Snapper, ordering her to slow down, couldn’t keep the raw nervousness out of his voice. Edie acted as if she didn’t hear a word.
The one who called himself Skink didn’t stir from his nap, trance, coma, whatever it was. Meanwhile the young newlywed (Edie noticed in the rearview) carefully removed her own wedding band from her finger.
The tollbooth was empty and the gate was up. Edie didn’t bother to slow down. Bonnie Lamb held her breath.
When they blew through the narrow lane, Snapper exclaimed, “Jesus!”
As the Jeep climbed the steep bridge, Skink raised his head. “This is the place.”
“Where you spent the storm?” Bonnie asked.
He nodded. “Glorious.”
Beneath them, broken sunlight painted Biscayne Bay in shifting stripes of copper and slate. Ahead, a bloom of lavender clouds dumped chutes of rain on the green mangrove shorelines of North Key Largo. As the truck crested the bridge, Skink pointed out a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins rolling along the edge of a choppy boat channel. From such a height the arched flanks of the creatures resembled glinting slivers of jet ceramic, covered and then uncovered by foamy waves.
“Just look,” said Bonnie Lamb. The governor was right—it was purely spectacular up here.
Even Edie Marsh was impressed. She curbed the Jeep on the downhill slope and turned off the key. She strained to keep the rollicking dolphins in view.
Snapper fumed impatiently. “What is this shit?” He jabbed Edie in the arm with the .357. “Hey you, drive.”
“Take it easy.”
“I said fucking drive.”
“And I said take it fucking easy.”
Edie was livid. The last time Snapper had seen that hateful glare was moments before she’d bludgeoned his leg with the crowbar. He cocked the revolver. “Don’t be a cunt.”
“Excuse me?” One eyebrow arched. “What’d you say?”
Bonnie Lamb feared that Edie was going to lose her mind and go for Snapper’s throat, at which point she certainly would be shot dead. Snapper jammed the gun flush against her right breast.
The governor was unaware. He had everted the upper half of his torso out the window to watch the dolphins make their way north, and also to enjoy a fresh sprinkle that had begun to fall. Bonnie tried to grab his hand, but it was too large. She settled for squeezing two of his fingers. Gradually Skink drew himself back into the Jeep and appraised the tense drama unfolding in the front seat.
“You heard me,” Snapper was saying.
“So that was you,” Edie said, “calling me a cunt.”
Violently Snapper twisted the gun barrel, bunching the fabric of Edie’s blouse and wringing the soft flesh beneath it. God, Bonnie thought, that’s got to hurt.
Edie Marsh didn’t let it show.
“Drive!” Snapper told her again.
“When I’m through watching Flipper.”
“Fuck Flipper.” Snapper raised the .357 and fired once through the top of the Jeep.
Bonnie Lamb cried out and covered her ears. Edie Marsh clutched the steering wheel to steady herself. The pain in her right breast made her wonder briefly if she was shot. She wasn’t.
Snapper cheerlessly eyed the hole in the roof of the truck; the acrid whiff of cordite made him sneeze. “God bless me,” he said, with a dark chuckle.
A door opened. Skink got out of the Jeep to stretch. “Don’t you love this place!” He unfolded his long arms toward the clouds. “Don’t it bring out the beast in your soul!”
Glorious, Bonnie agreed silently. That’s the word for it.
“Get back in the car,” Snapper barked.
Skink obliged, shaking the raindrops from his hair like a sheep dog. Without a word, Edie Marsh started the engine and drove on.
CHAPTER
24
“What do you mean, no roosters?”
The owner of the botánica apologized. It had been a busy week for fowl. He offered Avila a sacrificial billy goat instead.
Avila said, “No way, José.” The sutures from his goring itched constantly. “I never heard anyone running outta roosters. What else you got?”
“Turtles.”
“I don’t got time to do turtles,” Avila said. Removing the shells was a messy chore. “You got any pigeons?”
“Sorry, meng.”
“Lambs?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“How about cats?”
“No, meng, hiss no legal.”
“Yeah, like you give a shit.” Avila checked his wristwatch; he had to hurry, do this thing then get on the road to the Keys. “OK, señor, what do you got?”
