The winds around Key Largo had worried Alex, but now as they approached the bay side of Long Key, now as sunshine broke through the overhanging clouds in radiating spikes like a miracle in a religious film, now as sunshine touched the water ahead and set it aglow, now as a milder breeze sifted into the wheelhouse for the first time since they had left Miami, Alex suddenly felt that everything would be all right. The day, the plan, the wheel in his hands, the twin engines humming smoothly belowdecks, the boat’s prow knifing the water and sending a spuming spray back against the sides — everything felt fine, everything was good, everything was going to come off like clockwork, just the way Jason had planned it.
“These cracks you’ve been making,” Annabelle said abruptly.
Alex did not take his eyes from the windshield. He steered into the sunshine, and fantastically thought for a moment that the rays would snap off as the boat passed through them. The wheelhouse was bathed in sudden warmth and light. He squinted and said, “What cracks?”
“You know what I mean, Alex.”
“No, Annabelle, I don’t think I do.”
“Your hints that Randy made love to me last night,” she said flatly.
“Did I hint that?”
“Alex,” Annabelle said slowly and clearly and with an almost painful precision, “if you say something like that one more time, I’m going to kill you.” She kept watching him. His eyes flicked from the windshield and then back to the water ahead. “You hear me, Alex?”
“I hear you,” he answered, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look at me, Alex,” she said. He did not turn. “Alex, look at me.”
She was holding a.22 in her hand. The butt of the small gun rested on her immense belly, and the muzzle was tilted up so that it pointed at Alex’s mouth as he turned to look at her. Her face was unsmiling; the gun was steady.
“Say it one more time, Alex,” she said.
“Say what?”
“That Randy made love to me last night aboard this boat.”
“I never said that, Annabelle.”
“We’re coming to the bridge, Alex.”
“I see it,” Alex said.
“Say it before we pass under the bridge, Alex,” Annabelle said. “That way I can kill you and dump you overboard as soon as we come into the Gulf Stream. Go ahead, Alex.”
“I never meant anything like that, Annabelle.”
“You sounded like that was what you meant.”
They were passing under the Bascule Bridge now, through Channel Five, the bridge some fifty feet above them, momentarily shading the bow and then the wheelhouse and then the cockpit. The boat came out into sunshine again. Annabelle stood alongside him with the gun resting on her belly and pointed at his head.
“What do you say, Alex?” she asked.
“I’m not afraid of you, Annabelle,” he answered.
“No?”
“No.”
“Then you go right ahead and make another crack. Either now or later, or anytime you feel like it. If you’re not afraid of me, you just make another one of those smart cracks of yours.” The wheel-house was silent. Into the silence, with deadly calculation, Anna-belle pulled back the hammer of the.22, cocking the gun even though it did not require cocking before it could be fired. The hammer going back made a tiny ear-shattering click.
“Okay?” she said.
“You’re gonna hurt somebody with that thing,” Alex answered. He was sweating and his throat was dry. He did not believe for a minute that she would shoot him, and yet he was sweating and his throat was dry.
“I’m waiting, Alex.”
Alex nodded briefly. “I won’t say anything else that might upset you, Annabelle.”
Annabelle smiled, and then eased the hammer back down. She lowered the gun.
“Thank you, Alex,” she said sweetly.
7
Even moving as fast as she could, Ginny couldn’t get out of the apartment until almost nine-thirty, and then with a run in one of her stockings which she didn’t have time to go back and change. She pushed the old Chevy as hard as she could, and was about to make the turn onto the Spanish Harbor Bridge when a car came barreling up the secondary state road to make a turn just ahead of her. She jammed on the brakes and yelled “You stupid idiot!” through the open window on her left, but the driver of the other car — a 1964 Ford — had not heard her and was indeed already on the bridge and driving east toward the Spanish Harbor Keys and Ocho Puertos. She continued to nurse her anger as she drove onto the bridge, mixing her full repertoire of swear words with an equal amount of Sunday-driver criticism and also with several devout wishes for accidents that might befall the car ahead, already out of sight. She was completely exhausted by the time she crossed the bridge to Ocho Puertos. Her normal routine was to enter S-811 from its western end, driving past the Tannenbaum house and the other houses on the shore-front road leading to the diner. But this morning, as she approached the cutoff, she saw a car parked just at its mouth, right on U.S. 1. She recognized the car immediately as the one that had cut in ahead of her on Big Pine, the 1964 Ford, and her anger suddenly renewed itself and flared into life again. She slowed her own car and would have come to a stop behind the Ford had not its doors suddenly opened. As she came up behind the other car, three men stepped into the road and walked to the barricade that was across the mouth of S-811. Ginny immediately swung her old Chevy out into the other lane, passed the Ford, and then glanced back to see the three men moving the barricade aside. She had noticed that three other men were in the car, and now, as her own car moved out of viewing range, she wondered what six men in business suits were doing coming off the Long Beach road on Big Pine and racing here to Ocho Puertos where they were moving aside a highway department barricade to enter 811. She suddenly remembered, as though it had been there in a corner of her mind all along, waiting to fall into place, that a strange voice had answered the phone at the diner early this morning, long before the diner was supposed to be open for business.
Ginny pulled the Chevy to the side of the road.
She wanted a cigarette desperately, but she had smoked her last one back in the apartment and was waiting to buy a new package from the machine in the diner. A cigarette would have helped her to think this out more clearly, but she couldn’t get a cigarette until she got to the diner — and the thing she was trying to figure out was whether or not she should go to the diner. Or even onto 811, for that matter. She sat impatiently behind the wheel of her old car with the engine running and probably overheating itself, tapping her painted fingernails on the steering wheel and wondering what she should do. There probably was nothing at all sinister about a stranger answering the diner phone before eight-thirty. It was probably some truck driver, or somebody, who had driven up and knocked on the door, and Amos the nigger had probably opened up for him, even though Mr. Parch wasn’t in yet. After all, the guy had given her his name on the phone, hadn’t he? He had said This is Whatever-His-Name-Was, so there probably was nothing wrong with his being there. A guy doesn’t give you his name if he’s up to something. Of course, nobody said it had to be his right name. Mmm.
Ginny wet her lips and then put her thumb into her mouth and began chewing off the nail polish.
And if she hadn’t seen that Ford coming so fast off the Long Beach road, she probably wouldn’t have thought anything about the three men moving aside the barricade to get into Ocho Puertos. She’d probably have moved the barricade herself — how else could she get to the diner? But where had that barricade come from, anyway? It certainly hadn’t been there when she’d left last night.