Looking for good sight lines, for nests where they could hide and shoot, the agents plodded over coral rocks and tented roots, splashed through puddles and dragged their feet through traps of muck along that uncanny edge of Florida that was neither land nor sea. They took up positions in a spacious ring around the old marina's pier. The moon got higher, rained milk down on the unmoving water of the inlet.
They waited. It was still but not quiet. Mosquitoes found them, buzzed in greedy swarms around their eyes and ears. Spiders dropped from waxy leaves, then rode their own threads home again. Frogs croaked, confused by human legs pegged in the ground like pilings where no pilings were before. The air smelled of anchovies and rotted seaweed and iodine.
After a time a boat was heard. Its engine noise was at first a low and steady groan, barely distinct from the seldom-noticed murmur of the surfless ocean. But then the sound resolved into the steady beat of pistons, cylinders popping one by one as the craft crawled, unseen, through the winding, unmarked channel.
When it hove into view around the last barrier islet, Terry Sykes whispered to Keith McCullough, "Hot damn, first guest at the party."
McCullough kept his eyes on the water as Captain Johnny Castro expertly idled toward the dock. He said softly, "Lucca and Amaro, Terry. You're gonna get a citation, you know that? Frame and everything, hang it right up in your den."
Sykes said nothing, but McCullough felt him smiling, felt the moonlit whiteness of his goofy teeth between his blackened moustache and his painted chin.
46
Paul Amaro was getting ready—standing in front of the mirror, brushing back his silver hair and trying to summon up the old square and cocksure set of his jaw—when the knock came at the door.
It was a soft knock, not quite timid, but polite. It was probably the housekeeper; it was nothing to worry about. But Paul Amaro worried. He had reached that state of gloom and disillusion where dread bypassed the brain and burrowed directly into the pit of the stomach. It had become impossible for him to imagine that anything that happened could be good, and if nothing happened, that was bleak as well.
He put down his hairbrush, made one last try at firming his expression. He took a half-step toward the door, wondered if he should speak before looking through the peephole, decided what the hell. In a weary growl he said, "Who is it?"
"It's Angelina."
He heard it clearly but he didn't quite believe he had. His footsteps stalled a moment; a readiness to cry sprang up behind his eyes. Somewhere in his gut, hope was crawling like a crushed bug that would not stay dead, that roused itself for one more wingless and pathetic stab at getting off the floor. His daughter was okay. She was coming back to him. They would be reconciled.
He lunged toward the door, he was winded by the time he got there; blood was singing in his ears. He undid the locks, pulled the portal open. He saw her, his daughter. She was unharmed; unchanged. Her forehead, in spite of everything, was still unfurrowed, placid, blameless. Her violet eyes were clear and deep, the eyes he loved coming home to see.
He said her name. Some bashfulness or guilt took hold of him, he found he couldn't step toward her, but only leaned across the threshold to embrace her. She let herself be leaned toward, although her father seemed suddenly a stranger. She felt his cheek against her hair.
Then she fell back half a step. Paul Amaro grew very confused. He saw her hand in her purse, he saw it come out with a gun.
"Pop," she said, "I'm really sorry. You have to step back now. You have to step way back into the room."
* * *
Feeling for the moment safe, feeling unaccountably on top of things and confident, Ziggy didn't notice the pink taxi that followed his hulking Oldsmobile as it slowly plied the streets of Old Town. He didn't see it stop half a block away when he parked in front of the candy store on Bertha Street.
He climbed the cracked step, strode past the filthy fan, the torn seats leaking sisal, the fat silent man behind the counter.
He was halfway through the door frame at the back when his progress was arrested by a turnstile of an arm that slammed across his chest then clawed into his shoulder. In the next instant the muzzle of a gun was pressed against the hollow just behind his ear. He didn't go limp, exactly; he went extremely cooperative.
He was walked through the vines to where Carmen Salazar was sitting in his lawn chair, rubbing his chin so feverishly that the sound of beard mingled with the crickets and the rasping leaves. Standing before his sometime boss, Ziggy managed to say, "Carmen, what the fuck?"
Carmen didn't answer right away. The thug who held the gun on Ziggy pressed it in a little harder; the muzzle found a nest among the sinews. "Ziggy," said Salazar at last. "I have a question for you. You ever been afraid of me?"