Slowly Red Hammernut backed away, saying, “I believe I’ll wait in the truck.”
Sure, Tool thought. Wouldn’t want no blood on your fancy catalog clothes.
“Get in the water,” Tool said to Chaz.
“Tell him I’m not lying about Joey. Please.”
“You capped me and swiped the money.”
“Yes, I made a horrible mistake. Yes,” Chaz said breathlessly.
“You sure did. Now, I’m gone count to five.”
“Oh God, don’t make me go into that water.”
“That’s what you did to your girlfriend, right? What’s to be scared of?”
Another big gator huffed, somewhere off in a slough.
Mating season, Tool surmised.
Chaz began quivering uncontrollably. He slapped his hands on his thighs and said, “Look at me! Just look!”
It was a sorry damn sight, Tool had to admit. The man was wearing an undershirt, plaid boxers and shiny brown socks—that’s how they’d hauled him out of his house. The skeeters were feasting on his soft arms and knobby broomstick legs.
“Want some free advice?” Tool said.
“Okay. Sure.” The doctor nodded stiffly.
“Run like hell.”
“Where? Out there?” He motioned wildly behind him.
“Yep,” Tool said. “Here goes. One . . . two . . . three . . .”
Chaz Perrone lurched down the embankment and crashed into the knee-deep swamp, a setting most unfavorable for an Olympic-style sprint. He fled from the levee in an exaggerated, lead-footed swagger, splashing with crazed desperation through the heavy grass.
Tool’s first shot went too far left. His second shot was low, kicking up a small geyser that soaked the droopy rump of Chaz’s underpants. The third shot was wide right.
Red Hammernut hopped out of the pickup, bellowing angrily. Tool squinted through one eye, pretending to concentrate.
At the fourth shot, Chaz let out a cry and toppled over.
“Finally,” Red declared, only to watch the biologist rise up and resume his sloppy escape, pushing a crooked liquid trail through the saw grass prairie.
Red seized the Remington from Tool and feverishly took aim.
“Hurry,” Tool said with a hint of a smile, which Red failed to notice.
“You shut up!”
Red’s shot—the last shell in the gun—flew so high off the mark that the buckshot sprinkled down in a loose crescent as harmless as pebbles, well behind the departing target.
“Goddamn.” Red jumped off the ground in frustration. “Go get him! Go on!”
Tool laconically declined. “My arm hurts, from where that fucker shot me.” Reminding Red of his recent sacrifice in the line of duty.
“But, Christ Almighty, he’s gettin’ away!”
“Then you go after him, chief,” Tool suggested. “Lemme bright the headlights so you can see’m better.”
One of the lovesick gators grunted, this time closer.
Red Hammernut did not advance even a millimeter toward the still, dark water.
“Well, goddamn,” he said, studying the shotgun in his hands as if it had malfunctioned supernaturally. “I’m empty.”
“Yup,” Tool said.
In a taut and flurried silence the two of them watched Charles Regis Perrone, Ph.D., vanish gradually into the rich copper twilight of the swamp.
Thirty-one
Joey Perrone burrowed into the folds of her brother’s sheepskin coat.
“Can’t you stay a few more days?”
“Romance and adventure beckon,” Corbett Wheeler said. “Besides, my ewes are lost without me.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing. What if she does turn out to be a bimbo?”
“There are worse tragedies, little sister.”
Joey let out a cry of mock indignation and tugged Corbett’s hat over his eyes. Mick Stranahan carried the luggage to the helicopter, which had nearly given Strom a coronary when it touched down on the island. The pilot re-started the engines and Joey backed away from the din, fighting tears.
Corbett blew a kiss and rakishly twirled his walking stick. Before stepping aboard, he stopped to shake Stranahan’s hand. Joey could see the two men talking intently, Mick nodding and appearing to ask questions. He trotted back and stood with her as the chopper lifted off, both of them waving broadly as it thumped away toward the mainland.
“Ricca’s meeting him at the airport. She had a quick stop in Boca this morning,” Stranahan reported.
“What else?” Joey asked.
“That’s it.”
