by Carl Hiaasen
As he disarmed and handcuffed the truck hijacker, Jim Tile wondered aloud why anybody with half a brain would use a MAC-10 to steal a truck full of secondhand clothes. The young man said his original intention was to spray-paint a gang insignia on the side of the Salvation Army truck, but before he could finish his tagging the driver took off. The young man explained that he’d had no choice, as a matter of self-respect, but to pull his submachine gun and, yo, steal the motherfucking truck.
As Trooper Jim Tile assisted the talkative hijacker into the cage of his patrol car, he silently vowed to redouble his efforts to persuade Brenda Rourke to transfer out of this hellhole called Miami, to a more civilized hellhole where they could work together.
Snapper was proud of how he’d acquired the Jeep Cherokee, but Edie Marsh showed no interest in his conquest.
“What’s the story?” Snapper pointed at the dachshunds.
“Donald and Marla,” Edie said, annoyed. The animals were pulling her back and forth across Tony Torres’s front yard and peeing with wild abandon. Edie was amazed at the power in their stubby Vienna-sausage legs.
“By the way,” she said, straining against the leashes, “it took that asshole all of three minutes before he grabbed my tits.”
“Big deal, so you win the bet.”
“Take these damn dogs!”
Snapper backed away. Numerous encounters with police German shepherds had left him with permanent scars, physical and mental. Over the years, Snapper had become a cat person.
“Just let ’em go,” he said to Edie.
The moment she dropped the leashes, the two dachshunds curled up at her feet.
“Beautiful,” Snapper said with a grunt. “Hey, look what I found.” He flashed the chrome-plated pistol he’d taken from the gangsters. Palming the cheap gun, he noticed the chambers were empty. “Damn spades,” he said, heaving it into the murky swimming pool.
Edie Marsh told Snapper about the tough guy with the New York accent who came for Tony Torres. “You picked a peachy time to disappear,” she added.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Well, Tony’s gone. Even his damn beach chair. Figure it out yourself.”
“Shit.”
“He won’t be back,” Edie said gravely. “Not in one piece, anyway.”
A concrete block occupied the spot where Tony’s chaise had been. Snapper cursed his rotten timing. The ten grand was history. Even in the unlikely event that the salesman returned, he’d never pay. Snapper had fucked up big-time; he wasn’t cut out to be a bodyguard.
He said, “I don’t guess you got a new plan.”
A siren drowned Edie’s reply, which she punctuated with a familiar hand gesture. An ambulance came speeding down Calusa Drive. Snapper figured it was carrying Baby Raper to the hospital, for some unusual surgery. Snapper wouldn’t be surprised to read about it in a medical journal someday.
He spotted Tony Torres’s Remington shotgun, broken into pieces on the driveway. Snapper thought: It’s definitely time to abort the mission. Tomorrow he’d call Avila about the roofer’s gig.
“I’ll give you a lift,” he said to Edie Marsh, “but not those damn dogs.”
“Jesus, I can’t just leave ’em here.”
“Suit yourself.” Snapper scooped three Heinekens from Tony’s ice cooler, got in the souped-up Cherokee and drove off without so much as a wave.
Edie Marsh tethered Donald and Marla to a sprinkler in the backyard. Then she entered the ruined shell of the salesman’s house, to check for items of value.
Skink ordered Max Lamb to disrobe and climb a tree. Max did as he was told. It was a leafless willow; Max sat carefully on a springy limb, his bare legs dangling. Beneath him Skink paced, fulminating. In one hand he displayed the remote-control unit for the electronic training collar.
“You people come down here—fucking yupsters with no knowledge, no appreciation, no interest in the natural history of the place, the ancient sweep of life. Disney World—Christ, Max, that’s not Florida!” He pointed an incriminating finger at his captive. “I found the ticket stubs in your wallet, Tourist Boy.”
Max was rattled; he’d assumed everybody liked Disney World. “Please,” he said to Skink, “if you shock me now, I’ll fall.”
Skink pulled off his flowered cap and knelt by the dead embers of the campfire. Max Lamb was acutely worried. Coal-black mosquitoes swarmed his pale plump toes, but he didn’t dare slap at them. He was afraid to move a muscle.
