“It’s raining in Havana, too.”

I glance over my shoulder at the bartender and shrug an acknowledgment. Mexican American, I’d thought. Now I revise that to Cuban American. Or maybe he was just passing a remark about the island’s near neighbor. After all, Key West is closer to Havana than to Miami.

The bartender is a slim, dark-haired twenty-something in cargo shorts and a casually unbuttoned sport shirt with puka shells at his neck, flip-flops on his feet. He and I are the only ones in the bar this wet mid-afternoon. He is behind the counter, polishing glasses, straightening up, doing whatever bartenders do when too few customers show.

We are dressed pretty much alike, though I have about a decade on him. I perch on a stool, elbows on the scarred sill of the opened wall, and nurse a mojito, looking out at Duval Street, Key West’s colorful main drag, now dulled by the gray downpour. Mojitos have become my drink of choice the past couple of years. The rain is not artful, not the touristy sprinkle of the island brochures, but a full-out drencher, the kind that soaks you to the skin the moment you step from shelter. No one is out dancing between the raindrops. The palm trees look as though they want to fold up like umbrellas and go inside.

I take a pull on the mojito and watch the street and listen to the rhythm that the rain is beating on the tin roof of the bar. A few cars pass, going slow, headlights on. The natives’ usually wide-open Jeeps are buttoned tight, drivers hunched over the wheel to peer through the sodden gloom.

The mojito is liquid sunshine. Spiced rum, crushed mint leaves, limejuice, sugar, soda. Hemingway’s favorite in Cuba, it’s said. Maybe it was his favorite here, too. Why not? Papa probably drank them everywhere. I take a sip and feel a mint and rum flame down my throat. My stomach celebrates when the rum hits it, the warmth reaching up my back and wrapping around my chest like a lover’s arms.

I hadn’t planned to come to Key West and drink mojitos. That was Cody’s doing. It was his idea, stupid though it was, to skip to the end of the earth, the furthest point south in the whole U.S. of A., and a dead-end to boot. So I chased him, of course. I tell myself it isn’t just about the money or even the whole honor-among-thieves thing. Still, all those crisp bills. As much mine as they are his. He knew that, should have acted on it right. But he thought he could cut me out — in more ways than one.

The publicity folks who make the pretty brochures about the “Conch Republic” want you to think it’s paradise, four miles long, two miles wide, peopled by happy drunks, scruffy natives, and loud-shirted tourists, half of them day-trippers doddering off cruise ships and looking for nothing more than to get their pockets picked while they gape at snake-handlers on the pier during the nightly sunset ritual.

The reality is that Key West is a rock, literally, with a few palm trees and illusions clinging to it. The topsoil is an inch thick. That’s why every guesthouse and hotel has an aboveground swimming pool. Solid rock. Hemingway had his in-ground pool blasted out of the rock. Yeah, I read the brochure.

Did Cody think he was going to bury all those pretty bills in solid rock? Or hop a cruise ship and sail into the sunset? Swim to Cuba maybe? What? Lamming it to Key West was like climbing a tower — sooner or later you run out of up. Or did he just plain think that I wasn’t going to come after him, that I wasn’t going to figure it out? Hell, it was me who planned the job, start to finish. Like I couldn’t out-think him on this, too.

Haste makes waste, they say, but it also leaves a paper trail, which is what I followed. Cody had registered at a low-end guesthouse under his own name, having no other I.D. I knew he would. It wasn’t hard to find him. In fact, once I’d figured out that Key West was his destination, it was laughably easy. I could have beaten him to the island if I’d wanted to. He had driven a rental car out U.S. 1 over all the keys — Largo, Plantation, the Matecumbes, Long, and the rest. He could have lost me by stopping almost anywhere along the way. But I knew, I knew he was going all the way, all the stupid, stupid way. So I took an island-hopper flight out of Miami and landed in Key West, probably within a couple of hours of his arrival. I hit it lucky with the fifth phone call to backwater guesthouses. Yes, they had a Cody Grimes staying there; he’d just checked in, as a matter of fact. No, don’t say anything, I’d told them. I’m an old friend. I want to surprise him.

Was he surprised? Yeah, I honestly think he was. Maybe not surprised that I’d shown up but that I’d shown up so soon, too soon for him to hide the money, to construct the lie that would be convince me that it was all a mistake, that he’d never run out, not really, and he would never steal. Honor among thieves, you know. Right? Too bad he was stuck with the truth, a truth I knew down deep but didn’t want to hear.

The guesthouse was a two-story, whitewashed, Fifties, motel-style building with rooms opening directly onto a parking lot. A balcony ran along the second floor. I had walked from the small island airport through mist that gradually turned into light rainfall, hardly more than a sprinkle, under gray, featureless sky, until I found the place and got the location of his room on the second floor, third door along the open balcony.

I stood out of the line of sight from the peephole and knocked. “Housekeeping.” My best Spanish-accented falsetto. When he opened the door, I put one hand flat on his chest and pushed him back into the room, my face so close to his that I could smell the spearmint gum he always chewed. My other hand gripped a stiletto that was as viciously sharp as it looked. His eyes widened. He knew I meant business, a dawning realization apparently or he’d never had tried skipping out in the first place, not with all the crisp green in the world.