“Come on, Mick. What were you guys talking about?”
“Nothing, honest,” he insisted. “Your brother just wanted to thank me for taking care of you. He said he knew what a pain in the ass you can be.”
She chased him all the way to the dock, where they stripped off each other’s clothes and dove in. They were making a third lap around the island when a park ranger’s boat surprised them. It was a big SeaCraft with twin Mercs, driven by a muscular Cuban officer in his early forties. As he idled up to the swimmers he broke into a grin.
“Some things never change,” he said.
“Hey, Luis.”
“Hello, Mick. Hello, pretty lady.”
Peeking modestly over Mick’s shoulder, Joey gave a minisalute.
“Meet the legendary Luis Cordova,” Stranahan said, treading water. “We’ve known each other since the grand old days of Stiltsville, back when he was a rookie with the marine patrol. Now he’s a hotshot storm trooper for the Park Service, spying on innocent skinny-dippers.”
Luis Cordova laughed as he tossed a rope. “I’m here on official business, you horny old deadbeat.”
“Aw, please don’t tell me Señor Zedillo kicked the bucket,” Stranahan said.
Miguel Zedillo was the Mexican novelist who owned the island. Joey remembered the name from a stack of books on a shelf in Mick’s bedroom. He had told her that the writer was in fragile health, and that the island would probably be sold after he died. That’s when Joey had piped up and said she’d like to buy it, which had so delighted Mick that he’d immediately made love to her under the picnic table.
“Relax, man,” said Luis Cordova. “Far as I know, the old man is still alive and kicking in Tampico. I came out here to ask you about an abandoned boat.”
Mick grabbed the rope and Joey clung monkey-style to his back. The ranger pulled them to the transom of the SeaCraft, so that they could rest on the dive platform. Joey was pleased to note that Luis Cordova was a gentleman, strenuously averting his gaze from her bare bottom.
“What boat?” Mick asked.
“Twenty-three-foot rental floated up on the rocks at Cape Florida last night, probably when that weather moved through. No dive gear, no tackle, nobody on board. Just a busted spotlight and some blood spots on the gunwale.”
“Human?”
Luis Cordova spread his arms. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Who did the paperwork trace back to?”
“No paper, Mick,” the ranger said. “Rental company says the boat was stolen from the marina before the storm, but I’ve got a hunch they owed somebody a favor.”
“Twenty-three-footer, you said?”
“Blue Bimini top. Yamaha four-stroke.”
Stranahan said, “Sorry, Luis. I didn’t see any boats.”
Joey spoke up. “We stayed indoors all night. The weather was horrible.”
“That it was,” agreed Luis Cordova, gallantly trying to keep his eyes fixed above her neck. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
Joey, who had been covering her breasts with her free arm, let go just long enough to jab Mick in the rib cage. He took the cue.
“She’s trying to keep a low profile,” he confided to the ranger. “Family problems back home. You know what I mean.”
“Did I mention there was a bullet hole in the windshield?”
“No, Luis, you didn’t.”
“Maybe you folks heard something
—like a gunshot?”
“Not with all that hellacious thunder,” Stranahan said.
Joey added, “We could barely hear ourselves talk.”
Luis Cordova was nodding, but Joey sensed that he wasn’t entirely sold.
He said, “Well, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. Every time there’s a bloodstained boat, I think of you first, Mick.”
“I’m flattered, but these days I’m living a quiet, normal life.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Luis Cordova said dryly. “Sorry to interrupt your afternoon. You want a lift back to the dock?”
“Naw, we’ll swim.” Stranahan pushed away from the stern, Joey riding his shoulders. “Good seeing you again, man,” he called to the ranger.
“Same here, amigo.”
“Are you looking for a body?” The question popped out of Joey’s mouth before she realized it. Stranahan reached down and pinched her on the butt.
“A body?” Luis Cordova said.
Joey, thinking: How could I be such a ditz!
“What I meant,” she said, “was that maybe somebody fell off that boat during the storm.”
The ranger told her that nobody had been reported missing. “But don’t forget it’s Miami,” he added. “Sometimes people disappear and nobody ever calls the cops. Anyway, it’s a big ocean.”
