The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

Jonathon King Snake Eyes

From High Stakes

He saw them coming. Over the high grass a swirl of dust spun up on the horizon, rising on the midday heat. He squinted into hard sunlight and timed the movement. Car, he thought. Maybe two. Behind him, to the west, towering clouds with anvil-flat bottoms moved across the sky from the Everglades toward the ocean, soaking up moisture and turning bruised and dark as they came. In his hand was the twisted neck of a burlap sack and he could feel the writhing of thick animal muscle inside of it.

He pulled the wide-brimmed hat from his head and wiped the sweat from his eyes and then looked down, refocusing on the shadows of a saw palmetto clumped up beside him. The snakes were not forgiving of a man’s inattention. And contrary to legend, diamond-backs did not always sound their dry rattle before they struck. He stood watching both the trailing dust of approaching men and the half-hidden maw of a gopher hole, where the rattlers in this open ridge country liked to nest. He’d been in this part of south Florida long enough to know either one could bring trouble. And as in all gambles, anticipation and assessment are always key.

Four days earlier, on a dirt street in Miami, he had arrived on a corner at the edge of town with a handbill: “Wanted: Men Not Afraid of Snakes and Reptiles. Cash Money!” He’d joined two dozen others at the printed address. Most of the men who showed up were in their twenties and thirties, anxious and fidgety, their feet shuffling and hands busy around cigarettes and small packages of chew. Some wore their tweed suits, the color faded from the sun, the collars and cuffs rubbed soft at the edges. Others were in suspenders and caps but still scuffed about in stitched, hard-leather shoes. Street shoes. City shoes.

O’Hanlon had been in Miami less than a week, fresh off the train from his Brooklyn neighborhood, and he could already spot the “binder boys.” They were the young, slick-talking hustlers from the city who’d come to the land boom of Florida. They’d heard on cold northern sidewalks that there were fortunes to be made in the sun. Packing their cardboard suitcases and carrying a roll of savings or a stake gathered from family and friends, they’d come south. In a place gone real-estate mad they’d buy a chunk of unseen land and then sell it for profit days later, long before they ever had to make a payment. The “binder” on the property would change hands ten times until the last fool left holding it was stuck with the inflated bill, unable to find another buyer.

It was high-stakes gambling, not high finance. O’Hanlon had learned the scam from the shoeshine boy outside his flophouse hotel. He also learned that by this late fall of 1925, the boom was going bust. It had been a cleanout for the ones who had arrived early and who had money to begin with. No doubt some nameless butter-and-egg man from Yonkers fell into luck and came out sharp. But by this time the binder boys had fallen to O’Hanlon’s level, scrounging after any odd job they could just to buy a meal.

At the morning gathering he watched the group, scrutinizing each man’s hands, reading their eyes when they turned to speak to one another and especially when the conversation went quiet.

“You can always measure a man by his hands and eyes,” O’Hanlon’s father had taught him. “Don’t even need to see ’em get into the ring. If they’re scared, it’s in their eyes, son. If they’re weak, it’s in their hands.”

He had heard it hundreds of times in his father’s boxing gym on Delacourt. He had grown up in that gym, watching men bring their dreams in off the street, watching the ones whose ambition or determination or desperation drove them. He’d also seen the ones who let that same motivation leak away and watched others have it beaten out of them. The many who were without talent or were just plain lazy left without scars, their pride put in its proper place before the real fighting started. The few with skill labored and learned and could raise a dozen expectations with their potential. But he had only witnessed one champion, then seen him fall under the thumb of promoters and handlers and gamblers. The rich got richer, the rest of us worked and watched.

His father’s lessons were still with him that morning when a battered Model T truck pulled to the corner. A gray-bearded man with red suspenders climbed out of the cab and then swung himself up into the truck bed. With a voice scratched with age and handrolled tobacco, he introduced himself as Rattlesnake Pete. O’Hanlon took in the old man’s hands, the fingers knurled and twisted, two of them missing half their length. He could see that despite their damage, they were not weak hands.

“Any you all boys ever catched you a snake?” he said, his drawl coming straight out of Alabama. The group of men had started to gather, but no one offered an answer. The man called Pete did not bother to look up for any nods of assent or bragging. His attention was on the truck-bed floor where he’d bent to hoist a burlap bag.

“Ya’ll work with me an’ we got ten acres of brush land to clear outta rattlers,” he went on while untwisting the neck of the bag. A half dozen of the men narrowed their eyes on the movement of Mr. Pete’s hands and another half dozen, most of the binder boys, took a subtle step back.

“I pay you fifty cent a snake and that’ll beat pickin’ beans any day, boys,” he said, still looking into the hole of the bag opening and then suddenly stabbing his hand in.

“Course, this ain’t no bean neither,” he said as his fist came out with a slick, writhing ribbon of flesh.

