The Nomination by William G. Tapply Read Free Book Online Page A

to her, say, Hey, it’s me, Eddie Moran. You remember old Tommy Larrigan, dontcha? Well, guess what?”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake, Eddie, be discreet.”
    â€œHave I ever let you down?”
    â€œNot yet. And you better not this time.”

    EDDIE MORAN SPENT the rest of the afternoon sweltering in the rented gray Camry. Every once in a while he’d switch on the ignition and turn the air conditioning on high, let it blow out the hot air, but he couldn’t leave the motor running all day. So mostly he sat there with all the windows open, and every once in a while a puff of hot salty breeze would blow through.
    He’d parked strategically in the supermarket lot on Route 1. Every road on the island attached itself to Route 1, he’d learned. Route 1—the same Route 1 that traced the crooked coastline of New England—was the spine of the Keys. People down here oriented themselves by the mile markers along the roadside. It was, “Second left after mile marker thirty-four,” or, “You come to a Japanese restaurant on your right, then look for mile marker fifty-nine.”
    So he waited there at the corner of Route 1 and the side street that led down to the dolphin place on the ocean, close enough so he could see every face in every car that came along that side street. Sooner or later, Bunny Brubaker would have to pass directly in front of him.
    He sweated and drank orange soda and ate beer nuts and smoked cigarettes and pissed in a plastic milk jug. The Marines had taught him how to blank his mind against the passage of time, how to remain alert without thinking about anything. Boredom was a state of mind, and Eddie Moran had learned to master it. He just watched the faces go by, registering everything, thinking about nothing.
    Finally he spotted her. She was driving a maroon Volkswagen bug, braking for the stop sign right in front of him. Automatically he glanced at his wristwatch and jotted the time into the notebook on the seat beside him. 7:48 PM. The previous note read, “1:22. Called T. L.” He’d been sitting there a little more than six hours. That wasn’t bad. Plenty of times he’d sat outside an apartment building all night and nothing had even happened.
    When she pulled onto Route 1, heading south, he got a glimpse of her license plate. He hastily scratched the number into his notebook, too.
    Bunny’s old VW Beetle had a roof rack and a big plastic daisy stuck on top of the antenna. Considerate of her. He had no trouble hanging four cars behind her and keeping the daisy in sight.
    She was a few years younger than Eddie, which put her somewhere in her early fifties now. But she still had nice tits. He’d noticed that right away, when she was talking about how smart dolphins were and how well they were treated in their caged-in pool and how the place wasn’t a zoo but a “habitat.” Nice hair, too. Eddie Moran liked long hair, and Bunny Brubaker wore her auburn hair long and straight down her back, the same as she had in the old days. From where he’d been watching her, he couldn’t tell if she dyed it, or if there was any gray in it.
    Bunny Brubaker had been a real dazzler back then. She still looked good. If anything, a little thinner than she’d been back then.
    Thirty-five years. He wondered if she’d even remember him.
    The real question, of course, was what she remembered about Larrigan.
    Up ahead he saw the right directional begin to blink on the maroon VW. She turned off onto a narrow side road, and he followed. There were no vehicles between them now, so he crept along, keeping plenty of distance between them. When she pulled into a driveway beside a little square flat-roofed modular house pretty much like all the other little square flat-roofed modular houses on the street, he kept going. The road ended half a mile later in a turnaround by the water. He stopped there for the length of time it took him to