by Carl Hiassen
The speedboat was close enough to see it was metallic blue with a white jagged stripe, like a lightning bolt, along the hull. Two figures were visible at the console.
"There she is," said Max.
"And no cops." Skink waved the boat in.
One of the figures moved to the bow and tossed a rope. Skink caught it and tied off. As soon as the rope came tight, the twin outboards went quiet. The current nudged the stern of the boat against the pilings, into the lantern's penumbra.
Max Lamb saw that it was Bonnie on the bow. When he called her name, she stepped to the dock and hugged him in a nurselike fashion, consoling him as if he were a toddler with a skinned knee. Max received the attention with manly reserve; he was conscious of being watched not only by his captor but by Bonnie's male escort.
Skink smiled at the reunion scene, and slipped back into the shadows of the stilt house. The driver of the boat made no move to get out. He was young and broad-shouldered, and comfortable on the open water. He wore a pale-blue pullover, cutoffs and no shoes. He seemed unaffected by navigating a pitch-black bay mined with overturned hulls and floating timbers.
From the darkness, Skink asked the young man for his name.
"Augustine," he answered.
"You have the ransom?"
"Sure do."
Bonnie Lamb said: "Don't worry, he's not the police."
"I can see that," came Skink's voice.
The boat driver stepped to the gunwale. He handed Bonnie a shopping bag, which she gave to her husband, who handed it to the kidnapper in the shadows.
Max Lamb said: "Bonnie, honey, the captain wants to talk to you. Then he'll let me go."
"I'm considering it," Skink said.
"Talk to me about what?"
The driver of the boat reached inside the console and came out with a can of beer. He took a swallow and leaned one hip against the steering wheel.
Bonnie Lamb asked her husband: "What's that on your neck?" It looked like some appalling implement of bondage; she'd seen similar items in the display windows of leather shops in Greenwich Village.
Skink came into the light. "It's a training device. Lie down, Max."
Bonnie Lamb studied the tall, disheveled stranger. He was all the state trooper had promised, and more. In size he appeared capable of anything, yet Bonnie felt in no way threatened.
"Max, now!" the kidnapper said to her husband.
Obediently Max Lamb lay prone on the wooden dock. When Skink told him to roll over, like a dog, he did.
Bonnie was embarrassed for her husband. The kidnapper noticed, and apologized. He instructed Max to get up.
The shopping bag contained everything Skink had demanded. Within moments the new batteries were inserted in the Walkman, and "Tumbling Dice" was spilling out of his earphones. He opened the jar of green olives and poured them into his gleaming bucket of a mouth.
Bonnie Lamb asked Max what in God's name was going on.
"Later," he whispered.
"Tell me now!"
"She deserves to know," the kidnapper interjected, spraying olive juice. "She's risking her life, being out here with a nutcase like me."
Bonnie Lamb had dressed for a boat ride-blue slicker, jeans and deck shoes. Good stuff but practical, Skink noticed, none of that catalog nonsense from California. He pulled off the earphones and complimented Bonnie for her common sense. Then he instructed her husband to remove the shock collar and toss it in the sea.
Max's hands quavered at his neck. Skink told him to go ahead, dammit, off with it! Max's lips tightened in determination, but he couldn't make himself touch it. Finally it was his wife who stepped forward, unhooked the clasp and removed the Tri-Tronics dog trainer. She examined it in the light of the lantern.
"Sick," she said to Skink, and set the collar on the dock.
From his jacket he took a videotape cassette. He tossed it to Bonnie Lamb, who caught it with both hands. "Your hubbie's home movies from the hurricane. Talk about sick."
Bonnie wheeled and threw the cassette into the bay.
The girl had fire! Skink liked her already. Nervously Max lighted a cigaret.
His wife wouldn't have been more repulsed had he jabbed a hypodermic full of heroin in his arm. She said, "Since when do you smoke?"
"If you put the collar back on him," Skink volunteered helpfully, "I can teach him to quit."
