The rain came just as the three friends were parting on the sidewalk.
It came down heavy but slow, in fat warm creamy drops driven now and then by soft gusts that blew sheets of it sideways past the streetlights while other parts rained down straight as tap water. Ray Yates was soaked before he'd even reached his scooter; his pink and lime-green shirt wrapped him like a tattooed second skin. He kick-started the little bike; the gears clattered unpromisingly, then a spark survived the deluge and the motor whined, making a sound like a mosquito in your ear while you're asleep.
Key West is very flat and almost all of it is paved; the place drains about as well as a concrete basement without a sump, and a heavy downpour turns it almost instantly into a paddy-like landscape of uprooted garbage cans and fallen palm fronds scudding by like rafts. Yates drove slowly. Water came halfway up the scooter's spoked wheels; water streamed down his legs and between his toes, over the oozing leather of his open sandals. He wound his way through the narrow streets of Old Town, then was able to go just a little faster on the stretch of A1A along Smathers Beach. Dollops of rain pelted his forehead. A pickup truck went by too fast and threw an arcing wave that broke at shoulder height. By the time he'd reached his home on Houseboat Row and locked the scooter to a No Parking sign, his hands and cheeks had been slapped pink by shards of water and three postage stamps buried deep in his wallet had glued themselves to the back of his library card.
His head was down against the rain as he bounded soggily along his gangplank. He didn't see the large dark figure waiting for him there. " 'Lo, Ray," it said.
Yates recognized the voice and instantly felt his bowels go soft, a jolting knife-edged heat suffused his cool soaked khaki shorts. He stopped walking and stood there breathless in the rain.
"You're late onna payment again, Ray," the figure said. "Tha' shit gets old."
There are moments in life when anything you do or say is wrong, and if you do and say nothing, that's wrong too. Yates wrestled with the question of meeting his accuser's eyes, though he knew that nothing better or worse would come of it. There were no excuses to be made and no sympathy to be found: This was Bruno. Bruno was a bagman and enforcer for a Miami-based loan shark, bookmaker, and drug pusher named Charlie Ponte, and he was very good at his job. He was loyal as a Doberman and neutral as a snake, unburdened by intelligence and built like a pizza oven. 'Twice I let ya go already," Bruno said. "It don't look right, like I'm fucking off. Ya got twelve hunnerd bucks for me?"
The two of them stood there in the pouring rain and neither seemed to notice it was raining. The ocean was pocked, curtains of wet swirled in front of the headlights of the occasional passing car. Ray Yates was into Charlie Ponte for forty thousand dollars. The interest rate was 1.5 percent a week, and Yates had punted on two payments. The gambler had had losing streaks before, but never like this. This was the kind of losing streak from which people sometimes did not recover. "Bruno," he said, "I got like forty dollars in my pocket. Friday I get four hundred something. You can have it all, every penny."
"Ya don't take me serious," Bruno said.
"I do. I do," said Yates.
"Nah," said Bruno. He sounded sad and neutral. "On'y way you're gonna take me serious is if I hurt ya."
Without hurry, he moved through the rain toward Ray Yates, and Ray Yates didn't budge. There is a pathetic inevitability in a confrontation between someone who is tough and someone who is not. It is not a struggle but a ritual, the weak one keeps his anguish to himself and goes down with the humble and defeated silence of some toothless creature being gutted alive by a lion. Yates blinked water off his lashes and peed in his pants. Then Bruno smashed him between his left cheekbone and the socket of his eye. The blow came so quick that the debtor didn't know if he'd been hit with a fist, a forearm, or an elbow. His head snapped back and he turned half sideways, and Bruno pummeled the exposed flank with a punch that shook blood out of Yates's lung. He went down on one bare knee and covered up as best he could. Rain and snot poured down his throat as he labored to get back his wind.
Bruno stood over him, patient as death. He reached into a pocket for his cigarettes, then seemed to notice for the first time that he was soaking wet. He threw the ruined smokes into the water and found a stick of gum instead. He unwrapped it, folded it into his mouth, then gave his quarry a casual kick in the ass. "More?" he asked. He asked as casually as if he were offering a second helping of potatoes.
"No, Bruno," Ray Yates whispered. "No more."
"Stan' up like a man then. Ya look ridiculous."
Yates got to his feet. The left side of his face was already beginning to swell, the eye squeezing shut at the outside corner. His knees were jelly and he leaned against the frail wooden railing of his walkway.
"Sataday it goes ta eighteen hunnerd," Bruno said. His face was close to Yates's now, and the gambler smelled spearmint gum and garlic through the salty rain. "Fuck we gonna do about that, Ray?"
Yates's throat clamped shut, and for a while he couldn't speak. "Bruno," he rasped at last, "I don't know. The truth, Bruno? Short of a miracle, I'm not gonna have the money for another three, four weeks."
The enforcer spit his gum. It hit Yates in the forehead then bounced into the ocean. "That stinks. My business, that's a long time in my business."
"Look, tack on a penalty, double the interest, anything you want. Like I told you, Bruno, it's about those paintings. Once they're auctioned there'll be plenty of cash, I'll pay off in full, I swear."
Bruno put his hands on Yates's shoulders. The gesture was almost friendly, until he started pushing with his ramrod thumbs into the soft places behind the other man's collarbones. "How long's it been since you won a fucking bet, Ray?"
It was a gauche question and Yates didn't answer.
"What if you lose this next one too? What then?"
"Those pictures aren't a bet, Bruno. They're money in the bank."
The tough guy dropped his hands, moved his tongue around inside his cheek, and seemed to be considering. Then he looked up at the sky. Rain was still pouring down in big frothy drops, it ran in rivulets between his oily bundles of slick black hair. "Gonna catch cold on accounta you," he said, suddenly taking things personally. "I hate that, a summer cold."
He grabbed the front of Yates's tropical shirt, pulled him forward, then thrust him backward against the wooden rail. The rail was nothing more than a two-by-four nailed onto posts, and the beefy Yates crashed through it like a bowling ball through pins. The water next to the seawall was too shallow to break his fall; knobs of coral racked his legs and slammed against his back and he lay there stunned amid the beer cans and the condoms, the turds and tampons shot out the bottoms of people's boats.
Bruno looked enormous standing on the gangplank. "I'll see what Mr. Ponte wants to do with you," he said.
He walked off slowly through the rain, and Ray Yates lay dead still in the slimy water until he was very sure the big man wasn't coming back.
19
Jimmy Gibbs took up his position on the port side of the Fin Finder near the stern and got ready to loop his heavy line around the bollard. It was June 1. Supposedly the season was over, yet these goddamn know-nothing idiot tourists kept showing up at the charter-boat docks and saying they wanted to go out fishing. Bargain hunters, cheapskates-that's what you got this time of year. Fat guys who drove straight through from Georgia with miniature beer cans in their hatbands; guys whose shirttails wouldn't stay tucked in and whose fumbling fingers would screw things up if they so much as tried to put a shrimp on a hook. They said they liked the heat, these out-of-season visitors, but that was so much bullshit-nobody liked it ninety-two and hazy, with last night's puddles turning to steam that made your legs sweat like hot breath on your crotch. What they liked was the cheap motel rooms, the greasy free tidbits at happy hour, the twofers in the restaurants.