She walked toward me with an air of authority. She glanced at her watch from behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses and then ordered the Stiltons to fall in behind her, which they did. “That’s far enough, boys,” she said, halting her bodyguards. “I need to talk to my soul mate alone.”
The Stiltons walked back to the pilot and prison guards at the plane while Dawn eased herself to the ground next to me and gave me a peck on the cheek.
“It’s amazing how our relationship has gone from ‘Strangers in the Night’ to ‘Ball and Chain’ in just forty-eight hours,” I said.
Dawn picked up a stick and started drawing in the dirt. “Oh, Tully,” she said with a laugh, “we have met before. You don’t remember, do you?” She poked me in the knee with her finger and resumed her flirtatious manner.
Some kind of pattern was forming in the sticky heat of the Belize scrub, but I couldn’t get a handle on it. “You mean before the pool?” I asked.
I tried to do a rapid search of my memory—rodeos, stock pens, cowboy bars, topless clubs, beach bars, and even a couple of Japanese bathhouses, but I couldn’t match up anything.
“I’ll give you a clue.” Dawn paused and then leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Annie Oakley in Polo,” she said.
I rolled the phrase over in my mind like a ping-pong ball in the lottery machine, and then it popped up. “Good God!” I yelled. “Thelma Barston is your mother, isn’t she?”
“My wicked stepmother,” Dawn replied with a casual air.
“Pipe down, creep,” Waldo barked at me.
Dawn shot him an angry glance, and then, with the accuracy and speed of a circus knife thrower, she launched a stick at Waldo. She hit him squarely in the crotch.
Waldo grabbed his balls and slumped to the ground, moaning in obvious pain.
“Waldo!” Dawn snapped in a dominatrix voice. “When I need your opinion, I will ask for it.”
Dawn nudged me gently on the shoulder. “Remember? It was just after my asshole stepmother and my father bought the poodle ranch and moved to Wyoming. My cousin and I were ordered out from California by Thelma, the ranch Nazi, to ‘work with my hands for a living.’” Dawn spat those last three words out as if she had eaten a bad oyster.
“Well, Heartache, Wyoming, isn’t Beverly Hills, is it?” I said.
Dawn laughed. “We had seen you working fences and thought you were cute. We’d heard you were crazy. We wanted a closer look, so we rode up one day to your trailer, hoping to run into you. I can still see those pink flamingos standing in the snow. We were cruising around your trailer when you surprised us by riding up. You looked at us and said —”
“Well, if it ain’t two little Annie Oakleys in Polo,” I interrupted. I could see it as clearly as the morning it happened. There they stood, against the backdrop of clear-blue sky and snow-covered mountains—two spoiled-brat, early-teen products of a broken home in perfectly matching Polo ranch outfits, trying to flirt with me during one of the worst days of my life. Until now.
“Jesus Christ, you were twelve years old.”
“Actually, sixteen. I was a late bloomer,” she replied in an almost childish voice.
“That was how long ago?” I asked.
“Tully,” Dawn said in that casual manner of hers, “you don’t have to do the math. I just turned eighteen.”
“I need to see some ID,” I said.
“Tully, I have had a crush on you since that day at the ranch, and when I heard you had been fired for tearing up Thelma’s house, I was so sad and pissed off at her.”
“I wasn’t fired. I quit.”
“I know. She is such a bitch.”
“So you two don’t get along?” I asked.
“When it comes to Thelma, my inner child is a mean little fucker,” Dawn said, steely eyed.
“Well then, could you please explain to me why it is that you are sitting there, free as a bird, and me—your teenage heartthrob—has been shocked, beat up, and chained?”
“I think I can,” Dawn said, glancing down at her watch. “But it will have to be the short version.”
So Dawn told me the story of how she and her stepmother had continued their hateful relationship through high school graduation, which was two weeks before her father died. “He dropped dead of a heart attack, and I swear she drove him to his grave,” she said bitterly. “Of course Thelma was the one with all the money. My father tried to talk to her about her obsession with you. And so did I,” Dawn added. But she could only go so far because of “the money thing,” as she put it. As a by-product of Thelma’s poodle ventures, the ranch land was discovered to hold huge reserves of natural gas. So Thelma was now worth a staggering fortune, and Dawn was the only heir.