Six more men stepped two full steps back. A few stayed rooted. They were not necessarily brave men. The promise of fifty cents a snake was the glue. Mr. Pete now focused his attention back on the group, looking each of them in the eyes, going face to face. Then, without a word of embellishment or warning, he flung the snake down into the dirt, and two more of the men jumped back while the beast coiled itself in the shadow of the truck bumper and began to vibrate.

“All right, boys,” the snakeman said, climbing down from the bed and moving more smoothly and surely than a man his age should have. “Ain’t no danger if ya’ll do what I learn ya.”

O’Hanlon and three others who’d stayed close cut their eyes to old Pete’s movements, O’Hanlon studying the footwork, watching the body parts closest to the snake. The old man eased in, bending at the knee and never letting his eyes leave the rattler’s head.

“Oncet ya’ll know where he’s at, just keep his attention. They’s just stupid animals, boys. Ain’t got nothin’ in they heads but meanness and belly hunger and they already know ya’ll too big to eat.”

Now on his knee only a yard from the snake, the old man raised one hand and the reptile’s unblinking eyes locked onto the movement and rotated its head to match its slow path. O’Hanlon could hear the heavy breathing of the man next to him and the scuffle of feet farther back of the onlookers now trying to gain a view. With the animal’s head now focused on his left hand, the old snake man drifted his right hand more slowly to circle back behind the floating head.

“Ain’t a magician nor card player don’t know how to git you lookin’ at the one thing whilst they trickin’ you with the other,” old Pete said, staring intently at the snake’s head and sliding his left hand to further distract it. If the beast did not follow his left, the snake man kept his right hand still and waited for the snake’s attention to return to the movement before closing the gap. The breath sound next to O’Hanlon had stopped. Or maybe it was his own.

“Ya’ll old enough to know THAT!” old Pete suddenly yelped, simultaneously flicking his right hand across ten inches of space and snatching up the snake just behind its spade-shaped head. “Ain’t ya’ll?”

The man called Pete stood up and extended his arm. From his fist the rattler hung, curling its body frantically into a series of desperate S-shapes, its unhinged mouth glistening wide and white and angry.

The man beside O’Hanlon was shaking his head in appreciation and the group behind began to mumble.

“Fifty cent for five minutes of work, boys,” Pete said, now with a teasing light in his eye. “Anybody that’s game, climb on up into the truck.”

Three of them made it into the field. Rattlesnake Pete was not nearly as dramatic when showing the newcomers how to flush a gopher hole with kerosene to bring the snakes writhing and blind out into the sunlight. He’d armed them with long-handled, close-tined pitchforks if they wanted. The old man had been hired, he said, to clear the scrub just north and west of Miami of all its rattlers. The buyer of the land was to begin construction on what he promised would be the finest horseracing track and paddock south of Lexington, and just the thought of snakes and thoroughbred horses together would not do.

With an early morning sun already burning deep into his shoulders and the exposed angles of his nose and cheeks and forehead, O’Hanlon had spent his first day in the field watching. The more experienced snake hunters moved quickly away from the recruits, knowing the terrain and the gopher holes — which actually belonged to a large kind of land tortoise — where easy catches could be made. O’Hanlon quickly discarded their lies about the snake’s habit of staying in the shade to avoid the heat of the sun. The logic seemed right; the semitropical sun was raw and unmerciful. But O’Hanlon soon recognized that the cold-blooded species needed the sun to stay warm and he’d found his first catch half curled on a gray-white slab of limestone, the sun full on its distinctive, diamond-patterned skin. By watching the others, he’d stolen the idea of a hook at the end of the pitchfork handle fashioned from a length of stiff wire. Moving slowly, he eased the wire under the snake as it rattled its tail at him and then lifted it off the rock. By suspending the beast in air he robbed it of a solid foundation from which to launch a strike. Then, while carefully watching the movement of the head, he stuffed it into the open gunnysack and earned his first legitimate fifty cents since arriving in Florida.

By the third day he had snared ten of the animals, as many as even the more experienced men of the dozen who stayed on. At noontime old Pete fed them all lunch under any nearby shade oak. From the bed of his truck he handed out day-old loaves of hard bread, chunks of cheese cut from huge disks, and all the oranges a man could eat. It was during the breaks that O’Hanlon heard that Pete collected one dollar from the land developer for each of the snakes they all caught. The old man tallied the number on his own count, though he did offer the sacks to the rich owner to count for himself. Several of the men smiled knowingly when one suggested that Pete was not beyond overstating the catch or releasing a few of the undamaged snakes to be caught and paid for again.

“That ole rich man, he’ll stick his hand down your pocket to take ya’ll money but he ain’t gone take a chance puttin’ his finger on that snake for countin’,” said one, raising smiles and nods from the others.

“He don’t have to when he has fools like us to do it for him,” said another.

That statement put a damp silence over the group. But when the foreman called them up they all still stretched out their legs and took to the field. O’Hanlon rose with them, the five dollars he’d earned tucked deep under the leather of his boot.

