Star Island (9 page)

She pulled on her jeans and said, “I’m totally tuckered, Claude. You wore me out.”

“Have a nap,” he said.

“Only if you swear not to take my picture.”

“On my mother’s grave.”

She reached for his crotch, her small hand burrowing like a hamster. “I mean it, Claude, don’t be an asshole. Not if you ever want to make love with me again.”

Bang Abbott said, “I promise, Cherish.”

As soon as she began to snore, he uncapped a Nikon and popped off a dozen frames. Then he unbuttoned her blouse and took a few more shots, for the European tabs. The flight attendant,
who was fixing coffee for the pilots, frowned disapprovingly but said nothing. When Bang Abbott pretended to snap her picture, she blushed and turned away.

The jet hit some rough air and he hastily put the camera away, in case the bumps awoke Cherry. He tried to doze off but he couldn’t stop thinking about the astounding thing that had happened to him, and wondering why. Bang Abbott couldn’t recall one other shooter who’d actually been balled by the celebrity he was chasing. Occasionally you heard about the deliberate flash of a nipple or a playful peek up-skirt, but he knew of no paparazzo who’d received so much as a tug job from a star. The social chasm between parasite and host was considered impassable.

Even if he’d been an A-list liposuctionist or a hotshot movie producer, Bang Abbott knew, it would not have improved the astronomical odds of him receiving a high-altitude quickie from a frisky blonde. He was well aware of his prevailing unattractiveness—the weight issue, his negligent laundry habits, his cursory attention to basic grooming and hygiene. He was in many ways a pig, and Cherry Pye’s seduction of him defied explanation, even given her wild reputation.

The mystery nagged at Bang Abbott for the remainder of the flight, and he was forced to conclude that Cherry had been more wasted than he’d thought when she’d attached herself to his lap. By the time they landed at Tamiami she’d be sobering up, and he anticipated a cranky awakening and a brusque good-bye.
So what?
he thought.
At least I got some killer photos
.

But when the Gulfstream touched down, he was surprised to see Cherry wearing a smile. “Hey, big round dude,” she said sleepily. “Can I see your phone?”

Happily Bang Abbott handed over his BlackBerry. Either she didn’t remember what had occurred earlier, or she was down with it.

The jet was still taxiing as Bang Abbott squeezed into the lavatory, took a marathon piss and adjusted his Dodgers cap. What he saw in the mirror reinforced the extreme implausibility of the situation. It was beyond astounding that the rumpled, gamy-looking
lump staring back at him had gotten vigorously humped at 35,000 feet by a major female recording artist. Bang Abbott felt recklessly exhilarated. Now anything seemed possible.

Cherry was still talking on his phone when they got off the plane. A stretch Lincoln with smoked windows sat idling on the tarmac. The driver loaded their bags and Cherry climbed into the backseat, pulling the door shut behind her. Bang Abbott hustled around to the other side of the limo, but it screeched away just as he reached for the door handle.

“Nooooo!” he bellowed, raising both arms. “My cameras!”

The Lincoln kept going. With a merry honk it exited the airport through a rolling chain-link gate.

“Not the Nikons,” the photographer said desolately. “Not my goddamn Nikons.”

The flight attendant had been watching from the top of the steps. Bang Abbott looked up and raised his arms. “The crazy cunt—she took everything!”

“That’s terrible.”

“Please, sweetie, I need a phone.”

“Sorry,” said the flight attendant, “we’re off to Nassau.” It was the same smile she’d worn when presenting the warm beer nuts. “Enjoy your stay in Florida.”

“Drop dead,” Bang Abbott said. He turned and walked heavily toward the terminal building.

Janet Bunterman took a red-eye and landed at Miami International the next morning. She waited nearly an hour for her luggage and then took a hired car to the restaurant at the Raleigh, where Maury Lykes sat amid a pile of tabloids in a banquette.

“Have you heard from our wandering nymph?” he asked.

“Not yet, but don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry? That’s a good one, Janet.” Maury Lykes ran a warty tongue across his front teeth. “She’s supposed to start rehearsing for the tour—you remember the tour, don’t you?”

Janet Bunterman said, “What else can I do? She left her cell phone at Rainbow Bend—I’ve got no way of reaching her.”

