AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I sometimes thought it would be neater all around if there were just some big machine that grabbed the tourists at the outskirts of our little island, held them up by an ankle, shook out their money, and then sent them home. The money would be evenly divided, without all the fuss and bother of pretending to sell them something they wanted, and the streets would be clean and quiet again, the way it had been when I was a kid here.
I sat on the concrete lip of the Mallory dock. The nervous energy that had driven me down here in the first place was long gone. I couldn’t think of anyplace to go. I couldn’t think of any reason to do anything. Even if I thought of something, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get up to do it. A tarpon rolled a few feet out. Mallory Square was quiet now. It was strange after the frantic screaming glitz that had been flopping and bellowing on the concrete only a few minutes ago. The party had moved on without me. In my fragile state, that seemed profound. It seemed like a perfect metaphor for my whole life. And I wasn’t even drunk.
Self-pity is like masturbation. It’s fun for a while, but sooner or later you realize how silly you look. I finally managed to stand up. I had no real thoughts about where to go or what to do, but if I stayed here any longer I might want to buy a bottle of Mad Dog and sing “You Are My Sunshine.”
I rode my bicycle slowly up Whitehead Street to avoid the throng a block away on Duval. The street was quiet at this hour. The crowds had moved on from around Hemingway House. A cluster of black men sat on a porch and looked at me without expression. I crossed US 1 and, on an impulse, rode by the Blue Marlin motel. It was a small, clean motel with refrigerators in the rooms and in summer months it had the lowest prices. It was just the sort of place a cop might stay. I didn’t see a metallic blue car in the lot, but that might not mean anything.
I dropped my bicycle in the breezeway outside the office and went in. The night clerk was a guy of about fifty. He was balding but he had carefully brushed the side hair over the bald spot and given it a dye job. It looked like the sofa in a disco lounge. He looked at me over the top of a copy of The Advocate. “Help you?” he asked dubiously.
“What room is Roscoe McAuley in, please?” I gave him my best business smile and let him look me over carefully for signs of a concealed nuclear weapon. He finally decided I might not be a terrorist, sighed heavily, and flipped open a book. “How is that spelled?” I gave it to him and he scanned the book for a moment, flipping a few pages and following his index finger down the columns on four pages before asking, “When did you say he registered?”
“Today. Maybe yesterday.” And maybe not at all, I thought.
“We have no McAuley registered,” he said in a very final tone of voice, and lifted his newspaper again.
I thought about saying thanks, but it seemed like a waste of breath. Besides, I didn’t want to shatter his image of the rest of the world. I walked out of the little office and picked up my bicycle.
And then I was stuck, because I didn’t know where to point it. I could keep trying the hotels. I could go home and call around to the two or three dozen other hotels where Roscoe might be, and they might or might not tell me if he was there.
But what it came down to was that I didn’t know where to start looking for Roscoe, and wasn’t sure why I should or what to say if I found him. I suddenly felt like a thirty-year-old man sitting on a bicycle in the dark. Maybe it was a good thing I never made Detective.
I pedaled home.
After the bright light of the sunset at Mallory, the night seemed dark and quiet. It was a warm night and the feel of it on my skin was soft. It made me edgy. I went past the rows of houses. Most of them had one small light by the front door, usually yellow, and a purple glow inside from the television. This was another sure sign I was in a resident’s neighborhood; only people who lived here watched TV.
The streets here in the residential area were dark and nearly deserted. Most of the people who lived here year-round knew better than to go out after dark. For one thing, you might run into some drunken optician from Wisconsin who wanted nothing more than to follow you home and drink you dry and then throw up on your couch. For another, our island paradise had been catching up with the rest of the world, and over the last few years crack had come to Key West. That meant that the number of burglaries, robberies, and muggings were doubling every six months. Unless you stayed on Duval Street you ran the risk of becoming a statistic.
In fact, as I turned in at the corner of my street, I thought I saw a figure slip over the wall around my house.
I wasn’t positive, but I wasn’t taking any chances, either; not when I might otherwise stumble over somebody who would gladly remove my liver with his bare hands if he could get over half a dollar for it, fast.
With the thought of a little bit of action I felt alive again. The sour taste was gone from the back of my throat and I could feel the blood pounding through my veins.
I took a deep, steadying breath and slipped off my bicycle. I put it quietly on the grass alongside the road and moved into the shadow of a huge oleander that grew up from the corner of my coral rock wall. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darker yard. Then I moved across the wall as quietly as I could, slinking to the cover of my key lime tree.
From the lime tree I could see the side and back of the house. Sure enough, at the corner of the house, moving jerkily up to the window, there was a small figure. It—he?—appeared to be straining upward on tiptoe to look in the side window, which made him a lot shorter than the six-foot-high clearance of the windowsill. A kid, probably, strung out and wanting to see if anybody was home.
I moved closer. As I did, the intruder grasped the windowsill and started straining upwards in a clumsy chin-up. His toes were about six inches off the ground when I hit him hard, hooking a fist just above the belt into his kidney. He husked out, “Ekkk,” very distinctly, and dropped to the ground.
I quickly grabbed his right arm and twisted it around behind his back. He rasped a little moan as I applied pressure, forcing his face down into the dirt.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked politely.
“Awwg, bloody fucking hell—!” I heard, slightly muffled from the mouthful of sandy soil he must have been chewing on. The accent was familiar, even with the voice muffled. I let go of the arm and, reaching under, grabbed a handful of shirtfront and hauled upwards. Sure enough, I pulled a familiar face straight up and held it a few inches from my own.
“Hello, Nicky,” I said. “Lose your way?”
“Christ on a fucking bun!” he gagged at me. “You bloody fucking near killed me, mate! Jesus’ tits, my fucking noggin is totally bashed in!” He spat a small amount of dirty sand.
“Sorry,” I said. “Thought you were a prowler, Nicky.” I set him down and brushed him off. Truth is, he was so light it would be easy to forget I was holding him a foot off the ground.
Nicky Cameron was my neighbor. He was an Australian by birth and had landed in Key West by some mysterious process similar to Brownian motion that leaves so many strange, dissimilar people on our island.
Nicky stood just about five feet even and weighed a full ninety pounds soaking wet with a beer in each hand. He was mostly bald, with a few scraggly brown tendrils of hair occasionally flopping over into his face. The face was dominated by two huge brown eyes. In between them was a foot-long nose that hooked slightly to one side, and a chin so far back from his face that it looked like a second Adam’s apple.
How he had come by it in Australia I never found out, but somehow Nicky was stuffed with every existing scrap of New Age lore. He knew all about astrology, crystals, shiatsu, channeling, aroma and color therapy, Atlantis, astral projection, herbal medicine, and reincarnation. He ran a shop not far from Mallory Square that sold crystals, New Age music, posters, and other stuff you would otherwise have to go to California to buy.
Nick tended to mind everybody else’s business, but I liked him. He was a pretty good neighbor, and those are hard to come by.
