by Carl Hiassen
The immigration man seemed so relieved that Avila was left to conclude (as a former civil servant himself) that he'd saved the man mountains of paperwork.
"Su nombre, par favor?"
"Juan," Avila replied. "Juan Gomez. From Havana."
"And your occupation in Cuba?"
"I was a building inspector."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They waited in the Jeep-Edie Marsh up front, holding the revolver; Bonnie Lamb pressed against the governor in the back seat.
It was Bonnie who said: "What if he doesn't come back?"
Edie was thinking the same thing. Hoping it. The problem was, Snapper had the damn car keys. She asked the man in the shower cap: "You know how to hot-wire one of these?"
"That would be illegal."
The cinematic smile startled her. She said, "Why aren't you afraid?"
"Of what?"
"The gun. Dying. Anything."
Bonnie said she was frightened enough for all of them. The rain slackened; still no sign of Snapper, or Avila. Edie had difficulty keeping her eyes off the man called Skink.
"What is it," he said. "My hat?"
She lifted the .357. "You could take this away from me anytime you wanted. You know it."
"Maybe I don't want to."
That's what scared her. What was the point of holding a gun on a person like this?
He said, "I won't hurt you." Again with the smile.
Edie Marsh was a sucker for laugh lines around the eyes. She said to Bonnie: "I think I know what you see in this guy."
"We're just friends."
"Really? Then maybe you can tell me," Edie said, "what's he got planned?"
"I honestly don't know. I wish I did."
Edie was all clammy shakes, roiled emotions. In the motel room, depositing Mr. Stichler with the two hookers, she'd caught something on the TV that got her daydreaming-a news clip of the President of the United States touring the hurricane damage. At his side was a tall, boyishly attractive man in his thirties, whom the TV newscasters identified as the President's son. When they said he lived in Miami, Edie Marsh got a whimsical flash. So what if he wasn't a Kennedy? And maybe he was too much of a good young Republican to pick up some hot girl in a bar and get raunchy. Or just maybe he'd been waiting his whole repressed life to do exactly that. And he was the President's son. It was something to consider, Edie mused, for the future. Particularly if the hurricane scam continued to unravel at its current pace.
She put Snapper's gun on the seat. "Get out of here," she told Skink and Bonnie. "Go on. I'll tell him you pushed me down and got away."
Bonnie looked over at the governor, who said: "Now's your chance, girl."
"What about you?"
He shook his head. "I made a promise to Jim."
"Who the hell's Jim?" asked Edie Marsh.
Bonnie said: "Then I guess we're staying."
Skink encouraged her to make a dash for it. "Go call Augustine. Let him know you're OK."
"Nope," Bonnie said.
"And your husband, too."
"No! Not until it's over."
Edie was exasperated, her nerves worn ragged. Snapper was right; they are nuts. "Fine," she said, "you two fruitballs stay if you want, but I'm outta here."
Skink said: "Excellent decision."
"Tell him I went to use the bathroom."
"No problem," said Bonnie.
"I got my period or something."
"Right."
Skink leaned forward. "Could you hand me the gun?"
"Why not," Edie said. Perhaps the smiler would shoot Snapper dead. There were about forty-seven thousand reasons that Edie wasn't upset at the idea, not including the barrel-shaped bruise on her right breast.
She was passing the .357 to Skink when he waved her off, saying: "On second thought—"
Edie turned and let out a gasp. It was Snapper's face, dripping wet, pressed to the window of the Jeep. The bent nose and misshapen mouth made him look like a gargoyle.
"Miss me, bay-beeee?" he crooned, pallid lips wriggling like flatworms against the glass.
Jim Tile was tempted to call for backup, though it would spell the end of the governor's elaborate reclusion.
Long ago they'd made a pact: no cavalry, unless innocent lives were in peril. The trooper was thinking of the tourist woman as more or less innocent. She and Skink might be dead already.
Glumly Jim Tile watched the rain drench the passing cars on Highway One. Again he castigated himself for letting his emotions get the better of his brain. Brenda was alive. He should've thanked God, then let it go.
But he didn't. And the governor had had little trouble talking him out of the license-tag number.
