An awful thought had occurred to him: Maybe that meant he wasn't the stronger anymore.
He'd finished his cereal and sat there at the tiled table. His blind chihuahua looked up at him and sniffed at the sand in the cuffs of his trousers. The forbidden notion that perhaps his strength was failing made him weak; he could barely muster the energy to walk the dog. They took a short walk only, and once back home, Bert moped.
He moped from the living room to the bedroom. He wandered to the kitchen and then outside through the sliding doors. Standing in hot sunshine on the patio, he looked out at the milky green canal, the mute gray house across the way.
Absently, he'd sat down at the patio table. Sam's sporty yellow Walkman was out there still; the sight of it was unspeakably depressing, like the favorite toy of a child who has died. Bert picked up his dog, scratched it behind the ears, and tried to ignore the thing.
Then he heard a whirring sound, and then a click. He couldn't place the noise, and by the time he looked around it had stopped.
It happened again: Click; whirr; click; whirr; click.
It was not a bird noise or an insect noise. It didn't seem to be coming from the kitchen behind him or the canal at the end of the lawn. He focused his ears, narrowed his eyes, and saw a tiny red indicator gleaming on Sam's Walkman. Then the light went out.
Click.
It was odd. It was spooky. With a not quite steady hand, Bert reached out and picked up the small machine. It started to whir and he almost threw it on the lawn. He looked through the little smoked plastic window and saw that tape was turning.
When the tape stopped, Bert put the Walkman down. He looked at the gray house across the way. The machine clicked on again.
Nah. Could it be? Sam with his tinkering, with his yearning to invent a useful gizmo—was it possible?
Bert sat there squinting, scratching his dog like the dog was his own chin. He sat there until a considerable time went by without the Walkman clicking on, then he went inside to listen to the tape.
He dropped onto the worn settee, hit rewind, and put the headphones on. He listened through the static and the squeaking of Cherkassky's sofa cushions, and his pulse began to race. Adrenaline surged, strength returned. He listened until he heard the part about killing everybody. Then, head spinning, he reached for the phone to call the Mangrove Arms.
He should have done it a minute sooner.
By the time he dialed, an electric blue Camaro was careening off the little bridge and toward his street. Engine popping, it pulled into the driveway just as the ring tone was beginning to rasp in Bert's hot ear.
The phone rang twice, three times. Bert heard a car door open and prayed for Aaron to pick up.
"Hello, Mangrove Arms."
The voice came just as the tile-rimmed door of the rented house imploded. It quaked on its hinges and Tarzan Abramowitz, his bare chest puffed with rage, came bounding through.
The chihuahua made one shrieky little bark.
"Aaron," Bert whispered, "Aaron, they're gonna—"
The Russian thug, suspenders stretched across his rippling neck, yanked the wire from the wall.
One hard pivot brought him to the sofa. He grabbed Bert by the front panels of his chartreuse shirt, jerked him to his feet. The Walkman skidded from the coffee table, came to rest against the tile pathway. Abramowitz paid no attention to it and didn't say a word, just bundled Bert toward the open doorway, the waiting car.
The old mafioso, down to a hundred twenty-seven pounds and on three different kinds of heart pills, tried feebly to resist. Mostly he just leaned backward like an ancient crooner, his empty hands grasping woefully toward receding space. "My dog," he sang out "my dog."
Abramowitz ignored him, shoved him out into the sunshine.
Don Giovanni whined just for a moment his whiskers probing in the roiled air. Then he pancaked down against the floor, and dragged himself over to the yellow Walkman, and covered it over with his meager bony chest.
Chapter 50
When the phone rang at the Mangrove Arms, Aaron and Suki and four Key West cops had been standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking strategy. Who stands where. Who covers who. When to wait and when to spring. Gary Stubbs was reasonably happy with the plan. It was him and Carol Lopez and two others who were less experienced. But it was four guns protecting two civilians, and the arithmetic struck him as okay.
Except that now Aaron was standing there with the phone receiver in his hand, his mouth half open, a glazed look in his eyes. Out of the blue, he announced, "I'm going to Key Haven."
Stubbs said, "What?!"
"Bert. That was Bert. He was trying to tell me something. Somebody yanked the phone, I think. I'm going."
Suki said, "But Aaron—"
"They have Bert," he reasoned, his face going red with quiet pleading, "that probably means they have my father. The two of them together. Don't you see?"