Stormy Weather

  He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as “South Florida’s first hurricane-proof community.” Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the Titanic was promoted as unsinkable.

  All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-in-the Bay—a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.

  With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently planned his departure from the United States. He closed his bank accounts, shuttered the condo in Key West, packed the Seville and set out for the mainland.

  The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.

  When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.

  “Give us your goddamn car,” the man said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Don’t stare at me like that!”

  “Sorry.” The engineer’s trained eye calculated the skew of the man’s jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.

  “I got one bullet left!”

  “I believe you,” said Christophe Michel.

  The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly.

  Michel asked, “May I keep my suitcase?”

  “Fuck, no!”

  “I understand.”

  He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.

  “My life savings just drove away,” he said. “May I borrow the telephone?”

  Bonnie Lamb expected Skink to erupt in homicidal fury upon seeing his best friend shot down. He didn’t. Bonnie worried about the listless sag to his shoulders, the near feebleness of his movements. He wore the numb, unfocused glaze of the heavily sedated. Bonnie was sorry to see the governor’s high spirits extinguished.

  Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he’d gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they’d ditched it behind the convenience store.

  Bonnie squeezed Skink’s arm and asked if he was all right. He shifted his feet, and something rattled metallically on the floorboard. He picked it up and asked, “What’s this?”

  It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.

  Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. “The Club!”

  “The what?”

  Bonnie Lamb said, “You know. That thing they advertise all the time on TV.”

  “I watch no television,” Skink said.

  Snapper hooted. “The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you lock it across’t here”—he patted the steering wheel—“so your car don’t get stolen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K.” Snapper’s laughter had a ring of triumph.

  Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bonnie could see fresh tears shining in her eyelashes.

  “I had this boyfriend,” Edie sniffled, “he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer.”

  Snapper said, “No shit? Froze it?”

  “Yeah.” Edie couldn’t come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They’d never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?

  Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.

  “See, that way you can’t turn the wheel,” Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, “so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. ’Less they put a fuckin’ gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!”

  Skink set the device down.

  “Accept no imitations!” Snapper crowed again, waving the .357.

  The governor’s gaze turned out the window, drifting again. Teasingly, Bonnie said: “I can’t believe you’ve never seen one of those.”

  This time the smile was sad. “I lead a sheltered life.”

  Edie Marsh wondered if Snapper could have picked a dumber location to shoot a cop—a county of slender, connected islands, with only one way out. She kept checking for blue police lights behind them.

  Snapper told her to knock it off, she was making everyone a nervous wreck. “Another half hour we’re home free,” he said, “back on the mainland. Then we find another car.”

  “One with a CD player, I bet.”

  “Damn right.”

  The Seville got boxed in behind a slow beer truck. They wound up stopped at the traffic light in Key Largo. Again Edie snuck a peek behind them. Snapper heard a gasp.

  “What!” He spun his head. “Is it cops?”

  “No. The Jeep!”

  “You’re crazy, that ain’t possible—”

  “Right behind us,” Edie said.

  Bonnie Lamb began to turn around, but Skink held her shoulder. The light turned green. Snapper floored the Seville, zipped smartly between the beer truck and a meandering Toyota. He said: “You crazy twat, there’s only about a million goddamn black Jeeps on the road.”

  “Yeah?” Edie said. “With bullet holes in the roof?” She could see a bud of mushroomed steel above the passenger side.

  “Jesus.” Snapper used the barrel of the .357 to adjust the rearview mirror. “Jesus, you sure?”

  The Cherokee was still on their bumper. Bonnie noticed the governor wore a faint smile. Edie picked up on it, too. She said, “What’s going on? Who’s that behind us?”

  Skink shrugged. Snapper said: “How ’bout this? I don’t care who’s back there, because he’s already one dead cocksucker. That’s ’zackly how many shots I got left.”

  In what seemed to Bonnie as a single fluid motion, the governor reached across the seat, wrenched the .357 from Snapper’s hand and fired it point-blank into the Cadillac’s dashboard.

  Then he dropped it on Snapper’s lap and said: “Now you’ve got jackshit.”

  Snapper labored not to pile the car into a utility pole. Edie Marsh’s ears rang from the gun blast, although she wasn’t surprised by what had happened. It had only been a matter of time. The smiler had been humoring them.

  One thought reverberated in Bonnie Lamb’s head: What now? What in the world will he do next?

  Snapper, straining not to appear frightened, hollering at Skink over his shoulder: “Try anything, anything, I fuckin’ swear we’re all going off a bridge. You unnerstand? We’ll all be dead.”

  “Eyes on the road, chief.”

  “Don’t touch me, goddammit!”

