Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith

local.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “I thought it might be one of CJ’s acquaintances. Somebody with a grievance. But it’s not.”
    “How do you know?”
    “The way he was killed.”
    Cot just looks at him. Out in the street someone shouts, happy to be at US 1 Mile Zero.
    “He was shot,” Ordell says.
    “I thought . . .”
    “It was a pro job.”
    Cot feels a chill down his back. That’s what he’s been afraid of. He turns away to the window. Down in the street a hen followed by six buff-colored biddies moves along. A shirtless man, a fat man, waves them by like a traffic cop. Cot thinks of his father, leaning over his writing board in Havana. A picture of his apartment shows tall peeling walls, rattan rugs, hardly any furniture. Cot wishes he was there, in Havana, walking down a shuttered street, eating a chicken empanada. No, that’s not right—he wishes he was in Miami, sitting on a bench in Flamingo Park watching the tennis players. But not—
    “What should I do about Marcella?” Ordell says.
    “Nothing much you can do,” Cot says still looking out the window. Go over to Solly’s for banana pudding—that was something to do in Miami. “I’ve never been able to head her off.”
    “You don’t have to,” Ordell says bitterly. “You always know she’ll come back to you.”
    Cot turns around. “No, Buck, I don’t know that. Nobody can know something like that about Marcella.”
    He leaves and heads down the stairs. Outside the day is big with itself, full spring in the Keys, trumpet trees yellowly flowering, poincianas ruffling their red spangles, the island plump with life. Sam Butler, the mayor, passes on his scooter, on his way, Cot knows, to get a drink at Passerine Dooly’s house, his true love—both drink and Passerine. What is he going to do? Maybe it would be best to go back to Miami—draw off the stalkers. They are stalkers—right? But what could he do in Miami? And how do they know he’d taken the stones in the first place? Do they know that? Had CJ—well, it could be anything. Maybe Jimmy, maybe sensors in the ground, maybe a damn force field thrown around the whole of Florida Bay. A springing misery shivers and clips him as it passes.
    H e catches a ride on the tourist train back to his mother’s house. Buzzy Staples, the guide and driver, is talking to the tourists about sponge fishing when he lets him off, making that sloppy profession seem like a tale of romance and plunder.
    Jackie says his mother is over at the botanical garden by Higgs Beach, conducting a class in exterminating vermin. “You never know what she’s going to be up to,” he says when Cot gives him a look.
    He phones Spane, but Spane isn’t answering. He starts over to the garden on his bike, but halfway there he thinks he had better go to Miami and pedals out to the airport and buys a ticket. The plane is scheduled to leave at three. He goes over to the garden looking for his mother, but she’s gone. He sits under a little spicewood tree and stares at the ocean. A flat pale blue expanse that looks gelatinous in the heavy morning light. He again calls Spane who isn’t picking up and leaves a message saying he’s got the stones. He’s ice cold the whole time he’s speaking, a voice not very deep inside saying fool fool . “I’m going up to the island to return them,” he says. He’s making mistake after mistake, first on the list—after taking the stones, after getting Albertson’s operative locked up, after running around here like he knew what he was doing, after putting his mother at risk, and Marcella too and who knows who else—making such a call, even if it’s on an unregistered phone (they don’t let you off just because you put the money back in the bank); sticking his head in a noose. But it’s like he doesn’t care—or not that exactly: it’s as if he’s only half awake, only half there. Essentials decoalesce, drift away like scents into the trees. Yes, that’s it. His