The Harley gangbanger wasn’t as disfigured as I’d imagined. Asphalt had taken his left ear and scraped flesh from his skull, but surgeons had done a good job. They had pulled the skin together into a hairless sheen that showed only on his cheek and as a bald patch above the left temple. Scars that warranted a second look but not the instant horror, say, of third-degree burns.
Facial scarring, however, is not a reliable index of brain damage. Psychological scars are phantoms. An angry, legless man had recently proved it. Around the biker’s neck was a tubular scarf—an emergency mask—which suggested his ego had yet to accept his injuries. I watched for a while before making a move.
The biker had lost teeth, too. With incisors of white resin, he snared the glove off to reveal two stainless hooks that were spring-operated pincers. He extended his arm, the pincers opened. The inside edge of one hook was sharp and he used it to slice the envelope. Then he closed the pincers by retracting his arm.
A shoulder harness, which I should have noticed, became visible beneath the shirt. The pincers were adjoined to his wrist by a quick-release socket of stainless steel. Like a rechargeable drill, maybe other tools could be attached.
I watched him go through the photos, biting his tongue as he concentrated. A bland, bony face, curly hair, and sharp, mean eyes. Not an athlete, but not much body fat either. A loser since birth, I decided, who had to do something to make a living.
I also decided, What the hell.
Walking toward the car, I spoke. “Can I help you?” It is a question commonly asked by robbery victims. Otherwise, the noise of the motorcycle would have cloaked my approach.
Or maybe not. The Harley gangbanger didn’t lift his eyes from the photos when he said, “I was beginning to think you was just one more scared civilian. How long you been there?” Jaw damage caused him to speak from the side of his mouth; distinctive, like a hick farmer chewing a straw and discussing the weather.
“Long enough to call police,” I answered.
“Go ahead. I’ll tell my side, then listen while you explain about owning pictures of a stolen mastodon tusk. I want that shit back, by the way—the ivory—all of it.” Head down, the pincers moved to the scarf and squared it over his nose before he looked at me.
“Sun cancer’s a bitch,” I said.
“Then you die,” he answered, a smirking tone. He slid the envelope under his shirt, turned and faced me, a bandito sizing me up from behind a mask of red. It was a while before he spoke. “The way Deon talked, I expected some great big dude who was born-again hard. Them glasses—you remind me of a pharmacist I had to visit for personal reasons. I figured him for a dick smoker, not the type would leave a man offshore to drown. Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“You know, really do that? Deon, he said three or four miles from the beach, you left him out there to drown. Didn’t even look back. That there were sharks everywhere, but you didn’t give a shit.”
Brain-damaged—a glassy look in the man’s eyes; mean but not stupid. And he sounded eager to confirm the petty thief’s story. Hopeful, even. I pictured him breaking Deon’s ribs, kicking Deon while he was down, to extract the truth about a story he wanted to believe was true. Now the biker was asking me.
I stopped five paces away, a safe distance between us while I humored him. “I thought he’d shot two friends of mine. Turns out it was you with the pistol. Were you in the Army or Marines?”
“No kidding?”
“About Deon, you mean?”
“Come on, pard. Tell.”
“You really expect me to admit it?”
The biker made a cackling noise from behind the scarf. “Hell, man, you’re safe with me. I love a good story. You ever watch that Mel Gibson flick about them Aztec Indians, the way they’d cut people’s heads off? Which is cool if you’ve got a big audience, but not as cool as leaving a whining piece of shit out there to drown. That shows creativity on your part.”
He used his good hand to make a beckoning motion: Tell me the details, man.
I said, “Let’s put it this way: If I did something like that, it would’ve been less than two miles offshore. And I didn’t see any sharks. But then went back for the guy when I found out he wasn’t the shooter.”
The biker said, “You would’ve left him, though.” That hopeful tone again.
I said yes because he wanted to hear it.
Laughter; threw his head back and had to restraighten his mask. “That is so goddamn outlaw, man. Just left the dude. I figured the asshole made it up. Last Friday, right? Just before the old ladies saw you in that fancy boat, you and your hippie friend.”
