Stranahan stood up and said, “You get some rest, buddy.”
“I’m glad you took care of that prick who was using my name.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do.” Gavigan smiled. “Anyway, I’m glad you took care of him. He had no business lying like that, using my name.”
Stranahan pulled the blanket up to his friend’s neck.
“Good night, Timmy.”
“Be careful, Mick,” the old cop said. “Hey, and when I croak, you save the newspaper clipping, okay? Glue it on the last page of my scrapbook.”
“It’s a promise.”
“Unless it don’t make the papers.”
“It’ll makethedamn papers,” Stranahan said. “Buriedback in the truss ads, where you belong.”
Timmy Gavigan laughed so hard, he had to ring the nurse for oxygen.
3
Four days after the Mafia man came to murder him, Mick Stranahan got up early and took the skiff to the marina. There he jump-started his old Chrysler Imperial and drove down to Gables-by-the-sea, a ritzy but misnomered neighborhood where his sister Kate lived with her degenerate lawyer husband and three teenaged daughters from two previous marriages (his, not hers). The subdivision was nowhere near the ocean but fronted a series of man-made canals that emptied into Biscayne Bay. No one complained about this marketing deception, as it was understood by buyers and sellers alike that Gables-by-the-sea sounded much more toney than Gables-on-the-Canal. The price of the real estate duly reflected this exaggeration.
Stranahan’s sister lived in a big split-level house with five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a putting green in the yard. Her lawyer husband even bought a thirty-foot sailboat to go with the dock out back, although he couldn’t tell his fore from his aft. The sight of the sparkling white mast poking over the top of the big house made Stranahan shake his head as he pulled into the driveway-Kate’s husband was positively born for South Florida.