Very festive, Donny observed, though he wondered why they held Founder’s Day at night. Crackers just didn’t do things the way normal people do them, yet wasn’t there a sweet innocence about observed traditions in hick towns throughout this land of ours? The Annes filmed him as he and Sheriff Plotner unsteadily ascended the steps to the stage. After his encounter with the gangplank, Donny was leery of all means of elevated egress and ingress.
Captain Bert never made it to the stage steps. He stepped in a hole and fell on his side. It was kind of comfy down there in the warm sand, so he elected to remain for a brief nap. Professor Goode, who was supposed to appear behind Donny on the dais, couldn’t get the car door open.
Anne’s Electro-pak lighting unit flooded the stage.
Sheriff Plotner raised his hands to the audience, calling for quiet as if before a restive capacity crowd at the Orange Bowl. He thumped the microphone. It worked, but he liked the sound, so he thumped it again. “Ladies and gentlemen of Omnium Settlement”—feedback pierced the night—“we’re gonna get this Founder’s Day party in full swing here, but first a couple announcements—” Sheriff Plotner was ad-libbing now, getting in shape for Ted Koppel. “Be sure you all buy your raffle tickets for the new Evinrude outboard motor. Remember, if you ain’t in it, you can’t win it. Also if yer drinkin’ out there, remember, you gotta keep yer bottles in brown paper bags; it’s the law of the land. Now, without further doo—ado—let me introduce our guest of honor, who come all the way from New York City to grace us with his presence. Weren’t for this man’s gran’daddy, why, there wouldn’t be no Omnium Settlement. We’d all be living in cheekees, wrestlin’ alligators, and holdin’ bingo games. Our guest of honor took off from his busy schedule of makin’ deals to help us keep the memory alive, so let’s give him a big round of applause, let’s give a big southern welcome to one o’ the best of the good ole boys! Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Donald Throckmorton Sikes!”
Stage right and left, twin 400,000-candlepower halogen boat spots snapped on, and beams of yellowish light, like solid things, struck Donny in the temples.
Donald Sikes wobbled at the podium and peered out across the land. The site. The unit. The lot. The waxing moon danced on the dark surface of Small Hope Bay, soon to become new land. Gramps would be proud, and that made Donald Sikes feel warm inside. After all these years, Gramps’s vision was to be vindicated, and he, Donny Sikes, was the agent of vindication. And soon the entire county would carry Gramps’s name. The town fathers would cave in to his demands. He had no doubt of that. Why wouldn’t they? They had all to gain, and nothing to lose. With Big Al gone the way of Jimmy Hoffa, who was there to block his vision? And now he wished to stand here for a moment in the limelight, as it were, and watch the audience watching him, savor the festive feel of it, lanterns bobbing, moonlight shimmering, soft breezes caressing, the tropical splendor of victory—
And look! The audience was lighting candles. How quaintly charming an effect. They were lighting candles to honor him, holding them beneath their chins, illuminating their faces…
The realization came slowly at first, eyes adjusting to what seemed like a thousand points of light, then focusing on the faces themselves, but when realization finally struck, the force of it knocked Donny back a pace from the microphone. Bums! These were the faces of bums. Victims! These faces were beat to shit! What did it mean?
Indeed the effect was powerful. The Annes had made up the squatters of Omnium Settlement to look like the Beggars of London in The Threepenny Opera. Hideous skin eruptions, goiters, scars, pus, red festering wounds, wreckage of humanity, stunted children and hopeless adults—
Donny whimpered in shock at the sight, but this was nothing compared to the next: the sight of Big Al Broadnax, house center, his son Sennacherib holding a candle before his face!
Ghosts of Founder’s Nacht!
Was he going insane? Donny Sikes brushed at the winged insects alighting on his cheek. He turned upstage away from the dreadful audience, and then he saw her, sitting on the stage beside the stinking sheriff—the scuba diving woman, with the tits! Alive! Grinning at him!
Donny stumbled stage left, then right. The boat spots followed him from side to side, then settled, soaking him in the harsh light of confusion as he regained his balance. Grinning at him! After brushing off the last insect, he began to collect himself at least enough to ask himself some questions. For example, what the fuck was going on here in the dark! These weren’t ghosts, these were people, living people, whom Mr. Freed did not kill!
