Stormy Weather (10 page)

“I’m sure you’re mistaken. They passed inspection, Mister Jackson. Every home we sold passed inspection.” The confidence was gone from the salesman’s tone. He was uneasy, arguing with a faceless silhouette.

“Admit it,” Ira Jackson said. “Somebody cut the damn augers to save a few bucks on installation.”

“Keep talkin’ that way,” warned Tony Torres, “and I’ll sue your ass for slander.”

Even before it was made a specified condition of his parole, Ira Jackson had never possessed a firearm. In his many years as a professional goon, it had been his experience that men who brandished guns invariably got shot with one. Ira Jackson favored the more personal touch afforded by crowbars, aluminum softball bats, nunchaku sticks, piano wire, cutlery, or gym socks filled with lead fishing sinkers. Any would have done the job nicely on Tony Torres, but Ira Jackson had brought nothing but his bare fists to the salesman’s house.

“What is it you want?” Tony Torres demanded.

“An explanation.”

“Which I just gave you.” Tony’s eyes watered from peering into the sun’s glare, and he was growing worried. Edie the Ice Maiden had disappeared with Ira Jackson’s dogs—what the hell was
that
all about? Were they in on something? And where was the freak in the bad suit, his so-called bodyguard?

Tony said to Ira Jackson: “I think it’s time for you to go.” He motioned with the shotgun toward the street.

“This is how you treat dissatisfied customers?”

A jittery laugh burst from the salesman. “Sport, you ain’t here for no refund.”

“You’re right.” Ira Jackson was pleased by the din of the neighborhood—hammers, drills, saws, electric generators. All the folks preoccupied with putting their homes back together. The noise would make it easier to cover the ruckus, if the mobile-home salesman tried to put up a struggle.

Tony Torres said, “You think I don’t know how to use this twelve-gauge, you’re makin’ a big mistake. Check out the hole in that garage door.”

Ira Jackson whistled. “I’m impressed, Mister Torres. You shot a house.”

Tony’s expression hardened. “I’m counting to three.”

“My mother was hit by a damn barbecue.”

“
One!
” the salesman said. “Every second you look more like a looter, mister.”

“You promised her the place was safe. All those poor people—how the hell do you sleep nights?”

“Two!”

“Relax, you fat fuck. I’m on my way.” Ira Jackson turned and walked slowly toward the street.

Tony Torres took a deep breath; his tongue felt like sandpaper. He lowered the Remington until it rested on one of his kneecaps. He watched Beatrice Jackson’s son pause in the driveway and kneel as if tying a shoe.

Craning to see, Tony shouted: “Move it, sport!”

The cinder block caught him by surprise—first, the sheer weight of it, thirty-odd pounds of solid concrete; second, the fact that Ira Jackson was able to throw such a hefty object, shot-putter style, with such distressing accuracy.

When it struck the salesman’s chest, the cinder block knocked the shotgun from his hands, the beer from his bladder and the breath from his lungs. He made a sibilant exclamation, like a water bed rupturing.

So forceful was the cinder block’s impact that it doubled Tony Torres at the waist, causing the chaise longue to spring on him like an oversized mousetrap. The moans he let out as Ira Jackson dragged him to the car were practically inaudible over the chorus of his neighbors’ chain saws.

The Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office was quiet, neat and modern—nothing like Bonnie Lamb’s notion of a big-city morgue. She admired the architect’s thinking; the design of the building successfully avoided the theme of violent homicide. With its brisk and clerical-looking layout, it could have passed for the regional headquarters of an insurance company or a mortgage firm, except for the dead bodies in the north wing.

A friendly secretary brought coffee to Bonnie Lamb while Augustine spoke privately to an assistant medical examiner. The young doctor remembered Augustine from a week earlier, when he had come to claim his uncle’s snakebitten remains. The medical examiner was intrigued to learn from Augustine that the tropical viper that had killed Felix Mojack now roamed free. He E-mailed a memorandum to Jackson Memorial, alerting the emergency room to requisition more antivenin, just in case. Then he took a Xeroxed copy of Bonnie Lamb’s police report down the hall.

When he returned, the medical examiner said the morgue had two unidentified corpses that loosely matched the physical description of Max Lamb. Augustine relayed the news to Bonnie.

“You up for this?” he asked.

“If you go with me.”

