by Carl Hiaasen
The crackhead mumbled something about contracting licenses. Avila turned to Snapper and said, “They ask about our license, you know what to do.”
“Run?”
“Exactamente!”
Snapper wasn’t pleased with his door-to-door role in the operation, particularly the odds of encountering large pet dogs. He said to Avila: “Sounds like too much talking to strangers. I hate that shit. Why don’t you do the contracts?”
“Because I inspected some of these goddamn houses when I was with building-and-zoning.”
“The owners don’t know that.”
Chango had warned Avila to be careful. Chango was Avila’s personal santería deity. Avila had thanked him with a turtle and two rabbits.
“I’m keeping low,” Avila told Snapper. “B-and-Z’s got snitches all over the damn county. Somebody recognizes my face, we’re screwed.”
Snapper wasn’t sure if Avila was paranoid or purely lazy. “So where will you be exactly,” he said, “when we’re out on a job? Maybe some air-conditioned office.” He heard the roofers snicker, a hopeful sign of solidarity.
But Avila was quick to assert his authority. “Job? This isn’t no ‘job,’ it’s an act. You boys aren’t here ’cause you can mop tar. You’re here ’cause you look like you can.”
“What about me?” Snapper goaded. “How come I was hired?”
“Because we couldn’t get Robert Redford.” Avila stood up to signal the end of the meeting. “Snap, why the hell you think you got hired? So people would be sure to pay. Comprende? One look at that fucked-up face, and they know you mean business.”
Maybe an ordinary criminal would’ve taken it as a compliment. Snapper did not.
All the mattresses in Tony Torres’s house were soaked from the storm, so Edie Marsh had sex with the insurance man on the BarcaLounger. It was a noisy and precarious endeavor. Fred Dove was nervous, so Edie had to assist him each step of the way. Afterwards he said he must’ve slipped a disk. Edie was tempted to remark that he hadn’t moved enough muscles to slip anything; instead she told him he was a stallion in technique and proportion. It was a strategy that seldom failed. Fred Dove contentedly fell asleep with his head on her shoulder and his legs snagged in the footrest, but not before promising to submit a boldly fraudulent damage claim for the Torres house and split the check with Edie Marsh.
An hour before dawn, Edie heard a terrible commotion in the backyard. She couldn’t rise to investigate because she was pinned beneath the insurance man in the BarcaLounger. Judging from the tumult outside, Donald and Marla had gone rabid. The confrontation ended in a flurry of plaintive yips and a hair-raising roar. Edie Marsh didn’t move until the sun came up. Then she stealthily roused Fred Dove, who panicked because he’d forgotten to phone his wife back in Omaha. Edie told him to hush up and put on his pants.
She led him to the backyard. The only signs of the two miniature dachshunds were limp leashes and empty collars. The Torres lawn was torn to shreds. Several large tracks were visible in the damp gray soil; deep raking tracks, with claws.
Fred Dove’s left Hush Puppy fit easily one of the imprints. “Good Lord,” he said, “and I wear a ten and a half!”
Edie Marsh asked what kind of wild animal would make such a track. Fred Dove said it looked big enough to be a lion or a bear. “But I’m not a hunter,” he added.
She said, “Can I come stay with you?”
“At the Ramada?”
“What—they don’t allow women?”
“Edie, we shouldn’t be seen together. Not if we’re going through with this.”
“You expect me to stay out here alone?”
“Look, I’m sorry about your dogs—”
“They weren’t my goddamn dogs.”
“Please, Edie.”
With his round eyeglasses, Fred Dove reminded her of a serious young English teacher she’d known in high school. The man had worn Bass loafers with no socks and was obsessed with T. S. Eliot. Edie Marsh had screwed the guy twice in the faculty lounge, but he’d still given her a C on her final exam because (he claimed) she’d missed the whole point of “J. Alfred Prufrock.” The experience had left Edie Marsh with a deep-seated mistrust of studious-looking men.
She said, “What do you mean, if we go through with this? We made a deal.”
“Yes,” Fred Dove said. “Yes, we did.”
