Bo had moved to the living room by then. He was sitting in front of the television, but there was no sound on, only pictures. The Shirt handed him his coffee. Bo said, "So Bert, ya like it down in Florida?"
"Love it," said the old man absently. He'd settled into a blue vinyl chair from which he could see the kitchen clock.
"Ya drive New Yawk-Miami," Bo informed him, "the state a Florida is like one-third the ride. Lotta people don't realize at."
Bert reached down for his dog, put the brittle creature in his lap. "Big state," he said.
Bo slurped espresso, pictured the maps, the mileage charts in little boxes. "Big state," he agreed.
Bert smiled blandly, peeked into the kitchen. He figured that in forty-one minutes, give or take, things would start to rearrange themselves inside his captor's belly.
———
With some difficulty, Gino Delgatto, hunkered low and squinting over the steering wheel of his rented T-Bird, found the narrow and ill-marked entrance to Nassau Lane.
By the moon and the streetlamps he recognized the cottage that the Fabretti thugs had described. There were no lights on inside. He drove to the end of the short street, turned around in the cramped cul de sac. Stray cats fled from the panning headlights that lit up garbage cans, fallen coconuts, bundled cuttings of pruned shrubbery.
He parked across the street and one house up from Arty's place. He sat quietly a moment, summoning concentration like any workman with a job to do. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, thin and supple as condoms. He checked the pistol in his right-hand pocket, the small flashlight in his left. He got out of the car and walked past the close-together Christmas palms to his victim's door.
The screen was torn; a corner of it hung down and shook like a brittle leaf in the light breeze. The front door lock had not yet been repaired. Gino tried the knob; it turned easily.
He stepped inside, his right hand in his pocket, and closed the door behind him. He took out the little flashlight and looked around the living room. He saw the mismatched furniture with its loose strands of splintered ancient rattan. He saw the cheap table with its metal legs, the rough rug with its unraveling edges. "Place is a fuckin' dump," he murmured aloud. "Guy's a fuckin' nobody." He moved toward a low bench that held a telephone and an answering machine and casually yanked their wires out of the wall.
He poked his head into the narrow kitchen, saw two unwashed coffee mugs in the sink.
He slipped into the bedroom, let his light explore it like a doctor's shameless fingers. Drawers had been hastily slammed shut with sleeves and cuffs still poking out of them. The bed had not been made, the light quilt was ranged with hills and valleys. "A fuckin' nobody and a fuckin' slob," said Gino. He saw a rickety chair with a couple of T-shirts draped over its arms. He saw a pink scarf on the back of the chair.
He continued his circuit around the room, found a cheesy lamp, a stack of dog-eared paperbacks, then suddenly yanked his light back to the scarf. He stared at it. It gleamed a lewd and fleshy rose against the darkness all around it. No, he thought, it's impossible. Heavily, he walked around the bed. He picked up the scarf in his obscene gloved hand. He held it tight against his face and smelled it, then let it drop as though it carried some terrible contagion. "That fucking slut," he said. "That two-timing skinny-ass whore."
He scrunched his fat face into a mug of wronged trust. He started to pace but there was nowhere much to go. He moved back to the chair, picked up the guilty swatch of silk, and started tearing it to shreds. It was light cloth but it was hard to tear; Gino sweated as he ripped it. The fabric made a desolate rending sound as it was destroyed. Charged pink tatters fell from Gino's hand, he had to kick them off his pants leg.
At length, wet in his clothes and breathing hard, he sat in the dark in the bedroom chair to wait. Outside, breezes rustled the palm fronds, smells of jasmine and salted dust came through the open window. Gino's gun was in his lap, his gloved fingers stuck to it like gauze to a scab. Patiently, he waited for Arty Magnus, the nobody who had to go, and for that fucking tramp whose name he wouldn't say, if she happened to be with him.
45
"You like him, don't you?" Sandra said.
She and Debbi were working elbow to elbow in the kitchen, rinsing dishes, slipping them into the racks of the dishwasher. Water was running in the sink; the sound was companionable, intimate.
"I like him a lot," said Debbi.
"It shows."
Debbi flushed at this; her sunburned forehead got redder at the roots of her red hair. Like everyone with a secret, everyone with a new emotion, she wanted to probe it, tease herself with it, bring herself to the delicious cusp of going public.