I took over while Dunk scrambled up the bank and disappeared. I checked Mick’s pulse, then, against my better judgment, washed the wound in the river because I’d been told to do it. I don’t find humor in scaring people, but if it won the tour guide’s trust, or caused him to feel indebted, the ploy was worth a try. Mick had set us up, after all, to be robbed by a brain-damaged biker.
One thing for certain: The tour guide was scared. He went on a talking jag, hyperventilating again and speaking way too fast.
“A medevac chopper, mate . . . I’ve got to get to a hospital . . . Shit, can’t believe this is happening.”
I tried to calm him, but he wouldn’t shut up.
“On Discovery Channel, I watched a whole thing on snakebites. My arm . . . it’s gonna swell up and turn black because it’s, like, rotting, man. And . . . they’ll have to cut my arm off before the venom gets to my heart. Then I’m really screwed—but only if I don’t die first.” He almost chuckled at that, but panic returned. On impulse, he sucked at the fang marks and spit. Did it three times, then looked at me, eyes wide. “Oh my god. Why’d you ask me about a funny taste?”
We all know the taste of blood. Mick had just set himself up. I replied, “Metallic, is how some of the victims describe it. Or minty. It’s one of the symptoms in the literature about pit vipers.”
He groaned, his face chalky, and tasted his lips. “Metallic . . . oh god. That sonuvabitch really got me good.”
It gave me an opening to ask about the psycho biker, who already had a hand missing, but I resisted and let him ramble on about losing an arm, and necrotizing flesh, then he got back to snakes, groaning, “Damn . . . I’ve seen a million cottonmouths. Had my head up my ass as usual. Showing off to impress you . . . Man, why am I such a loser sometimes?” That sobbing sound again.
I felt a wisp of guilt, so told him, “We all think we’re losers occasionally,” then stood because Dunk had returned. He had a glob of moss in one hand, a bouquet of tiny purple flowers and what looked like miniature carrots in the other.
I didn’t like the way this was going. There are too many dangerous plants and flowers in the Sunshine State. I’m familiar with only the most common—lantana, manchineel, a few others. The man from Montana was about to risk actually poisoning a guy who, at the worst, might suffer an infection.
“Don’t get carried away,” I whispered when I intercepted him.
“Arrowleaf violets and snakeroot,” Fallsdown responded, and held up the flowers for me to see. “How’s our patient doing?”
“He’ll be fine if you don’t kill him with that crap.”
“Not a chance,” he confided. “In prison, the books on ethnobotany were in the herbs and spices section.” Which sounded like a joke until he added, “Except for the moss, the same plants grow in the Rockies.” Then gave me a Can’t hurt shrug and went to Mick without waiting for my okay.
I watched Duncan sniff the wound, then say, “Let me smell your breath.”
Mick exhaled. “Metallic, huh?”
“Good weed, more like it,” was the reply. “I think my Fawnee brother has gone and pissed off the Little People.”
“The what people?” Mick sounded weaker but compliant.
Fallsdown turned to me. “Doc—hike back and call an ambulance. Just in case, okay?”
Twice, I checked over my shoulder for a secret signal to cancel the call, but the Crow or Apache medicine man was busy chanting. Using the moss, too. He had Mick’s wrists clamped between his hands.
The last time I looked, Mick was chewing something. He also began to chant.
• • •
AN HOUR LATER, by phone, Tomlinson asked me, “Why did the crazy biker threaten to kill the elephant?”
I hadn’t yet mentioned what the biker had said about how Lillian had died. Instead, I was listening to Tomlinson tell me about his afternoon with Ava Albright, but a faint trumpeting had nudged us off topic.
I said, “I’m not sure, but the biker’s mean enough to kill animals just for fun. You’re right, I think he was the guy wearing the ski mask.”
I was in the rental car, air on low, while Dunk, Mick, and Shelly stood in the heat watching the ambulance pull away. Mick, a bandage on his arm, waved. He had declined a ride to the hospital, said he felt fine . . . no, had said he felt reborn, which had caused the EMTs to roll their eyes. After checking vital signs and treating the wound, the medics hadn’t pressed the issue beyond what protocol obligated them to tell their semi-stoned patient, who didn’t appear to be in danger.