O’Hanlon kept his head down, eyes up at the brim of his hat, watching and assessing the arrival of the now close vehicles as they jounced across the open field through the brush. Within minutes he recognized the cough and clatter of old Pete’s truck, but not the cream-colored touring car. He did not look up fully until they stopped ten yards away, next to an outcropping of cabbage palms. Pete’s foreman, the man they called McGahee, was driving the truck and got out first, his hands in his pockets and his porkpie hat tipped back.

“Any luck, Irish?”

“Just the one so far,” O’Hanlon answered, raising the bag ever so slightly.

But O’Hanlon’s eyes were on the Pierce-Arrow convertible, the Florida sun flashing off its chrome and somehow melting into the glowing enamel of its polished hood. The driver got out. O’Hanlon measured him at just over six feet and 190 pounds, which he carried well. He was wearing the same shoes as the binder boys, but his were new and polished. His dark suit was equally new but made of a rough cloth, and he unbuttoned his jacket as he assessed O’Hanlon from a distance. Their eyes met and neither looked away until the passenger of the car stood up in the back seat and the driver turned to open the door.

The colonel was dressed in a white linen suit complete with a vest stretched tight across his substantial belly and a straw boater with a yellow and black ribbon. He did not move to step out, but instead stood erect, surveying the land from a height, his large head turning slowly. The sun made the cloth of his suit seem luminous and he raised a large cigar to his lips and posed as if he knew it.

“How is the drainage here, Mr. Pete?” he said as the snakeman walked round the back of his truck.

“She’s pretty dry here ’cause of the ridge, Colonel. Even in the rainy season she’ll drain without too much help.”

The colonel did not answer and the rest could only stand and wait. The only sound was the ticking of the cooling engines. “Too damn hot for horses in October,” the colonel finally said, and moved to the doorway, which his driver now opened. On the ground his height was diminished but O’Hanlon noted that the man carried his girth with considerable grace. A starched collar pinched at the folds of flesh in his neck and a carefully trimmed walrus mustache gave him a look of old English. He seemed to be studying the sandy soil with the toe of his polished boot; then he stepped forward to where O’Hanlon was standing.

“How many snakes do you see a day out here son?”

O’Hanlon looked up into the colonel’s eyes and marked their clear grayness, a pale color that reflected nothing. His fingers were thick and blunt at the ends, the flat, squared nails carefully clipped and buffed. They were not the hands of a man easily ignored.

“The number goes up, sir, when you get better at spotting them,” he answered.

“I suppose that’s so,” the colonel said, turning to Mr. Pete. The snakeman took his hat off and scratched at his balding head. McGahee turned away, shaking his.

The colonel toed the ground again and the afternoon silence enveloped them all. The tall driver moved up next to his boss without a word and O’Hanlon could feel the heat on his shoulders. A single rivulet of sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. He watched as the colonel bent to brush a burred sticker from his spotless pants leg. O’Hanlon was waiting for the gentleman to speak when he heard the dry rattle. At first he thought it was coming from his bag but quickly realized it was unmuffled and too sharp and just to his right. The volume increased and froze all five men. O’Hanlon cut his eyes to the shade of the cabbage palm and caught the movement, the angle of the snake’s strike, the sound of scaled skin on rock.

The jaws of the rattler were less than a foot from the flesh of the colonel’s outstretched arm when O’Hanlon’s hand snapped out in a blur and stopped it. His fist closed just behind the snake’s head and twisted the body up and away, but the momentum of the animal caused its tail to snap against the colonel’s pants leg. At the exact same moment an explosion sounded from O’Hanlon’s left. His eyes blinked at the sound of the report but then refocused just as the snake’s head disintegrated.

For a moment, all five men could only stare. O’Hanlon first looked at the shredded gristle in his fist and the blood spattered across his arm. Then he turned to see the smoking barrel of a handgun held by the colonel’s driver. The tall man’s arm was still locked at the elbow, his eye still sighting down the weapon. The heavy crack of the gunshot seemed to have sucked all other sound out of the air, no bird or breeze or rustle of palm fronds. Even the heat seemed to have stopped at the level around their heads, robbing them all of a single breath.

“Gotdamn, boys!” Mr. Pete finally said, breaking the silence.

The colonel stood, looking first at the red knot in O’Hanlon’s hand and then at his driver’s.45. He cleared his substantial throat and placed two fingers into his right ear but could only reiterate the old snakeman’s reaction.

“Goddamn, gentlemen.”

O’Hanlon put the palm of his hand over the tureen of soup, guarding it each time a car or truck rolled down the city street, raising a yellow film of dust that would drift with the ocean breeze and threaten his meal. He had splurged and spent twelve cents on the large pail, the extra for the chunks of beef stirred in. It was the first time he’d eaten meat since he’d come south. It was, he guessed, a celebration of sorts. He was sharing the soup with the shoe-shine boy in front of his hotel, sitting up in the customer’s chair while the black boy, whose name he did not know, squatted on his box.

“Colonel Bradford just give you a job,” the shoeshine said again, repeating the line, and then putting another spoonful into his mouth, savoring both the taste and the idea.

