Then the water stopped and the car paused in the metal shed between the wash frame and the rinse frame. That's where Jimmy Gibbs stood, in the clanging, steamy place between cycles. He wore green rubber boots and held a rag. He worked the vehicles' starboard side, and his job was to rub away the dirt and stains too stubborn for the brushes: the bird shit that sometimes needed scraping with a fingernail, the exploded bugs that congealed to the color and consistency of baked-on egg.
People wanted a clean car when they rented. Spotless. That fact had been drummed into him from the instant he'd applied for this idiotic job. Didn't matter if the engine pinged, didn't matter if the body rattled. The car had to look good, festive, vacation-like for the off-season deadbeats with their cheapie vouchers and their plastic nose protectors. Was it part of what made it feel like vacation, Gibbs wondered, to look as ridiculous as possible? To wear a nose protector, a flowered shirt, and to drive around in one of these silly-looking ragtops in their frippy Florida shades of plum, persimmon, turquoise?
Wave on wave the cars came through the shed, a dreary parade of dripping doors and fenders emerging from a fog of mildew and the smarting stench of strong detergent. Gibbs's toes itched maddeningly inside his rubber boots. He'd wanted to work barefoot, give his cracked and soggy dogs some air. The boss wouldn't let him; some insurance bullshit. That was the thing about working on land-there was always some rule, some regulation, some suit making it his business how you had dealt with the fungus between your toes. They blocked you from the light, these land jobs; they stank up the air worse than fish guts ever could. In all, going from sea to land seemed a terrible descent, a punishing demotion.
Jimmy Gibbs had come down in life. He admitted it, in some crazy way he savored it, it confirmed the way he'd always figured things would turn out. Except he wasn't finished yet-that's what no one realized. He had a plan, and this jerked-off job was part of it. A big part. Gibbs had to laugh. Could anyone imagine that he was standing melting in this metal hell of steam for the four-fucking-thirty-five an hour they were paying him?
Another turquoise convertible rolled dumbly up to him and waited to be scrubbed. He clutched his fraying rag and attacked a patch of guano on its windshield. All alike, these rented cars, alike as fish in a school. That was the worst thing about them, and the best. Gibbs rubbed some limestone grit off the vehicle's sleek flank as the conveyor yanked it past him. Hell, he thought, these cars aren't even from a place; on the bottom of the license plate, where the home county was stamped, these just said Lease. Lease County, famous for its cheapskate deadbeats. Cars from nowhere, going nowhere.
Unlike himself. Jimmy Gibbs was moving up. He'd sunk low, he'd sink a little lower still, but after that he knew that he was springing to the top. This job was going to do more for him than the boss man with his dry hands and his tie clip could ever have imagined. With a wet hand Gibbs patted the yard keys in his pocket. Satisfying, the feel of those keys. He raked a forearm across his streaming hairline and turned back, just slightly refreshed, to the unending line of ridiculous convertibles.
At around four o'clock that afternoon, the telephone rang at the Silver house. It was Joe Mulvane. He'd done some checking up on the list of names that Nina had called in to him a few hours before. She switched on the speakerphone in the living room so that she and Augie could listen together, sitting on the couch. With the speaker on, Augie thought, it seemed less like talking on the phone than listening to the radio, passively taking in a news flash not on one's own life but on some stranger's.
"The agent and her husband," Mulvane said, "they checked out of the Flagler House around two p.m. yesterday."
"Ah," said Nina. "So they were gone."
"No," said Mulvane. "They didn't fly out till nine-thirty. But they didn't rent a car. I checked both names."
Augie let a long breath out.
"Of course," the detective went on, "there are other ways to get cars. Theft is popular. Fake I.D. s. But in the meantime, somebody did rent. Ray Yates. Rented a ragtop, turquoise, Friday night, and hasn't been seen or heard from since."
"Maybe he went on vacation," Augie said.
"His employer didn't know about it," said Mulvane. "I called the station. Yates phoned in yesterday morning, he didn't say from where, and told them he didn't know when he was coming back."
"Can you find him?" Nina asked.
The answer was quick and definite. "No. I checked his boat, I asked some neighbors. I don't have the resources to do more."
There was a pause. Augie caught himself staring at the speaker and felt suddenly pathetic, having a conversation with a plastic box, looking to the box to solve his life for him.
"Maybe we can find him," Nina said.
Mulvane cleared his throat. It was a skeptical sound that seemed to go with the lifting of eyebrows, the rolling of eyes. "We might be dealing with a killer here," he said.
The words hung in the air; Augie tried to get his mind around them. Ray Yates a killer? It seemed preposterous. But then, was it any more unlikely than the notion that the would-be murderer was his agent, or Clay Phipps his oldest friend, or any of the other buddies with whom Augie had drunk and sailed and fished and eaten? No, Yates was neither more nor less fantastic as a villain than the others. As in a nightmare, everything was taking on a tinge not only of horror but of a dread perverted flatness; all things were equally misshapen and equally possible. The painter, suddenly dizzy, let his head swim backward onto the settee cushion.
After what seemed a long time, Mulvane continued. "If you learn anything, through friends, whatever, call me. Don't do anything crazy."
The plastic box seemed to be waiting for an answer, but Augie and Nina just stared at each other, and after a few seconds Joe Mulvane hung up. A moment passed, then the dial tone kicked in. It was a rude and ugly sound, urgent as a siren as it blasted through the reedy speaker. Nina got up silently to turn it off. "What now?" she said.
Augie blinked up at the ceiling. Fear and bafflement had combined in his brain to produce something verging on indifference, a numbness that allowed for certain threads of clarity running through a fabric whose larger pattern had stopped making sense. "Let's call Natchez," he suggested. "He'll know where Ray is, if anybody does."
Nina dialed. Then she switched the speaker on and nestled next to her husband. The phone rang two times, three times, and on the fourth it was picked up; there followed the telltale pause of an answering machine.
Then the poet's voice, somber and imperious, filled the Silvers' living room.
"You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez," it said. The R's had a lot of tongue, the O's were round as sea-tossed stones. Augie and Nina stared first at each other, then at the phone.
"I do not often take calls," the message continued. "I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish."
In the short space before the beep, Augie tried without much luck to collect his thoughts. "Natch, it's Augie, call me" was all he could manage to say.
Nina went to the phone, pre-empted the intrusion of the dial tone. "He sounds deranged," she said.
Augie didn't answer. He was thinking at that moment not about Natchez's sanity but his own. Not so many months ago, he'd been walloped on the head, had a concussion and amnesia. His brain had been blood-starved, sun-baked, desiccated. How sure could he be that he'd ever quite recovered? Suddenly he was scared in a different way than he had been before. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. His voice was soft and a little shaky.