by Carl Hiassen
"At approximately 6:07 this morning, a commercial fishing vessel discovered fuel residue and evidence of helicopter wreckage approximately six miles off Miami Beach. Navy and Coast Guard personnel searched the area thoroughly and found no signs of survivors. Because of the preponderance of carnivorous deep-water marine species, it is highly unlikely that any human remains will be recovered.
''However, one item found in the debris has been conclusively identified as the property of Daniel Wilson, age thirty-six, a former professional football player who had been sought as a suspect in several recent kidnappings."
The Orange Bowl chairman reached into a brown grocery bag and pulled out the dark-stained Miami Dolphins jersey belonging to Viceroy Wilson. At the sight of the number 31, the photographers became frenzied.
"According to Sergeant Al Garcia of the Metro-Dade police, Mr. Wilson was an active member of a small terrorist group known as Las Noches de Diciembre.This organization, also known as the Nights of December, has claimed credit for several recent kidnappings, homicides, and bombings in the Miami area, including the so-called Trifecta Massacre at the Hibiscus Kennel Club. The Nights of December also are prime suspects in a bombing incident two days ago in which a local journalist was seriously injured. We have strong reason to believe it was Mr. Wilson and three other members of this radical cell who carried out last night's attack on the Nordic Princess,and who died in the subsequent helicopter crash. While every effort is being made to verify this information, we feel confident that a sinister and senseless threat to our community has been removed, and that the people of South Florida can celebrate the new year—and the Orange Bowl festival—without fear or worry. Thank you all very much."
The Orange Bowl chairman sat down and wiped the back of his neck with a crisp white handkerchief. He had no intention of uttering another word, or doing anything to ruin his slick job of delivering the press release. He'd even improvised a bit, changing the distasteful and tourist-repellent phrase "oil slick" to "fuel residue" in the third paragraph.
As soon as the reporters began firing questions, the Orange Bowl chairman motioned Al Garcia to the podium.
The detective approached the long-necked microphone with extreme caution, as if it were a flame-thrower.
"What about Jesus Bernal?" a TV reporter shouted.
"No comment," Garcia said. He felt like having a cigarette, but the chief had ordered him not to smoke in front of the cameras.
"Where did all the snakes come from?" someone asked.
"I've got no idea," said Al Garcia. The sound of two dozen scribbling felt-tip pens clawed at his nerves.
"What about the banner?" a radio reporter said. "Did you find the banner?"
"No comment."
"Where did the chopper come from?"
"No comment."
Several reporters began to complain about all the no commentsand threatened to walk out of the press conference. The Dade County mayor excitedly whispered something to the chief of police, who leaned across and excitedly whispered something to Al Garcia. The detective glared at all of them.
"Seems I've been authorized to answer your questions," Garcia told the reporters, "as long as it won't interfere with the investigation. About the helicopter—we haven't traced it yet. It was a rebuilt Huey 34, probably stolen up in Lauderdale or Palm Beach."
"What about Jesus Bernal?" asked a man from a Cuban radio station.
Al Garcia decided to give the guys in the orange blazers something to think about. "We have no evidence that Mr. Bernal was aboard the helicopter last night," he said.
The Orange Bowl chairman shot to his feet. "But he probably was!"
"We have no such evidence," Garcia repeated.
"What about the banner?" the radio reporter asked.
"We recovered it this morning, tangled up in a swordfish line. The streamer was rented yesterday afternoon from Cairo Advertising at the Opalocka Airport. Three individuals were seen attaching the letters. A white male, bearded, late thirties, wearing an Australian bush hat; a black male, approximately the same age but heavyset, wearing a football jersey; a younger, dark-skinned male, cleanshaven, described as either a Mexican or a native American Indian. The banner on the chopper basically said the same thing as all the previous communiques—'Welcome to the Revolution' et cetera."
"Those men seen at the airport," a TV reporter said, "those were The Nachos?"
"Las Noches,"Garcia snapped.
"Who paid for the banner?" somebody shouted.
"Apparently the white male."
"How much?"
