"So Gino, it's just you and me."
Joey Goldman had turned seaward again, and was a mile offshore by the time he spoke, or rather, yelled over the grind of the engine and the hiss of water shooting past the hull. The moon had gone from red to yellow to eggshell white, and spilled an endless beam that glinted over the water and seemed to single out the little skiff.
"Yup," yelled Gino. He was suddenly rather giddy, made so by too much freedom and too little control. Being sprung from his hotel room was about as invigorating and disconcerting as getting out of jail. Being rid of Vicki felt, for the moment at least, as good as waking up to find that a throbbing boil had vanished in the night. But then again, he had no gun, no car, no crew, no plan, and no idea what Joey had in mind. "So kid, what the hell we doin' now?"
Joey smiled without parting his lips. His thick hair had been pressed back by the wind, his eyes were narrowed against the spray, his forearms were ropy from clutching the wheel. Gino almost noticed that his bastard half brother had become a grown man. "We're gonna find your fucking emeralds," Joey hollered. "What else?'
"You can do that?' Gino screamed.
Joey did not immediately answer but gave himself a moment to savor the hope, need, and doubt in Gino's tone. He thought he could do it. He'd studied his chart. It seemed to him there was only one place Sand Key Marina could be. Straight out from a radio tower, behind the arc of a narrow peninsula that curved away like the bone on a lamb chop, there should be a narrow channel marked by unlit buoys. If there wasn't, well, that was that.
"I can find 'em," Joey yelled.
Gino suddenly felt tears of greed welling in his windblown eyes-greed and amazement, as if he'd stopped believing he would ever see the three million dollars' worth of Colombian stones. "Great, kid," he screamed. "We'll go partners." Then he realized that the word implied a fifty-fifty split, and he quickly recovered from his spasm of generosity. "I mean, I'll cut you in."
Joey let that slide, and continued with his own line of thought. "But Gino, ya gotta do everything I tell you."
"Sure, kid, sure," Gino shouted.
"Before, during, and after," Joey pressed.
"Whatever."
"Swear on your mother, Gino. Whatever I say, you do."
Gino looked away. Water was flying off the side of the boat like it was shot from a fire hose. "Christ, Joey. We gotta start with this mother shit again?"
"Yeah, Gino, we do. Swear."
He did, and Joey eased back on the throttle. He scanned the shore for the radio tower. There seemed to be lots of radio towers, but most of them were probably electrical pylons. From a mile away, by moonlight, it was hard to tell. Joey steered closer to land, waiting for the low shapeless ribbon of limestone and shrubs to show some useful feature. For some minutes no such feature appeared; the land showed blank as an oil slick, and Joey choked down the thought that he might yet have to admit to Gino and himself that once again he'd failed, that just like the jerks from the neighborhood, he'd talked big and could not deliver.
Then, finally, he spotted what seemed to be the peninsula shaped like a lamb chop bone. It was nothing more than a finger of mangrove and showed only as a brief interruption in the gleam of moonlight. He made toward it. Gino started pawing around like a dog that hears its food bowl being filled.
" 'Zat it?" he asked. " 'Zat it?"
Joey just shrugged. Then, a couple of hundred yards off the tip of the peninsula, he thought he saw a channel marker. It was unlit, stood crooked in the water, but was dabbed with a reflective paint, and for just an instant it caught the moonlight and sent back an improbably bright flash. Joey realized that his heart was pounding. This had nothing to do with emeralds, but with finding what he was looking for, studying a picture that stood for the world and discovering that the pieces fit, that both the picture and his ability to read it could be trusted. The radio tower was dead ahead. Joey idled forward.
