Free Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames

made her less sad than irretrievably bitter, grimly vindicated in her ready sorrow. Her husband's violent life would fold back someday and destroy them all—that was a bleak belief she'd lived with for decades. Now that the bill was coming due, she was unsurprised and strangely calm, as helplessly resigned as though the devil himself had appeared on her doorstep to claim his half of the bargain.
    "I'd almost rather believe ..." her husband said, and then he fell silent. What he was thinking was unspeakable, and the part of him that was beyond the death grip of his pride knew he didn't mean it anyway. He stoppered his mouth with the glass of liquor, then tried again. "Was there any contact, Maria? Were they in touch?"
    "I told you, Paul. I don't know. Do I know everyone she talked to for nine years? Did I look at every piece of mail?"
    "You say no boyfriends all that—?"
    The phone rang. It was bolted to a tiled wall; the tiles made the ring sound very crisp and cold and loud.
    Husband and wife stared at each other a long second, there was hope and a pale conciliation in the look. Then Paul Amaro squared his shoulders and went to the phone, hearing in his mind his daughter's quiet hello.
    It was not his daughter. It was his sister-in-law Rose. She sounded drunk and she was crying.
    "It's Louie," she sniffled. "Louie, he's not here. Last night he didn't come home. I called the store, it rang and rang. Today, no Louie. Again no Louie. I'm calling the police."
    "You don't call the police," said Paul. He said it by reflex though his head was spinning. "Now pull yourself together, Rose, and tell me what happened."
    "What happened? I don't know what happened. He left the house, he didn't come back. That's what happened."
    Paul Amaro leaned against the counter, closed his eyes, held the phone a few inches from his ear. His chest hurt and his bowels burned. His whole life had been a crude campaign against ever feeling helpless, ever being the sucker, and now helplessness was ripping up his insides like a fast disease. Was someone out to get him, out to get his family? And if they were, what kind of craziness made them start with the few relations who were innocent?
    "He'll come back, Rose," said Paul, his voice not feeling like his own. "We'll find him."
    "We won't find him," snuffled Louie's wife. "He's dead. I know he's dead."
    For a moment Paul stared at the telephone, then he quietly hung up. He took a pull of bourbon and looked down at his shoes. He needed to think. He'd been weak and foolish to imagine he'd get any solace from Maria; a silly sloppy broad like Rose just complicated things. He needed to think the way he always thought, alone.
    "Louie's missing," he said to his wife, and then he turned his back on her and headed for the door.

12
    Even in Key West, people's schedules sometimes got cluttered, and the next time Ziggy was summoned to meet with Carmen Salazar, the appointment made him late for work. The meeting, fortunately, was routine and brief, dealing with the distribution of certain bribes to assure the smooth operation of Salazar's lap-dance joint on Stock Island. Still, Ziggy was in a big hurry when he left, and as he barreled through the dim and narrow chute of the candy store, he almost collided with a short and stocky man on his way in. He noticed a broken nose and beautiful shoes and almost nothing else.
    By the time he reached Raul's he was in a lather, his shirt splotched before he'd even gone around to the professional side of the bar. He endured a snide look from the guy he was late relieving, and then he started making drinks for the early crowd already edgy to get their sunburned hands on some alcohol.
    What happened to the years, he wondered, when season had a beginning and an end, when places got mobbed in mid-December but relative sanity returned by April? Now it was nonstop; month after month the desperate hordes flocked in, hungover, blistered, crudely raucous, acting like they'd never act where