Tampa Burn

by Randy Wayne White

  His voice growing louder, Lake said, “But he’s insane. His head was crushed in when he was a kid. He’s sick. There’s a medication out now that might change his entire behavior. Even if it doesn’t, who are you to judge?”

  I replied, “Someone has to,” then watched, immobile, as my son began to lift the Glock toward my chest. He was letting me see it now, no longer hiding his intent.

  “Nope. I’m not going to let you murder him, Doc. I can’t. Your days of interfering with our country’s politics are done. Same with the assassination bullshit. It’s not necessary.”

  My breath coming in shallow gulps, I held my hands up, palms out, wanting him to stop before I was forced to react—there was no way I could bring myself to hurt him.

  But I had to act . . . had to do something. Still backing away, I asked him again: “Laken? What are you doing with that gun?”

  I’d decided to dive toward him, to roll-block his legs from beneath him . . . when he suddenly flipped the pistol around in his hand.

  The abrupt movement caused me to jump. I stiffened, expecting to hear a round explode.

  Instead, he caught the handgun by the barrel, then held it out to me butt-first.

  “I found this on the deck up there”—he glanced toward the ship’s house—“when I first saw you knock Prax unconscious. I took the bullets out because I don’t want you to use it. I don’t want you to do that . . . stuff anymore. He’s sick, Dad. People get sick and do crazy, terrible things. So let him out of the barrel, O.K.?”

  Slowly, I reached and took the Glock from his hand, thinking that if it didn’t belong to someone else, I’d have thrown it into the sea. Lake was facing me, standing close enough to put his hand on my shoulder, and he gave me a little shake.

  “Hey—are you O.K.? You look all pale. Are you hurt? Your head’s bleeding.”

  I leaned my weight against him, feeling weak-kneed again. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Do you promise me that you’re not going to kill the guy?”

  I remembered saying to Tomlinson something about pathology; that when illness is involved, a person’s behavior can’t be judged as either moral or immoral.

  Did I really believe that?

  Sometimes. Maybe.

  “Promise me, Dad?”

  The pounding and howling from inside the drum were louder now, as I replied, “You know what, Lake? You’re right. I promise. But . . . do you mind if we leave him locked in there? I really don’t want to have to deal with the big bastard again.”

  My son looked at me, and then he grinned. “Sure. The guy did the same thing to me last night, you know—stuck me in one of those cans.” He shook his head. “He really is an asshole.”

  The noise of the helicopter began to vibrate through the hull of the ship.

  EPILOGUE

  ON an afternoon of dazzling, corn-belt blue in early June, my commercial flight touched down at Quad City International Airport, and I drove my rental car over a bridge that spanned the Mississippi River and carried me into the green, green land of area code 563.

  I didn’t realize how wide that ancient river is. I looked at it and thought of Mark Twain. I thought of paddle-wheelers and lazy summer afternoons, and of Huck Finn. The river did not, however, catalyze any association with the leggy, sailor-tongued, former international tennis star, Dewey Nye.

  But she was here. She was living somewhere nearby.

  I would have no trouble finding her, because the lady had kindly provided directions.

  Even so, I missed a turn and ended up atop a city hill, parked outside a beautiful old brownstone behemoth, with a sign that said it was Central High School, home of the Blue Devils.

  I wondered what experience the people here had with devils, blue or otherwise, in a city as pretty and peaceful as Davenport, Iowa.

  As I thought about it, the face of Praxcedes Lourdes slipped into my mind and held me captive for a moment. The night that the Coast Guard boarded Repatriate and put the cuffs on him, Praxcedes and I had a brief visual exchange. Not a word was spoken, but the messages were unmistakable.

  He glared at me with his wild, pale eyes, then looked to my son, who was standing nearby. He smiled—a leer—and nodded before looking into my eyes again.

  The next time, I’ll kill him!

  That’s what he was telling me.

  My gaze unwavering, I stared back. As I did, I used a vague index finger to point to him, then at the 50-gallon drum that seemed to still echo with his screams. For emphasis, I patted at my heart.