  Skink placed his chin next to the headrest, inches from Snapper’s right ear. He said, “That cop you shot, he was a friend of mine.”

  Edie Marsh’s chin dropped. “Tell me it wasn’t ‘Jim.’”

  “It was.”

  “Naturally.” She sighed disconsolately.

  “S
o what?” Snapper said. His shoulders bunched. “Like I’m supposed to know. Fucking cop’s a cop.”

  To Bonnie, the social dynamics inside the carjacked Seville were surreal. Logically the abduction should have ended once Snapper’s gun was out of bullets. Yet here they were, riding along as if nothing had changed. They might as well be on a double date. Stop for pizza and milk shakes.

  She said: “Can I ask something: Where are we going? Is somebody in charge now?”

  Snapper said, “I am, goddammit. Long as I’m drivin’—”

  He felt Edie jab him in the side. “The Jeep,” she said, pointing. “Check it out.”

  The black truck was in the left lane, keeping speed with the Cadillac. Snapper pressed the accelerator, but the Jeep stayed even.

  “Well, shit,” he grumbled. Edie was right. It was the same truck they’d abandoned ten minutes earlier. Snapper was totally baffled. Who could it be?

  They watched the Cherokee’s front passenger window roll down. The ghost driver steered with his left hand. His eyes were locked on the highway. In the oncoming headlights Snapper caught sight of the man’s face, which he didn’t recognize. He did, however, note that the stranger definitely wasn’t wearing a Highway Patrol uniform. The observation gave Snapper an utterly misplaced sense of relief.

  Bonnie Lamb recognized the other driver immediately. She gave a clandestine wave. So did the governor.

  “What’s going on!” Edie Marsh was on her knees, pointing and shouting. “What’s going on! Who is that sonofabitch!”

  She was more dejected than startled when the Jeep’s driver one-handedly raised a rifle. By the time Snapper saw it, he’d already heard the shot.

  Pfffttt. Like a kid’s airgun.

  Then a painful sting under one ear; liquid heat flooding down through his arms, his chest, his legs. He went slack and listed starboard, mumbling, “What the fuh, what the fuh—”

  Skink said it was a superb time for Edie to assist at the wheel. “Take it steady,” he added. “We’re coasting.”

  Reaching across Snapper’s body, she anxiously guided the Seville to the gravel shoulder of the highway. The black Jeep smoothly swung in ahead of them.

  Edie bit her lip. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t.”

  “Me, neither,” said Bonnie Lamb. She was out the door, running toward Augustine, before the car stopped rolling.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Jim Tile once played tight end for the University of Florida. In his junior year, during the final home game of the season, a scrawny Alabama cornerback speared his crimson helmet full tilt into Jim Tile’s sternum. Jim Tile held on to the football but completely forgot how to breathe.

  That’s how he felt now, lying in clammy rainwater, staring up at the worried face of a platinum-haired hooker. The impact of the shot had deflated Jim Tile’s lungs, which were screaming silently for air. The emergency lights of the patrol car blinked blue-white-blue in the reflection in the prostitute’s eyes.

  Jim Tile understood that he couldn’t be dying—it only felt that way. The asshole’s bullet wasn’t lodged in vital bronchial tissue; it was stuck in a layer of blessedly impenetrable Du Pont Kevlar. Like most police officers, Jim Tile detested the vest, particularly in the summer—it was hot, bulky, itchy. But he wore it because he’d promised his mother, his nieces, his uncle and of course Brenda, who wore one of her own. Working for the Highway Patrol was statistically the most dangerous job in law enforcement. Naturally it also paid the worst. Only after numerous officers had been gunned down were bulletproof vests requisitioned for the state patrol, whose budget was so threadbare that the purchase was made possible only by soliciting outside donations.

  Long before that, Jim Tile’s loved ones had decided he shouldn’t wait for the state legislature to demonstrate its heartfelt concern for police officers. The Kevlar vest was a family Christmas present. Jim Tile didn’t always wear it while patrolling rural parts of the Panhandle, but in Miami he wouldn’t go to church without it. He was glad he had strapped it on today.

  If only he could remember how to breathe.

  “Take it easy, baby,” the hooker kept saying. “Take it easy. We called 911.”

  As Jim Tile sat upright, he emitted a sucking sound that reminded the prostitute of a broken garbage disposal. When she smacked him between the shoulders, a mashed chunk of lead fell from a dime-sized hole in Jim Tile’s shirt and plopped into the puddle. He picked it up: the slug from a .357.

  Jim Tile asked, “Where’d they go?” His voice was a frail rattle. With difficulty he holstered his service revolver.

  “Don’t you move,” said the woman.

  “Did I hit him?”

  “Sit still.”

  “Ma’am, help me up. Please.”

