Native Tongue (28 page)

“I’m a little discouraged,” she went on. “I guess I’d gotten my hopes up prematurely.”

Danny Pogue felt so lousy that he almost told her about the other files, about the blackmail scam that he and Bud Schwartz were running on the great Francis X. Kingsbury.

He said, “There’s nothing we can do? Just let him go ahead and murder off them butterflies and snails?” Molly had given him a magazine clipping about the rare tropical snails of Key Largo.

She said, “I didn’t say we’re giving up—”

“Because we should talk to Bud. He’ll think a something.”

“Every day we lose precious time,” Molly said. “Every day they’re that much closer to pouring the concrete.”

Danny Pogue nodded. “Let’s talk to Bud. Bud’s sharp as a tack about stuff like this—”

Molly stopped rocking and raised a hand. “I heard something, didn’t you?”

From the kitchen came muffled percussions of a struggle—men grunting, something heavy hitting a wall, a jar breaking.

Danny Pogue was shaking when he stood up. The bum foot made him think twice about running.

“Hand me the purse,” Molly said. “I’ll need my gun.”

But Danny Pogue was frozen to the pine floor. His eyelids fluttered and his arms stiffened at his side. All he could think was:
Somebody’s killing Bud!

“Danny, did you hear me? Get me my purse!”

A block of orange appeared in the hallway. It was a tall man in a bright rainsuit and a moldy-looking shower cap. He had a damp silvery beard and black wraparound sunglasses and something red fastened to his neck. The man carried Bud Schwartz in a casual way, one arm around the midsection. Bud Schwartz was limp, gasping, flushed in the face.

Danny Pogue’s tongue was as dry as plaster when the stranger stepped out of the shadow.

“Oh, it’s you,” Molly McNamara said. “Now be careful, don’t hurt that young man.”

The stranger dropped Bud Schwartz butt-first on the pine and said, “I caught him putting somebody’s fingertip in a Mason jar.”

“I’m the one who told him to,” said Molly. “Now, Governor, you just settle down.”

“What happened to you?” the stranger demanded. “Who did this to you, Miss McNamara?”

He took off the sunglasses and glared accusingly at Danny Pogue, who emitted a pitiful hissing noise as he shook his head. Bud Schwartz, struggling to his feet, said: “It wasn’t us, it was some damn Cuban.”

“Tell me a name,” said the stranger.

“I don’t know,” said Molly McNamara, “but I got a good bite out of him.”

“The finger,” Bud Schwartz explained, still gathering his breath.

The stranger knelt beside the rocking chair and gently examined the raw-looking cuts and bruises on Molly’s face. “This is … intolerable.” He was whispering to himself and no one else. “This is barbarism.”

Molly touched the visitor’s arm and said, “I’ll be all right. Really.”

Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue had seen men like this only in prison, and not many. Wild was the only way to describe the face … wild and driven and fearless, but not necessarily insane. It would be foolish, perhaps even fatal, to assume the guy was spaced.

He turned to Bud Schwartz and said, “How about giving me that Cuban’s nub.”

“I dropped it on the floor.” Bud Schwartz thought: Christ, he’s
not
going to make me go pick it up, is he?

Danny Pogue said, “No sweat, I’ll find it.”

“No,” said the man in the orange rainsuit. “I’ll grab it on the way out.” He squeezed Molly’s hand and stood up. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes, they’re taking good care of me.”

The stranger nodded at Bud Schwartz, who couldn’t help but notice that one of the man’s eyes was slipping out of the socket. The man calmly reinserted it.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said to Bud Schwartz. “Well, actually, I
did
mean to hurt you.”

Molly explained: “He didn’t know you fellows were my guests, that’s all.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said the stranger. He kissed Molly on the cheek and said he would check on her in a day or two. Then he was gone.

Bud Schwartz waited until he heard the door slam. Then he said: “What the hell was that?”

“A friend,” Molly replied. They had known each other a long time. She had worked as a volunteer in his gubernatorial campaign, whipping up both the senior-citizen vote and the environmental coalitions. Later, when he quit office and vanished, Molly was one of the few who knew what happened, and one of the few who understood. Over the years he had kept in touch in his own peculiar way—sometimes a spectral glimpse, sometimes a sensational entrance; jarring cameos that were as hair-raising as they were poignant.

“Guy’s big,” said Danny Pogue. “Geez, he looks like—did he do time? What’s his story?”