The shop owner led him to a small storage room and pointed at a wooden crate. Inside, Avila could make out a furry brown animal the size of a beagle. It had shoe-button eyes, an anteater nose, and a long slender tail circled with black rings.
Avila said, “What, some kinda raccoon?”
“Coatimundi. From South America.”
The animal chittered inquisitively and poked its velvety nostrils through the slats of the crate. It was one of the oddest creatures Avila had ever seen.
“Big medicine,” promised the shop owner.
“I need something for Chango.”
“Oh, Chango would love heem.” The shop owner had astutely pegged Avila for a rank amateur who knew next to nothing about santería. The shop owner said, “Sí, es muy bueno por Chango.”
Avila said, “Will it bite?”
“No, my freng. See?” The botánica man tickled the coati’s moist nose. “Like a puppy dog.”
“OK, how much?”
“Seventy-five.”
“Here’s sixty, chico. Help me carry it to the car.”
As he drove up to the house, Avila saw the Buick backing out of the driveway; his wife and her mother, undoubtedly off to Indian bingo. He waved. They waved.
Avila gloated. Perfect timing. For once I’ll have the place to myself. Quickly he dragged the wooden crate into the garage and lowered the electric door. The coati huffed in objection. From a cane-wicker chest Avila hastily removed the implements of sacrifice—tarnished pennies, coconut husks, the bleached ribs of a cat, polished turtle shells, and an old pewter goblet. From a galvanized lockbox Avila took his newest, and potentially most powerful, artifact—the gnawed chip of bone belonging to the evil man who had tried to crucify him. Reverently, and with high hopes, Avila placed the bone in the pewter goblet, soon to be filled with animal blood.
For sustenance Chango was known to favor dry wine and candies; the best Avila could do, on short notice, was a pitcher of sangria and a roll of stale wintergreen Life Savers. He lighted three tall candles and arranged them triangularly on the cement floor of the garage. Inside the triangle, he began to set up the altar. The coatimundi had gone silent; Avila felt its stare from between the slats. Could it know? He whisked the thought from his mind.
The final item to be removed from the wicker chest was the most important: a ten-inch hunting knife, with a handle carved from genuine elk antler. The knife was an antique, made in Wyoming. Avila had received it as a bribe when he worked as a county building inspector—a Christmas offering from an unlicensed roofer hoping that Avila might overlook a seriously defective scissor truss. Somehow Avila had found it in his heart to do just that.
Vigorously he sharpened the hunting knife on a whetstone. The coati began to pace and snort. Avila discreetly concealed the gleaming blade from the doomed animal. Then he stepped inside the triangle of candles and improvised a short prayer to Chango, who (Avila trusted) would understand that he was pressed for time.
Afterwards he took a pry bar and started peeling the wooden slats off the crate. The sacramental coati became highly agitated. Avila attempted to soothe it with soft words, but the beast wasn’t fooled. It shot from the crate and tore crazed circles throughout the garage, scattering cat bones and tipping two of the santería candles. Avila tried to subdue the coati by stunning it with the pry bar, but it was too swift and agi
le. Like a monkey, it vertically scampered up a wall of metal shelves and bounded onto the ceiling track of the electric door-opener. There it perched, using its remarkable tail for balance, squealing and baring sharp yellow teeth. Meanwhile one of the santería candles rolled beneath Avila’s lawn mower, igniting the gas tank. Cursing bitterly, Avila ran to the kitchen for the fire extinguisher. When he returned to the garage, he was confronted with fresh disaster.
The electric door was open. In the driveway was his wife’s Buick, idling. Why she had come back, Avila didn’t know. Perhaps she’d decided to pilfer the buried Tupperware for extra bingo money. It truly didn’t matter.
Apparently her mother had emerged from the car first. The scene that greeted Avila was so stupefying that he temporarily forgot about the flaming lawn mower. For reasons beyond human comprehension, the overwrought coatimundi had jumped from its roost in the garage, dashed outdoors and scaled Avila’s mother-in-law. Now the creature was nesting in the woman’s coiffure, a brittle edifice of chromium orange. Avila had always believed that his wife’s mother wore wigs, but here was persuasive evidence that her fantastic mop was genuine. She shrieked and spun about the front yard, flailing spastically at the demon on her scalp. The jabbering coati dug in with all four claws. No hairpiece, Avila decided, could withstand such a test.