Maury Lykes said he had people check Cherry’s usual haunts on South Beach—the Stefano, the Shore Club, the Setai—and she hadn’t been seen.

The waiter brought Janet Bunterman a Bloody Mary. “I bet she’s with that kid from the Tarantino picture,” she said.

“You mean Vicodin Boy. That was my concern, as well.” Maury Lykes whispered something to the waiter and then turned back to Cherry’s mother. “I’m going to introduce you to somebody, Janet, and I don’t want you to be alarmed. At least, try not to
show
you’re alarmed, will you promise?”

Before Janet Bunterman could absorb the warning, a very tall man approached the table and sat down. He wore an execrable salmon-red hairpiece from which prunish ears extruded. His face appeared to have been massaged with an industrial cheese grater and then retouched with a glue gun. The thin, etiolated lips looked like crinkled parchment, and his eyes stared pink-rimmed and dull. Janet Bunterman nervously lowered her gaze and found herself contemplating the man’s clublike left arm, which was cloaked from the elbow down in a zippered nylon bag that bore the logo
COBRA GOLF
.

Maury Lykes said, “Janet, this is the fellow I told you about—Cherry’s new bodyguard.”

“Dear God.”

“His name is Chemo.”

“Could you excuse me for a moment?” Janet Bunterman rose.

“Sit down,” Maury Lykes said firmly.

The man named Chemo blinked like a drowsy iguana.

After Cherry’s mother resettled herself, she cleared her throat and asked, “Do you have a résumé, Mr. Chemo?”

He looked at Maury Lykes. “Is she for real? Jesus H. Christ.”

“Janet, desperate times, et cetera,” the promoter said. “Look on the bright side—for once Cherry won’t be banging the help.” He shrugged at Chemo and added, “No offense, brother.”

Chemo smiled, a fresh horror. His stained teeth were tiny and nubbed; it looked like stale rice kernels had been implanted in his gums.

Janet Bunterman paled. “Maury, can I please speak to you alone?”

“Nope.”

“Then can I have another drink?”

“Make it a Cuban coffee for me,” said Chemo. He reached into his water glass and plucked out the lemon rind and gnawed it to mush.

“How tall are you?” Cherry’s mother inquired. She was at a loss for conversation.

“Six-nine. And don’t fuckin’ ask if I ever played basketball.”

“Okay.”

“It’s like askin’ a midget how come he’s not in the circus.”

“Chill,” Maury Lykes interjected. “She’s just curious about your background.”

“You didn’t tell her?” Chemo chuckled to himself.

Janet Bunterman anxiously looked around for the server.

“Chemo was a very successful mortgage broker,” Maury Lykes said.

It was improbable but true. After sixteen years and nine months at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Chemo had walked out of maximum security and straight into a job selling home loans in Orlando. Because it was the peak of the real-estate boom and flimsy credit was abundant, the state of Florida bigheartedly overlooked all regulatory restrictions and welcomed with open arms absolutely anyone—including thousands of convicted felons—to the mortgage-peddling racket. Swelling the motley ranks were unreformed embezzlers, bank robbers, dope smugglers, burglars, pimps, counterfeiters, carjackers, and even a few killers such as Blondell Wayne Tatum, aka Chemo.

Among his murder victims had been the doddering dermatologist who’d fried his face during a botched electrolysis procedure, and the crooked plastic surgeon who’d falsely promised to repair the damage. A plea deal reduced the crimes from first-degree to second-degree, so Chemo wound up at Raiford with relatively mild concurrent sentences. Like many inmates, he changed in prison, although in his case the Bible played no role in his conversion.
It was instead a more slender tome called
A Snake’s Guide to Milking the Mortgage Trade
, which preached a strictly nonviolent philosophy of fraud and subterfuge.

Once on the outside, Chemo learned quickly despite his rough edges. He became adept at embellishing the qualifications of shaky loan applicants, such as the fry cook at his neighborhood Sizzler for whom Chemo secured a note for $525,000, a fifteen-year subprime with zero down. Chemo was pleased that he could make the American dream come true—albeit temporarily—for a nineteen-year-old kid earning minimum wage, fresh off the freighter from Honduras. Chemo was even more gratified by his under-the-table skim from the deal, which he spent on a secondhand Denali with custom rims.

