McCullough turned his back on his former boyfriend. "Paul Amaro isn't down here for the weather," he said to Ziggy. "You're gonna tell me what he's doing here."
"Kiss my ass."
"And I might help you stay alive."
"I've been doing fine without you assholes," Ziggy said.
"Fine as a guy who's fallen thirty stories off a forty-story building," said McCullough. "Paul Amaro, what's he up to?"
"Lemme ask you a question," Ziggy said. "You got a wife and kids, what're you doing fucking guys?"
"And hurting people's feelings," Uncle Louie could not help putting in.
McCullough said, "Ziggy, you're trapped here. Pinned. My guess, you're not a person who likes to feel trapped. Feeling trapped makes your skin crawl. You don't have to like me. I don't have to like you. I'm your ticket out of here. Remember that."
He turned, his tight jeans creaked. He said to Michael, "Sorry I couldn't let you know some other way." And he left.
An unnatural hush followed his leaving, time flattened out like the water behind a big boat that has passed. Uncle Louie absently sipped at tepid coffee. Michael very slowly sat himself down at the foot of Angelina's lounge. "God," he said, "I feel so stupid. How's it possible to be so wrong about a person?
Angelina slid forward, put her arm around her friend, kissed him on the cheek. "Sometimes it's like that," she said. "It'll be okay."
33
The TV and the VCR were set up on a plastic milk crate in the garden. A long extension cord, orange, snaked away through the gravel and the shrubbery, climbed the cracked step up into the candy store. One of Carmen Salazar's goons pushed some buttons and turned some dials, and Uncle Louie's video began to play.
Pictures of Key West filled the screen, which in turn was framed by a shady background of Key West, and there was something unsettling in the doubling of the place, a little spooky, like those sets of dolls that are gobbled up inside of other dolls. The ocean appeared, as flat and green as the real ocean that was simmering a mere five hundred yards away. Tourist attractions flickered by—Hemingway House, Curry Mansion, Southernmost Point; the machinery suggested they were distant, exotic, touched by some unearthly magic, when, to locals, they were ordinary buildings practically around the corner, shabby monuments in need of paint, obstacles you had to go around to get to a gas station or a liquor store.
The images rocked and bounced and quivered. There was no rhyme or reason to their sequence. Now and then the screen went black or blazed with a painful glare.
Rose, formerly too critical, now felt she had to make excuses for her absent husband. "He hadn't had the camera very long," she said.
Carmen Salazar had promised himself to be nothing but gracious to this relative of Paul Amaro's. "Actually," he lied, "it's very good. He's really capturing the high points."
"But what the hell's it telling us?" Amaro said.
So far it was telling them nothing. Here was a glimpse of the harbor, a sailboat full of people going snorkeling. There went the laundromats with the names that Louie found so droll. Foliage rustled, it was hard to tell if it was in the garden or the soundtrack.
Then, with no transition, the scene jumped to a bar, an open-air place, at twilight. Matches rasped; glasses tinkled. A smoky mirror, partly blocked by ranks of stately bottles, was edged with tangles of grabbing vine. Just for an instant, the wobbly camera skated over the barkeep's turning face, revealed dark hair, olive skin already stubbly, a feisty guarded mouth.
Salazar said, "Whaddya know, there's Bigtime."
"Bigtime?" Paul Amaro said, with no particular interest. By the time he said it, the bartender's face was gone, the screen was filled with his hands instead as they layered liquors in a pony glass.
"Guy who works for me," Salazar casually explained. "You met him yesterday. Ziggy."
"Ah," said Paul Amaro, watching the barkeep's tics and swoopings as he built the drink. "Why ya call him Bigtime?"
Salazar gave a little laugh. "Ya know, I can't even remember how it started."
But by now Paul Amaro found he couldn't move his eyes from the television. A vague unease, like yesterday's, a feeling of inchoate wrongness, had started churning in his gut. "Try," he said.
Salazar felt a little scolded, rubbed his chin. "When he first came to me for work, he dropped these hints, you know, of bigger things he'd done, important people that he knew."
Amaro leaned far forward in his lawn chair, squeezed one hand tight inside the other. "Like what?" he said. "Like who?" On the screen, the stripes of booze were mounting to the top of the pony glass.