Flamingo Lane

  | ALSO BY TIM APPLEGATE |

  Fever Tree

  Amberjack Publishing

  1472 E. Iron Eagle Drive

  Eagle, ID 83616

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Tim Applegate

  Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Applegate, Tim, 1952- author.

  Title: Flamingo Lane / by Tim Applegate.

  Description: New York : Amberjack Publishing, 2018. | Series: The Yucatan quartet ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017363 (print) | LCCN 2018017563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948705080 (eBook) | ISBN 9781948705073 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Single women—Fiction. | Kidnapping victims—Fiction. | Runaways—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3601.P66425 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.P66425 F53 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017363

  For Kerstin and Molly

  See the cross-eyed pirates sitting

  Perched in the sun

  Shooting tin cans

  With a sawed-off shotgun.

  Bob Dylan, “Farewell Angelina”

  Spring, 1982

  Chance

  At sunrise Chance wakes from a night of patchy sleep in a room he doesn’t recognize, a room he can’t recall. Bare walls, a small window, a pair of cane chairs. Then he remembers the wobbly plane, a two-seater, falling through the clouds before landing on the dusty airstrip, and it all comes rushing back. Yesterday’s meeting with Pablo Mestival at the safe house on Isla Mujeres. The return ferry to Cancun over a channel of increasingly bumpy water followed by a drive into the interior with one of Mestival’s silent thugs. A clearing in the jungle, streak of grey tarmac, and a single shining plane. Just before they slammed into the kapok trees at the end of the runway, the Cessna lifted up over dense jungle canopy, shuddering in the gusts.

  Flexing his stiff back—the mattress he’d slept on was too soft, too mealy—he climbs out of bed and peers out the window, shaking off the cobwebs of sleep. On assignments like this the first few days were always the hardest, and he reminds himself to remain patient, to remain steadfast until the mental fog vanishes and his sense of purpose returns, until he rediscovers the Zen balance, the Zen serenity his dad, that old poseur, instilled in him at the commune in Oregon when he was a boy.

  After splashing his face with a trickle of tepid water and yanking a stiff brush through his hair, he strides down a dark hallway into a silent, empty kitchen, where he reaches over the sink, fingers open the blinds, and sees the woman in the backyard hanging clothes on a line. In the distance a red mesa, the sandstone glowing like embers in the morning sun, shadows the desert floor, but the sharp pang in his heart isn’t a response to the beauty of that austere landscape, it’s a gut reaction to a sudden mental image of his mother, a clothespin clenched in her teeth, lifting one of his shirts to a line.

  In retrospect, the commune had been a joke, a tangled path scaling the heights of enlightenment his parents and their friends had so desperately yearned, in vain, to attain. In the end, all that middle-class baggage, all those bourgeois hang-ups they spent years denouncing proved impossible to shed, their unruly cluster of teepees and cabins along a stretch of the Powder River in eastern Oregon nothing more than a pastoral version of the corrupt suburbs in that book of John Cheever’s short stories Dieter swapped him in the village in the Yucatan one evening for a chunk of Lebanese hash. Sadly, all those indiscriminate affairs, all those manic episodes of self-medication, all those unpredictable sex and power, sex as power undercurrents roiling just beneath the placid surface of Cheever’s well-heeled Connecticut neighborhoods was his father’s commune all over again.

  Carrying her empty laundry basket, the woman slips into the kitchen, regarding Chance with the same indecipherable expression she had worn the night before. A slightly built, taciturn Hispanic in her early forties, she projects the unflinching stoicism the Vietnam vets down in the village in Mexico projected too. No one can touch her. No one can harm her. She’s surrounded by a wall.

