Free Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith

robbed CJ.”
    “It was some men from Fort Lauderdale.”
    “How do you know?”
    “One of those little lawbreakers from up the Keys told on them, Ordell said.”
    “That’s a fact for sure?”
    “Mmm.”
    “So’d Ordell call the authorities?”
    “He said he was going to.”
    They watched a slender sailboat, a sloop, sails furled, a sunbrowned man and woman on deck, come sliding along, easing in against the next dock over. It soothed him to see such a beautiful boat. The man’s hair was sun-blond, the woman’s too, they could have been twins, familiar gods from another world. He said, “We get so close, just a step away—you’d think we could make it.”
    “Are you talking about us?”
    “Among other things.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t get portentous—is that the word?”
    “Dystopian.”
    “That’s not quite it.”
    Across the water on the far side of the docks: egrets in the jucaro trees, white fuel tanks belonging to the power station next door, and three cars coming down the unpaved street raising dust—something . . . a feeling as if they were moving smoothly into a silent, secret movie, into still pictures, coming over him. A’s deadline hours ticking, a whole day gone—and more, was it more?—like fingernails ticking on a hardwood counter, on the stock of an AK-47.
    He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Let’s go.”
    They ran down the docks, cut through an open storage warehouse and out into the power plant grounds where a couple of men on forklifts were moving bales from one place to another.
    She hadn’t spoken, she had only run with him, her head thrown slightly back as if she was running in a parade, but now she said, “Are you going to tell me anything?”
    “Sorry. In a minute.”
    Around a corner among the huge exposed parts of old transformers and uncoiled spools of wire they stopped. She said silently what what what , and he kissed her, putting his tongue like a sly one into her mouth, wishing it was long as a snake, that he could sink into her guts among the placards and ruby necklaces and the gushes of untainted blood. “What?” she said.
    “This guy. This Bert.”
    “The one you depantsed?”
    “The exact same. Plus a couple of recruits.”
    “Because you stole from them?”
    “These islands are dotted with little crosses where they buried treasure.” In his business, he had told her, after you pass the tests, they begin to reveal the locations of these X’s.
    “Does he know the locations too?”
    “No.”
    “That’s his real problem, ay?”
    “Yeah. Envy.”
    “It gets in everywhere.”
    “Like fly eggs.”
    So they spoke as they sprinted across the big rumpled yard and entered the scrub woods. Immediately the smell of sea rot—grasses and tiny fishes, abandoned mollusk housing, shreds and tatters—fumed up. There was a path, winding, gray with bony coral outcroppings, and they followed this through mixed buttonwood and acacia past a little stream, really only a sally of ocean water diverted into the woodland. The water was orange from the buttonwood roots; tiny snapper fry darted and frisked in cloudy schools, shirking danger. The buttonwoods creaked and swayed in a jittery breeze. He knew there wasn’t really anywhere but Coon Channel to get to, but he hoped Bert didn’t know that.
    Dodging faded fabric trash, broken fish boxes and such, they came to a clearing. Off there the reticulated sea vista: the old channel, ruffled along the back by breeze. She waved flies away from her face. “We’re going which way?”
    “Swimming.”
    He was still carrying the shrimp but now he swung it in an arc and sent it sailing into the channel. She made a muffled cry, half laughter, half scooped out of other sorrows. The shrimp hit the water, followed by gulls that began to nip at the plastic bag. “Salt to salt,” she said.
    “You all right?”
    “Don’t I look it?”
    “Only partly.”
    She scowled in a familiar way that didn’t really reassure him.
    They