Predator

48

Marino hates the trendy restaurants ofSouthBeachand never parks his Harley anywhere near the lesser bikes, mostly Japanese crotch rockets, that always line the boardwalk at this hour. He cruises slowly and loudly alongOcean Drive, glad his pipes annoy all the cool customers drinking their flavored martinis and wine at their little candlelit outdoor tables.

He stops inches away from the back bumper of a red Lamborghini, pulls in the clutch and rolls the throttle, giving the engine enough gas to remind everybody he’s here. The Lamborghini inches forward and Marino inches forward, almost touching the back bumper, and rolls the throttle again, and the Lamborghini inches ahead and Marino does the same. His Harley roars like a mechanical lion, and a bare arm flies out the Lamborghini’s open window and a middle finger with a long, red nail flips up.

He smiles as he gooses the throttle again and threads between cars, stopping beside the Lamborghini, peers in at the olive-skinned woman behind the steel-alloy wheel. She looks maybe twenty, is dressed in a denim vest and shorts and not much else. The woman next to her is homely but makes up for it by wearing what looks like a stretchy black Ace bandage around her breasts, and shorts that barely cover what matters.

“How do you type or do housework with those nails?” Marino asks the driver over the roaring and throbbing of big, powerful engines, and he splays his huge hands like cat claws to make his point about her long, red nails, acrylic extenders or whatever they’re called.

Her pretty, snooty face stares up at the light, probably desperate for it to turn green so she can blast away from the redneck in black, and she says, “Get away from my car, motherfucker.”

She says it in a heavy Hispanic accent.

“Now that ain’t no way for a lady to talk,” Marino replies. “You just hurt my feelings.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“How about I buy you two babes a drink? After that, we’ll go dancing.”

“Leave us the fuck alone,” the driver says.

“I call police!” the one in the black Ace bandage threatens.

He tips his helmet, the one with the bullet hole decals, and rockets ahead of them as the light turns green. He is around the corner on14th Streetbefore the Lamborghini is even out of first gear, and parks by a meter in front of Tattoo’s By Lou andScooterCity, cuts the engine and dismounts his warrior seat. He locks the bike and crosses the street to the oldest bar in South Beach, the only bar he frequents in these parts, Mac’s Club Deuce, or what the local clientele simply call Deuce, not to be confused with his Harley Deuce. A two-Deuce night is what he says when he rides his Deuce to Deuce, a dark hole with a black-and-white checkered floor, a pool table and a neon nude over the bar.

Rosie starts pouring him a Budweiser draft. He doesn’t have to ask.

“You expecting company?” She slides the tall, foaming glass across the old oak bar.

“You don’t know her. You don’t know nobody tonight,” he gives her the script.

“Ohhhhh-kay.” She measures vodka in a water glass for some old guy sitting by himself on a nearby stool. “I don’t know anyone in here, least not the two of you. That’s fine. Maybe I don’t want to know you.”

“Don’t break my heart,” Marino says. “How ’bout putting some lime in it.” He pushes the beer back to her.

“Well aren’t we fancy tonight.” She drops in a few slices. “That how you like it?”

“It’s really good.”

“Didn’t ask if it was good. Asked if that’s how you like it.”

As usual, the usual locals ignore them. The usuals are slouched on stools on the other side of the bar, glazed as they stare at a baseball game they’re not following on the big TV. He doesn’t know their names, but they don’t need names. There’s the fat guy with the goatee, the really fat woman who’s always complaining and her boyfriend, who is a third her size and looks like a ferret with yellow teeth. Marino wonders how the hell they fuck and imagines a jockey-sized cowboy flopping like a fish on a bucking bull. All of them smoke. On a two-Deuce night, Marino usually lights up a few, doesn’t think about Dr. Self. Whatever goes on in here stays in here.

He carries his beer with lime to the pool table and picks out a stick from the mismatched collection propped in a corner. He racks the balls and stalks around the table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, chalking his stick. He squints at ferret, watching him get up from his stool and carry his beer to the men’s room. He always does that, afraid someone will swipe his drink. Marino’s eyes take in everything and everyone.

A scrawny, homeless-looking man with a scraggly beard, a ponytail, dark, ill-fitting Goodwill clothes, a filthy Miami Dolphins cap and weird pink-tinted glasses walks unsteadily into the bar and pulls up a chair near the door, stuffs a washcloth into the back pocket of his dark, baggy pants. A kid outside on the sidewalk is shaking a broken parking meter that just ate his money.

Marino smacks two solids into side pockets, squinting through cigarette smoke.

“That’s right. You keep knocking your balls in the hole,” Rosie calls out to him, pouring another beer. “Where you been anyway?”