Now some color had returned to Mick’s face, but he still looked shaken when he turned and followed the others from asphalt into shade. Dunk conversed with Shelly—no surprise—but Shelly was more attentive to Mick, the fossil savant, who had recently been wounded in battle. Her motive was obvious: Mick was her key to fossil greatness.
That morning, I had packed sliced mangoes and grilled fish in a cooler. The cooler was open on the seat beside me. I took a bite of a snapper-mango sandwich, and told Tomlinson, “I wish you could see this. The great Chief Fallsdown is hitting on the woman I mentioned, but she’s more interested in your stoner buddy. Ask Dunk about Shelly when we get back.”
“No thanks,” Tomlinson said. “Not after five hours with Ava. I’ve had it up to here with women. She pulled her swimming pool act again.”
“I warned you,” I said.
“You would have been very proud.”
“I bet. What did you find out?”
“That there are too many Avas in this world and not enough Lillians.” Tomlinson had sounded upbeat until he said that, but then rallied, asking, “After seeing Ava in the flesh, you mean? I found out I’m still a breast man, God help me. Last year, it was noses and dimples. But I’m not hung up on the consistency thing.”
I said, “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. My friends in Venice still haven’t heard anything about how Lillian died. You should warn Leland about the biker. Did he threaten to kill the elephant for his tusks? Or was it more an extortion thing?”
From Tomlinson’s phone, in the background, a bell tinkled; a child’s voice spoke of hating papaya. I asked, “Where are you?”
“Just leaving a juice bar, downtown Sarasota near the bookstore. Mack wouldn’t loan me his Lincoln, so I now have to wait for my radiator to cool.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that his van had broken down.
He added, “It’ll be hard to say good-bye to the ol’ Magic Bus, but I think it’s time for new wheels. I’m considering an almost cherry GTO.”
Tomlinson’s VW van, with its “Deluxe Swiss Alps Touring package”—a fridge and an automatic pop top—didn’t fare well in hot weather. The Electric Kool-Aid Love Machine, as it was also known on the islands. I suggested, “Try something from the current century,” then asked about Ava again.
“She and I had an interesting talk once she finally put on some clothes. That’s why I wouldn’t feel right about calling Leland. I’d be forced to lie.”
I asked, “Since when has force been required?”
“Sure, go ahead, make jokes, but Ava is nothing to joke about. She wants two things from me. One is to convince the twins their father should cash in on the mine.”
I asked him to repeat that before remarking, “That’s a switch.”
“Not really. Ava has been manipulating the daughters all along. That’s what I think, anyway, which wouldn’t be that hard.”
“Esther and . . . What’s the other one’s name?”
“Tricia and Esther. Esther is more levelheaded, but they are identical twins. They’re the kind of girls who think they can save the earth by cutting back on air freshener and donating to PETA. Smart, but they’re not devious, so they still buy Ava’s act—but not enough to manipulate their vote. Ava’s counting on me, just like Leland’s counting on you to wri
te a rosy report about the water quality.”
“Squeeze play,” I said.
“Ava did her damnedest to score, that’s for sure. When I didn’t hop in the pool, she had a backup plan all ready—a yoga mind-link thing that involved a blindfold and touching hands. Talk about God’s little morality tests. It’s a way of swapping polarities, she said, but then pretended to see images projected from my hara. Take a guess at what she saw.”
“Projected from your navel?” I asked.
“Close enough. She claimed to see stolen Spanish coins and the other stuff in the duffel bag. Didn’t come right out and say what they were. It was more like one of those old-time séances. She stumbled around, describing the mammoth tusk, and I was tempted to say, Yes, yes! That’s the gigantic dildo on my boat.” He made a snorting, laughing sound. “But nothing about the saber cat glyph, Doc. I dreamt about that carving last night.”
I said, “Ava knows you’re a sucker for metaphysics. That’s the angle she’s taking.”
