Basket Case

  I point the spotlight in the direction of the approaching din but it turns out I'm aiming high. A more powerful beam shoots back at the johnboat and I spin away, to save my eyes. The onrushing roar is now so intense that I put down the spotlight and press my knuckles to my ears. Suddenly the engine changes pitch, and trails off to nothing with a thwocka-thwocka-thwock.

  Now I know what we're dealing with: Cleo's bodyguard has swiped an airboat.

  The light plays back and forth across our little fishing craft, lingering on the yellow tarpaulin a moment too long for my ragged nerves. I snatch up my own light and aim for the guy's face. He ducks, but not before I catch a telltale glint of an earring and a flash of bare pate.

  "Knock it off, dickhead," the shadow barks.

  "Jerry, my brother, you're late."

  Simultaneously we kill the spotlights. The distinctive L-shaped profile of the airboat becomes visible against a pinkish swath of low sky—the faraway glow of West Palm Beach. I see Jerry's burly silhouette on the driver's platform in front of the big propeller. In the bow are two other figures; one is standing and one is seated, cloaked in a hood.

  "Where's the package?" Jerry shouts at me.

  "Not yet, you silly man!"

  The standing figure prods the hooded figure, who says, "Jack, it's me."

  I feel like a mule just kicked me in the gut.

  "It's me, Emma." She sounds doped and exhausted.

  "How are you doing, princess," I hear myself calling in a strained voice. "It's gonna be all right."

  I'm shaking so badly it must be rocking Juan in the front of the boat. If I tried to stand up now I'd keel sideways into the lake. "How do you want to do this?" I ask Jerry.

  "Right here. Bring your boat over."

  Boy oh boy.

  The tall figure in the front of the airboat is loosening the hood on Emma's head. I feel for the starter cord on the Mercury and I pull on it once, twice, three times.

  That figures—the fucker won't start. Its moist wheezing reminds me of the late MacArthur Polk.

  "Hurry it up," Jerry snaps.

  Easy, Jack. Don't panic. Try the choke—but let's not flood it, okay?

  "What's the problem, dickhead?" Jerry zaps me with his spotlight. He thinks I'm stalling.

  Twice more I yank on the cord before the outboard chugs to life. I put it in gear and idle toward the kidnappers. What else is there to do?

  "You look very cool in that contraption, Jerry. Have you driven one of those things before?"

  "Shut up, Tagger."

  "If you ever get canned by Cleo, maybe you could get a job on the Seminole reservation. Nature tours!"

  "Eat me," says Jerry. Descending from the driver's seat, he keeps the spotlight trained on my chest. I guess he wants to make sure I'm not reaching for another frozen lizard.

  Pointing my own Q-beam at the bow of the airboat, I see that Emma's hood is a burlap feed sack. She slumps round-shouldered and unmoving. The man guarding her is none other than Loreal. His eyeglasses are bug-splattered and his lustrous waist-length mane is pulled back in a drenched and unglamorous ponytail—the life of a big-time record producer! Under any other circumstances he'd have me in stitches. His distressed expression suggests he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet but here. Obviously Jerry has given him a preview of what lies ahead.

  Easing up to the airboat, I put down my light, slip the outboard into neutral and move to the bow. I'm careful not to step on Juan, who remains motionless under the yellow tarpaulin. When I reach beneath it, a large plastic cartridge is pressed firmly into my hand—Jimmy Stoma's unfinished creation.

  Jerry's spotlight is scorching the back of my neck, and I know he's looming over me, a gun in his other hand. The glare is so hot that I can't look up.

  "Give it here," he says.

  "Not until you hand down the lady."

  The spotlight's beam jiggles as he shifts positions. I've already decided to knock him into the water if he tries to board the johnboat. The light clicks off, and as my eyes adjust, I can see Loreal leading Emma by the arm; leading her to me. This I can scarcely believe.

  Yet now I'm helping her into the johnboat, gently squeezing her arm and whispering that everything's going to turn out fine. In the cloud-glow I see the black stripe of Jerry's eye patch encircling his naked skull. The spotlight bobs restlessly in his left hand, which means the gun is in the other. I expect he'll shoot us the moment he gets his mitts on Jimmy's music.

  "Now give it here!" he says.

  I pick up the computer box and dangle it above the water on the opposite side of the boat, so that Jerry can't grab at it. "If this baby gets wet, it's all over," I say. "The unit is ruined and the song's lost forever." With such morons it's impossible to belabor the obvious.

  "Tagger, what the fuck're you doin'?"

  "Your gun, Jer. Throw it as far as you can."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Listen, Cyclops, I'm counting to five. If I don't hear your pistola hit the water, the package will. Then you can go home and explain to Mrs. Stomarti what happened to her hit single. Explain how you're a tough guy, and tough guys can't part with their guns. I'm sure she'll understand."

  Jerry raises his right arm. It's not so dark that I can't make out the shape of the barrel, aimed more or less at my beak. Soiling myself would not be an inappropriate reaction.

  Yet I continue to brandish the prized hard drive over the water. "One," I hear myself saying. "Two... three... "

  "Shit, Jerry, do what he says!" Finally Loreal has something to contribute. "If he drops the damn thing, we lose all the tracks and then we're screwed. I'm fucking serious."