Donald Sikes grabbed the podium, tilted it, and hurled it at Rosalind. Sheriff Plotner went over backward in his chair, but Rosalind dodged the rolling podium. But she didn’t stop grinning! As if they had him dead to rights. Donny Sikes dead to rights! They had nothing! They couldn’t prove a thing! What could they prove?
“I’ll get you for this!” he screamed in a choked, boyish voice before he leapt off the upstage edge and ran for the road. He smashed into a stand of wild sea grape, and the world turned dark. He tore wildly at their leaves and batted at their branches, but he was getting nowhere. He dropped in the sand and belly-crawled around their boles. The trees tore at his clothes and scratched his face, but he continued to crawl until he came out on the road, where he began to run for the King Don.
He’d never make it on foot. He halted, panting. He needed transport. Bad. What was this? A moped. Donald Sikes didn’t know much about motor vehicles, since someone else always drove him around, but he knew mopeds, having rented one once in Bermuda. He mounted up and kicked at the starter. Pudgy knees akimbo, he twisted the throttle for full speed.
“What the fuck is going on here!” Big Al Broadnax demanded of his son. “Who the fuck was that guy!”
“He’s a comedian, Dad. They hired him for the celebration,” said Snack.
“What celebration!”
“Why, the celebration for the Colonel A.C. Broadnax Memorial Museum. These folks here, they’re the ones going to build it.”
“Oh. Really?…They could use a bath.”
EMBARKATION
Teeth bared, Donald Sikes sped down the dock past Staggerlee’s late berth and careened the moped deftly up the gangplank right to the bulwark above the King Don’s main deck, but he slammed his balls on the seat prong as he dismounted. The moped fell into the water, sizzling as it sank. Shit! Donny forgot the dock lines. His balls throbbed. Moving hurt, so he decided to skip the dock lines, let the ship tear them off.
But could he operate the King Don? He’d watched his crooked captain do it numerous times. There was nothing that pothead could do that a man of Donny’s caliber couldn’t. Donny hobbled up the companionway into the wheelhouse. He’d flee full speed ahead to international waters, then decide what all this meant, this Founder’s Day. It was some kind of setup, but what kind? What was the point? He fumbled for the light switch on the after bulkhead. The light came on. He screamed—
Donny Sikes was not alone in the wheelhouse. There was a man wearing a bathing suit in there with him, and it didn’t take an M.D. to know that that man was dead as a hammer. There was a corpse sitting in the helmsman’s seat! Not exactly sitting. This dead man was as stiff as a plate-glass window. Why was he stiff like that? Donny approached…The stiff wasn’t wearing a bathing suit; he was wearing a pair of blood-encrusted Jockey shorts! The bugs were bouncing off Donny’s cheeks now. Panic welled…Mr. Freed!
Donny tapped Mr. Freed’s forearm with his fingernail. Mr. Freed’s forearm was frozen. In fact, all of Mr. Freed was frozen! That’s why he wasn’t exactly sitting in the helmsman’s seat. There was a blue-black hole in his forehead ringed with cold gray ooze. Donny Sikes clutched his face and bellowed. The pep band played Chuck Berry’s greatest hits.
He glanced out the shoreside window. The sheriff was roaring up the road. Others—the halt, lame, mutilated—were making their way on foot down the dock toward the King Don. Marchers still carried twinkling candles. The parade was coming after him! H
e should have known killers didn’t have agents! Gramps would call him a fool for that. Later. He’d worry about that later. First priority was speed. Maybe he didn’t need to make it all the way to international water. Maybe he could find a nice swampy hole where he could dump this frozen hitter, whose pupils were milky discs like the eyes of a dead barracuda.
Donny punched the starter button, and his three MTU 16V-396TB94’s roared to life. There was hope in that sound, sea room in that sound. The green lights and gauges on the instrument panel cast a cozy glow. Needles jumped. Maybe everything would be all right. But how did Walter Freed get—! Donny shoved the throttles to their stops.
Small Hope Bay frothed and boiled under the stern. The bow line fell slack as the stern line twanged taut. It stretched to its limit. The dock creaked and groaned. The dock gave up first. The plank to which the cleat was bolted pulled through its fasteners, and like a slingshot the recoiling line hurled plank and cleat through the panoramic smoked windows of the main salon. The same thing happened with the bow line. It tore out a large section of dock and trolled the boards against the side.
