Mangrove Squeeze Read online

Then he heard a whirring sound, and then a click. He couldn't place the noise, and by the time he looked around it had stopped.

  It happened again: Click; whirr; click; whirr; click.

  It was not a bird noise or an insect noise. It didn't seem to be coming from the kitchen behind him or the canal at the end of the lawn. He focused his ears, narrowed his eyes, and saw a tiny red indicator gleaming on Sam's Walkman. Then the light went out.

  Click.

  It was odd. It was spooky. With a not quite steady hand, Bert reached out and picked up the small machine. It started to whir and he almost threw it on the lawn. He looked through the little smoked plastic window and saw that tape was turning.

  When the tape stopped, Bert put the Walkman down. He looked at the gray house across the way. The machine clicked on again.

  Nah. Could it be? Sam with his tinkering, with his yearning to invent a useful gizmo—was it possible?

  Bert sat there squinting, scratching his dog like the dog was his own chin. He sat there until a considerable time went by without the Walkman clicking on, then he went inside to listen to the tape.

  He dropped onto the worn settee, hit rewind, and put the headphones on. He listened through the static and the squeaking of Cherkassky's sofa cushions, and his pulse began to race. Adrenaline surged, strength returned. He listened until he heard the part about killing everybody. Then, head spinning, he reached for the phone to call the Mangrove Arms.

  He should have done it a minute sooner.

  By the time he dialed, an electric blue Camaro was careening off the little bridge and toward his street. Engine popping, it pulled into the driveway just as the ring tone was beginning to rasp in Bert's hot ear.

  The phone rang twice, three times. Bert heard a car door open and prayed for Aaron to pick up.

  "Hello, Mangrove Arms."

  The voice came just as the tile-rimmed door of the rented house imploded. It quaked on its hinges and Tarzan Abramowitz, his bare chest puffed with rage, came bounding through.

  The chihuahua made one shrieky little bark.

  "Aaron," Bert whispered, "Aaron, they're gonna—"

  The Russian thug, suspenders stretched across his rippling neck, yanked the wire from the wall.

  One hard pivot brought him to the sofa. He grabbed Bert by the front panels of his chartreuse shirt, jerked him to his feet. The Walkman skidded from the coffee table, came to rest against the tile pathway. Abramowitz paid no attention to it and didn't say a word, just bundled Bert toward the open doorway, the waiting car.

  The old mafioso, down to a hundred twenty-seven pounds and on three different kinds of heart pills, tried feebly to resist. Mostly he just leaned backward like an ancient crooner, his empty hands grasping woefully toward receding space. "My dog," he sang out "my dog."

  Abramowitz ignored him, shoved him out into the sunshine.

  Don Giovanni whined just for a moment his whiskers probing in the roiled air. Then he pancaked down against the floor, and dragged himself over to the yellow Walkman, and covered it over with his meager bony chest.

  Chapter 50

  When the phone rang at the Mangrove Arms, Aaron and Suki and four Key West cops had been standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking strategy. Who stands where. Who covers who. When to wait and when to spring. Gary Stubbs was reasonably happy with the plan. It was him and Carol Lopez and two others who were less experienced. But it was four guns protecting two civilians, and the arithmetic struck him as okay.

  Except that now Aaron was standing there with the phone receiver in his hand, his mouth half open, a glazed look in his eyes. Out of the blue, he announced, "I'm going to Key Haven."

  Stubbs said, "What?!"

  "Bert. That was Bert. He was trying to tell me something. Somebody yanked the phone, I think. I'm going."

  Suki said, "But Aaron—"

  "They have Bert," he reasoned, his face going red with quiet pleading, "that probably means they have my father. The two of them together. Don't you see?"

  Stubbs saw. But the problem was the numbers. He said, "Listen, if we divvy up our forces—"

  "So call more people," Suki said.

  Stubbs's neck chafed against his collar as he turned. He gave a quick bleak smile or a wince. "You think we keep a SWAT team here? There are no more, okay?"

  The phone started beeping in Aaron's hand, he finally remembered to hang it up. He pointed vaguely toward Key Haven, and with an immovable calm, he said, "Look, there's two old men in trouble up there, and they're not any less important than us. I'm going."