  In the village in the Yucatan those walls—those barricades—came crashing down only when enough tequila had been consumed, enough hashish smoked, enough mescaline chased through the blood with a swallow of cold cerveza. Then the bonfire would be lit, the bottle passed, a guitar softly strummed. For a time, bonds that felt as unbreakable as iron were forged in the fire of that chemical high, the hippies and poets, veterans and draft dodgers, runaways and strays temporary replacements for the families they had all left behind. True companions. Compañeros. Someone would recognize the song the guitarist was playing—Neil Young’s “Helpless” or Joni Mitchell’s “Clouds”—and sing the chorus. Then the others would join in. And yet all the while it was the Vietnam vets, Bobby Parrish and his brothers-in-arms, who understood that these moments of happiness, like all moments of happiness, were transitory. Even on a tropical beach. Especially on a tropical beach.

  The woman indicates the coffeepot on the counter and Chance nods, determined to match her reticence with his own. Every day was a war of wills. But he was used to that.

  He’s waiting for the man from town, the one who picked him up at the airstrip the previous evening, to deliver the car. Which might take a day. Or a week. At this point his schedule, his itinerary, is in the hands of someone else, and that’s why he’s so frustrated. The plan’s in place and he’s ready to get on with it. Of course he could always ask the woman when the driver’s coming back, but even if she knows, which isn’t likely, she probably won’t tell him.

  Without a word she places a chunk of stale coffee cake on a chipped white plate on the table next to his cup. Then, cradling a second basket of laundry, she steps back outside. Chewing the rubbery cake, Chance tracks her as she crosses the yard and begins to pin more garments to the line, including a pair of flimsy white panties that immediately generates, despite his resolve to stay focused, to keep his eyes on the prize, a pulse of heat. But he won’t think about that now. As part of the purification, he won’t think about that now. He takes a gulp of lukewarm coffee to wash down the tasteless cake and slides the plate away, no longer hungry. Meanwhile, out the window, in the shadow of the mesa, the woman turns her back to him and bends lithely down to pick up the empty basket, and Chance wonders if she knows that he’s staring at her, if that’s why she bent over that way.

  At the commune in Oregon, the wash line had been strung between two cottonwoods perched on a flat rectangle of grass above the banks of the Powder River. Once a week his mother and her friends hung their clothes there, a colorful tapestry of tie-dyed T-shirts, frilly summer dresses, patched-at-the-knee jeans. Pinning the clothes to the line, the women would laugh, whisper, and glance back toward the fire pit to make sure that none of the men who had gathered around the embers to ward off the morning chill were eavesdropping. Only Chance, quiet and watchful and too young to pose a threat, was allowed to hear what they had to say, was allowed to share their feminine secrets.

  In Cheever’s short stories errant husbands stole illicit kisses behind clo
sed doors, but Chance’s father was more careless than that. One morning as the boy trotted back from a solitary run along the river he spied his dad and a woman who called herself Peony standing in the shadows of the communal dining hall, talking. That’s all they appeared to be doing, chatting, but something about their gestures—Chance’s father leaning down toward the woman in confidence, Peony unconsciously touching his sleeve—caused the boy to suspect that there was more going on than idle conversation.

  In the following days he covertly stalked his father, his first taste of surveillance, as he went about his duties as one of the commune’s leaders—checking the food stocks, supervising the construction of a new sauna, listening to complaints—and what the boy eventually discovered crushed him. Instead of stealing kisses behind a bedroom door, Chance’s dad stole his, and more, anywhere and everywhere he could: inside the smokehouse, on the steep trail up the spine of the mountain, in one of the teepees recently abandoned by a family disillusioned not with the ideals of the tribe but by its behavior, which, like his father’s, betrayed those ideals.

  And that wasn’t all. If Chance thought (or more accurately, hoped) that Peony was the sole object of his father’s affections, he soon discovered the ugly truth. Like one of Cheever’s fallen heroes, his father didn’t discriminate in the matter of partners. As far as the boy could determine, practically every woman in the commune, married or not, had at one time or another been the target of his advances. And more than a few had succumbed.

