their labored paint job, her eyes even had a kind of softness. Her mouth seemed calm, though Joey could not tell if she had broken through to some extreme form of patience or had become quietly deranged.

Gino returned with three fingers of Jack Daniel's in a smudged glass and sat down heavily on the bed. Either he sighed or some air came out of the mattress. "Awright, Joey," he began. "Awright. Now the first thing ya gotta know is that nunna this was my idea." He swigged half his drink. "But O.K. There were these two guys, Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread. They were, like, a little bit attached to my crew, a little bit attached to Ponte, but it was, ya know, a vague kinda thing, nothing really solid. Ya follow?"

"Yeah, Gino. I follow."

"Well," Gino continued, "these guys knew about the stones, they knew about the drop. So they come to me, they wanna be partners, and Joey, I swear to God, I tell 'em it is a very fucked-up idea. I tell 'em no way. But these guys, Vinnie and Frank, they're like very persuasive guys. They say, look, who's Ponte gonna suspect—his own paisans or the fucking spicks? It's a piece a cake, they say. Lift the stones, Ponte decides the Colombians fucked him, and that's the end of it."

Dried salt made Joey's scalp itch and he gave it a luxurious scratch. "Then wha'd they need you for?"

Gino drank. "They figured they'd walk away with like a million and a half each. How can they spend that kinda money without it lookin', ya know. . . ? So the deal was this: They cut me in, I get them made, so then it looks like they're earning good with us, and that's where the cash is coming from."