His wife bilingually shouted that he should do something, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! The pry bar was out of the question; one misplaced blow and that would be the end of his mother-in-law. So Avila tried the fire extinguisher. He unloaded at point-blank range, soaping the stubborn animal with sodium bicarbonate. The coati snarled and snapped but, incredibly, refused to vacate the old woman’s hair. In the turmoil it was inevitable that some of the cold mist from the fire extinguisher would hit Avila’s mother-in-law, who mashed her knuckles to her eyes and began a blind run. Avila gave chase for three-quarters of a block, periodically firing short bursts, but the old woman showed surprising speed.
Avila gave up and trotted home to extinguish the fire in the garage. Afterwards he rolled the charred lawn mower to the backyard and hosed it down. His distraught wife remained sprawled across the hood of the Buick, crying: “Mamí, mamí, luke what chew did to my mamí!”
Above her keening rose the unmistakable whine of sirens—someone on the block had probably called the fire department. Avila thought: Why can’t people mind their own goddamn business! He was steaming as he hurried to his car.
At the very moment he fit the key in the ignition, the passenger window exploded. Avila nearly wet himself in shock. There stood his wife, beet-faced and seething, holding the iron pry bar.
“Chew fucking bastard!” she cried.
Avila jammed his heel to the accelerator and sped away.
“O Chango, Chango,” he whispered, brushing chunks of glass from his lap. “I know I fucked up again, but don’t abandon me now. Not tonight.”
A peculiar trait of this hurricane, Jim Tile marveled on the drive along North Key Largo, was the dramatic definition of its swath. The eye had come ashore like a bullet, devastating a thin corridor but leaving virtually untouched the coastline to the immediate north and south. August hurricanes are seldom so courteous. Its bands had battered the vacation estates of ritzy Ocean Reef and stripped a long stretch of mangrove. Yet two miles down the shore, the mangroves flourished, leafy and lush, offering no clue that a killer storm had passed nearby. A ramshackle trailer park stood undamaged; not a window was broken, not a tree was uprooted.
Phenomenal, thought Jim Tile.
He goosed the Crown Victoria to an invigorating ninety-five; blue lights, no siren. At high speeds the big Ford whistled like a bottle rocket.
Paradise Palms was a lead but not a lock. Augustine had done his best in a tough situation; the trick with the redial button was slick. Maybe the guy who’d beaten up Brenda was in the black Jeep Cherokee. Augustine didn’t know for sure. Maybe they were headed to the Keys, maybe not. Maybe they’d stay with the Jeep, or maybe they’d ditch it for another car.
The only certainty was that they were transporting Skink and the tourist woman, Augustine’s girlfriend. The circumstances of the abduction, and its purpose, remained a mystery. Augustine had promised to lie back and wait at Paradise Palms, and the trooper told him that was an excellent idea. One-man rescues only worked in the movies.
The old road from Ocean Reef rejoined Highway One below Jewfish Creek, where it split into four lanes. The traffic thickened, so Jim Tile slowed to seventy miles per hour, weaving deftly between the Winnebagos and rental cars. It was the time of late summer when the setting sun could torment inexperienced drivers, but there was no glare from the west tonight. A bruised wall of advancing weather shaded the horizon and cast sooty twilight over the islands and the water. Lightning strobed high in distant clouds over Florida Bay. Its exquisite sparking was wasted on Jim Tile, who dourly contemplated the prospect of hard rain. A chase was tricky enough when the roads were bone dry.
On Plantation Key the highway narrowed again, and as the traffic merged to two lanes, Jim Tile thought he spotted the black Cherokee not far ahead. Quickly he turned off the blue lights. It had to be the same Jeep; the shiny mud flaps were as preposterous as Augustine had described them.
Four vehicles separated Jim Tile from the Jeep—three passenger cars, and a station wagon towing a fishing boat on a wobbly trailer. The boat was tall and beamy enough to make it hard for those in the Jeep to see the marked police car in the stacked traffic behind them. Already the rain was falling, fat drops popping sporadically on the hood of the Ford. The thickening sky promised a deluge.
