Native Tongue

by Carl Hiaasen

“We’ll be out of the way in a minute,” said Sergeant Mark Dyerson.

  The rangers had gathered between the trucks in the center of the makeshift triangle. Jim Tile joined them. He noticed dogs pacing in the back of one of the Jeeps.

  “Look at this,” Sergeant Dyerson said.

  In the middle of the road, illuminated by headlights, was a battered red collar. Jim Tile crouched to get a closer look.

  “Our transmitter,” the ranger explained. Imprinted on the plastic was the name “Telonics MOD-500.”

  “What happened?” Jim Tile asked.

  “The cat tore it off. Somehow.”

  “That’s one tough animal.”

  “It’s a first,” Sergeant Dyerson said. “We’ve never had one that could bust the lock on the buckle.”

  Another officer asked, “What now?” It was the wretched plea of a man being devoured by insects.

  “If the cat wants out this bad,” said Sergeant Dyerson, “I figure we’ll let him be.”

  From the south came the oscillating whine of a fire truck. Sergeant Dyerson retrieved the broken panther collar and told his men to move the Jeeps off the road. Minutes later, a hook-and-ladder rig barreled past.

  Jim Tile mentioned that the theme park was on fire.

  “It’s breaking my heart,” Sergeant Dyerson said. He handed the trooper a card. “Keep an eye out. My home number is on the back.”

  Jim Tile said, “All my life, I’ve never seen a panther.”

  “You probably never will,” said the ranger, “and that’s the crime of it.” He tossed the radio collar in the back of the truck and slid behind the wheel.

  “Not all the news is bad,” he said. “Number Nine’s got a litter of kittens over in the Fakahatchee.”

  “Yeah?” Jim Tile admired the wildlife officer’s outlook and dedication. He was sorry his old friend had caused the man so much trouble and confusion. He said, “So this is all you do—track these animals?”

  “It’s all I do,” Sergeant Dyerson said.

  To Jim Tile it sounded like a fine job, and an honorable one. He liked the notion of spending all day in the deep outdoors, away from the homicidal masses. He wondered how difficult it would be to transfer from the highway patrol to the Game and Fish.

  “Don’t you worry about this cat,” he told Sergeant Dyerson.

  “I worry about all of them.”

  “This one’ll be all right,” the trooper said. “You’ve got my word.”

  * * *

  As soon as he spotted the police car, Joe told Carrie to hike up her gown and run. She followed him down the slope of the bridge and into a mangrove creek. Breathlessly they clung to the slippery roots; only their heads stayed dry.

  “Don’t move,” Joe Winder said.

  “There’s a june bug in your ear.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.” He quietly dunked his face, and the beetle was swept away by the milky-blue current.

  She said, “May I raise the subject of snakes?”

  “We’re fine.” He wrapped his free arm around her waist, to hold her steady against the tide. “You’re certainly being a good sport about all this,” he said.

  “Will you think about Orlando?”

  “Sure.” It was the least he could do.

  The metronomic blink of the blue lights grew stronger, and soon tires crunched the loose gravel on the road; the siren died with a tremulous moan.

  Winder chinned up on a mangrove root for a better view. He saw a highway patrol cruiser idling at an angle on the side of the road. The headlights dimmed, and the trooper honked three times. They heard a deep voice, and Winder recognized it: Jim Tile.

  “We lucked out,” he said to Carrie. “Come on, that’s our ride.” They climbed from the creek and sloshed out of the mangroves. Before reaching the road, they heard another man’s voice and the slam of a door.

  Then the patrol car started to roll.

  Joe Winder sprinted ahead, waving both arms and shouting for the trooper to stop. Jim Tile calmly swerved around him and, by way of a farewell, flicked his brights as he drove past.

  Winder clutched his aching rib cage and cursed spiritedly at the speeding police car. Carrie joined him on the centerline, and together they watched the flashing blue lights disappear over the crest of the Card Sound Bridge.

  “Everyone’s a comedian,” Joe Winder said.

  “Didn’t you see who was in the back seat?”

