by Carl Hiaasen
"Nooooo!" he bellowed, raising both arms. "My cameras!"
The Lincoln kept going. With a merry honk it exited the airport through a rolling chain-link gate.
"Not the Nikons," the photographer said desolately. "Not my goddamn Nikons."
The flight attendant had been watching from the top of the steps. Bang Abbott looked up and raised his arms. "The crazy cunt--she took everything!"
"That's terrible."
"Please, sweetie, I need a phone."
"Sorry," said the flight attendant, "we're off to Nassau." It was the same smile she'd worn when presenting the warm beer nuts. "Enjoy your stay in Florida."
"Drop dead," Bang Abbott said. He turned and walked heavily toward the terminal building.
Janet Bunterman took a red-eye and landed at Miami International the next morning. She waited nearly an hour for her luggage and then took a hired car to the restaurant at the Raleigh, where Maury Lykes sat amid a pile of tabloids in a banquette.
"Have you heard from our wandering nymph?" he asked.
"Not yet, but don't worry."
"Don't worry? That's a good one, Janet." Maury Lykes ran a warty tongue across his front teeth. "She's supposed to start rehearsing for the tour--you remember the tour, don't you?"
Janet Bunterman said, "What else can I do? She left her cell phone at Rainbow Bend--I've got no way of reaching her."
Maury Lykes said he had people check Cherry's usual haunts on South Beach--the Stefano, the Shore Club, the Setai--and she hadn't been seen.
The waiter brought Janet Bunterman a Bloody Mary. "I bet she's with that kid from the Tarantino picture," she said.
"You mean Vicodin Boy. That was my concern, as well." Maury Lykes whispered something to the waiter and then turned back to Cherry's mother. "I'm going to introduce you to somebody, Janet, and I don't want you to be alarmed. At least, try not to show you're alarmed, will you promise?"
Before Janet Bunterman could absorb the warning, a very tall man approached the table and sat down. He wore an execrable salmon-red hairpiece from which prunish ears extruded. His face appeared to have been massaged with an industrial cheese grater and then retouched with a glue gun. The thin, etiolated lips looked like crinkled parchment, and his eyes stared pink-rimmed and dull. Janet Bunterman nervously lowered her gaze and found herself contemplating the man's clublike left arm, which was cloaked from the elbow down in a zippered nylon bag that bore the logo COBRA GOLF.
Maury Lykes said, "Janet, this is the fellow I told you about--Cherry's new bodyguard."
"Dear God."
"His name is Chemo."
"Could you excuse me for a moment?" Janet Bunterman rose.
"Sit down," Maury Lykes said firmly.
The man named Chemo blinked like a drowsy iguana.
After Cherry's mother resettled herself, she cleared her throat and asked, "Do you have a resume, Mr. Chemo?"
He looked at Maury Lykes. "Is she for real? Jesus H. Christ."
"Janet, desperate times, et cetera," the promoter said. "Look on the bright side--for once Cherry won't be banging the help." He shrugged at Chemo and added, "No offense, brother."
Chemo smiled, a fresh horror. His stained teeth were tiny and nubbed; it looked like stale rice kernels had been implanted in his gums.
Janet Bunterman paled. "Maury, can I please speak to you alone?"
"Nope."
"Then can I have another drink?"
"Make it a Cuban coffee for me," said Chemo. He reached into his water glass and plucked out the lemon rind and gnawed it to mush.
"How tall are you?" Cherry's mother inquired. She was at a loss for conversation.
"Six-nine. And don't fuckin' ask if I ever played basketball."
"Okay."
"It's like askin' a midget how come he's not in the circus."
"Chill," Maury Lykes interjected. "She's just curious about your background."
"You didn't tell her?" Chemo chuckled to himself.
Janet Bunterman anxiously looked around for the server.
"Chemo was a very successful mortgage broker," Maury Lykes said.
It was improbable but true. After sixteen years and nine months at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Chemo had walked out of maximum security and straight into a job selling home loans in Orlando. Because it was the peak of the real-estate boom and flimsy credit was abundant, the state of Florida bigheartedly overlooked all regulatory restrictions and welcomed with open arms absolutely anyone--including thousands of convicted felons--to the mortgage-peddling racket. Swelling the motley ranks were unreformed embezzlers, bank robbers, dope smugglers, burglars, pimps, counterfeiters, carjackers, and even a few killers such as Blondell Wayne Tatum, aka Chemo.