“Of course. She sized me up at the drum ceremony. But also because of my book—which the twins love, by the way. Tricia and Esther can both quote whole passages verbatim. Or so they claim. How would I know?”
Tomlinson’s One Fathom Above Sea Level, written between shock treatments and hallucinogenics, was still paying him royalties, plus perks in the form of female groupies.
I watched Duncan, Mick, and Shelly file into the trees, returning Shelly to the river and her Jet Ski, while Tomlinson told me more about his yoga mind-link experience. I could picture him and Ava near the pool, sitting in an air-conditioned gazebo with yoga mats and candles to cover the smell of marijuana. Ava wearing a flimsy beach dress over a bikini while Tomlinson, blindfolded, played along by clinging to the last thread of what, in him, passes as morality.
“With Ava, it’s not just about sex. It’s about assembling Ava addicts to do her heavy lifting,” he said. “The yoga stud, Enrique—Ricky, she calls him—he’s on the team, but I’m no longer convinced they’re a pair. Just the opposite. She doesn’t give a damn about Ricky. A woman like Ava would go after a real power player. I think there’s someone else.”
He knew about the other landowners—the Sanford family and the Moroccan—and I asked if he had slipped their names into the conversation.
Tomlinson said, “Of course. Monty Mondurant has been in magazines, so he would be her obvious choice. Ava lit up when I mentioned him, but only because she was hoping for an introduction. Because of my book, she thought I might know the bad boy neighbor she’s read so much about. The stepson steered you wrong there, Doc. Monty never comes near Central Florida. It’s just raw property his family owns.”
In my head, I replayed Owen talking about the starlet-loving Moroccan. Burn, Monty, burn was from the Internet, but Owen’s contempt had had a personal edge. Maybe I had been right: Owen had offered me Monty as a red herring.
I said, “Ava could be a better actress than you think.”
Tomlinson asked, “How much power does the stepson have?”
“None that I know of. Did Ava mention him?”
“Owen—that’s his name? She said he was trying to straighten himself out, that’s all. Not enough to activate my censors. I’d bet I’m right about Monty. She’d love to meet the guy. From what she said, the head of the Sanford family is an attorney in his seventies. Too old for her, I think.”
“Harris Sanford isn’t,” I said. “He’s another possibility. But don’t count the yoga instructor out yet.”
“That’s why I’m going to overnight in the van,” Tomlinson said. “There’s a twenty-four-hour Walmart not far from Hooters I’ve got my eye on. I’m meeting Ava for Ricky’s power yoga class in the morning. Later, the twins want to have drinks by the pool.”
As he spoke, Duncan appeared in the side mirror with his new best friend, Mick, who had the keys to his truck in hand.
I warned Tomlinson about solo riders on a Harley, then added, “With any luck, Dunk and I will meet a major player tonight. But first, we’re going to check on the elephant—if Leland will give me the combination.”
• • •
TOBY WAS GRAZING in a grove of stunted citrus near the pond that, to Mick, was more interesting than an elephant standing a hundred yards away. He walked down to get a closer look through the electric fence that separated him from the water and Toby.
I thought, He never stops hunting. Mick’s life combined fairy tales with addiction—the search for time tunnels, or what Finn Tovar had called the Ivory Pot, which was a lake, not a three-acre pond, that Mick was studying.
Duncan waited until we were alone to tell me, “I had a talk with Mick on the drive over.” He had ridden with the magic tour guide. I had driven the rental.
“Did he open up?”
“Turns out that Mick’s only contact is the biker. Quirk or Quark’s his name. He doesn’t know the actual collector—he lied to us about that. We only had a couple minutes, so maybe I’ll find out more later.”
I said, “Mick didn’t react when I mentioned the Sanford family or the other property owner’s name. What happened to his blood feud story?”
“That part’s true. Tovar had a feud going with almost every collector in the state—including Leland Albright’s father. That doesn’t mean his father was a collector. All the mining tycoons hated Tovar.”
“Mick’s a con man, we knew that going in,” I said, then asked, “The psycho biker’s name is Quirk?”