“The afternoon you showed up wearing a ski mask,” I added, “but the house had already been robbed.”
“Ski Mask?” He was a pretty good actor, the way he shrugged it off. “That don’t compare with the way you handled your situation. You in a hot rod boat; Deon so far offshore, he can’t even see the damn beach.” The biker coughed and cackled but showed some manners by touching the pincers to his mouth. “Okay . . . what about the sweatsuit part? Deon claims—”
I said, “Over a beer sometime, I’ll tell you the whole story. Right now, I’m more interested in why you’re robbing my car.”
“Come on, I gotta know. Deon says the guy—you, I’m starting to believe—Deon says he’s drowning, he’s begging, but you look down and say, ‘Dude, your choice, I can shoot you in the head—or lose the sweatsuit, maybe you’ll make the beach.’” The biker sobered. “Did you really say that?”
A scene from a movie was running in his head, I realized. Brain-damaged. Or maybe he’d always been a man-child who saw Hollywood’s stone-cold killers as heroes.
I was done playing along. “On the boat, I wasn’t carrying a gun.” I touched a hand to my pocket to indicate I was now. “How about we save the war stories for later?”
Snap. The biker’s eyes changed. He extended his left arm to open the pincers and clacked the steel tines like teeth. “I ain’t Deon, cowboy. I admire your style, but don’t push your luck.”
“Then let’s talk about you,” I said. “You threatened my friend on the phone but didn’t show up Sunday night. Or tell me about the woman who died in the house fire.”
“I did what?”
“Did you stick a rag in her mouth?”
I was fishing. He knew it but let the truth slip anyway. “Hell, man—now you’re blaming me for some old woman who fell asleep smoking weed.” His indignation was an admission—that’s the way he’d done it, gotten Lillian to smoke something—but then dismissed it all, saying, “The hippie—yeah, I know who you mean. Thompson . . . Tomlinson . . . something like that. The gas-rag-in-the-mouth thing really got to the ol’ boy. About wet his panties.”
The biker’s snorting laughter caused something in me to snap. The temptation was to put him on the ground, tag him, bag him, then leave him for the vultures in some high, distant tree.
The biker sensed it, was spooked for an instant. But then fed off what I was feeling and piped it back at me. “Know why your hippie pal was so scared? ’Cause I love watching people’s face light up. You can’t fake love—can you, hoss?”
I had to take a slow breath. “I waited for you off Cayo Pelado until one. If you don’t know how to run a boat, I’ll be happy to give you a private lesson.”
The biker enjoyed that, understood it was a threat. “And leave my ass offshore, I bet.” He wagged his steel hooks at me—Behave yourself, man—and walked toward his motorcycle, saying, “Style! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” Then stopped, as if he’d left out a detail. “Oh . . . I meant to ask: What do you think of that elephant?”
The man’s brain jumped around, but how did he know I had been to the Albright ranch? Or maybe he had heard the elephant’s trumpeting. Either way, I wasn’t going to buy into it. I said, “No idea what you mean.”
“Really? You will, hoss, you will. Black ivory’s worth a shitpotful. But blood ivory’s worth more—even if it takes ten or twelve rounds in that big ugly bastard’s head. What I’m asking is, do you have any good contacts in China?”
When I didn’t respond, he laughed at what he read as my confusion, but, in fact, it was contempt.
“When you see Mick,” he said, turning toward the Harley, “give him your phone number. We’ll order some pitchers, just you and me. Be a honor to face a man with style, then see who walks away.”
He was leaving? I didn’t believe it. I palmed the pistol while he opened a saddlebag and stuffed the envelope inside; expected him to turn, a weapon in his hand. Instead, he donned glove and helmet, straddled the bike, and booted the kickstand free.
“¡Vaya con dios!”
He actually yelled that, riding away.