  He turned his back. He was heading for the office door.

  Stubbs blew air between his teeth, said, "You're staying. Two of us'll go."

  Carol Lopez quickly counted troops, said, "But—"

  Dryly, Stubbs told her, "If they're there, they can't be here. We'll be back as soon as we can."

  And Stubbs left with another officer, their footsteps heavy on the front porch stairs. The ones left behind sipped their cooling coffee. The Mangrove Arms, as it almost always did, once again seemed emptier than it should have been.

  Abramowitz shoved Bert into the backseat of the Camaro, quickly tied his skinny ankles in their sheaths of nylon socks, and drove the few short blocks toward Markov's house.

  There, standing on the seawall, with Cherkassky monitoring his every move, the physicist was casting the last of his equipment to the tides. Beakers bobbed away like men-of-war, glinting in the sun; acid sizzled as it hit the ocean salts then became inconsequentially dilute in all that vastness. Pebbles of plutonium, far heavier than lead, defied the current and sank deep into the muck, becoming tiny heaters whose warmth would fascinate the fish and make the plankton glow.

  When the job was done, Ivan Cherkassky pulled back his thin gray lips and said with satisfaction, "You see— like there never was a lab."

  Markov said nothing, stared down at the water. Science was his secret edge and science now was finished. Underling and figurehead, nothing more. His humiliation was complete.

  "Only we are small-time smugglers," said Cherkassky. "Like a thousand others. Hardly worth the time of FBI. Deported, Gennady. Where next you like to go?"

  Markov didn't respond, and Cherkassky didn't care. Neither quite knew why he still bothered talking to the other.

  The Camaro's tires crunched over Markov's driveway, and the two old comrades walked toward it.

  The car's bright blue paint glittered in the sunlight. There was no foreboding in the sky, and this was somehow cruel. It should have been night, but it was day. It should have been stormy, but it was hot and calm, the cloudless sky imposed no mood. Silently, Markov and Cherkassky climbed into the car along with bound and stoic Bert the Shirt and headed downtown to try to save themselves by murdering everyone who'd dared to know them.

  At the corner of Whitehead and Rebecca, Pineapple sat on the curb in the moist shade of the banyan tree and thought things over.

  He wished Fred wouldn't put sweet things so crudely. Shacked up. Made it sound rough when really it was tender. Aaron and Suki kissing; sharing a blanket; all that stuff. She'd liked him from the start; Piney had seen that right away. So he was happy that they were together. If they really were. He just hoped he'd get to see her now and then, visit for a while.

  He sat there and he twirled his parking sign. Twirling it was something he did when he was preoccupied; the arrow faced all different ways, and people couldn't find his boss's parking lot. But there'd been a few distractions that day. Two unmarked cop cars had pulled up in front of Mangrove Arms. Four cops went in, three of them in uniform. A little while after, two came out again and drove away. Why all the coming and going? It was worrisome, and Piney closely watched the old hotel.

  Inside, in the kitchen, Carol Lopez was worried too. But she was the seasoned one, the pro, and she couldn't let it show. She pushed her hat back and stole glances at the guy that Stubbs had paired her with. Rookie. He had pale pudgy fingers and the leather around the snap of his h
olster was perfectly uncrinkled, like the snap had never once been opened. She sipped more coffee and looked down at her watch. But the watch could only tell her what time it was, not when anything would happen.

  Aaron and Suki were sitting at the unromantic table, holding hands. They didn't just hold palms, but interlaced each and every finger, and Carol Lopez looked at the twined-up digits as at a Chinese puzzle, trying to figure out which fingers belonged to whom. It dawned on her that once those hands were parted they might never be rejoined.

  She put down her coffee cup, said, "I think it's time we went to our positions."

  Music was blasting at the T-shirt shop.

  Infernal bass shook the floor, screaming treble knifed through the racks of merchandise. Back in the stockroom, Sam Katz slumped and swayed on his hard stool, now and then humming scraps of tune that had nothing to do with the music that was playing. He did not hear the approach of a loud car in the alleyway that backed the row of stores.

