For Angelina, too, sitting on her lounge, nibbling mango off its skin, the contours of the universe seemed altered. Ziggy and her family—those were the two fixed points her life had long revolved around. Now she was moving, inch by inch, away from them; the process was as draining as a climb against some multiple of gravity. But did she dare, did she want, to break loose into something altogether new, or was she only testing the outermost limits of her orbit, waiting with hope as well as resignation for the moment when the only life she'd ever known would reach the end of its elastic and pull her back?
Through that hot slow day, Ziggy fell again into the outward semblance of a sulk—but what seemed to be old grouchiness was in fact a new kind of concentration. He was painfully aware that he'd never gotten anything exactly right in his life—in either of his lives. He'd done okay on certain things, he'd gotten by. But at every crucial juncture, every moment when he was truly tested, he'd fallen short. He'd blamed it on distraction; or on fatigue; or on lust for Angelina's neck. But it was something else as well: He'd screwed up because he knew that he'd screw up. That knowledge had always been the trigger of his failure, and he spent the day trying to sweat it out, to lose it and the other self-made poisons that went with it.
For Michael, the afternoon was a befuddled meditation on the dangers of the vicarious. He felt like he'd been watching someone else's movie and a giant hand had come out of the screen and grabbed his throat and pulled him in. Cops and robbers. Smuggling and vendettas. Murderous fathers and bisexual Feds. Somewhere along the line, watching had been transfigured into doing, and he couldn't shake the feeling that if he was in this far, he'd be called upon to get in farther still.
He was right. Around four o'clock, Ziggy, speaking for nearly the first time all day, said to him, "Michael, couple more things. Can I ask you to help with a couple more things?"
Michael nodded. He'd been yanked into the screen, he couldn't help but nod.
Ziggy said, "My car, it's on the side street. Underneath the dashboard, taped up, like, there's a gun. Can you bring it here?"
Michael's eyes got wide, he swallowed and his Adam's apple shuttled in his ropy neck. His voice congested, he said, "God Almighty, you're gonna need a gun?"
"No," said Ziggy. "You are."
* * *
Manny Links had been dubious as ever when Keith McCullough called that morning to ask for reinforcements.
"Lemme make sure I have this straight," the supervisor had said into the phone. "You have Amaro there. You have Lucca. You have Lucca and Amaro together. You have an informant right smack in the middle of Lucca and Amaro. And yet you have no idea what it is that Lucca and Amaro are up to."
Somewhat sheepishly, the undercover man had said, "That's right."
Links's chair squeaked, through the wires came the faint sound of fingers drumming on the desk. "And I'm supposed to send you six men, heavy weapons, infrared, to intercept this activity that you don't know what it is."
"Right again," McCullough said.
"And this course of action," Links went on, his teeth now grinding against his unlit pipe, "was suggested by a source who you acknowledge hates your guts and presumably would take great pleasure in making you look like a horse's ass."
"Probably so," the agent said.
There was a silence. McCullough could picture his boss's eyes flicking here and there around his office, the way they did when he was feeling most beset, like he was scouring the universe for some shred of sense or solace. "Sykes have a hand in this?" the supervisor had asked at last.
"This one," McCullough said, "you can't blame Sykes for this one."
"Oh, I'll know who to blame, Keith. Depend on that. . . Six men you want?"
"A.S.A.P.," McCullough said.
* * *
It was almost six p.m. when the produce truck arrived at the address in Hialeah.
The place turned out to be an auto shop, up near Opa-Locka airport, that specialized in the dismantling of stolen Lexuses and Jaguars. The Italian guy and the Spanish guy pulled into a vacant bay then watched through road-bleary eyes as a giant red sun went down beneath the muffler and transmission of a half-stripped car that was raised up on a lift.
Carlos Mendez was gracious as he paid the northerners. But he was so excited to get his guns, and so accustomed to hearing Spanish, that he noticed nothing remarkable about the New York mob guy speaking in his native tongue; he didn't even acknowledge it. Crestfallen, the Spanish guy decided he wouldn't say a word the whole way home.
While the weapons were removed from underneath the vegetables and fruits, and repacked in a different truck under iced crates of pompano and conch, Mendez retreated to the chop shop's small office and called Tommy Lucca at his hotel suite in Key West.