As he followed her into the house, she asked, “How soon can you get this done?”
“Well, I could file the claim this week—”
“Hundred percent loss?”
“That’s right,” replied the insurance man.
“A hundred and forty-one grand. Seventy-one for me, seventy for you.”
“Right.” For somebody about to score the windfall of a lifetime, Fred Dove was subdued. “My concern, again, is Mister Torres—”
“Like I told you last night, Tony’s in some kind of serious jam. I doubt he’ll be back.”
“But didn’t you say Mrs. Torres, the real Mrs. Torres, might be returning to Miami—”
“That’s why you need to hurry,” Edie Marsh said. “Tell the home office it’s an emergency.”
The insurance man pursed his lips. “Edie, every case is an emergency. There’s been a hurricane, for God’s sake.”
Impassively, she watched him finish dressing. He spent five full minutes trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his sex-rumpled Dockers. When he asked to borrow an iron, Edie reminded him there was no electricity.
“How about taking me to breakfast,” she said.
“I’m already late for an appointment in Cutler Ridge. Some poor old man’s got a Pontiac on top of his house.” Fred Dove kissed Edie on the forehead and followed up with the obligatory morning-after hug. “I’ll be back tonight. Is nine all right?”
“Fine,” she said. Tonight he’d undoubtedly bring condoms—one more comic speed bump on the highway to passion. She made a mental note to haul one of Tony’s mattresses out in the sun to dry; another strenuous session in the BarcaLounger might put poor Freddie in traction.
“Bring the claim forms,” she told him. “I want to see everything.”
He jotted a reminder on his clipboard and slipped it into the briefcase.
“Oh yeah,” Edie said. “I also need a couple gallons of gas from your car.”
Fred Dove looked puzzled.
“For the generator,” she explained. “A hot bath would be nice … since you won’t let me share your tub at the Ramada.”
“Oh, Edie—”
“And maybe a few bucks for groceries.”
She softened up when the insurance man took out his wallet. “That’s my boy.” She kissed him on the neck and ended it with a little bite, just to prime the pump.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“Don’t be, sugar. It’s a breeze.” She took two twenties and sent him on his way.
CHAPTER
10
On the drive to the morgue, Augustine and Bonnie Lamb heard a news report about a fourteen-foot reticulated python that had turned up in the salad bar of a fast-food joint in Perrine.
“One of yours?” Bonnie asked.
“I’m wondering.” It was impossible to know if the snake had belonged to Augustine’s dead uncle; Felix Mojack’s handwritten inventory was vague on details.
“He had a couple big ones,” Augustine said, “but I never measured the damn things.”
Bonnie said, “I hope they didn’t kill it.”
“Me, too.” He was pleased that she was concerned for the welfare of a primeval reptile. Not all women would be.
“They could give it to a zoo,” she said.
“Or turn it loose at the county commission.”
“You’re bad.”
“I know,” Augustine said. As legal custodian of the menagerie, he felt a twinge of responsibility for Bonnie Lamb’s predicament. Without a monkey to chase, her husband probably wouldn’t have been abducted. Maybe the culprit was one of Uncle Felix’s rhesuses, m
aybe not.
Without reproach, Bonnie asked: “What’ll you do if one of those critters kills a person?”
“Pray it was somebody who deserved it.”
Bonnie was appalled. Augustine said, “I don’t know what else to do, short of a safari. You know how big the Everglades are?”
They rode in silence for a while before Bonnie said: “You’re right. They’re free, and that’s how it ought to be.”
“I don’t know how anything ought to be, but I know how it is. Hell, those cougars could be in Key Largo by now.”
Bonnie Lamb smiled sadly. “I wish I was.”
Before entering the chill of the Medical Examiner’s Office, she put on a baggy ski sweater that Augustine had brought for the occasion. This time there were no preliminaries to the viewing. The same young coroner led them directly to the autopsy room, where the newly murdered John Doe was the center of attention. The corpse was surrounded by detectives, uniformed cops, and an unenthusiastic contingent of University of Miami medical students. They parted for Augustine and Bonnie Lamb.