All day the kidnapper’s spirits had seemed to improve. He’d even taken Max to a rest stop along the Tamiami Trail, so Max could call New York and leave Bonnie another message. While Max waited for the pay phone, Skink had dashed onto the highway to collect a fresh roadkill. His mood was loose, practically convivial. He sang during the entire airboat ride back to the cypress hammock; later he merely chided Max for not knowing that Neil Young had played guitar for Buffalo Springfield.
Max Lamb believed himself to be blessed with a winning personality, a delusion that led him to assume the kidnapper had grown fond of him. Max felt it was only a matter of time before he’d be able to shmooze his way to freedom. He put no stock in Skink’s oral biography, and regarded the man as an unbalanced but moderately intelligent derelict; in short, a confused soul who could be won over with a thoughtful, low-key approach. And wasn’t that an advertiser’s forte—winning people over? Max believed he was making progress, too, with tepid conversation, pointless anecdotes and the occasional self-deprecatory joke. Skink certainly acted calmer, if not serene. Three hours had passed since he’d last triggered the canine shock collar; an encouraging lull, from Max’s point of view.
Now, for reasons unknown, the one-eyed brute was seething again. To Max Lamb, he announced: “Pop quiz.”
“On what?”
Skink rose slowly. He tucked the remote control in a back pocket. With both hands he gathered his wild hair and knotted it on one side of his head, above the ear—a misplaced mop of a ponytail. Then he removed his glass eye and polished it with spit and a crusty bandanna. Max became further alarmed.
“Who was here first,” Skink asked, “the Seminoles or the Tequestas?”
“I, uh—I don’t know.” Max gripped the branch so hard that his knuckles turned pink.
Skink, replacing the artificial eyeball, retrieving the remote control from his pocket: “Who was Napoleon Bonaparte Broward?”
Max Lamb shook his head, helplessly. Skink shrugged. “How about Marjory Stoneman Douglas?”
“Yes, yes, wait a minute.” The willow limb quivered under Max’s nervous buttocks. “She wrote The Yearling!”
Moments later, regaining consciousness, he found himself in a fetal ball on a mossy patch of ground. Both knees were scraped from the fall. His throat and arms still burned from the dog collar’s jolt. Opening his eyes, Max saw the toes of Skink’s boots. He heard a voice as deep as thunder: “I should kill you.”
“No, don’t—”
“The arrogance of coming to a place like this and not knowing—”
“I’m sorry, captain.”
“—not caring to learn—”
“I told you, I’m in advertising.”
Skink slipped a hand under Max Lamb’s chin. “What do you believe in?”
“For God’s sake, it’s my honeymoon.” Max was on the slippery ledge of panic.
“What do you stand for? Tell me that, sir.”
Max Lamb cringed. “I can’t.”
Skink chuckled bitterly. “For future reference, you got your Marjories mixed up. Rawlings wrote The Yearling; Douglas wrote River of Grass. I got a hunch you won’t forget.”
He cleaned the bloody scrapes on Max’s legs and told him to put on his clothes. His confidence fractured, Max dressed in arthritic slow motion. “Are you ever going to let me go?”
Skink seemed not to have heard the question. “Know what I’d really like,” he said, stoking a new fire. “I’d like to meet this bride of yours.”
“That’s
impossible,” Max said, hoarsely.
“Oh, nothing’s impossible.”
Among the stream of outlaws who raced south in the feverish hours following the hurricane was a man named Gil Peck. His plan was to pass himself off as an experienced mason, steal what he could in the way of advance deposits, then haul ass back to Alabama. The scam had worked flawlessly against victims of Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and Gil Peck was confident it would work in Miami, too.
He arrived in a four-ton flatbed carrying a small but authentic-looking load of red bricks, which he’d ripped off from an unguarded construction site in Mobile—a new cancer wing for a pediatric hospital. Gil Peck had caught the festive groundbreaking on TV. That afternoon he’d backed up the flatbed, helped himself to the bricks and driven nonstop to South Florida.