“Maybe Quark. He’s not a bad guy—Mick, I mean. When you left to call the ambulance, he admitted he’s Irish with some Italian, not a Skin. But he’s a believer now.”
“A believer in what?”
“You wouldn’t be interested. It was a ceremony I did back at the river.”
I said, “Good thing it wasn’t a real cottonmouth.”
Dunk raised his eyebrows. “You’re positive it wasn’t? The bite had a weird smell.” He sniffed, as if remembering, and said, “Musky—even worse than that damn elephant.” He looked across the pasture, where, a hundred yards away, Toby grazed and used his ears to swat flies.
I smiled until I realized the man from Montana wasn’t smiling—part of his medicine man routine, but I couldn’t be sure. He was watching Mick get as close as he dared to the electric fence, then cup hands around his eyes, Indian style, to block the late-afternoon sun.
Dunk asked, “What’s he looking at?”
A big chunk of inland Florida is what I’d been looking at: cypress trees on knobby muscled trunks, limbs moss-heavy, shading the pond. An abandoned barn on the other side of the pond and humpbacked cattle grazing on a far ridge. Then a wheat-tan savannah that tied a mile of blue sky to trees in the distance, and white birds feeding. It could have been Africa. Only a CBS storage building inside the fence interrupted the vista. A large building with green steel doors and a double garage.
Our tour guide, though, was focused on something else, because he stood and stiffened like a pointer, then waved us over. Not frantic, but serious.
When we got to him, he asked, “Is that a big tree stump or a pot?” He pointed toward the abandoned barn.
“A pot?” Fallsdown asked.
“For boiling things; a cauldron, you know, like witches use.” Mick strained to see what I’d thought was a tractor tire or a barrel near the barn. Hard to make out from a distance because, in late-afternoon sunlight, the object lay among weeds in eastern shadows. He said, “I’d swear that’s not wood.” Then, getting excited, he reached for his pipe and matches. “If that’s not a tree stump . . . Jesus Christ, guys . . . this could be the place.”
Dunk spoke to me, asking, “What’s he talking about?”
I had a guess but waited.
Mick said, “I need to get closer,” and hurried along the fence, as if that would help.
It didn’t. The fence consisted of four paral
lel cables strung post to post on yellow insulators, but spaced far apart, ten feet high. The cables were coated with white synthetic for visibility, plus orange caution signs that warned Danger.
It was an electric fence that was solar-powered; high voltage but low amperage, Owen had explained, so it wasn’t lethal yet would still zap Toby—or anyone else—with a hell of a shock. At the gate, which was chained with a combination lock, there was a dedicated breaker switch.
Mick began to pace, his eyes fixed on whatever it was he thought he saw. “What would happen if I tried to step through the fence?” he asked. Then changed his mind because of the sizzling sound the cables made. “Or I could pull my truck up, stand on the bed, and jump over.”
“How would you get out?” Dunk asked.
Mick said, “Damn it,” then looked to me. “You could make up a story and ask Mr. Albright for the combination to the gate.”
I had called Leland from the car about the gangbanger’s threat to shoot his elephant. The property manager was in poor health, Leland had told me, so he’d been happy to give me the code to the front entrance a quarter mile away. Asking to enter a pasture with a ten-thousand-pound elephant, though, might be a different story. On the other hand, I had been here before. I had seen Owen look under a solar panel before opening the gate—a new lock, he had said—so maybe someone had written the combination on the post.
Duncan asked Mick, “Why’s it so damn important to get in there? That elephant sees us. Elephants kill people. I’ve seen it on the news.”
Toby had wandered closer. He was snatching wild sugarcane out by the roots and looping it into his mouth after tiring of guavas among bare citrus trees. Castrated or not, he was in his territory. Big flat eyes never left us.
I said to Mick, “What do you think you see?”
Sharing information wasn’t the bone hunter way, so I knew he was trying to construct a believable lie. After a few seconds, he reconsidered, and addressed Fallsdown. “That was some pretty heavy shit you laid on me back at the river. You know what I mean.”
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