Mangrove Squeeze(35)

"Here?" the driver said. He looked around as he applied the brake and he saw no reason in the world why anyone would stop there. No houses, no motels; no liquor store, no welfare office. Inwardly he shook his head. Just three dirt-bags going from nowhere to another nowhere.

They got out of the cab and walked into the mangroves. The air smelled of iodine and the limestone rocks were warm beneath their feet. Not much more than twenty yards in, with the road noise already swallowed up in foliage and the light sliced into jungle patterns by overhanging boughs,

Suki caught her first glimpse of the hot dog. She saw the service window cut into the swelling roll, the squiggles of mustard embossed on the frank. "It's adorable," she said.

Pineapple and Fred just looked at one another.

With Piney leading, they climbed the cinder blocks that led to the ripped screen door on the side. Suki entered, saw the sauerkraut steamer and the pronged rotisserie, her hosts' bedrolls and their eating kits. Then, in a broken mirror hanging from a peg above the sink, she saw herself.

She wished she hadn't. Her spirit had found its own mood, independent of her body, and except for the raw ache in her throat and the bruises on her ribs, she'd been feeling pretty good. She'd had no way of knowing just how abused she looked. Her nicked cheek had gotten puffy, the little cuts congealed into a warm knot whose swelling reached to the outside corner of her eye. She'd bled just slightly from a small wound at the back of her scalp, and her hair was stuck to the blood like a bandage. The handprints on her neck had smudged and spread and darkened to a queasy unnatural violet.

She felt herself starting to cry. It wasn't from pain, and wasn't from vanity, but rather, from pity for the woman in the mirror, who seemed like someone else, the sort of universal victim that Suki never imagined she would be. But she didn't want to cry, she didn't see the point. She bit her lip and choked back the impulse that was riding up her ravaged gullet. The effort made her ears ring but her voice was almost normal when she said, "I've got to get cleaned up."

"No running water," Piney said. "But we've got a barrel and a basin. Works pretty good."

Suki nodded, tore her eyes away from the broken mirror. "Any chance of a needle and thread?"

* * *

"Has Suki come in?" asked Aaron Katz.

He was sitting in the kitchen at the Mangrove Arms, a damp cordless phone pressed against his ear. In front of him was a plate of cold eggs he hadn't got around to eating and a lukewarm cup of coffee he pecked at now and then.

"No," said a voice that was harried and impatient even through the drawl. "She should have but she hasn't."

"Do you know if she's out selling?"

Donald Egan fiddled with his cheap cigar, rounded the ash against the edge of the ashtray. "I wish I knew what my staff was doing. I wish my staff knew what my staff was doing. Is this about an ad?"

"It's a personal call," said Aaron.

Egan looked around the converted classroom that was his office. It was almost eleven, and not one of his underpaid employees had come in. The computers were switched off, vacant desks were topped with random scraps of paper and winding chains of paper clips. Wanting badly to believe that it was true, he said, "This is a place of business. We try to discourage personal calls."

"I'm afraid she might be in trouble," Aaron said.

"Wouldn't surprise me," the publisher blithely answered. He didn't know exactly what he meant by it. It was just the sort of thing he said to show that he was worldly and tough-minded, like a real newspaperman had to be.

Aaron didn't remember standing up but he was pacing now, his coffee sloshing in the mug. "I mean real trouble. Like danger. Don't you even give a shit?"

Too late as usual, Egan's humanity woke up. He said, "Look, if you have reason to believe-"

Aaron Katz hung up on him, slid his coffee mug along the table. He paced some more and his burgeoning frustration and responsibility surprised him, filled him with a reckless prideful need to act.

He found that he was headed for the door. He didn't know where he was going or what he'd do, just that he had to feel like he was helping, doing something, if only wandering blindly through a town he was still learning, on an uninvited crusade to help a woman whom he barely knew.





Chapter 17


"Attempted murder?" said the sergeant who answered the phone for Key West's one-man homicide squad. "We're kind of busy with a successful one right now. 'Zit an emergency?"

This struck Suki as an odd question, and she was less sure than ever that calling the local cops was really such a good idea. "I'm supposed to be dead," she said.

"Is it a domestic situation?" asked the cop.