“We don’t want to know,” Bud Schwartz said. “Am I right?”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Molly McNamara.

Shortly before midnight on July 23, Jim Tile received a radio call that an unknown individual was shooting at automobiles on Card Sound Road. The trooper told the dispatcher he was en route, and that he’d notify the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office if he needed backups—which he knew he wouldn’t.

The cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road a half-mile east of the big bridge. Jim Tile took inventory from the stickers on the bumpers: two Alamos, a Hertz, a National and an Avis. The rental firms had started putting bumper plates on all their automobiles, which served not only as advertisement but as a warning to local drivers that a disoriented tourist was nearby. On this night, though, the bright stickers had betrayed their unsuspecting drivers. Each of the vehicles bore a single .45-caliber bullet hole in the left-front fender panel.

Jim Tile knew exactly what had happened. He took brief statements from the motorists, who seemed agitated by the suggestion
that anyone would fire at them simply because they were tourists. Jim Tile assured them that this sort of thing didn’t happen every day. Then he called Homestead for tow trucks to get the three rental cars whose engine blocks had been mortally wounded by the sniper in the mangroves.

One of the drivers, a French-Canadian textile executive, used a cellular phone to call the Alamo desk at Miami International Airport and explain the situation. Soon new cars were on the way.

It took Jim Tile several hours to clear the scene. A pair of Monroe County deputies stopped by and helped search for shell casings until the mosquitoes drove them away. After the officers had fled, and after the tourists had motored north in a wary caravan of Thunderbirds, Skylarks and Zephyrs, Jim Tile got in his patrol car and mashed on the horn with both fists. Then he rolled up the windows, turned up the air conditioner and waited for his sad old friend to come out of the swamp.

“I’m sorry,” Skink offered the trooper a stick of EDTIAR insect repellent.

“You promised to behave,” said Jim Tile. “Now you’ve put me in a tough position.”

“Had to blow off some steam,” Skink said. “Anyway, I didn’t hurt anybody.” He took off his sunglasses and tinkered unabashedly with the fake eyeball. “Haven’t you ever had days like this? Days when you just had to go out and shoot the shit out of something, didn’t matter what?”

Jim Tile sighed. “Rental cars?”

“Why the hell not.”

The tension dissolved into weary silence. The men had talked of such things before. When Clinton Tyree was the governor of Florida, Jim Tile had been his chief bodyguard—an unusually prestigious assignment for a black state trooper. After Clinton
Tyree resigned, Jim Tile immediately lost his job on the elite security detail. The new governor, it was explained, felt more comfortable around peckerwoods. By the end of that fateful week, Jim Tile had found himself back on road patrol; Harney County, night shifts.

Over the years he had stayed close to Clinton Tyree, partly out of friendship, partly out of admiration and partly out of certitude that the man would need police assistance now and then, which he did. Whenever Skink got restless and moved his hermitage to deeper wilderness, Jim Tile would quietly put in for a transfer and move, too. This meant more rural two-lanes, more night duty and more ignorant mean-eyed crackers—but the trooper knew that his friend would have done the same for him, had fortunes been reversed. Besides, Jim Tile was confident of his own abilities and believed that one day he’d be in charge of the entire highway patrol—dishing out a few special night shifts himself.

Usually Skink kept to himself, except for the occasional public sighting when he dashed out of the pines to retrieve a fresh opossum or squirrel off the road. Once in a while, though, something triggered him in a tumultuous way and the results were highly visible. Standing on the crowded Fort Lauderdale beach, he’d once put four rounds into the belly of an inbound Eastern 727. Another time he’d crashed the Miss Florida pageant and tearfully heaved a dead baby manatee on stage to dramatize the results of waterfront development. It was fortunate, in such instances, that no one had recognized the hoary cyclopic madman as Clinton Tyree; it was even more fortunate that Jim Tile had been around to help the ex-governor slip away safely and collect what was left of his senses.

Now, sitting in the trooper’s patrol car, Skink polished his glass eye with a bandanna and apologized for causing his friend so much inconvenience. “If you’ve got to arrest me,” he said, “I’ll understand.”

“Wouldn’t do a damn bit of good,” said Jim Tile. “But I tell you what—I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what’s going on down here.”

“The usual,” Skink said. “The bad guys are kicking our collective ass.”