After the gunshot and the cussing, the colonel had relighted his cigar and taken a more careful measure of O’Hanlon, assessing him as one might a prospective horse purchase. He was only a couple of inches shorter than the colonel’s driver and several pounds lighter, though it was difficult to gauge with the ropy muscle of his forearms and the wide, coat-hanger look of his shoulders. His dark hair and nearly black eyes only gave a suggestion of immigrant. The colonel noted O’Hanlon’s hands, one still loosely gripping the neck of the burlap bag, the other, blood-spattered, holding what was left of the snake. Neither of them showed even the slightest flutter.

“I could use a handsome young man up at the club,” the colonel suddenly announced, turning his big head slightly to Mr. Pete’s direction.

The snakeman stepped up and looked at O’Hanlon, winking as he did.

“He’s the best man I got out here. Colonel. You seen how quick he is. Be a shame to lose him.”

The colonel let a grin come into his face.

“I’m sure he is. Mr. Pete. But I will pay him twenty-live dollars a week and he won’t have to stand out in this godforsaken sun all day.” He brought a card out from his vest pocket and handed it to O’Hanlon before turning to climb back into his car. “Be at this address day after tomorrow, son. Seven a.m. sharp.”

O’Hanlon finished out the day with Mr. Pete. He was paid for three more snakes caught before twilight and his pay included fifty cents for the rattler missing its head. When Pete dropped the crew of men off on the street corner at dusk, he caught O’Hanlon’s attention and called him to the opened window of the truck. He lowered his voice even though their faces were drawn near.

“You got somethin’ in your eye, boy, though I cain’t say what,” the old man said, trying to look under the brim of O’Hanlon‘s hat “You best think on it hard when you’re up to the colonel’s, ’cause if you’re ‘spectin’ to outsmart somebody for they money with that quick hand and brain of yours, that ain’t the place to do it. Ain’t nobody took nothin’ off the colonel and walked away with it.”

O’Hanlon tilted his head up from the shadow of its brim, exposing a bemused look on his face. He squinted into the old man’s eyes, challenged by the thought that they might hold the same power to glimpse a man’s soul as his own.

“Thank you, sir,” he finally said, the first time in the days he’d spent with the old man that he’d spoken directly to him. “I will appreciate the advice, sir, I’m sure.”

Danny O’Hanlon’s father didn’t need to tell his son that he would never make it as a fighter. He knew himself by the time he was seventeen that his near-photographic memory of technique and tactics, his ability at assessing an opponent and the undeniable quickness of his hands and feet were not enough. He could pound the heavy bag for hours, rattle the speed bag until it sang like a snare drum, and work endlessly in the ring with a seemingly limitless endurance. But the desire was missing. He was not like the desperate ones who melded hunger and meanness together with a physical talent to satisfy both. He had done well in amateur bouts, but when he worked the corners with his father at the professional matches he could see the hearts in men who knew and wanted nothing more than the fight. He also saw the men with money in the third row, watching intently, not guffawing or shaking their fists in elation or rage, but watching. The rich got richer without pain. They only watched, while the fighters let their hearts bleed.

“It’s off limits, son,” his father would say when he caught Danny staring at the fine suits and glossy women in row three. “They’re born to it, lad; forget about it.” And Danny O’Hanlon would turn back to watch men at war, but he would not forget. On his twentieth birthday he left New York, left this father’s corner as the cut man and took the train south. Now he’d met a rich man, and seen his eyes and hands.

“I got me a cousin works the Breakers Hotel up to Palm Beach,” said the shoeshine, still working his soup. “Been tryin’ to get me a job in that place almost a year now. Says that’s where all the rich folk are.”

O’Hanlon knew of the talk. The railroad and tourist hotel Henry Flagler built on the island of Palm Beach was well known. He had overheard locker-room talk by fighters and their hangers-on who knew when certain people left the city and “the dollars went south for the winter.”

Both he and the shoeshine boy had gone quiet with the thought of it, both looking out into the growing twilight, chewing softly on the bits of beef and their own image of money.

“My cousin says the colonel own the finest-gamblin’ joint in Florida, right there on Palm Beach island,” said the shoeshine.

“I thought gambling was illegal in Florida,” O’Hanlon said, though he’d seen plenty of it since his arrival.

“Hell, Irish. Ain’t nothin’ illegal you got that kind of money. My cousin say one a his favorite customers go to the colonel’s every night but Sunday when he in the Poinciana Hotel. Get his shoes all shined every single time like a routine and give my cousin a silver dollar. Says it’s lucky. You believe that, Irish?”

O’Hanlon scraped up the final spoonful of soup, the sound of metal on metal making a soft, screeching sound.

“How would I know about lucky?”

“What you mean, ‘How would you know’? You got you a job wit’ the colonel, Irish! You done got you some lucky.”

