“Fall backward in love?”
He laughed and laughed and reached for the champagne, filling it nearly to the top of his plastic cup with a University of Florida Gators logo. Chomp. Chomp. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. I guess I’m just like this old house. A real fixer-upper.”
The house was big and empty, with a few broken windows, but so many bedrooms and bathrooms, seeming like the kind of place an old movie star could live. She could make that work. The palm trees and the beach made the old stucco, the empty swimming pool, and all that just fine. She could be happy to sit up here on the second floor and drink cheap champagne and watch the fishing boats come and go, feel the wind on her face, smell the salt air. This was at least something. This was something to work with. Eating Suki Hana alone at the International Plaza was a torture she’d rather not endure.
He smiled at her and reached for his pill bottle. Downed a little blue one. “Tallyho.”
When the police came, the first time, she didn’t even know he was gone. She was asleep in the master bedroom, a brand-new Sealy Posturepedic king they bought on sale on the floor, a swirl of blankets and sheets. Two bottles of Korbel and an empty prescription container scattered nearby. The policewoman shined a flashlight into her eyes and asked her for some identification.
“Excuse me,” Debbie Lyn said, pushing herself up and covering her bare chest. “You can’t just come in here. Bust in the door and hassle people. Just what in the hell’s going on?”
The cop looked at her partner, a burly man, and didn’t say a word, just clicked off the flashlight, the room filled with early morning glow right before sunrise.
“The neighbors called about squatters,” she said. “You do know you can’t just break into any home in Florida and set up shop. Come on, lady. Get some clothes on. Get your stuff. Let’s go.”
“It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s his. This place is his home. He bought it at auction. We’re fixing it up.”
“And who exactly is he?” the cop asked.
Debbie Lyn looked up as the cop tapped the flashlight against her leg, the room filled with that bluish-gray predawn glow. Her head throbbing from the night before, more Hawaiian martinis at a tiki bar on Treasure Island. Him doing a silly little dance, forming a conga line with some bikers down from Mississippi. Debbie Lyn touched a Tiffany bracelet he’d given her and twirled it on her wrist. “I don’t really know,” she said. “My God. How stupid does that sound? I really have no idea.”
“I knew you would come to your sense,” Delores said, speeding across Tampa Bay on the Howard Frankland Bridge in her battered little coupe, Harry Connick Jr. coming through the speakers. “The Way You Look Tonight.” Rain pinging her windshield, her wipers tick-tocking.
“He left me there,” Debbie Lyn said. “I was arrested but they let me go. I told them everything I knew about him. I’m not sure they believed me. I think they thought I was nuts.”
“And he take your things?”
“Yes, he took my stuff. Boxes of my things. Some of my clothes. My television. He took my brand-new television. And my stereo and my CDs. My UB40. Meet Me in Margaritaville.”
“No one cares about CDs no more,” Delores said. “I play this man on my iPhone. This man, Harry Connick Jr., sing from his heart. He’s a real man. He know what it is like to love and feel. I see him on TV and he says such things.”
She pounded at her chest as she drove with her left hand, right wrist covered in an assortment of bracelets. Debbie Lyn felt at her wrist for the gift he’d given her. She pulled off the silver bracelet and held it up. “Do you recognize this?”
“Yes, yes,” Delores said, taking the exit downtown. “That’s mine. You keep it. It’s yours. You earn it. I tell you what we do. First we find him. And then we kill him. You okay with that? He take your TV, your music, personal soundtrack to your life, and my bracelet. That man, Jack Russell. He take his tobacco pouch made from the tiger’s privates. That’s what we do. We kill him and take his pouch. I make a coin purse out of it. Not for big change, no. But for nickels and dimes. Small things to buy Chiclets and gumballs. He small time. He nothing to me.”
“I couldn’t kill a man,” she said. “I couldn’t kill him.”
Delores shrugged, laughing but not with much humor, following Armenia toward Bayshore, past an old cigar factory and lots of restored bungalows and new trendy restaurants. She let down her window and lit up a cigarette. “You know where he go? He go where he always go. He go to that house where they make that TV show about a zoo. You see that zoo house where he feel safe and comfortable? Like an animal behind glass. That zoo house where he woo a woman, take her to bed for the first time. That man liking to do it in the Jacuzzi like a lizard, like a reptile at the Busch Garden.”
Debbie Lyn found him in back, skimming the pool naked, a hefty blond woman in a cheetah-print swimsuit sprawled out in a lounge chair. He had his little stereo with him, playing her CDs. “Red Red Wine,” just like from before. The woman passed out or asleep, gently snoring, not even lifting her head as Debbie Lyn came around back of the mansion. She had noticed a For Sale sign staked in the front lawn that she’d never seen before.
He stopped skimming and looked up. Son of a bitch. From the looks of it, he’d just taken the pill.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, dropping the skimmer and raising his hands. Debbie Lyn marched right up to him, tearing off the bracelet and tossing it toward him. “So many leaves at this time of year. And I hate tan lines. It’s so much healthier for the skin, getting all that vitamin D.”
“And her?” Debbie Lyn jacked her thumb at the hefty blonde. “Who is she? Did you fall in love with her too? Did you ask that she join in your adventure? Is she going to help you roam the beach for surprises and dive for pirates’ treasure?”
“Where is Delores?” he said. “She put you up to all this. She filled your head with lies. Made you crazy. I told you that she’s not well.”
“She’s calling the police,” Debbie Lyn said. “They woke me up this morning. You asshole. You stole my fucking TV. And my music. It’s my personal soundtrack. Not yours.”
He stretched his hands out wide, looking in the harsh afternoon light like a tribal elder from a National Geographic film, all those folds and wrinkles like a hand-crafted wallet or a tobacco pouch.
“I was moving us,” he said. “Over here. It’s so much better over here. On this side of the bay. We can take long walks on Bayshore, gaze into God’s sunset. I just didn’t want to wake you this morning.”
The blond woman, about Debbie Lyn’s age or perhaps older, stirred, flipping over on her back and showing off the plunging neckline of the cheetah suit, a pair of ginormous breasts. “Honey?”
“And who is she? Or did she come with the property?”
“Nobody,” he said. “She was just helping me with a few items of business. Don’t let the nudity fool you. It’s all very European. Don’t let those Midwest morals your mother taught you cloud your mind.”
And at that very moment, Debbie Lyn did think about her mom, up in a nursing home in Hamtramck watching reruns of The Newlywed Game and Frank futzing around their old house, cursing her for stowing away his tools. And she thought about those high school boys laughing at her at International Plaza when they got her to talk about stroking it. She looked at him, standing there on the diving board, and thought, Gee, that old bastard could really use a shave. The white whiskers made him look crummy as hell. She fumbled around in the purse slung over her shoulder and found Jack Russell’s gun, closing one eye and aiming it right toward the right side of his face. You always started with the right, pulling your skin taut with the left hand, then started into a downward stroke. She would stroke that smile right off his face.