Free American Tropic by Thomas Sanchez

landings in a flutter of wings on distant mangrove islands dotted across the horizon.
    A large billboard looms up on the side of the highway declaring COMING SOON! NEPTUNE BAY RESORT! The billboard’s visual depicts a vast resort of luxury condos, hotels, golf courses, and a yacht marina. Towering above the resort depiction is a giant image of the bearded sea god Neptune clutching a trident spear. Luz turns her car abruptly off the highway onto a dirt road leading into the center of an abandoned construction site stripped of all vegetation and empty of any people. She parks the car and gets out. Chicken follows her as she walks across a scraped-earth landscape dominated by rows of hulking, dust-covered bulldozers, earth-graders, dump trucks, andcement mixers. She continues, zigzagging between incomplete cement building foundations with rusted iron rebar struts sticking up from them. She arrives at a concrete pier jutting out into a brackish backwater inlet coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. She walks to the far end of the pier, where a canary-yellow forty-foot powerboat is tied, its high jet-exhaust chrome spoilers gleaming in the harsh sunlight.
    In front of the powerboat, Big Conch sits in an aluminum slingback chair, wearing only a tight red Speedo swimsuit. His sinewy suntan-oiled body is shaved of all hair except for the dyed slick blond hair of his head. On his chest glint heavy antique Spanish medallions that dangle from a gold chain around his neck. He shucks oysters with a broad-bladed knife. Scattered around his bare feet are empty shells. Chicken trots up, sniffs the shells, and starts nibbling on them. Big looks up and greets Luz with a smirk as he nods toward Chicken. “I see they finally gave you a better partner than that Riviera redneck, Moxel. At least this one’s got a pair of balls.”
    Big pulls a gnarly-shelled oyster from a wooden crate next to the aluminum chair. He deftly knifes open the shell and scrapes free its meat. He holds out the glob balanced on the knife’s blade. “You want an aphrodisiac from the sea? Neptune’s original Viagra. It’ll give you a hard-on for that hot blond-bombshell girlfriend of yours. Oh yeah, you can’t get a hard-on. What is it you get, anyway, if you can’t get a stiff dick? Come on, have an oyster. It might even make me attractive to you.”
    “I just lost my appetite.”
    “No appetite from stuffing fritters all day. You won’t die from a bullet to your heart but a grease hole throughyour gut.” Big holds the knife up to his mouth. He lets the oyster balanced on the blade slide off between his lips.
    Luz looks over at the name emblazoned on the powerboat’s sleek hull:
Big Conch
.
    She looks back at Big. “Since you know so much about the sea, did you know that if a conch’s johnson is bitten off by a hungry eel, the conch grows himself a new johnson?”
    “Is that why you eat conch fritters all day, hoping to grow yourself a wiener?” Big glances over at Chicken, crunching a mouthful of oyster shells. “Dumb bastard’s gonna puke.” He turns back to Luz. “You didn’t drive all the way out here to give me a lesson on the sex life of the conch. What the hell do you want?”
    “Dandy Randy and Bill Warren were both murdered.”
    “So were the Kennedy brothers. Ancient news. Get to it. You’re here because you figure I killed my two partners.”
    “No. I’m here because I believe whoever did kill your partners is now after you. You should back off developing this resort and lay low.”
    “Lay low? Never. I don’t give a shit if half the people accuse Neptune Bay of destroying the habitats of everything from white herons to blind manatees to one-armed nuns. The other half of the people love me for this hundred-million-dollar resort I’m developing. It means jobs to build it, jobs to sell it, jobs to service it. We’re coming off the worst economic times in the history of the Keys since the Great Depression, and I’m the man leading the way