Louie stammered, but only for an instant. Then he said, "The poor guy just got outa jail. We're supposed to help you send him back again?"
"Did I say I'm sending him back again?" asked Ziggy.
"You didn't say you weren't," Angelina said.
"All you said," Rose added, "you said you didn't want him where you were. And let's face it, that's 'cause you're scared of him."
With his free hand Ziggy pulled down hard on his synthetic face. "I'm scared of 'im. Sure I am. We're all scared of 'im. Why the hell else are we sitting here like goddam refugees?"
No one answered that and after a moment he went on. "Look, I've known this family a lotta years—
"An' ya wanna be honest," Uncle Louie interrupted, "it hasn't been the happiest association."
"Ya wanna be honest," added Rose, "you've been a fink."
The word stung; Ziggy felt a futile impulse to argue it away. Instead he said, "You don't trust me. Fine. You think I'm trying to save my own sorry ass. You're right. But one thing's for sure. Paulie shows up where I'm goin', he's headed right back to the slammer."
Louie said, "And if he doesn't show up, you could whaddyacallit, implicate him anyway."
Ziggy said, "That's absolutely true. I could. Nothing would be easier .. . Now, is someone gonna take the goddam gun and keep him in his room or do I carry it along for self-defense when he tries to murder me in front of half the cops in Florida?"
There was a pause. Streetlamps hummed. Toads answered one another's rumblings from shrub to shrub.
Uncle Louie looked down at his shoes, saw instead the road signs that had hovered over him on the morning that his steering wheel had turned itself and sent him careening toward Key West to be a hero. "Okay," he said at last. "Me, I'll go."
His hand started moving toward the offered weapon, but his wife's forearm came down like a board and clamped him at the wrist. "Like hell you will."
"Rose, someone's gotta—"
"Your brother's a violent lunatic."
"What's to be violent? I'm saving him from—"
Rose said, "He won't know that. Why should he believe it?"
"Excellent point," conceded Ziggy. "Maybe he won't."
"You see?" said Rose. "You see? He'll get crazy, Louie."
"I'll explain to him, I'll make him see—"
"Understand," said Ziggy, "you'll be standing between him and a payday. And one other thing— his paranoid nutcase of a partner is gonna be extremely pissed if he doesn't show."
"You see?" said Rose. "You see? No matter what, he's gonna wanna go."
Louie felt his courage leaking away, he clamped his throat to hold some in; his voice got very pinched. "Alla more reason—"
"Louie, I didn't track you down just so you could—"
She was silenced not by a word but a gesture.
Angelina had been sitting very still, seeming to fold within herself, her expression blank, her gaze turned downward. Now her hand came up slowly, resolutely. It came up before she raised her eyes and before she spoke. At last she said, "I'll go. It's my place to go."
Ziggy chewed his lip before he answered. "Angelina, I don't think—"
"He's my father," she said. "I'm the one should face him."
"But—"
"Ziggy," she said, "if you trust your plan, if you trust yourself, give me the gun."
He looked at the ground, sucked hard at an elusive breath, then very gently placed the pistol in Angelina's outstretched palm. As he did so, his fingertips raked lightly over hers. It was the first time that they'd touched in days.
* * *
Six Federal agents, dispatched amid misgivings from North Miami, had driven down the Keys in two bland cars. They'd passed the afternoon at the cheap motel where Keith McCullough stayed, and at dusk they dressed in camouflage fatigues. They blackened their faces with shoe polish and headed for the ambush site near mile-marker twelve.
Off the highway, they drove along an unpaved and slowly disappearing road that wound among encroaching mangroves. Panicked lizards scuttled across the headlight beams that rocked crazily as the vehicles bounced through potholes filled with fetid water. Twigs poked out from both sides of the path, wasps' and hornets' nests hung on them like Chinese lanterns.
Where the road was finally smothered, just before a ruined building blanketed in vines, the agents got out of the cars. They unloaded floodlights and rifles with infrared scopes. Then two men drove the vehicles back to the highway, and the others took some time to orient themselves.
The clearing had been a going business once. It featured corroded gas tanks caked in guano, some shreds of awning still stuck on random sections of rusted frame, a dock warped and crumpled like a mangled xylophone. The whole sad enterprise was subsiding now, being patiently reclaimed by shifting waters and the obstinate progress of the mangroves.