  The boy brooded. His mother represented, as always, the center of his universe, the sun he depended on for sustenance and warmth. And even though the father had been there too, from the beginning, it wasn’t the same. If the mother was the sun the boy-planet revolved around, the father was the moon, cold and distant, spectral. It wasn’t that he ignored the boy, far from it. On various occasions he showed him how to fly-fish for trout, chop firewood without slicing off a toe, or prime a faulty pump, skills that would serve him well later on. But he did so without affection or love, less a doting father than a master craftsman helping a wide-eyed apprentice learn a useful trade. And now he had taught his son something else, something obscene. Marital vows meant nothing, trust was an illusion, fidelity a lie. Time and again the boy covertly witnessed his father’s seductions, and soon his youthful brooding gave way to rage.

  In the bedroom of the safe house, he hears a car pull into the drive and reminds himself once again that patience is the key. Glancing out the window, he inhales a few sharp breaths—pranayama—while the man who escorted him to the safe house the night before slides out of a dark blue Monte Carlo and marches toward the front door, jingling a set of keys.

  Even though the sun is already slipping behind the western hills, their contours in the falling light as soft as loaves of bread, Chance considers leaving that evening instead of the following day. He could drive all night, make Santa Fe by sunup, then crash for a while at a rest stop before the heat sets in. But then again, why rush it? As far as he knows, his target isn’t going anywhere, so why the hurry? What’s one more day? Instead of a rash, impulsive gesture, it would be better, he finally decides, to get a fresh start in the morning after a good night’s sleep.

  To Chance’s surprise the woman sits directly across the table that night, watching him demolish her chorizo tacos, avocado salad, bowl of pinto beans flecked with slivers of ham. Halfway through the meal she stands up and goes over to the fridge and brings back a second bottle of cerveza, and even though he knows that she’s only doing what Pablo Mestival pays her to do, feeding and housing one of his contractors, she seems slightly less guarded now, fractionally more relaxed. He spoons up the last of the pinto beans then tilts the second bottle and finishes that off too. But when the woman starts to rise again, presumably to bring him another cerveza, he reaches out, not quite touching her, and shakes his head.

  No more, por favor. Gracias. Then he catches the woman’s eye and for once, she doesn’t turn away.

  Habla Inglés?

  She appears reluctant to answer but eventually relents, spreading a thumb and a finger an inch apart.

  A little?

  Sí, she answers, a leetle.

  He asks her if she’s married and she replies no more.

  No more?

  My husband, she says without emotion, ees dead.

  Chance glances out the window, imagining years here, in this barren desert, all alone. I’m sorry, he says.

  Her response, her pinched smile, is impossible to decipher. Bitterness? Sarcasm? Fear? She swivels around on her chair and points out the window. There, she murmurs. Right there.

  Chance points too.

  He died out there? In the yard?

  Not died, keeled. The woman lifts a hand, pretending to clutch a pistol, pretending to squeeze off a shot. Right by, how you say? With her small fingers she mimics pinning clothes.

  The clothesline?

  Sí, he was killed out there. By the clothesline.

  Instead of imagining the scene—the husband bleeding out beneath her blouses—Chance once again sees the woman bend over the laundry basket to attract him. Or not. She knew he had been watching her when she leaned over. Or he hadn’t, at that moment, crossed her mind. If he made a move toward her this evening, she would accept his advances. Or plunge a knife into his heart.

  At the sink, she washes and rinses his dishes, her movements quick and decisive now, almost fierce. She looks upset, perhaps ashamed to have mentioned her husband in front of a stranger. Sliding a plate into a slot in the strainer, she turns back to him, and once again her expression remains unreadable. Chance recalls the psychological term for it: flat affect, the inability to express emotion.

  You will be leaving soon?

  In the morning, he replies. He stands up and grabs the two empty beer bottles and places them on the counter. Early, he adds, though the woman, furiously wiping her hands on a dish towel, no longer seems aware that he’s even there, in her kitchen, gazing out the window at the dusty ground beneath the clothesline where her husband died.

