The Complete Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Collection

by David F. Berens

  As he rolled along, his hands seized into balled fist—cramping into bony vises. Ironically, though they were both clamped tight to the handlebars, the cramp kept him from being able to apply the handbrakes and slow the pink bike. Tourists and visitors strolled along the boardwalk peering into the lush vegetation, studying birds Troy couldn’t see as he barreled toward them uncontrollably. He put his left foot down in an effort to slow his ride, but as he did, it cramped as well. Later, after the crash involving a woman wearing a tie-dyed muumuu, her two inconsolably wailing toddlers, and a husband who insisted on clucking at the birds like a chicken, Troy would count himself lucky that he’d passed out, missing their loud and obnoxious exit from the park.

  He woke up lying in a sparsely decorated bedroom that looked to be straight out of the seventies—mid-century oak dresser with gold inlays, white metal bed that squeaked loudly as he moved, and a threadbare yellow quilt rolled down covering only his feet. A clock was ticking somewhere, but when he tried to move his head to look for it, the timpani drums pounded in his brain. He closed his eyes and flopped back down on the pillow.

  “Easy, young fellow,” a voice said to him.

  She sounded like an older woman, raspy and thin, but kind and motherly at the same time. He wondered if he’d died and somehow reunited with his mama in heaven. Not likely, he thought. He opened his eyes slowly.

  “Am I dead?” he asked as the small bedroom came back into view.

  Thin curtains blew in the breeze from an open window to his right. In front of the window was a silhouette of a tiny little woman with short gray hair. She had ruddy skin tinged with sunburn, a dingy pink t-shirt with a pelican on the front, and a clear bag of fluid in her hand. Troy could see that a tube trailed out of the bag, drooped down toward the floor, then rose up again to end at a needle in his arm.

  “S’pose not,” the woman said. “Unless we’re both dead.”

  She looked around at the room through dark sunglasses.

  “Which is entirely possible at this point.”

  She laughed and gave the bag a gentle squeeze. Troy felt warmth enter his skin through the IV.

  “What is that?” he asked, nodding toward the bag.

  “Saline. Hope you ain’t got any heart issues,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Didn’t see a medical bracelet or anything on ya, so I took a chance giving you this.”

  Troy shook his head. “Nothing that I know of.”

  He tried to sit up, but his head swam and his body twitched like a jellyfish, threatening to cramp again.

  “Whoa, now, son. Give me a minute to get some fluid in you before you get all jumpy again.” She held up a hand. “I’m figuring you probably had a big night partying and you’ll need some hydration before you get your next drink. Am I right?”

  “Actually, I just biked down from Key Largo and didn’t have any water. Must’ve gotten dehydrated in the heat.”

  The woman rolled an imaginary toothpick around her mouth. “Uh huh. And I’m Mother Teresa.”

  Troy shrugged. He had no energy to argue the point and figured it didn’t matter anyway.

  “Nice to meet you, Ma’am.” Troy held out his free arm. “Name’s Troy Bodean. Never thought I’d get to meet a saint.”

  The woman laughed and took his hand. She was thin and bony, but her squeeze was firm and sure.

  “Actually, most folks might tell you I ain’t no saint, just a bird lady. Name’s Laura Quinn.”

  “So, you’re the one who owns this place?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you have to give that woman and her family their money back after I crashed into them?”

  “Nah, they didn’t pay anything,” she said, waving the thought away. “Ain’t no admission, though donations are always welcome.”

  Troy felt more warmth flowing into his arm and took a deep breath. The room wasn’t swimming as much now and he was beginning to feel a little more normal. Normal but tired. His eyelids felt like sandbags and he let them close.

  “Yup,” the bird lady said as darkness closed in. “Just get a little rest. We’ll continue this later when you wake.”

  And with that, Troy fell into a deep blue sleep. Blue like the water he been cruising past on his cotton candy-colored bike.