She is sexy in a hard-ridden way, a little thing nobody in his right mind dares to mess with, no matter how drunk he is. Marino once saw her break a three-hundred-pounder’s wrist with a beer bottle when he wouldn’t stop grabbing at her ass.

“Quit waiting on everybody and get over here,” Marino says, smacking the eight ball.

It warbles to the center of the green felt and stops.

“Screw it,” he mutters, propping his stick against the table, wandering over to the jukebox while Rosie pops open two bottles of Miller Lite and sets them in front of the fat woman and the ferret.

Rosie’s always frenetic, like a windshield wiper on high. She dries her hands on the back of her jeans as Marino picks out a few favorites from a mix of the seventies.

“What are you staring at?” he asks the homeless-looking man sitting by the door.

“How about a game?”

“I’m busy,” Marino says, not turning around as he makes selections on the jukebox.

“You’re not playing anything unless you buy a drink,” Rosie tells the homeless-looking man slumped by the door. “And I don’t want you hanging around here just for the hell of it. How many times I got to tell you?”

“I thought he might like a game with me.” He pulls out his washcloth and nervously starts wringing it.

“I’m going to tell you the same thing I did last time you came in here buying nothing and using the john, get out,” Rosie says in his face, her hands on her hips. “You want to stay, you pay.”

He slowly gets up from his chair, wringing the washcloth, and stares at Marino, his eyes defeated and tired, but there’s something in them.

“I thought you might like to play a game,” he says to Marino.

“Out!” Rosie yells at him.

“I’ll take care of it,” Marino says, walking over to the man. “Come on, I’m seeing you out, pal, before it’s too late. You know how she gets.”

The man doesn’t resist. He doesn’t stink half as bad as Marino expected, and he follows him out the door onto the sidewalk, where the idiot kid is still shaking the parking meter.

“It ain’t a goddamn apple tree,” Marino tells the kid.

“Fuck off.”

Marino strides over to him, towers over him, and the kid’s eyes get wide.

“What’d you say?” Marino asks, cupping his ear, leaning into him. “Did I hear what I think I did?”

“I put in three quarters.”

“Well now, ain’t that a pity. I suggest you get in your piece-of-shit car and get your ass out of here before I arrest you for damaging city property,” Marino says, even though he really can’t arrest anybody anymore.

The homeless-looking man from the bar is walking slowly along the sidewalk, glancing back as if expecting Marino to follow. He says something as the kid starts his Mustang and guns it out of there.

“You talking to me?” Marino asks the homeless-looking man, walking his way.

“He’s always doing that,” the homeless-looking man says quietly, softly. “Same kid. He never puts a damn nickel in the meters around here and then shakes the hell out of them until they break.”

“What do you want.”

“Johnny came in here the night before it happened,” he says in his ill-fitting clothes, the heels of his shoes cut out.

“Who you talking about.”

“You know who. He didn’t kill himself, neither. I know who did.”

Marino gets a feeling, the same feeling he got when he walked inside Mrs. Simister’s house. He spots Lucy a block away, taking her time on the sidewalk, not dressed in her usual baggy black clothes.

“Him and me played pool the night before it happened. He had on splints. They didn’t seem to bother him. He played pool just fine.”

Marino watches Lucy without making it obvious. Tonight, she fits in. She could be any gay woman who hangs out around here, boyish but good-looking and sexy in expensive jeans, faded and full of holes, and beneath her soft, black leather jacket is a white undershirt that clings to her breasts, and he’s always liked her breasts, even if he isn’t supposed to notice them.

“I saw him just the one time when he brought this girl in here,” the homeless man is saying, looking around as if something makes him edgy, turning his back to the bar. “Think she’s somebody you ought to find. That’s all I have to say.”

“What girl and why should I give a shit?” Marino says, watching Lucy get closer, scanning the area, making sure nobody gets any ideas about her.

“Pretty,” the man says. “The kind both men and women look at around here, dressed all sexy. Nobody wanted her around.”

“Seems to me nobody wants you around, either. You just got your ass kicked out.”

Lucy walks into Deuce without looking, as if Marino and the homeless man are invisible.

“Only reason I didn’t get kicked out that night is because Johnny bought me a drink. We played pool while the girl sat by the jukebox, looking around as if she’d never been taken to such a slop hole in her life. Went in the ladies’ room a couple times and after that it smelled like weed.”

“You make a habit of going into the ladies’ room?”

“I heard a woman at the bar talking. This girl, she looked like trouble.”

“You got any idea what her name is?”

“Sure don’t.”

Marino lights a cigarette. “What makes you think she has anything to do with what happened to Johnny?”

“I didn’t like her. Nobody did. That’s all I know.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t be telling nobody else about this, you got it?”