  "Listen to the man, Jer. He's a pro."

  The bodyguard emits a crude slur on my ancestry, then he rears back and heaves the gun. From the sound of the splash, it was a big one.

  He says, "Okay, now gimme the fucking package."

  I'm a man of my word. "Here, Jerry. Catch."

  I toss the plastic box at his squat silhouette. The hard drive bounces off his chest and falls to the deck of the airboat. While he and Loreal clamber to retrieve it, I shove off.

  Stepping to the stern of the skiff, I twist the throttle wide open.

  "Jack?"

  "It's okay, Emma. Everything's fine."

  I reach for the hood and tug it off. She looks haggard and dazed. Smiling numbly, she clutches at my hand. Juan peeks out from beneath the tarpaulin. "We cool?"

  "Not quite." A mild understatement.

  We'll never outrun that airboat if they come after us, which is a distinct possibility. Jerry didn't even ask for the CDs that we burned from Jimmy's master. It would be calamitous for Cleo if they turned up on some radio station at the same time her album came out. She made a point of telling me to bring those discs tonight, so that she could destroy them. I'd have been pleased to hand them over, too, but that sonofabitch Jerry never said a word.

  Which means he either forgot, or he doesn't intend to let us get off this lake alive.

  Juan crawls back to take the tiller and to deliver Carla's gun, which he'd held cocked for the duration of the rendezvous. That was one of our contingency plans—in the event of an especially violent double cross, Juan was to burst from beneath the tarp and plug Cleo's bodyguard in the brain. It wasn't a particularly original idea, but we were looking to keep things simple.

  Delicately I slip the Lady Colt into my waistband, the challenge being not to shoot myself. I move forward to sit beside Emma, who is wobbly and shuddering. I wrap one arm around her and with the other I point the Q-beam at twelve o'clock, so that Juan is able to see where we're heading. In his fist the GPS screen glows a cozy green, and the unanimous hope is that it will guide us back to Ernie Bo Tump's marina.

  For all the neurotic ruminating I do about death, I never before felt the ice-cold breath of the beast. In all my life I cannot recall a singular moment I thought would be my last. Even when no-neck Jerry was whaling on me in the apartment, I was more angry than scared, wh
ich doesn't say much for my survival instinct. Tonight a large-caliber handgun was pointed at my nostrils, and my response was cinematic defiance. Whether that was brave or merely idiotic, it plainly reveals a new, more flexible attitude toward the concept of dying. Emma has no frame of reference, but Anne might call it a breakthrough.

  In any case, I'm not off the hook. None of us are.

  "Jack, look! Look!" Juan points ahead. Emma stiffens in my embrace. Streaking off our port side is another white light—the air-boat, angling on a course to intercept us. Instantly I kill the Q-beam and start fumbling for the gun. I tell Juan not to slow down, no matter what.

  Jerry the goon is wilier than I thought. He circled far around us to get downwind, so that we couldn't hear him coming until it was too late to hide. And he's not going to leave us full of bullet holes, which would arouse suspicion. Instead he intends to run us down, making it appear as if we accidentally wrecked the johnboat. Jerry figures that even if the cops wonder about the mess, nobody will put it all together.

  The lake was dark, they must've hit something...

  Their spotlight slashes back and forth as Cleo's boys feverishly try to find us again. We're all crouched low, Juan panting and Emma's fingers digging into my leg. We're holding to a steady speed, a daring strategy in inky darkness. If we strike another log, the chase is over.

  "Shit," I hear Juan say. "Jack! They're... "

  His warning is smothered by the rising roar. I twist around to see the airboat skimming up our wake, not more than fifty yards behind us. Loreal is braced in the bow, manning the spotlight. The beam is fixed on the back of Juan's head, radiating an unwanted halo. In the glare I can't see Jerry on the driver's perch, but he most certainly can see us.

  The gap shrinks with a sickening inevitability—powered by a cropduster-sized aviation engine, the airboat is nearly twice as fast as our dinky outboard. It's also twice as wide and probably three times as heavy. At fifty miles an hour it will flatten us like a lily pad. Either we'll die on impact or go down screaming.

  In any event, we will be long past caring by the time the gators get around to us.

  Juan thumps my arm and gestures disgustedly at our motor. The prop is picking up weeds and we're slowing steadily. Jerry has taken dead aim at our flimsy transom.

  "Grab Emma," Juan tells me, "and jump."

  "Oh, I don't think so."

  "Jack, please!" Emma says. It's the same tone she uses in the newsroom when I'm being impossible.

  "Everybody get down!" I hear myself yelling, though I'm standing as straight as a fence post. Carla's gun is gripped with both hands and my arms are extended, the way the cops showed me that day at the firing range. I'm squinting because Loreal is blasting the spotlight in my face. The airboat bears down with a rising backbeat of heavy pistons, like an oncoming locomotive. At roughly one hundred feet I start pulling the trigger, the pistol jumping in my hands. The odds of me actually hitting these pricks with a.38 slug are slender indeed, but Loreal appears to have taken due notice of the muzzle flashes. A yelp of alarm goes up from both men in the airboat, and the spotlight beam wavers madly. A heated downshifting can be heard, then a sibilant rush of air.

