Rattled, she fell back half a step, said, "Louie, you could have told me, we would have worked it out."
He swept off the itchy wig, tossed it on the bed. "Told you what?"
"This dress-up thing," she said. "I hear it isn't really that abnormal."
The acceptance with which she said it, the compassion, made Louie for an instant almost wish he was a real drag queen.
His wife said, "I would've tried to understand. I would've loved you anyway."
"You would have?" Louie said, his voice soft but taut with wonder. He took a bold step in his mid-heel shoes, closed the space between them, and held her hard against him.
* * *
It was sad, how easily Tommy Lucca's enforcers got the drop on Carmen Salazar's bodyguards, how puny the local tough guys seemed when the outside world invaded.
Next to the practiced bone breakers from Miami, the homegrown goons were slow, flabby, indecisive, almost humane. They'd hardly reacted when the out-of-towners bulled through the narrow passage of the candy store and stormed through the doorway at the rear, their hard hands readying their guns. The defenders had fallen back, spontaneously surrendered; there was no fight but only a weirdly dance-like ritual of dominance and obeisance, as Salazar's two guards stood dwarfed by Lucca's men like pawns immobilized by rooks.
A third Miami hood strapped a dazed and silent Carmen Salazar into his lawn chair, swaddling him in a dozen ravels of shiny silver tape. With each wrap, Salazar's usually languorous posture grew more rigid, until finally he sat there squeezed and snug as a sausage. He didn't have time to be afraid, exactly. His thoughts were bleak but resigned: I've made a dumb mistake; I should have realized sooner; I'm dealing with a madman.
Tommy Lucca, twitchy and snarling, paced through the dappled light of the garden so that broken sunshine painted him one moment in stripes, the next in leopard spots. He pointed a finger at his taped-in host, said, "You're fuckin' me. You and Amaro, you're cuttin' me out."
Salazar groped for composure, said, "Tommy, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Tommy? ... To you, fuckeye, it's Mr. Lucca."
Salazar never sweated. He sweated now, his shirt grew wet beneath the coils of the tape.
Lucca paced. "Amaro's been to talk to you. Yes or no?
"Yes. I told you that."
"What the fuck about?"
Salazar tried to breathe in deep but the tape was like a second set of cramping ribs. Paul Amaro might kill him if he spilled his secrets. Tommy Lucca might kill him if he didn't. This was what happened when you got ambitious, moved beyond the small safe confines of your garden. "Personal stuff," he said. "Family stuff."
Lucca said, "Do better, asshole."
Foliage scraped. Salazar swallowed, reluctantly told Lucca about Paul Amaro's daughter and his brother, and the video brought down from New York, and the search for Ziggy Maxx.
Lucca paced, stalled, paced again, unsatisfied. "The two of you watch videos. He's looking for his relatives, for a man that everybody knows has not been seen in a dog's age. A bigger crock of bullshit I have never heard."
"Mr. Lucca, why would I lie to you?"
"Cocksucker Amaro offered you a bigger cut."
"We haven't even talked about that deal."
"How's he routing the guns?" the mafioso chipped away. "Through Tampa? Through New Orleans and down the Gulf?"
Salazar tried to move against the tape; the effort made the bonds seem tighter. "I told you, Mr. Lucca, there aren't any guns."
Lucca mugged toward his underlings, showed them he was not fooled for a moment. Then he moved very close to Salazar's chair. Fear sent a sharp pain through the seated man's bowels; he braced himself to be smacked or pummeled but Lucca reached out very slowly, with a mocking gentleness intended to humiliate, and grabbed him by the chin. "Carmen," he said, "I used to think you were bright, that I could work with you. Now I see you're one more second-rate scuzzball, I gotta watch you every second."
He released the other man's face, took half a step away, swiveled toward him once again.
"Carmen, we're gonna do this deal. I want it and we're gonna do it. But I have to tell you, I'm disappointed in you. That it turns out you're the kinda scumbag that would rather take money from a has-been from New York than do right by your people here in Florida."
"I haven't taken any money," said Carmen Salazar.
"Your neighbors in Florida," Tommy Lucca said. "Don'tcha have no fuckin' sense a neighborhood?"
39
Love gives a man courage, or at least makes him feel that he should act courageous.
Uncle Louie, having lain with his wife, having been reminded that she'd missed him, now remembered what feeling strong was like; he resolved to confront his brother Paul. He'd come to Florida to try and make things right for Angelina, to show his family that he had some brains and nerve, that he could be of use. Here, finally, was his chance. Feeling loved himself, he'd make Paul understand Angelina's love for Ziggy, make him see that love was more important than revenge. He'd be the hero by being the peacemaker.