Max Lamb told Skink to get on with it. "You said you wanted to talk to her, so talk."
"No, I said I wanted to spend time with her."
Bonnie turned toward the barefoot young man at the helm of the striped speedboat. He apparently had nothing to say. His demeanor was casual, almost bored.
"Where," Bonnie asked the kidnapper, "did you want to spend time? And doing what?"
"Not what you think," Max Lamb cut in.
Skink put on his plastic shower cap. "The hurricane has set me on a new rhythm. I feel it ticking."
He put his hands on Bonnie's shoulders, gently moving her to Max's side. From the governor's shadow she felt his stare. He was studying them, her and Max, like they were lab rats. Then she heard him mutter: "I still don't see how."
Tersely Bonnie said, "Just tell us what you want."
"Watch it," Max advised. "He's been smoking dope."
Skink looked away, toward the ocean. "No offense, Mrs. Lamb, but your husband has put me sorely off the human race. A feminine counterpoint would be nice."
Bonnie was surprised by a pleasurable shiver, goose-flesh rising on her neck. The stranger's voice was soothing and hypnotic, a wild broad river; she could have listened to him all night. Mad is what he was, demonstrably mad. But his story fascinated her. Once a governor, the trooper had said. Bonnie longed to know more.
Yet here was her husband, exhausted, sunburned, emotionally sapped. She ought to tend to him. Poor Max had been through hell.
"I only want to talk," the kidnapper said.
"All right," Bonnie told him, "but just for a little while."
He cupped a hand to his mouth. "You, Augustine! Take Mister Lamb to safety. He needs a shower and a shave and possibly a stool softener. Return at dawn for his wife."
Skink grabbed Max under the arms and lowered him to the speedboat. He cut the line with a pocketknife, pushing the bow away from the sagging stilt house. He flung one arm around Bonnie and with the other began to wave. As the boat drifted out of the lantern's glow, Skink saw a third figure rise in the stern of the boat– where had he been hiding? Then the young man at the wheel brought a rifle to his shoulder.
"Damn," said Skink, pushing Bonnie Lamb from the line of fire.
Something stung him fiercely, spinning him clockwise and down. He was still spinning when he hit the warm water, and wondering why his arms and legs weren't working, wondering why he hadn't heard a shot or seen a muzzle flash, wondering if perhaps he was already dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Late on the night of August 27, with a warm breeze at his back and nine cold Budweisers in his belly, Keith Higs-trom decided to go hunting. His friends declined to accompany him, as Keith was as clumsy and unreliable a shooter as he was a drunk.
Truthfully there wasn't much to hunt in South Florida, the wild game having long ago fled or died. However, the hurricane had dispersed throughout the suburbs an exotic new quarry: livestock. Mile upon mile of ranch posts in rural Dade County had been uprooted, freeing herds of cattle and horses to explore vistas beyond their mucky flooded pastures. Motivated more by dull hunger than by native inquisitiveness, the animals began appearing in places where they were not customarily encountered. One such place was Keith Higstrom's neighborhood, a subdivision of indistinguishable clam-colored houses, stacked twenty deep and twenty-five across and bordered on every side by bankrupt strip shopping malls.
It was here Keith Higstrom had spent his childhood. His father's family had moved to Miami from northern Minnesota in the early 1940s bringing an affinity for long guns and an appetite for the great outdoors. An impressionable
boy, Keith had listened to hunting yarns his entire life-timber wolves and trophy black bears in the north woods, white-tailed deer and wild turkeys in the Florida scrub. The head of an eight-point buck, stoic but marble-eyed, hung over the Higstrom dinner table; the tawny pelt of a prized panther was tacked spread-eagle on the west wall of the den. At age five, Keith began collecting in leatherbound volumes each edition of Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield. His most treasured possession was an autographed photo of the famous Joe Foss, standing over a dead grizzly. At age six, young Keith got a Daisy popgun, a BB pistol at age nine, a pellet rifle at age eleven, and his first .22 at thirteen.
