Stormy Weather

by Carl Hiaasen

  “You’ve had enough excitement. We all have.”

  “You, son!” the governor barked at Augustine. “You had enough excitement?”

  “Well, they just shot my water buffalo at a supermarket—”

  “Ho!” Skink exclaimed.

  “—but I’d be honored to help.” The skull juggling had left Augustine energetic and primed. He was in the mood for a new project, now that Bonnie’s husband was safe.

  “You think about what I said,” Skink told Jim Tile. “In the meantime, I’m damn near hungry enough to eat processed food. How about you guys?”

  He charged toward the door, but the trooper blocked his path. “Put on your pants, captain. Please.”

  • • •

  The corpse of Tony Torres lay unclaimed and unidentified in the morgue. Each morning Ira Jackson checked the Herald, but in the reams of hurricane news there was no mention of a crucified mobile-home salesman. Ira Jackson took this as affirmation of Tony Torres’s worthlessness and insignificance; his death didn’t rate one lousy paragraph in the newspaper.

  Ira Jackson turned his vengeful attentions toward Avila, the inspector who had corruptly rubber-stamped the permits for the late Beatrice Jackson’s trailer home. Ira Jackson believed Avila was as culpable as Tony Torres for the tragedy that had claimed the life of his trusting mother.

  Early on the morning of August 28, Ira Jackson drove to the address he’d pried from the reluctant clerk at the Metro building department. A woman with a heavy accent answered the front door. Ira Jackson asked to speak to Señor Avila.

  “He bissy eng de grotch.”

  “Please tell him it’s important.”

  “Hokay, but he berry bissy.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Ira Jackson.

  Avila was scrubbing rooster blood off the whitewalls of his wife’s Buick when his mother announced he had a visitor. Avila swore and kicked at the bucket of soap. It had to be Gar Whitmark, harassing him for the seven grand. What did he expect Avila to do—rob a fucking bank!

  But it wasn’t Whitmark at the door. It was a stocky middle-aged stranger with a chopped haircut, a gold chain around his neck and a smudge of white powder on his upper lip. Avila recognized the powder as doughnut dust. He wondered if the guy was a cop.

  “My name is Rick,” said Ira Jackson, extending a pudgy scarred hand. “Rick Reynolds.” When the man smiled, a smear of grape jelly was visible on his bottom row of teeth.

  Avila said, “I’m kinda busy right now.”

  “I was driving by and saw the truck.” Ira Jackson pointed. “Fortress Roofing—that’s you, right?”

  Avila didn’t answer yes or no. His eyes flicked to his truck at the curb, and the Cadillac parked behind it. The man wasn’t a cop, not with a flashy car like that.

  “The storm tore off my roof. I need a new one ASAP.”

  Avila said, “We’re booked solid. I’m really sorry.”

  He hated to turn down a willing sucker, but it would be suicidal to run a scam on someone who knew where he lived. Especially someone with forearms the size of fence posts.

  Avila made a mental note to move the roofing truck off the street, to a place where passersby couldn’t see it.

  Ira Jackson licked the doughnut sugar from his lip. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he said.

  “Wish I could help.”

  “How’s ten thousand sound? On top of your regular price.”

  Try as he might, Avila couldn’t conceal his interest. The guy had a New York accent; they did things in a big way up there.

  “That’s ten thousand cash,” Ira Jackson added. “See, it’s my grandmother, she lives with us. Ninety years old and suddenly it’s raining buckets on her head. The roof’s flat-out gone.”

  Avila feigned compassion. “Ninety years old? Bless her heart.” He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. “Problem is, I’ve got a dozen other jobs waiting.”

  “Fifteen thousand,” Ira Jackson said, “if you move me to the top of the list.”

  Avila rubbed his stubbled chin and eyed the visitor. How often, he thought, does fifteen grand come knocking at the door? A rip-off was out of the question, but another option loomed. Radical, to be sure, but do-able: Avila could build the man a legitimate, complete roof. Use the cash to settle up with Gar Whitmark. Naturally the crew would piss and moan, spoiled bastards. Properly installing a roof was a hard, hot, exhausting job. Perhaps desperate times called for honest work.