A ruddy, gray-haired man in a lab coat stood at the head of the steel table. He nodded cordially and took a step back. Holding her breath, Bonnie lowered her eyes to the corpse. The man was potbellied and balding. His olive skin was covered from shoulder to toe with sprouts of shiny black hair. In the center of the chest was a gaping, raspberry-hued wound. His throat was a necklace of bruises that looked very much like purple fingerprints.
“It’s not my husband,” Bonnie Lamb said.
Augustine led her away. A tall black policeman followed.
“Mrs. Lamb?”
Bonnie, on autopilot, kept moving.
“Mrs. Lamb, I need to speak with you.”
She turned. The policeman was broadly muscled and walked with a hitch in his right leg. He wore a state trooper’s uniform and held a tan Stetson in his huge hands. He seemed as relieved to be out of the autopsy room as they were.
Augustine asked if there was a problem. The trooper suggested they go someplace to talk.
“About what?” Bonnie asked.
“Your husband’s disappearance. I’m running down a few leads, that’s all.” The trooper’s manner was uncharacteristically informal for a cop in uniform. He said, “Just a few questions, folks. I promise.”
Augustine didn’t understand why the Highway Patrol would take an interest in a missing-person case. He said, “She’s already spoken to the FBI.”
“This won’t take long.”
Bonnie said, “If you’ve got something new, anything, I’d like to hear about it.”
“I know a great Italian place,” the trooper said.
Augustine saw that Bonnie had made up her mind. “Is this official business?” he asked the trooper.
“Extremely unofficial.” Jim Tile put on his hat. “Let’s go eat,” he said.
In the mid-1970s, a man named Clinton Tyree ran for governor of Florida. On paper he seemed an ideal candidate, a bold fresh voice in a cynical age. He was a rare native son, handsome, strapping; an ex–college football sensation and a decorated veteran of Vietnam. On the campaign trail, he could talk smart in Palm Beach or play dumb in the Panhandle. The media were dazzled because he spoke in complete sentences, spontaneously and without index cards. Best of all, his private past was uncluttered by slimy business deals, the intricacies of which taxed the comprehension of journalists and readers alike.
Clinton Tyree’s only political liability was a five-year stint as an English professor at the University of Florida, a job that historically would have marked a candidate as too thoughtful, educated and broad-minded for state office. But, in a stunning upset, voters forgave Clint Tyree’s erudition and elected him governor.
Naively, the Tallahassee establishment welcomed the new chief executive. The barkers, pimps and fast-change artists who controlled the legislature assumed that, like most of his predecessors, Clinton Tyree dutifully would slide into the program. He was, after all, a local boy. Surely he understood how things worked.
But behind the governor’s movie-star smile was the incendiary fervor of a terrorist. He brought with him to the capital a passion so deep and untainted that it was utterly unrecognizable to other politicians; they quickly decided that Clinton Tyree was a crazy man. In his first post-election interview, he told The New York Times that Florida was being destroyed by unbridled growth, overdevelopment and pollution, and that the stinking root of those evils was greed. By way of illustration, he cited the Speaker of the Florida House for possessing “the ethics of an intestinal bacterium,” merely because the man had accepted a free trip to Bangkok from a Miami Beach high-rise developer. Later Tyree went on radio urging visitors and would-be residents to stay out of the Sunshine State for a few years, “so we can gather our senses.” He announced a goal of Negative Population Growth and proposed generous tax incentives for counties that significantly reduced human density. Tyree couldn’t have caused more of an uproar had he been preaching satanism to preschoolers.
The view that the new governor was mentally unstable was reinforced by his refusal to accept bribes. More appallingly, he shared the details of these illicit offers with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that manner, one of the state’s richest and most politically connected land developers got shut down, indicted and convicted of corruption. Clearly Clinton Tyree was a menace.