Tell me about it, Joey said to herself.
Swimming toward the house, she couldn’t stop wondering about her husband. Had a suitcase crammed with half a million dollars been found on the abandoned boat, Luis Cordova likely would have mentioned it.
And if no suitcase or corpse had turned up, Joey reasoned, the odds were better than even that Chaz Perrone had survived and made off with the cash. It was almost unbearable to contemplate.
“You kept telling me not to worry,” she shouted to Mick, who trailed her by ten yards in the water. “Now you happy? The worthless creep got away!”
“Why won’t you trust me?” Stranahan called back.
“Because you’re a man.” Joey blew bubbles as she laughed.
“Fine,” he said, “then you owe me two weeks’ room and board!”
“Gotta catch me first.”
She lowered her head and lengthened her strokes, knifing across the foamy crests of the waves. She could barely hear him shouting, “Hey, Joey, slow down! I love you!”
Geezer, she thought.
Happily she kicked toward the seawall where Strom paced, yapping and wagging his silly stump of a tail.
Red Hammernut licked at the corners of his lips. He’d been spitting and swearing so much that his tongue had gone to chalk. For about the sixth time he proclaimed, “That was the worst job a shootin’ I ever saw from a man with two good eyes.”
Earl Edward O’Toole kept his two good eyes on the levee road and said nothing. Evidently he was done apologizing.
Red was nearly apopletic about Chaz Perrone’s escape. Tool had told him to quit worrying; said the guy was a hopeless pussy who’d never get out of the ’glades alive.
Only what if he does? Red thought.
“That boy can flat-out ruin me,” he said somberly.
Tool chuckled. “He ain’t gone ruin nobody, chief. He’s gone run till he drops.”
“You know sumpin’ I don’t?”
“Just that he’s got plenty to be a-scared of,” Tool said, “he ever comes out.”
“And what if somebody else catches him first? Ever thought about that? Boy’s lookin’ at Death Row, he’d be tickled to rat out yours truly for a plea bargain.”
Tool said, “Don’t getcha self all worked up.”
On the chance that Chaz might backtrack, they had waited a long time in the darkness on the levee—listening, watching for a shadow to move—until Red could no longer endure the bugs. They left Perrone’s Hummer but took the keys, in the event that the sonofabitch was waiting in the weeds nearby. His maudlin suicide note lay prominently displayed on the dashboard—“in case he’s polite enough to float up dead,” Red had explained.
Now, riding next to Tool in the dusty pickup, Red couldn’t stop stewing about all that had happened since the screwball biologist had gotten rid of his wife. It was uncanny how things had unraveled, how swiftly order and reason had spun into mayhem. Red Hammernut was not a complicated or ruminative person; he was a pragmatist and a fixer and a kicker of asses. He didn’t believe in fate or karma or the fortuitous alignment of the constellations. If a tide of bad shit was rolling his way, it meant that somebody down the line had fucked up.
Normally Red Hammernut had no difficulty identifying the source of the problem and fixing it—a payoff, a beating or a plane ticket usually did the trick—but the Perrone situation was unlike any he’d ever come up against. All of Red’s clout and political connections would be useless if Chaz resurfaced and started blabbing about the Everglades scam. Red now regretted destroying the two videotapes of Joey Perrone’s murder, which in retrospect would have been useful in turning the tables on Chaz.
That back-stabbing lowlife.
Oh well, Red thought, at least I got my money back.
The Samsonite was sliding noisily around the bed of the pickup as they jounced along the berm, heading out of the Loxahatchee preserve.
“Why you goin’ so damn slow?” he griped at Tool.
“Because I gotta keep the headlights off.”
“And why exactly do you gotta do that?”
“ ’Cause they’s park rangers and game wardens out here,” Tool explained. “It ain’t like back home, Red. This is a federal deal.”
“They can kiss my ass, them feds.”
“Plus your boy only left us ’bout a quarter tank of gas.”
“Well, that figgers.”
