She worked hard for a breath. Her nostrils flared, her forehead flushed, she felt the wet weight of her heart squeezed like a sponge by the hoops of her ribs. She was halfway off her bar stool, one foot was on the floor, the strap of her purse was dangling. Above her, vines plucked downward, seizing, grabbing; somewhere an unfelt breeze was rattling dry fronds. Angelina whispered: "Sal."
That wasn't his name. He'd been trained, he'd trained himself, never to respond to it. It was not his name; it had never been his name, except perhaps in some life so remote and dead that its names had been erased, forgotten. Still, reflex lived even after life was over, and Ziggy could not stop his head from moving toward the sound. It turned a few degrees; he tried to stop it, but then it was the voice and not the word that spun him till his eyes met Angelina's.
His face was blank and false, a stranger's face. His hands were the hands she dreamed of.
For a long moment no one spoke, the noise of the bar rose up in a gibberish crescendo.
Then a voice said, "Angelina." It wasn't Ziggy talking. It wasn't Sal.
Angelina turned her head and saw her Uncle Louie, standing at her elbow. He had pizza on his breath and was looking very happy; a smile made the flesh bunch up beneath his sunburned cheekbones.
PART TWO
14
Ziggy had a policy. He didn't drink at his own bar, not while he was working.
But as soon as Angelina and her escorts had sipped one highly awkward cocktail and headed for the door, that rule went straight to hell. It was a deviation that Keith McCullough didn't fail to notice, watching discreetly as the bartender took a highball glass, filled it half-full with tequila, and fired it down.
With the rasp of sour cactus scratching at his throat, Ziggy leaned against the back bar, steadied his hands against the damp teak, and tried to think. Angelina in Key West. What a fucked-up idea. What a wild mismatch. What the hell was she doing here, and how in Christ had she recognized him when he could barely recognize himself? Thank God she'd had the smarts and the reflexes not to blow his cover when that funny-looking guy showed up. Uncle Louie. He'd distinctly heard her call him Uncle Louie. It was a name he remembered hearing long ago, back when his own name had been Sal. Louie— the black sheep of the family, the guy no one took serious.
But he was still Paul Amaro's brother; Angelina was still Paul Amaro's daughter; and Ziggy saw no percentage in getting reacquainted with the family.
He gazed absently around his now mostly empty bar, gave muddled but exigent consideration to the question of whether he should spring nimbly off the balls of his ass and get the hell out of there. Charter a plane to the Bahamas. Smuggle himself into Cuba. Go to Mexico, Panama, Belize—someplace he could again molt his soiled identity, peel off the numb dead skin of another weak attempt at a life.
Should he flee? Absently, he drew beers for a couple guys who really didn't need them, and tried to measure the depth of the dung he was standing in. Paulie didn't know his whereabouts, he reasoned: If he did, he would have sent the guys in trench coats, not his daughter. But why, then, was Angelina here? Was it possible that it was just an appalling coincidence? A lot of people, after all, came to Key West for vacation; a lot of them wandered into his bar. And how did Uncle Louie figure in? Now that Ziggy thought about it, the guy looked a little bit familiar. Had he been in here before?
The barkeep reached toward the tequila bottle, but then, midway through the motion, a whole different line of thought stopped his arm and tweaked a memory at the base of his belly. He finally let it register that Angelina looked very, very good to him.
She'd hardly changed. Her skin was not quite as taut as it had been ten years ago, not quite as burstingly translucent. She was a little fuller in the shoulders and the bosom. But in all—not just compared to Ziggy with his lopped-off being, but by any standard—she was remarkably, triumphantly the same. Unmarked; seemingly outside of time; constant as a compass needle though a whole world pivoted beneath her. The violet eyes remained clear and frank. The black hair was as lush and imperfect as it had ever been. Ziggy recalled the smell of her perfume, a little sweet and girlish. He remembered the pulse in her neck, the slight scratchiness of the lacy scalloped edge of her bra . . .
His hand shot out for the tequila bottle, and he quashed his incipient lust as decisively as though he'd slammed a window on his private parts. Was he crazy? Was he out of his mind? This was Paulie's daughter, for Chrissake, and he, Ziggy, was no longer family friend and protege, but mortal enemy, pariah. He may as well fuck death as lay a finger on her.
He should bolt; in his heart he knew it. But leaning against the bar, his shirt wet against his back, his revamped hairline beaded with oily sweat, he strongly suspected that he wouldn't. Maybe it was just the weather, the soggy sapping air that smothered decisions and nurtured indifference like a mold. Maybe it was the gnaw of something unfinished, an infecting tension passed down from one existence to the next. Or maybe it was something more perilous still. Maybe what kept him from fleeing Angelina was something that could almost stand for love, a mute desire for nearness that was as close as Ziggy or Sal had ever come to caring for a woman.