So far, business was booming. Gil Peck had collected almost twenty-six hundred dollars in cash from half a dozen desperate home owners, all of whom expected him to return the following Saturday morning with his truckload of bricks. By then, of course, Gil Peck would be northbound and gone.
By day he worked the hustle, by night he scavenged hurricane debris. The big flatbed conveyed an air of authority, and no one questioned its presence. Even after curfew, the National Guardsmen waved him through the flashing barricades.
Many valuables had survived the storm’s thrashing, and Gil Peck became an expert at mining rubble. An inventory of his two-day bounty included: a bagel toaster, a Stairmaster, a silver tea set, three off-brand assault rifles, a Panasonic cellular telephone, two pairs of men’s golf spikes, a waterproof kilogram package of hashish, a brass chandelier, a scuba tank, a gold class ring from the University of Miami (1979), a set of police handcuffs, a collection of rare Finnish pornography, a Michael Jackson hand puppet, an unopened bottle of 100-milligram Darvocets, a boxed set of Willie Nelson albums, a Loomis fly rod, a birdcage and twenty-one pairs of women’s bikini-style panties.
Exploring the demolished remains of a mobile-home park, Gil Peck was a happy fellow. There was a bounce to his step as he followed the yellow beam of the flashlight from one ruin to another. Thanks to the Guard, the Highway Patrol and the Dade County police, Gil Peck was completely alone and unmolested in the summer night; free to plunder.
And what he spied in the middle of a shuffleboard court made his greedy heart flutter with joy: a jumbo TV dish. The hurricane undoubtedly had uprooted it from some millionaire’s estate and tossed it here, for Gil Peck to salvage. With the flashlight he traced the outer parabola and found one small dent. Otherwise the eight-foot satellite receiver was in top condition.
Gil Peck grinned and thought: Man, I must be living right. A dish that big was worth a couple grand, easy. Gil Peck thought it might fit nicely in his own backyard, behind the chicken coops. He envisioned free HBO for the rest of his natural life.
He walked around to the other side to make sure there was no additional damage. He was shocked by what his flashlight revealed: Inside the TV dish was a dead man, splayed and mounted like a butterfly.
The dead man was impaled on the cone of the receiver pipe, but it wasn’t the evil work of the hurricane. His hands and feet had been meticulously bound to the gridwork in a pose of crucifixion. The dead man himself was obese and balding, and bore no resemblance to the Jesus Christ of Gil Peck’s strict Baptist upbringing. Nonetheless, the sight unnerved the bogus mason to the point of whimpering.
He switched off the flashlight and sat on the shuffleboard court to steady himself. Stealing the TV saucer obviously was out of the question; Gil Peck was working up the nerve to swipe the expensive watch he’d spotted on the crucified guy’s left wrist.
Except for kissing his grandmother in her casket, Gil Peck had never touched a corpse before. Thank God, he thought, the guy’s eyes are closed. Gingerly Gil Peck climbed into the satellite dish, which rocked under the added weight. Holding the flashlight in his mouth, he aimed the beam at the dead man’s gold Cartier.
The clasp on the watchband was a bitch. Rigor mortis contributed to the difficulty of Gil Peck’s task; the crucified guy refused to surrender the timepiece. The more Gil Peck struggled with the corpse, the more the TV saucer rolled back and forth on its axis, like a top. Gil Peck was getting dizzy and mad. Just as he managed to slip a penknife between the taut skin and the watchband, the dead man expelled an audible blast of postmortem flatulence. The detonation sent Gil Peck diving in terror from the satellite dish.
Edie Marsh paid a neighbor kid to siphon gas from Snapper’s abandoned car and crank up Tony Torres’s portable generator. Edie gave the kid a five-dollar bill that she’d found hidden with five others inside a toolbox in the salesman’s garage. It was a pitiful excuse for a stash; Edie was sure there had to be more.
At dusk she gave up the search and planted herself in Tony’s BarcaLounger, a crowbar at her side. She turned up the volume of the television as loudly as she could stand, to block out the rustles and whispers of the night. Without doors, windows or a roof, the Torres house was basically an open campsite. Outside was black and creepy; people wandered like spirits through the unlit streets. Edie Marsh had the jitters, being alone. She gladly would have fled in Tony’s huge boat of a Chevrolet, if it hadn’t been blocked in the driveway by Snapper’s car, which Edie would have gladly swiped if only Snapper hadn’t taken the damn keys with him. So she was stuck at the Torres house until daybreak, when it might be safe for a woman to travel on foot with two miniature dachshunds.
