Whiplash River (9 page)

Chapter 13

S
hake sent Idaba to the post office. He kept his passport in his post office box, taped to the wall of the box so the box looked empty. He was lucky the passport hadn't been upstairs in his flat when the restaurant blew. Baby Jesus was right. Everything else that Shake owned had been.

He started to climb out of bed, but the pain froze him in place. “Oh, no, you don't,” the nurse told him. She'd come into the room to bring him breakfast. She put the tray aside and helped him lie back down. “Not till the doctor comes in and says you can.”

“What time?”

“Later.” As exact as island time got. The nurse put a hand on Shake when he started to sit up again, so Shake waited till she left. He didn't plan to hang around till the doctor arrived, no matter how much it hurt to get out of bed. It hurt a lot. Every move he made was like another rib cracking. You'd think he had an unlimited supply of ribs to crack. He put on his pants, his T-shirt, got one sandal on, and then paused to take a breather.

The nurse poked her head in again. “What'd I just tell you?”

“I forget. Must be the drugs.”

“You got another visitor.” Shake thought,
Who the hell now?

A second later Armando walked in. “How you feelin', boss?” he said.

“Help me with this,” Shake said, pointing to his other sandal.

Armando frowned. “You need you rest, boss.”

“Help me.”

Armando helped him put the sandal on. Roger walked in. “You ask him yet?” he asked Armando.

“Idiota,”
Armando snapped at him.

“Oh,” Roger said.

Shake sighed. “How much do I owe you?”

“Two weeks,” Armando said.

“All right. See Idaba about it in the next few days.”

“Thanks, chef,” Roger said.

“Thanks, boss.”

“Help me up.”

“You think you wanna do that, chef?”

“C'mon. Both of you. Let's go.”

Shake put a hand on Armando's shoulder. He was just the right size. It hurt to stand, but no more than sitting up. With Armando on one side and Roger on the other, Shake made it down the hallway. He thought the nurse might try to stop him, but she was having a conversation with a guy holding a bouquet of flowers. The guy, with his back to Shake, blocked the nurse's view of the lobby.

“I'm sorry,” the nurse was saying. “You just gonna have to wait.”

There was something vaguely familiar about the guy, the way he was standing. Shake didn't have time to worry about it.

 

OUTSIDE, SHAKE SAID GOOD-BYE TO
Armando and Roger. Idaba was waiting for him on the corner of Pescador Street. It took Shake a while to get there. The grit was blowing around and the sun felt twenty or thirty degrees hotter than it should have. Shake noticed sweat popping out all over his body.

“You see him over there, don't you?” Idaba said as she handed Shake his passport.

“I do,” Shake said. One Love, Baby Jesus's thug. Hanging out about halfway down the block, lurking in the shadows.

“I guess Baby Jesus don't trust you,” Idaba said.

“I guess he shouldn't.”

“Come to my house. My husband and I, we'll help you.”

“Your husband thinks I'm a jackass.”

She didn't deny it, or argue with her husband's conclusion. “Come to my house,” she said.

“You think you can cover a couple of weeks' pay for Armando and Roger?” Shake said. “I'll pay you back when I can.”

She nodded. They stood there for a minute.

“You sure you didn't see her on the beach?” Shake said.

“Who? The one with freckles?”

“The other one.”

“The pretty one,” Idaba said. Sly.

“I was gonna take your advice, believe it or not. About getting a woman in my bed. I was gonna give it the old college try.”

“Be the first time you take my advice,” she said. “No, I didn't see her.”

Shake checked his watch. It was time to go. “And I'll send something for you too,” he told Idaba, “soon as I can.”

“I don't want no money.”

“Your severance package.” He braced himself. “Now let's have it. The part you've been waiting for.”

She slapped him hard, no hesitation. He rubbed his cheek. He'd told her to make it convincing, but still.

“Hell, Idaba. You could have pretended you were pretending.”

“Huh,” she said.

From the corner of his eye he could see One Love watching them. “Now storm off. I don't want Baby Jesus bothering you.”

“He won't bother me. You the one. Be careful, you hear me?”

“Go. Unless you're planning to slap me again.”

“Be careful. You hear me?” And then she stormed off.

 

SHAKE RESTED FOR A MINUTE
and then made his way over to Front Street. One Love followed, on his cell phone, reporting in to Baby Jesus.

Front Street was crowded. Tourists who were staying on the island, plus cruise-ship day-trippers tendered over from Belize City. Shake kept his eyes open. Golf carts were parked on both sides of the street and it didn't take him long to spot one with the key still in the ignition. Shake liked to call it Blissful Idiot Syndrome. He saw it all the time. You went on vacation to a place as beautiful as Ambergris Caye, and it never occurred to you that the rules of the real world might still apply.

He heard Gina's voice in his head before he could stop himself. “Blissful idiot?” she'd say, and wink. “Look who's talking.”

Shake slid into the golf cart and eased it out onto the street. He went fast enough that it didn't seem suspicious, but not so fast he'd lose One Love, who hurried to keep up. It was the first golf cart Shake had ever stolen, after who knew how many Honda Accords and Cadillac Escalades and delivery vans big enough to accommodate, for example, a one-eyed safecracker flown in from Belfast, plus his entire safecracking rig.

Shake turned left on Black Coral Street. He turned left again, into the alley that ran behind the buildings on Front Street. One Love had to hang back on the corner. The alley was deserted and Shake would make him if he tried to follow.

Shake pulled over halfway down the alley. He parked the golf cart tight, scraping up against the stucco back of a building that fronted Front Street. He got out of the cart and walked back up the alley toward Black Coral Street.