"Pest control" was what Skink had called it, as they were leaving the hospital.
"Whoever did that to Mrs. Rourke is not a viable member of the species. Not a welcome donor to the gene pool. Wouldn't Darwin himself agree?"
And the trooper had merely said: "Be careful."
"Jim, we're infested with these mutant shitheads. Look what they've done to the place."
The trooper, locked in some cold distant zone: "The tag's probably stolen off another car. It may lead you nowhere."
The governor, momentarily shaking loose of his friend's firm grip: "They're turning it into a sump hole. Some with guns, some with briefcases-it's all the same goddamn crime."
"Pest control."
"We do what we can."
"Be careful, captain."
Then he'd flashed those movie-star pearlies, the ones that had gotten him elected. And Jim Tile stood back and let him go. Let him stalk the man in the black Jeep Cherokee.
Which was now parked in a windy drizzle outside the Paradise Palms. The trooper counted three figures inside the truck; two of them, he hoped, were Skink and Bonnie Lamb.
A dark shape near the road caught his attention.
The tall man in the suit was hurrying along the gravel shoulder of Highway One. There was a tippiness to his gait; he seemed well challenged to keep a straight course, clear of the speeding cars. He flinched when the high beams of a gasoline tanker caught him in the face.
This time Jim Tile got a good look at the misaligned jaws.
He watched the man pass beneath the bright electric sign in front of the motel. He saw him walk up to the Jeep, lean close to a window. Then the man ran around to the driver's side, opened the door and got in. Smoke puffed from the truck's exhaust: pipe. The brake lights flickered.
Jim Tile said, "Hello," and started his engine.
Suddenly, all around, the night was diced into blues and whites.
Snapper was backing the Jeep out, chortling about what had happened to Avila: "Dumb fuck went straight off the bridge, you shoulda seen– Hey! Hey, what the hell..."
Bright lights started strobing everywhere. In the reflection of the puddles. On the coral-colored walls of the motel. In the fronds of the sabal palms.
Snapper shoved the Jeep into Neutral. "Fucking cops!"
"No way," Edie said. But she knew he was right.
A figure in gray was approaching the Cherokee. Snapper rolled down the window. It was a state trooper; big black sonofabitch, too. He'd parked his patrol car at an angle, to block the exit.
Snapper's mind raced, half drunk, half wired: Christ Almighty, would Momma and Pappy pitch a fit they ever heard I got taken down by a nigger cop. Momma especially.
In a flash Snapper figured out what must've happened: The lady trooper either was alive, or had survived long enough after the beating to give a description of the Jeep, and maybe even of Snapper himself.
So this was the big black posse.
Snapper knew he should've ditched the Cherokee after it happened. Sure, park the fucker in the nearest canal and call it a deal. But, oh Jesus, how he loved that stereo system! Reba, Garth, Hank Jr., they'd never sounded so sweet. His whole life Snapper had wanted a car with decent speakers. So he'd stayed with the stolen Jeep because of its awesome stereo-and here
was the price to be paid.
A big black motherfucker of a cop, coming across the parking lot, drawing his gun.
The one-eyed man tapped him on the shoulder. "Haul ass, chief."
"Huh?"
"That's what I'd do."
"No," murmured Edie Marsh. "We've had it."
Snapper told her to shut up. He snatched the .357 off the seat, pointed it out the window and somehow managed to shoot the trooper in the center of the chest. The man fell backward, landing with a splash.
"Good night, nigger," Snapper said.
Skink went rigid. Bonnie and Edie screamed. Snapper slammed the Jeep into gear and peeled rubber.
"You see thaa-aatt?" he whinnied. "One shot, one nigger cop! Whooheee! One shot!"
In the cargo well of the Cherokee, Augustine popped up on one knee. The stubby dart rifle was at his shoulder, the sights trained on the ragged hairline of Snapper's neck. He was surprised when Skink turned and shoved him back to the floor.
That's when the rear window of the Jeep vaporized.
The explosion caught Snapper furrowed in concentration, as he labored to steer around the parked Highway Patrol car, lit up like a Mardi Gras float.