  When he woke for the second time, the sash was lowered a bit and the sheer curtains hung limp in front of a dusky window. Pale purple skies glowed beyond revealing that he’d slept for at least three or four hours and that it was nearly night. He propped himself up on his elbows and saw that the quilt had been pulled up over his legs and the IV had been removed from his arm. A single dot of blood blossomed into the gauze taped over the needle’s former entry point. His head throbbed, but softly, not threatening to drown him into unconsciousness again. He slid his legs over the edge of the bed, wincing with the expectation of the cramps returning to savage his calves, but thankfully, they never came. He tested his weight on one foot, then added the second. He managed to stand upright and was relieved that he felt—all things considered—pretty good. By force of habit, he rubbed his hands together in a motion that would wipe away dirt or grime and was met with a stab of fiery pain in both palms. He opened his hands and found they were bandaged with gauze and tape. A dark red and brown stain soaked through both, the right a little more than the left. An image of tumbling over the handlebars of the bike and reaching out to catch himself flashed into his head. He remembered his palms dragging and bumping along the boardwalk grabbing splinters in both.

  “No pushups today, I reckon,” he mumbled as the pain subsided.

  Using his fingertips, he turned the knob to the door and squeaked it open. He was met with a hallway lined with old photographs. Most of them featured Miss Laura Quinn and various birds in states of injury or healing. More of the wall was covered with photos than was bare. Troy was duly impressed. Apparently, she was some kind of bird rescuer.

  “That ones a brown pelican. We’ve got quite a few of them here,” a voice said from behind him.

  Troy turned to see Laura Quinn standing behind him. She had long black rubber gloves on that were slick with something—he couldn’t tell what. Noticing his gaze, she began to peel the gloves off.

  “Yeah, it’s blood,” she sighed. “Couldn’t save that one.”

  An awkward silence hung between them. Finally, she was the one to speak again.

  “You always prance around in your birthday suit?”

  It was then that Troy came to the realization that he was naked. He covered himself with his bandaged hands. She seemed not to care that he was nude and he was thankful for that.

  “I gather you noticed your hands?”

  He nodded looking down at his gently clasped hands.

  “You had some pretty vicious scrapes and a dozen or so big splinters.” She motioned for him to follow her down the hall. “I’m almost certain I got ’em all. Just keep an eye on your hands for any red, puffy areas that linger.”

  He followed her into a small, fluorescent lit room. She opened a cabinet, pulled out a white towel and tossed it to him. He wrapped it around his waist as she took down a large white bottle from the top shelf. Opening a drawer, she took a plastic baggie out, counted a few pills into it, then sealed it with a zip. She handed it to Troy.

  “Take three a day. Space ’em out a bit. Might wanna eat somethin’ with ’em.”

  “Antibiotics?” Troy asked.

  She nodded.

  “How can I repay you?”

  “No need, son. It’s part of what we do here. Keep them flying.” She pointed a finger up at the ceiling.

  “Only question now, I suppose, is where are my clothes, and my hat, and my bike?”

  She leaned her head back and chuckled with a raspy, thin laugh. “Clothes are in the bedroom. I washed ’em for you. As for the bike, you won’t be goin’ anywhere on that thing. You trashed it pretty good.”

  “Dangit,” Troy said, tucking the baggie into his pocket. “What mile marker are we at?”
r />   “You’re at ninety-three. Tavernier”

  Troy took in a deep breath. The air in the small room was bleachy and sterile, not at all like the bedroom he’d woken up in.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be hitching down to Islamorada. What is that? Seventy-six?”

  “Uh-yah,” she said, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t put my thumb out around here. The police aren’t too friendly with hitchhikers. You can probably catch a bus that’ll take you all the way though.”

  Before he could tell her he didn’t have the money to take the bus, she held pulled a wallet out of her back pocket. He immediately recognized that it was his wallet.

  “You’ll find you have a bit more there than you came in with.”

  Troy stared at it for a long moment before taking it.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I told you, son.” She smiled an ushered him back into the hall. “It’s what we do around here. Keep ’em flyin’.”