  “I didn’t see a damn thing.”

  Carrie laughed. “Look what he threw out the window.” She held up a gooey stick of insect repellent. The top-secret military formula.

  “Do me first,” she said. “Every square inch.”

  Epilogue

  A team of police divers recovered the body of PEDRO LUZ from the whale tank at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills. The Monroe County Medical Examiner ruled drowning as the official cause of death, although the autopsy revealed “minor bite marks, contusions and chafing of a sexual nature.”

  JAKE HARP recovered from his gunshot wound and rejoined the professional golfing circuit, although he never regained championship form. His next best finish was a tie for 37th place at the Buick Open, and subsequently he set a modern PGA record by missing the cut in twenty-two consecutive tournaments. Eventually he retired to the Seniors’ Tour, where he collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on the first hole of a sudden-death play-off with Billy Casper.

  With his payoff money from the mob, BUD SCHWARTZ started a private security company that specializes in high-tech burglar-alarm systems for the home, car and office. Bearing a letter of recommendation from Molly McNamara, DANNY POGUE moved to Tanzania, where he is training to be a game warden at the Serengeti National Park.

  After Francis X. Kingsbury’s murder, AGENT BILLY HAWKINS was docked a week’s pay, and given a written reprimand for taking an unauthorized leave of absence. A month later he was transferred to the FBI office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He endured one winter before resigning from the Bureau and returning to Florida as an executive consultant to Schwartz International Security Services Ltd.

  NINA WHITMAN quit the phone-sex syndicate after three of her poems were published in the New Yorker. A later collection of prose and short fiction was praised by Erica Jong as a “fresh and vigorous reassessment of the female sexual dynamic.” Shortly after receiving the first royalty statement from her publisher, Nina gave up poetry and moved to Westwood, California, where she now writes motion-picture screenplays. Her husband owns the second-largest Chevrolet dealership in Los Angeles County.

  The estate of FRANCIS X. KINGSBURY, aka FRANKIE KING, was sued by the Walt Disney Corporation for copyright infringement on the characters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The lawsuit was prompted by accounts of a pornographic tattoo on the defendant’s left forearm, as described by newspaper reporters attending the open-casket funeral. After deliberating only thirty-one minutes (and reviewing a coroner’s photograph of the disputed etching), an Orlando jury awarded the Disney company $1.2 million in actual and punitive damages. PENNY KINGSBURY is appealing the decision.

  CHARLES CHELSEA accepted a job as executive vice president of public relations for Monkey Mountain. Four months later, disaster struck when a coked-up podiatrist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, jumped a fence and attempted to leg-wrestle a male chacma baboon. The podiatrist was swiftly killed and dismembered, and the animal park was forced to close. Chelsea retired from the public-relations business, and is now said to be working on a novel with Gothic themes.

  At his own request, TROOPER JIM TILE was reassigned to Liberty County in the Florida Panhandle. With only 5.1 persons per square mile, it is the least densely populated region of the state.

  DICKIE THE DOLPHIN survived the fire that destroyed the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, and was temporarily relocated to a holding pen at an oceanfront hotel near Marathon. Seven months later, a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the frisky mammal to a marine attraction in Hilton Head, South Carolina. No swimming is allowed in
Dickie’s new tank.

  After the Amazing Kingdom closed, UNCLE ELY’S ELVES never worked together again. Veteran character actor MOE STRICKLAND branched into drama, taking minor roles in television soap operas before miraculously landing the part of Big Daddy in a Scranton dinner-theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A free-lance critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer described Strickland’s performance as “gutsy and brooding.”

  Several weeks after fire swept through Francis X. Kingsbury’s theme park, a piano-sized crate from Auckland, New Zealand, was discovered outside the padlocked gate. No one was certain how long the crate had been there, but it was empty by the time a security guard found it; whatever was inside had clawed its way out. Soon residents of the nearby Ocean Reef Club began reporting the disappearance of pet cats and small dogs at a rate of two per week—a mystery that remains unsolved. Meanwhile, Kingsbury’s estate received a handwritten invoice from a person calling herself RACHEL LARK. The bill, excluding shipping, amounted to $3,755 for “miscellaneous wildlife.”