  Unfortunately, we're no longer moving. The outboard has quit. As I throw myself upon Emma, Juan jumps off the stern.

  The next sound isn't the expected crunch of impact but rather a long turbulent splash, followed by the thumping, fading grind of the aircraft engine. A gargled cry arises before silence reclaims the darkness.

  In a whisper I ask Emma if she's all right.

  "Yes, but I'm very thirsty, Jack. Thirsty and tired." Her voice is somnolent and hollow, from another galaxy. They must have drugged her with a goddamn horse tranquilizer. Hastily I make a bedding of the yellow tarp and lay her down on the deck. Meanwhile Juan has jetted out of the water like an otter. Wordlessly he cleans the duckweed off the outboard's lower unit while I re-attach the Q-beam cables to the battery.

  The crashed airboat is easy to find. Bow skyward, it rests in a dense bank of cattails. The gunshots evidently spooked Jerry into cutting the rudders sharply, a maneuver for which flat-bottomed watercraft traveling at high speeds are not favorably designed. Also working against him was the lack of one eye, which undoubtedly affected his depth perception as he struggled to control the boat. It spun violently before tipping backward at a radical cant, its stern embedding in the mud.

  I'm guessing Jerry got bucked off when the airboat began to whirl. He was probably sitting on his ass in the cattails, gaping in dull wonderment as the boat upended and wallowed back on him, the blade still very much a blur. His head should be landing in Pahokee any time now.

  Loreal went next, though not as instantly. His fall appears to have been stopped by the frame of the driver's seat, but his silken ponytail slipped unluckily through the mesh of the engine cage. The propeller must have snagged it and continued to rotate, dragging his face in a brutally concentric pattern across the metal grid, until the scalp ripped loose. It now hangs like a soggy red pennant from one tip of the blade.

  What this looks like is a dreadful accident. Two joyriders in a stolen airboat.

  The lake was dark, they must've hit something...

  Emma is breathing softly—in the sudden quiet she has fallen asleep. I hear Juan slap at a mosquito. I hang over the gunwale and vomit as discreetly as possible.

  "It's getting late," Juan says.

  "Maybe I hit 'em with a shot."

  "Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera."

  "That bad, huh."

  "Yeah, but it sure did the trick."

  Not far from Jerry's body, my spotlight snares the flash of an object submerged on the muddy lake bottom: a black plastic box, slightly larger than an eight-track cassette.

  Jimmy Storm's widow will be mighty disappointed.

  29

  Emma and I lounge in bed until nearly noon. Juan calls to check on us.

  "That was a bad scene out there." He sounds tired though unshaken. "Those guys got what they deserved, Jack."

  "The case could be made. But what a godawful mess."

  "So, from now on you'll be sleeping with the lights on. Welcome to the club," he says. "How is Emma? That's the most important thing."

  "Emma is strong."

  In fact, she has insisted on preparing a lumberjack's breakfast—an omelette, flapjacks, sausages, grapefruit and toast. I hang up the phone in time to dart out of her path as she twirls through the kitchen wearing nothing but my Jaguars jersey and mint-green toenail polish.

  Bravely she relates the details of her abduction. Jerry and Loreal were staking out my place the night I returned from Los Angeles, then tailed Emma home from the pancake house the next morning. She thinks they got in through the front door, which she'd left unlocked after letting in the cat. The men waited as she dressed for work, then tossed the burlap hood over her head as she came out of the bedroom. She was dosed with sleeping pills, bundled in the trunk of a car and driven to an unknown location—based on a whiff of bathroom cleanser, Emma believes it was a cheap motel. There she was kept for thirty hours until they doped her again, took her to the lake and placed her aboard the airboat. She never saw the faces of her captors, and never once heard them mention Cleo Rio by name.

  So, as anticipated, it will be impossible to pin the kidnapping on Jimmy's widow. After what happened last night, the crime is destined to remain unreported anyway. Mrs. Stomarti will get away with everything, except her dead husband's song.

  I can live with that. We got Emma back.

  While the omelette is frying, she ambushes me with a boisterous hug. "You are hereby forbidden from touching a loaded firearm ever again," she teases.

  "I told you how much I hated those damn things."

  "From what I remember, you were very gallant last night."

  "Lucky I didn't shoot off my own fingers."

  "You still saved our lives. Think about it, Jack."

  I haven't told Emma what happened to
Jerry and Loreal. She was in dreamland when Juan and I went to find them.

  "The men who kidnapped you died in the airboat crash."

  After a troubled pause, Emma asks: "You're sure?"

  "You've heard of blunt trauma? This was the opposite."

  "Should we call the police?"

  "And tell them what—the dead guys tried to kill us to cover up the theft of a pop song? The cops would roll us both in bubble wrap and ship us to the psycho wing at Charity."

  Breakfast turns into a quiet affair. Emma isn't angry; she's engrossed. It's no small weight to bear, the experience of a soul-rattling event that may never be acknowledged.