A waitress brought the pizza, hot and pungent. They attacked it hungrily. Keyes got tomato sauce on both his sleeves. Kara Lynn rolled her eyes, pretending to be mortified.
"Have you had many girlfriends?" she asked.
"Thousands. I was once engaged to half the Rockettes."
"You don't like this subject, do you?"
"Look, I never asked you what it's like to be the Stone Crab queen, with a dozen greaseball contest judges staring up your crotch. I never asked because it seemed personal and none of my business, and I knew you wouldn't want to talk about it."
"You're right. It's awful, that's why."
"It looksawful," Keyes said. "I don't know how you do it."
Kara Lynn plucked an anchovy from the pizza and dropped it neatly on a napkin; a little anchovy graveyard. "It's easy to become Stone Crab queen," she said. "All you have to do is get some black heels and a bikini and learn to play 'Eleanor Rigby' on the French horn."
"You got my vote."
"I hate it. All of it."
"I know."
"Half the girls get boob jobs and butt tucks," Kara Lynn said. "Nobody does anything about it."
"What happens to them when there's no more beauty pageants?"
"Two, three years of modeling. A few local TV commercials if you're lucky. Guy once offered me three grand to lie on the hood of a Dodge truck and say: I got my Ram Charger at Cooley Motors.Real Shakespearean television. Daddy had a seizure when I turned it down."
"What do you really want to do, Kara Lynn?"
"Stop world famine, of course."
Keyes laughed. "And after that?"
"See Europe."
Keyes cut another slice of pizza but it surrendered grudgingly. A web of cheese hung elastically from his mouth to the platter.
"What about you, Brian? Your life all mapped out?"
Keyes chewed pensively.
"Someday I'm going to buy a sailboat," he said. "Move down to Islamorada, live off seaweed and lobsters. Let the sun fry me so brown that my hide gets tough as a turtle shell. I think I'd make a helluva good sea turtle—hey, don't look at me like that."
"But you're serious!"
"A turtle's got no natural enemies," Keyes said.
Kara Lynn felt warm. She liked the cozy smell of the sweater. "Can I come visit you down there?"
"You bet. Fix up a nice big plate of sargassum. We'll pig out."
Kara Lynn watched him so closely that Keyes began to feel a little uncomfortable. She was zeroing in on something. The old Jenna antennae started to twitch.
"What do you think about me, Brian?"
"I like you," he said. "I like you very much."
"She really hurt you, didn't she?"
Out of the blue. Just when he'd started to relax.
"Who?" he said inanely.
"Jenna. One look at the two of you together—"
"Forget the two of us together."
"I'm sorry. No more soap opera, I promise." She folded her arms and sat back. Her gray-green eyes captured him, froze him in one place. Nineteen years old, no one should have a look that good, Keyes thought.
"I can't figure out what I like so much about you," Kara Lynn said. "But I think it's your attitude."
"I've got a miserable attitude."
"Yeah, you come on that way but it's bullshit, isn't it, Marlowe? Some of it's an act."
"Until I grow my turtle shell."
"What I like," said Kara Lynn, "is your attitude toward me. You're the first man who hasn't treated me like a porcelain doll. You don't pamper, you don't drool, and you don't try to impress me."
Keyes smiled wanly. "Somehow I knew there was no danger of that."
"And I like the way you tell the truth," she said. "For instance, I think you told the truth just now when you said you liked me. I think you really do."
"Sure."
"I think you wouldn't mind if I kissed you."
Keyes opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a little shaky. Like prom night, for God's sake.
Kara Lynn reached over and took his arm. She pulled him gently. "Meet you halfway," she said.
They kissed across the table. It was a long kiss, and Keyes nearly got lost in it. He also managed to plant his left elbow in the pizza.
"You're nervous," she said.
"You're a client. That makes me nervous."
"Naw. Pretty girls make you nervous."
"Some of them, yeah."
In the MG on the way home, she sat much closer.
"You're worried about me," Kara Lynn said.
"I don't want you in this stupid parade."
She held onto his right arm with both hands. "I've got to do it. It's either me or some other girl."
"Then let it be some other girl."
"No, Brian."
Things were changing—all of a sudden the stakes couldn't be higher. The harrowing parameters of his nightmare had become perceptible; and locked inside them, Kara Lynn Shivers and Skip Wiley.
Keyes wondered if the maniac had phoned Cab Mulcahy, like he promised.
"You're frightened, aren't you?" Kara Lynn asked.
"Yup."
"We'll be all right," she said. Like Jenna used to say.
The house was dark when Keyes pulled into the driveway. The shaggy-headed palms hung still in the crisp night. Crackles bickered high in the old ficus tree. From the flowerbed a disinterested calico cat watched them come up the walk.
Keyes waited on the second step while Kara Lynn unlocked the front door. He went in first, switched on a small lamp in the hall, checked around.
"Everything's fine," he said. And out of habit took a step toward the guest room where he slept.
"No," Kara Lynn whispered, taking his hand. "Come upstairs."
Wiley stormed into the warehouse shortly after noon on the twenty-ninth of December, the day after the bombing at police headquarters.
'Where is Jesus?" Wiley demanded.
"Don't know," Viceroy Wilson said.
"He was gone when we got here," said Tommy Tigertail.
Both men were shirtless, with leather carpentry belts strung from their waists. The Indian had a red bandanna around his neck, and his caramel chest was beaded with perspiration. Viceroy Wilson wore gray sweatpants and faded aqua wristbands, which kept his hands dry.
They had worked unceasingly since dawn, and the skeletal contraption had grown to fill the warehouse from floor to ceiling.
"It's coming along," Wiley said halfheartedly. "You're doing fine."
He paced with agitation, gnawing his lower lip, hands crammed in the pockets of his jeans. With each step his track shoes squeaked on the dusty concrete—a noise that only added to the tension. El Fuegowas on the threshold of eruption; Viceroy Wilson and Tommy Tigertail could sense it.
In slow motion Skip Wiley picked up an iron mallet. He studied it methodically, weighed it in each hand, then began to pound the aluminum door like a gong. With every swing came a new expletive. "That crazy-cretinous-brain-less-shitheaded putz of a Cuban!" he grunted. "Worthless-misguided-suicidal-goddamn miscreant!"
Viceroy Wilson flinched each time the mallet landed, the noise amplified in his skull by forty freshly ingested milligrams of methamphetamine.
"Why didn't he tell me about this?" Wiley cried. "Who ordered him to go bomb that reptile Bloodworth?"
"Maybe he thought it would make up for the tennis thing," Tommy Tigertail said.
"Rubbish! Even after my lecture on solidarity, he pulls a silly stunt like this! No wonder the other crazy Cubans kicked him out. I should have known better—I should have listened to you guys."
Viceroy Wilson resisted the temptation to rub it in. Actually he was somewhat puzzled by Skip Wiley's anger. He figured that after all that had happened, Wiley ought to be elated to see Ricky Bloodworth go up in smoke. And if a new wave of counterpublicity was what Wiley sought, the bombing had been a bonanza: Las Nocheswere all over the morning papers and TV. But Viceroy Wilson listened unquestioningly to the harangue because he simply couldn't bring himself to defend Jesus Bernal. He'd warned the little bastard to chill out until after New Year's.