Star Island (10 page)

“He was actually an okay guy,” the bus driver said of the hijacker, “for a whack job.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he didn’t rob or shoot nobody. He just cussed at ’em.”

“How much did he give you?” Valdez asked.

The bus driver reddened. “Hundred bucks. How’d you know? ‘Take your old lady out for stone crabs,’ he told me. So what’s the big deal?”

“It’s not.” As far as the trooper was aware, there was no law against victims accepting cash from an armed abductor. “What about the woman?” he asked. “Was she a hostage or an accomplice?”

The bus driver thought about it for a moment. “She didn’t act scared of the guy, but she was banged up some.”

“What was her name?”

“I didn’t catch it.”

“Where’s she at now?” Valdez asked.

“He had me drop her up at Alabama Jack’s. Some guy on a motorcycle was waiting.”

“Did you get a look at the man?”

The bus driver said the cyclist had been wearing a helmet that covered his face. Valdez closed his notebook. He had a pretty good idea who the motorcycle man was. He’d trained under him when he first joined the Highway Patrol.

“Can I keep the hundred bucks or not?” the driver asked.

“Sounds like you earned it,” the trooper said.

When he stepped off the bus, he felt a pleasant breeze and saw the sun rising over the ocean. An unmarked sheriff’s car rolled up and a rookie detective named Reilly got out. Valdez had met him before, and he liked him all right. He remembered Reilly telling a story about catching a thirty-pound wahoo while vacationing in Islamorada, and how he went straight home to St. Louis, packed his bags and moved to the Keys. That was how much the guy loved fishing.

Now Reilly greeted Valdez and said, “You think it’s him again?”

Meaning the wild man who’d strung up the poachers.

“He tied our victim to a poisonwood tree,” Valdez said. “Then he put him in a diaper.”

“So the answer’s yes.”

“Inside the diaper was a sea urchin.”

The detective winced.

“I bet this never happens in Missouri,” said Valdez.

“Where is he?”

The trooper led Reilly to Jackie Sebago, who was lying on a stretcher and no longer wailing at the top of his lungs. A paramedic had unknotted the improvised snuggy—a square of shiny checkered fabric—and was grimly inspecting the victim’s multiple punctures and poisonwood rash. Reilly assumed that heavy pain medicine had been administered.

“Anybody else hurt?” he asked.

The paramedic shook his head. “Just this one here.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Now’s probably not a great time.”

“Hey, you guys catch that fuckin’ psycho?” Jackie Sebago raised his head woozily off the stretcher. “Look what he did to my nuts! You find him, okay? Lock that crazy bastard up!”

“You bet,” said Reilly. “We’ll get him.”

The trooper, who’d been around longer than Reilly, knew better.

They could use helicopters and infrared spotlights and heat sensors and bloodhounds, but the man who had hijacked the charter bus would not be caught. If half the stories were true, he was already deep in the mangroves, untouchable, sleeping among the crocodiles.

Ann DeLusia was scared of motorcycles. Clinging to the driver, she kept her eyes squeezed shut and one cheek pressed against his broad back. When they got to the hospital in Homestead, he parked outside the emergency room and helped her climb off the bike.

“Wait,” she said.

The man named Jim hadn’t spoken a word during the ride.

“I need to know something,” she said.

When he removed the helmet, she saw that he was an African-American.
He had gray hair and stern features. “What is it?” he asked.

“That man back there—”

“An old friend of mine.”

Ann said, “But he’s nuts, right?”

“No, ma’am.” From his jacket the motorcycle driver took out a matchbook imprinted with a skull and crossbones and the words
LAST CHANCE SALOON.
“There’s a phone number on the inside,” the motorcycle man said.

“Are you for real? I never want to see that maniac again. Ever!”

“That’s the sensible response.”

Ann put the matchbook in her handbag. “What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

“He’s got a bad temper and a long memory, but he’s completely sane.”

“Oh my God! You didn’t hear what he said to those guys from the bus—”

The Harley driver touched a gloved finger to her lips. “I didn’t say he was harmless, did I? My advice: Don’t call that phone number unless you’re absolutely out of options.”

Ann said, “Mister, what kind of life do you think I lead?”

“Let’s go.”