  The widow of DR. WILL KOOCHER hired a Miami lawyer and filed a wrongful-death action against the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, Ramex Global Trust, N.A. and Bermuda Intercontinental Services, Inc. The insurance companies hastily settled the lawsuit out of court for approximately $2.8 million. The gutted ruins of the Amazing Kingdom were razed, and the land was replanted with native trees, including buttonwoods, pigeon plums, torchwoods, brittle palms, tamarinds, gumbo-limbos and mangroves. This restoration was accomplished in spite of rigid opposition from the Monroe County Commission, which had hoped to use the property as a public dump.

  The surviving owners of the FALCON TRACE golf resort sold all construction permits and building rights to a consortium of Japanese investors who had never set foot in South Florida. However, the project stalled once again when environmentalists surveying the Key Largo site reported the presence of at least two blue-tongued mango voles, previously thought to be extinct. According to an unsigned press release faxed to all major newspapers and wire services, the tiny mammals were spotted at Falcon Trace during a nature hike by MOLLY MCNAMARA and the Mothers of Wilderness, who immediately reported the sighting to the U.S. Department of Interior.

  Eventually the Falcon Trace and Amazing Kingdom properties were purchased from bankruptcy by the state of Florida, and became part of a preserve on NORTH KEY LARGO. In the spring of 1991, a National Geographic photographer set out to capture on film the last surviving pair of blue-tongued mango voles. After two months in the woods, the photographer contracted mosquito-borne encephalitis and was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he spent three weeks on clear fluids. He never got a glimpse of the shy and nocturnal creatures, although he returned to New York with a cellophane packet of suspect rodent droppings and a pledge to keep searching.

  Read an excerpt from

  Bad Monkey

  By Carl Hiaasen

  Available from Knopf

  June 2013

  One

  On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.

  “What’re you waiting for?” James Mayberry barked at the mate. “Get that thing off my line!”

  The kid tugged and twisted, but the barb of the hook was imbedded in bone. Finally the captain came down from the bridge and used bent-nose pliers to free the decomposing limb, which he placed on shaved ice in a deck box.

  James Mayberry said, “For Christ’s sake, now where are we supposed to put our fish?”

  “We’ll figure that out when you actually catch one.”

  It had been a tense outing aboard the Misty Momma IV. James Mayberry had blown three good strikes because he was unable to absorb instruction. Dragging baits in the ocean was different than jigging for walleyes in the lake back home.

  “Don’t we need to call somebody?” he asked the captain.

  “We do.”

  The hairy left arm was bloated and sunburned to the hue of eggplant. A cusp of yellowed humerus protruded at the point of separation, below the shoulder. The flesh surrounding the wound looked ragged and bloodless.

  “Yo, check it out!” the mate said.

  “What now?” James Mayberry asked.

  “His freakin’ finger, dude.”

  The victim’s hand was contracted into a fist except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended.

  “How weird is that? He’s flippin’ us off,” the mate said.

  The captain told him to re-bait the angler’s hook.

  “Has this ever happened out here before?” James Mayberry said. “Tell the truth.”

  “You should go see about your wife.”

  “Jesus, I’ll never hear the end of it. Louisa wanted to ride the Conch Train today. She did not want to come fishing.”

  “Well, son,” the captain said, “we’re in the memory-making business.”

  He climbed back to the bridge, radioed the Coast Guard and gave the GPS coordinates of the gruesome find. He was asked to remain in the area and look for other pieces of the body.

  “But I got a charter,” he said.

  “You can stay at it,” the Coast Guard dispatcher advised. “Just keep your eyes open.”

  After calming herself, Louisa Mayberry informed her husband that she wished to return to Key West right away.

  “Come on, sugar. It’s a beautiful morning.” James Mayberry didn’t want to go back to the dock with no fish to hang on the spikes—not after shelling out a grand to hire the boat.