No previous governor had dared to disrupt the business of paving Florida. For seventy glorious years, the state had shriveled safely in the grip of those most efficient at looting its resources. Suddenly this reckless young upstart was inciting folks like a damn communist. Save the rivers. Save the coasts. Save the Big Cypress. Where would it end? Time magazine put him on the cover. David Brinkley called him a New Populist. The National Audubon Society gave him a frigging medal.…
One night, in a curtained booth of a restaurant called the Silver Slipper, a pact was made to stop the madman. His heroics in Southeast Asia made him immune to customary smear tactics, so the only safe alternative was to neutralize him politically. It was a straightforward plan: No matter what the new governor wanted, the legislature and cabinet would do the opposite—a voting pattern to be ensured by magnanimous contributions from bankers, contractors, real estate brokers, hoteliers, farm conglomerates and other special-interest groups that were experiencing philosophical differences with Clinton Tyree.
The strategy succeeded. Even the governor’s fellow Democrats felt sufficiently threatened by his reforms to abandon him without compunction. Once it became clear to Clint Tyree that the freeze was on, he slowly began to come apart. Each defeat in the legislature hit him like a sledge. His public appearances were marked by bilious oratory and dark mutterings. He lost weight and let his hair grow. During one cryptic press conference, he chose not to wear a shirt. He wrote acidulous letters on official stationery, and gave interviews in which he quoted at length from Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and David Crosby. One night the state trooper assigned to guard the governor found him creeping through a graveyard; Clinton Tyree explained his intention was to dig up the remains of the late Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, the governor who had first schemed to drain the Everglades. Tyree’s idea was to distribute Governor Broward’s bones as souvenirs to visitors in the capitol rotunda.
Meanwhile the ravaging of Florida continued unabated, as did the incoming stampede. A thousand fortune-seekers took up residence in the state every day, and there was nothing Clint Tyree could do about it.
So he quit, fled Tallahassee on a melancholy morning in the back of a state limousine, and melted into the tangled wilderness. In the history of Florida, no governor had ever before resigned; in fact, no elected officeholder had made such an abrupt or eccentric exit from public life. Journalists and authors hunted the missing Clinton Tyree but never caught up with him. He moved by night, fed off the road, and adopted the solitary existence of a swamp rattler. Those who encountered him knew him by the name of Skink, or simply “captain,” a sole
mn hermitage interrupted by the occasional righteous arson, aggravated battery or highway sniping.
Only one man held the runaway governor’s complete trust—the Highway Patrol trooper who had been assigned to guard him during the gubernatorial campaign and later had come to work at the governor’s mansion; the same trooper who was driving the limousine on the day Clinton Tyree disappeared. It was he alone who knew the man’s whereabouts, kept in touch and followed his movements; who was there to help when Clinton Tyree went around the bend, which he sometimes did. The trooper had been there soon after his friend lost an eye in a vicious beating; again after he shot up some rental cars in a roadside spree; again after he burned down an amusement park.
Some years were quieter than others.
“But he’s been waiting for this hurricane,” Jim Tile said, twirling a spoonful of spaghetti. “There’s cause to be concerned.”
Augustine said: “I’ve heard of this guy.”
“Then you understand why I need to talk to Mrs. Lamb.”
“Mrs. Lamb,” Bonnie said, caustically, “can’t believe what she’s hearing. You think this lunatic’s got Max?”
“An old lady in the neighborhood saw a man fitting the governor’s description carrying a man fitting your husband’s description. Over his shoulder. Buck naked.” Jim Tile paused to allow Mrs. Lamb to form a mental picture of the scene. He said, “I don’t know about the lady’s eyesight, but it’s worth checking out. You mentioned a tape you made—the kidnapper’s voice.”
“It’s back at the house,” said Augustine.
“Would you mind if I listened to it?”
Bonnie said, “This is ludicrous, what you’re saying—”
“Humor me,” said Jim Tile.
Bonnie pushed away her plate of lasagna, half eaten. “What’s your interest?”
“He’s my friend. He’s in trouble,” the trooper said.
“All I care about is Max.”
“They’re both in danger.”
Bonnie demanded to know about the fat man in the morgue. The trooper said he’d been strangled and impaled on a TV satellite dish. The motive didn’t appear to be robbery.