It was a long walk to the autopsy room, where the temperature seemed to drop fifteen degrees. Bonnie Lamb took Augustine’s hand as they moved among the self-draining steel tables, where a half-dozen bodies were laid out in varying stages of dissection. The room gave off a cloying odor, the sickly-sweet commingling of chemicals and dead flesh. Augustine felt Bonnie’s palm go cold. He asked her if she was going to faint.

“No,” she said. “It’s just… God, I thought they’d all be covered with sheets.”

“Only in the movies.”

The first John Doe had lank hair and sparse, uneven sideburns. He was the same race and age, but otherwise bore no resemblance to Max Lamb. The dead man’s eyes were greenish blue; Max’s were brown. Still, Bonnie stared.

“How did he die?”

Augustine asked: “Is it Max?”

She shook her head sharply. “But tell me how he died.”

With a Bic pen, the young medical examiner pointed to a dime-sized hole beneath the dead man’s left armpit. “Gunshot wound,” he said.

Augustine and Bonnie Lamb followed the doctor to another table. Here the cause of death was no mystery. The second John Doe had been in a terrible accident. He was scalped and his face pulverized beyond recognition. A black track of autopsy stitches ran from his breast to his pelvis.

Bonnie stammered, “I don’t know, I can’t tell—”

“Look at his hands,” the medical examiner said.

“No wedding ring,” Augustine observed.

“Please. I want her to look,” the medical examiner said. “We remove the jewelry for safekeeping.”

Bonnie dazedly circled the table. The bluish pallor of the dead man’s skin made it difficult to determine his natural complexion. He was built like Max—narrow shoulders, bony chest, with a veined roll of baby fat at the midsection. The arms and legs were lean and finely haired, like Max’s.…

“Ma’am, what about the hands?”

Bonnie Lamb forced herself to look, and was glad she did. The hands were not her husband’s; the fingernails were grubby and gnawed. Max believed religiously in manicures and buffing.

“No, it’s not him.” She spoke very softly, as if trying not to awaken the man with no face.

The doctor wanted to know if her husband had any birthmarks. Bonnie said she hadn’t noticed, and felt guilty—as if she hadn’t spent enough time examining the details of Max’s trunk and extremities. Couldn’t most lovers map their partner’s most intimate blemishes?

“I remember a mole,” she said in a helpful tone, “on one of his elbows.”

“Which elbow?” asked the medical examiner.

“I don’t recall.”

“Like it matters,” said Augustine, restlessly. “Check both his arms, OK?”

The doctor checked. The dead man’s elbows had no moles. Bonnie turned away from the body and laid her head against Augustine’s chest.

“He was driving a stolen motorcycle,” the doctor explained, “with a stolen microwave strapped to the back.”

Augustine sighed irritably. “A hurricane looter.”

“Right. Smacked a lumber truck doing eighty.”

“
Now
he tells us,” said Bonnie Lamb.

The wash of relief didn’t hit her until she was back in Augustine’s pickup truck.
It wasn’t Max at the morgue, because Max is still alive. This is good. This is cause to be thankful
. Then Bonnie began to tremble, imagining her husband gutted like a fish on a shiny steel tray.

When they returned to the neighborhood where Max Lamb had vanished, they found the rental car on its rims. The hood stood open and the radiator was gone. Augustine’s note on the windshield wiper was untouched—a testament, he remarked, to the low literacy rate among car burglars. He offered to call a wrecker.

“Later,” Bonnie said, tersely.

“That’s what I meant. Later.” He locked the truck and set the alarm.

They walked the streets for nearly two hours, Augustine with the .38 Special wedged in his belt. He thought Max Lamb’s abductor might have holed up, so they checked every abandoned house in the subdivision. Walking from one block to the next, Bonnie struck up conversations with people who were patching their battered homes. She hoped one of them would remember seeing Max on the morning after the hurricane. Several residents offered colorful accounts of monkey sightings, but Bonnie spoke with no one who recalled the kidnapping of a tourist.

Augustine drove her to the Metro police checkpoint, where she contacted a towing service and the rental-car agency in Orlando. Then she made a call to the apartment in New York to get her messages. After listening for a minute, she pressed the pound button on the telephone and handed the receiver to Augustine.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

It was Max Lamb’s voice on the line. The static was so heavy he could have been calling from Tibet:

“Bonnie, darling, everything’s OK. I don’t believe my life’s in danger, but I can’t say when I’ll be free. It’s too hairy to explain over the phone—uh, hang on, he wants me to read something. Ready? Here goes:

“‘I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples.’”

