Tuna Tango by Steven Becker

leave, giving Dick a hard look before he acknowledged him. 
     
    ***
     
    Dick waited for a few minutes, finishing the joint and throwing it overboard before he got up and went back to the fish house. What was the point of sitting there waiting for Will, when the least he could do was to sell the fish and pay off his and Kyle’s debt? The padlock on the plywood door was locked and he had a quick, anxious moment before he remembered the holes in the floor. He went back to the platform and pushed himself under the building, stopping at the first hole he came to. As he had earlier, he struggled through the opening, missing on his first attempt. Once inside the building, he went for the fillets, now covered with flies, and started tossing them down onto the platform. He followed the last one through the hole and pushed the platform toward the seawall. 
    With an eye on the road in case George or Will came back, he loaded the fillets into the backseat, rubbed his slimy hands on his cargo shorts, and sat in the driver’s seat. It had been a while since he had driven, having lost his license to traffic violations and court no-shows a year or so ago, but the keys were still in the ignition and he started the engine. Flies buzzed around his head as he opened the windows and pulled out of the lot. Once on the road, he drove as fast as he thought he could get away with, the flies streaming out the windows as he accelerated. 
    The only choice to sell the fish now was Dirk, the fish dip guy. Dick figured he had at least a hundred pounds of fillets, and that would get him at least a couple hundred dollars—just enough to pay off Rucker. He knew the fillets were worth more, but he had no idea where to get their true value. He drove toward the Gandy Bridge, glancing down at the lights from the boats fishing below, and wishing he were there instead of in his current mess. 
    At the end of the bridge, he followed Gandy Boulevard for several blocks before turning right into an older residential area. He passed rows of homes, mostly built in the 40s and 50s, all with the same ranch house layout and shallow pitch roof. They’d been built to house the residents of MacDill Air Force Base, nearby, so they all looked exactly the same. Finally, he stopped at a rundown house with an unkempt front yard and a boat sitting on a trailer with a flat tire in the driveway. Even in the dark he could tell the lawn was dead.
    A light came on as soon as he pulled in the driveway, and a face peered out from behind the flimsy curtains. Dick breathed a sigh of relief; Dirk must have recognized the car, because he went right to the door. They talked neighborhood gossip for a few minutes before Dick showed him the fillets, and then quickly made a deal. 
    A few flies still swarmed the slimy backseat as Dick pulled out of the driveway a few minutes later, but at least he had some cash. Enough to pay their debt and maybe score a little more weed to see him through. Dirk had seen the fish for what it was and paid him a premium. 
    He drove slow, now, careful to stay just below the speed limit as the houses started to get nicer. The neighborhood changed from all older homes to a few blocks of old mixed with newer homes dwarfing the original houses. Builders had moved in and started buying the smaller homes, tearing them down and building as large a house as possible. 
    Soon all the houses were new. He pulled into a driveway, skirting the large circle in front of the house, and proceeded to a gate on the side, where an intercom buzzed. The gate opened in front of him. The smaller driveway led to a courtyard behind the home, where he parked and waited, knowing that Rucker had seen him on the security cameras. 
    “Dicky.”
    He heard the voice before he saw the man. The relationship tortured him—they had run in the same group in high school, but Rucker had cleaned up his act and gone to college, while Dick was, well, where he was. Rucker had become a banker, but