Dawn had been due a huge trust-fund payment in six months, but she had really angered Thelma five months earlier. She and her cousin, Noel-Christmas, had been thrown in jail in Austin when they were photographed naked, riding a couple of bull riders on the bar.
Thelma had threatened to cut off her allowance and disinherit Dawn, which presented the horrible reality that Dawn might have to actually get a job. Dawn laid low the last quarter of school and actually studied and made the dean’s list. It was all a ploy to get Thelma to reward her by letting her go to spring break in Belize. Her stepmother had agreed, but only on the condition that the Stilton brothers, Thelma’s own private posse, would go and keep an eye on her.
Dawn despised the Stiltons. They had been sent to bail her out of jail after the bare-assed bull-rider incident, and she had been forced to ride home with them in a plane. Those three hours with Wilton and Waldo had been worse than jail to her, but if that was the only way she could get to the beach, then she agreed.
So Dawn and Noel-Christmas had come to Belize with the Stiltons seated four rows back on the jet from Houston to Belize City. It had been Dawn’s plan all along to divert the Stiltons to Cancún with bribes of money and hookers when they got there. Once out of the country, the Stiltons gladly took the deal.
“Waldo and Wilton were on their way to Cancún when you walked by the pool,” she said. “At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes.” She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. “Tully, that was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. I had to turn you in. Thelma has been obsessed with your capture beyond anything rational. I hate to say it, but to her, you are the Charles Manson of exercise equipment and picture windows. I caught the Stiltons just as they were about to board the plane for Cancún. I have to say they’re not your biggest fans since the pay cut they took when you got away from them in Alabama. Of course those morons wanted to bust into your room like a SWAT team, but I told them you were too smart for that. And that’s when Noel-Christmas and I came up with the plan to flush you out of the shower.” She laughed and looked at me. “You have to admit, that was a good one. And then I got to have my cake and eat it too.”
“I don’t follow that concept,” I said.
“It meant that I could make my teenage fantasy come true at last and then turn you in to Thelma. And that is what happened.”
We sat next to each other in silence for a moment, and then Dawn put her hand on mine. “At least we had a good time at the foam party,” she said in a naive, almost babylike voice.
“Well, I guess that will have to last me through prison,” I said flatly.
“Oh, you’ll be out in no time, Tully. Once you’re in jail, I plan on getting you into one of those cushy Club Fed places where all the politicians and corporate crooks go. They say it’s like a country club.” She beamed.
“With bars,” I added. “Dawn?”
“What, Cowboy?”
“Do me a favor?”
“Anything but let you go.”
“Just don’t do me any favors.”
“Something tells me you’re not thrilled with my plan. Oh well.” She sighed. “Tully, I really had no choice.”
The silence of the morning was broken by the click of the igniters and the high-pitched engine of the pris
on plane as it roared to life.
“Most of us don’t!” I hollered back above the noise.
Waldo ran to us in a limping gait. “Ms. Dawn, if we are going to meet Mrs. Barston, then we best be movin’.”
“Call Thelma and tell her you are on the way. I’m going back to the beach for the afternoon,” Dawn said. With that, she leaned over, gave me a kiss on the lips, and put her sunglasses back on.
It is a sick feeling to lose your freedom, and that was the way I felt as I sat there helplessly. I had tempted fate and had gotten myself into this trouble. The scrub brush and weeds that surrounded me were as bleak as my future.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move against the stationary landscape. A small, spotted wildcat was zigzagging with a strange hopping gait through the brush.
“What the hell kind of animal is that?” Waldo guffawed.
“You don’t see them too often,” Dawn said, gazing at the animal.
But I had seen it before. There are not that many three-legged ocelots running around Belize. It was Tripod, Archie’s pet cat. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked directly at me.