  Ten minutes and a tepid, slightly slimy ham and cheese sandwich later, he was in the farthest back bench he could get on a Dade-Monroe shuttle. It stank of sweat, urine, and alcohol. The nineties-era neon Miami Vice pattern of the cloth seats was threadbare and slightly damp, but there seemed to be no problem with the A/C. A cool rush of air streamed down steadily on his head. He took off his hat—the outback tea-stained cowboy hat—to feel the chill up and down his scalp and neck. For the first time in twenty-four hours, he felt reasonably good. He dozed in and out of consciousness until the driver—a woman who might have been Esther Rolle in another life—sang out.

  “Islamorada, sugars.” Her hand waved across the front windshield. “Village of Islands.”

  Outside the sky was on fire with purple, red, orange, and yellow. As Troy stepped down off the bus, the same smell of salt and fish from Key Largo bathed him in the thick, hazy air. The bus door screeched shut and the muffler rattled as it pulled away from the stop. All was quiet and still—even the breeze had already gone to sleep. Off-season in the Keys, thought Troy. Nobody here but us locals.

  He pulled out the scrap of paper he’d squirreled away into his pocket. It was slightly wet having gone through the wash at the bird sanctuary, but the writing was still clear enough. He saw that he was only a few steps from 76800—the place that was hiring. He hoped he hadn’t taken too long to get here. A large round sign with peeling paint and amateurishly drawn palm trees proudly wore blue lettering announcing that he’d made it. Islamorada Tennis Club. Beyond the green chain link fence wrapping the driveway, he heard the thwock thwock sound of tennis balls being hit. He wiped his face with his shirt hoping he didn’t look too homeless—but he knew in the Keys, that wasn’t uncommon, nor was it inculpatory. Troy Bodean tucked the paper into his pocket and walked through the gate.

  It was around that same time that the police were notified of the disappearance of the infamous Laura Quinn. No one would know anything was amiss until three days later when her body was found in a brown pelican nest hidden back in the mangroves. When questioned, the regular staff and interns at the Wild Bird Sanctuary would describe a strange, lanky man showing up just before her disappearance wearing a straw cowboy hat over long, stringy, black hair. When the bulletin hit the airwaves, a computer buried in a secret office, under a secret compound, in a secret location sent a highly encrypted email to a man with no official title. Very few knew anything about what he did at the bureau. Most just called him The Hunter.

  4

  Hammock Style

  Troy circled the two-story whitewashed house looking for the source of the rallying sounds he could hear echoing around the mangrove encircled tennis courts. Green shutters framed old wooden windows and thick, pink bougainvillea climbed a wall of lattice attached to the parking lot side of the building. Some kind of bird screeched and flew out of it as he got near, causing him to duck and slap a hand on his hat to keep it in place. The courts—six clay and one hard—were not lit and most sat in near total darkness. The single hard court—a rarity south of the Florida-Georgia line—was closest to the back of the pro shop and benefited from a soft mosquito-bulb-yellow glow from the porch lights beaming out over a long row of half-broken rocking chairs.

  A man in a shockingly fluorescent pink shirt dripping with rivulets of sweat was pounding tennis balls being flung at him from what Troy thought might be a 1970’s era ball machine. Most flew long and smashed into the windscreen lined chain link fence beyond the far baseline. The man, whose black Nike socks were pulled high on his calf to just under his knees, looked to be making no attempt at proper tennis shots.

  As Troy got closer, he saw the man’s face was twisted into an angry grimace and he grunted with vehemence on every shot. And then, all was quiet, save for the grinding of the machine’s gears and the man’s huffing breath. Troy took a step up onto the porch next to the court and was surprised to hear a woman’s screeching voice calling out from somewhere above—maybe an upstairs window.

  “I think the goddamn thing’s empty, Lucas. It is past ten o’clock. Give it a rest.”

  Her accent was thick and latin.

  The man smashed his racket into the ground, splintering the head, and turned toward the house.

  “I’ll do what I please, woman. Just like you, apparently.”

  Troy heard her growl.

  “It was a mistake, Lucas. Seriously. It is not like you have never flirted with a tennis bimbo.”