  The next morning he wakes at sunrise again, at the first rumor of light, remembering how his father had been an early riser too, often rising before dawn. Sometimes Chance would hear the cabin door close and he would finger open the curtains next to his bed and watch his father carry his yoga mat to the bank above the Powder River, where he would stretch the kinks out of his lanky frame by assuming his favorite positions: The Bridge, The Extended Triangle, The Mountain Pose.

  The last time Chance saw him—in hospital, a few days before he died—he had tried to conjure up some kind of tangible feeling, pity or sadness or regret, but failed to do so. Why lie, especially to yourself?

  The old poseur had suffered an aneurysm and lay unconscious on the bed. Chance stared at the haggard face, which was strangely calm, perhaps accepting, at last, his inevitable demise. At some point a nurse entered the room and checked his father’s pulse and smiled sympathetically at the son, but none of it meant a thing. You live and you die, he thought. You harm some and help others but mostly you tend to yourself. It was that simple. Absurdly, on his way out the door, he had wheeled around, winked at the man in the coma, and given him a mock salute.

  Now in the safe house, in the first flush of dawn, he zips up the duffel, tosses a couple of wrinkled dollar bills on the bed, and re-checks the side pocket of his valise to make sure he hasn’t forgotten the file on Faye Lindstrom, the woman they used to call Angelina when they were all young and happy and living on borrowed time in a village in Quintana Roo.

  Faye

  No, it was unacceptable, untenable, absurd. Her mother’s false cheer. Her father’s clumsy attempts at idle conversation over a bowl of beef stew. The disastrous trip to Baesler’s Market the afternoon she ran into her former schoolmate, Cathy what’s her name, who, clueless, wanted to know what Faye had been up to all these years. No, it was impossible, intolerable, she had to get away.

  And ye
t the old neighborhood at dusk—all those familiar two-story houses on South Tenth Street—still tugs at her heart when she sits alone out on the porch swing after dinner, a cool breeze wafting through the black screens and the stars blinking on over the sycamore. On certain nights she hears the faint whistle of a freight train cutting through a distant field and her childhood comes flooding back, a swollen river cresting its narrow banks as she recalls how she used to lie in her bed or lounge on this porch swing listening to the trains and dreaming of all the exotic places she would one day visit. Places like Quintana Roo.

  But that has all changed. She spent four years in exotic places all right—in the village on the sea then in safe houses scattered across the Yucatan—and she has come home damaged, possibly beyond repair.

  The garish aisles at Baesler’s Market could have been a set on a TV show, the cases of Heineken too green, the boxes of Wheaties too boxy, the muzak pumped out over the loudspeakers too loud. If only the world would calm down. Why did everyone have to pretend to be so happy?

  Trying to keep up with her mother as she raced through the produce section, Faye suppressed the sudden aching urge for a shot of smack to calm her nerves by silently repeating the promise she had made to herself a thousand times during the nightmarish two weeks she had recently spent in detox: now that she was finally clean, she would never touch a needle again.

  As brisk and efficient as a Stepford Wife, Blanche Lindstrom marched up and down the bright aisles, tossing a box of mac and cheese or a plastic jar of apple sauce into her cart without breaking stride. To Faye’s amazement her mother didn’t even consult a list, opting instead to purchase her groceries in a burst of spontaneity that seemed to the bewildered daughter one step away from hysteria. The term was impulse shopping, but it looked a bit more desperate than that.

  Ever since the private detective her parents had hired brought her home from Mexico, her mother had shifted into overdrive, presuming, Faye supposed, that the best way to ward off the evil spirits that must surely still inhabit her daughter’s haunted soul was by drowning them in an ocean of goodwill. No string of garlic bulbs or silver dagger to the heart for Blanche Lindstrom; to defeat the forces of darkness, her mother was determined to put her brave face on, projecting fey, girlish gaiety at every opportunity, as if to convince Faye that she was out of harm’s way now even though she must have known that no one who had suffered what her daughter had suffered would fall for such a ruse.