The station wagon in front of Jim Tile began an untimely, though predictable, deceleration. Bad omens abounded: Michigan license plates suggested unfamiliarity with local landmarks; the driver and a female passenger were gesticulating heatedly, indicating a marital-type disagreement. Most distressing, from Jim Tile’s point of view: A third passenger clearly could be seen unfolding a road map as large as a tablecloth.
They’re lost, the trooper thought. Lost in the Florida Keys. Where there was only one way in and out. Amazing.
Now the map was being passed to the front seat, where the driver and his wife pawed at it competitively. The station wagon began snaking back and forth, followed somewhat indecisively by the boat trailer. Two McDonald’s bags flew from one of the car’s windows, exploding unwanted French fries and ketchup packets on the shoulder of the highway.
“Pigs,” Jim Tile said aloud. He scowled at the speedometer: thirty-two damn miles per hour. If he tried to pass, the guy in the Jeep might see him coming. The trooper boiled. As the rain fell harder, he went to his windshield wipers and headlights.
The sluggish station wagon stayed ahead of him for the entire length of Plantation Key, until its sole operative brake light began to flicker. The rig meandered to a dead stop.
Dispiritedly, Jim Tile put the patrol car in Park, thinking: This ain’t my day.
Ahead rose the Snake Creek drawbridge. The black Jeep and the three cars behind it easily crossed before the warning gates came down. The moron in the station wagon would have beaten it, too, had he ventured to touch the accelerator.
Now the trooper was stuck. The Jeep was on the other side of the waterway, out of sight. Jim Tile stepped from his car and slammed the door. With raindrops trickling off the brim of his Stetson, he approached the witless driver of the station wagon and asked for a license, registration and proof of insurance. In the eight minutes that passed before the Snake Creek bridge came down, the trooper managed to weigh the bewildered tourist with seven separate traffic citations, at least three of which would inconveniently require a personal appearance in court.
On the way to the Torres house, Fred Dove stopped to buy flowers and white wine. He wanted Edie Marsh to know he was proud of her performance as Neria, devoted wife of Tony.
When the insurance man pulled up to 15600 Calusa, he saw that the Jeep wasn’t in the driveway. His heart quickened at
the possibility that Snapper was gone, leaving him alone with Edie. Not that she was fussy about privacy, but Fred Dove was. He couldn’t perform at full throttle, sexually, as long as a homicidal maniac was watching TV in an adjoining room. Snapper’s loud and truculent presence was deflating in all respects.
Nobody answered when the insurance man rapped on the wooden doorjamb. He stepped into the Torres house and called Edie’s name. The only reply came from the two miniature dachshunds, barking in the backyard; they sounded tired and hoarse.
The ugly Naugahyde recliner in the living room was unoccupied, and the television was off. Fred Dove was encouraged—no Snapper. Inside the house, the light was fading. When the insurance man flipped a lamp switch, nothing happened. The generator wasn’t running; out of gas, probably. He found Snapper’s flashlight and peeked in the rooms, hoping to spy Edie napping languorously on a mattress. She wasn’t.
Fred Dove saw her purse on the kitchen counter. Her wallet lay open on top. Inside he found twenty-two dollars and a Visa card. Fred Dove was relieved; at least the house hadn’t been robbed. He held Edie’s driver’s license under the flashlight; her expression in the photograph spooked him. It was not a portrait of pure trustworthiness and devotion.
Oh well, he thought, lots of girls look like Lizzie Borden on their driver’s license.
The insurance man returned to the living room, lit a candle and sat in the recliner. He wondered where Edie had gone and why she’d left her purse when she knew the streets were crawling with looters. It seemed like she’d departed in a hurry, probably in the Jeep with Snapper.
Fred Dove settled in for a wait. The candle smelled of vanilla. The cozy way it lighted the walls reminded him of the night they nearly made love on the floor, the night Snapper barged in. The humiliation of that moment still stung; it had invested Snapper with indomitable power over the insurance man. That, plus the loaded gun. Fred Dove could hardly wait until the psycho thug was paid off. Then he and Edie would be free of him.