  The man jerked a matching pink headband off his forehead. His hair was soaked and flopped down in an odd way. The right side hung down past his ear, but the left was trimmed close. The top of his head was cornrowed with dark plugs in an otherwise barren plain of skin. As if feeling Troy’s eyes on him, he reached a hand up and swiped the longer hair over the top to cover the plugs. Troy wasn’t sure he’d seen a worse comb-over.

  “Manuela, screwing the maintenance man is not flirting. It’s … well, it’s screwing the help for Chrissakes!”

  The man took two steps toward the porch and realized with a jolt that Troy was standing there.

  “What the hell do you want?” the man demanded, pointing a finger at Troy. “Are you here to bang my wife, too?”

  With the ball machine still whirring in the night, Troy cleared his throat. He reached into his pocket for the piece of paper he’d found at the Key Largo Kampground & Marina. He unfolded it and held it up.

  “I’m here about the job.”

  The man looked up toward the hidden voice coming from above Troy. “Hey, hun, you’re in luck. Here’s a new maintenance man for you to—.”

  He was interrupted by the sound of the window slamming shut. Troy was sure he heard the woman’s voice cursing muffled behind the closed glass.

  “Did I come at a bad time?” Troy pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “I could come back tomorrow if you want.”

  The man put his hands on his hips. He sighed as he tried to calm his panting breath.

  “No. No. It’s fine. Just … just gimme a minute.”

  He walked over to the ball machine and unplugged it. Troy walked out to the court and started picking up balls with the man, depositing handfuls back into the machine. The man bent over and his combover flopped down in front of his face. He swiped it back over the top without skipping a beat.

  “I don’t hire bums or vagrants,” he said.

  “I ain’t neither, sir.” Troy said. “Just an honest man lookin’ for work.”

  The man took a deep breath and looked Troy up and down. “You don’t look like a tennis guy. You know anything about clay courts?”

  “Yes, sir. I dressed ten of them up in Key Biscayne on a daily basis for a few years.”

  “Key Biscayne,” the man said. “Well, well, well. Hoighty-toighty. Why’d you leave there?”

  Troy’s mind flashed back to the murder of the Colpiller girl and the eventual kidnapping of her twin sister, Mindy. He shivered at the thought.

  “Long story. Just didn’t work out.”

  “Uh huh.”

>   “Look. I’m a traveler. Have been for most of the time I’ve spent back from Afghanistan. But I’m a hard worker and I need a place to stay. Your paper here says you’ve got a job and room and board. If you’ll give me a week, I’ll prove I’m your man. If you don’t agree, I’ll move along.”

  The sound of glass breaking somewhere upstairs made the man jerk his gaze upward.

  “Shit,” he said, running up the steps of the porch. “Let’s talk about this in the morning.”

  “Oh, uh, okay,” Troy watched as the man ran past him. “So, um, meet you here tomorrow?”

  As he disappeared up the stairs to the apartment above the shop, he called, “There’s a hammock at the back of the porch. You’re welcome to crash there.”

  Troy heard a door slam followed by angry muffled voices. He shrugged his shoulders and walked past the rocking chairs to the back of the porch. There, behind a wall of lattice, he saw an old, white hammock, swaying in the light breeze.

  He tossed his backpack down beside it and went back around to the first rocking chair. Discovering that it looked to be on its literal last leg, he moved on to the next one and slumped into it. It was comfortable and the air was exactly the right temperature for rocking. He settled into a nice rhythm hoping the couple’s argument wouldn’t keep him awake for very long. It didn’t.

  Troy woke the next morning to find that a drizzle had watered the courts nicely overnight so running the sprinklers wouldn’t be necessary. Luckily, his hammock was tucked back under the roof of the long porch so he was dry and fully rested. It only took fourteen tries and three blisters to get the rusted yellow lawn tractor started. He hooked a wide brush onto the back with a bungee cable and pulled the ramshackle grooming zamboni out onto the first court. Before it backfired the first time, he heard yelling coming from the upstairs apartment over the pro shop.