Just then, when escape seemed possible, Donny spotted Doom Loomis. Legs crossed, he was sitting on a dock piling like a nasty fucking leprechaun. He was wearing a wet suit. And he was wet. Why was he wet?
The King Don didn’t steam ten feet over the bottom before the new, improved Longnecker special detonated under her keel. Concussion tore through the ship in waves. The sound of things breaking followed each wave. Marble cracked, steel snapped, glass shattered. Donny found himself on his ass. But that was minor compared to the damage below the waterline. The bomb had buckled a steel plate and flattened the engine room’s forward bulkhead. Almost instantly the power plants, flooded, died with a violated hiss. And the King Don came to a stop. Chlorine gas from the batteries coursed through her insides.
Donny whimpered like a little boy abandoned in a shopping mall…He couldn’t hear! Doom Loomis did it! Defeated and deafened by some geek, some nobody! Donny screamed at the outrage of it all. Then he began to kick things. He drove his fist through the radar screen. He moved in the smoke of disbelief. Doom Loomis! A small-timer’s son! A depressed sailor!
Mr. Freed! He had to get Mr. Freed over the side. Mr. Freed’s presence would be hard to explain. Walter Vale, a.k.a. Mr. Freed, had been frozen at the morgue in a recumbent posture, arms at his sides, bare feet falling outboard, fish eyes staring at the ceiling. Donny clutched Walter Vale’s head under his armpit, dragged the stiff’s heels along the wheelhouse floor and out the door on the starboard side, the side away from the dock.
Groaning, balls and brains throbbing, Donald Sikes hefted Walter Vale up against the bulwark and leaned him there like a shovel. Donny didn’t mean to look Walter Vale in the face, but he did. There was the stuff of insanity in the sight. Little icicles hung from his eyelashes. His blue-black lips formed an O as if the bullet that made the mouthlike hole in his forehead had come as something of a surprise. And that wasn’t the only hole in Mr. Freed. His torso seemed riddled with hideous puckers. Donald Sikes squatted, clutched the icy thighs, and lifted the corpse’s lower region up to the bulwark rail. Donald Sikes shoved Walter Vale over the side.
No splash?…Why was there no—? Donny peeked over the side. He moaned at the sight: Walter Vale hung upside down by a 500-pound test fishing line tied around his ankles. Only his head bobbed in the water. Where was the other end of the line! Donald Sikes crawled along the line until he got to the knot. It was tied to the base of the helmsman’s seat. He clawed at it. He bit at it, but he couldn’t break the knot under that load.
The lights went out aboard the King Don.
“Gramps! Gramps!” keened Donald Sikes to the darkness as he scurried in tight circles on his hands and knees. He peeked out the dockside window. The crowd had assembled there, candles flickering. There was that bitch Rosalind, the stinking sheriff, and Doom Loomis!
Doom waved at Donny.
Donny ducked out of sight and resumed his confused circular crawling. He had to get off this boat! With its life sentence hanging dead to rights off the starboard side. On the next lap he noticed something strange—not as strange as Mr. Freed hanging over the side, but still strange. The crowd was now looking straight into the wheelhouse window, directly at Donny circling. When Donny had boarded his boat, her bridge deck floated twenty feet above the dock. Now dock and wheelhouse were level. That could mean only one thing! Either they were pumping up the dock or—
Donald Sikes ducked under Walter’s tether, hurled himself out the door and over the rail. His feet hit something hard before they hit the water, something that might have been Mr. Freed.
Light beams from the Annes’ movie cameras were pawing the black water, searching for him. He ducked underwater and swam for his life. Roger Vespucci was among the first to see him surface, but Roger did not point out his position to the crowd. He wanted Donny Sikes alone. He was swimming south out around the parking lot. A thicket of red mangroves lined the shore in that direction all the way down to Omnium Settlement. It looked to Roger Vespucci that the man who had tried to murder him in cold blood was heading for the cover of that thicket. Roger cocked his spear gun—the best gun he could come up with under the circumstances—and ran across the lighted lot to vanish among the mangrove roots, to wait where no light penetrated.