  Touch him, I’ll bury you alive. Promise.

  THE road west followed the river toward Muscatine. It took me through Rockingham, Walnut Grove, and Montpelier, where I slowed and turned right onto Cemetery Road, which was little more than a shaded country lane. Then I took a left onto Wheelands, where corn grew on both sides of the road, so it was a little like driving through a tunnel. I had the windows down, and the car was flooded with the sweet, earthen smell of corn silk and clover.

  I’d known that Dewey’s maternal family had Midwestern roots. I didn’t know that her great-grandmother had died recently and left her what remained of the family farm. It was to the farm that the lady had retreated to get perspective on her personal world; a world that seemed to be unraveling.

  As one of the principal causes for the turmoil, I was eager to make amends.

  After another mile or so, I found a road marked “Wagon Trail,” and then the red mailbox she’d described. Her property was at the end of a long lane, in a valley of hardwoods and clover. There was a white clapboard house that looked a hundred years old, a broken-down barn, and several unpainted outbuildings that looked older.

  I’ve noticed before that when I see old friends in new or unexpected surroundings, it takes the brain a microsecond to convert then reassemble their facial features from those of a stranger back into the face of the person I know so well. It is in that brief space of time that we see our friends as they really appear, unfiltered by personality quirks or our fondness for them.

  As I parked, the door to the back porch swung open, and I saw a lanky, prairie-plain woman come striding out, jeans loose on her hips, plaid shirt bust-heavy, with sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her blond hair was cut boyishly short. She moved as if she were in a hurry to get chores done.

  Dewey?

  Yes. The short hair had thrown me. Then . . . there she was walking toward me, my old friend, my workout partner and love—the woman jock with the California beach girl face, the smile, the satirical eyes.

  “Long time no see, sailor. Welcome to fly-over country.”

  By “fly-over,” I took her to mean that part of the U.S. that most only see from a plane.

  I said, “They don’t know what they’re missing. Now that you’re here, anyway.”

  I was nervous, had a case of dry-mouth, but felt instantly better when she allowed me to hug her close, and then to kiss her lightly on the lips.

  I said, “You smell great. I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too, Doc. And I’m so happy about your son.”

  “He’s an amazing kid. You’ll meet him. Soon.”

  She scared me a little when she replied, “I’d like that. No matter what happens between you and me. I’d like to meet your son.”

  On the phone, she had refused to tell me if she was pregnant. She said she didn’t want it to influence discussions about our relationship. But just the possibility of being parents together had a huge effect on me. I wanted to know. So now I slid my hand to her flat belly, a brief touch . . . and felt her draw away.

  “Put your bag in the guest bedroom. We have a lot to talk about.”

  I said, “Yeah, we do.”

  I spent two weeks with her there. Her family had leased out the tillable land, so it wasn’t a working farm. But there was still a hell of a lot of work to do. I learned that it’s always that way around a farm.

  “Kinda like boats,” I told her one night. “There’s always something tha
t needs fixing.”

  We were sitting outside on the porch swing, watching lightning bugs drift like time-lapse stars among the corn and black trees. Their cold strobing reminded me of navigational markers on Tampa Bay, and I felt a brief pang of homesickness.

  When had I ever spent so much time away from saltwater?

  That’s what we did at night. Talk. We’d sit on the porch and talk. We’d go for long walks and talk. We’d drive into Davenport, have dinner at one of the great restaurants, then walk along the levee and talk.

  The words she’d overheard me speak to Pilar had wounded her deeply, and so they had damaged us. Talking was part of what I hoped was a gentle reconstruction phase.

  I told her just enough about my battle with Praxcedes Lourdes to explain the fresh scar on my forehead. Also told her about Tomlinson and me accompanying Laken back to Masagua, where the boy’s mother was granting interviews and sharing the truth about Jorge Balserio’s involvement with the kidnapping of her son.

