American Tropic

by Thomas Sanchez

  Sipping her hot caffeine nectar in the sun’s morning glare, Luz keeps her eyes on the Duval Street activity from behind her sunglasses. Packs of excited vacationers in shorts and flip-flops hurry by on the sidewalk, darting into gift shops, trying on T-shirts with tropical scenes silk-screened on them, and buying Key West’s two most famous postcard photos, the mile-zero sign at the end of Highway 1, and the tall bullet-shaped concrete monument at the Atlantic’s edge declaring SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A.—90 MILES TO CUBA.

  From the open window of Luz’s car, parked at the curb, a police dispatcher’s radio voice drones. Luz takes another sip of buche as she listens to the bored voice announcing bicycle thefts, lost dogs, and jaywalkers. The voice is suddenly drowned out by the roar of a motorcycle. She turns to see Pat on her Harley-D jump the curb behind the Charger and come to a tire-burning stop on the sidewalk, scattering the startled tourists.

  Luz eyes Pat with mock discipline. “I could arrest you for that stunt.”

  Pat tightens her grip on the Harley’s chrome handlebars. She fixes Luz with a bold stare. “Oh, I want to be arrested. That’s my dream, one night locked up with you. I’ll lick all the brown sugar out of your bowl. You should jilt your girlfriend, Joan. Hop on my bike. We’ll never look back.”

  Luz swallows her coffee. “You still poaching endangered turtles?”

  Pat flexes the muscles of her bare arm with the octopus tattoo, bulking up the one-eyed creature’s nasty-looking tentacles. “No one will ever catch me. But, hey, you can catch that ecofreak brother of Joan’s. He’s broadcasting illegally over the radio.”

  “Noah broadcasts from outside the city limits. I don’t have jurisdiction on the ocean. That’s for the feds.”

  “I hope his pissy pirate boat sinks in the middle of a shit slick dumped from a thousand crappers off a cruise ship.”

  Pat gazes over at the gleaming white Charger SRT8, taking in its arched rear-end cobra-wing spoiler and the black front grille open-jawed like an onrushing land shark.

  She grins. “You got yourself some unmarked cop car, tricked out like a Cuban Miami pimp-mobile. I know there’s a siren embedded in that grille, and red strobe-lights under those halogen headbeams that you can switch on from inside. How come you got all the flash, when most of Key West’s dumb-dicks poke around in stupid Ford Victorias?”

  Luz grins back. “I have this rocket because I’ll need it to go a quarter of a mile in twelve seconds when I’m coming to bust your ass.”

  “Like I said, no one can catch me.”

  Luz shakes her head and looks long at Pat. “No hay rosas sin espinas.”

  “Huh? I don’t habla the Es-span-yolla. What are you saying?”

  “There are no roses without thorns.”

  Pat twists her Harley’s throttle in a rev and shouts above the engine’s loud growl, “I’ll take that as a compliment. Whenever you get tired of your blond bunny, you come running to me. I’m the only real rose in the garden. With me you get the prick of the thorns and not just the flower’s soft petal. Life on the edge. It’s your choice, brown sugar.” Pat roars off.

  From Luz’s police radio, the droning dispatcher’s voice suddenly crackles with urgency. “Code five at Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower! All Alpha units respond!”

  Luz gulps her coffee and starts her car. She switches on her outside flashing red lights and siren and speeds away.

  Luz skids to a stop in front of the pyramid-shaped bat tower. Behind her, Deputy Detective Moxel pulls up in his late-model Ford Victoria police car. They both cut their engines and jump out.

  Moxel cocks a hand above his eyes to block the sunlight glaring off the tower as he surveys the situation. He puts on his sunglasses. “I don’t see anything going on—place is deserted. Why’d they radio an urgent homicide dispatch? We’re even out of Key West jurisdiction up here.”

  Luz doesn’t answer; she hurries toward the tower. Moxel follows with a scowl. They both step under the massive wooden support struts of the tower’s broad base. Luz looks up into the shadowy interior of the ascending wooden shaft and points. “There’s our customer.”

  Moxel pushes in close to Luz and stares up. At the top of the pyramid’s narrowing peak hangs a human body. He grabs Luz’s arm and pulls her away. “Let’s get out of here and call for backup.”