Among his murder victims had been the doddering dermatologist who'd fried his face during a botched electrolysis procedure, and the crooked plastic surgeon who'd falsely promised to repair the damage. A plea deal reduced the crimes from first-degree to second-degree, so Chemo wound up at Raiford with relatively mild concurrent sentences. Like many inmates, he changed in prison, although in his case the Bible played no role in his conversion. It was instead a more slender tome called A Snake's Guide to Milking the Mortgage Trade, which preached a strictly nonviolent philosophy of fraud and subterfuge.
Once on the outside, Chemo learned quickly despite his rough edges. He became adept at embellishing the qualifications of shaky loan applicants, such as the fry cook at his neighborhood Sizzler for whom Chemo secured a note for $525,000, a fifteen-year subprime with zero down. Chemo was pleased that he could make the American dream come true--albeit temporarily--for a nineteen-year-old kid earning minimum wage, fresh off the freighter from Honduras. Chemo was even more gratified by his under-the-table skim from the deal, which he spent on a secondhand Denali with custom rims.
One doomed loan begat another, but brokers such as Chemo were rewarded for quantity, not quality. That was the beauty of the process. Eventually a local newspaper published an unflattering front-page article about the firm where Chemo was employed, and about his boss, who'd once done a nickel at Avon Park for sticking up a Wells Fargo truck. On the day the story appeared, Chemo drove to work and found the building shuttered and a TV crew snooping around, so he took off for his old stomping ground, Miami Beach.
Janet Bunterman said, "May I ask what happened to your mortgage business?"
Chemo looked perturbed. "The bubble busted--don't you watch the news? The goddamn bottom fell out."
Again, Maury Lykes cut in: "Before he went into finance, his specialty was security. That's why I offered him the job, Janet. No harm will come to Cherry as long as Chemo's around."
Janet Bunterman snuck another glance at the bodyguard's face. The damage obviously wasn't genetic; something awful had happened to the man. "So I guess it's a done deal, then," she said tightly as her second Bloody Mary arrived.
Maury Lykes reminded Cherry Pye's mother of his substantial stake in the new album and the upcoming concert tour. "I can't take any chances, Janet."
"But how are we going to find her?"
"Oh please. She doesn't exactly fly under the radar," the promoter said.
With his unsheathed hand, Chemo dropped a cube of sugar into his coffee. He said, "Don't worry, I'll hunt her skinny ass down."
Then what? wondered Janet Bunterman.
Chemo noticed she was eyeing his hidden arm. "Should I show her?" he asked Maury Lykes, and flashed his Halloween smile.
The promoter nodded. "Let's get it over with."
"Show me what?" said Cherry's mother.
Maury Lykes explained that, many years earlier, Chemo had been seriously injured while swimming in Biscayne Bay. "A barracuda nearly killed him," he said.
"That's horrible," Janet Bunterman said with a cringe.
"A big fucker, too," Chemo added.
"And it bit off your face?"
Maury Lykes shot her a blazing look. "No, Janet, his hand. It bit off his hand."
Without elaborating, Chemo unzipped and removed the Cobra Golf bag cover.
Cherry Pye's mother was dumbstruck. "Is that what I think?"
"With a power pack," said Maury Lykes admiringly.
Chemo lifted it to give Janet Bunterman a closer view.
"And it's for real?" she asked in a hushed voice.
"Best part is, you don't need a carry permit like you do for a pistol." He turned it on and shredded the floral centerpiece, three Singapore orchids in a vase. The noise brought two waiters running, but Maury Lykes motioned them away.
"A weed whacker," Janet Bunterman murmured incredulously.
"You're a quick one." The bodyguard re-bagged his unusual prosthesis. "She's a quick one, Mr. Lykes."
The promoter sat forward and rubbed his palms. "Let's order some brunch, okay?"
"I'm really not hungry," said Cherry's mother.
Chemo flipped open a menu. "Anything but fish," he said.