The Orange Bowl chairman sensed that it had been a tactical mistake to let Al Garcia stand at the microphone. The idiot was actually answering the journalists' questions. The more Garcia talked, the more frenetically the reporters wrote in their notebooks. And the more they wrote in their notebooks, the more stories would appear in the newspapers and the more airtime the dead Nachos would get. More was not what the Orange Bowl Committee wanted to see.
The chairman stood up and said with a smile, "I think that's all for now." But he was completely ignored by everyone, including Al Garcia.
"The white male suspect paid three hundred dollars cash for use of the advertising streamer," Garcia said.
"Could that man have been El Fuego?"a reporter asked.
"It's possible, yeah."
"Did he give a name at the airport?"
"Yes, he did," Garcia said.
Then all at once, like a flock of crows: 'What?"
Garcia glanced over at the police chief. The chief shrugged. The Orange Bowl chairman waved a chubby hand, trying to get somebody's attention.
"The suspect did use a name at the airport," Garcia said, "but we believe it was an alias."
"What was it?"
"In fact, we're ninety-nine percent sure it was an alias," the detective said, fading from the microphone.
"What was it, Al? What?"
"Well," Garcia said, "the name the suspect gave was Hugo. Victor Hugo."
There was a lull in the questioning while the reporters explained to each other who Victor Hugo was.
"What about motive?" somebody shouted finally.
"That's easy," Garcia replied. "They attacked the ocean liner for the same reason they marinated Sparky Harper in Coppertone. Publicity." He smiled with amusement at all the busy notebooks. "Looks to me like they got exactly what they wanted."
The press conference had taken a perilous turn, and the Orange Bowl chairman could no longer contain his rising panic. Squeezing to the podium, he discreetly placed a stubby hand between Garcia's shoulder blades and guided the detective to the nearest available chair. Then the Orange Bowl man boldly seized the neck of the microphone himself. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said cordially, "wouldn't you rather hear the mayor's firsthand account of his escape from the Nordic Princess?"
Brian Keyes watched the press conference on a television in Kara Lynn Shivers' bedroom. Her father was out playing golf and her mother was eating quiche with the Junior League.
Kara Lynn was curled up on the bed in bikini panties and a lemon T-shirt. Keyes wore cutoffs. He squeezed her hand as they listened to Al Garcia talking to the reporters. When the mayor got up and started to tell about the helicopter attack, Keyes punched the remote control and switched to a basketball game.
For a long time he didn't say anything, just stared at the TV screen. Kara Lynn put her arms around him and kissed him on the neck.
"It's really over," she whispered.
"I don't know," Keyes said distantly. He kept visualizing that crackpot Wiley, strolling into the Opa-locka Airport with his bush hat and two hundred bags of wild snakes. Keyes tried to imagine the scene later, aboard the Huey, Wiley and his portable record player; Wiley trying to explain Exodusto Viceroy Wilson.
"The only one left is that Cuban," Kara Lynn said.
"Maybe." Keyes tried to think of Skip Wiley as dead and could not. The obstacle was not grief; it was plain disbelief. It was not beyond Wile
y to have rented an aged and dangerously unreliable helicopter, or to have hired an inept pilot. What was uncharacteristic was for Wiley to have placed himself so squarely in jeopardy. All through December he had kept a safe distance from the actual terrorism, sending Wilson or Bernal or the Seminole to take the big risks. Why the sudden bravery? Keyes wondered. And what a convenient way to die. He had felt a little guilty that he could summon so little sadness for his old friend—but then again, maybe it was too soon for mourning.
"The late Victor Hugo," Keyes mused. Wiley must have known how his friends would smile at that one; he was forever edifying his own legend.
"Les Miserables,"Kara Lynn said. "Sounds like Mr. Fuego had a sense of humor."
"Sick," Keyes said. "Sick, sick, sick." Wiley would be better off dead, he thought, before the incredible dismal truth were known. With Wiley dead, Kara Lynn would be safe. So would the newspaper; Cab Mulcahy could return to the world of honest journalism. It would be better for almost everybody if Wiley were lost at sea, everybody except Jenna—Jenna was another issue. She hadn't been aboard that helicopter. Keyes knew it instinctively. Jenna's talent was creating catastrophes, then avoiding them.