That night O’Hanlon swam in the ocean again. He took a bus to A1A and made his way down to the beach well past dark. It was a windless night and the small breakers made only a hissing sound when they washed up and for a moment made a new dark border in the sand. He stripped to his shorts and eased himself step by step into the black water up to his shoulders and then turned to mark a beachfront light as a bearing. The current was pulling softly north and he began stroking straight out, a metronome in his head, a beat built with routine. Every three hundred strokes he would stop and turn, treading water long enough to find the high beach light and then adjust his course. His muscles were tight in the first two sets but then loosened with the action. The taste of salt water in his mouth again reminded him of summers on Coney Island, his father frantic with his six-year-old son’s ludicrous ability to swim in the Atlantic without a single lesson or practice. After ten three-hundred-stroke turns, the light had disappeared in the distance, and O’Hanlon kept on. He had heard once from a lifeguard on Coney Island that no man would swim too far out in the ocean to get back, simply because he would have no choice but to get back. At the twenty-first turn O’Hanlon stopped swimming and flipped over on his back, his lungs aching, his eyes looking up at a black bowl of stars. There was nothing to hear but the beat of his heart in his cars. Nothing to feel but the gentle movement of the swells, raising him first, only inches, and then settling him back. He never thought of what was below the surface. Never let his imagination hold sharks or hungry bluefish eyeing his floating white flesh. Out here he could just drift and focus and plan. With his ears in the water he could track out a plan in the stars and let it roll or start it all over again until he could see it. Then, when the vision was clear, he would turn to land and begin stroking again, watching for the light, timing his endurance until he would finally stagger back up the sand, confident that he could make it again.

The eastern sky was still dusky gray when the train slowed for the West Palm Beach station. O’Hanlon timed an oncoming patch of dark brush and jumped. He let his knees take the shock of the landing and rolled onto one shoulder, his arms wrapped around the waterproof canvas bag stuffed with all his possessions.

He waited in the groundcover, the smell of cinder and dry grass in his nose. No shouts or whistles, only the same clack of metal and shiver of hinged wood that had drowned out his noise when he’d jumped the freight car after midnight back in Miami. In time he gained his feet and moved away toward the streets, brushing the dirt and sticker seeds from his pants legs. At first he used the alleys and the walls of wooden storage shacks and warehouses for cover until he was several blocks to the cast. Only then did he step out into the wide expanse of a city street and try to take his bearings.

The shoeshine had given him directions, told him to look for the tall, white-stucco building rising above town and use it as a landmark. From that tower the bridge across the lake would be due east. It was the shoeshine who also convinced O’Hanlon to jump the night train north.

“Ya’ll still gonna have some walkin’ to do. Best get there early, Irish. Ya’ll don’t want ta keep the Colonel wailin’.”

O’Hanlon kept moving east toward a lightening sky. The street was lined with small cottages set back off the roadway, the lean of their rooflines their only distinction. An occasional lantern light could be seen coming through a window. Working people, up in the predawn to start their day. Farther on, the working-class houses were replaced by small shop fronts and automobile repair bays, and then the paved streets of a true business section began. A milk delivery truck passed him. A man dressed in a suit coat walked a dog. Along the way O’Hanlon noted the same interruption in construction that he’d seen in Miami. Lots with foundations already set, but unfinished walls left ragged. Piles of fill dirt were sprouting weeds from sitting too long undisturbed. They were projects started and then abruptly stopped by worried investors. By the time he reached the lakefront, the top five floors of the ten-story building were glowing in the early rays of sunrise. It was the only thing that seemed beyond pedestrian on this side of the lake. But on the opposite shore, even in the early shadows, O’Hanlon could see Henry Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel, stretched out in white like some languorous, highly bred woman. Even from here one could see the distinction. Even from here one knew where the clean ocean breezes stopped first. On the island was where the untroubled money was.

The tender at the western end of the bridge took a full minute to judge O’Hanlon before allowing him to pass, the man’s rheumy eyes jumping from the colonel’s card to O’Hanlon’s face, worn clothes and the hag he carried.

“Working for the colonel, eh?”

O’Hanlon nodded. The tender looked once more at the hag and then tipped his head to the east.

“Just north of the hotel, son. And nowhere else.”

O’Hanlon retrieved the card and started his walk, counting his steps over the length of the span, looking down into the clear water, judging its depth and the pull of its currents.

By the time he reached the eastern end the sun was streaming through the fronds of the few planted palm trees and his shirt was pasted to his hack with an early sweat.

Carpets of thick-leafed grass and a military-like line of royal palms banked the lane that led past the hotel to the colonel’s. O’Hanlon could see glimpses of the new mansions set hack off the roadway and done in the Mediterranean revival style of white-stucco arches and terra-cotta tiles.

The colonel’s was more modest. It was a white-framed, two-story affair on the lakefront with striped canvas overhangs and a pyramid-shaped shingled roof at the entrance. Several louvered cupolas were situated on the shingled roof to vent the heat. On the street side a five-foot-tall cement wall guarded the front of the club. There was no movement at the front so O’Hanlon followed the sound of a truck engine and voices around to a side alley and approached a group of three men unloading cases of fresh produce and cartons of dry goods. He was about to ask for the colonel when the driver’s voice sounded from a porch above.

