Naked Came the Manatee

by Carl Hiaasen

  "No, no, no! Your neck isn't simply sore," Lassiter told him. "It throbs. It aches. The pain is excruciating. Every breath is torture, every movement torment. Get it?"

  "Yeah, my life is a living hell," Deal said dryly.

  "That's good, John. Have you done this before?" Deal shrugged and looked toward the table nearest the bay, where the guy's face was hidden behind a copy of Diario las Americas.

  "Could be an insurance investigator," Lassiter said, "making sure you're not doing the lambada at Club Taj."

  Deal crumbled some crackers into his conch chowder. "No. He was there the night I went off the dock."

  "There was a witness? Why the hell didn't you tell me?" He studied his client a moment. "John, I may not be the best lawyer in town, but... "

  "Don't belittle yourself, Jake."

  "No, it's true. I'm one of the few lawyers in the country who wasn't asked to comment on the O. J. Simpson case, even though I'm probably the only one to have tackled him."

  "For a second-string linebacker, you're not a bad lawyer, Jake, but as I recall, you usually missed tackling him."

  "Thanks. But you gotta trust me now. What else have you left out?"

  Now Deal told him everything. The traffic jam that turned into bedlam in Coconut Grove, then wheeling the Hog down a side street, the specterlike vision of the man draped in the shrimp net, then the plunge and crunching descent into the black, brackish water. By the time he told about the manatee, the old woman, and the box, it was a three-beer story.

  "What should we do, Jake?" Deal asked, finally.

  "Shula would go with the play-action fake, get the corner to bite, then throw deep. But me, I just buckle up the chin strap, lower the head, and slog straight ahead."

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

  "Watch."

  Lassiter stood and headed to the guy's table, carrying a fresh Grolsch, a sixteen-ouncer with the porcelain stopper. "Hey, buddy, I wonder if you would move."

  The guy glared at him and looked around. There were no empty tables. "Move? Where?"

  "Hialeah, Sopchoppy, I don't care. You're crowding my friend."

  The guy stood up, barely reaching Lassiter's shoulders. He had the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a bodybuilder. A tattoo of a scorpion was visible on his right forearm. "My name is Hector," he said, without smiling, "and your friend has something I want very much."

  "What, a personality?"

  At the next table, one of the Yuppie lawyers was boasting about tossing out a paraplegic's lawsuit because the statute of limitations had expired.

  "Your thieving friend stole something from me," Hector said angrily.

  "Yeah, well, under the law of the sea, the Treaty of Versailles, and the doctrine of finders keepers, what he found belongs to him."

  Hector grinned, but there was no humor in it. "No, cabron, it belongs to me."

  "Look, Hector, I'm going to count to ten, and when I get there, you're gone. One... two... three... C'mon, make yourself scarce. Cuatro... cinco... seis... Hey, Hector, vete! Seven... eight... nine... "

  Suddenly, Hector slammed a size 10-EEE cowboy boot on Lassiter's instep. The pain shot through his ankle and radiated up his leg. Before Lassiter could recover, Hector threw a short right back, sinking it deep into his gut. The lawyer doubled over, retched, and an explosion of grilled dolphin, coleslaw, and beer showered the Yuppie lawyers.

  Deal got painfully to his feet and hobbled over, but Hector was already halfway to the dock, where a Boston Whaler sat idling, a young man at the wheel. Hector leapt into the boat, which took off, engine roaring in the no-wake zone.

  Deal knelt down next to Lassiter, who was on one knee. "You look worse than I do, counselor."

  "On the other hand," Lassiter said, wheezing, "there is something to be said for the play-action fake."

  The moonlight streaked across the dark water, a highway reaching toward the horizon. A light breeze blew from the southeast, and the dive boat rocked gently at anchor. The twinkling lights of Key Biscayne condos were visible to the west. Jake Lassiter sat in the captain's chair, his bandaged foot resting inside an open cooler filled with beer and ice. John Deal removed his cervical collar and kneaded the muscles of his aching neck, then popped three Advil. It had been a long day.

  "I can't believe you didn't even open it," Lassiter said.

  "The old woman told me not to, said I'd be better off just to get rid of it."

  "It could be jewels, drugs."

  "Ebola virus," Deal added.

  Lassiter shook his head. "No. It's gotta be something valuable. Why else would Hector want it so much?"

  Deal shrugged and looked over the rail into the water. Seventy feet below, a Boeing 727 sat on the sandy bottom, an artificial reef for the fishermen and divers. "If the storms last month haven't stirred up everything, we'll know soon enough." In the dark water below, a light was growing brighter. "Can you trust her?" Deal asked.

  "I've known Fay Leonard since she was a kid catching lobsters bare-handed off Islamorada. She's a good diver and a good friend."

  "So the two of you aren't... "

  He let it hang there.

  "Ancient history, John. Ancient history."