I memorized the license number and dialed my cop friend in Tallahassee. No answer, so I left a message saying I had information on a woman who had died in a house fire. Then added a description of the Harley.
• • •
TWO OF THE THREE JET SKIS HAD RETURNED, the woman in her yellow shorty neoprene standing with Fallsdown, Mick in the water, while the man who’d worn a helmet waded his ski toward the opposite bank.
“Shelly, meet Doc Ford,” Fallsdown said, after he’d asked me in private, “Is everything okay?”
When I extended my hand, the woman ignored me by scowling at Mick, only his fins showing on the water’s surface. So I said, “Are we keeping you from something?”
She didn’t appreciate that. “How obvious does it have to be? I have only two weeks a year off. I was just telling your friend that I paid Harris in cash for this trip. Now he’s gone off and left me with his assistant.”
“I didn’t know he was a guide,” I said.
“Harris is the best. In April, we did the Myakka River—unbelievable. This is my third trip. But he has a thing about outsiders. So now, of course, he’s too mad to work.”
“Because of me,” I said.
“I don’t tolerate men with a temper,” she warned, meaning Harris had told her about me splashing his rifle. Then she banished me by speaking only to Duncan, saying, “I’ve been looking forward to this dive since May, now I’ve got to share the water with three strangers. You seem like a nice guy, but we’ve got to be careful because of the idiotic laws when it comes to fossils.”
“Only two divers, not three,” Dunk replied, and managed to sound both wise and empathetic. “I’m not going in.”
“Really?”
“Nope. I live in the Rockies, and Florida is a whole different deal. The water here isn’t comfortable. It’s . . . earth-colored, not clear like in the Rockies.”
Earth-colored? My god, he was playing a role, the noble red Indian. I was tempted to explain to the woman He can’t swim, but I had been dismissed from the conversation.
“That’s thoughtful,” Shelly said to him, “but not necessary. Why don’t we buddy up?”
Arms folded, the man from Montana studied the river, which was an amber gel making a slow glide seaward. “I’ll stay here as your spotter. Not far is a golf course. We passed it. There was a sign that warned about alligators.”
The woman laughed. “You are so sweet. But that was Arcadia or Venice—thirty miles from here at least. Look, I was being bitchy. Sorry, or . . . Hey, are you worried about me?”
Fallsdown used his wise-old-Indian smile and said, “Women who travel alone are hard to come by. While you swim, I’ll stand watch.”
Oh brother. But it was working. Shelly excluded me by moving closer to Duncan so they could talk. Fine, I was all for it. Dunk liked what he saw in this thirtyish woman who was athletic, thin as a marathoner but attractive, a nice face framed by short brown hair, her shorty wet suit promising good things if Shelly unzipped it and stepped into the shower.
“I’ll find a nice meg tooth for you,” she told Duncan. “It’s so rare to get a chance to dive a spot like this.”
“That would be perfect,” the man from Montana replied, then pointed. “Hey . . . look.”
Mick, wearing a mask, was standing, water up to his chest. He spit the snorkel from his mouth and held up something long, black as a tree limb but curved delicately as a scythe. “Rib bone,” he hollered to Fallsdown. “Mastodon or mammoth—this is in our blood, man. Didn’t I say I heard the bones calling?”
Harris’s partner, on his Jet Ski, shook his head, disgusted, then turned an ear skyward—Toby, a mile or more away, trumpeting again.
Dunk looked at me, his expression asking, Wouldn’t Tomlinson love the timing?
But not Harris’s partner, who’d heard elephants before. Toby, or the elephant rescue facility, both of them close enough. He had used ropes to secure the stern of his Jet Ski to the opposite bank and was just finishing. Downstream, chunks of earth had been gouged from the bank. Now I understood: Harris’s group used the skis to dredge soil away and expose fossils buried beneath tree roots. The man’s vehicle was tatted NASCAR-like, Sea-Doo GTX, a muscle machine propelled by impellers that jetted water with the force of a fire hose. I wondered how effective it was as a cutting tool.