“No point in it.”

“Point or not, keep your mouth shut. And now you’re going to tell me how the hell you knew I was going to be in here tonight, and why the hell you thought you could talk to me.”

“That’s quite a bike you got.” The homeless man looks across the street. “Kind of hard to miss. A lot of people around here know you used to be a homicide detective and now do private-investigation stuff at some police camp or something north of here.”

“What? Am I the mayor?”

“You’re a regular. I’ve seen you with some of the Harley guys, been watching for you for weeks, hoping for a chance to talk to you. I hang out in the area, do the best I can. Not exactly the high point of my life, but I keep hoping it will get better.”

Marino pulls out his wallet and slips him a fifty-dollar bill.

“You find out more about this girl you saw in here, I’ll make it worth your while,” he says. “Where can I reach you?”

“Different place, different night. Like I said, I do the best I can.”

Marino gives him his cell phone number.

“Want another one?” Rosie asks as Marino returns to the bar.

“Better give me an unleaded. You remember right before Thanksgiving, some good-looking blond doctor coming in here with a girl? He and that guy you just chased out play pool that night?”

She looks thoughtful, wiping down the bar, shakes her head. “A lot of people come in here. That was a long time ago. How long before Thanksgiving?”

Marino watches the door. It is a few minutes before ten. “Maybe the night before.”

“No, not me. I know this is hard to believe,” she says, “but I got a life, don’t work here every damn night. I was out of here at Thanksgiving. InAtlantawith my son.”

“Supposedly there was a girl in here who was trouble, was in here with the doctor I’ve told you about. Was with him the night before he died.”

“Got no idea.”

“Maybe she came in that night with the doctor when you was out of town?”

Rosie keeps wiping down the bar. “I don’t want a problem in here.”

Lucy sits by the window, near the jukebox, Marino at another table on the other side of the bar, his earpiece in and plugged into a receiver that looks like a cell phone. He drinks a nonalcoholic beer and smokes.

The locals on the other side aren’t paying any attention. They never do. Every time Lucy has been in here with Marino, the same losers are sitting on the same stools, smoking menthol cigarettes and drinking lite beer. The only person they talk to outside their deadbeat little club is Rosie, who once told Lucy that the hugely fat woman and her scrawny boyfriend used to live in a nice Miami neighborhood with a guard gate and everything until he got sent to jail for selling crystal meth to an undercover cop. Now the fat lady has to support him on what she makes as a bank teller. The fat man with the goatee is a cook in a diner Lucy will never visit. He comes here every night, gets drunk and somehow manages to drive himself home.

Lucy and Marino ignore each other. No matter how many times they’ve been through this routine during various operations, it always feels awkward and invasive. She doesn’t like being spied on, even if it’s her idea, and no matter the logic in him being here tonight, she resents his presence.

She checks the wireless mic attached to the inside of her leather jacket. She bends over as if tying her shoes so no one in the bar can see her talking. “Nothing so far,” she transmits to Marino.

It is three minutes past ten.

She waits. She sips a nonalcoholic beer, her back to Marino, and she waits.

She glances at her watch. It is eight minutes past ten.

The door opens and two men walk in.

Two more minutes pass and she transmits to Marino, “Something’s wrong. I’m going out to look. Stay here.”

Lucy walks through the Art Deco district alongOcean Drive, looking for Stevie in the crowd.

The later it gets, the louder and drunker the patrons ofSouthBeachbecome, and the street is so crowded with people cruising and looking for parking, traffic barely moves. It’s irrational to look for Stevie. She didn’t show up. She’s probably a million miles from here. But Lucy looks.

She thinks of Stevie claiming to have followed her footprints in the snow, follow them to the Hummer parked behind the Anchor Inn. She wonders how she could have accepted what Stevie said, not really questioned it. While Lucy’s footprints would have been obvious just outside the cottage, they would have gotten mixed in with other footprints along the sidewalk. It’s not as if Lucy was the only person in Ptown that morning. She thinks of the cell phone that belongs to a man named Doug, of the red handprints, of Johnny, and is sickened by how careless she has been, how myopic and self-destructive.

Stevie probably never intended to meet Lucy at Deuce, just teased her, toyed with her the same way she did atLorraine’s that night. Nothing is Stevie’s first time. She’s an expert in her games, her bizarre, sick games.

“You see her anywhere?” Marino’s voice sounds in her ear.

“I’m turning around,” she says. “Stay where you are.”

She cuts over on11th Street, then heads north onWashington Avenuepast the courthouse as a white Chevy Blazer with dark, tinted windows drives past. She walks quickly, uneasily, suddenly not so brave, mindful of the pistol in her ankle holster and breathing hard.