  There was a splash, and suddenly Fay was behind the boat. She spit out the regulator and slid her face mask on top of her head, and once again Deal had the powerful sense that he knew her from somewhere. It had been itching at him since they'd first met, but... well, it'd come to him. With her free hand, she slung a net onto the dive platform. Inside the net was a round metal canister wrapped in plastic. Lassiter hobbled toward the stern, his foot throbbing, and Deal walked stiffly to meet him. Fay came halfway up the dive ladder. "It was just where you said it would be, John, in three feet of sand just under the cockpit."

  Fay pulled herself onto the dive platform, removed her tank, mask and flippers, then, without a word, peeled off her one-piece suit. She was a lithe, tanned, athletic woman in her early thirties, with sun-bleached hair tied back in a ponytail. "Jake, I'm going to take a swim," Fay said. "The water's beautiful."

  "Don't you want to see what's—"

  "No, you boys play treasure salvors. There's a big old manatee out there who wants some company. Just yell when you want to head back in."

  She slipped gracefully into the water, the moonlight reflecting off her long limbs as she swam into the darkness. "I must be getting old," Lassiter said, " 'cause I'd rather see what's in that box than go skinny-dipping with Fay Leonard."

  "As I recall, she didn't exactly invite you."

  "Sure she did, John, in a woman's roundabout way."

  "The way I heard it, she'd rather swim naked with a manatee."

  Lassiter thought about it a moment and said, "Fay was always partial to linemen."

  "C'mon," Deal said. "Let's do it."

  They huddled over their prize,, Deal unwrapping the plastic, Lassiter holding a flashlight. It took less than a minute. Underneath the plastic, a shiny steel canister the size of a hatbox. A wheel lock secured a door built into the top. Deal strained to turn the wheel counterclockwise. "It's stuck," he said, his face reddening.

  Together they pulled, and after a moment, the wheel turned and the small door opened with a whoosh. Inside, a circle of tiny green lights immediately flashed red, and a blast of frigid air escaped. In the center of the lights, a second door with a simple slide latch led to another compartment.

  "Well, counselor, here goes," Deal said.

  They both held their breath. They were unaware of Fay Leonard swimming fifty yards away in the darkness, the giant manatee Booger alongside. They were unaware of the Boston Whaler with two men aboard, anchored directly in Fay's path. They were unaware of anything and everything in the whole wide world and the deep blue sea, except what treasure might rest in front of them.

  Deal slid the latch and opened the interior door as Lassiter shone the flashlight inside.

  "Uh-oh," Lassiter said.

  "Oh Lord," Deal said.
/>   Lassiter exhaled a tense breath. "Turn it over."

  "No, you."

  "C'mon. It's not alive."

  "You're the ambulance chaser, Jake. You've seen stuff like this before."

  "No I haven't."

  Wincing, Lassiter reached into the compartment and grabbed the human head by its thick, graying hair. "It's cold," Lassiter said. "Like it's being preserved."

  He turned the head over, faceup, then dropped it back into the canister.

  And there it was.

  Bushy beard and all.

  Staring at them with wide-open eyes, a startled look on that familiar face.

  The face of Fidel Castro.

  4. THE L.A. CONNECTION—Edna Buchanan

  Moments earlier, Britt Montero had been hungry and feverish, battling deadlines and the blues, yearning to go home, desperate and exhausted, her brain an overloaded computer about to crash. But she never could resist a ringing telephone. And Jake Lassiter knew exactly what to say.

  "Have I got a story for you!"

  She felt the adrenaline pump and her brain cells kick back into life. Her blood began to tingle. She loved to hear those words, but still, she reacted with caution.

  "Have you been drinking, Jake?"

  "Hell, yeah," he said. "You would be too. I've got John Deal here... "

  She pinched the bridge of her upturned nose and tried to ignore the distant drumbeat of an impending headache. "Isn't he the one that wrecked that entire showroom full of exotic cars... ?"

  "Yep, that's him, he's a client of mine."

  It did not surprise Britt that John Deal needed a lawyer.

  "Did your jury just come in?"

  "No... "

  "Then call me tomorrow."

  "This isn't about him, not directly anyway." Jake lowered his deep voice for dramatic effect. "This story is so big that when word gets out, there will be riots in the streets, power grabs, and the whole damn revolution will come down."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You've got to see this to believe it."

  "Where are you?"

  "Crandon Park Marina. Can you meet us here right away? And, uh, could you grab a couple of recent pictures, close-ups, of Fidel Castro from the newspaper morgue and bring them with you?"

  "Castro? What is this? If you're putting me on, Jake... "

  "Scout's honor, this is dead serious, in fact it could be a matter of life or death. Uh, check the wires too, before you leave. See if anything unusual is coming out of Havana."

  Britt hung up and punched the send button on her computer terminal, booting into the editing system her story about the lovesick bag boy who had taken an entire Kendall supermarket and its shoppers hostage with his father's 12-gauge shotgun.