  “His political career is ruined,” Pilar told me.

  It was one of the few times that we spoke. When I gave her the nearly $200,000 I’d recovered from the ship, all she said was “Thanks.” Which was fine with me. I was no longer even tempted to ask her about the e-mails I’d found, or about Tinman. She seemed equally uninterested in me. The woman no longer existed in my world, so perhaps I no longer existed in hers.

  She seemed indifferent when I asked if Tomlinson and I could take Lake on a vacation tour of Central America’s rain forests and jungle coastline.

  “We deserve to celebrate,” my friend said on my behalf.

  Which was true. But I also wanted to spend enough time with Lake to be certain that he didn’t show any delayed signs of post-traumatic-stress syndrome.

  To be rescued does not necessarily mean that a victim is out of harm’s way.

  We had a great trip. The boy seemed to be recovering just fine. We laughed a lot, the three of us. We took tough hikes together, a couple of long swims in the Pacific, and we fished.

  The only time we discussed the kidnapping or my son’s abductor was when Lake brought up the subject. One night, as we sat at the campfire awaiting a dinner of snook fillets, freshly gathered clams, plus black beans and rice, he said, “Do you know why I think he didn’t go through with it? Why Prax didn’t kill me?”

  I’d thought about it often, but I said, “No. Why?”

  My son said, “At first, I thought it was because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing, except in reverse. I’d tried hard to make him see me as a person—just like the advice in that e-mail you sent me. I did things for him. I talked to him like I cared. I could tell I was getting under his skin a little. So in the end, he couldn’t do it. Or at least that’s what I thought originally.”

  I said, “But not now?”

  He was shaking his head, gazing into the fire. There was no hint of emotion in his voice, only a scholastic curiosity as he said, “No. I think it may have played a small role. Subconsciously, maybe. But I think the real reason he didn’t . . . didn’t go ahead and cut my throat was something else.” He looked right at me. “It wasn’t fun. He started to kill me, but realized he wasn’t getting the emotional charge out of it that he usually got.”

  Quietly, I’d come to the same conclusion.

  I listened as Lake said, “The guy burns people. That’s his pathology. That’s his sickness. There was probably some sexual component keyed only by fire. So he had to do it that way.

  “I think Prax still planned to kill me, but he wanted to enjoy it. He always carried this little blowtorch with him. So he left my room to search for something that would protect my face so it wouldn’t be damaged. Then, when he came back, I think he would’ve waited until I was awake. Then he would’ve set me on fire. It’s the only way he could enjoy it.”

  Tomlinson and I had exchanged glances, both of us thinking, Smart kid.

  The highlight of our getaway, though, was being “captured” by a little band of guerrilla troops who were under the command of my old friend General Juan Rivera. They took us to his secret mountain baseball diamond, where Tomlinson played centerfield. Lake and I alternated innings catching the bearded, revolutionary pitcher.

  When my son and I said goodbye at the Masaguan airport, he’d looked into my eyes and said, “Relax, Dad. You get so damn emotional. We’ll be together again in August—when I come to the lab to visit.”

  IT took some convincing to get Dewey to agree to allow me to visit her in Iowa, so I spent the last week of May working with scientists from the University of Florida on our tarpon-spawning project.

  I also entertained a surprise visitor: Detective Merlin Starkey. One afternoon, he came ambling up the boardwalk, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle, carrying something heavy in a brown paper sack.

  Tomlinson happened to be with me. The guides had finally gotten the police boat to stay under, and we were discussing a good time to fish it.

  Starkey stopped at the bottom of the steps to my lab, touched the brim of his hat in greeting, and we listened to him say, “When I’m wrong, I admit I’m wrong. And I was wrong about you, Mister Ford. I come to congratulate you on getting your boy back. Plus, I brought you a little make-friends present. You don’t seem to be the slimy little snake that Tucker Gatrell was.”

  I said, “Thanks. In that case, come on aboard,” and accepted the sack when he handed it to me.