  Luz shakes loose from Moxel. She grips the first slat of a ladder fixed to the side of the tower. “I’m going up.” She starts climbing the ladder, hand over hand, pulling herself into the higher reaches.

  Moxel watches Luz climbing farther away and shouts: “You crazy? Could be somebody’s baiting a trap with that body. I said we should call for backup.”

  Luz stops climbing. In the stifling air of the narrow shaft, she wipes sweat from her forehead. She looks back at Moxel below. He seems distant and insignificant. She pulls her pistol out of its holster. She continues climbing into even hotter air. Buzzing flies whiz around her. She waves her pistol at the oncoming flies, and the sudden shift of her body weight puts pressure on the supporting wood slat of the ladder beneath her feet. The slat gives way and tears out with a creaking rip. Luz drops her gun and grabs the slat above her with both hands. She hangs suspended in the air, her legs swinging beneath her. She looks at the slat above that she is hanging on to; the rusty nails securing it begin slowly pulling out.

  The sound of Moxel’s angry voice rises through the shaft. “Goddamn, I told you to wait. Hold on, I’m coming.”

  Luz looks down as Moxel makes his way up the ladder. He carefully climbs from one wood slat to the next until he reaches her.

  Moxel grabs Luz’s dangling legs. “I’ve got you. Let your weight shift onto me. I’m a strong guy, I’ll get you down.”

  “No. I’m going up.”

  “You can’t. This is a trap. Somebody loosened the nails on these slats to kill anyone trying to get to the body.”

  “Keep your grip on my legs and push me up so I can grab on to the next slat.”

  “I can’t do that. Our combined weight will rip out the slats and we’ll fall.”

  Luz’s brown eyes narrow into severe slits. She speaks in a guttural growl. “That’s an order, goddamn it. Boost me up!”

  Moxel tightens his hold around Luz’s legs. “Okay, but you’re going to kill us both.” He grunts and boosts her.

  Luz grabs on to the next slat, pulling the weight of her body higher until she is able to gain a foothold on the lower slat.

  Moxel calls after her, “You don’t have a gun.”

  Luz looks back down. “Stay where you are and keep me covered.”

  Moxel pulls his gun from its holster and aims it up.

  Luz keeps climbing until she reaches just below the pointed peak of the tower; she stops. She tries not to inhale the overwhelming stench suddenly engulfing her. From the crossbeam rafter above swings the naked body of a man hung by a rope noosed around his neck. The man’s face is a puffed-up purple blotch. Slimy maggots worm out from the orbs of his chalk-white eyes. His ears have been cut off. His pale lips are sewn shut with fishing line. The pallid skin of his body is spotted with green flies sucking at caked flecks of blood. A steel spear is pierced through the man’s chest and out his back. A red X is slashed on the skin of his stomach.

  Thick brown hard roots of towering Spanish laurel trees heave up the sidewalk ahead of Noah in an uneven roll of cracked cement. The sidewalk glimmers in the morning mist coming in from the sea. He follows the sidewalk with the deliberate movements of a rum-soaked man overcompensating for his off-balance gait, as if he was on an invisible surfboard riding a serpentine wave. Ahead of him, the massive leathery trunk of another Spanish laurel has not only cracked the sidewalk but completely lifted and shattered the cement-covered ground in its mighty thrust skyward, throwing dark limbs out to block the sun. From the tree’s overhead branches, tendrils of airborne roots cascade back to earth, forming a roped curtain that swings in front of Noah. He pushes through the dripping curtain of vegetation. A three-story tropic
al mansion of imposing white clapboard comes into view. The mansion is the last of the many that were built in the nineteenth century, when the island was the wealthiest place in America, a bustling port for merchant clipper ships. The ships, loaded with silk, gold, lace, and pewter, had sailed down the Florida Strait, then hugged the narrow channel along the jagged reef and put into Key West’s safe harbor at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. The mansion, built by a mercantile-marine millionaire, has been battered and besieged by storms, its wood shutters slammed and splintered by high winds. The elaborately carved spindles of the second-story balcony circling the exterior have been shrunk by the sun and snapped in half. The tin-stamped roofs of the cupolas rising above the second story on all four corners are rusted through; past rains have entered and begun the process of a rotting collapse.