  Beyond the big bayfront windows of the Miami News building, the panoramic Miami Beach skyline and its twinkling lights beckoned alluringly, but she knew there was no going home soon. Her apartment on the Beach might as well have been a thousand miles away. The west drawbridge of the Venetian Causeway had been stuck in the open position since noon. On the MacArthur span, the remains of a house and several cars were scattered across the eastbound lanes. In order to save one of the last historic pioneer homes from demolition, the city had decided to move it to a new location, but the house had toppled off the wide-load flatbed and smashed into a million pieces. Several South Beach-bound motorists, startled by a house dead ahead as they ascended a fast-lane rise at fifty-five miles an hour, lost control, compounding the problem. The Julia Tuttle Causeway, two miles north, was also closed to traffic. A Hollywood movie crew had rented it for the night to shoot a high-speed chase scene for a new action epic.

  Maybe Jake really had a great story, Britt thought hopefully. She loved this job. Every day was like Christmas morning. Full of surprises, stories unfolding, always the possibility that the big one would break today. So far, today had brought only two threatening letters and three obscene calls from faithful readers, while another had left chicken entrails on the hood of her new T-Bird in the News parking lot. She fervently hoped they were chicken entrails. Then came the assignment, followed by a major skirmish with the assistant city editor from hell.

  Still steamed about the assignment, she drove south through the soft night to meet Jake, half listening to the crackle of her portable police scanner. Enthralled city, tourism, and newspaper executives were eager to cooperate with the moviemakers on location.

  Final Deadline, a major action flick, would star movie hero Dash Brandon as a government agent under cover as a newsman for a major Miami newspaper. Britt's assignment, and she had been given no choice but to accept, was to help the star research his role by having him accompany her on the police beat for a week.

  Unimpressed by Hollywood types, Britt resented the intrusion. But so far, the assignment hadn't been too bad, she thought, turning east across the Rickenbacker Causeway, windows open, the salt breeze bracing. The jet-lagged star wearied quickly. Summoning his limo, he had departed between the mini-riot that had broken out during a police raid on a Hialeah cockfight and the high-speed pursuit of three carloads of teenage smash-and-grabbers across the Broad Causeway from Bal Harbour.

  Fay had fought hard, but Hector and Phil, despite the obvious difficulties in holding on to a slippery, wet, naked body, had succeeded in wrestling her aboard. Before Lassiter and Deal, stunned by the contents of the shiny steel canister, realized what was happening, Fay was shrieking and struggling on the deck of the Boston Whaler. Hector managed to cuff the surprisingly strong and agile woman to the handrail, but as he grinned victoriously, she landed a vicious kick to his crotch. He dropped to his knees, moaning. Phil gunned the engines, cut the running lights, and throttled into the darkness, as Lassiter and Deal collided painfully, cursing and fumbling in their haste to start the engine of their dive boat.

  "Did you see that big feesh?" groaned Hector, still sitting dazed and wet on the deck.

  "That shows how much you know about fishing," Phil jeered. "That was a barrel."

  "It was a manatee, you jerks," Fay gasped. "Touch me and I'll rip your faces off. Who the hell are you?"

  "Your friends have something that belongs to us," Hector said. "Here, cover yourself with this." He blushed and looked away as he draped something around her shoulders.

  "This is a fishing net, you idiot! Where are we going?" she demanded.

  Booger, buffeted about by the wake, experienced a vague sense of something amiss. It had begun as Fay flailed and grappled on the deck of the dive boat, thrashing about like a slick mermaid in the moonlight. Then he was alone, with neither a playmate nor a swimming partner. Miffed and lonely, he followed at a distance, hoping she would come back.

  Britt spotted Jake on the dock. The tall, sandy-haired ex-football jock was limping, and lugging a metal canister the size of a hatbox and what appeared to be a woman's one-piece bathing suit slung over his arm. The man in a neck brace who was trailing behind him had to be Deal, she thought. Both looked grim.

  "What happened to you two?"

  "That's not important," Jake said, wincing as he led the way. "Did you bring the pictures?"

  "Kidnapping?" Britt said, as they trooped into Jake's kitchen. He lived in the Grove, in a small coral rock house with no air-conditioning. They had gone there in her T-Bird after a brief but vicious argument about who would drive. Jake's foot was bandaged, and although Britt could not clearly recall the specifics of Deal's destructive swath through the exotic-car showroom, she suspected that it would be safer to skydive without a chute than travel anywhere as his passenger.

  They sat at the table and filled her in on Fay's abduction.

  "We have to call the FBI," she said, concerned.

  "No cops," Jake said. "Bring in any kind of badge and that'll get Fay dead. I know those guys. That's why we called you."

  "Jake, I'm no Rambo. What can I do?"

  "Look, Britt, nobody in Miami has better contacts. We need you to check something out for us. Quietly. You'll have
to sit on it for a few days, but then you'll have the story of a lifetime, and hopefully we'll have Fay back, and maybe a little something extra for our trouble."

  Deal nodded and popped a handful of Advil. "Those lowlifes on the boat know who we are," he muttered. "We'll be hearing from them soon, without a doubt. We need to know who they're working for, what the hell we're dealing with here."

  "They'll probably contact us, to arrange a swap," Jake said.

  "Swap?"

  "That's what we have to show you." Jake swept an accumulation of beer cans and pizza crusts off the cluttered tabletop and placed the metal canister in the center.