Key West is a big coral rock that hosts a small city. The place is a state of mind as much as a geographical location, and it's undergoing drastic change. The old stores along Duval Street have given way to T-shirt shops that are now being replaced by major chain stores usually found in shopping malls. The town is schizoid, the residents resenting the tourists, but unable to survive without them. Stasis is never attained, balance never found. Change is constant, turmoil a part of daily life.
Cruise ships dock daily, disgorging midwestern tourists in guyabara shirts and Bermuda shorts. They fill the bars, especially the ones made famous by Ernest Hemingway, and leave before dark to take their ship to the next island destination. Then the locals and the tourists who fill the hotels and bed and breakfast establishments come out to take their places at the bars. Key West never sleeps.
It's a small island, about a mile wide and four miles or so long. It covers a little over eight thousand acres and houses twenty-five thousand locals, who like to call themselves Conchs.
Its history is full of robber barons, pirates, thieves, wreckers, sailors, and whores. Bad people doing bad things made fortunes in every decade. In the eighties it was the drug runners based here at the end of the country, and many of the bad guys who were lured here stayed.
The Greyhound station in Key West is on the south side of the island near the airport, about as far away from the downtown section as you can get. It was going to be a long hike. I couldn't afford to be seen in a cab. A guy looking for work on the fishing boats wouldn't have the cab fare.
The elderly crowd exited the bus and began to fill up vans with the Hyatt Hotel logo on the doors. I'd started my walk toward town when one of the vans pulled up beside me. Austin Dwyer stuck his head out of the window and said, "Ben, you going downtown?"
I nodded my head.
"Get in. We're going to the Hyatt."
It beat walking. I got in. The conversation was mostly about what they were going to do over the next few days in Key West. When we pulled into the Hyatt, I thanked the driver and Austin, hiked my backpack onto my shoulders and started up Duval Street.
I went several blocks and turned onto a side street near the Garrison Bight. I entered a neighborhood that hadn't yet seen urban renewal. The houses were old and dilapidated, and they wouldn't last long. The guys with the money would tear them down and build monuments to themselves and their successes. They'd spend a few weeks each winter in their new acquisitions and have the maids take care of it the rest of the year.
I found the house I was looking for. One of Cracker's fisherman friends from Cortez told him about this rooming house where nobody got too nosey. It was bigger than the others in the block, but just as unprepossessing. It had once been painted white, but most of that had peeled off, leaving bare clapboard. There was a large porch running along the front of the house, with a few rocking chairs placed haphazardly. They were all empty.
A screen door with rusty hinges guarded the entrance. I opened it and went in. In what had been the entrance hall in better days, there was a desk piled high with newspapers. A bulletin board took up space along one wall. It had newspaper clippings pinned to it, that I realized were help wanted ads from the local mullet wrapper. Nobody was in evidence, but a little round bell with a plunger on top sat on the desk. I hit the plunger, and in a minute a stooped elderly woman came out of the back, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.
"Help you?" she said.
"I need a room."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Can I get it from day to day?"
"Yeah, but you got to let me know by ten every morning if you're planning to stay another day."
"That's fair. How much?"
"Thirty a day. Share a bathroom."
"Okay." I pulled two twenties from my pocket and set them on the desk.
"Got to register," she said. "City ordinance." She handed me a registration card and ten wrinkled one-dollar bills in change.
I filled it out with Ben Joyce's name. "I don't have an address," I said, putting the pen down.
"Where did you come from?"
"Tampa."
"Put your last address in there. That'll do."
I made up a street address and wrote it on the card.
The old woman gave me a key. "Up the stairs, second door on your right, room eight."
I went to the room and called Logan to tell him where I was.