She planned to get out of Dade County before anything else went wrong. The expedition was a disaster, and Edie blamed no one but herself. Nothing in her modest criminal past had prepared her for the hazy and menacing vibe of the hurricane zone. Everyone was on edge; evil, violence and paranoia ripened in the shadows. Edie Marsh was out of her league here. Tomorrow she’d hitch a ride to West Palm and close up the apartment. Then she’d take the Amtrak home to Jacksonville, and try to make up with her boyfriend. She estimated that reconciliation would require at least a week’s worth of blow jobs, considering how much she’d stolen from his checking account. But eventually he’d take her back. They always did.
Edie Marsh was suffering through a TV quiz show when she heard a man’s voice calling from the front doorway. She thought: Tony! The pig is back.
She grabbed the crowbar and sprung from the chair. The man at the door raised his arms. “Easy,” he said.
It wasn’t Tony Torres. This person was a slender blond with round eyeglasses and a tan briefcase and matching Hush Puppy shoes. In one hand he carried a manila file folder.
“What do you want?” Edie held the crowbar casually, as if she carried it at all times.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said. “My name is Fred Dove. I’m with Midwest Casualty.”
“Oh.” Edie Marsh felt a pleasant tingle. Like the first time she’d met one of the young Kennedys.
With a glance at the file, Fred Dove said, “Maybe I’ve got the wrong street. This is 15600 Calusa?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you’re Mrs. Torres?”
Edie smiled. “Please,” she said, “call me Neria.”
CHAPTER
8
Bonnie and Augustine were cutting a pizza when Augustine’s FBI friend stopped by to pick up the tape of Max Lamb’s latest message. He listened to it several times on the cassette player in Augustine’s living room. Bonnie studied the FBI man’s expression, which remained intently neutral. She supposed it was something they worked on at the academy.
When he finished playing the tape, the FBI agent turned to Augustine and said, “I’ve read it somewhere. That ‘creaking machinery of humanity.’”
“Me, too. I’ve been racking my brain.”
“God, I can just see ’em up in Washington, giving it to a crack team of shrinks—”
“Or cryptographers,” Augustine said.
The FBI man smiled. “Exactly.” He accepted a hot slice of pepperoni for the road, and said good night.
“Never,” she said. Her husband was into ditties and jingles, not metaphysics. “And he doesn’t read much,” she added. “The last book he finished was one of Trump’s autobiographies.”
It was enough to convince Augustine that Max Lamb wasn’t being coy on the phone; the mystery man was feeding him lines. Augustine didn’t know why. The situation was exceedingly strange.
Bonnie took a shower. She came out wearing a baby-blue flannel nightshirt that Augustine recognized from a long-ago relationship. Bonnie had found it hanging in a closet.
“Is there a story to go with it?” she asked.
“A torrid one.”
“Really?” Bonnie sat beside him on the sofa, at a purely friendly distance. “Let me guess: Flight attendant?”
Augustine said, “Letterman’s a rerun.”
“Cocktail waitress? Fashion model?”
“I’m beat.” Augustine picked up a book, a biography of Lech Walesa, and flipped it open to the middle.
“Aerobics instructor? Legal secretary?”
“Surgical intern,” Augustine said. “She tried to cut out my kidneys one night in the shower.”
“That’s the scar on your back? The Y.”
“At least she wasn’t a urologist.” He closed the book and picked up the channel changer for the television.
Bonnie said, “You cheated on her.”
“Nope, but she thought I did. She also thought the bathtub was full of centipedes, Cuban spies were spiking her lemonade, and Richard Nixon was working the night shift at the Farm Store on Bird Road.”
“Drug problem?”
“Evidently.” Augustine found a Dodgers game on ESPN and tried to appear engrossed.
Bonnie Lamb asked to see the scar closely, but he declined. “The lady had poor technique,” he said.
“She use a real scalpel?”