Snapper ducked, peering up at the rearview. He saw the black trooper lying in a puddle, his arm waving but not aiming the smoking gun. Then the trooper went limp, and Snapper cackled.
The Cherokee fishtailed on the rain-slicked asphalt as it entered the highway. Edie Marsh hunched like an aged nun, sobbing into her hands. Skink had pulled Bonnie Lamb into his lap, out of the gunfire's path. Huddled in the cargo hatch, Augustine silently plucked nuggets of safety glass from his clothes.
Snapper was loopy on Midols, Johnnie Walker and pure criminal adrenaline. "You see that big nigger go down?" he yammered at the top of his lungs. "You see him go down!"
Christophe Michel spent the night of the hurricane in the safe and convivial atmosphere of Key West. At noon the next morning he put on the television and recognized, with cramps of dread, the bombed-out remains of a luxury housing development called Gables-on-the-Bay. The subdivision had been built by a company called Zenith Custom Homes, which not only employed Christophe Michel as a senior structural engineer but advertised his ecumenical credentials in its sales brochures. Michel had been recruited from one of France's oldest engineering firms, which had not energetically protested his departure. Among the fields in which Michel sorely lacked experience was that of girding single-family structures to withstand the force of tropical cyclones. His new employer assured him there was nothing to it, and FedExed him a copy of the South Florida Building Code, which weighed several pounds. Christophe Michel skimmed it on the flight from Orly to Miami.
He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as "South Florida's first hurricane-proof community." Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the Titanic was promoted as unsinkable.
All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-w-the-Bay-a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.
With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently planned his departure from the United States. He closed his bank accounts, shuttered the condo in Key West, packed the Seville and set out for the mainland.
The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.
When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.
"Give us your goddamn car," the man said. "Certainly."
"Don't stare at me like that!"
"Sorry." The engineer's trained eye calculated the skew of the man's jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.
"I got one bullet left!"
"I believe you," said Christophe Michel. The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly. Michel asked, "May I keep my suitcase?"
"Fuck, no!"
"I understand."
He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.
"My life savings just drove away," he said. "May I borrow the telephone?"
Bonnie Lamb expected Skink to erupt in homicidal fury upon seeing his best friend shot down. He didn't. Bonnie worried about the listless sag to his shoulders, the near feebleness of his movements. He wore the numb, unfocused glaze of the heavily sedated. Bonnie was sorry to see the governor's high spirits extinguished.
Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he'd gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they'd ditched it behind the convenience store.
Bonnie squeezed Skink's arm and asked if he was all right. He shifted his feet, and something rattled metallically on the floorboard. He picked it up and asked, "What's this?"
It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.
Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. "The Club!"
"The what?"
Bonnie Lamb said, "You know. That thing they advertise all the time on TV."
"I watch no television," Skink said.
Snapper hooted. "The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you lock it across't here"-he patted the steering wheel—"so your car don't get stolen."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K." Snapper's laughter had a ring of triumph.
Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bonnie could see fresh tears shining in her eyelashes.
"I had this boyfriend," Edie sniffled, "he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer."
Snapper said, "No shit? Froze it?"
"Yeah." Edie couldn't come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They'd never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?
Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.
"See, that way you can't turn the wheel," Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, "so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. 'Less they put a fuckin' gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!"
Skink set the device down.
"Accept no imitations!" Snapper crowed again, waving the .357.
The governor's gaze turned out the window, drifting again. Teasingly, Bonnie said: "I can't believe you've never seen one of those."
This time the smile was sad. "I lead a sheltered life."
Edie Marsh wondered if Snapper could have picked a dumber location to shoot a cop-a county of slender, connected islands, with only one way out. She kept checking for blue police lights behind them.
Snapper told her to knock it off, she was making everyone a nervous wreck. "Another half hour we're home free," he said, "back on the mainland. Then we find another car."
<
br /> "One with a CD player, I bet."
"Damn right."
The Seville got boxed in behind a slow beer truck. They wound up stopped at the traffic light in Key Largo. Again Edie snuck a peek behind them. Snapper heard a gasp.
"What!" He spun his head. "Is it cops?"
"No. The Jeep!"