She said, “Am I going with you?”
“You gonna follow, in a day or so. But tell me where you going now, where you gonna be.”
“You won’t believe it. Harry’s apartment in South Beach. For my own protection.”
“You feel you need it?”
“Well, I sure don’t want to see Bobby again. I’ll call when I get there, give you the number.”
“I got all kind of numbers for Harry Arno,” Louis said. “What I need to know, if it’s true what my horoscope say, about romance could suffer.”
“I doubt it.”
“Tell me what you feel.”
“Well, I feel something,” Dawn said, “pressing against my tummy. It means you haven’t lost confidence in your ability to please others.”
“I get next to you, girl, I become confident in a big way.”
She looked up at him, making a face with sad eyes.
“I have to get going, or Raylan’ll be looking for me.”
“You call him Raylan,” Louis said. “What’s he call you?”
“I didn’t tell him anything, honest to God.”
“I know you didn’t, baby.”
They sat in metal chairs on the Della Robbia porch making conversation, waiting for Dawn Navarro.
“Harry says these chairs have to be fifty years old,” Joyce said. “He never sits out here-doesn’t want to look like he’s retired. He said the way it used to be, every hotel along the beach you’d see old people lined up in their chairs like birds sitting on a telephone wire.”
A guy in his twenties, a grown man wearing shorts down to his knees, no shirt, but gloves and knee pads, went sailing past on a skateboard.
“Harry says the weirdos have taken over and he doesn’t like it. You know, maybe he did just take off.”
Raylan watched the guy on the skateboard, wondering if this was the high point of his life, weaving through crowds of people in bathing suits and resort outfits-the guy wanting everybody to look at him-skimming past the tables outside the Cardozo, across a the side street, where Raylan had walked inside to sit at a table with a man he told his time was up and when the man pulled a gun, shot him. He had thought it was going to happen with Bobby Deo, in front of Dawn’s house, but he didn’t force it and Bobby, on the edge of doing it, changed his mind. He wondered if he had wanted Bobby to pull his gun and tried to remember what he felt in those moments. There was too much to watch here to concentrate on something that didn’t happen. He wondered what he’d do if he saw Bobby now, on the street, Bobby going to see his girlfriend, Melinda. Raylan couldn’t picture them together. He liked Melinda for no special reason; he liked her because she seemed natural, full of life. He could stop in while he was down here, ask her… what, if she’d seen Bobby? Try to set something up?… He didn’t want to use her that way. He was thinking, though, she could help him bring Chip Ganz out in the open, and she might go for it. The Santa Marta, where Melinda was staying, was only a few blocks from here.
Joyce said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What?”
“Letting her use Harry’s apartment.”
“It’s not her idea.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“You said ‘letting her use it,’” Raylan said, “like she asked if she could.”
“How about ‘putting her up in Harry’s apartment’? Will you accept that?”
“Why don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
“Harry has nothing to say about it. Don’t you have places where you make arrangements to keep people like that?”
“Like what?”
“Witnesses-or whatever she is. Don’t you put them up in a hotel room?”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“I know what it is,” Joyce said, “you don’t have authorization, so you’d have to pay for a room out of your own pocket. That’s why you thought of Harry’s place.”
“He won’t even know about it.”
“No, but that’s why you want to use it-it won’t cost you anything.”
Raylan let it go. She was looking for ways to criticize him or she was being protective of Harry or-whatever her reason, it didn’t matter.
They sat in silence watching vacationers, the fun-seekers, across the street in Lummus Park and out on the beach where you could burn your feet off without shoes getting to the ocean.
Joyce said, “Harry has a lot of nice things in his apartment.”
Raylan pictured Harry’s living room, looking for nice things. Harry had an imitation-leather recliner, so did Dawn.
“You afraid she might steal something?”
“No, but she could mess the place up. We don’t know anything about her,” Joyce said. “Does she cook?”
Raylan couldn’t recall any cooking smells in Dawn’s house. He said, “I don’t know.”
“That could present a problem.”
“You mean if she cooks?”
Joyce, watching people on the street, didn’t answer.
“Harry doesn’t cook, does he?”
She said, “What’s Harry have to do with it?”
“I don’t think she’ll go in there and start cooking anyway,” Raylan said, “so I’m not gonna worry about it.”
“Where is she?”
“She should be along any minute.”
“I’ll bet she doesn’t come,” Joyce said.
Raylan’s beeper went off. He took it out and looked at it, said, “Excuse me,” and went into the hotel.
As soon as he was back, standing by his chair, Joyce said, “She’s not coming.”
“It was the office,” Raylan said. “I have to work a court security detail. Some cartel guy’s getting sentenced.”
“You have to leave? What about Reverend Dawn?”
“You said you wanted to meet her.”
“I did? When?”
That’s right, it was Dawn who said Joyce wanted to meet her. Raylan said, “All you have to do is show her upstairs. You feel like it, you can keep her company, sit around and chat.”
Joyce said, “You suppose she’d give me a reading?”
Louis put the Mercedes back in the garage and went through the house to the study. Chip was still there on the sofa, the same as when Louis had left, but with expectation in his eyes now, like waiting to hear bad news.
“She wasn’t home,” Louis said.
“You go by the restaurant?”
“They said she must’ve gone to read somebody, so we fine, no problem. I get any calls?”
“Your buddy in Freeport,” Chip said. “I could barely understand him.”
“He leave a number?”
“Said he’d call back.”
Louis studied Chip on that big sofa, the man’s bones showing he was so thin, with kind of a yellow cast to him underneath his tan, like he might have some slow sickness taking over him, AIDS coming to Louis’s mind. He used to wonder if the man was queer or maybe went both ways. Dawn was the only woman Louis knew of the man had been with and Dawn said Chip was never much in bed, went through the motions and got it done. Louis used to worry the man might come on to him sometime, but it never happened.
“You feeling all right?”
Chip gave him a shrug.
“You look like you winding down,” Louis said. “Where’s Bobby?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
Louis used the remote to switch the picture from the front drive to the room upstairs-man, tired to death of this security shit. He saw Harry lying on his cot again, his shirt off, food from the dinner plate on the floor.
“Bobby still hasn’t shot him,” Louis said. “That’s good, since Harry’s all we got.” He saw Chip watching, but not saying anything. As tired of all this as you are, Louis thought. He switched the scene to the patio and there was Bobby standing at the table, his back to the camera.
Louis went out through the sunroom. He walked toward Bobby, still at the table, Louis saying, “What you doing out in the sun?”
Bobby came around to stand with his hands at his sides, arms loose. Louis recognized the pose. The next thing he saw was Bobby’s left hand lifting the front of his fiesta shirt while his right hand went in and dug his gun out of his waist. Bobby held it straight out for Louis to look at that black hole in the muzzle pointing at him.