  “I see,” remarked Ira Jackson, “your place came through the hurricane pretty good.”

  “We were a long way from the eye, thank God.”

  “Thank God is right.”

  “Where exactly do you live, Mister Reynolds? Maybe I can squeeze you on the schedule.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I’ll send a man out for an estimate,” Avila said. Then he remembered there was no man to send; the thieving Snapper had skipped.

  Ira Jackson said, “I’d prefer it was you personally.”

  “Sure, Mister Reynolds. How about tomorrow first thing?”

  “How about right now? We can ride in my car.”

  Avila couldn’t think of a single reason not to go, and fifteen thousand reasons why he should.

  When Max Lamb put down the phone, his face was gray and his mouth was slack. He looked as if he’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The reality was no less grave, as far as the Rodale & Burns agency was concerned. On the other end of the line, easygoing Pete Archibald had sounded funereal and defeated. The news from New York was bad indeed.

  The National Institutes of Health had scheduled a press conference to further enumerate the health hazards of cigaret smoking. Ordinarily the advertising world would scarcely take notice, so routine and predictable were these dire outcries. No matter how harrowing the medical revelations, the impact on retail cigaret sales seldom lasted more than a few weeks. This time, though, the government had used sophisticated technology to test specific brands for concentrations of tars, nicotine and other assorted carcinogens. Broncos rated first; Bronco Menthols rated second, Lady Broncos third. Epidemiologically, they were the most lethal products in the history of tobacco cultivation. Smoking a Bronco, in the lamentably quotable words of one wiseass NIH scientist, was “only slightly safer than sucking on the tailpipe of a Chevrolet Suburban.”

  Details of the NIH bombshell had quickly leaked to Durham Gas Meat & Tobacco, manufacturer of Broncos and other fine products. The company’s knee-jerk response was a heated threat to cancel its advertising in all newspapers and magazines that intended to report the government’s findings. That bombastically idiotic maneuver, Max Lamb knew, would itself become front-page headlines if sane heads didn’t prevail. Max had to get back to New York as soon as possible.

  When he told his wife, she said: “Right now?”

  As if she didn’t understand the gravity of the crisis.

  “In my business,” Max explained impatiently, “this is a flaming 747 full of orphans, plowing into a mountainside.”

  “Is it true about Broncos?”

  “Probably. That’s not the problem. They can’t start yanking their ads; there’s serious money at stake. Double-digit millions.”

  “Max.”

  “What?”

  “Please put out that damn cigaret.”

  “Jesus, Bonnie, listen to yourself!”

  They were sitting in wicker chairs on Augustine’s patio. It was three or four in the morning. Inside the house, Neil Young played on the stereo. Through the French doors Bonnie Lamb saw Augustine in the kitchen. He noticed she was watching, and shot her a quick shy smile. The black trooper and the one-eyed governor were standing over the stove; it smelled like they were frying bacon and ham.

  Max Lamb said, “We’ll catch the first plane.” He stubbed out his Bronco and flipped the butt into a birdbath.

  “What about him?” Bonnie cut her eyes toward the kitchen window, where Skink could be seen breaking eggs at the sink. She said t
o Max, “You wanted to file charges, didn’t you? Put him in jail where he belongs.”

  “Honey, there’s no time. After the NIH mess blows over, we’ll fly back and take care of that maniac. Don’t worry.”

  Bonnie Lamb said, “If they let him go now …” She finished the sentence in her head.

  If they let him go now, they’ll never find him again. He’ll vanish like a ghost in the swamp. And wouldn’t that be a darn shame.

  Bonnie bewildered herself with such sentiment. What’s wrong with me? The man abducted and abused my husband. Why don’t I want to see him punished?

  “You’re right,” she said to Max. “You should go back to New York as soon as you can.”

  With a frown, he reached over and lightly smacked a mosquito on her arm. “What does that mean—you’re not coming?”

  “Max, I’m not up for a plane trip this morning. My stomach’s in knots.”

  “Take some Mylanta.”

  “I did,” Bonnie lied. “Maybe it was the boat ride.”

