Laurence Shames - Florida straits

Joey studied. He wanted to see how people acted at a dinner party, what they talked about, if there was a code for what you did or didn't say. The women talked about the bank, about some new system for closing out the cash count at the end of the day. Zack asked Bert about the Paradiso; he was interested in the real estate angle.

There was a sound of cascading water as Steve the naked landlord got out of the pool. People tried not to notice the flash of crotch before he wrapped his towel around him and said goodnight. Joey went inside to fetch more drinks.

When he returned, Bert was holding forth about the old days in New York. "Fifty-second Street," he was saying. "The jazz clubs. Beautiful. Three, four inna morning you could walk downa street. There was no drugs, no crime. It was perfectly safe."

As if conjured up by the mention of music, Luke the reggae player at that moment stepped out of his front door. He'd put his hair in dreadlocks, and his guitar was strapped across his back. Lucy the beautiful Fed followed him out. She'd done her eyes up big and looked like Cleopatra.

After they had passed, Claire said, "Jeez, you guys live, like, an interesting lifestyle here."

Joey hadn't thought about it quite that way before, but now that she mentioned it, he supposed they did. Very Key West. Extremely Key West. Feeling proud, he got up and lit the gas grill, then took a moment to look at the first star that had popped through the deepening sky. He filled glasses one more time, then went to the kitchen for the mountain of steaks.

Zack Davidson, who knew the protocol of cookouts, joined him at the grill. It was part of a guest's responsibility, part of the ceremony, this manly convocation around the fire and the meat. "This is nice," Zack said, with a small but enveloping gesture that took in the compound, the weather, the heavens.

Joey nodded. "Nice we're getting together outsida work."

"Away from Duval Street. The fucking zoo."

Joey stabbed a filet mignon, slapped it onto the grill, then realized, a beat later than a more practiced host would have, that he now had the opportunity he was waiting for, the opening that the whole evening had been set up to afford. It was strange, he reflected. He used to imagine that crime was easy and legitimate enterprise was hard. But just the opposite was true, because the whole world was set up to thwart the one and lubricate the other. Joey used to have to slip twenties, sometimes hundreds, to limping cross-eyed numbers runners from Catholic school to set up meetings that might advance his criminal career; but here in the legit world such meetings simply happened, around the barbecue, around the table, even, no doubt, around urinals at the office.

"Zack," he said, above the companionable crackle of burning fat, "I wantcha to know I really appreciate the way ya hung in there with me when I had, ya know, this personal bullshit that needed taking care of."

Zack waved the gratitude away, but Joey continued without a pause.

"And I remember you promised that you'd let me make it up to ya."

Zack said nothing, as if he assumed that Joey meant the dinner party was by way of thank-you.

Joey fiddled with the steaks. "So Zack, I'd like to give you a quarter-million dollars."

Zack was swallowing some wine, and he took an extra second to make sure it went down. Joey did not sound like he was kidding. He did not sound like he was drunk. Zack couldn't even stammer, but just stood there with his throat closed tight, Valpolicella pooling on either side of the constriction.

"There's just one more little thing I need you to do for me," Joey resumed, "and if that works out, we're in."

Zack still could not speak, and there was growing in him the heady and not totally unpleasant conviction that whatever Joey was talking about, it could not possibly be legal. The odd satisfaction Zack took from this made him wonder if maybe he was drunk; it made him wonder, too, if maybe he'd known all along that Joey was a desperado, and if it was this whiff of the outlaw that had drawn Zack to him.

"You're serious?" Zack choked out at last.

"Serious as diabetes," said Joey.

"Wha'do I gotta do?" As Joey had been groping for a toehold in normalcy, so Zack in that moment was getting on terms with the possibility of crime, and it was as if the boundary between their two positions was nothing more dramatic than a faint chalk line dabbed on rotting boards.

Joey poked a filet. "Set up a meeting with Clem Sanders and, ya know, sort of ease the way with him."

Zack shifted his feet, looked up at the sky. He was relieved yet somehow let down that he was not being asked to drive a getaway car or carry a satchel through a border check. "That's all?"

Joey flipped a steak, admired the grill lines etched across it, and nodded.

"Joey," said Zack, "I talk to Clem all the time. You don't have to pay me to talk to Clem."

"This is business."

Zack sipped some wine and found himself at a loss once more. Unlike Joey, he was unaccustomed to feeling out of his depth. He didn't improvise as well, couldn't fall in with a new cadence quite as readily.

Joey peeked at the underside of a filet, then looked toward the little group sitting by the pool. Bert, he noticed, had given Claire the high honor of holding Don Giovanni in her lap. "Sandra," Joey hollered over, "you ready with the salad and the broccoli?"

She waved yes, and jogged with her small neat steps toward the kitchen.

Zack cleared his throat. "This thing you wanna talk to Clem about," he said. "Is it, ya know, against the law?"

"I'm not really sure," said Joey, heaping the steaks onto the platter. Zack could only admire his blitheness, his certainty that it was not worth overcooking a filet mignon to discuss a mere question of legality. "That's one of the things we have to talk to him about."

Zack nodded, and Sandra bustled by with a salad bowl you could've bathed a baby in. Then she made a second pass with an avalanche of broccoli. Joey turned off the grill. "So you'll do it?" he said to Zack.

"Sure," Zack said. "But it's really not worth-"

Joey dropped his voice another notch to cut him off. "And lemme ask ya one more thing, while we're here, ya know, the two of us. In your experience with women, are they all such nuts about salad, about vegetables?"

"I get half," said Clem Sanders.

It was Monday lunchtime, and they were sitting in his office at the Treasure Museum. The office was a big room with barred windows, lined with glass display cases filled with old coins, ancient jewelry, corroded pistols, pieces of silver robbed of their luster and fused together by salt water and time so that they resembled crude models of the atom. Behind Clem Sanders's chair was a wall covered with photographs of himself outsmiling various dignitaries and local celebrities, none of whom Joey recognized.

"Come on, Clem," said Zack Davidson, "take a quarter. It's not like you really have to go hunting. Joey here can pretty much pinpoint the spot for you."

Sanders folded his hands as if in prayer and cocked his head at the sympathetic angle an undertaker or a southern politician strikes when he is about to tell you he wishes to God there were more he could do for you, but there isn't. His face was deeply lined and seemed sunburned right down to the bone, just slightly redder than the color of dark-meat chicken. The pigment seemed to have been bleached out of his blue eyes, leaving them pale as hospital paint. He wore a green jumpsuit open at the neck, and nestled in his gray chest hair was a Spanish doubloon on a leather string. His hands were huge and crinkled, his voice a honeyed drawl fashioned for coaxing funds out of greedy but skeptical investors. " 'Taint the huntin' that's involved," he said gently. "It's the precedent."