Teddy was worried he’d have trouble staying on Vincent’s tail in this automatic Chevette he’d rented. Some piece of equipment-it took about twenty minutes for the son of a bitch to lug out of low gear and get moving. When he saw Vincent also had a Chevette he had to laugh. Here they were playing a deadly game in a couple of kiddie cars. The red one following the white one from Isla Verde through the busy Condado Beach section and across the bridge to Vincent’s old neighborhood. In fact, it looked like he and Linda-wherever the hell she had come from-were going into the same place where he’d stayed before. The Carmen Apartments above the liquor store. The cop sure had a lot of class, didn’t he? Moving in, it looked like, both of them with suitcases. Well, wasn’t that cute?
What he’d do, work something like the idea he had in Atlantic City but never got to use. Follow Vincent to get Vincent to follow him. Come up next to him at a light. Let him see you. Maybe make some remark to the girl, or to Vincent about the girl-she wasn’t bad looking-and then lead them out in the country somewhere. Have a place picked out. Stop off the road in some trees and wait for Vincent to come up to the car to chat or whatever-look up in his police rule book to see what he could do and what he couldn’t, as dumb and stupid as he was. Time it, pull out the new stainless steel Smith & Wesson .38 they said was a military weapon, stolen from the army depot; it was okay, nothing fancy. Mr. Magic would do a job with it-pop the cop between the eyes looking in the car at him and then give old Linda a pop, hey, give her two pops for one, both at the same time, Jesus-and bid adieu to sunny Puerto Rico on the first plane out. Get back to Atlantic City and see what was cooking.
His mom had said on the phone nothing was. She said the police had not stopped by or called, not even that nice colored man who had admired her parrot stuff so much. He’d told her, “Mom, the jig ain’t a cop he’s a goddamn kidnapper.” His mom said, “You didn’t learn language like that in my house.” He asked her to send him a check on account of lawyers didn’t take VISA and he was going to sue the ass off the police here for persecuting him. His mom said, “What? I can’t hear you so good, this connection…” Teddy said, “Sure, Mom. All I can say is, you got a pretty shitty attitude for a mom.” His mom said, “What? What’d you say?”
Parked across the street and down a bit toward the Hilton, Teddy looked up at the Carmen Apartments, three floors of windows and tiny balconies, an old building on a street named after an Indian, Calle Geronimo. Which didn’t make much sense. He didn’t believe Geronimo had been a PR. He wondered what apartment they were in… And just like that stopped wondering, as Linda appeared on a second-floor balcony, right above the liquor store.
Vincent didn’t mention Miami Beach, that it was time for him to go home, past time; he would set it aside for a while. They were together now, closer because they had been apart. They sat in the sun at Escambron beneath that clean sky and talked about things as they thought of them, Teddy already out of the way as a topic, done to death.
“I can’t play with him anymore.”
“Good. But it makes you mad.”
“More than that.”
“You have to forget about him.”
He was trying. They watched the sleek young bodies in skimpy stringy bathing suits, the vendors cooking, selling, the families on blankets, and looked out at the low barrier of rock a hundred yards offshore and imagined it, squinting, a rusting snip’s hull, a long brown submarine… And a red Chevette behind them. Parked back in the shade of Australian pines. He didn’t imagine the car, it was there, and felt someone inside it watching them-trying to forget Teddy but feeling his presence.
Linda had said, “I missed you, Vincent. Boy, did I miss you.” And it was true, he believed it. But then learned another truth. An executive at Bally’s had forced a keyboard player on Linda. “A guy who used to arrange for Jerry Vale-I’m not kidding, he actually did, and he brought his charts, very tight with the exec, you understand, had worked for him before and I was supposed to play his music, this high romantic drama or cute little happy Italian numbers…”
“So you didn’t leave there-” Vincent began.
“Wait. I had to get out, Vincent, it’s true, I won’t lie to you. But I missed you-I mean I really missed you, and that’s truer. I could’ve gone to Orlando, I had an offer…”
“You got a ride with Jackie…”
“I went to see Tommy about a job and ran into Jackie as he was getting ready to leave. He said the building was starting to shake and things were coming loose. He said he needed somebody to talk to, preferably a woman.”
“He sounds different.”
“Don’t you know why? Wait. First I find out Miss Congeniality left him.”
“She didn’t.”
“LaDonna went back to Tulsa. Jackie said after all he did for her. Could’ve made her a star. Then, I find out, he had a long session with the cops, I guess about Ricky and the guy Ricky shot.”
Vincent said, “That was it,” with a grin. Jackie had got out before they connected him with the bad guys; no other reason. “He’s the same Jackie but he sounds different.”
“That’s it exactly. He was more nervous than usual-I mean when I went to see him. But he came onto me without wasting a minute. ‘You want to work, kid? You’re just what I need down at Isla Verde, make you a star within eight weeks, guaranteed.’ The hotshot from Vegas. On the plane he starts telling me about all the celebrities he knows, his very dear friends, all the personally signed photographs in his office and how he makes a bet with everybody who comes in…”
Vincent nodding, “I know.”
“… he’ll give ’em a hundred bucks if they can name a major fucking entertainer who isn’t on that wall. Well, I bet him a hundred bucks he couldn’t go the whole trip, from wherever we were at the time all the way to San Juan without saying ‘fuck’ in one form or another at least once.”
“He lost.”
“He could barely speak. He’d start to say something and there’d be a long pause, like he was learning a foreign language. Finally he said, ‘Fuck it,’ and handed me a hundred-dollar bill and said he was going to do it on his own.”
“That’s what it was,” Vincent said, “I noticed in the lounge. It isn’t that he listens any more than he ever did. But he didn’t use the word, I don’t think even once.”
“He did use it once, I remember,” Linda said, “but for Jackie that’s fucking remarkable.”
As they dressed to go to dinner Linda watched Vincent slip the blue-steel automatic in the waist of his trousers, at the small of his back, and glance at his profile in the dresser mirror, his linen sportcoat hanging open, limp.
“You saw him,” Linda said.
“I think so.”
“He knows where we are?”
“I think so.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re shutting me out,” Linda said.
No, he was detached; he was a policeman, he knew how to get outside of himself, look at something without letting his feelings get in the way. Teddy might be back but he was not between them. He told her that at dinner in the Spanish restaurant, Torreblanca. He told her Teddy would have to wait, and maybe he would get tired of it and go home. He told her he wasn’t worried about Teddy, as long as he sat facing the door. Linda said, “I’ve never even seen him.”
Vincent said, “Would you like to?”
They came out of the restaurant, waited as the parking attendant brought them the white Chevette, backing it up the entrance drive from the street. “He’s about halfway down the block,” Vincent said, “to the left.”
Ready to tail them. Magdalena one-way east and Vincent would have to turn to the right leaving the drive.