“Well, if it isn’t snake boy come to work an honest day.”

O’Hanlon looked up to see the man he would now always consider “the gunman” in his internal file of new faces and then back to the workers. Their heads had snapped up at the sound of the voice but then quickly turned back to their lifting and carrying once they knew it was not their duty to respond.

“I came for the colonel,” O’Hanlon said.

“No. You came to work, snake boy. So quit standing around and work,” the gunman said. “Next wagon’s coinin’ round the corner, boys. Let’s get to it.”

O’Hanlon dropped his bag near the picket fence and joined the brigade line, passing food cartons and cases of illegal liquor hand to hand in through the kitchen door. No one said a word to him. The occasional grunts and exhalations of the men remained the only sound as the sun rose, the alley warmed, and the next truck pulled in.

O’Hanlon spent his first three days working the trucks, digging out rooted palms on the property and replanting tropical ferns. At night he would walk back over the bridge where he’d found a cheap room with the other workers. After a week he’d figured out that the driver, who’d become Mr. Brasher, was also the security captain of sorts. The four quiet men who reported to the house after dinnertime dressed in plain black suits gave deferential nods to the workers and then disappeared into the building, only to be seen later, walking the upstairs porches or peering from high railings. Another man stayed close to Brasher at all times, agreeing when spoken to, occasionally scratching down an instruction on a small pad.

One morning O’Hanlon and the work crew were breaking up a coral outcrop to run a waterline to the main house when a slab of rock slipped from its lashings and fell from the back of a truck. The sharp coral sliced through the lower leg of an older worker called Mauricio, crushing his ankle. His scream brought Brasher and his assistant running from the house. When the group lifted away the boulder, Mauricio’s leather boot lay at a sickening right angle to his leg. While the others simply stared, O’Hanlon quickly went to work, carefully ripping away the man’s blood-soaked trouser. The glisten of wet, white bone shown through the cleaved and reddening meat of muscle. Brasher’s assistant, a man called Dimmett, drew a sharp breath and even Brasher took a slight step back. O’Hanlon checked their reactions and then used his left hand to squeeze shut the fleshy wound, and as blood flowed between his fingers he called out for supplies.

“Towels! Clean towels!” he yelled at no one in particular, but it was one of his crew that went running.

“Do you have a first-aid kit?” he said, this time looking up to Brasher, who seemed to be confused by the question. “Some bandages? Some iodine? You don’t want this getting infected, boss. It’s way too deep for that.”

Brasher shook his head, then looked up to the porch where one of his men was standing, the metal barrel of a rifle in his hands, watching the commotion.

“In the casino!” Brasher called up to him. “Get that first-aid pouch from behind the coat-check counter.” The man hurried off. The laborer scrambled back with an armload of kitchen towels and O’Hanlon pressed one flat to the wound and wrapped it with another.

“I need your bell, boss,” O’Hanlon said. Brasher’s hand went to his buckle but stopped. He looked at Dimmett and flicked a finger. The other security man pulled his belt off and had to grab at the Colt revolver that he carried in a holster at the small of his back. O’Hanlon watched the man fumble with the weapon and then took the belt and tied it tight around the reddening wrap of towels. He looked into Mauricio’s eyes and watched the pupils dilate and roll with oncoming shock.

“Let’s get him over to the doc’s at the hotel,” O’Hanlon said, looking up at Brasher, who hesitated. “Come on!” he said. “If that artery in his calf is split, he’s going to lose a lot of blood.”

Brasher looked down again at the towels.

“You’ll have to take him over the bridge. There’s a doctor’s right on Clematis by the drugstore.”

“Brasher, the doc from the hotel was here in five minutes last night when that lady fainted inside,” O’Hanlon said. “Hell, it’ll take us near thirty to bounce him over to West Palm.”

The other laborers didn’t look up to see Brasher’s face and instead moved to lay the rest of the towels as a mat in the bed of the truck.

“Then you better get moving, snake boy,” Brasher said, and motioned the other security man to help gather up Mauricio. “The help don’t get treated at the hotel.”

O’Hanlon held Brasher’s eyes longer than he wanted to, then moved to Mauricio’s legs while the others hooked under his arms. Once they had him settled in the truck Dimmett climbed in to drive and O’Hanlon watched through the back window as the security man carelessly put the handgun on the seat beside him.

It was after five when they returned from the mainland. Brasher was waiting.

“Colonel wants you out front, parking cars,” he said, handing O’Hanlon a suit complete with new shoes. “You do know how to drive?”

“Not a problem,” O’Hanlon said.

“Good. Get cleaned up and get something to eat and be out on the front porch at seven.”

Throughout the night he politely greeted the colonel’s guests, ladies in fine summer fashions, men in dark, conservative suits. The autos were all expensive sedans and touring cars. They all smelled of fine perfume and hair tonic. O’Hanlon only ground the gears of one, for which he received a smirk from the other valets.