  “You’ll feel better later.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  He said he’d get her a room near the airport. “Take a long nap,” he suggested, “and catch an evening flight.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Poor Max, she thought. He hasn’t got a clue.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Bonnie Brooks’s father worked in the circulation department of the Chicago Tribune, and her mother was a buyer for Sears. They had an apartment in the city and a summer cabin on the boundary waters in Minnesota. Bonnie, an only child, had mixed memories of family vacations. Her father was an unadventurous fellow for whom the northern wilderness held no allure. Because he couldn’t swim and was allergic to deerflies, he avoided the lakes. Instead he stayed in the cabin and assembled model airplanes; classic German Fokkers were his passion. The tedious hobby was made more so by her father’s chronic ham-fistedness, which turned the simplest glue job into high drama. Bonnie and her mother stayed out of the way, to avoid being blamed for disturbing his concentration.

  While her father toiled over the model planes, Bonnie’s mother paddled her across the wooded lakes in an old birch canoe. Bonnie remembered those happy mornings—trailing her fingertips in the chilly water, feeling the sunlight warm the back of her neck. Her mother was not the stealthiest of paddlers, but they saw their share of wildlife—deer, squirrels, beavers, the occasional moose. Bonnie recalled asking, more than once, why her folks had bought the cabin if her father was so averse to the outdoors. Her mother always explained: “It was either here or Wisconsin.”

  Bonnie Brooks attended Northwestern University and, to her father’s puzzlement, majored in journalism. Soon she embarked on her first serious romance, with a divorced adjunct professor who claimed to have won prizes for his reportage of the Vietnam War. The absence of plaques in the professor’s office Bonnie naively attributed to modesty. For Christmas she decided to surprise him with a framed, laminated copy of his front-page scoop about the mining of Haiphong harbor. Yet when Bonnie searched the college’s microfilm of the San Francisco Chronicle, for whom her lover had supposedly worked, she found not a single bylined story bearing his name. Demonstrating the blood instincts of a seasoned reporter, she contacted the newspaper’s personnel department and (using harmless subterfuge) was able to determine that the closest her heroic seducer had ever come to Southeast Asia was the copy desk of the Chronicle’s Seattle bureau.

  Bonnie Brooks acted decisively. First she dumped the jerk, then she got him fired from the university. Subsequent boyfriends were more loyal and forthcoming, but what they lacked in dishonesty they made up for with indolence. Bonnie’s mother grew tired of cooking them meals and deflecting their halfhearted offers to help dry the dishes. She couldn’t wait for her daughter to graduate from school and find herself a grown-up man.

  Good or bad, jobs in journalism were hard to come by. Like many of her classmates, Bonnie Brooks wound up writing publicity blurbs and press releases. She went to work first for the City of Chicago Parks Department and then for a baby-food company that was eventually purchased by Crespo Mills Internationale. There Bonnie was promoted to the job of assistant corporate publicist. The title was attached to a salary that ten tough years in most city newsrooms wouldn’t have earned. As for the writing, it was as elementary as it was unsatisfying. In addition to pablums and breakfast cereals, Crespo Mills manufactured whipped condiment spreads, peanut butter, granola bars, cookies, crackers, trail mix, flavored popcorn, bread sticks and three styles of croutons. In no time, Bonnie Brooks ran out of appetizing adjectives. Attempts at lyrical originality were discouraged by her Crespo supervisors; during one especially dreary streak, she was required to use the word “tasty” in fourteen consecutive press releases. When Max Lamb asked her to marry him and move to New York, Bonnie didn’t hesitate to quit her job.

  Max could take only a few days off from work, so they decided to take their honeymoon at Disney World—a corny choice, but Bonnie figured anything was better than Niagara Falls. She knew that a waterfall, no matter how grandiose, wouldn’t hold Max’s interest. Neither, it turned out, did Mickey Mouse. Two days at the Magic Kingdom and Max was as antsy as a cat burglar.

  Then the hurricane blew in, and he just had to go see.…

  Bonnie had wanted to stay in Orlando, stay cuddled under the scratchy motel sheets and make love while the rain drummed on the windows. Why wasn’t that enough for him?

  She’d almost asked that very question as they sat in the dark on Augustine’s patio after the adventure in Stiltsville. And later, on the way to the airport. And again, standing at the Delta gate, when he’d hugged her in a loose and distracted way, his hair and shirt reeking of cigarets.

