"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

A formation of pelicans, long beaks tucked close to their gray chests, swooped low across the water toward their nests among the mangroves. Croaker followed their flight, looking out over the pale turquoise shallows of Florida Bay that led to Everglades National Park. Locals called it the backcountry, in this area alone, a six-hundred-square-mile warren of waterways, basins, and inlets between mangrove islets, and rookeries for tropical birds, that were too small and numerous to be counted or fully mapped. He'd fished many times for trout and snook and bonefish in the purling waterways where, at the dawning of the century, the Calusa and Tequesta silently paddled their buttonwood canoes. It was there that he'd met Stone Tree, a Seminole who had become his guide in the Everglades.
Stone Tree, tall as a Calusa, thin as a length of whittled wood, slowly brought into focus for Croaker the moments of sublime back-country beauty that few people ever saw or understood. Things here can keep you alive and healthy for decades, Stone Tree told him as they stalked strange flora and fauna through hardwood hammocks and coastal prairies. Things here can kill you in a matter of minutes. It's all a matter of knowledge. In that self-contained environment a man could lose himself to the rest of the world until the day he died.
Not ten minutes later, Croaker and Bennie were tucked away in Papa Joe's Tiki Bar, a second-floor crow's nest overlooking the western expanse of the mangrove-woven bay. Papa Joe's was an Islamor-ada institution, part bar, part restaurant, part fishing marina, and all hangout.
"It was like looking into infinity." Bennie's hand clasped a tall beer glass beaded with moisture. "Like understanding for the first time that there are forces beyond your control, forces so primitive and urgent they're, like, incomprehensible."
He was talking about the tiger shark. The bar, crowded with garrulous regulars, was like a color-drenched reef behind them. In front, the oblate sun was setting over the water. It was that gorgeous Keys color, neither orange nor red, but part of both. A few clouds, ungainly as a clown's whiskers, floated by overhead, and a couple of motorboats slashed their way across the luminescent skin of the bay. A handful of laughing gulls set up shop behind the restaurant on the dock below, where the small fishing skimmers rocked gently at their moorings.
The sky near the horizon was turning that peculiar shade of green found nowhere else but in the tropics. Everyone was standing, staring at the sunset. Down here, it was more than a ritual; it was a basic part of life, like drinking and fishing.
As the last curve of the sun dropped below the horizon there was a burst of spontaneous applause. Then everyone got back to drinking and socializing. The Keys were the great equalizer. Status was nonexistent here. It didn't matter worth a damn whether you had money or not, whether in some other part of the world you counseled presidents or commanded a seven-figure salary. Here, you were no better or worse than the next person.
Bennie, dressed in dark raw silk shorts and a blindingly bright aloha shirt, was in a serious mood. "That fuckin' shark was, like, symbolic, right? Symbolic of what the world is and what we never can be. See what I mean?" He made horns of his forefingers, pointed them at his temples. "We got all these smarts, we got opposable thumbs." He wiggled his thumbs as an exhibit. "We invented weapons that can level cities, weapons that can kill people but not buildings. We got E equals M C fuckin' squared." This was not the street-smart cocky businessman most people got to see, but the other Bennie Milagros, a deep thinker, a kind of philosopher who questioned everything in life. Croaker knew instinctively that he was privileged to be seeing this side of the man, just as he knew some unspoken bond was being woven between the two of them.
"What I mean is, all these things they don't mean shit to the shark." Bennie finished his beer in one long gulp. "I swear, Lewis, we almost got our asses chewed to meat out there today."
Croaker got more beers as the waitress came with plates of whole grilled pompano from the restaurant below. He said, "It was a force of nature, like a storm or a tidal wave, nothing, more nothing less."
Bennie stared at the fish made fragrant with fresh rosemary and thyme and Croaker could see the look on his face. He was reminded, as Croaker was, that if not for this particular force of nature they'd be eating wahoo now.
"See, you're wrong, Lewis. That fuckin' thing-that was our fu- ture. That's what's gonna take us all down one day-a force of fuckin' nature, unknown, unannounced, unstoppable."
Croaker pulled Bennie's glass over, peered into the bottom. "Whoa! I think I'd better drop some mighty Prozac in here."
Bennie laughed sourly, but he was watching the spectral outlines of the brown pelicans on their perches atop the pier pilings. The frightening encounter with the shark had set off something inside him. "I tell you, Lewis, there's something out there waiting for us."
Just after ten o'clock, Maria appeared with Sonia right behind her. Maria was a willowy South American with a massive swirl of black hair, black eyes, and the manner of a woman born to money. Sonia, also Latina, was tall, very slender with thick layers of dark brown hair, and startling hazel eyes. She moved with a certain energy and an unselfconsciousness that was immediately endearing. It was Croaker's experience that women who used their beauty like a bank account soon proved dull or self-involved or both.
At Croaker's suggestion, they went to the Shark Bar, a place both he and Bennie knew. It was a fairly new club on Islamorada, a funky but hip place. It featured salsa bands, a tropical setting, and, best of all, it catered to the Latin American crowd down from South Beach for sport fishing. Which was good for Croaker's business. But he had another reason for hanging out there and he saw that reason standing head and shoulders above the crowd.
"Hey, Rafe!" he called.
