Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

He said, “Baby, you look great.” She brightened and gave him a smile and a kiss.

He sniffed the air between them. “Love the perfume too.”

The children cut across their current, clamoring for attention. A moment of plea bargaining with their mother ensued, after which Kyle and Courtney trudged away toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Hernandez, a smiling Nicaraguan who was going to apply for her green card any day now, stood ready to dish out their supper before she began her trek out past the guardhouse and estate gates to the bus stop, and her night off.

“Any better today, sweetness?” Caroline asked, sitting down and taking a joint from her jeans pocket and lighting up.

The phone rang inside the house. Darryl lurched to his feet, saying, “I did okay in coffee. Made a buck or two. But I got hammered again in currencies. Big time.” He stepped into the house, carefully closing the sliding glass door behind him.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Caroline muttered, watching him pick up the phone in the television room. She took a hit off her joint. When she exhaled, it sounded like a sigh.

She smoked and watched Darryl waving a hand and talking. Behind him, the colors on the television screen changed into electric blues, greens, and reds and became a map of Israel, Jordan, and Syria, which was replaced by the image of a handsome young man in a safari jacket talking into a microphone in a desert. Caroline wondered, Would he find me attractive? The correspondent’s eyes narrowed, as if he were thinking it over. Then his hair lifted, like the wing of a bird, revealing a bald spot the size of Jordan. Caroline shouted with laughter.

Darryl paced around the television room: tall, red-haired, muscular, dressed in chinos and a blue Izod shirt, moving his right arm as if he were conducting the conversation. Still handsome, Caroline thought. She’d fallen in love with him when she was sixteen years old and he was twenty. He desired her still. She was as certain of that as she was of anything else in this darkening world. Lately, though, he had been making love to her with such a blind, nuzzling intensity that she felt herself recoiling from him. His need frightened her. At the same time, her response left her feeling inadequate and guilty.

Well, she would get him a nice safari jacket for his birthday. She watched the frown on his face and drifted into a fantasy: Darryl was talking to the correspondent in the desert. Together they were solving a knotty international problem. “I told Arafat that he better cut the crap.” Something like that.

Darryl slid open the door and returned to slump into the chair next to her.

Caroline glanced at him. “What’s happening, Mr. A?”

His face looked drained. “That client keeps calling to say that he’s going to kill me.”

Dread thumped on Caroline’s heart. She blinked and fingered a button on her blouse. “Have you called the police?”

“It’s under control.”

“Control?” She sat up and flicked away her joint. “Whose control? He’s calling you at home?”

“Well, he’s upset.”

“And you’re not? He should be locked up.”

“I’ve got to keep him talking. Calm him down.”

“So, are we in danger? And damn you, Darryl, don’t you lie to me.”

“He’ll calm down. And there’s a guard on the gate and police on tap. We’re safe.”

“I don’t feel safe. I mean — you’re going to do nothing?”

“I’ve just got to live with it for a while. It’ll blow over. Someday I’ll kick his ass. He’s a jerk. The market turned against him and he started hollering that I’d robbed him.”

Caroline asked where the client was from, and Darryl said that, as far as he could make out, he’d begun in Ecuador but had ended up in Panama. Darryl shrugged. “He uses a Panamanian passport. But who knows? He hangs out in Key Biscayne when he’s not in Panama.”

“He’s the only one complaining?”

Darryl looked darkly at her. “In a down market, everybody complains.”

“But he says you clipped him? Why would he think that?”

Darryl shrugged. It wasn’t what she thought. This guy loved playing the commodities market. Darryl had made a lot of money for him in the past. Last week, however, he’d lost big time — stopped out, three days in a row. Darryl had told him, “Cool off.” But he was hot to jump in again. Well, he’d lost again, big time. Now he claimed it was Darryl’s fault. He wanted his money back.

“And the threats?”

“You want his actual words?”

She looked away. She didn’t want to hear the threats. “Well, anyway, this isn’t Ecuador, or wherever he’s from.”

“Oh, no. Thank God we live in little old Miami, where everybody fears God and pays their taxes.” Darryl nodded over his shoulder. “Like that nice Mr. Dominguez.”

“This is not a sane way to live.”

“Well, my choices are limited at the moment.”

Caroline asked if maybe, just maybe, Darryl was getting too old for the commodities game?

Darryl bristled. “You don’t like the style of life we have down here? I do it for you and the children. You want to go back to Chunchula, Alabama?”

She gave him a troubled smile. She told him that she surely loved him more alive than dead. And his children did too.

“Lover,” he said, calming down. He took her hand and kissed it and admitted that maybe his life was a little too exciting now. That happened in his business. It was part of the adventure. As soon as he was clear of this little problem, they would think about changing things. Right now, he had to sit tight and roll with the punches.

Darryl told her a story about how Napoleon interviewed officers slated for high rank. The last question Napoleon asked was: Are you lucky? If they hesitated, or said no, he didn’t promote them. Darryl grinned. “I damn well know what I would’ve told him.”

Caroline had heard the story before. Tonight, it lacked its old magic. An aggressive attitude to luck might help on a battlefield. But in business? She worried that Darryl bragged about luck just to keep himself moving through the scary scenarios he seemed bent on creating for himself these days. Maybe bragging was a fuel. Or a mantra. Or a charm. He’d always been addicted to danger, to the edge, to the thrill of winning big. A little impromptu craziness had made life interesting for him. It used to refresh him. Now it seemed to her as if something else was going on.

She worried about Darryl’s attitude toward other people’s money. She used to love hearing him romance a client: his voice had carried a weird and beautiful music, rich and deep and sexy — a “brown velvet” voice, somebody had once called it. But over the years she had identified new sounds, less beautiful. Now when the check changed hands, the music suffered a modulation too. She heard dry notes of contempt in Darryl’s voice. Darryl acted as if the client had signed away his rights over his own money, and Darryl resisted with bewilderment and outrage any client’s attempts to withdraw his account. He acted as if the client were trying to weasel away his, Darryl’s, property.

Caroline worried that Darryl was growing addicted to the stronger jolt, the darker thrill, of losing big. She had been trying to identify- the signs. Was she seeing another example tonight? She wasn’t sure. He’d deny it, of course. Could she tell before it was too late? The fragility of their life worried Caroline, but it seemed to excite something in Darryl.

“Lover?” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m thinking of making some big changes.”

“When?”

“Well, as soon as I get clear of these problems.”

They looked at each other, and then away, toward the canal, where the Lay-Z-Giri gently chafed at its moorings in the evening breeze.