  Tarzan Abramowitz stopped the blue Camaro and opened up the stockroom door. A moment later, he half- shoved, half-carried Bert inside.

  With his ankles tied the old man had to hop and shuffle. He hopped close to where Sam sat, mouth taped, wrists bound, pants stained. Their eyes met, Sam's soupy and facetious, Bert's vigilant and sly. A century and a half of life between them, and neither had any idea what to say or do.

  Markov and Cherkassky wandered in. Cherkassky blinked around the ranks of cardboard boxes, the prodigious piles of shirts. Thinking aloud, he said, "Here they will search, find ikons, paintings, cash. These things we must let them find."

  No one else was thinking of those things. Tarzan Abramowitz had reached into his pocket and produced a folding knife.

  Unhurriedly, he opened it. The blade was long and slender, a filleting shape, with just a hint of an Arabian curve; it caught glare from the one bare hanging bulb and sprayed it back around the room. The music kept pounding, drum machines ruthless in their chattering.

  The young man in suspenders clutched the handle of the knife and approached Sam Katz with the dispassion of a farmer moving toward a heifer or a suckling pig.

  Bert, immobile, watched him for an instant, and there stampeded through his mind a lifetime's worth of playground bullies; he somehow found the archaic courage of the stronger kid trying to protect the weaker, and without deciding he hopped between the killer and his victim, making short and shallow leaps as though he was racing in a potato sack.

  Abramowitz seemed amused by the absurd and gallant gesture. He snickered as, with one huge and hairy arm, he slammed Bert across the chest and shoved the old mobster aside. Bert went down like a toppled statue, his fleshless hips bouncing and scraping along the splintery floor. He groaned just once and then he lay there as the murderer turned his attention back to Sam. Bert found to his horror that he could not avert his eyes.

  He watched as the assassin closed the distance to his prey. Saw the unpanicked sorrow in Sam's eyes as the killer grabbed him by the jaw. Almost gently, with a bizarre solicitousness, an art, like a barber preparing to trim behind an ear, Abramowitz turned Sam's head. Skin stretched across the neck, grew translucent above the blue and tired artery that carried blood to his flagging brain. Giving in to naked fear at last, Sam tried to cry out, his voice buzzed like a piteous kazoo behind the duct tape. Abramowitz changed the cant of his blade so that light flashed on the ceiling, shifted his stance like a hitter at the plate, and cocked his elbow high.

  And Ivan Cherkassky, calmly and without hurry, said, "No. Wait."

  Tarzan turned to look at him, still holding Sam's face, still wrenching the old man's jaw. Sam's eyes had lost the horizontal, they swam like the eyes of someone who was seasick.

  "Blood on floor, no good," Cherkassky said. "Blood on floor ruins everything."

  Tarzan was jumpy and unconsummated. His hand was sweaty around the knife. "Strangle 'em?" he suggested.

  Cherkassky pulled his lumpy face, considered. Strangling was better. But then he shook his head. People thrashed, lost skin and hair while getting strangled. Skin and hair were bad things for the FBI to find. "We do the others first," he said. "Afterward we take these people somewhere else."

  Abramowitz scowled, blew out a stale breath and, like a turned-down lover, reluctantly released Sam's face. It took a long time for Sam to straighten out his neck.

  "This brave one," Cherkassky went on, pointing at the supine, panting Bert, "tape his hands, his mouth."

  Bert rolled onto his side and protested that. He was a dead man; he felt he had a right to. There were things he wanted Sam to know. "Let us talk at least," he said. He gestured vaguely toward the thumping madhouse music. "No one's gonna hear."

  Ivan Cherkassky, paranoid and brutal but not without respect for the obligations of a boss, pursed his lips and shrugged. He said to Tarzan, "Only do his hands."

  He himself went up to Sam and pulled the silver adhesive off his face. It came away with a sound like ripping canvas and left a gray-white residue behind. He looked at Sam's cracked lips and withered gums, and shook his head. "Weak old men," he said. "Almost I am sorry."

  Chapter 51

  On Key Haven, Lieutenant Gary Stubbs unholstered his revolver as he slipped out of his unmarked car to approach the tiled house. Sweat prickled his neck; hot sun dried the sweat and left a paste of oily salt behind.

