Off the Chart. James Hall
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the west. An Everglades breeze full of mold spores and mosquitoes and the first ozone whiffs of a spring thunderstorm. It had been a brutally dry year. During the winter only a couple of cold fronts had plowed all the way down the state, and those brought no rain. And so far, the summer monsoon season still hadn’t kicked in.
His grass was charred and crispy underfoot, but the bougainvillea seemed ecstatic about the drought, and their great clouds of purple and pink and white cascaded over trees and lesser shrubs all around the perimeter of his five acres. The wild lantana and the penta were doing fine as well. For generations those indigenous plants had thrived in the inch of sandy soil dusting the limestone rubble that passed for land in the Florida Keys. Regularly flooded by the salty sea or scraped back to nubs by hurricanes, those native plants seemed to bloom with even greater flourish after each new trial.
The year of relentless heat had been nearly ruinous for Thorn’s fly-tying business. Out on the flats the bonefish and reds were lethargic in the overheated water. A warmer-than-average winter in the Northeast and a series of airline crashes had cut the tourist flow by half, so the fishing guides who worked the flats hadn’t snapped up Thorn’s custom flies in the numbers they had in the years before. And though Thorn had almost exhausted his savings and was starting to make uneasy calculations whenever he looked into the pantry, he wasn’t about to confess any of that to Marty Messina.
Back when Marty Messina had been a bush-league dope peddler around the upper Keys, word was Marty was connected to a Miami crime family. Whether it was true or not Thorn didn’t know, but the guy certainly had acted the part. As a sideline, he’d laundered some of his profits through Tarpon’s, a waterfront restaurant he operated in nearby Rock Harbor. Probably through dumb luck, Marty signed on a young chef who’d discovered some creative uses for cinnamon and bananas and exotic Caribbean fruits in his fish dishes. Nobody had ever cooked that way in Key Largo before, and the restaurant became a trendy hit with locals. Even Thorn had gone there once or twice for special occasions.
Marty kept the prices low, routinely buying rounds of drinks for the whole bar to celebrate his great good fortune. But then a trawler Marty was piloting was boarded by the DEA just off Islamorada. Nearly a ton of Mexican grass was aboard at the time. Within a few weeks Marty was sent away to perfect his croquet skills in a minimum-security prison somewhere in north Florida, a place that housed corrupt politicos, white-collar embezzlers, and other well-lawyered crooks. In his absence, the restaurant changed hands, the chef moved on, and finally the place became just another tourist joint, pumping out fish sandwiches and limp fries.
A couple of weeks ago Marty Messina had materialized again in Key Largo. Thorn had heard from one of his fishing guide buddies that Messina had been planting his butt on a stool at the bar of his old restaurant, running the place down to anyone who’d listen. Reminding everyone what a cutting-edge hot spot it had once been.
‘So you a Realtor now, Marty? Get your license in prison?’
‘Fuck you, Thorn.’
‘Seems reasonable,’ Thorn said. ‘Real estate’s the logical next career choice after apprenticing in crime.’
‘Hey, Thorn, come on, man, I don’t have all fucking day. Just say yes, and I’ll go back and draw up the papers and get your money bundled up.’
Marty gave him a cheerless grin.
‘My buyer will pay all cash,’ he said. ‘Two and a half mil.’
‘A minute ago you said two.’
‘I’m negotiating.’
‘Oh, is that how it’s done?’
‘Okay, three,’ Marty said. ‘Three million dollars, Thorn.’
Marty stood up and lumbered back over to the sawhorse.
‘You’re negotiating in a vacuum. I’m not selling.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I told him. You were a first-class knucklehead.’
Thorn glanced up, but Marty was looking out at the glassy bay.
‘Tell him to drop by. I’ll refuse him to his face.’
‘This guy doesn’t drop by, Thorn. He pays people to drop by.’
Marty turned and looked Thorn in the eyes and a smile spread slowly across his face as if he’d surprised himself with his own ominous wit.
‘What’s his name, Marty? The guy who wants this place so bad.’
‘Look, Thorn. If you fuck with me, you fuck with him. And believe me, buddy, you don’t want to fuck with him.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah, really.’
Marty’s dark eyes held to Thorn’s and he clamped his lips together as if to keep from blurting out the name. The buyer could’ve been any of a hundred of Marty’s old associates, dope runners of an earlier era who’d stashed away enough to buy their way into legit businesses around the Keys. Thorn had nothing against their kind. He’d smoked his share of funny stuff back in his younger days before grass got all inbred and so full of hallucinogenic juice that one toke would give you the munchies for a month. He knew a ton of plumbers and electricians and roofers around the island who’d bought their first tools and panel trucks with the proceeds of one successful dope run. Most of them were upstanding citizens now. Churchgoers with a mortgage, kids in high school, a small fishing boat they took out weekend yellowtailing. But there were other guys he’d run into back in the good old dope days who’d gaffed and gutted one too many of their competitors, waded a little too deep into the dark sea of deadened senses. They were still around the island, but you didn’t see them out and about. They sent their lackeys, guys like Marty Messina, to do their bidding.
‘Okay,’ Thorn said. ‘So what exactly does he want to do with my land?’
‘Improve it,’ Marty said.
‘Ah, yes.’ Thorn lined up another slat of pine on the sawhorse and drew out the aluminum tape. ‘This land’s long overdue for improving.’
‘Don’t get funny with me, Thorn. I’m running low on patience.’
‘Hey, Marty. I have a tip. Tell your guy to swoop in and buy the tract where the Island House motel used to be. Back in March somebody knocked all the trees down, scraped the land bare, then left it sitting there. Guy must’ve run out of money. That’d be a nice spot to improve.’
‘He wants this land,’ Marty said.
‘You hit town one week, you’re out throwing around millions of dollars the next. How do I know you’re even legit? You know what I’m saying?’
‘This is for real, Thorn. A bona fide offer. Far as just getting into town, yeah, that’s true. But some people around here remember me, respect my abilities. I got excellent credentials.’
‘A stretch in jail being near the top of the list.’
‘I been out for a while, jerkhole. I been into some other things; now I’m into this. Not that it’s any of your fucking business.’
‘You’re standing here trying to buy my land. That sort of makes it my business, doesn’t it?’
Thorn took the pencil from behind his ear and marked the slat, then set the blade of the saw against the mark, drew it back an inch to score the spot. But before he could begin to saw, Marty stepped close to the horse, blocking his stroke.
‘Look, Thorn. You got a piece-of-shit car; it’s rusting through. Same fucking car you had before I went off to the joint.’
Thorn looked up at Marty. He held the saw in place.
‘You got this falling-down house, one good storm comes along, a puff of wind, trust me, Thorn, that shack’s gonna wash right into the bay.’
Marty made his eyes go droopy like he was bored with this, bored trying to reason with a knuckle-head, but still trying real hard to be decent.