* * *
Agent Terry Sykes did not know much, but he knew who Tommy Lucca was, and he was awfully pleased with the results of his day's surveillance—so pleased that, when Keith McCullough joined him for a poolside dinner at Flagler House, he wanted to go over every detail of his day.
Cramming a french fry in his mouth, he said, "First this old bag hooker comes in—"
McCullough took pleasure in correcting him. "That was not a hooker, that was Amaro's brother."
Sykes pulled on his beer, wiped foam from his moustache. "His brother? In drag? I don't see—"
"You don't have to see," McCullough said. "Tell me about Lucca."
Sykes looked down at his plate: half-eaten cheeseburger, the bun scalloped with bite marks; fries cooling in a pool of ketchup. He took a deep breath, as though he had a long tale to tell, but then realized he hadn't in fact seen much. Tommy Lucca had marched around the pool, looking purposeful and hell-bent—but then, he always looked like that. He had three palookas with him—but that, as well, was pretty standard. It seemed they'd gone right in—no key, no argument. The geek in woman's clothing came out a couple minutes after. In all, Lucca was in Paul Amaro's room twenty-two minutes, and when he emerged he looked perhaps a half- shade less pissed-off than when he'd gone in. Paul Amaro had not left with him.
"Maybe Lucca killed him," Keith McCullough said.
"If he did," said Terry Sykes, "room service didn't notice. Guy went in a little while after, rolled his table out."
"So they're doing business," McCullough said. "Lucca and Amaro. Fairly interesting."
Sykes's blond hair was slightly lavender in the blue light from the pool. He reached up and scratched his head. "But I thought this Ziggy guy—"
"The connection," said McCullough, absently pushing his plate away, "it's starting to make sense."
Sykes went back to eating, fried onions squeezed out the edges of his burger. "What connection?"
"Why Ziggy's involved," McCullough said. "What I couldn't figure out, is how Ziggy would get hooked into a deal with Paul Amaro. I mean, he's not that stupid. But if it started off as someone else's deal—"
"Someone else's deal?"
"Lucca's deal. See, it's Lucca's. Amaro comes in later, and boom, there's Ziggy, suddenly in the sack with the guy that wants to kill him. That make sense to you?"
Sykes's tongue chased scraps of dangling food. "Not really."
"Not really," McCullough intoned, impressed anew at his partner's obtuseness. "Okay, it doesn't have to. But Terry, try to figure it out by the time you have to testify, 'cause it looks like we're bringing down two big guys and not just one."
* * *
The Feds were still at dinner when Michael stepped through the picket gate of Coral Shores to carry out, with great misgivings, the first of two errands he'd agreed to run for his roommate Ziggy.
As quickly as possible, he slipped away from the bustle and glare of Duval Street, its carnival vapors of candy and grease, and disappeared into quiet residential precincts where cats slunk through the lattice under porches, and household shadows sent mysterious patterns through the slats of louvered windows. He skirted the cemetery, saw the whitewashed multilevel crypts where unburied bones waited for the trumpet blast that would rehinge them and send them dancing in the sun; crossed White Street, that slacking locals' boulevard, with its hand-scrawled shop signs, its beer bottles poking out the tops of paper bags next to old men playing dominos.
He passed into a neighborhood where the houses were cinder block and the dogs unfriendly, till at length he came to the candy store in whose garden Carmen Salazar held court.
He stood before it a long moment, licked his lips, smoothed his hair, approached with tremulous resolve the cracked stone step. He went inside.
Dim in daylight, by evening the store was rudely bright with a bluish grainy glare. Behind the counter sat the fat man in the undershirt, torpid and expressionless as ever. The greasy fan turned side to side, strings of matted dust fluttered on its grille. As instructed, Michael didn't speak, just moved steadily toward the open doorway at the rear.
He was halfway through it, one foot searching for the ground on the far side of the threshold, when he was suddenly grabbed by a man who sprang from the shadows, with garlic on his breath and a tire iron in the hand that wasn't clawing into Michael's shirt. His snaggled teeth yawned open before the emissary's eyes and he said, "Fuck you want, my friend?"
Michael's foot still dangled in midair; it made spasmodic stabs at terra firma. Ziggy hadn't mentioned a welcoming committee. But then, Ziggy didn't know that Carmen's bodyguards had been recently outmuscled and embarrassed, that Michael would be their means of saving face. "I want. . ." he managed, "I want to speak with Carmen."