  His partner covered him as he took low and furtive steps along the driveway, then flattened himself against the mosaic frame of the kicked-in door. His gun was propped against his breastbone, pointing at his chin. Hot tiles pressed against his back. He summoned nerve and stillness and listened hard.

  He heard no breath or scuffling from inside, just a ticking sound, dry and faint and syncopated. It could have been a wind-up clock, a timer, just possibly, for a bomb. Waiting suddenly seemed a bad idea.

  Stubbs braced his trigger hand and pivoted, facing full into the living room, and screaming "Freeze!"

  His eye detected motion and he aimed his gun at a ghostly white chihuahua spinning in futile little pirouettes, its paws making tiny ticking tap-dance sounds against the tiled floor. Blind, the dog yet turned its milky eyes toward the barrel of the cop's revolver, its dry nose sniffing for a friend.

  Stubbs plucked his wet shirt from his skin and looked around. The phone was pulled out of the wall. There were some magazines and a yellow Walkman on the floor right near the dog. Those were the only signs of a struggle.

  He checked the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets. Nothing. He gave the dog a bowl of water and a scratch behind the ears, and left.

  Next they drove to Markov's house.

  The house was closed up tight. Stubbs parked in the shade of the porte cochere and went up to the front door. He listened, heard silence. He knocked and rang the bell, sang out, "Open up. Police." Even to himself, the challenge sounded thin.

  There was no response and he decided to do some peeping. He stepped back around the shrubbery and soon found Aaron's footprints, still clearly etched in the moist soil of the beds. He retraced the other man's journey past the dining room, the master suite, down the long and narrow guest wing to where the lab was. He stopped where Aaron's steps had stalled and blurred and doubled back, and he peered intently through the slats of the not quite snug-fitting blinds.

  He saw a small guest bedroom.

  There was a Murphy bed, complete with fancy spread and flounce. A small nightstand held a reading lamp. There was even a book on the stand. There was no sign whatsoever of a lab.

  Stubbs stood there for a moment. His shirt was soaked and sun was clawing at his neck. Suddenly it seemed like he had been away from Whitehead Street for far too long, and at the bottom of his stomach there formed a pulsing knot that had the weight and bitterness of a big mistake.

  He ran across the lawn to his unmarked car and headed back to town.

  The banyan tree had clustered trunks all squeezed together like organ pipes, and it threw a blanket of shade that covered a quarter acr
e. Once Pineapple had settled into that lake of shadow, he could keep the same position for hours at a time, only slightly shifting his butt against the curb so that his legs wouldn't fall asleep. He was sitting there, insignificant and loyal, when a blue Camaro came popping and growling down the street and parked outside the Mangrove Arms.

  He watched. The driver got out without bothering to turn the motor off. He had big shoulders and narrow eyes and wore just suspenders, not a shirt. Then two older men stepped out. One of them was thin and brittle, a sick and sour pallor on his crescent face. The other was fat and sweaty. He was the man who'd brought the red wagon back into the mangroves, the man with the limestone dust on his expensive shoes.

  The three of them hesitated just a moment by the car, then they headed toward the front porch steps. There was something in the stiff and sneaky way they walked that Piney didn't like. He waited for them to vanish through the picket gate, then, without bothering to stand, he slid his butt along the curb, closer to the entryway, and he watched and listened as he twirled his PARKING sign.

  Bert the Shirt rolled over on the floor a couple times, until he collided with a heavy cardboard box that he could brace himself against. Straining so hard that he felt it in his bowels, he jerked and shimmied to something like a sitting position, and then he coughed and took a rest. When he had his breath back, he looked at Sam—the wild hair, the pin- wheel eyes, the blotchy trousers. He said to him, "You look like hell."

  Sam smiled at that. "And you look like a broken puppet. Like someone got your strings all twisted."

  Hellish music hammered through from the shop, acid light streamed from the single naked bulb. Sam made a great effort to arch his back, pointed with his chin at the piles of T-shirts, the dusty floor. He went on, "What a way for it to end, huh, Bert?"

  "It ends," said Bert, with just a suggestion of a shrug. "What's the difference how?"