Yet ... even plinking beer cans at the local rock pit, the boy displayed an unfailing lack of proficiency with firearms. His father was more than slightly disappointed. Young Keith was a pure menace with a gun. Practice brought no improvement, nor did experimenting with different styles of weapons. Scopes didn't help. Tripods didn't help. Recoil cushions didn't help. Even goddamn breathing exercises didn't help.
Often these father-son target practices disintegrated into sulking and tears until the elder Higstrom relented, allowing young Keith to fire a few rounds with a twelve-gauge Mossberg, just so he could have the experience of hitting something. Clearly the family lineage of crack dead-eye shots had come to a sorry end. Keith's father returned from these outings looking pale and shaken, although he said nothing to Keith's mother about what he'd witnessed at the rock pit.
Fortunately, by the time Keith was old enough to go out hunting, there was practically nothing left to shoot in Miami except for rats and low-flying seagulls. Every autumn, Keith badgered his father into taking him to the Big Cypress Swamp or private hunting camps in the Everglades, where the deer were chased into high water by airboats and shot at point-blank range. The elder Higstrom dreaded these excursions and found no sport in the killing, but his son couldn't have been happier had he been lobbing grenades at crippled fawns.
It was on one such miserable morning that Keith Higstrom's father swore off hunting forever. They were riding a tank-sized swamp buggy in hot pursuit of a scraggly, half-senile bobcat. Suddenly Keith began firing wildly at an object high in the sky-a bald eagle, it turned out, a federally protected species. The attempted felony was not consummated, due to the young man's shaky aim, but in the fever of the moment he managed to blow off his father's left ear.
Deafened, blood-drenched, writhing facedown in Everglades marl, the elder Higstrom experienced a peculiar catharsis, an unexpected soothing of the soul, as if a cool white sheet were slowly being drawn over his head. Yes, his injury was terrible, and the deafness would (if he came clean about it) cost him his job as an air traffic controller. On the other hand, he could never again be forced to go hunting with his excitable son!
Keith Higstrom couldn't duck responsibility for the accident, nor the guilt that went with it. His father recovered from the gunshot wound, and was kind enough not to bring it up more than once or twice a day. Before long, Keith's remorse gave way to an unspoken resentment, for he perceived that his father was using the missing ear as an excuse to avoid their weekend expeditions. A plastic surgeon had attached a durable polyurethane facsimile to the left side of the elder Higstrom's head, while a high-tech hearing aid had restored the old man's auditory capacity to eighty-one percent of what it was before the Everglades mishap. Yet he stubbornly refused to pick up a gun. Doctor's orders, he squawked.
For Keith, outdoor companionship was increasingly hard to come by. His friends always seemed to have prior commitments whenever Keith invited them to go hunting. Frustrated and restless, he spent long sullen weekends cleaning his guns and watching videotapes of his favorite American Sportsman episodes. Whenever his trigger finger got itchy, he'd drive out the Tamiami Trail and park by the canal. As soon as darkness fell, Keith would load a double-barrel shotgun, strap on a headlamp and stalk along the shoreline. His usual targets were turtles and opossums; anything faster or smarter generally eluded him.
Shortly after the hurricane, Keith Higstrom noticed four dairy cows and a palomino mare grazing on his neighbor's front lawn. Everyone on the block was gathered on the sidewalk, laughing and taking pictures; a light moment of relief in the otherwise somber aftermath of the storm. That night, drinking with his buddies at an Irish bar on Kendall Drive, Keith asked: "How much does a cow weigh?"
One of Keith's friends said, "I give up, Higstrom. How much does a cow weigh?"
"It's not a joke. More than an elk? Because I got cows loose on my street."
One of his friends said, "From the hurricane."
"Yeah, but how big do you figure? More than a mulie?" Keith Higstrom drained his Budweiser and stood up. "Let's go hunting, boys."
"Sit down, Higstrom."
"You pussies coming or not?"
"Have another beer, Keith."