I had spent too many times like this with Mr. Twain to know that animals can communicate with humans. Tripod’s eyes told the story. He was not on a casual walkabout from Kafiri. He was there for a reason.
“Well, it makes him an easier target,” Waldo said as he raised his pistol.
Once again, Dawn jerked his chain. This time her weapon of choice was a huge dirt clod that she picked up and hurled at Waldo’s head, striking him on the side of the face. Waldo let out a howl, and the cat darted for cover.
“Waldo, what is it about what we are doing here that you don’t get? If this air force sitting in front of us isn’t enough to draw attention our way, then let’s just start shooting the local handicapped wildlife as a way to alert the general population to our whereabouts. You idiot! We are kidnapping an American citizen and transporting him illegally back to Wyoming.”
Dawn got up and went over to have a word with Wilton, but I wasn’t paying much attention to what they were saying. For coming in our direction, from the other side of the runway, was a rapidly moving cloud of dust.
“Jesus, it’s the game warden! Thank God Waldo didn’t shoot that cat!” Wilton said.
But it wasn’t the game warden. As the Rover emerged from the dust, there was no mistaking the paint job. Tripod had been right, and now one thing was certain: I was not on the prison plane yet, and the Fishmobile was a hundred yards away—bearing down on my captors at a rapid pace.
33
Put on Your Sailin’ Shoes
All around me, people scrambled in different directions. Standing in chains, I began to tap my foot in the dust, quietly singing the words of Fontella Bass, with one slight lyric change:
Come on, Archie, and rescue me
Come on, Archie, and rescue me
As the Land Rover neared the tree, I saw that Archie was not alone. A head bobbed up out of the sunroof and aimed a video camera straight at us. Bucky and Captain Kirk stood in the rear, shooting off their flash cameras in rapid, paparazzi style. Suddenly, I realized the cameraman was Ix-Nay dressed as an Englishman. They had come to rescue me.
Right then and there, I knew I was not going back to Wyoming. The Rover skidded to a halt directly in front of the airplane, and Archie popped his head out the window.
“Pardon us,” he said to no one in particular, “but have you seen a three-legged ocelot running about? We are filming him for the BBC, and we seem to have lost the little bugger.”
The arrival of the Land Rover had totally confused Dawn, the Stiltons, and the crew. I just bit my tongue and watched, waiting to see how this was going to play out. Archie had blocked the plane’s path back to the runway.
“Listen, your highness, you gotta move that truck right now. We’re taking off,” Waldo commanded.
“Name’s Archie. Archie Mercer.” He was grinning broadly.
“Whoever. And you,” Waldo snapped, pointing a finger at Ix-Nay, “put down that fucking camera.”
“Well, you certainly don’t have to be rude about it, Jocko.”
“Name’s Waldo. Waldo Stilton.”
“That’s just great, shit-for-brains,” I heard Dawn hiss as she walked over to the truck.
“Well, Waldo, what brings you to our little country?” Archie inquired, his voice getting more serious.
“We are having a picnic,” Waldo replied.
“And I suppose the bloke wrapped in chains over there is being punished for not bringing the potato salad.”
“That’s right, sport, but none of this is any of your business. I am only gonna ask you nicely one more time to move that truck.”
Suddenly Tripod walked out of the bush and stood between the Stiltons and the plane.
“There he is!” I heard Ix-Nay shout.
“We must get this shot, if you don’t mind,” Archie explained.
“Don’t touch those goddamn cameras!” Waldo ordered.
Dawn, sensing Waldo’s loose screws, interrupted. “Mr. Mercer, please take your pictures. But it would be so helpful if you could move the truck, as we do have to be on our way shortly.”
“Is he going with you?” Archie asked, pointing at me. He flashed me a quick wink.
“That’s none of your fucking business,” Waldo growled.
“Mr. Stilton, such language!” Dawn gasped. She was trying to act cool, but I could see that she wanted to claw Waldo’s eyes out.