When the evening was through, the colonel, with Brasher two steps behind, escorted the last of the guests to the street. O’Hanlon was sent scurrying for the car and returned with the Collingsworths’ Chrysler B70. The colonel held the passenger door for the lady and O’Hanlon the driver’s side for Mr. Collingsworth. When the car rumbled off, the colonel, dressed in a tuxedo, waited until O’Hanlon gained the sidewalk before speaking.

“I understand you may have saved a man’s leg today Mr., uh—”

“O’Hanlon, sir. Danny O’Hanlon.”

“Irish?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From New York City?”

“Chicago,” O’Hanlon lied, cutting his eyes to Brasher.

“You’re too young to have been in the war. Where did you learn your medical skills?”

“My father, sir. I was a corner man with my father in the fight game,” O’Hanlon said, going back to the truth.

“Fight game,” said the colonel, the taste of disapproval on his voice. He took a draw from his Cuban cigar. “A nasty business.”

O’Hanlon said nothing. Then the colonel extended his arm and slipped a ten-dollar bill into his hand. He stared at the bill a moment, unsure what the philanthropy might cost him.

“Thank you, sir.”

“You earned it, lad. Report here for the rest of the week. Mr. Brasher will look after you.”

The colonel took another deep draw of smoke and looked up through the palm fronds at a waxing moon.

“Another beautiful night in paradise,” he said, perhaps to himself. “But duty calls. Let us do the count and see how much they left behind tonight.”

O’Hanlon stood unmoving but caught Brasher’s final look as he held the door for the colonel and then shut it. The distinct snap of a metal lock sounded. Only then did he leave, heading south to the bridge and then walking its span, watching the water and marking the lights of the West Palm high-rise in the distance.

It was another week before he saw the inside of the casino itself. An arriving guest had bashed into the rear bumper of another guest’s automobile. The valet behind the wheel of the damaged car said he did not recall the name of the owner. O’Hanlon’s perfect memory had “Mr. Reed” instantly on his tongue and Brasher sent him inside to give the news to the man. Inside he approached a man he knew to be the floor manager.

Reed was pointed out, standing at one of the English hazard tables. The room was tastefully decorated; brocaded sofas, tall-stemmed lamps and polished wood. Around the roulette, faro, and other gaming tables the men stood exchanging polite conversation. They seemed to be only mildly distracted by the play of the cards or the spin of the wheel, and when they became too animated, their wives’ faces turned chilly with reproach. O’Hanlon had not expected the kind of raucous backslapping and cussing he’d been a part of in locker-room poker games, but the quiet, controlled atmosphere unsettled him at first. His discomfort subsided as he moved through the room, working his way to the side of Mr. Reed, and he realized that no one seemed to notice him, or if they did, they were trying mightily to ignore his presence. When he got to Reed’s elbow he stood for a few extra seconds, watching the route of money moving from tables to drawers. He scanned the room for office doors or the presence of the quiet security men he knew were somewhere on duty. Then he excused himself and sought Reed’s attention. The man turned to him and listened to the message and then dismissed O’Hanlon with a wave of limp fingers as if an errant mosquito had pestered him. “Park it, boy. We’ll see to it tomorrow.”

O’Hanlon kept his hands clasped behind his back, nodded, and in a low voice said, “She’s a beauty, sir. We’re very sorry.”

Reed looked at him again, this time with more interest. “And she will be again, son. With a bit of luck,” he said, turning back to his game.

O’Hanlon excused himself and walked away, again taking in the layout, the length of hallways, and the single staircase in view. “Bit of luck,” he whispered to himself.

He picked a particularly busy Friday night, one with a clear sky and no moon. An easy southeasterly breeze was blowing in from the Atlantic. He’d counted and timed, the retiring guests so that the final car was his to fetch. The others were gone when he returned with the car and the front of the club went quiet as it pulled away. O’Hanlon waited several minutes at the wall, giving the colonel and Brasher time to gather the money from the drawers and retire to the colonel’s office to count it. While he waited he picked the lock on the front door and then stepped back out to see Dimmett making his final rounds on the balcony. The security man would be in the hallway in between thirty and thirty-five seconds at O’Hanlon’s count, like every night before. Under the lamplight O’Hanlon extracted a flask and poured a pint of pig’s blood that he’d bottled from a West Palm butcher shop onto his pants leg from the thigh down, smeared the thick red fluid with his hands, and added a smear across his cheek.

At his count of twenty-eight he staggered into the hallway and cut his eyes to the top of the stairs where Dimmett’s footsteps were just falling. He groaned and stumbled into the bottom two risers and heard the security man catch his breath and say, “Christ!”

“Hit! By the B70,” O’Hanlon spat out between his teeth, clutching his leg with both hands, the blood oozing between his fingers. Dimmett bent and started to reach down but recoiled at the sight and froze.