Now, what passes for a harbor in the Florida Keys would not be called a harbor most other places. There is no deep water, not much shelter, just skinny passages where the limestone muck has been dredged away and boats have a reasonable chance of making it to shore. The channel that Joey hoped he was following soon narrowed to a swath of flat water barely wider than the skiff. On either side, little tepees of mangrove popped out, their greedy roots already capturing nests of land. Mosquitoes swarmed and buzzed at the nearness of fresh meat. Toads croaked, night herons screamed out their ugly clicking screech. The moonlight was swallowed up as the foliage closed in, and something that sounded like giant crickets made a noise like sandpaper scratching bone.
Gino fanned invisible bugs from in front of his face. "Joey, man, this can't be right. It's like we're halfway inna fucking jungle." Black leaves and low branches drank up the sound of the engine.
Ahead, on a nubbly, tilted wooden stake, was what might have been another marker. Joey edged toward it. Behind it loomed a seemingly endless wall of mangrove that gave off a smell of sulfur and anchovies kept too long in tin. But at this second stake, the channel took a sudden dogleg left, and the new angle revealed an overhung cut between two islets. The cut was so narrow that waxy mangrove leaves scratched against the skiffs hull as the little craft slipped through.
Then there was a clearing in which the still water gleamed black and flat as a lake.
At the edge of this cove was a falling-down dock.
Its outermost pilings had crumpled like the forelegs of a crippled horse, and its planks had come unhinged like the keys of a broken xylophone. On shore, half grown over with vines and shrubs, was the rotting structure of what once had been an office or store; next to it was a gas pump with no paint left on it, then, propped on cinder blocks, a rusty mobile home with smashed windows and a guano-caked TV antenna.
"Here's your marina," Joey said. "Don't feel bad you couldn't find it. And there's your boat."
He pointed to a black hulk tied up to the far side of the dock. Made of ancient planking, with thick sides and a small, square pilothouse that had lost both its windshield and its roof, it seemed to be floating only out of habit. Joey pulled the skiff closer. In small flecks of brittle paint caught between splinters of wood, he could just make out the vessel's name: Osprey.
If Gino Delgatto had had a tail, it would have been slapping wildly against his buttocks. As it was, he paced the skiff with avid steps, making it rock as though in a gale. "Holy shit, Joey! Tree million bucks. There it is! It's mine! Oh baby, I can taste it! Come on, willya, move the boat closer, lemme get on there and grab the fucking stones."
Joey didn't. He idled some twenty feet away and held steady at that tantalizing distance while a cloud of mosquitoes formed around them and his brother tried to jerk the skiff closer with body english. "Hol' on a second, Gino. We're not just grabbin' the emeralds. We're takin' the whole boat."
On Gino's red and beefy face, the features all pushed forward, as if his mouth and nose were racing to the stones. The more his blood rushed to the surface, the better the mosquitoes liked it. "Joey, what I want with the fucking boat? Just lemme get the emeralds and let's get the fuck outta here."
Joey crossed his arms. "Gino, did you or did you not just swear we're doing things my way?"
"Sure, kid, yeah. But I don't see the fucking point-"
"Gino, use your head. The guys that got whacked- you got no waya knowing what Ponte got out of 'em before he clipped 'em. Am I right? Ya gotta figure he squeezed 'em pretty good. So maybe they gave it up that the stones are on a boat. Maybe they even told 'im where, and Ponte couldn't find it, just like you couldn't."
"So?" Gino crushed a mosquito that had landed in his ear; it squirted some of his blood. He never once took his eyes off the junked fishing boat.
"So, what if sometime Ponte does find the boat, and the stones ain't on it? Who's he gonna figure got there first? You, Gino. So you'll be fucked all over again. This way, we take the whole boat, there's nothin' to find, it's done with."
Gino scratched, thought, and let out a deep breath that blew some bugs around. "O.K., kid," he said. "You're right."
"I know I'm right," Joey pressed. "I been thinkin' this through for weeks. So Gino, willya do me a favor? Stop questioning every little goddamn thing and do like I tell ya."
Gino nodded through a faceful of mosquitoes. Anything to get his hands on the emeralds. Besides, what did it cost him to take orders from Joey in a place where no one could see and no one would ever know?