One Love eased back into the shadows. Shake retraced, by foot, the route he'd just driven in the golf cart. Black Coral to Front Street, back down Front Street. One Love followed. He was trying to figure out what the hell Shake was up to, Shake knew it.

Halfway down Front Street, Shake stepped into the little shop that sold hair products to black people living in 1983. He calculated that One Love would wait outside the shop for a minute or two before he got suspicious and followed Shake inside. Before he wondered what Shake was doing in a shop that sold hair products to black people living in 1983.

A minute or two should give Shake enough time. He hoped so.

The same Mayan girl was behind the counter of the shop. “I'm going to borrow your back door,” he called over his shoulder. He'd noticed the door the first time he'd been in the shop a couple days ago, a lifetime of professional habit at work. Old getaway drivers don't die, they just spot the nearest exit. “Okay?”

The Mayan girl yawned. Shake slipped out the back door. The stolen golf cart was parked a few feet away. He got in, pulled it forward, and parked again, this time flush against the back door of the shop.

Shake jogged, as fast as his cracked ribs would let him, back toward Black Coral. He'd been counting seconds in his head, another old habit. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Sixty-two Mississippis after he entered the shop, he heard a sharp metal
wunk
as One Love tried to push open the back door of the shop and found it blocked by the stolen golf cart.

Wunk-wunk-wunk.
Shake smiled. One Love wasn't getting through that door.

Pijua's little Toyota minitruck was idling at the corner of the alley. Shake rolled into the bed of the truck and pulled a tarp over himself, thinking how he wouldn't want to be One Love when Baby Jesus found out what happened. On the other hand, he supposed, One Love probably wouldn't want to trade places with Shake either.

 

PIJUA DROVE UP PAST THE
high school and over the bridge that spanned the Cut. That part of the ride wasn't too hard on Shake's ribs. The next part, ten miles north on a rutted sand track, was.

For the first time it really hit Shake that the restaurant was gone.
His
restaurant. Shake remembered how for the first few weeks the local fishermen had tested him. Steering him toward the snapper with the milky eyes. Shake would toss the bad snapper back and say, “Would you feed this to your family?” He gradually earned their respect. Or else the fishermen just got tired of him making a scene every time, pain-in-the-ass
cabrón.

And not just his restaurant gone, Shake realized. His life in Belize too. A life, for better or worse, that he'd expected to live for a long time. It felt like he'd lost his balance. Like he'd reached for the rung of a ladder, and the rung wasn't there. The ladder wasn't there. Maybe there'd never been a ladder at all.

Shit.
Pijua hit a bump and Shake couldn't breathe for the next thirty seconds. Finally, though, the truck slowed and stopped. Pijua gave him an all-clear rap on the back window of the cab. Shake climbed out from beneath the tarp and out of the truck bed. Pijua came around to shake his hand.

“Thanks,” Shake said. “I mean it.”

Pijua looked around, dubious. They were in the middle of nowhere. “For what?”

“I know,” Shake said.

“Seem like you gotta have a better option, amigo.”

“Seems that way to me too. I agree.”

“Might be tricky, you know, but we can get you over to the mainland.” That had been Shake's original plan, when he thought he still had his Wahoo. Now, though, he realized he had bigger problems.

“That doesn't help me any,” Shake said. “And it sure doesn't help you any.”

Pijua slapped at a mosquito. “You thinking Baby Jesus got reach over there too. Somebody high up.”

“Yeah.” As much dope as Baby Jesus ran up into the Yucatán, the odds were good that he had a cabinet minister or two in his pocket. Maybe he didn't, but Shake would rather not test the theory by walking up cold to airport security at Goldson International in Belize City. Shake's passport was fake paper that he'd picked up a few years ago in Vegas. But it was in the name he'd been using while he was in Belize, so that didn't help him any.

“I need to find a way out of the country that Baby Jesus won't know about,” Shake said.

“How much he want?”

“Two and a half.”

“American?” Pijua slapped at another mosquito. “Shit.”

“And then we'd have to start talking about the other people want to kill me. The girl with the freckles.”

“Idaba said she didn't see no girl with the freckles.”

“Idaba wasn't there about to get shot.”

“How about,” Pijua said, but then didn't finish the thought.

“This is my only option,” Shake said. “I wish it wasn't.”

Pijua sighed. “You in a pickle, amigo.”

 

PIJUA GAVE SHAKE A MACHETE,
promised he'd have his daughter say a rosary for Shake, and then drove back toward town. Shake began to hike north, hacking his way through the brush. There was a better path on the beach, just a hundred yards or so to his right, but it was too exposed. Shake couldn't afford to be spotted.

About an hour later, around three, Shake turned seaward. The resort was on the other side of some low dunes. There were a dozen or so small bungalows, white stucco and red clay tile roofs, grouped around the pool with the leaping dolphins. Farther on was the main, two-story building, with a long balcony that faced the beach and the ocean beyond.

The resort looked just like the glossy photo on the business card. Except—not exactly. Shake noticed, as he got closer, that the stucco was chipped and a lot of the roof tiles were missing or broken. The pool was empty. You could see the dry rusty tubes in the dolphin mouths, where the water used to flow. A flexible plastic drainage tube, a couple of feet in diameter, snaked from the roof of the main building down to the ground.

There wasn't anybody around. No guests, no staff. Shake asked himself if he was surprised by any of that. He wasn't.

He found Harrigan Quinn pacing the balcony of the main building, talking on his cell phone. He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and pressed khakis, deck shoes without socks. When he saw Shake down below, he didn't seem surprised at all. He killed the call and spread his arms wide.