7
The state trooper introduced himself as Corporal Valdez. He wrote down the names of the hijacked bus passengers and listened to their story. It wasn't the first time he'd been called all the way to North Key Largo for such an incident, though he didn't mention that to the victims. The one named Sebago was in severe pain because a spiny sea urchin had been snugly trussed to his scrotal region. Valdez sensed that the other passengers weren't especially sympathetic to Mr. Sebago's situation. In fact, a man named Shea angrily demanded that Sebago be arrested on the spot for fraud and embezzlement, crimes beyond the authority (or interest) of a working road-patrol officer.
While waiting for the ambulance, Valdez went up in the bus to interview the driver, who was watching one of the morning news shows on the satellite TV. The driver gave a description of the hijacker that matched the one given by the passengers: a towering, naked, grease-painted cyclops wielding a sawed-off shotgun. Valdez wasn't surprised. Three months earlier the same suspect had ambushed two lobster poachers and strung them upside down from their ankles to the Carysfort lighthouse. The previous summer, the man had detained for several hours--and convicted in a mock trial--the daughter of a state senator and her frat-boy companion, who'd been drunkenly buzzing a pelican rookery on a high-powered Sea-Doo.
"He was actually an okay guy," the bus driver said of the hijacker, "for a whack job."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, he didn't rob or shoot nobody. He just cussed at 'em."
"How much did he give you?" Valdez asked.
The bus driver reddened. "Hundred bucks. How'd you know? 'Take your old lady out for stone crabs,' he told me. So what's the big deal?"
"It's not." As far as the trooper was aware, there was no law against victims accepting cash from an armed abductor. "What about the woman?" he asked. "Was she a hostage or an accomplice?"
The bus driver thought about it for a moment. "She didn't act scared of the guy, but she was banged up some."
"What was her name?"
"I didn't catch it."
"Where's she at now?" Valdez asked.
"He had me drop her up at Alabama Jack's. Some guy on a motorcycle was waiting."
"Did you get a look at the man?"
The bus driver said the cyclist had been wearing a helmet that covered his face. Valdez closed his notebook. He had a pretty good idea who the motorcycle man was. He'd trained under him when he first joined the Highway Patrol.
"Can I keep the hundred bucks or not?" the driver asked.
"Sounds like you earned it," the trooper said.
When he stepped off the bus, he felt a pleasant breeze and saw the sun rising over the ocean. An unmarked sheriff's car rolled up and a rookie detective named Reilly got out. Valdez had met him before, and he liked him all right. He remembered Reilly telling a story about catching a thirty-pound wahoo while vacationing in Islamorada, and how he went straight home to St. Louis, packed his bags and moved to the Keys. That was how much the guy loved fishing.
Now Reilly greeted Valdez and said, "You think it's him again?"
Meaning the wild man who'd strung up the poachers.
"He tied our victim to a poisonwood tree," Valdez said. "Then he put him in a diaper."
"So the answer's yes."
"Inside the diaper was a sea urchin."
The detective winced.
"I bet this never happens in Missouri," said Valdez.
"Where is he?"
The trooper led Reilly to Jackie Sebago, who was lying on a stretcher and no longer wailing at the top of his lungs. A paramedic had unknotted the improvised snuggy--a square of shiny checkered fabric--and was grimly inspecting the victim's multiple punctures and poisonwood rash. Reilly assumed that heavy pain medicine had been administered.
"Anybody else hurt?" he asked.
The paramedic shook his head. "Just this one here."
"Can I talk to him?"
"Now's probably not a great time."
"Hey, you guys catch that fuckin' psycho?" Jackie Sebago raised his head woozily off the stretcher. "Look what he did to my nuts! You find him, okay? Lock that crazy bastard up!"
"You bet," said Reilly. "We'll get him."
The trooper, who'd been around longer than Reilly, knew better.
They could use helicopters and infrared spotlights and heat sensors and bloodhounds, but the man who had hijacked the charter bus would not be caught. If half the stories were true, he was already deep in the mangroves, untouchable, sleeping among the crocodiles.
Ann DeLusia was scared of motorcycles. Clinging to the driver, she kept her eyes squeezed shut and one cheek pressed against his broad back. When they got to the hospital in Homestead, he parked outside the emergency room and helped her climb off the bike.