Very effective. He started the engine . . . gunned the throttle while ropes strained . . . revved it higher, and soon, behind him, the riverbank began to melt away.
“Is this standard?” I asked Shelly over the noise.
“If you knew anything about rivers, you’d understand that banks erode—every year, it’s a natural cycle. This just speeds up the process.”
“That’s a lot of silt for a creek this narrow,” I replied. “Have you ever seen a toilet back up?”
Shelly didn’t appreciate that. “Do you get some kind of weird kick out of ruining my day? If you don’t like it, leave.”
My pal, the noble redskin, played both sides by observing, “Rivers find their own path.”
Geezus. I waited for Shelly to gather her mask, fins, and weight belt and leave before telling him, “You should contact the Actors Guild and get a card.”
Fallsdown kept his eyes fixed on the woman. “I’ve been a member since The Horse Whisperer. What do you think of Shelly? I really like her legs and that cute little chin of hers.”
“You’ve been in movies?”
“Redford believes I’m the hereditary medicine man of the Crow Nation. But three years in the joint knocked me off the A list. I like her body, but there’s something not quite right about her . . . I don’t know—her behavior, I guess. Something.”
“She can’t stand me. Or, are you asking if she’s onto your act?”
Duncan said, “I give people what they want. Sometimes it makes them happy to play along. Besides, what makes you think I’m acting?”
“From your wise-old-Indian bullshit,” I replied, which made him smile. I was about to tell him about my confrontation with the biker, but he suddenly got serious.
“I saw something out there, Doc.”
I said, “On the other side? It was probably a feral hog.”
“In the water. Big, too. It surfaced just before you got back.” His eyes left the woman long enough to explore downstream. “Fifty meters or so, but it could have been a log, I guess. It came up, then went under.”
“What color?”
“Blackish . . . dark green, maybe. Too big for a fish. Or maybe not.”
Because of the Jet Ski’s dredging, the creek was beginning to boil with vegetation and silt, the surface brown as coffee, while, upstream, the water maintained its rum clarity. I said, “Some of those pools look deep enough, it could have been an alligator gar. They get to three hundred pounds. Lots of teeth, but they’re harmless. Or even a manatee. Are you really worried?”
Duncan said, “It looked more like a damn snake. Sort of humped its back when it went under.”
I took off
my glasses; checked on Mick, who had deposited the mastodon rib on the bank and was diving again. Shelly, adjusting her mask, was shuffling backward, water to her waist. The Jet Ski’s scream mimicked a chain saw. The noise added chaos and a sense of danger. No point in mentioning Florida’s problem with exotic snakes—ball pythons and other constrictors, some twenty feet long, even waterborne anacondas.
Duncan asked, “Are there alligators this far north?”
He missed the irony when I replied, “Only the ones that survive.” I took the little pistol from my pocket, tilted it to show a round in the chamber, and handed it to him. “Keep a watch behind us, too. The psycho biker made an appearance.”
Dunk understood. “Did he find the photos?”
“He took them. Mick set us up.”
“Are you sure?”
I said, “I’m not worried about it. Whoever’s in charge knows we have the tusk. Or soon will. He’ll keep his people on a leash until we make the trade.”
Fallsdown, folding his arms again, said, “If Mick makes the owl stones angry, the Little People will tear him a new asshole. Or I will.”
I smiled. “Hollywood is missing an angel,” I told him, then got in the water.
EIGHTEEN
Until a snake got its mouth around Mick’s wrist, the magic tour guide was at his ingratiating best. An overeagerness to please is a red flag, but neither his yoga training nor twenty years dealing with tourists had taught him the first tenet of infiltration: Only whores and amateurs tumble eagerly.
Mick started on the wrong foot at first by instructing Shelly on breath control. “Slow down. How much lead you wearing? Doesn’t matter ’cause in a wet suit it’s never enough. So what you do is . . . Here.” He handed her a chunk of rock. “Use this as an anchor. And never search an area any wider than your shoulders. One square foot at a time, then move another foot or two.”
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