I decided to wait.
In the heat of the closed house, sweat crawled like bugs through the mat on my chest, stained the waistband of my pants, ran down my calves to puddle in my socks.
When it was full dark, he came. I was warned by a scratching on a rear window. I heard a brittle snapping of metal, the sliding of the window. A breath of air slipped into the cottage.
A corner street light was on, and in the murk I saw his shadow creep into the dining room.
He picked up one of the captain’s chairs with two fingers, laughed, and threw it on the floor. (With his presence added, the normal-sized house seemed enormous, the tiny furnishings pathetic.)
He padded to the living room. He had a pint bottle in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, slugged it, and recapped it.
He sat down on the carpet, because none of the furniture would hold him, and parked the bottle beside him.
He was facing full toward the entry foyer, and I guessed he was thinking of that moment when she’d step into the room and turn on a light.
“Bucks,” I said, “you’ve made a bad mistake.”
I clicked on the dining room light as I spoke. He stopped breathing, literally. For a second he was paralyzed, unable to turn his head. It was exaggerated, like a bit out of an old-time movie that used to bring laughter. But he wasn’t comical, not to me. He was the kind who went berserk if he got scared enough. Berserk men can kill, even those a lot smaller than this big slab of beef.
As my shadow belted the waist of the room, he jerked around to a half crouch. His face made me feel a little better about the brawl last night. His nose was a big, purple sausage and there were little yellowish-purple half-moons under each eye.
When he saw who was in the house with him, his eyes went crazy.
His right hand dipped under his shirt and jerked the blackjack from the waistband of his pants.
“You lay off me,” he howled. “I ain’t scared of you. You lay off...”
He made a great try for the foyer. My weight hit him. We slammed down and a tiny end-table made sounds like crunching eggshells.
My stabbing hand missed, and the sap clipped me on the side of the jaw. I went a little nuts myself, pinned him, and started hitting him in the face. The third or fourth punch caught that swollen nose. A wail came from him. He tore himself free, scrambling toward the dining room. He’d lost the sap. It rolled under my foot, almost pitching me.
I closed on him. He came around swinging the dining-room table. I ducked. The table shattered against the wall.
Before he could regain his balance, I piled into him. His buttocks crashed against the china cabinet and it made glassy tinkling noises.
He was cornered now. He made sledge-hammers of those two big hands and fought back blindly. If he’d held onto his reason, he might have turned the trick. As it was, he was wide open. I hit him until I was sickened, of having to do it, of him making me do it, of myself, because I could think of no other way of controlling him.
Then his knees sagged. He hung as if invisible wires were keeping him from pitching forward. His face was a bloody wreck.
The carpet met his knees. He held to the edge of the buffet to keep from going all the way down.
“Bucks, you’re never to bother her again, you understand?”
His head hung forward.
“Be smart and stay healthy,” I said. “Don’t ever come near Tina La Flor — and I’ll forget you exist.”
He went crawling toward the living room and the bottle. I wondered if he was crying. The sounds coming from him might have been due to that, or the difficulty he was having in getting air through his blood-clotted throat.
“You got it, Bucks?”
He moaned softly, a sound that shouldn’t have belonged to a man. “Please, Rivers...”
“You got it?”
“Yeah,” he choked. “Only leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”
“Just the way you’re going to leave the little doll alone. It’s a bargain you’d better keep, Bucks.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know I will.” He groped for his bottle.
“Do your drinking some place else, Bucks. She’ll be coming back. I’ll bring her. She’d better not find you here.”
Bowed over, he put his hands over his face and sobbed. “She won’t. Only leave me alone, can’t you?”
I turned and walked out the back door. My clothes were stuck to me with sweat. But it wasn’t the sweat or slight difference in temperature outside that caused me to stop and shudder.
I hurried up the street, got in the car, and U-turned. I hit Nebraska and turned toward Ybor City.
A beer would do. Or a pail of ice water.
I wasn’t hungry any longer.
Tina wasn’t in the apartment when I got there. She’d left a note: “Ed, I’m gone to eat. Can’t take any more of that pepper and hot spice stuff you keep in your refrigerator. What do you use for a stomach, a secondhand bomb casing?”
I grinned at the note and dropped it on the table. Except for breakfast, I didn’t eat much in the apartment myself. Tina had been stuck here all day with snack stuff and beer go-withers.
While the tub filled from the cold tap, I stripped down. The final item of apparel was the knife I carry in a sheath at the nape of my neck. It’s strictly for those times when all the emergency lights are screaming red. I dislike the knife, but I’ve owed it my life a few times.
The water temporarily soaked away the heat, along with the tender spots my encounter with Bucks had created.
I was glad it was all over. Tina could go home now and start repairing her lilliputian domain and I could get the bad taste of the whole affair out of my mind.
With fresh clothes on, I felt my appetite returning. It was my turn to leave a note for her: “Stay put until I get back.”
It was nice to relax. I ambled a few blocks to a restaurant and, settled for a steak while the tourists at the next table had their first encounter with Spanish squid with rice.
By the time I started back to the apartment, the subtle change of night had come to Ybor City. The Quarter doesn’t start jumping in the fully American sense; it slithers; it breathes the air of old Spain and stretches voluptuously. The aristocracy gathers in the plush restaurants for two-hour repasts. Tourists jostle on the narrow streets beneath the balconies of iron filigree. In a crowded, smoky club maracas seethe a snaky whisper, and a girl with long, silken black hair and purple-shadowed eyes stands in a dark doorway like a carnivorous flower waiting for prey.
The apartment was still unlocked. I didn’t like that. I turned the lights on, and I liked the emptiness even less.
I decided to go downstairs to see if I could get a lead on the direction she’d taken.
Just as I opened the door, a peeled-egg head showed in the stairwell, a bulbous moon catching the feeble hallway light.
He came up with slow, deliberate movements. He was a big guy with a fleshy, quietly humorous face. His name was Steve Ivey. He was a lieutenant of detectives. He was far from being a flashy man. Maybe he wasn’t even brilliant. But he was a good cop, determined, with an integrity that was bone deep.
He saw me standing in the doorway, paused, and came forward slowly.
“Hello, Ed.”
I returned the greeting.
“Going out?” he asked.
“Just coming in. How goes it?”
“Hot,” he said.
“You didn’t come here to discuss the weather.”
“I’m looking for somebody. A little doll named Tina La Flor. You know her.”
“Sure.”
“She came out of this building a couple hours ago.”
“What makes you think that?” I fished with a bland face. His was just as bland.
“Well, we put out a call on her. The beat cop over here remembers he saw her a couple hours ago. Coming out of the building. Can’t help but spot and remember a little doll like that.”