He took her into the emergency room, where he told a nurse that he’d found her wandering along the Card Sound Road, past the toll bridge. The nurse asked Ann what had happened, and Ann said she remembered renting a Mustang and driving south down the turnpike but everything after that was a blur. The nurse put her in a wheelchair and rolled her to the X-ray department and then to a private examining room, where she asked Ann who had cleaned and dressed her abrasions.

Ann said she didn’t recall. “Maybe it was the bus driver,” she said.

“What bus? You said you rented a car.”

“Yeah, but I remember riding on a bus, too. It’s all kind of weird and foggy.” Ann was covering the bases, in case they somehow connected her to the hijacking.

The nurse said, “Come lie down, sweetie. You might have a concussion.”

Later a young Cuban doctor came in with her X-rays, which he fastened to a flat lamp. He said there were no broken bones or skull fractures. While Ann lay on a padded table, he checked out her bruises and pressed his fingers on different places on her abdomen. He asked if she was suffering from headaches or nausea.

“No, I’m just tired.”

“We can do a CAT scan, or wait and see how you feel tomorrow.”

Ann said, “I’ll be okay.”

The doctor wrote a prescription for Tylenol with codeine and said she was free to go.

“Is there someone who can come get you?” he asked.

“First I’ve gotta charge my cell phone.”

“You can use mine,” he offered. “My name’s Carlos, by the way.”

“Hello, Dr. Carlos.”

“Do they call you Ann or Annie?”

“‘The future Mrs. Clooney’ is what they call me.”

“Oh.”

Sometimes it was Mrs. Clooney and sometimes it was Mrs. DiCaprio and sometimes it was Mrs. Depp. Most guys got the message but didn’t pick up on the joke.

Ann wiggled the bare ring finger on her left hand. “I left my rock in a vault at Harry Winston. Four-point-two carats.”

“Congratulations,” the doctor said tepidly, and handed her his phone.

The motorcycle driver was gone when Ann returned to the waiting room, where she tossed the Tylenol prescription in a wastebasket. A police officer stopped by and took some information about the rental car. She pressed Ann for details about the accident, which Ann said she still couldn’t remember. The cop mentioned nothing about a charter bus being hijacked, and Ann said nothing about the man called Skink. She wasn’t sure why she was shielding such a dangerous lunatic, but she figured she could
always change her mind and drop the amnesia act—wake up one morning with total recall, like they did on the soap operas.

Ninety minutes after the officer departed, a black SUV rolled up outside the ER. Ann DeLusia got in the backseat next to Janet Bunterman, who was scrolling through her e-mails and sipping a sludge-colored smoothie. She acknowledged Ann with a grave nod and said, “Cherry’s missing and Maury’s hired this deformed bodyguard with a totally vile attitude to go find her. It’s a nightmare, Annie. The man’s got a damn weed whacker for a hand!”

“I was in a major car crash but I’m feeling better now. Thanks for asking.”

“She jumped the wall at Rainbow Bend,” Janet Bunterman went on, “and chartered a jet back to Miami. Now she’s disappeared. Yes,
again.”

Ann said, “Did I mention I was held hostage by a hermit with a gun? He made me eat a dead crocodile.”

Cherry Pye’s mother leaned forward and peered critically at Ann’s upper lip, which was still swollen. “That won’t do,” she said with a frown.

“I quit, Janet.”

“What?”

“I met a fantastic guy. We’re getting married,” Ann said.

“Stop.”

“He’s a doctor. We’re starting a family right away.”

“You can’t quit now—not before the tour.”

“His name is Carlos, and he’s brilliant.”

Janet Bunterman said, “What are we paying you these days, Annie?”

“Eight hundred a week. Like you don’t know.”

“Well, how about nine?”

“Make it a thousand,” Ann said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Carlos interned at Johns Hopkins and then he camped in Sierra Leone for a year, vaccinating lepers.”

“You are so full of baloney,” Janet Bunterman said.

“He’s teaching me the mandolin.”

“This isn’t funny. Cherry’s still my little girl.”

Ann shrugged. “I’m totally serious about quitting. I want a life of my own.”

“But you’re an actress,” Janet Bunterman said. She had finished the smoothie and was gnawing the tip of the straw. “The part about the car accident—was that true? Please tell me you didn’t get beat up on a date or something.”

“No, Janet. It wasn’t a date.” Ann suddenly felt like crying and she didn’t know why.

“I’m glad you weren’t hurt badly. I mean it.”

“How touching,” Ann said. She was trying to recall how much money she had in the bank. Six or seven grand tops; it wouldn’t last long in L.A.

