I watched him call a shot, line it up, and sink the eight ball. He grinned, playfully punching the other player on the arm. “Gotta split.” I overheard him saying. “My old lady’s coming back from Utah. Been gone a fuckin’ week visiting her mama out West. I got the worst case of blue balls, bluer then that number two ball.” He laughed, placed the stick in a rack and left. He walked past me, the smell of testosterone and body odor followed him out the door.
I gave it a few seconds, listening for the sound of a Harley engine starting. I inhaled deeply, turned and walked across the floor of the bar. He stood outside on a wooden deck elevated off the ground a foot or so. He lit a cigarette with a Zippo lighter, the smell of lighter fluid in the breeze. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, man, you got a light?”
He looked at me oddly, his bloodshot eyes searching my face. “Sure.” He fished in his pants pocket for his lighter. “Where’s your smoke?”
“Here.” I reached inside my shirt and retrieved the icepick he used on Nick. “You left something behind. Thought I’d return it.” Before he could fully register what I said, I drove the icepick into the center of his left shoulder. Between the rotator cuff. All the way in to the wooden handle. To the bone. The cigarette toppled from his mouth.
He swung at my head with a powerful right hook. I danced backward, his fist missing my chin by an inch. He yelled, “Mother fucker! You’re a dead man!”
“I heard that earlier from your pal, Carlos Bandini.”
He charged me — an enraged brown bear. I knew the embedded icepick was taking some of his prowess down. But to be caught in his massive arms and body slammed could lead to a broken back. I dodged his attack and kicked him in the side of his thick skull. He fell for a moment, shook it off, and stood, blood pouring down his chest and over his belly. He pulled the icepick out of his shoulder, grinned, and swiped in the air at me. “I’m gonna stick this through your neck. Shoulda done it to your pal. Next time I’m gonna skin that curly-headed bastard.”
He lurched forward, the icepick barely missing my chest. He jabbed, the steel point raking down my forearm. When he thrust again, I used both hands to pull his arm hard. Pulled him off balance. He fell, dropping the icepick. I grabbed the pick and slammed it through the center of his palm, skewering him to the wooden deck. Then I drove my fist into his jaw with a hard right, a fast left and another right. His eyes rolled. I hit him again. I grabbed him by the bandana and lifted his head off the deck. I leaned into his face and said, “If you ever touch Nick again, they’ll find your body parts in the same place they’ll find Bandini’s, that’ll be on the windows of cars because after the vultures digest what’s left of you, that’s all you be. Bird shit on a window. You stuck the icepick into Lonnie Ebert, didn’t you? Answer me!”
He grinned through blood and loose teeth. “Fuck you, dead man. He’ll come huntin’ you.”
“Who? Bandini? I found him.”
“You’ll never find him ‘til he wants you to.”
The front screened door opened and two bikers stepped out. One slid a long, serrated knife from a sheath on his belt. I reached behind my shirt and leveled the Glock at them. “Drop the knife!” They did as ordered, both with palms facing out. I glanced over at Pirate’s Harley-Davidson. The skull and crossbones, the vacant eye sockets in the skull staring at me. I looked down at Pirate, barely conscious, the dropped cigarette smoldering near his shoulder. I said, “Didn’t you learn how to use an ashtray? That’s a fire hazard.”
I turned and shot a bullet between the eyes of the black skull painted on the gas tank. Gasoline poured out, splashing over flattened beer cans and remnants of fireworks. I picked up the burning cigarette and tossed into the puddle of gas. Then I turned and ran to my Jeep. I started the engine and roared out of the parking lot as the Pirate’s motorcycle exploded in an orange ball of fire that reached higher than the brick chimney on the Lone Wolf Saloon.
Blood dripped from my arm as I drove fast, my thoughts bouncing from Nick to Courtney Burke. I didn’t know if the damage I did to Bandini and his henchman, Pirate, would build up more fear than anger in them. But I did know that to do nothing would prevent nothing. I learned a long time ago that a douse of preventive medicine can lower the risks of disease. Bandini was a cancer walking on two legs. Maybe I’d cut it off at the knee. Maybe not.
Who had Pirate been referring to when he said, ‘You’ll never find him ‘till he wants you to.’ If it wasn’t Carlos Bandini, then who was it? Maybe Pirate was doing what cons do … conning. Deception is their reality.
I pulled into the parking lot of a strip shopping center. I went inside a drug store, bought gauze, tape, and a bottle of hydrogen-peroxide. Outside, I stood beside my Jeep in the lot and poured half the bottle over the deep wound the icepick carved into my forearm. White bubbles boiled up out of the six-inch gash. I dressed the cut and got back in my Jeep, heading for the marina.
I drove through the Florida countryside, beneath the canopies of live oaks on both sides of the road, their thick limbs arching over the highway. I had a sudden urge to pick up little Max and head back to our old cabin on the St. Johns River. To canoe down river and fish for bass hiding in the shallows around the cypress knees. To lie back in the canoe under the warm sun and simply drift in the slow current, letting the ancient river guide me, floating like a reed basket on the Nile. I wanted the St. Johns to carry me and my little dog around the mossy bends and shoals laden with bald cypress trees, honeysuckles, and weeping willows whose slender fingers scratched the back of the old river.
Maybe I could push the events of the last few days out of my mind, push Andrea Logan’s appearance back into a college yearbook, into a black and white memory, a static image in alphabetical order with no biological order — no lifeline connection to the present. Maybe I could learn to not care how and why Courtney Burke knew about the birthmark on my arm — to let her find whatever eats at her soul without trying to save it for her — to somehow keep Nick from taking such a bad and humiliating beating. Maybe the old river could rock the cradle of my world and return the genies to the bottle, to lock away the time capsule of my life and allow me to live in the present, the moment, without worrying about what I do disturbing the future of others.
But I couldn’t. Whoever I was, whatever gene pool my conscience floated in, I had no choice but to be engaged because it wasn’t only about me. And for the good of others, I wished it was.
The buzzing of my phone lying in the center console interrupted my thoughts. I answered and Dave Collins said, “Where are you?”
I never like conversations starting with that question. “Highway 92. Why?”
“Don’t come back to the marina, at least not right now.”
I figured his warning had to do with my fiery exit from the Lone Wolf Saloon. “Why shouldn’t I come back there?”
“News media are everywhere. Thicker than thieves, and probably just as unsavory. They smell blood, Sean. Not so much yours as Senator Logan’s.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently, the DNA testing that the local constables are doing was leaked to the media. They know the cops are testing DNA samples from you and Andrea, hoping to get a sample from Courtney Burke to prove one way or the other whether she, the alleged serial killer, is the biological daughter from Andrea’s former relationship with you. Problem is … nobody can find the girl. But since Senator Logan is the presumed presidential nominee, you can bet the farm that a lot people are looking for her now. And her life just might be in even greater danger.”
43
Boots Langley was about to drop a mouse into the snake cage when his mobile phone rang. He looked into the red eyes of the albino python coiled in the glass enclosure, its tongue tasting the rodent molecules in the air. “Bon appetite,” he said, taking the top off a small Styrofoam container and setting the mouse in one corner of the cage.