“We got a dead body off the bridge, a guy named Angel Gaviria. You know about that, right?” The trooper didn’t wait for an answer. “The coroner is saying suicide or accident, but I was there and I don’t think it’s either one. The deceased was a well-known scumbucket and they don’t usually have the decency to kill themselves. Usually someone else does the honor.”

“Jim, we live in troubled times.”

“The other day I pulled over a blue Ford sedan doing eighty-six down the bridge. Turns out to be a Feeb.”

“FBI?” Skink perked up. “All the way down here?”

“Hawkins was his name. He badges me, we get to chatting. Turns out he’s working a case at the Amazing Kingdom. Something to do with militant bunny huggers and missing blue-tongued rats.” Jim Tile gave a lazy laugh. “Now this is the FBI, interviewing elves and cowboys and fairy princesses. I don’t suppose you can fill me in.”

Skink was pleased that the feds had taken notice of events in North Key Largo. He said, “All I know is bits and pieces.”

“Speaking of which, what can you tell me about killer whales? This morning a semi rolls over and I got stinking gobs of dead whale all over my nice clean blacktop. I’m talking tonnage.”

Skink said, “That would explain the buzzard shit on this state vehicle.” Secretly he wished he would have been there to witness the spectacle.

“You think it’s funny?”

“I think,” said Skink, “you should prepare for the worst.”

Jim Tile took off his Stetson and lowered his face in front of the dashboard vents; the cool air felt good on his cheeks. A
gumdrop-shaped sports car blew by doing ninety-plus, and the trooper barely glanced up. He radioed the dispatcher in Miami and announced he was going off duty. “I’m tired,” he said to Skink.

“Me too. You haven’t seen anybody from Game and Fish, have you?”

“The panther patrol? No, I haven’t.” Jim Tile sat up. “I haven’t seen the plane in at least a month.”

Skink said, “Must’ve broken down. Else they’re working the Fakahatchee.”

“Listen,” the trooper said, “I won’t ask about the dead guy on the bridge, and I won’t ask about the whale—”

“I had nothing whatsoever to do with the whale.”

“Fair enough,” said Jim Tile, “but what about torching those bulldozers up on 905? Were you in on that?”

Skink looked at him blankly. The trooper described what had happened that very afternoon at the Falcon Trace construction project. “They’re looking for a guy who used to work at the Kingdom. They say he’s gone nuts. They say he’s got a gun.”

“Is that right?” Skink tugged pensively at his beard.

“Do you know this person?”

“Possibly.”

“Then could you
possibly
get him a message to stop this shit before it gets out of hand?”

“It’s already out of hand,” Skink said. “The sons-of-bitches are beating up little old ladies.”

“Damn.” The trooper stared out the window of the car. A trio of mosquitoes bounced off the glass and circled his head. Skink reached over and snatched the insects out of the air. Then he opened the window and let them buzz away into the thick fragrant night.

Jim Tile said, “I’m worried about you.”

Skink grinned. “That’s a good one.”

“Maybe I should haul you in after all.”

“Wouldn’t stick. No one saw me do it, and no one found the gun. Hell, they wouldn’t even hold me overnight.”

“Yeah, they would,” Jim Tile said, “on my word.”

Skink’s smile went away.

The trooper said, “The charge wouldn’t stick, that’s true. But I could take you out of circulation for a month or two. Let the situation simmer down.”

“Why?” Skink demanded. “You know I’m right. You know what I’m doing is right.”

“Not shooting rental cars.”

“A lapse of judgment,” Skink admitted. “I said I was sorry, for God’s sake.”

Jim Tile put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I know you think it’s the right thing, and the cause is good. But I’m afraid you’re gonna lose.”

“Maybe not,” Skink said. “I think the Mojo’s rising.”

The trooper always got lost when Skink started quoting old rock-and-roll songs; someday he was going to sit Skink’s shiny ass down and make him listen to Aretha. Put some soul in his system. Jim Tile said, “I’ve got a life, too. Can’t spend the rest of it looking after you.”

Skink sagged against the car door. “Jim, they’re paving the goddamn island.”

“Not the whole thing—”

“But this is how it begins,” Skink said. “Jesus Christ, you ought to know. This is how it begins!”

There was no point in pushing it. The state had bought up nearly all North Key Largo for preservation; the Amazing Kingdom and the Falcon Trace property were essentially all that remained in private hands. Still, Skink was not celebrating.