One doomed loan begat another, but brokers such as Chemo were rewarded for quantity, not quality. That was the beauty of the process. Eventually a local newspaper published an unflattering front-page article about the firm where Chemo was employed, and about his boss, who’d once done a nickel at Avon Park for sticking up a Wells Fargo truck. On the day the story appeared, Chemo drove to work and found the building shuttered and a TV crew snooping around, so he took off for his old stomping ground, Miami Beach.

Janet Bunterman said, “May I ask what happened to your mortgage business?”

Chemo looked perturbed. “The bubble busted—don’t you watch the news? The goddamn bottom fell out.”

Again, Maury Lykes cut in: “Before he went into finance, his specialty was security. That’s why I offered him the job, Janet. No harm will come to Cherry as long as Chemo’s around.”

Janet Bunterman snuck another glance at the bodyguard’s face. The damage obviously wasn’t genetic; something awful had happened to the man. “So I guess it’s a done deal, then,” she said tightly as her second Bloody Mary arrived.

Maury Lykes reminded Cherry Pye’s mother of his substantial stake in the new album and the upcoming concert tour. “I can’t take any chances, Janet.”

“But how are we going to find her?”

“Oh please. She doesn’t exactly fly under the radar,” the promoter said.

With his unsheathed hand, Chemo dropped a cube of sugar into his coffee. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll hunt her skinny ass down.”

Then what?
wondered Janet Bunterman.

Chemo noticed she was eyeing his hidden arm. “Should I show her?” he asked Maury Lykes, and flashed his Halloween smile.

The promoter nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Show me what?” said Cherry’s mother.

Maury Lykes explained that, many years earlier, Chemo had been seriously injured while swimming in Biscayne Bay. “A barracuda nearly killed him,” he said.

“That’s horrible,” Janet Bunterman said with a cringe.

“A big fucker, too,” Chemo added.

“And it bit off your face?”

Maury Lykes shot her a blazing look. “No, Janet, his
hand
. It bit off his hand.”

Without elaborating, Chemo unzipped and removed the Cobra Golf bag cover.

Cherry Pye’s mother was dumbstruck. “Is that what I think?”

“With a power pack,” said Maury Lykes admiringly.

Chemo lifted it to give Janet Bunterman a closer view.

“And it’s for real?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“Best part is, you don’t need a carry permit like you do for a pistol.” He turned it on and shredded the floral centerpiece, three Singapore orchids in a vase. The noise brought two waiters running, but Maury Lykes motioned them away.

“A weed whacker,” Janet Bunterman murmured incredulously.

“You’re a quick one.” The bodyguard re-bagged his unusual prosthesis. “She’s a quick one, Mr. Lykes.”

The promoter sat forward and rubbed his palms. “Let’s order some brunch, okay?”

“I’m really not hungry,” said Cherry’s mother.

Chemo flipped open a menu. “Anything but fish,” he said.

The state trooper introduced himself as Corporal Valdez. He wrote down the names of the hijacked bus passengers and listened to their story. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called all the way to North Key Largo for such an incident, though he didn’t mention that to the victims. The one named Sebago was in severe pain because a spiny sea urchin had been snugly trussed to his scrotal region. Valdez sensed that the other passengers weren’t especially sympathetic to Mr. Sebago’s situation. In fact, a man named Shea angrily demanded that Sebago be arrested on the spot for fraud and embezzlement, crimes beyond the authority (or interest) of a working road-patrol officer.

While waiting for the ambulance, Valdez went up in the bus to interview the driver, who was watching one of the morning news shows on the satellite TV. The driver gave a description of the hijacker that matched the one given by the passengers: a towering, naked, grease-painted cyclops wielding a sawed-off shotgun. Valdez wasn’t surprised. Three months earlier the same suspect had ambushed two lobster poachers and strung them upside down from their ankles to the Carysfort lighthouse. The previous summer, the man had detained for several hours—and convicted in a mock trial—the daughter of a state senator and her frat-boy companion, who’d been drunkenly buzzing a pelican rookery on a high-powered Sea-Doo.