Free Welcome to Paradise by Laurence Shames Page A

cracked pallets. Still, when he
stepped across the pitted threshold and pulled the string that
worked the lights, Nicky Scotto felt a pang. He'd been happy here.
It wasn't just the money and the power. He'd felt like he was where
he ought to be. And if happiness and belonging didn't give someone
a claim, what did?
    He went to his old desk. On it, in corny
frames, stood pictures of Big Al Marracotta's fat wife and ugly,
spoiled kids. He flipped them facedown against the metal, buried
them under a phone book. He sat in what used to be his chair, and
drummed his fingers on the arm, and told himself not to get too
comfortable.
    He was there only as a fill-in, a pinch
hitter; his pal Donnie kept reminding him of that, as gently as he
could. Tony Eggs hadn't changed his mind about who should run the
market. Carlo Ganucci had been very clear: when Al Marracotta got
back from vacation, he would take over once again.
    Well, that was life, thought Nicky Scotto.
You're up, you're down; you're in, you're out. But he didn't have
to like it, and he didn't have to pretend it felt right. Sitting
there as Big Al's sub, guest host on the show he used to run—it
felt wrong as hell, wrong as a bad clam beginning to break down and
spread its poison through his churning gut.
    *
    Al Tuschman didn't wake up happy.
    His tongue was dry and swollen; there was a
deep, slow throb where his spine plugged into his brain. He ached
between the legs, and couldn't tell how much of the ache had to do
with thwarted sex, and how much with the depredations of the
lobster. In a feeble attempt to cheer himself, he remembered that
most people paid two hundred bucks a night to be here.
    He got up from the sweaty sheets, threw water
on his face. He collected Fifi, whose nose bore a deep scratch from
a flailing claw, and they headed out for breakfast.
    As they rounded the blue pool, Al noticed a
tangled and inert lump of something at the bottom. Turned out to be
a pair of suffocated lobsters, strangled by chlorine. Al felt a
moment's thin revenge, followed quickly by remorse. Poor guys. Try
to see it their way. Could they help it they were lobsters? They'd
survived bizarre adventures, endured the weight and heat of human
crotches, then made a bold break for freedom through terrain as dry
and foreign as the moon, only to end up in the dread gravity of the
sucking drain.
    Then he recalled the thick and springy hair
of the woman he almost had, and thought, The hell with 'em, let 'em
smother.
    He passed the office, and the desk clerk
called to him in a tone of mock politeness. By now it was war
between the two of them. The passive, insolent employee smirking
behind a charade of cheerful service. The disgruntled guest whose
grumbling would have to ripen into bodily assault if he ever hoped
to express his full dissatisfaction.
    "Important call for you this morning," said
the clerk. He handed Al a slip of paper, serenely confident that it
contained bad news.
    Al read it and his headache instantly got
worse. Sun Motors in Miami. He asked the clerk for the phone.
    The clerk moved grudgingly away to
eavesdrop.
    He heard Al say, "What?... Stolen?...
Hijacked?!... What kind of craziness is hijacked? . . . Now, wait a
second. I deal with the public, too. So let's make sure we have
this clear . . . we're not saying we'll work it out. We're
saying you'll work it out. Right?"
    Al slammed the phone down, pushed it across
the desk in the direction of the clerk hard enough so that its
rubber feet squeaked against the varnish. "What the hell kind of
town is this?" he said.
    The clerk allowed himself a hint of a smile.
"Most people find it a very pleasant and relaxing town."
    Al ran a hand through his hair. The motion
pulled a throb behind it, as if something were stuck and crawling
between his scalp and skull. "And another thing," he said. "Someone
put lobsters in my room last night."
    The clerk fingered the row of studs above his
eyebrow. "You mean orchids."
    "Whaddya mean, I mean