  Noah weaves up to the front of the decaying structure through a spectacular riot of overgrown exotic fauna. At the entrance stand two tall faux-Roman columns, their white plaster surfaces crumbling and chipped. He walks between the columns, pushing through more entangled vines onto a dilapidated, termite-decimated porch. The stained-glass fanlight window above the weather-beaten mahogany door is spider-webbed with cracks, threatening to shatter and crash down. The door is slightly ajar. Noah pushes it open and enters a cavernous foyer. He is surrounded by overstuffed chairs and sofas shrouded in musty dust-covered sheets. From the center of the room, a circular staircase ascends, its lustrous pecan-wood steps now buffed to a dusty dung color. He climbs the rickety staircase, which is only one loose board away from collapsing.

  At the top of the staircase, Noah stops and waits for a moment, then walks down a long hallway lined by dark cypress wood. At the end of the hallway, tall arched windows are open to the sea. He looks through an open doorway into a bedroom. He sees Lareck, a once-formidable and celebrated painter now ancient and, like his mansion, barely resembling past glories. Lareck reclines in his pajamas on top of the rumpled sheets of a bed, a large sketchpad propped up on his knees. He dips a brush into the open box of watercolors next to him and paints in quick, intuitive flourishes on the pad.

  Facing Lareck, from across the room in front of an expansive bay window, is Zoe, caught by a shaft of vivid sunshine. The light dapples off her high-boned cheeks. She wears a strapless white dress, exposing the tan of her smooth bare shoulders and long legs.

  Lareck continues his painting of Zoe as he speaks with a rolling Southern twang; his voice rises and falls in a rush of smoothed-off syllables that nearly become a high-pitched whine. “My dear muse and inspiration, loosen those lips. I don’t want you looking like Whistler’s sour-puss mother.”

  Zoe licks her lips, shifts her weight, and moves slightly. “Is this better?”

  “That’s it. Turn to the right. I want more light on you. Your skin shines with promise. A lifetime of painting, and I still chase the promise.”

  Zoe turns to a sharper profile angle in the shaft of sunlight. “Like this?” The light fires up her blond hair in a golden halo.

  Lareck pushes up on his bed pillows for a better view. “Perfect. You’re a pensive Botticelli Madonna gazing out over the Arno River in Florence. You have, my dear, the dreamy gleam of the sassy saints that the Renaissance boys fell over each other trying to capture.”

  He bends his head toward the pad and paints furiously with aggressive strokes. He puts the brush down, overcome by his creation. He takes a deep breath and sighs, rubs his eyes, and looks around. He glimpses Noah standing outside the open door in the hallway. His voice mellows in a warm greeting. “Noah, come in and sit with me.”

  Noah enters and sits in a wicker chair with chipped white paint. He is mesmerized by Zoe illuminated in tropical light streaming through the window. She shifts her body nervously at being so close to him. He looks back at Lareck. “Sorry to interrupt. I forgot you have your painting session with Zoe on Wednesday afternoons.”

  Lareck nods, picks up his brush, and continues his strokes on the large pad. “She’s the beautiful daughter I never had. But I’ve got to paint fast—beauty doesn’t last forever.”

  Zoe gives Lareck a pert, ironic smile. “And you aren’t lasting forever. So hurry up, this is a hard pose to hold. I’m getting a muscle pull in my left calf.”

  Noah looks back at Zoe. “As a poet said, nothing lasts forever, not beauty, not marriage, not even eternal love. But I’m still holding out for you on the eternal love part.”

  Zoe snaps at him, “Your philosophy comes straight from the bottom of a rum bottle. Too simple, too sugary.”

  Lareck huffs. “Quiet, your marital bliss is distracting me.”

  Noah and Zoe stay silent as Lareck continues his strokes on the pad. From the outside hallway, the sound of approaching footsteps is heard. Hogfish appears in the doorway. He steps into the room, bobbing back and forth manically to the musical beat blasting through his earbuds.