  The “present” was as unexpected as the ending of the story that I asked him to repeat for Tomlinson’s sake: why he still hated my uncle.

  This time, the man actually seemed to get a kick out of it himself. He didn’t sound so bitter. Maybe it was because of the pleasant coolness that comes to Dinkin’s Bay at sunset. Or maybe it was the tall El Dorado rum drink that Tomlinson got down him.

  Sitting in one of the deck rockers, Starkey told Tomlinson, “The way it happened was, I was runnin’ for sheriff of Collier County, my first election, and ev’body knew I was gonna win. It was all set. Mr. Ford’s uncle come to me with a problem—I already had a lot of power, and I was soon gonna have a lot more.”

  Tucker Gatrell’s problem, Starkey told us, was that the drug investigation branch of the county sheriff’s department suspected that my uncle had somehow hijacked a stash of marijuana. They also suspected that he had it hidden somewhere on his property. The department was seeking a search warrant.

  Tucker told soon-to-be-Sheriff Starkey that he didn’t have the marijuana. But he did have a moonshine still that he’d prefer not to disassemble. Could he pull some strings and have the search called off?

  Starkey continued, “Tucker was a Freemason. I’m a Freemason. You may have heard of it. If so, you know that’s a secret and sacred brotherhood that dates back to the time of the Crusades. He asked for my help using a certain word I won’t tell you. Because he used that word, I was immediately obligated. But Tucker Gatrell was just as obligated to tell me the whole godly truth when I said to him, I says, ‘Tucker, I don’t care if you stole the dang drugs or not. Jus’ swear to me it ain’t on your property, and I’ll see what I can do.’”

  Starkey said that Tucker’s exact words to him were, “Brother Merlin, I don’t got any more of that stolen marijuana hidden on my property than you got hidden away on yours—on my oath. I swear it’s true.”

  The old man stopped rocking in his chair, took a big sip of his rum, and said, “So I talked to the right people and got the search called off to help my brother Freemason. I had the power—I was gonna be sheriff of Collier County for a long, long time. That’s what ev’body thought, me included.

  “But then one of our helicopters spotted something odd hidden away on the back section of a little hunting camp I owned near Mango, not far from your uncle’s ranch.”

  Two tons of marijuana had been stolen. Approximately a ton of it—or half—was found on Starkey’s property.

  “Tucker had swore to me that he didn’t have any more of that marijuana on his place than I did on
mine,” Starkey said. “I reckon that was accurate, but it still ain’t the way to treat a brother Freemason. That was the end of my run for sheriff.”

  We talked for a little longer before the old detective gave us a farewell salute and disappeared down the boardwalk into the mangroves. Because he’d asked me to put off looking into the paper sack until he was gone, I did.

  Inside, I found my old 9 mm SIG-Sauer, the handgun I’d planted in Balserio’s car.

  There was also a note:

  My lawyer has an envelope addressed to you. Inside is the name of the person I think was responsible for the fire that killed your folks. You’ll get it when I pass into a better world than this one. Don’t ever ask me about it again. You’ll understand when the time’s right.

  A few hours later, working in the lab, I received another emotional jolt when Tomlinson tuned in an oldies radio station, WAXY 106, and turned the volume up, saying over the music, “Hey, remember the great band I told you about? The band that hired me as a roadie before I lost my memory? America, right? This is one of their best songs.”

  Then he blasted the volume even louder, and I listened to the rock group who’d inspired Tomlinson sing:

  . . . Some are quick to take the bait

  And catch the perfect prize that waits among the shelves.

  But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man

  That he didn’t, didn’t already have

  And cause never was the reason for the evening

  Or the tropic of Sir Galahad

  So please believe in me . . .

  Tin Man?

  Tin Man!

  In reply to my fierce, quizzical expression, Tomlinson shrugged his shoulders, took a long drink from his fifth or sixth rum, Adam’s apple bobbing, before he said, “It’s always been a race between alcohol and my memory. So far, the alcohol’s winning. Thank God.”