Tropical Freeze by James W. Hall Read Free Book Online Page A

one of those lines had a dick like a sequoia. So figure it out.”
    Thorn said, “I don’t think I know you well enough to be having this conversation.”
    “I don’t know anyone ,” she said, “well enough to be having this conversation.”
    The moon was a smudge of light behind thick clouds out in the Florida Straits. Thorn took a fast ride out there, cruising weightless along his line of sight. It was a boyhood game he’d played on those nights when the island fever burned too hot. He stayed out there for a moment or two, got some order back in his head, then came back slowly to that island, that trailer park, that chair, that body grown heavy with drink.
    The bathroom in the mobile home was smaller than the head on Thorn’s Chris Craft. And the racket he was making in there, mainlining five Budweisers into the John, blotted out Springsteen. When Thorn was finished, he washed up, checked his face in the mirror. The beers had taken root in his eyes. He experimented with a happier look, lifting his eyebrows, forcing a momentary shimmer to his eye, raising the corners of his mouth. But it was grotesque, a drunk’s cockeyed smile.
    Darcy was waiting for him in the dark living room. She was leaning against the doorsill, looking out at the sky, holding on to the brass door lock chain.
    “Another front coming?” he said.
    “Yeah,” she said. “But a high-pressure ridge’s deflecting it at the moment.”
    He came up to her side. Snagged the toe of his boat shoe on the edge of the rug and stumbled into her shoulder. She turned and put out her hand to steady him, and it slipped into his shirt, grazed across his chest. She smiled and began to slide it out, but Thorn covered it with his hand, kept it there. One of her fingertips pressing against his nipple.
    “I’m a little drunk,” he said. But he didn’t release her hand.
    She brought her other hand up slowly and touched his face. Fingertips reading the stubble on his cheeks, braille, a message there. Then a slow tracing of his eyebrows, nose, upper lip, up the cheekbone, and brushing the hair at his temples. Thorn felt a flood of warmth rise inside him. His eyes swimming. The muscles in his neck relaxing as well. He gave himself over to this ticklish tour.
    Her hand circled his neck, back-combed up through his hair, and cupped his head. He let her have some of its weight. Holding there, cradling his skull.
    “Are you drunk?” he said. Drowsy, his head floating in her palm.
    “No,” she said. “Stone cold sober.”
    “Good.”
    After a time he opened his eyes, looked at her now, at the moonlit face, sideburns of down. He lifted a finger, brought it to that dust of hair on her cheek, ruffled it against the grain of the light till it was a milky powder.
    He brought his face to hers, their mouths aligning, but not a kiss. Holding off the hunger. Their lips grazed, adjusting, making the slightest calibrations of angle and shape as if they were whispering into each other’s breaths. Both of them trying to make this first kiss, this one which Thorn did not even realize until now that he had been waiting for for a very long time, to make it as close to perfect as possible.
    And it was.

6
    “I didn’t kill anybody till I was twenty-eight,” Papa John said. “What’s your hurry?”
    Ozzie said, “I’m thirty-two, for christ sakes.”
    John lit another Camel and rubbed the thumb of his smoking hand across the beard stubble on his throat. He eyed Ozzie through the smoke. Ozzie was wiping down the bar with a wet, greasy rag, putting a fleeting shine on the mahogany. The guy wasn’t at all what Papa John had had in mind. He was a Florida Cracker for one thing. Worse than an ordinary redneck. You couldn’t teach Crackers anything. They had undescended brains.
    It was three o’clock in the morning. It’d been another slow Friday night. Used to be that the Bomb Bay Bar was the axis of the universe in Key Largo. You didn’t come to this island and not squeeze