Teddy.
“Anyway,” I said, “you get over the thing about camaraderie the first time one of them takes a shot at
you. That‟s part of the scam.”
“I didn‟t mean to get off the subject,” Stick said. “The thing is, the GRIPS were mean motherfuckers
and Nance was one of them.”
“Why all this interest in Nance?” I asked.
“I‟m about to show you.”
He peeled off Ocean Boulevard just before we reached the bridge to Oceanby Island and the beaches.
The city docks were clean, well-kept, concrete wharves, stretching several hundred feet along the
river. It was early for the shrimpers. There was one boat unloading. It was jet black, its nets draped
from the outriggers like the wings of a bat. The strikers were shovelling shrimp from the hold onto a
conveyor belt that carried it into a sheet-metal building that was little more than an elaborate icehouse.
Stick pulled into a large parking lot flyspecked with battered fishing cars and stopped near a beat-up
Ford that looked vaguely familiar. Zapata peered out of the front seat and grinned.
“Hey, amigo,” he said. “How‟s everything at the track?”
“I got an education,” I answered.
“You‟re about to get another one,” he said.
“How‟s that?”
He reached out between the cars and handed me a pair of binoculars.
“Check the belt.”
I checked the belt running into the building. It appeared deserted.
“Nobody around,” I said.
“Just keep watching for a minute,” said Zapata.
Stick put lighter to cigarette and hunched down behind the wheel.
A man with a clipboard came out of the shrimp house. He was a short man with a white beard, rather
benevolent looking, with a stomach that was used to too many beers. His bullet head was covered by a
bright green fishing cap, and he was checking wooden crates piled against the back of the building. I
watched him for a full minute before I realized it was Tuna Chevos. A new beard and dark glasses
were my own excuses. I knew that face well.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “There he is, the missing link. I knew it! I knew that old bastard had to be
around here. That means Nance can‟t be too far away. How did you tumble on to them?”
“Shit, this was easy,” Zapata said. “You said Chevos ran barges on the Ohio River. Seemed logical
he‟d stick to the same trade, especially since shrimp boats move a lot of grass. So I got out the phone
book, turned to shrimp companies. I got lucky. This is the third place I checked out.”
“What‟s the name of this joint?” I asked.
“Jalisco Shrimp Company,” Stick answered.
“Let‟s find out who owns it.”
“Check.”
Another man joined Chevos, a tall, lean, ferret of a man who walked on the balls of his feet, loose and
rangy. His head moved constantly, as though lie were stalking some unsuspecting prey. I could almost
smell his feral odour three hundred yards away.
“There he is,” I said, no longer trying to conceal my hatred of Turk Nance. “That‟s Nance.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Zapata said. He was grinning like the man in the moon.
“You did good, Chino,” I said.
“Thanks. Piece of cake, this one.”
“You really have a hard-on for Nance, don‟t you?” Stick said.
“I owe the son of a bitch.”
“Well, maybe we can fix it so you‟ll be accommodated,” Zapata said almost gleefully.
“That would be nice,” I answered. “At least we know they‟re all here.”
I watched them taking inventory of the shrimp boxes.
“They look like they‟re actually working for a living,” I said.
“These are the real bad ones, huh?” asked Zapata.
I kept watching Nance, his snake eyes gleaming malevolently. Nance had killed a dozen men I could
think of.
“The real badasses,” I affirmed. “The way it is, if anybody in the Tagliani outfit is capable of wasting
the whole family, it‟s Chevos, with Nance probably doing the batting.
“Twenty-four-hour surveillance on these two, okay?” I said to Zapata.
“I‟ll see to it personally,” he said, obviously proud of his score.
“It also might help to know where the two of them were last night. Particularly Nance. But don‟t let
them on to you.”
“That may be a little tougher but I‟ll see what I can do. You want Nance, you got him.”
I gave the glasses back to Zapata. „I‟ll tell you how I want Nance. I want Nance doing the full clock in
the worst joint there is. I want him screaming in solitary for the rest of his natural life.”
The Stick stared at me with surprise for several moments, then broke into his grin.
“We got the point,” he said.
33
ISLE OF SIGHS
It was eight thirty when I started out to the Isle of Sighs and it was dusk by the time I had put Front
Street and Dunetown behind me. Crab fishermen were standing hard against the railing of the twolane bridge that connects the main island to Sea Oat Island. Below it, an elderly woman, as freckled as
an Iowa corn picker, and wearing a battered white fishing hat with its brim folded down around her
ears, fished from a flat-bottom skiff that drifted idly among the reeds in the backwater. The hyenas
hadn‟t got this far yet.
Sea Oat was the buffer, a small, marshy islet that separated the whore-city from the wistful Isle of
Sighs. There were few cars, the road was populated mostly by weathered natives on bikes. The
islanders seemed to have prevailed here, stubbornly refusing to surrender to time or progress. I passed
what seemed to be an abandoned city square, its weeds crowding the wreck of a building at its center,
then half a mile farther on, a small settlement of restored tabby houses, surrounded by laughing
children and barking dogs. Streets narrowed to lanes, oyster shells crackled beneath my tires, and the
oaks, bowed with age, turned the roadways into living arches, their beards of gray Spanish moss
shushing across the top of my car.
I was racing the sun, hoping to get to Windsong before dark, but as I got closer to the old, narrow,
wooden bridge that ties the Isle of Sighs to Sea Oat, I unsuspectingly burst out of the trees for several
hundred yards and the marsh spread out before me for miles, like an African plain. It was as if I had
suddenly driven to the edge of the world.
I pulled over, got out of the car, and leaned against a fender. The sun, a scorched orb hanging an inch
or two above the sprawling sea grass, lured birds and ducks and buzzing creatures aloft for one last
flight before nightfall. I watched the sun sink to the horizon, merge with the flat tideland, and set it
briefly afire. The sky turned brilliant scarlet and the colour swept across the marsh like a forest fire.
The world was red for a minute or so and then the sun dropped silently behind the sea oats and marsh
grass.
Whoosh; just like that it was dark.
When I got back into the car, I had a momentary attack of guilt. My mind flashed on Dutch and the
promise I had made to him. No scandal, I had told him. I thought about that for at least sixty seconds
as I drove on through the oak archways and across the narrow bridge to the Isle of Sighs. Nothing
here had changed. It was like driving into a time warp. here and there, along the rutted lanes, handcarved signs announced the names of houses hidden away among pine and palm. Once this had been
the bastion of Dunetown, a fiefdom for the power brokers who took the gambles, claimed the spoils,
divided them up, and ruled the town with indulgent authority. The ho.mes were unique, each a
masterpiece of casual grace.