After a scratchy pause: “Bonnie, honey, it sounds worse than it is. Please don’t tell my folks a thing—I don’t want Dad all worked up for no reason. And please call Pete and, uh, ask him to put me down for sick leave, just in case this situation drags out. And tell him to stall the sixth floor on the Bronco meeting next week. Don’t forget, OK? Tell him under no circumstances should Bill Knapp be brought in. It’s still my account.…”

Max Lamb’s voice dissolved into fuzzy pops and echoes. Augustine hung up. He walked Bonnie back to the pickup.

She got in and said, “This is making me crazy.”

“We’ll call again from my house and get it on tape.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll jolt the FBI into action. Especially the poetry.”

“Actually I think it’s from a book.”

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Augustine reached across her lap and placed the .38 Special in the glove compartment. “It means,” he said, “your husband probably isn’t as safe as he thinks.”

By and large, the Highway Patrol troopers based in northern Florida were not overjoyed to learn of their temporary reassignment to southern Florida. Many would have preferred Beirut or Somalia. The exception was Jim Tile. A trip to Miami meant precious time with Brenda Rourke, although working double shifts in the hurricane zone left them scarcely enough energy to collapse in each other’s arms.

Jim Tile hadn’t counted on an intrusion by the governor, but it wasn’t totally surprising. The man worshipped hurricanes. Ignoring his presence would have been selfish and irresponsible; the trooper didn’t take the friendship that lightly, nor Skink’s capacity for outstandingly rash behavior. Jim Tile had no choice but to try to stay close.

In the age of political correctness, a large black man in a crisply pressed police uniform could move at will through the corridors of
white-cracker bureaucracy and never once be questioned. Jim Tile took full advantage in the days following the big storm. He mingled authoritatively with Dade County deputies, Homestead police, firefighters, Red Cross volunteers, National Guardsmen, the Army command and antsy emissaries of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Between patrol shifts, Jim Tile helped himself to coffee and A-forms, 911 logs, computer printouts and handwritten incident reports—he scanned for nothing in particular; just a sign.

As it happened, though, madness flowed rampant in the storm’s wake. Jim Tile leafed through the paperwork, and thought: My Lord, people are cracking up all over town.

The machinery of rebuilding doubled as novel weapons for domestic violence. Thousands of hurricane victims had stampeded to purchase chain saws for clearing debris, and now the dangerous power tools were being employed to vent rage. A gentleman with a Black & Decker attempted to truncate a stubborn insurance adjuster in Homestead. An old woman in Florida City used a lightweight Sears to silence a neighbor’s garrulous pet cockatoo. And in Sweetwater, two teenaged gang members successfully detached each other’s arms (one left, one right) in a brief but spectacular duel of stolen Homelites.

If chain saws ruled the day, firearms ruled the night. Fearful of looters, vigilant home owners unloaded high-caliber semiautomatics at every rustle, scrape and scuff in the darkness. Preliminary casualties included seven cats, thirteen stray dogs, two opossums and a garbage truck, but no actual thieves. Residents of one rural neighborhood wildly fired dozens of rounds to repel what they described as a troop of marauding monkeys—an episode that Jim Tile dismissed as mass hallucination. He resolved to limit his investigative activities to daytime hours, whenever possible.

Nearly all the missing persons reported to authorities were locals who had fled the storm and lost contact with concerned relatives up North. Most turned up safe at shelters or in the homes of neighbors. But one case caught Jim Tile’s attention: a man named Max Lamb.

According to the information filed by his wife, the Lambs drove to Miami on the morning after the hurricane struck. Mrs. Lamb told police that her husband wanted to see the storm damage. The trooper wasn’t surprised—the streets were clogged with out-of-towners who treated the hurricane zone as a tourist attraction.

Mr. Max Lamb had left his rental car, in pursuit of video. It seemed improbable to Jim Tile that anybody from Manhattan could get lost on foot in the flat simple grid of a Florida subdivision. The trooper’s suspicions were heightened by another incident, lost deep in the stack of files.