James Hall - Off the Chart

‘Place like this,’ Vic said, staring up at the ceiling, ‘all this wood. Must be a bitch to insure.’

Milton closed his eyes and shook his head solemnly.

‘A grease fire,’ Vic said. ‘Or maybe a smoker flicking his butt in the bathroom waste can, or bad wiring, overloaded circuits. Shit, it could start a hundred different ways. All this old timber, about twenty minutes all you got is ash and rubble. Then you’d be sorry as hell you didn’t take the six million.’

‘What happened to seven?’

‘Did I say seven? Well, I meant six.’ Vic watched the hubbub of the kitchen. Steam rising from the dishwashing machine. A darker steam coming from the deep-fat fryers. The Lorelei was a busy place, and prickly hot. Kitchen staff hustling back and forth, sending uneasy looks their way. Everyone knew Vic Joy, how he worked. ‘Actually, Milton, now that I take a careful look around, I’m going to have to back down to five mil. All this wood. This place is a fucking fire trap. I don’t know how it’s lasted as long as it has.’

Milton’s stubby arms hung at his sides. The man’s eyes were grayish and bulgy. A large man’s large eyes. Pry them out of their sockets, they’d fill your palm. For a second Vic flashed on an image of a couple of gray eyeballs floating inside a glass jar, suspended in formaldehyde. Make a nice addition to his collection.

He smiled at the big man, but Milton wasn’t in the smiling frame of mind.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Vic. I’m taking all that fire shit as a threat. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it, but that’s how I’m taking it. Now I want you to get the hell out of here. If I ever see your sorry ass around my restaurant again, I’ll call the cops. You got that? Tell them you been threatening me.’

‘The cops?’ Vic shivered and wobbled his hands in the air. ‘Be still my heart. Not the cops.’

Milton gave Vic a bitter glare, then about-faced and tramped across the buzzing kitchen to his office and shoved the door closed behind him.

Vic stepped over to the fry cook, a tall thin man with a hook nose. Guy’d been eavesdropping, sneaking looks.

‘You know who I am, kid?’

‘Vic Joy,’ the hook nose said.

‘Bingo.’

With a wide spatula the cook slid a burger onto a plate, then settled a fish sandwich onto another. Lettuce, tomato, pickle on the side.

‘Let me see that ticket.’ Vic reached out and snapped the order slip from the clip. A few minutes earlier he’d watched Anne Bonny hang it there. When she’d appeared, Vic swung around and kept his back to her. Didn’t want to give his little sister a cardiac right there at work, bumping into her long-lost brother after all these years. Vic studied the order slip. In his sister’s scrawl, Thorn was written out next to the guy’s order.

‘Which one’s the grouper with Swiss?’

Vic nodded at the six plates lined up in the window.

The hook nose took a careful look at Vic.

‘Which one?’ Vic said again.

The fry cook reached out his spatula and tapped one of the sandwiches.

Thorn’s lunch. Fried fish with a layer of melted cheese. Guy was going to choke on cholesterol if he wasn’t careful. Which suited Vic fine, as long as the jerkhole waited till after Vic was completely done with him.

‘Guy’s a friend of mine,’ Vic said. ‘We do this, me and him. Little pranks back and forth.’

‘Whatever.’ The fry cook got busy with the dressing on a cheese-burger.

Vic peeled back the bun on the grouper sandwich and laid it on the plate. He reached into his pocket and drew out his penknife and flicked open the blade. Out on the sunny patio Anne Bonny was taking the order at another table. Two blondes and a dark-haired guy. Vic craned forward and squinted into the sunlight.

Dark-haired Romeo smiling up at Vic’s little sister. Batting his eyes and Anne batting back.

Vic laid the blade against the palm of his left hand. He looked over at the fry cook, but the guy was focused on his work.

Vic gritted his teeth and sliced the blade across his palm, an inch, another inch, just deep enough to get a trickle of blood rising from the seam, spilling into the web of creases.

He reached out to Thorn’s open sandwich and made a fist and watched the dark fluid dribble out. Six, seven drops spattering against the melted Swiss.

He milked out a few more drips, then closed up the sandwich and set it back under the warming lights just as the fry cook smacked the signal bell.

A few seconds later Anne headed back toward the window to pick up her order. There was a tiny smile on her lips. Probably nobody else would’ve noticed, but Vic was her brother and he’d spent years studying the looks that came and went on Anne Bonny’s face. He’d never seen that exact smile before. Not once.

Vic ducked away from the window. He rubbed his bloody hand on the leg of his jeans and tried to shape his lips into a replay of Anne’s smile, but it felt slippery and uncertain on his face.

When he looked back, Anne was at Thorn’s table dealing out the plates. Vic stayed in the shadows to the side of the window and watched until finally Thorn picked up his sandwich and held it for a moment near his mouth while he laughed at something one of the little girls said. Then he took a bite and munched on the fried grouper seasoned with Vic Joy’s blood.

Vic grinned, watched Thorn swallow, watched him take another bite. Swallow that one, too. The lumps of food snaking down Thorn’s throat and into his esophagus, heading toward his belly. Wouldn’t be long until Vic Joy was slipping inside the fucker’s bloodstream, mingling, festering. Taking root.

‘That’s some weird prank,’ the fry cook said.

Vic turned to the cook, then fixed his eyes on the hand holding the spatula.

‘Think you could still flip burgers with a metal hook on the end of your arm?’

The guy stared down at his right hand, then back at Vic. His Adam’s apple jiggled.

‘Hell, Mr Joy, I wouldn’t say anything. Not a goddamn word. Really.’

Vic winked at the kid and headed for the parking lot.

Three weeks after their meeting at the Lorelei, Daniel Salbone and Anne were having breakfast on the outside patio of the Cheeca Lodge.

Overnight a late-season cold front had muscled in and the sky was hanging low – as heavy and ominous as a slab of slate. A few yards away from their table the Atlantic thrashed and foamed against the resort’s white beach. While they sipped their coffee Daniel’s gaze kept drifting out toward the end of the long dock where a white sport-fishing yacht was moored. For the last half hour several men had been rolling dollies down the dock, then heaving the supplies aboard.

Anne’s mind was whirling, her body inflamed from the three-week frenzy of sex and extravagant food and full-throttle cruises on the Black Swan , both of them naked, racing the moonlight. Except for the boat rides, they’d not left their room at the Cheeca Lodge. DO NOT DISTURB on the doorknob. Room service trays piling up in the corner, their sheets growing funkier by the hour. They’d switched off the air conditioner because they wanted to marinate in their own juices, breathe the other’s true scent. They opened the windows to hear the ocean and the gulls, inhale the marshy breeze. Lying in the black night or at noon, feet tangled in the sheets, skin glistening, she trailed her fingertips across his long stretches of muscled flesh.

A few nights ago in the dark, Daniel said, ‘Is this love?’

‘Hell, no,’ she said. ‘This is sex, plain and simple.’

He laughed and she laughed with him.

A moment later he said, ‘You don’t want it to be love.’

‘What does that mean?’