Rafe Roubinnet, owner of the Shark Bar, waved and grinned like a man spotting an old college roommate.
"How you been?" Roubinnet thundered. "Must be grand, 'cause I hear you've been out on Captain Sumo almost nonstop for a month," His laughter was infectious. "Been reeling in the charismatic mega-vertebrates?"
Croaker, with Sonia's hand in his, maneuvered through the crowd toward the restaurateur. "You bet. The big fish are running and my client list keeps getting longer. I can't complain."
Roubinnet was very tall, lean, and lined from tropical sun and wind, his skin dark as mahogany. He wore white jeans and a midnight blue T-shirt on which was printed in large white Gothic letters: no recreational whining. With his dark, thick hair, bright blue eyes, and rugged good looks, Croaker supposed he could have been a model. But Roubinnet seemed too addicted to the slow and easy pace of the Keys.
"Ai de mi, who's the beautiful lady?" Roubinnet cried. "Bring her on over here, compadre!"
Croaker and Roubinnet had a special relationship. Croaker had gotten a lot of business from the Shark Bar ever since he had relocated from Marco Island on the Gulf Coast. It was his home away from home; he was known there, and well liked, not to mention much admired. Not long ago, he'd ended a spate of death threats against Roubinnet by tracking down a local wise guy who'd been hired by a couple of Miami mobsters wanting a piece of Roubinnet's lucrative action.
Roubinnet, grinning hugely, kissed Sonia's hand, then clasped Croaker's right hand in his, and gave it a squeeze that was as professional as it was powerful. You could tell many things about a man from the way he shook your hand. Before his incarnation as a restaurateur, Roubinnet had been mayor of Miami for a term. Being half-Hispanic hadn't done him any harm, and having Bennie backing him with money and influence hadn't either.
"It's good to see you," Roubinnet said in that special way of his that made you believe that you were the center of his attention, "Spending too much time on that boat of yours. You've got to kick back a little. Relax. Like now."
Someone called to him and he waved. "Minute!" He clapped Croaker on the shoulder. "Don't be such a stranger, compadre. Take advantage of the hospitality of the house. Your dinero's no good here." Then he was striding through the crowd, shaking hands, laughing as he listened to bits of gossip delivered up by his best customers.
"He's some character," Sonia said.
"Comes on strong but he's a good guy. Big heart and a straight shooter." Croaker smiled. "Drink?"
"Right now I'd rather dance."
"It will be my pleasure," he said, as he led her out onto the dance floor. "So. Sonia. Is that your first and last name, like Madonna?"
"Madonna's over," Sonia said. "So is having one name." They swung to a sensuous merengue beat. "My last name's Villa-Lobos. Like the music composer." She smiled. "I like the way you dance. Very, you know, liquid. Reminds me of my brother, Carlito. I used to dance with him like this when we were little."
"I learned from the best," Croaker said. "I hung around Spanish Harlem up in New York so much the Latinos finally got used to me."
He watched her move to the music's insistent beat. "Why did you come tonight?"
She looked at him curiously, her arms hooked around his shoulders as their bodies carved out patterns on the floor. "Because Bennie asked."
Now he was curious. "Just like that?"
Sonia looked at him as if he ought to know. Then she laughed. "Bennie, Maria, and I all come from Asuncion. We know each other a long time."
The band took a break and the dance floor emptied toward the bar, the front of which was fiberglass molded and realistically painted to look like a giant shark. A set of jaws from a real great white shark, its wicked teeth intact, jutted from the wood-paneled wall behind the bar. It was replicated in the mirrors, which reflected the exuberant, casually dressed crowd. Everything was muy casual in the Keys.
"Would you like a drink?" Croaker asked.
Sonia nodded. "But afterward I want to dance some more." Her eyes sparkled. "It's not every night I get to be with an Anglo who knows how to merengue."
"You like to merengue."
"It's a very sexy dance," she said.
He took her hand, threading through the raucous throng. Recorded music came on. Jimmy Buffett, and then a succession of well-known salsa artists. Elbowing his way to the bar, he shouted his order to Frank, one of the three bartenders working that night. He got a frozen margarita for Sonia, another mescal for himself. What the hell, he thought.
They headed away from the bar, across the packed room and out of the glass doors onto a wide wooden patio. In true South Florida tradition the frigid air inside became an instant memory as the humidity hit them with a moist slap. They could smell the mangrove hanging rank and heavy in the spangled night. A bed of stars arched overhead. The soft lap of the waves was everywhere, the frenetic scene behind them seemed a million miles away. You didn't even have to close your eyes to believe you were walking on the far edge of the universe.
They looked up. The stars seemed to burn more brightly in the velvet sky. In the distance the lights of the Keys glowed like pearls around a beautiful neck.
"Are you going to ask me to have sex with you?" Sonia asked.
Croaker laughed, taken aback. "I hadn't quite gotten around to thinking about it."
"That's a relief," she said. "Because I don't do that kind of thing, even for Bennie."
"I think he knows that," Croaker said, recalling Bennie's description of Sonia as a pearl in an oyster.
Her eyes danced in amusement. "Don't get me wrong. I mean I
like sex. But I prefer to choose my partners. And, anyway, these days, well, there's a dark side to it and I worry about ... things." She took a breath, let it out very slowly.