She was leaving today. She'd booked her flight. She'd tried to call her Uncle Louie, left a message for him. Thanks for everything. Sorry to be leaving so abruptly. Sometime, when she was feeling calmer, clearer, she would explain it all.
She was already mostly packed, her open suitcase sitting at the foot of the bed, piled with pastel blouses and floral shifts in hothouse colors that she doubted she would ever wear back in the austere and washed-out north. Things were very different up there, she reminded herself. Up there she wouldn't greet each sunset with a salty cocktail. Up there she wouldn't spend her evenings hopping bars, eating seafood on the ocean. What would she do up there, without Michael for a friend, without Ziggy for a mission, without her own awakened desires giving direction to her days? She didn't know; the question gave her the beginnings of a bellyache. She leaned back farther in her lounge chair, offered her face to the sun, and tried to think of other things, or better yet, of nothing.
She succeeded well enough in going blank that she didn't see Michael come in the front gate from the street, and it wasn't all his shadow cooled her skin that she noticed him standing above her lounge, staring down at an unsettling angle. Russet stubble bristled on his chin and underneath his nostrils. His eyes were narrow in the sun, laugh lines at the corners; his mouth was stretched in a slightly goofy smile powered by conspiracy and triumph.
"You're looking pleased with yourself this morning," Angelina told him.
By way of answer, he reached into the pocket of his jeans, produced a rumpled bit of paper which he dangled over her like a string above a cat. "Know what this is?" he said.
Without much interest, Angelina guessed, "A new boyfriend's phone number?"
Michael said, "What kind of slut do you think I am? It's for you."
"Me?"
He sat down near the foot of her lounge. With effort he tempered his grin, looked almost priestly in a pagan sort of way. "Give me your hand."
Hesitantly, Angelina reached out. Michael pressed the scrap of paper into her palm. "Ziggy's address," he whispered.
"Michael, for God's sake!"
"We followed him home this morning. Four o'clock."
"We?"
"David and me. The whole thing's so romantic, he was into it immediately."
"You tell people? I thought I was confiding—"
"It was an adventure. We tracked him to his car, grabbed a cab to follow—"
"Michael—"
"The place he lives, it's no pleasure palace, I have to tell you. Not without a certain tawdry charm, I guess . . . but you'll see what I mean."
"I won't see what you mean," said Angelina.
"Of course you will," he said. "How can you not go—?"
"Michael, I know you think you mean well. But the spasm has passed. I'm packed. I'm leaving."
"What time's your flight?"
"Five."
"That's plenty of time."
"Time for what?"
"Jesus, Angelina! Don't you see how you could put the perfect finishing touch on this vacation?"
"Finishing touch?" she said. "God, Michael, you make it sound like, I don't know—a garnish."
"Sometimes it's like that."
"Sometimes it's like a garnish?"
He leaned closer to her, put both his hands on one of hers, closed her fingers around the precious scrap of paper. "Go there," he said. "Have a wonderful, wonderful afternoon . . . Write to me sometime, my address is on the back . . . And don't say goodbye, I can't stand to say goodbye."
* * *
They took the stretch from Coral Gables so no one would get crampy, cranky on the long ride down the Keys.
Even so, Paul Amaro was feeling foul. He looked out the window as a pretext for turning a wide shoulder on his companions, but he allowed himself to take no pleasure in the sparkling greens and blues that stretched away from Seven Mile Bridge, in the effortless flight of pelicans whose wing tips hung an inch above the water.
A suspicion was gnawing at him—the suspicion that he was being duped somehow, made a fool of. But when he pondered who or what was duping him, he could come up with no villain other than himself. He was pretending he cared about this deal. He was feigning a professional's interest in the details, going through the old charade of showing he was tough and sly. He was shamming, even, the expected avidity for money, when the truth was that, once the mindless spasm of involvement had passed, he didn't give a damn about any of it, not the guns, not the risk, not the payoff. He cared about his missing daughter. When he thought about her, worry and rage brought him to the brink of madness; when he tried to distract himself with thoughts of anything except her, he felt only a cowardly dishonesty, an emptiness beyond despair.