"Awright," Joey resumed as he clicked the engine into gear and edged closer. "So here's what we're gonna do. The skiff, we're gonna leave it here. We're gonna take the little motor off the back, put it on the junker, and use it to get the junker outta heah. We're gonna tow the rowboat, then put the little motor onna rowboat to get back, then pick up the skiff. Got it?"
Gino hadn't got it. He wasn't listening. He was thinking about emeralds and swatting mosquitoes, and had no attention left for other things.
Joey mustered a tone of command. "So Gino, don't just fucking stand there. Take the little motor off."
Gino unclamped the auxiliary engine and hoisted it over the Osprey 's splintery gunwales as Joey softly clunked the skiff against its side. But once Gino actually reached the treasure boat, his fragile patience let go all at once and he went blind with lust for the emeralds. He leaped out of the skiff, sending it scudding sideways, and clambered onto the Osprey 's damp and spongy deck. His soft imported loafers skidded on the slimy planks and he dove obliviously toward the roofless pilothouse. By the pale but steady light of the moon, he searched out the board on which an X had supposedly been marked. For some moments he couldn't find it, and seemed inclined to rip out his eyes for their failure.
Then he spotted a smudge as of damp powder. He fell to his knees in front of it and tried to pry up the plank with his fingernails. A soft unwholesome grit of moldy wood and the remains of ancient ants and spiders covered his fingers. Then, from a hole at the base of the steering console, not two feet from where Gino knelt, there emerged a rat the size of a dachshund. For an unspeakable moment the rodent's beady red eyes met those of the mafioso from New York. Gino could see the gleam of mucus on its pointy black nose, which was twitching in terror. The rat scratched at the floor, hunkered low as a snake, then, with desperate courage, it charged along the only escape route it had. It darted over Gino's hands, its damp, rank fur obscenely tickling his wrists. Gino, recoiling, flicked his arms and caught the rodent in the underbelly. It rose in a macabre claws-out somersault, landed on Gino's Achilles tendon, and scampered away. Gino went back to pawing at the plank.
Finally it lifted. Nothing was visible in the dark, narrow gap, but far down in the bilges, fetid water was dully gleaming. Gino plunged his hand in, and slime stretched out along the sleeve of his silk jacket. The slime had a skin on it like burned milk, it clung to his wrist like a condom. His fingers found a small burlap sack, and squeezed it hard.
Still kneeling, his pulse throbbing in his mosquito- covered neck and his lips stretched tight across his teeth, he tugged at the sack's drawstring, then poured into his palm a sampling of uncut, unpolished Colombian emeralds.
They didn't look like much, just green rocks that didn't shine, and were coated with a rough white dust that seemed to have bubbled out from inside them. They varied in size, the biggest like brazil nuts, but nubbly as potatoes. Gino closed his hand around them and shook them softly like a favorite set of dice.
"You happy now?"
Joey was standing on the deck, leaning against the rickety frame of the pilothouse. He'd secured the skiff and put the small outboard on the Osprey's rotting transom. "You got your stones. You happy?"
The words seemed to bring Gino out of his trance of avarice. He glanced up over his shoulder, and for an instant he seemed abashed, as if it had dawned on him that he must look like a real horse's ass, kneeling like in church, slime all over his hands, elbow-deep in crud. Only now did it register that a rat had run on him, that he had touched its fur and felt the yielding of its gut, and he choked back a sudden nausea. But what the hell, he had the emeralds, it was worth it, worth everything. He grinned. "Fuck yeah, Joey. Hell yeah."
"Good," the younger brother said. "Now put 'em back, and put the plank back on."
Gino swiveled on his knees. "Fuck for?"
Joey showed him the tired look of a teacher stuck for too many years with the dumb kids. "Coast Guard, Gino. They patrol. For drugs. But a bagga emeralds on a crummy old fishing boat-Gino, how's it gonna look?"