“Another question?” I asked.
“Why not?” Vivaise said.
“Have you ever been to the Ringling Museum?”
“You are nuts, Fonesca.”
“Maybe, but I’m taking a sort of survey.”
“I’ve been to the museum. My wife and I have taken the kids. We’re museum members. I like it there. It’s peaceful, old. It’s a refuge, a garden of sanity, a sanctuary from the mad chaotic world outside, the world where people like you drive the streets and ask crazy questions. You satisfied with my answer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Get out, Lewis,” he said calmly. “I sort of like you, but that can change quickly.”
I got out. The two young cops who had brought me here were waiting outside Vivaise’s door watching the painters, talking to them, laughing. They offered to take me home. I told them I’d walk.
I went down Main Street past the YMCA. I hadn’t been there for five days. I longed for that bicycle ride and workout. I wanted my routine back. I wanted my loneliness back. I looked at the people beyond the glass on the exercise machines. I thought, waited for an epiphany. None came. I walked back to 301 and headed south toward home.
When I passed the Crisp Dollar Bill across from the DQ, it hit me. It hit me hard. It was the only thing that made sense. I didn’t like the sense it made.
The blue Buick was parked in the DQ lot. The blue angel was sitting at one of the tables eating what looked like the deluxe burger. He had probably seen the cops pick me up and had decided it wasn’t a good idea to follow a police car. He was waiting for me.
I didn’t want him with me where I was going, so I went into the Crisp Dollar Bill. It took my eyes a few long seconds to adjust to the darkness. There was no music. I had lived across from the bar for more than two years and had never been in it before. It wasn’t as big as I thought it would be, just a line of wooden tables to the right and a long bar with stools on the left. There were no booths. One man sat alone at a table. He was a silent solitary drinker, his eyes fixed in the past. He was wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt and I guessed his age at fifty.
There were two people at the bar, talking quietly. One was a woman who looked as if she were a retiree from the North Trail. The man wore a rumpled suit and had his back to me.
I went to the bar and ordered a Budweiser from the lean, long-haired bartender, who might have been any age between forty and sixty. He gave me a friendly smile and wink and said, “Coming up.”
No music. I liked that. I never understood why, when you got in someone’s car or went to their home to talk, they turned on music.
The television over the bar was off and the place was dark. I liked it here. I wondered if it was like this at night. I didn’t think so. Late afternoon was the time to come to the Crisp Dollar Bill. I’d remember that.
“Phone?” I asked when the bartender came back with my beer.
“Back there by the john,” he said. “Need change?”
I checked. I had a handful of quarters and other change in my pocket.
“No,” I said.
“Give me a nod if you want your bill or another Bud,” he said.
“There’s no music,” I said.
“Music-free bar,” he said. “Watch a football game once in a while. Sundays, Monday night. Quiet most nights.”
He moved down the bar toward the man and the woman. The bartender knew I needed space. He was one hell of a good bartender.
I made my call and went back to finish my beer.
Ten minutes later, my glass empty, I paid my bill and left a good tip.
I went out the door and looked over at the DQ. The blue angel had finished his burger. He was probably back in his Buick watching the parking lot and my door. I walked back to Main Street and stood in front of the Main Street Book Store across from the Hollywood Twenty movie theaters.
Ames pulled up on his motor scooter a few minutes later. He was wearing his blue zipper jacket and a helmet. I moved to the scooter and he handed me a helmet. It was a duplicate of his, green.
I had told him on the phone where we were going. I hadn’t told him why. It was too noisy on the scooter to carry on a conversation. I waited till he had parked in the lot on Longboat Key, about fifteen minutes later. Ames locked the scooter and ran a chain through a hole at the rear of both helmets. He locked the chain to the scooter with a padlock he kept in his pocket and we began to walk as I explained.
“We go in the same way?” he asked.
“Worked before,” I said. “This time we do a better job.”
There were two long-necked white birds in the pond beyond the bushes that surrounded the Beach Tides Resort. One of them looked at us as we moved.
We didn’t go to the beach this time. We didn’t have to search for the building. We knew where it was. We watched for security guards in their golf carts, didn’t see any and moved to the rear of the building where John Pirannes had an apartment.
There was no one in sight. We could hear the voices of people at the pool and beach, but their possible view of us and ours of them was blocked by a hill, a bed of red flowers and tropical trees.
“Here,” I said. “Right?”
We were standing in a plot of tall grass. Ames looked up at the building.
“Yes,” he said.
“A lot to look through,” I said.
“Seems so,” said Ames.
We bent and started to go through the grass with our hands. In twenty minutes of looking, I managed to find a golf ball, a soggy eyeglass case and an ant hill. I got two bites on my hand. My stomach was feeling better, but far from healed. Bending was not easy.
“Nothing,” I said, looking at Ames.
“Still light,” he said, looking at the sky.
Fifteen minutes later Ames found it, about fifteen yards from the building, next to a short palm tree, in plain sight. He pointed to it and I took the plastic zippered bag from my pocket.
I lifted the gun by the barrel and carefully dropped it into the bag.
Half an hour later we were back downtown. I was constantly thanking Ames, but I did it again.
“Anytime,” he said as I got off the scooter and handed him the green helmet. “I owe you.”
“You’ve paid me back,” I said.
“I like you,” he said.
“I like you too, Ames,” I said.
He looked at me, gray eyes serious.
“We’re friends,” he said. “I haven’t had more than three real friends in my life.”
“Friends,” I said.
He drove away. A crowd of people waiting in line at the movie theater for the early-bird show looked at him as he shot into traffic.
I walked to the DQ, got a Diet Coke to go from Dawn and went to my office, moving past the blue Buick.
My window was boarded up. I went in, locked the door, turned on the light, put the bag with the gun on my desk and sat down. I was pretty sure what it could tell me. I didn’t need a lab report.
I made a call and set up an appointment.
Then I put the bag with the gun under my dresser and lay on my bed. The sound of traffic on 301 put me to sleep. I didn’t dream. At least I don’t remember dreaming.
I woke up to the sound of people arguing.
Moist and groggy, I rolled over, got on my knees and reached under the dresser to convince myself I hadn’t dreamed the day. The gun was there, inside the bag. I moved to the window near my television set, pushed the drapes aside and saw a couple in their twenties standing in the parking lot of the DQ. They were arguing.
The woman, bedraggled, probably pretty beneath defeat, was carrying a child about a year old in her arm. The child had a pacifier in its mouth. The child was looking at what I assumed was its father, who was pointing a finger at the woman as he shouted. The young man’s neck was stretched in anger, tendons taut. He was wearing a baseball uniform sans cap.
I moved away from the window and checked my watch. I had to hurry.