  A look of dismay spreads across Lareck’s wrinkled face. “Ah, my son pops up out of nowhere.” Hogfish doesn’t hear the words, bobbing agitatedly to his music. Lareck rolls his eyes at Noah and Zoe. “What can I say? Only that a man sends his sperm into a woman’s womb like a blind ambassador hoping to make a good deal—but a man never knows what’s going to emerge from that womb. It could be a president or a jackass.”

  Hogfish screams at Lareck: “Pop! You can’t stay here! El Finito’s coming! His hurricane wind is going to blow right through this window to get you! Run!”

  Lareck sighs. “What a cross I must bear. Where I sought the complexities of art, my son sought the simplicity of war. He thought that war was nothing more than a video game played in foreign countries with tanks and guns.”

  Noah keeps his eyes on Hogfish. “Some men fight for their truth with paintbrushes or pens. Other men fight with bullets and bombs.”

  Lareck points the sharp end of his paintbrush at Hogfish. “What’s necessary about war? The army medics rebuilt my boy’s skull with titanium plates and sent him home. Now he’s somebody I don’t know, convinced a hurricane is coming to wipe us out. I don’t know if he hears music through those damn things stuck in his ears or if he’s getting instructions from space aliens.”

  Zoe walks to Hogfish in the center of the room. She stops before him and pulls out his earbuds. His eyes widen with apprehension at her close body. He shudders and stiffens. She stares into his eyes, speaking in a firm voice: “Hogfish, you’ve survived a personal hell most people can’t even imagine. I want you to know, I believe all of your fears are justified.”

  Hogfish jams the earbuds back into his ears, wraps his arms around himself, and bobs violently.

  Luz is ushered into the bright fluorescent-lighted autopsy room of the police morgue by a white-coated lab technician. She nods hello to the Police Chief and Moxel, standing next to a high-wheeled gurney. On the gurney’s aluminum surface is laid out the naked dead body of the man Luz found hanging in the bat tower. His skin is a waxy parchment-yellow; the sides of his head are dark gashes where his ears have been slashed off. A gaping purple hollow is in his chest, where the steel arrow was extracted. His lips are riddled with puncture holes from having his mouth sewn shut with fishing line. Luz shakes her head at the brutal sight. “Poor Bill Warren.”

  The Chief holds up a micro–digital recorder. “One like this was found inside Warren’s mouth. The reason his lips were sewn shut was to hold it in. I sent that recorder to Miami for further forensics.” He sets the recorder on the gurney, next to Warren’s head. “You’re going to hear an exact duplicate of the original recording.”

  The Chief presses the play button on the recorder. From the speaker, a stream of static rises, as if emanating from a deep void and traveling a great distance. Out of the static explodes an electronically altered violent voice in a scathing wail:

  “My heart is a ticking bomb waiting to explode.

  Your evil will bleed in the streets.

  I am a suit of bones,

  a vengeful skeleton stalking your island.


  I discover wrongdoers bent by corruption and profit.

  I am a stab in your conscience,

  a knife at your throat,

  an arrow in your chest.

  My blood-red X of vengeance cannot be escaped.

  Boogie till you bounce,

  bop till you drop.

  I am Bizango.”

  The raging voice stops. Static noise vibrates the air.

  Moxel shifts uneasily. He tries to hide his unease with a sneer of bravado as he peers down at Warren. “Now we have two of Neptune Bay’s three partners chopped up like they were attacked by a blind sushi chef. Shit-in-your-pants bizarro stuff.”

  The Chief clicks off the recorder. “Bizango? It took me a while to recall this monster’s strange name. Back in the 1980s, when Luz’s father was head homicide detective here, he shot dead a man who called himself by that name. It was a big sensation. You remember that, Luz? When your father killed Bizango?”

  “I was just a kid when that happened, so I didn’t know much about it at the time.” Luz takes a deep breath. “Later I was told the story. Bizango was a serial killer, thought of himself as some kind of righteous assassin. My dad tracked him to where he was hiding and shot him. Bizango had terrified the island. No one knew who he was, because he always dressed in a full-body rubber skeleton suit.”

  “If this Bizango was shot dead years ago, who the hell is calling himself Bizango now?”

  “My dad always said, an evil thing never dies.”