Laurence Shames - Florida straits

Tony yawned. It was a profound yawn that twisted his scarred lip until it was almost folded double.

A moment passed, then Bruno caught the contagion. He stretched like a grizzly bear and gave off a sound like some large thing mating in the jungle. "Fuck I'm tired."

"Take a nap," said Tony. He was showing off, like he had better stamina. But then he yawned again.

"What about duh lovebirds heah?" Bruno gestured vaguely toward Joey and Sandra, and in the gesture it was terrifyingly clear that the captives had stopped being human in his eyes. They were freight, furniture, mute parcels that needed guarding and were keeping him awake.

"Duh lovebirds," Tony echoed. He was getting slaphappy with fatigue, and the word tickled him. "Duh lovebirds, fuck 'em, whyn't we just tie 'em up together inna sack. Good and tight. Pack 'em away, forget about it, you and me can take turns sleeping."

Bruno took a puff of his cigar, then nodded agreement. He went to untie Sandra just long enough to move her into the bedroom and truss her up again. He got down on one knee like a grotesque troubadour and fiddled with the knots at her ankles. Then he muttered a curse, pulled a knife out of his sock, and cut the ropes. He did the same with the loops around her midriff, and the sight of his meaty hand against her body made Joey feel faint with rage.

For a moment Sandra sat as rigid as she'd been before she was unbound. Tony leaned over her and looked at her hard, the way a referee looks at a beaten fighter to see if there are any brain connections left, any sanity. "Listen, lady," he said, "you want I should untape your mouth?"

Sandra was afraid to nod. She felt that anything she did would be the wrong thing, would lead to some horrendous and perverse response. She just sat.

Tony wagged a warning finger in her face. "Any noise, any trouble, you're in deep shit, lady. You got that?"

He grabbed a corner of the duct tape and ripped it away. The skin around Sandra's mouth seemed to draw into itself like the foot of a probed clam. She licked her lips and felt a rough white residue of glue. "I have to pee," she said.

Tony followed her to the bathroom and guarded the door.

"And you, peckerhead," Bruno said to Joey. "You gonna be quiet, or do I gotta cut your fucking tongue out?"

Joey stayed still. It had worked for Sandra. Bruno grabbed the tape and yanked like he was starting a lawn mower. Joey's lips felt gone, his teeth felt suddenly as naked as those of a skeleton. Bruno stared at him with his oil-puddle eyes and seemed to be daring him to speak. He didn't.

"Get inna bedroom, Romeo."

"Lay down," Tony ordered when they were all assembled.

Joey and Sandra got into bed, and the thugs stood over them in some hell-born parody of putting the kids to sleep. Bruno had loops and scraps of rope slung over his shoulder like a cowboy. Tony slipped his gun in his pocket to free up his hands. He tied their outside ankles to the legs of the bed and their outside wrists to the comers of the headboard. Their inside wrists he tied together.

Then he brandished the gun. "Listen, you pains innee ass. One of us is gonna be sittin' right outside heah. Any noise, any aggravation, we break heads. Got it?"

The thugs turned off the bedroom light, and half closed the door behind them as they left.

For a few moments Joey and Sandra lay silent, trying to let some of the fear seep out of them. It was a moonless night and dim suggestions of starlight came in blue slices through the louvered windows.

"I hate sleeping on my back," Sandra whispered.

"Baby, I'm so, so sorry," Joey said. "I never meant-"

"I know you didn't."

She rubbed the back of her hand against his. It was almost the only thing she could move. There was love and forgiveness in the gesture and it put a lump in Joey's throat.

"If they killed us," Sandra went on, "they'd get away with it, wouldn't they?"

Joey nodded.

"Will they? Will they kill us, Joey?"

"I don't know."

"Why? It's not gonna get them their money, their jewels, whatever."

"It's not about that, Sandra. It's about not being made a fool of. It's about winning. They wanna win."

Sandra considered this, then tried without success to turn onto her side. "And you, Joey, whadda you want?"

He looked up toward the ceiling. It seemed very far away. He felt the back of his hand tied against Sandra's. It was hard to tell whose veins, whose pulse, was whose. What did he want? He wanted an honorable truce with his old life, and something like a fair start in the new one. He wanted a kitchen like Peter and Claude's, one that didn't look like the last tenants had bolted an hour ago leaving their dishes still in the sink. He wanted, he admitted now, a normal job, some normal friends who did normal things. He lay there trying to figure out how to explain all this to himself, how to sum it up to Sandra, and suddenly the thread, the cord that held the whole package together, seemed utterly clear to him. "I want you to marry me," he said.

For a while Sandra said nothing. She was not the type who fantasized about marriage proposals, and if she had been, she would not have fantasized being proposed to while her limbs were tied to bedposts and her free hand was bound with a greasy rope to that of her betrothed. Besides, was Joey full of love or just remorse? Maybe, for him, a proposal stood mainly as the biggest apology he could think of.

"Joey," she finally said, "I've been waiting a long time to hear you say that."

He gave a little laugh that was full of sad, sudden, and useless knowledge. "I been waiting a long time to get ready to say it."

"But listen," said Sandra. "Not tonight. Not with the state we're in. I'm not gonna hold you to what you say tonight."

"Hold me to it, Sandra," he said, and there was a note of pleading in his voice. "I wanna be held to it. This is what I'm telling you. For once I wanna be held to it."

At two a.m. Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia was still sitting in his recliner sporadically looking at television with the sound turned off. But mostly he was thinking out loud, talking to his dog. "This is not good, Giovanni. Not good at all."

The chihuahua did a little pirouette on its velvet bed. The flickering TV picture made kaleidoscopes in its stuck-open pupils.

"Fucking Gino gets away clean, Joey gets grabbed. Ponte's gotta be very frustrated, very pissed."

The dog lay down and licked its private parts.

"Ya know what bothers me, Giovanni, what gets to me? In like the backa my mind, I can't help wondering if maybe it's my fault."

The dog gave a little whine of disagreement, or maybe it was in pain.

"Maybe I gave some bad advice," the Shirt went on. "Did I? I really can't remember. Sometimes, I'll tell ya the truth, Giovanni, I don't even notice I'm givin' advice. That's the scary part, huh? Sometimes I'm just yakkin' away, and a kid like Joey, he sees the white hair, he figures, hey, this old guy must know somethin'. Ha. Fuck do I know? Poor kid, he listens to me."

The old man shook his head. The chihuahua shook its whiskers. Then Bert spent a long moment climbing out of his recliner and the two of them walked stiffly to the bedroom.

Joey did not think he'd slept. He was too scared, too uncomfortable, too weirdly proud of himself for proposing marriage, and besides, he'd been keeping a weather vigil. He wanted to believe that by paying close attention, he could usher in a calm dawn, could keep away the winds or squalls that would prevent Clem Sanders from going to the reef. He lay still and silent, sniffing for airborne salt and iodine. The back of Sandra's hand was against his, his left ankle was chafed from the rope that held him down. Over and over again, he'd rehearsed what he would say to Charlie Ponte, how he would explain his plan for turning three million dollars into four. For what seemed like many hours he stared at the grooves in the louvered windows, searching for the first pale slices of saving light.