"I want this to be the end," Kara Lynn said quietly.
"Well, maybe it is."
"But you don't believe they're really dead," she said.
"The way it happened, it's too perfect."
"The Prince of Cynics. You don't believe life can ever be perfect?"
"Nope," Keyes said. "Death, either."
Later, when Kara Lynn was in the shower, Al Garcia phoned.
"It's about damn time," Keyes groused.
"Been kinda hectic around here," the detective said. "I saw this stack of messages from you and Mulcahy. Figured your conscience finally woke up."
"We had our reasons, Al. Now it's time to talk."
"Oh, I can't wait. But it just so happens I already got a line on El Fuego"
So Garcia knew.
Keyes felt lousy about not telling him in the first place, but Wiley's threats had seemed serious and, in retrospect, believable. Garcia would have to understand.
"When we were doing routine checks on Wilson and Bernal, I had a pal search the morgue at the newspaper," the detective said. "Easy, really. I guess it's all on computer now. Funny thing, Brian. About four months ago your asshole buddy Wiley does this story on whatever happened to Daniel Viceroy Wilson, the famous football star. Very sympathetic. Hard-times-for-the-troubled-black-athlete number. Typical liberal shit. Anyway, three weeks later, guess what? Guy does a column about Jesus Bernal. Ourprecious Jesus. Fire burns in the breast of a young Cuban freedom fighter—that's how the story starts off. Makes me sick, too, I gotta tell you. Nearly tossed my black beans. So I'm thinking, what a weird coincidence this is: two of the four Nights of December getting a big ride in the newspaper just before the ca-ca hits the fan. So, for the hell of it, what d'you suppose I do?"
"Pull all Wiley's columns."
"Right. Big stack of 'em, and they're full of geeks and cons and losers ... shit, if you threw them all together you'd have the scariest nest of bizarros in the history of the planet Earth. Took me a week to wade through that crap, too—hey, the guy can write, I told you that. He can put the words together okay, but it's his attitude that hacks me off. Such an arrogant hump. Anyway, out of all these columns, guess who pops up next? Your Indian, Brian, the guy with the airboat, Tommy Tigerpaws or whatever the hell it is. A fucking full-blooded gator-wrestling white-hating Seminole Indian. I got more stuff out of Wiley's column than I've been able to squeeze out of the whole Seminole tribe. Turns out ole Tommy's richer than your average Colombian snowbird. And he's also very bitter about all the bad shit to come down on his ancestors—for that I can't blame him, Brian. That was yourpeople, too. The Cubans had nothing to do with screwing the Indians out of Florida."
"Al, let's—"
"I'm almost done, amigo.So after all this I look on my desk and what have I got? I got an angry black racist football player, a crazy bomb-happy Cuban revolutionary, and a filthy-rich Indian with a bingo chip on his shoulder. Three of the four. So the rest was easy, even for a dumb cop like me—the trick was to read everything Wiley wrote for the last two years. Cristo!What a strange guy."
"Funny you didn't mention all this at the press conference," Keyes said.
"Gee, guess I forgot."
Which meant Garcia wasn't ready to buy the chopper crash.
"It bugs me," he said. "I think to myself, why would El Fuegopick a stunt like this to show his face?"
"If only they'd found some bodies," Keyes said. The words sounded stark and bloodless, but he meant them. He said to Garcia: "What do we do now?"
"The smart guys in the suits say it's all over."
"What do you say, Al?"
"I say we wait till after the parade before we open the fucking champagne."
"Good idea. In the meantime, I'll stick with the queen."
"One more thing, Brian. Since I'm nice enough not to immediately throw your ass in jail for obstruction, the least you could do is stop by later and tell me about your crazy batshit friend."
"Yeah," Keyes said, "I guess I'd better."