With a burp, he charged out the door. He drove home, slipped into the den, and removed his grandfather's old .30-06 from the maple gun cabinet. He dropped a box of bullets, and giggled drunkenly when nobody woke up. He pulled on his boots and his mailorder camo jumpsuit, strapped on the headlamp, and went looking for a cow to shoot.
They were no longer grazing in his neighbor's front yard. Dropping into an exaggerated half crouch, Keith Higstrom weaved down the block. He felt light as a feather, lethal as a snake. The rifle was slick and magnificent in his hands. His plan was to tie the dead cow on the front fender of his Honda Civic and drive all the way back to Kendall, back to the Irish bar where his chickenshit pals were drinking. Keith Higstrom chuckled in advance at the spectacle.
For cover he used mounds of hurricane debris, shuffling noisily from one to another. The street was empty and black and shadowless; the homes on the north side still had no electricity. Passing the Ullmans' house, Keith Higstrom heard something in the backyard-deep raspy snorting. He thought it might be the runaway palomino. As he snuck around the corner of the garage, the beam of Keith Higstrom's headlamp illuminated a pair of glistening indigo eyes, as large as ashtrays.
"God damn," he exclaimed.
An enormous animal stood next to the Ullmans' half-drained swimming pool. The light from Keith's headlamp played up and down its blue-black flanks. This was no ordinary cow. For starters, it was as big as a tractor.
Its sharp horns were lavishly curved and downslung, upside down from those of domestic American stock.
Keith Higstrom knew exactly what he was looking at. Hadn't he watched Jimmy Dean and Curt Gowdy shoot one of the very same majestic bastards on The American I Sportsman? But that was in Africa, for Christ's sake. Not Miami, Florida.
It occurred to Keith that he might be suffering the effects of too much alcohol, that the gigantic oval-eyed ungulate glaring at him was merely a Budweiser-enhanced Angus.
Then it snorted again, expelling twin strings of dewy snot. The animal lowered its head and, with hooves the size of laundry irons, decisively pawed a trench in the Ullmans' newly replanted Bermuda sod.
"Shit on a biscuit," Keith Higstrom said, raising his grandfather's rifle. "That's a Cape buffalo!"
He fired and, naturally, missed. Twice.
The gunshots awakened Mr. Ullman, a banker by trade and a recent arrival from Copenhagen, who looked out the bedroom window just in time to see a tremendous bull galloping across his yard with a thrashing young American impaled on its rack. Mr. Ullman quickly telephoned the police and informed them, as urgently as his newly acquired English would allow, that an "unlucky cowboy is being perforated seriously." Eventually the police figured out what Mr. Ullman was trying to say.
Two hours later, a police dispatcher phoned Augustine's house with a message: His dead uncle's missing Cape buffalo, identified by an ear tag, had turned up in the produce aisle of a storm-gutted supermarket. Unfortunately, there was trouble. The dispatcher requested that Augustine call Animal Control as soon as possible.
Augustine didn't check his answering machine for several hours, because he was out on Biscayne Bay with Bonnie
Lamb.
They had borrowed the speedboat from one of Augustine's friends, an airline pilot. The pilot owed Augustine a favor from a long-ago divorce, when Augustine had let him bury $45,000 worth of gold Krugerrands behind Augustine's garage, to conceal them from his future ex-wife's private investigator. After the divorce litigation ended, the airline pilot was left with nothing but the hidden stash of coins. He immediately depleted them on a ninety-one-pound fashion model, who later abandoned him at a five-star hotel in Morocco. Although years had passed, the pilot never forgot Augustine's act of friendship in a time of personal crisis.
The speedboat was on a trailer at a marina in North Miami Beach, untouched by the hurricane. Augustine and Bonnie Lamb met Jim Tile there. His eyes were red and his voice was raw. He told them that a close friend, a female trooper, had been savagely beaten by a car thief, and that he would have preferred to be out on road patrol, hunting for the gutless low-life sonofabitch.