“Shut up, bitch! I have had enough of your spoiled rich ass,” Waldo barked as he pulled the pistol out from under his shirt. He walked over to the Rover and pointed the gun at Archie. “Now drop those cameras, and get your tree-hugging asses out of here.”
Archie and the boys put away their cameras.
“That’s better,” Waldo said with a smile. “Now move that truck.”
“Waldo, you need to get a grip,” Wilton said cautiously, walking over to Waldo.
“You stay right where you are, ass wipe. All my fucking life you’ve told me what to do. Not anymore. This is my collar. I am taking Mars to Wyoming. You are off the case.”
Dawn lunged at Waldo, who wheeled around and aimed the gun at her. As he did, everyone in the truck disappeared from sight.
“Stay right there!” Waldo yelled at Dawn. “You are no longer in charge of this!”
“You are absolutely right about that,” Archie said. As Waldo turned to point the gun back at the Rover, the rear door snapped open, caught him squarely in the face, and sent him flying. His gun sailed off in the other direction. Archie, Ix-Nay, Bucky, and Captain Kirk were no longer holding cameras. Instead they were pointing a variety of assault rifles at Dawn, Waldo, and the prison-plane crew.
It was over in a matter of seconds. Wilton and the prison guards surrendered without a word. Dawn just dropped to the ground and began sobbing uncontrollably. Her perfect breasts heaved up and down as she shrieked, “There goes my fucking money! I am going to have to get a job waiting tables.”
Ix-Nay and Kirk went to work on the collar and my chains. “How in God’s name did you find me?” I asked.
“Your cry for help was heard by the Mayan gods,” Ix-Nay said as he freed my hands and feet.
“It might have been the gods, but it was also the phone message that saved your ass. Good thinking,” Archie said.
“I didn’t leave a message.”
“I know. But Waldo shit-for-brains didn’t have the sense to jerk the phone out of the wall. After he zapped you with the stun gun, he and his pals described exactly where they were going—and all of it was recorded on my sat phone. I called Sandra, and she found Ix-Nay. Once he tracked down Bucky, Kirk, and me, all we had to do was come up with a plan. Worked quite well, that photo-safari thing—don’t you think?”
“Where are we?”
“Not in Marwar Junction, brother. We’re up in the Corozal district. We’d best be sending this pack of vultures on
their way and worry more about where you’re going.”
Bucky and Kirk marched Wilton, the prison guards, and the pilot onto the airplane, and then Archie helped the debilitated Waldo aboard. His nose looked as if it were made of putty, and blood streamed out of his nostrils.
I walked Dawn to the helicopter and helped her put her seat belt on. She said nothing. I went back over to the plane. I was having mixed feelings about the whole thing, and there was no ready advice about what to do. Archie had just tied Waldo to his seat, and he exited the plane.
“I’m thinking about turning myself in—not to Thelma but to the police in Wyoming. I have to stop running sometime. I don’t want to always have to rely on you guys to bail me out.”
“Tully, prison is not the place to ponder your future,” Archie said. “The windows are very small.”
“So what’s my other option?”
“Follow our little plan that will safely get you out of the country to a place where you can live in peace until the statute of limitations runs out. Then you can be a free man again,” Archie said. “But first we really must get rid of these rotten eggs.”
The passengers were tied and duct taped to their seats. Waldo was trying to speak, but with blood dripping from his nose and his brain scrambled from the sudden impact with the Rover door, he sounded as if he were mumbling into a megaphone.
Archie walked to the front of the plane. “Captain, I don’t care where you guys go as long as it is north and you don’t attempt to free these buggers until you are five hundred miles from the Belize border. Just so you know, if you attempt to come back here, the local authorities will be informed of your exact whereabouts and that you are carrying a kilo of cocaine on board your plane.”
The pilot’s navy-blue shirt turned three shades darker from the sweat that flooded from his armpits.
“What you do with it when you get to the States is your business—that is, if you can find it.”
“You have got to be kidding!” the frantic pilot called out.
“Afraid not. Either fly or get ready to die,” Archie said. “It will just be another dope deal gone bad.” The engines fired.