By choice Red Hammernut hadn’t spent much time in what little remained of the original, untouched Everglades. He preferred the parts that had been drained, plowed or paved—such as the vegetable fields he patrolled by Cadillac or helicopter; flat and orderly rectangles, neatly delineated by ditches and shorn of unruly tree cover. Sometimes you might run across a feral pig or a stray coon, but wildlife was generally sparse on the farm.
Red was not afraid of the wilderness but he wasn’t truly comfortable there, especially at night; especially with a shotgun that was empty.
“Those fuckin’ feds,” he said contemptuously, “and the state of Florida, too, they’re gonna bust my hump about dumpin’ shit in this water. You wait and see, son. A damn travesty is what it is!”
“Yessir,” said Tool, with not as much empathy as his boss would have liked.
“Take them bull gators we heard tearin’ it up out there tonight,” Red went on. “They been around—what, a hundred trillion years? You think a little fertilizer’s gonna bother ’em? Fungicides? Pesticides? Hell, those badass fuckers could eat their weight in DDT and not get sick enough to fart. They’re dinosaurs, for Christ’s sake. They don’t need the damn U.S. guv’ment to watch out for ’em.”
Tool fixed his gaze straight ahead. “But didn’t all the other dinosaurs get extincted?”
“What?” Red Hammernut couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Son, whose side are you on? I don’t know what the hell happened to the other damn dinosaurs, and who gives two shits anyhow?”
Tool said, “I shot me a li’l gator just the other day. Wasn’t but a four-footer, but still.”
“Still what?”
Red simmered all the way out of Loxahatchee. He started feeling better only when the truck finally hit dry pavement and he could see the sodium lights of Palm Beach County glowing to the east. “We’re gonna put a chopper up first thing tomorrow,” he announced coolly. “I ain’t worried. We’ll track down that gutless bastard.”
“If the dinosaurs don’t get him first,” said Tool, stone-faced.
“Son, you tryin’ to bust my balls? Because I ain’t in the mood, case you didn’t notice.”
“Yessir.”
“Know what you could do tomorrow, Mr. O’Toole? You could take that twelv
e-gauge out to the range for target practice, so that maybe next time you’ll be able to hit the side of a motherfuckin’ barn.”
Tool accepted the insult impassively, a silence that Red Hammernut misread as submission. He failed entirely to perceive the flimsiness of Tool’s loyalty, or to sense the anger that had begun to simmer in the man’s simple thinking.
“It’s all ’cause of you he escaped!” Red fumed. “It’s your damn fault and nobody else’s!”
Tool gave a half shrug. “Try shootin’ a shotgun with a slug in your armpit.”
“Goddammit, just drive. Just get me home.”
Closing his eyes, Red thought of the steaming Jacuzzi that awaited. He couldn’t wait to scrub the sweat and sunscreen and dead bugs off his skin; sit down to a sixteen-ounce T-bone and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He was jolted from this reverie when Tool braked the pickup to an abrupt halt on the grassy shoulder of the highway.
Red looked around. “Now what? We blow a tire?”
“Sit tight.” Tool pushed himself out of the truck.
“Hey! Get back here,” Red hollered. He hopped out and chased after him. “Where the hell you think you’re goin’? I ain’t got time tonight for this nonsense!”
Tool did not alter his pace. Red got up beside him and began calling him every name he could think of.
“You hush,” Tool said, raising a brick-size hand. He stooped to study the small white cross, and removed a spray of shriveled lilies.
“Not now, son. You come back some other day and fetch it, but not tonight,” Red admonished him. “Not on my time.”
“It’ll just take a second.”
“You gone deaf? Deaf and dumb?”
The name on the homemade cross was visible in the wash from the truck’s headlights:
Pablo Humberto Duarte
Loving Husband, Father, Son, and Brother
B. Sept. 3, 1959. D. March 21, 2003
Now He Rides with God Almighty
Remember: Seat Belts Save Lives!
“Just some damn beaner,” Red Hammernut grumped. “Probably got trashed and drove hisself into the canal.”
“You don’t know that,” said Tool.
“Just lookit the name. Pah-blow Humm-bear-toe—tell me that ain’t a beaner name.”