  “The first day of our honeymoon, and this! Aren’t you sketched out?”

  James Mayberry peeked under the lid of the fish box. “You watch CSI all the time. It’s the same type of deal.”

  His wife grimaced but did not turn away. She remarked that the limb didn’t look real.

  “Oh, it’s real,” said James Mayberry, somewhat defensively. “Just take a whiff.” Snagging a fake arm wouldn’t make for as good a story. A real arm was pure gold, major high-fives from all his peeps back in Madison. You caught a what? No way, bro!

  Louisa Mayberry’s gaze was fixed on the limb. “What could have happened?” she asked.

  “Tiger shark,” her husband said matter-of-factly.

  “Is that a wedding band on his hand? This is so sad.”

  “Fish on!” the mate called. “Who’s up?”

  James Mayberry steered his bride to the fighting chair and the mate fitted the rod into the gimbal. Although she was petite, Louisa Mayberry owned a strong upper body due to rigorous Bikram yoga classes that she took on Tuesday nights. Refusing assistance, she pumped in an eleven-pound blackfin tuna and whooped triumphantly as it flopped on the deck. Her husband had never seen her so excited.

  “Here, take a picture!” she cried to the mate, and handed over her iPhone.

  “Hold on,” James Mayberry said. “Get both of us together.”

  Louisa watched him hustle to get ready. “Really, Jimmy? Really?”

  Moments later the captain glanced down from the bridge and saw the mate snapping photographs of the newlyweds posed side by side at the transom. Their matching neon blue Oakley wraparounds were propped on their matching cap visors, and their fair Wisconsin noses practically glowed with sunblock.

  Louisa Mayberry was gamely hoisting by the tail her sleek silvery tuna while James Mayberry wore the mate’s crusty gloves to grip his rancid catch, its middle finger aimed upward toward the puffy white clouds.

  The captain dragged on a cigarette and turned back to the wheel. “Another fucking day in paradise,” he said.

  The phone kept ringing but Yancy didn’t answer it. He was drinking rum, sitting in a plastic lawn chair. From next door came the offensive buzz of wood saws and the metallic pops of a nail gun. The absentee owner of the property was erecting an enormous spec house that had no spiritual place on Big Pine Key, and furthermore interfered with Yancy’s modest view of the sunse
t. It was Yancy’s fantasy to burn the place down as soon as the roof framing was finished.

  He heard a car stop in his driveway but he didn’t rise from the chair. His visitor was a fellow detective, Rogelio Burton.

  “Why don’t you pick up your phone?” Burton said.

  “You believe that monstrosity? It’s like a goddamn mausoleum.”

  Burton sat down beside him. “Sonny wants you to take a road trip.”

  “Miami?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll pass.” Yancy glared at the construction site across the fence. “The house is forty-four feet high—I measured it myself. The county code’s only thirty-five.”

  “It’s the Keys, man. The code is for suckers.”

  “Deer used to come around all the time and feed on the twigs.”

  Yancy offered his friend a drink. Burton declined.

  He said, “Andrew, it’s not like you’ve got a choice. Do what Sonny wants.”

  “But I’m suspended, remember?”

  “Yeah, with pay. Is that Barbancourt?”

  “My last bottle. Tell him anywhere but Miami, Rog.”

  “You want me to ask if you can go to Cancún instead?” Burton sighed. “Look, it’s a day trip, up and back.”

  “They always screw me on the mileage.”

  Burton knew this wasn’t true. Yancy had issues with the Miami Police Department, from which he’d been fired in a previous era of his life.

  “Chill out. You’re just going to the ME’s office.”

  “The morgue? Nice.”

  “Come out to the car,” said Burton.

  Yancy set down his drink. “This ought to be special.”

  The severed arm had been bubble-wrapped and packed on dry ice in a red Igloo cooler. To make it fit, the limb had been bent at the elbow.

  “That’s all they found?”

  “You know how it goes,” Burton said.

  “John Doe or Juan Doe?”