Doom Loomis felt sorry for Donald Sikes in his wild-eyed flight and for the King Don sinking pathetically in the shallow water of Small Hope Bay. Soon she would come to rest on the oozy bottom with only the bridge deck protruding. She hissed and boiled as if protesting the waste of it all. Doom averted his eyes. Rosalind put her arm around his shoulder.
Tears ran down Rosalind’s cheeks. Doom put his face in her hair. “I guess this is it,” Rosalind muttered.
“I knew we wouldn’t feel good when it was over,” said Doom.
The Flamingo Tongue skippers discussed the intricacies of marine salvage law without moving their lips.
But it wasn’t over yet.
Donald Sikes crawled ashore in the mangroves. Flaying his ankles on the root oysters, he clambered into the thicket. Through the chinks, he could see the crowd heading his way, lights licking at the trees. Then a flashlight beam hit him flush in the eyes and knocked him to his knees—
“Come on, Donny, give yourself up!” It was the smelly sheriff calling. “You’ll only get hurt in there—” But it wasn’t the sheriff’s light that struck him in the face.
“It’s me, Donny,” said the man with the light, a voice full of glee.
“Who? Who are you?”
“I’ll give you a hint: Want a piña colada, you crazy lush?”
“Roger!”
All the dead were coming back to haunt him! “Half a mil, Roger. All yours. Just help me get out of here!”
“You aren’t going to get out of here,” said Roger flatly.
“What?”
“This is where you’re going to die. Not a very nice place, huh? Tough shit.” Squinting, Roger Vespucci peered down the shaft of the spear, lined it up with Donny’s heart, and he would have pulled the trigger, he intended to pull the trigger, but—
A gun fired a single shot. It struck Donald Sikes in the right temple. In the beam of his own flashlight Roger saw Donny’s head jerk violently left, then back to its normal attitude. Donny Sikes was dead before he hit the ground. He sagged straight down into the mud. His body wanted to fall over, but the mangrove roots prevented it. Instead, he sat there, hands in his lap, head lolling.
Roger cringed, waiting for the impact against his own head…When it didn’t happen, he slowly turned the light to his left, where the shot had come from.
It was an old lady! An old lady with a leather face! Maybe it was a mask, a disguise. Maybe it was a transvestite. Roger threw down his spear gun. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! I didn’t like him either!”
Lisa Up-the-Grove examined Donny’s head. It didn’t take long to assure herself that Donny was dead
. “This man kidnapped my granddaughter. Had her stripped, scared. He was going to kill her. You do that to my granddaughter, you get shot in the skull. The tide goes in, the tide goes out. That’s the way things work.”
“Sure, lady, absolutely. I don’t blame you,” said Roger. Did she mean to shoot him now? “He tried to kill me. That’s why, uh, I was going to spear him—” Roger was backpedaling in the mud. “We better get out of here, you know what I mean? Don’t wanna be caught hanging around your victims—You take care now—” Roger Vespucci turned and crashed out of the thicket, taking a terrible beating on the way, but that was better than a bullet in the brain pan.
Lisa Up-the-Grove silently dematerialized.
Sheriff Plotner shone his light on Donny Sikes after he had cordoned off the area.
The Annes filmed the body.
“He’s dead,” said the sheriff when Doom arrived on the scene alone, having convinced Rosalind to spare herself the sight.
“And I bet I know who done it,” said Sheriff Plotner, who was crowded shoulder to shoulder next to Doom in the thicket.
“Who?” said Doom, in the excitement barely noticing the stink.
“That joker Roger Vespucci. That was your idea, right? I mean that’s why you let him go, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be here somewhere. I’ll block off the bridge. He ain’t got a prayer of escape—” The sheriff started to slog off, tripping over roots.
“Ahh, Sheriff—”
“Yeah, what?”
“I think we ought to let him go again.”
“What? Why!”
“Because if we catch him there will be a trial. We don’t want there to be a trial.”
No trial, no publicity. No publicity, no Ted Koppel. Shit.
“A lot of things might come out in the trial. Some of the things could land you and me and our friends in jail. It’s just like the Annes’ film. It can’t ever see the light of day. The Annes know that. We’ve discussed it, haven’t we?”
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