As Al Garcia hung up, he chided himself for not hollering more at Brian Keyes. He didn't know why Keyes had held back about Skip Wiley all these weeks, but he certainly would find out. The gamesmanship of trading information always irritated Garcia, but he accepted it as essential to the job. Reporters, cops, politicians, private detectives—all gifted in the coy art of you-tell-me, I-tell-you. Afterward you felt like either an oracle or a whore.
Garcia assumed there was a compelling reason for what Keyes had done. There better have been. A trade-off of some sort, maybe even extortion. Wiley seemed capable of anything.
Besides, the question had diminished in urgency since the helicopter crash. No sooner had the Sunday press conference ended than the chief had slipped Garcia a terse note: "Consider disbanding Fuego One Task Force. We could have a press release ready by tomorrow A.M."
Garcia had acknowledged the suggestion without committing to it. As all good detectives, he had learned to subsist on the bittersweet. Good guys, bad guys, you had to watch your step. He'd met crooks to whom he'd entrusted his life, and cops who'd steal crackers from the blind. Garcia was seldom moved by the wisdom of his superiors, and more often dazzled by the cleverness of the criminal mind. The Fuegocase had been a peculiar challenge; all along he had felt as if he were battling two sides, Las Nochesand the Miami establishment.
The detective was ambivalent about the mysterious helicopter crash. Part of him wanted to believe that the Nights of December was dead. It had nothing to do with the Orange Bowl or civic boosterism or preserving the tourist trade. Rather, it seemed a marvelous example of bad guys getting their due; justice in the biblical sense. And as a practical matter, there was no tidier way to solve a homicide than to have all your suspects suddenly croak. God knows the small fortune it would save the taxpayers.
On the other hand was the tug of professional pride: Garcia didn't like the Chamber of Commerce opening and closing his murder cases. The self-congratulatory tone of the TV press conference had been farcical; the truth was, Garcia's crack squad never had come close to finding, much less capturing, Las Noches de Diciembre.It had been a frustrating assignment for a cop unaccustomed to being outwitted, and Garcia didn't like the taste of it. To see Skip Wiley and his weird crew vanquished by a sputtering old Army helicopter seemed mundane and anticlimactic. From Garcia's view, it would have been immensely more satisfying to have tracked the bastards to their Everglades hideout and smoked them in a blazing firefight.
Which is why he wasn't ready to call it quits.
Intuition told Garcia that the ending didn't fit. A bunch of crazy Cubans or Nicaraguans?—sure, that's the sort of fuck-up you'd expect, running a chopper clean out of fuel. But from the very first victim, the Nights of December had been different. They had approached each act of violence with a
certain selectivity and elan. Choking Sparky Harper with a toy alligator was more than murder; it was terrorism with imagination. It was the stamp of a blade like Wiley.
Wiley—who, in Al Garcia's opinion, was too damn smart to flame out over the deep blue sea. It'd be just like that cagey sonofabitch to fake his own death, lull everyone to sleep, then swoop down on the Orange Bowl parade and snatch the queen—just like he'd planned all along.
The detective crumpled the chiefs directive and dropped it into a trashcan. He flipped through a stack of clippings until he came to the infamous hurricane column:
What South Florida needs most is a killer hurricane, sudden and furious, an implacable tempest that would raze the concrete shorelines and rake away the scum and corruption ...
As he read it for the second time, Garcia felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.
The tidal surge, a swollen gargoyle of a wave, is born beyond the Gulf Stream. Gaining size and thunder by the minute, it races under a deafening wind toward Florida's sleeping coastline. In purple darkness it pulverizes Miami Beach with a twenty-foot wall of water, flooding Carl Fisher's billion-dollar island of muck. Picture it: corpses upon corpses, clogging the flooded lobbies of once-majestic condominiums; dead dreamers, swollen, blue-veined, carplike.
They will die in bewilderment, in the fierce arms of the beloved ocean that brought them here in the first place. Fools! the wind will scream, fools all.
Garcia thought: These are the words of a pathologically bitter man, if not a certified fruitcake. He was dying to hear what Keyes could tell him about the guy.
Somebody rapped lightly on the door.