Dagger Key and Other Stories

“Everyone fibs now and again.”

“She lied about something pretty crucial.”

I suspected that Jo had told him he hadn’t always been Josey Pellerin. “Mind if I ask what?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mind.”

I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His features relaxed from their belligerent expression and he appeared to be tracking the progress of something through the air. I asked what he was looking at, half-expecting him to claim that he had discovered a microscopic planet with an erratic orbit, but he said, “A gnat.” Then he laughed. “A gnat with a fucking aura.”

“You see that shit all the time?”

“Auras? Yeah. Weirder stuff than that.”

“Like what?”

“Shadows.” He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, napkins, gum wrappers—there must have been thirty or forty hundreds in with the debris; he selected a twenty, tossed the rest on the table and hailed the blond waitress. “Margarita rocks,” he told her. “Salt.”

“Better slow down,” I said. “If you’re going to play poker, that is.”

“You kidding me? I need a handicap to play with those old ladies.”

I let my thoughts wander, vaguely mindful of the activity in the pool, speculating on the rate of skin cancers among the patrons of the Seminole Paradise, reflecting on the fact that I had not seen a single Seminole during our stay, if one omitted the grotesque statue of Osceola in the lobby, fashioned from a shiny yellowish brown material—petrified Cheese Whiz was my best guess. The waitress set Pellerin’s margarita down on the table; her eyes snagged on the cash strewn across it. She offered Pellerin his change and he told her to keep it. He tilted his head, squinted at her name tag, and said, “Is waitressing your regular job, Tammy, or just something you do on the side?”

Tammy didn’t know how to take this. She flashed her teeth, struck a pose that accentuated her breasts and said, “I’m sorry?”

“Reason I ask,” said Pellerin, “I wonder if you ever done any hostessing? I’m throwing a party up in my suite tonight. Around ten o’clock. And I was hoping to get a couple of girls to help me host it. You know the drill. Take care of the guests. See that everyone’s got a drink. You’d be doing me a huge favor.” He reached into his other pocket, peeled what looked to be about a grand off his roll and held it out to her. “That’s a down payment.”

A light switched on in Tammy’s brain and she re-evaluated Pellerin. “So how many guests are we talking about?” she asked.

“I’m the only one you’d have to worry about.” Pellerin gave a lizardly smile. “But I can be a real chore.”

“Why, I think we can probably handle it.” Tammy accepted the bills, folded them, stashed them next to her heart. “Around ten, you say?”

“I’m in the Everglades Suite,” said Pellerin. “Wear something negligible. And one more thing, darling. It’d be nice if your friend was a Latina. Maybe a Cuban girl. On the slender side. Maybe her name could be…Thomasina?”

“Why, isn’t that a coincidence! That’s my best friend’s name!” Tammy turned and twitched her cute butt. “See ya tonight.”

As she sashayed off, Pellerin slurped down half his margarita and sighed. “Ain’t freedom grand?”

“What was that bullshit?” I said. “You’re in the Everglades Suite?”

“Three nights from now, we could be lying in a landfill,” he said. “I booked myself a suite and I’m going to have me a party.”

“This isn’t wise,” I said. “Suppose she gets a look at your eyes?”

“Did you get a load of the brain on that girl? I could tell her I was down in the Amazon and got stung by electric bees, she’d be fine with it.”

I wasn’t too sure about that, but then I was distracted from worry by thinking about Jo all alone in Room 1138.

“Yeah, boy!” said Pellerin, and grinned—he’d been watching me. “What they say is true. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

I made no response.

“Hell, if Jocundra don’t do it for you,” he said, “I’m sure Tammy and Thomasina wouldn’t mind accommodating another guest.”

“That’s all right.”

“On second thought, I believe you’re the kind of guy who needs that old emotion lotion to really get off.”

“Shut your hole, okay?”

Pellerin finished his margarita, signaled Tammy for another. I was through cautioning him about his drinking. Maybe he’d drop dead. That would let us off the hook. More people had jumped into the pool—it looked like a sparkling blue bowl of human head soup. There came a loud screech that resolved into “The Pina Colada Song” piped in over speakers attached to the surrounding palms. I was half-angry, though I couldn’t have told you at what, and that damn song exacerbated my mood. Tammy brought the margarita and engaged in playful banter with Pellerin.

“Does your friend want a friend?” she asked. “Because I bet I could fix him up.”

“Naw, he’s got a friend,” said Pellerin. “The trouble is, she ain’t treating him all that friendly”

“Aw! Well, if he needs a friendly-ier friend, you let me know, hear?”