Free Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall

down.”
    “And you’re the big Mensa hotshot with the hundred forty IQ and shit for brains.”
    “One hundred fifty-three. I’m the smart one in this group. You should be paying attention to me. You should be following my plan.”
    “You’re a joke, Milburn. I heard this same speech, what, a hundred times? A hundred fucking times, and it never varies. You should be the leader; you should be rich like your daddy; you should be running this and that. Well, how come you’re such a dirtbag then? How come you’re not governor, or mayor, or even the head of the fucking garbage department? It’s because you’re such a fucking jerk, a wimp, and a goddamn whiner.”
    Milburn swallowed another Percodan from the bottle on the glass table, chased it with the rest of his St. Pauli’s Girl. He sat down at the wet bar, threw a dart at the dart board. It hit the outer rim, hung for a second, and fell to the floor.
    “All I’m saying is, it’s a weird fucking thing to see when you start up with that Jack Nicholson shit.”
    “You love it. The whole thing. There we are, the ultimo Cubans. We had her fooled every way from Tuesday. I just wanted to see her face, man, when she finds out she’d been had. Tough old lady captain. Big billfish dyke. That’s what it’s all about, man, see their faces when you take off the mask and they see they been dancing with the devil.
    “So don’t give me your shit, man. If it wasn’t for me not following the fucking plan, we’d still be stoolies for Abe Philpot. You liked that? Flying around everywhere, tagging around behind Abe, looking mean? You want to go back to that? Waiting for fucking Abe’s check every month to buy groceries? Man, if it wasn’t for me coming up with our own plan, inventing things, we’d still be muscle for some two-bit real estate contractor, putting a barrel in some zoning official’s ribs so Abe can build a couple of extra fucking stories on his condo. You want that? You want to get back to that kind of fucking, dim-witted life, being somebody’s lackey? Man, I don’t believe you sometimes. Mr. Plan Follower.”
    “I need to get down to the doctor, man.” Milburn not whining now. The pain turning him serious. The sweat making a dark butterfly on the front of that pink shirt. He was probably right about that eye. He’d lose it. That old lady got the tip way in there, punctured the shit out of it.
    Irving found the keys to the BMW. He felt fine, happy. Not so much the five thousand for the job. Shit, he’d given Ricki the bargain basement rate anyway. Five thousand, he got that every month from his old man. Smelled like fried chicken, every dollar of it.
    But it was the idea of it, his profession. He was sailing now, a career in the fine arts. His name getting around where it mattered, people with money and some dirty little deal to do. People he’d met when he and Milburn had been Abe’s goons were calling him up. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, all over the place. They remembered Irv, said they liked his style, his unfucking-predictabilities.
    He felt good. Even getting fat Milburn on his feet and out the door. There were parts for a lifetime. Parts and parts and parts. He hadn’t even scratched the goddamn surface.

7
    T HE PUFF, THE HARD PUFF, Wild Harry’s Delight, the Muddler, Improved Nasty Charlie, the Horror, Bonebuster, Purple Shadow.
    Thorn sat at his rolltop desk and looked up at the cork board where his collection of flies was displayed. It was quiet, still an hour till daybreak. He could finish maybe three Crazy Charlies before the roosters started in.
    There was an old rooster and a young one that’d recently begun to debate over a brood of wild hens that lived in the mangrove woods that bordered his house. The chickens provided him with feathers for his flies, and the crowing coaxed him back to an earlier day when the Keys were more a cousin of South Georgia than Miami’s weekend playground and a tour stop on the Disney World