“Mike…!”

“Shut up.” His mouth moved like a fish gasping for air. I toed a straight chair away from the table group. “Sit. Put your hands behind your back and hold onto your wrists.”

He did as he was told. He’d been good at that … usually. Cody knew, ultimately, that I was the top dog in our particular two-man kennel. So what possessed him to break out, jump the chain-link, so to speak? I asked it out loud, not really knowing or wanting to know the answer but needing it.

His answer was too quick, too pat. “Money.”

“No.” There was more to it than that. “There was more than enough to share. We could have been set for life, you and me.”

“That’s just it….” He stopped. He was trembling, willing himself to stay still, to keep hold of his wrists as I’d told him to.

“What’s ‘just it’?” It was a demand, not merely a question, though I kept my voice steady, scarcely above a whisper.

“I’m sorry I took the money. This wasn’t about money, not really.” He was calming himself, taking deep breaths now, trying to stay rational. “Look, it wasn’t working any more.”

I wanted to scream: But I did everything! I did everything for you! I paced around him, a complete circuit, like a panther spiraling in on its prey, wanting to spring, wanting not to hold back. The motion eased me down until I could speak again.

“It was working. You and me? It was working.”

Cody shook his head. “Only for you. I couldn’t breathe anymore. I needed to get away, I had to get away. Can’t you see that?”

I was behind him then. He couldn’t see my shoulders fall, the tears coming unbidden to my eyes, couldn’t see me trying to shrug off all the feelings — love, abandonment, despair. He was crying too, soundlessly, his shoulders rising in small rhythms. I reached out with my free hand and put it on top of his head, running my fingers….

“Hey, Buddy, you want another mojito?”

I look over my shoulder at the bartender and then back at the rain still drenching Duval Street. “Sure.” I’m not going anywhere for a while. I turn again to the gloomy street.

A maroon Crown Vic draws up to the curb at the end of the block, facing the bar. Don’t cops know that driving a Crown Vic is like putting a neon sign on the roof that blinks out “Police”? It’s impossible to see through the windshield, but I’m guessing two with backup somewhere out of sight. The car’s headlights go out and the wipers stop moving, but the engine is still idling because I can see a faint tail of exhaust drifting from behind the rear fender.

The bartender brings the mojito over and takes my empty glass. I take a sip of the fresh rum-and-mint fire, letting it flow like a lava rivulet down my throat. The rain falls in gray sheets.

I was standing behind Cody, my fingers entwined in his dark, thick curls, each miniscule caress evoking a flood of images. I do not want this.

“Mike….”

“Stop. Don’t say anymore.” All at once I couldn’t bear the sound of his voice. Tears welled in my eyes as I looked down at the top of his head, which I still caressed. First sorrow, then anger. I felt my fingers tighten in his hair. My other hand arced back, and in a single stroke I plunged the stiletto to the hilt into his neck. Somewhere I’d read that was how the ancient Romans killed their human sacrifices: one swift stab to the jugular. Cody was my sacrifice to all that might have been, the world that might have been ours.

The sudden stab drew no sound, no intake of breath. I held Cody’s hair, keeping his head upright, until the gush of blood that covered my knife hand slowed to a trickle. Then I withdrew the knife and let his chin dip toward his chest. In death his hands still gripped one another’s wrists.

Soundlessly I walked into the bathroom and rinsed the blood from my knife and arm and dried carefully. Cody’s backpack sat against the wall next to the cheap dresser. I stepped over the spreading pool of blood, opened it, and gazed absently at the bundles of crisp bills. Our fortune, our future … once. Shouldering the pack I looked at Cody’s body, slumped in the chair, his arms still behind his back as if I’d tied them there. I wiped my eyes, stepped out on the balcony, and closed the door silently behind me.

The rain had begun to fall in earnest, heavy drops close together. I hunched under the backpack and walked aimlessly but in the general direction of Key West’s main drag, the dense cleansing rain washing away, if not my crimes, at least any vestige of Cody’s blood that I hadn’t left in the bathroom sink….

“That’s the last of the mojitos.” The bartender is talking to my back. “We’re out of mint now.”

“It’s okay.” I stare at the rain and take another sip of the one in front of me. Cody’s backpack is at my feet, shoved up against the wall under the sill where I’m parking my elbows. The maroon Crown Vic hasn’t moved. Did the occupants get out while I was lost in thought? I can’t say. Maybe they did. Maybe they aren’t police but a couple of elderly tourists, waiting out the rain. I don’t know. I’m not sure I care. Not right now. Maybe never. I nudge the pack with my toe.

The rain is still steady but the sky is lighter. Soon it will slack off.

“Can I get you anything else?”

I shake my head, reach into the backpack, and peel off a couple of twenties, which I lay on the bar as I shoulder the pack. If the bartender is surprised, he doesn’t show it, just says, “Thanks.”

I am ready, as ready as I ever will be. Should I feel more? Should I do more? My nerves are dulled, more than can be justified by drinking of the mojitos. It’s not just about the money in the backpack on my shoulder. It was never just about that.

As I hunch under the remnants of the downpour and trudge up the street, the headlights of the Crown Vic come on.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.09.2009

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