“Your belt, man! It’s a cut artery,” O’Hanlon hissed through his teeth, urgent but not too loud. Dimmett was panicky. He undid his buckle, stripped the belt out, and ignored the sound of the revolver as it tumbled onto the wooden step behind him. When he bent forward to wrap the belt around the leg, O’Hanlon arched back, picked up the Colt, and came down hard on the back of Dimmett’s skull with the butt. He cradled the unconscious body and waited a full minute, listening. The club remained silent. His first assessment? True to form.

Gaining his feet, O’Hanlon put the Colt in his waistband at the small of his back and then slung Dimmett’s arm over his shoulder and hefted him. He now knew the way down the hall to the colonel’s office. With the security man propped up against the doorframe, he banged the oak door with the heel of his hand, hoping to move the people inside but not arouse others still in the club. He heard footsteps and then Brasher’s voice.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Dimmett,” said O’Hanlon. “He’s been hit by a car.”

“O’Hanlon? You know the damn rules, O’Hanlon. Nobody’s allowed in here after closing.”

“Christ, Brasher! The man’s hurt bad. It was a customer who hit him for Christ’s sake!”

O’Hanlon heard the colonel’s muffled baritone voice, too soft to make out the words. A metal lock snapped open from the inside. Brasher opened the door a few inches and looked squarely into Dimmett’s slack face and then at O’Hanlon’s blood-smeared check. “The hell?” Brasher said, letting the door swing wider.

O’Hanlon timed the movement, like a good fighter using his opponent’s own body momentum to set him up. When Brasher stepped back, O’Hanlon pushed Dimmett’s dead weight up and into Brasher’s left hand, which was already holding the.45. Brasher hooked his gun arm under the falling man to support him and O’Hanlon instantly snapped down on the barrel of the gun, twisting it up against the falling weight of Dimmett’s body. A muffled snap sounded as Brasher’s trigger finger broke at the knuckle and by the time his knee hit the floor O’Hanlon had the.45 pointed at his face while the Colt in his other hand was trained across the room on the colonel’s chest. Both of the men froze.

“Well, goddamn, gentlemen,” O’Hanlon said quietly. “This — is a robbery.”

With the.45 at the colonel’s temple, it took only five minutes for Brasher to tie both his employer and Dimmett with lengths of wet rawhide O’Hanlon had brought with him in his waterproof bag. O’Hanlon only let the colonel call him a common thief and a fool once before gagging the old man with a satin handkerchief from his own suit pocket. There was no comment from Brasher, only a smoldering, animal stare as O’Hanlon finally lashed him to a fine and sturdy straight-backed chair.

The office safe behind the colonel’s desk had not yet been opened, or had perhaps been slammed shut at the initial knock on the door. But O’Hanlon was not a greedy man. The three hundred thousand dollars in cash still in partially counted stacks on the colonel’s desk was enough. He pushed the bills into his waterproof bag and closed it.

“Nobody steals from the colonel and gets away with it. We’ll hunt you down, snake boy,” Brasher finally said.

O’Hanlon shook his head, gagged Brasher, and then moved to the door and listened for any movement out in the hall.

“Tough to find much cooperation with the law when you explain that the stolen cash came from an illegal gambling operation?” he said, leaving the rhetorical question in the air. “Snake eyes. Brasher. It’s all a gamble.”

O’Hanlon could hear the scrape of the chair the second he closed the door. He knew the route through the club to the back and marched out, moving fast, but not running. At the open kitchen door he saw the chef, carving at something on the counter, and two of the security men on the other side, waiting for the food. He ducked by without being seen, crossed the slate patio outside, and slipped into the dense wall of palm fronds and sea grape leaves to the rear gate. Sharp voices and a scuffling of feet sounded as he latched the door and headed into a neighbor’s yard. Floodlights came on behind him and he moved into the alley. He did not look back, did not panic, and never stopped moving east until he felt water.

He could feel the body of the swells below him, rising and falling, working against him, but not hard enough. He kept a rhythm with his feet, flutter kicking at a pace he could keep forever. On the darkened beach, O’Hanlon had filled two bicycle tires and positioned them inside the bag and next to the money. He tucked his clothes inside, then sealed the duffel shut and pushed off onto the sea. That was the beauty of the island, the security that the rich felt knowing they were on an island with only one entrance across the bridge. The better to keep the riffraff away. O’Hanlon knew Brasher would shut that route first. He knew he’d work the lake shorelines. Maybe they would get to the beach, figure out the ocean escape eventually. But the flow from the southeast would keep him moving up the coast. He could make three or four miles by sunup.

When he finished his third three-hundred-stroke turn he rolled over and hooked his arms over the bag. His muscles were warm from the work. The taste of salt water was in his mouth again and he watched the lights of the Breakers Hotel on the beach disappear in the distance. There was nothing to hear but the beat of his heart in his ears. Nothing to feel but the gentle movement of the swells, raising him first, only inches, and then settling him back. In the stars he tracked a plan, and when the vision was clear, he would turn to land and begin stroking. No man goes out too far to make it back, simply because he has no other choice.