"Wait," she said.
The man named Jim hadn't spoken a word during the ride.
"I need to know something," she said.
When he removed the helmet, she saw that he was an African-American. He had gray hair and stern features. "What is it?" he asked.
"That man back there--"
"An old friend of mine."
Ann said, "But he's nuts, right?"
"No, ma'am." From his jacket the motorcycle driver took out a matchbook imprinted with a skull and crossbones and the words LAST CHANCE SALOON. "There's a phone number on the inside," the motorcycle man said.
"Are you for real? I never want to see that maniac again. Ever!"
"That's the sensible response."
Ann put the matchbook in her handbag. "What's wrong with him, anyway?"
"He's got a bad temper and a long memory, but he's completely sane."
"Oh my God! You didn't hear what he said to those guys from the bus--"
The Harley driver touched a gloved finger to her lips. "I didn't say he was harmless, did I? My advice: Don't call that phone number unless you're absolutely out of options."
Ann said, "Mister, what kind of life do you think I lead?"
"Let's go."
He took her into the emergency room, where he told a nurse that he'd found her wandering along the Card Sound Road, past the toll bridge. The nurse asked Ann what had happened, and Ann said she remembered renting a Mustang and driving south down the turnpike but everything after that was a blur. The nurse put her in a wheelchair and rolled her to the X-ray department and then to a private examining room, where she asked Ann who had cleaned and dressed her abrasions.
Ann said she didn't recall. "Maybe it was the bus driver," she said.
"What bus? You said you rented a car."
"Yeah, but I remember riding on a bus, too. It's all kind of weird and foggy." Ann was covering the bases, in case they somehow connected her to the hijacking.
The nurse said, "Come lie down, sweetie. You might have a concussion."
Later a young Cuban doctor came in with her X-rays, which he fastened to a flat lamp. He said there were no broken bones or skull fractures. While Ann lay on a padded table, he checked out her bruises and pressed his fingers on different places on her abdomen.
He asked if she was suffering from headaches or nausea.
"No, I'm just tired."
"We can do a CAT scan, or wait and see how you feel tomorrow."
Ann said, "I'll be okay."
The doctor wrote a prescription for Tylenol with codeine and said she was free to go.
"Is there someone who can come get you?" he asked.
"First I've gotta charge my cell phone."
"You can use mine," he offered. "My name's Carlos, by the way."
"Hello, Dr. Carlos."
"Do they call you Ann or Annie?"
"'The future Mrs. Clooney' is what they call me."
"Oh."
Sometimes it was Mrs. Clooney and sometimes it was Mrs. DiCaprio and sometimes it was Mrs. Depp. Most guys got the message but didn't pick up on the joke.
Ann wiggled the bare ring finger on her left hand. "I left my rock in a vault at Harry Winston. Four-point-two carats."
"Congratulations," the doctor said tepidly, and handed her his phone.
The motorcycle driver was gone when Ann returned to the waiting room, where she tossed the Tylenol prescription in a wastebasket. A police officer stopped by and took some information about the rental car. She pressed Ann for details about the accident, which Ann said she still couldn't remember. The cop mentioned nothing about a charter bus being hijacked, and Ann said nothing about the man called Skink. She wasn't sure why she was shielding such a dangerous lunatic, but she figured she could always change her mind and drop the amnesia act--wake up one morning with total recall, like they did on the soap operas.
Ninety minutes after the officer departed, a black SUV rolled up outside the ER. Ann DeLusia got in the backseat next to Janet Bunterman, who was scrolling through her e-mails and sipping a sludge-colored smoothie. She acknowledged Ann with a grave nod and said, "Cherry's missing and Maury's hired this deformed bodyguard with a totally vile attitude to go find her. It's a nightmare, Annie. The man's got a damn weed whacker for a hand!"
"I was in a major car crash but I'm feeling better now. Thanks for asking."
"She jumped the wall at Rainbow Bend," Janet Bunterman went on, "and chartered a jet back to Miami. Now she's disappeared. Yes, again."
Ann said, "Did I mention I was held hostage by a hermit with a gun? He made me eat a dead crocodile."