  He was shuffling for his car when the fire truck arrived. The paramedics made him lie down while they stripped off his shirt and the vest. They told him he was going to have an extremely nasty bruise. They told him he was a very lucky man.

  By the time the paramedics were done, the parking lot of the Paradise Palms was clogged with curious locals, wandering tourists and motel guests, a fleet of Monroe County deputies, two TV news vans and three gleaming, undented Highway Patrol cruisers belonging to Jim Tile’s supervisors. They gathered under black umbrellas to fill out their reports.

  Meanwhile the shooter was speeding up Highway One with the governor and the newlywed.

  A lieutenant told Jim Tile not to worry, they’d never make it out of the Keys.

  “Sir, I’d like to be part of the pursuit. I feel fine.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” The lieutenant softened the command with a fraternal chuckle. “Hell, Jimbo, we’re just gettin’ started.”

  He handed the trooper a stack of forms and a pen.

  The body of Tony Torres inevitably became a subject of interest to a newspaper reporter working on hurricane-related casualties. The autopsy report did not use the term “crucifixion,” but the silhouette diagram of puncture wounds told the whole grisly story. To avert embarrassing publicity, the police made a hasty effort to reignite the investigation, dormant since the aborted phone call from a woman claiming to be the dead man’s widow. Within a day, a veteran homicide detective named Brickhouse was able to turn up a recent address for the murdered Tony Torres. This was done by tracing the victim’s Cartier wristwatch to a Bal Harbour jeweler, who remembered Tony as an overbearing jerk, and kept detailed receipts of the transaction in anticipation of future disputes. The jeweler was not crestfallen at the news of Señor Torres’s demise, and graciously gave the detective the address he sought. While the police department’s Public Information division stalled the newspaper reporter, Brickhouse drove down to the address in Turtle Meadow.

  There he found an abandoned hurricane house with a late-model Chevrolet and a clunker Oldsmobile parked in front. The Chevy’s license plate had been removed, but the VIN number came back to Antonio Rodrigo Guevara-Torres, the victim. The tag on the rusty Olds was registered to one Lester Maddox Parsons. Brickhouse radioed for a criminal history, which might or might not be ready when he got back to the office in the morning; the hurricane had unleashed electronic gremlins inside the computers.

  The detective’s natural impulse was to enter the house, which would have been fairly easy in the absence of doors. The problem wasn’t so much that Brickhouse didn’t have a warrant; it was the old man next door, watching curiously from the timber shell of his front porch. He would be the defense lawyer’s first witness at a suppression hearing, if an unlawful search of the victim’s residence turned up evidence.

  So Brickhouse stayed in the yard, peeking through broken windows and busted doorways. He noted a gas-powered generator in the garage, wine and flowers in the dining room, a woman’s purse, half-melted candles, an Igloo cooler positioned next to a BarcaLounger—definitive signs of post-hurricane habitation. Everything else was standard storm debris. Brickhouse saw no obvious bloodstains, which fit his original
theory that the mobile-home salesman had been taken elsewhere to be crucified.

  The detective strolled over to chat with the snoopy neighbor, who gave his name as Leonel Varga. He told a jumbled but colorful yarn about sinister-looking visitors, mysterious leggy women and insufferable barking dogs. Brickhouse took notes courteously. Varga said Mr. and Mrs. Torres were separated, although she’d recently phoned to say she was coming home.

  “But it’s a secret,” he added.

  “You bet,” Brickhouse said. Before knocking off for the evening, he tacked his card to the doorjamb at 15600 Calusa.

  That’s where Neria Torres found it at dawn.

  Matthew’s pickup truck had followed her all the way from Fort Drum to the house at Turtle Meadow. The seven Tennesseeans swarmed the battered building in orgiastic wonderment at the employment opportunity that God had wrought. Matthew dramatically announced they should commence repairs immediately.

  Neria said, “Not just yet. You help me find my husband, then I’ll let you do some work on the house.”

  “I guess, sure. Where’s he at?”

  “First I’ve got to make some calls.”

  “Sure,” Matthew said. “Meantime we should get a jump on things.” He asked Neria’s permission to borrow some tools from the garage.

  “Just hold on,” she told him.

  But they were already ascending the roof and rafters, like a troop of hairless chimpanzees. Neria let it go. The sight of the place disturbed her more than she had anticipated. She’d seen the hurricane destruction on CNN, but standing ankle-deep in it was different; overwhelming, if the debris once was your home. The sight of her mildewed wedding pictures in the wreckage brought a sentimental pang, but it was quickly deadened by the discovery of flowers and a bottle of wine in the dining room. Neria Torres assumed Tony had bought them for a bimbo.