Cherry’s mother said, “So, we’ve got a deal, right? Everything’s cool?”

Ann reached over and pinched the twice-modified tip of her employer’s nose. “I’m tired of playing your whacked-out daughter. I want my own
vida loca
.”

“After the tour,” Janet Bunterman quacked.

Although Bang Abbott had been blessed with a flaccid conscience, he felt an occasional prick of regret concerning his role in the unfortunate mauling of Terence Hughes, an orthodontist from Montreal who’d come to Florida on a four-day vacation with his family. Hughes was not an incautious fellow, and he’d done nothing to deserve what happened to him. There had been no shark warnings posted at Clearwater Beach that Sunday morning, no way for a visitor to know that a school of hungry lemon sharks had been lured close to shore with a bucket of rancid grouper guts.

On the rare occasions Bang Abbott talked about the incident, he would emphasize that it had never been his intention to cause bodily harm. The photograph he’d sought, and composed graphically in the viewfinder of his imagination, was a portrait of primal mayhem—pale innocents stampeding in terror from the green surf, a dark dorsal fin looming in the froth behind them. Bang
Abbott was a film buff, and
Jaws
had been one of his favorites. There was nothing more compelling in photojournalism than capturing a moment of raw fear, and that was the picture that Bang Abbott had sought. At the center of his dream shot he had envisioned a young mother with grim desperation in her eyes, trying to escape from the water while clutching a toddler under each arm. However, in a pinch he would’ve settled for flailing teenagers, or even a couple of wobbly retirees.

To prepare for this masterpiece, Bang Abbott had hung around the charter docks and schmoozed a few of the local captains, who told him that large schools of lemons and blacktips cruised the Gulf shallows at certain times of the year, though attacks on humans were quite rare. The sharks were usually following migrations of bait, and displayed no appetite for any prey larger than a two-pound mullet. Bang Abbott had asked if the beasts could be chummed—purely for sportfishing purposes, of course—and the charter captains had said sure, it was easy. All you had to do was dump some bloody fish.

So, one Saturday night, under the pretense of an angling expedition, Bang Abbott had obtained (in exchange for a fifth of Jim Beam) a jumbo bucket of smelly grouper heads and entrails from the mate of a boat called the
Master Baiter IV
. The following morning, shortly after dawn, Bang Abbott had gone to the beach and selected a stretch that he knew was popular with the family crowd. After a messy struggle he’d managed to transfer the fish parts to a large mesh bag, which he staked to the sandy bottom in about four feet of water. Then he had waded back to shore, fitted long lenses on two of his camera bodies, and sat down to wait as the tide fell, carrying the irresistible stench into the Gulf.

Terence Hughes had arrived at eight-thirty with his wife and three children, none of whom expressed any enthusiasm for swimming. There were perhaps a dozen other tourists cavorting off the beach when Hughes splashed in the water alone, wearing flippers and an ill-fitting mask. By that point, Bang Abbott already had mounted one of his Nikons on a tripod and aimed it toward the area offshore where he had submerged the chum bag.

For a man whose life’s work was visual composition, Bang Abbott maintained an uncommon lack of wonder about the natural world. He had never photographed a sunset or a meadow of wildflowers, or even a flock of pelicans. If there wasn’t a human being somewhere in the frame, Bang Abbott wasn’t much interested. His knowledge of animal behavior was sparse, based on hokey films and staged television documentaries. Among his many misconceptions was a belief that sharks cruising in skinny water would automatically be easy to see because their dorsals would protrude above the surface. His plan, once he’d spotted the first fin, was to shout a warning to the swimmers and then begin shooting, so as not to miss a frame of their panicky flight.

The scheme was ill-conceived and preposterously dangerous. Bang Abbott had assumed that the sharks, following their noses, would race to the seeping chum bag and pay no attention to the thrashing tourists. When the screams broke out he’d been caught by surprise, because no telltale fins were visible from his improvised photo station. And he’d been authentically shocked when one of the tourists, a man in his thirties with a dive mask strapped crookedly to his face, cried out that he’d been bitten.

Howling, the victim had sloshed toward the beach, his legs churning frantically against the waves. As he’d watched through his clicking camera, Bang Abbott noticed that the man was advancing slowly, as if dragging a heavy weight. Other tourists were struggling to get out of his way, yelling and shoving one another aside.