  But Bonnie hadn’t asked. The moment wasn’t right; he was a man with a purpose. A grown-up man, just like her mother wanted her to find. Except her mother thought Max was an asshole. Her father, well, he thought Max Lamb was a fine young fella. He thought all Bonnie’s boyfriends had been fine young fellas.

  She wondered what her father would think of her now, on the way to a hospital, scrunched in the front seat of a pickup truck between a one-eyed, toad-smoking kidnapper and a plane-crash survivor who juggled skulls.

  Brenda Rourke’s head was fractured in three places, and one of her cheeks needed reconstruction. She was bleeding under the right temporal bone, but doctors had managed to stanch it. A plastic surgeon had repaired a U-shaped gash on her forehead, stitching the loose flap above the hairline.

  Bonnie Lamb had never seen such terrible wounds. Even the governor seemed shaken. Augustine fastened his eyes on his shoetops—the sounds and smells of the hospital were too familiar. He felt parched.

  Jim Tile held both of Brenda’s hands in one of his own. Her eyes were open but unfocused; she had no sense of anyone besides Jim at her bedside. She was trying to talk through the drugs and the pain; he leaned closer to listen.

  After a while he straightened, announcing in a low, angry voice, “The bastard stole her ring. Her mother’s wedding ring.”

  Skink slipped from the room so quietly that Bonnie and Augustine didn’t notice immediately. There was no trace of him outside the door, but a rush of blue and white uniforms attracted them to the end of the hall. The governor was in the nursery, strolling among the newborns. He carried an infant in the crook of each arm. The babies slept soundly, and he studied them with profound sadness. To Bonnie Lamb he appeared harmless, despite the rebellious beard and the grubby combat pants and the army boots. A trio of husky orderlies conferred at a water fountain; apparently a negotiation had already been attempted, with poor results. Calmly Jim Tile entered the nursery and returned the infants to their glass cribs.

  Nobody intervened when the trooper led Skink out of the hospital, because it looked like a routine arrest; another loony street case hauled to the stockade: Jim Tile, his arm around the madman, walking him briskly down the maze of pale-green corridors; the two of them talking
intently; Bonnie and Max dodging wheelchairs and gurneys and trying to keep up.

  When they reached the parking lot, Jim Tile said he had to go to work. “The President’s coming, and guess who gets to clear traffic.”

  He folded a piece of paper into Skink’s hand and got into the patrol car. Wordlessly Skink settled in the bed of Augustine’s pickup and lay down. His good eye was fixed on the clouds, and his arms were folded across his chest.

  Augustine asked Jim Tile: “What do we do with him?”

  “That’s entirely up to you.” The trooper sounded exhausted.

  Bonnie Lamb asked about Brenda Rourke. Jim Tile said the doctors expected her to pull through.

  “What about the guy who did it?”

  “They haven’t caught him,” the trooper replied, “and they won’t.” He strapped on the seat belt, locked the door, adjusted his sunglasses. “Place used to be something special,” he said absently. “Long, long time ago.”

  A feral cry rose from the bed of the pickup truck. Jim Tile blinked over the rims of his shades. “It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Lamb. You and your husband do what’s right. The captain, he’ll understand.”

  Then the trooper drove off.

  On the way to the airport hotel, where Max Lamb had reserved a day room for her, Bonnie slid across the front seat and rested her cheek on Augustine’s shoulder. He was dreading this part, saying good-bye. It was always easier as a bitter cleaving, when suitcases snapped shut, doors slammed, taxis screeched out of the driveway. He checked the dashboard clock—less than three hours until her flight.

  Through the back window of the truck, Bonnie saw that Skink had pulled the flowered cap over his face and drawn himself into a loose-jointed variation of a fetal curl.

  She said, “I wonder what’s on that piece of paper.”

  “My guess,” said Augustine, “it’s either a name or an address.”

  “Of what?”

  “It’s just a guess,” he said, but he told her anyway.

  That night he didn’t have to say good-bye, because Bonnie Lamb didn’t go home to New York. She canceled her flight and returned to Augustine’s house. Her phone messages for Max were not returned until after midnight, when she was already asleep in the skull room.