Joey nodded again. Maybe he'd turn up, maybe he'd call. The younger brother didn't think so. He stared through his sunglasses, past the thin bedroom curtains at the brightening day, and wondered how it would be when he could no longer stall and had to tell Vincente.
25
Somewhere in the Carolinas, sometime after dawn, Pretty Boy pulled his Lincoln off the Interstate and swung into a Shoeless Jimmy truck stop. He parked in a distant comer of the lot. Not that he was seriously worried that Gino would draw attention to himself. The captive was handcuffed, his mouth sealed with duct tape, his legs bound up double so he couldn't kick against the carpeted walls of the trunk. Still, he could bounce a little, he could groan. Better to leave him where the highway hum would drown him out.
The Fabretti thugs got out of the car and stretched. Less than twelve hours from Miami, it was already a different world, an ice age. Against the red sky, frost-loving pine trees, ramrod straight, were wreathed in frigid mist, the vapor wound through the branches like a corkscrew.
Pretty Boy did a little dance, shifted his weight from foot to foot. "I hate the fuckin' Sout'," he groused. His breath showed opaque white as he said it. "You're gonna freeze your ass off, why call it Sout' to begin wit'?"
"It's called Sout'," said the philosophic Bo, " 'cause, like, back inna Civil War—"
"And they got such stupid fuckin' names for things down heah," interrupted Pretty Boy. He gestured disgustedly toward the frosty neon sign above the restaurant. "Shoeless Jimmy Truck Stop. Betty Sue Biscuit's White Trash Cafe. Whistlin' Darkie Trailer Lodge—"
"Go easy onna pills, huh?" Bo suggested. "They're makin' you, like, irritable."
Pretty Boy flapped his arms to warm himself. "What's makin' me irritable is that dog turd inna trunk. I still say we shoulda—"
"How many more states I gotta listen ta dis?" protested Bo. "Florida. Georgia. Sout' Carolina—"
"And fuck geography too," said Pretty Boy. "Ya fuck geography," said Bo, "how ya gonna know where you're at?"
His partner didn't answer, just fumbled in the pockets of his sharkskin pants for his bennies. A couple more pills, three, four cups of coffee, he'd be driving over the Verrazano Bridge, looking at the skyline, getting ready to deliver his half-dead cargo to Aldo Messina on the seafood docks in Brooklyn.
———
Over breakfast, Joey said, 'Take a ride wit' me, Pop? I gotta look at some property up the Keys, I'd like to know what ya think." The Godfather looked up from his grapefruit. He knew nothing about real estate, and his son had somehow come to be an expert, as much an expert as a briefcase guy who went to a fancy college. But it wasn't Joey's know-how that Vincente was reflecting on; it was the deeper mystery of his kindness. The kindness to coddle an old man's vanity, to let him believe he wasn't in the way, he was helping. Vincente thought, His mother was very kind. He musta got it from his mother. He said, "Sure, Joey, I'm always happy ta take a ride."
The two men left the house around nine-thirty, comfortably before Debbi would arrive in her taxi from Miami. Sandra would have a chance to talk with her alone. Maybe Gino would call while Vincente was out.
It was a beautiful morning, with just enough breeze to animate the palms, and with scattered puffy clouds whose flat bottoms were tinged green by the reflecting water of the Straits. The old El Dorado hummed along, archaic and imperial beside the rented compacts, its enormous tires gripping the pavement like giant paws. There was something goofily erotic about the knobs and swellings of the dashboard. Vincente stroked the orifice of the AC vent. "I'm glad you kept this car," he said. "Car this nice, ya can't find 'em anymore."
Joey just gave his father an absent glance from behind his blue-lensed sunglasses.
They looked at lots on Summerland Key, three rocky parcels overgrown with grayish scrub and fronting on a silted-up canal that smelled like anchovies. While Vincente listened in with pride, Joey and the seller talked about flood plains, dredging regulations, rights-of-way. The seller wanted eighty-five a lot, and Joey said he'd think about it. He said it with a perfectly unreadable neutrality that the Godfather could only admire.
It was now eleven-thirty, and Joey suggested continuing on to Marathon, twenty-five miles farther up, for lunch. It seemed a long way to go for a bowl of chowder, but Vincente didn't argue.
They went to a place on the Gulf side of the highway and sat outside, under an umbrella made of thatch. Between spoonfuls of soup, Vincente said, "Joey, I never really thanked ya for gettin' me together wit' Ahty, for pushin' me on 'at."