Stormy Weather (13 page)

“Eight sweaters,” said Fred Dove, glancing up from his clipboard. “In Miami?”

“The finest Scottish cashmeres—can you imagine? Ask your wife if it wouldn’t break her heart.”

Fred Dove took a small flashlight from his jacket and went outside to evaluate structural damage. Soon Edie heard barking from the backyard, followed by emphatic human profanities. By the time she got there, both dachshunds had gotten a piece of the insurance man. Edie led him inside, put him in the BarcaLounger, rolled up his cuffs
and tended his bloody ankles with Evian and Ivory liquid, which she salvaged from the kitchen.

“I’m glad they’re not rottweilers,” said Fred Dove, soothed by Edie’s ministrations with a soft towel.

Repeatedly she apologized for the attack. “For what it’s worth, they’ve had all their shots,” she said, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

She instructed Fred Dove to stay in the recliner and keep his feet elevated, to slow the bleeding. Leaning back, he spotted Tony Torres’s Salesman of the Year plaque on the wall. “Pretty impressive,” Fred Dove said.

“Yes, it was quite a big day for us.” Edie beamed, a game simulation of spousely pride.

“And where’s Mister Torres tonight?”

Out of town, Edie replied, at a mobile-home convention in Dallas. For the second time, Fred Dove looked doubtful.

“Even with the hurricane? Must be a pretty important convention.”

“It sure is,” said Edie Marsh. “He’s getting another award.”

“Ah.”

“So he
had
to go. I mean, it’d look bad if he didn’t show up. Like he wasn’t grateful or something.”

Fred Dove said, “I suppose so. When will Mister Torres be returning to Miami?”

Edie sighed theatrically. “I just don’t know. Soon, I hope.”

The insurance man attempted to lower the recliner, but it kept springing to the sleep position. Finally Edie Marsh sat on the footrest, enabling Fred Dove to climb out. He said he wanted to reinspect the damage to the master bedroom. Edie said that was fine.

She was rinsing the bloody towel in a sink when the insurance man called. She hurried to the bedroom, where Fred Dove held up a framed photograph that he’d dug from the storm rubble. It was a picture of Tony Torres with a large dead fish. The fish had a mouth the size of a garbage pail.

“That’s Tony on the left,” Edie said with a dry, edgy laugh.

“Nice grouper. Where’d he catch it?”

“The ocean.” Where else? thought Edie.

“And who’s this?” The insurance man retrieved another frame off the floor. The glass was cracked, and the picture was puckered from
storm water. It was a color nine-by-twelve, mounted inside gold filigree: Tony Torres with his arm around the waist of a petite but heavy-breasted Latin woman. Both of them wore loopy champagne smiles.

“His sister Maria,” Edie blurted, sensing the game was about to end.

“She’s in a wedding gown,” Fred Dove remarked, with no trace of sarcasm. “And Mister Torres is wearing a black tuxedo and tails.”

Edie said, “He was the best man.”

“Really? His hand is on her bottom.”

“They’re very close,” said Edie, “for a brother and sister.” The words trailed off in defeat.

Fred Dove’s shoulders stiffened, and his tone chilled. “Do you happen to have some identification? A driver’s license would be good. Anything with a current photograph.”

Edie Marsh said nothing. She feared compounding one felony with another.

“Let me guess,” said the insurance man. “All your personal papers were lost in the hurricane.”

Edie bowed her head, thinking: This can’t be happening again. One of these days I’ve got to catch a break. She said, “Shit.”

“Pardon?”

“I said ‘shit.’ Meaning, I give up.” Edie couldn’t believe it—a fucking
wedding
picture! Tony and the unfaithful witch he planned to rip off for half the hurricane money. Too bad Snapper bolted, she thought, because this was ten times better than Sally Jessy.

“Who are you?” Fred Dove was stern and official.

“Look, what happens now?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what happens—”

At that moment, the electric generator ran out of gasoline, dying with a feeble series of burps. The lightbulb went dim and the television went black. The house at 15600 Calusa became suddenly as quiet as a chapel. The only sound was a faint jingle from the backyard, where the two dachshunds squirmed to pull free of their leashes.

In the darkness, Fred Dove reached for his flashlight. Edie Marsh intercepted his wrist and held on to it. She decided there was nothing to lose by trying.

“What are you doing?” the insurance man asked.

Edie brought his hand to her mouth. “What’s it worth to you?”

Fred Dove stood as still as a statue.

“Come on,” Edie said, her tongue brushing his knuckles, “what’s it worth?”

The insurance man, in a shaky whisper: “What’s
what
worth—not calling the police? Is that what you mean?”

Edie was smiling. Fred Dove could tell by the feel of her lips and teeth against his hand.

“What’s this house insured for?” she asked.

“Why?”

“One twenty? One thirty?”

“One forty-one,” said Fred Dove, thinking: Her breath is so
unbelievably
soft.

Edie switched to her sex-kitten voice, the one that had failed to galvanize the young Palm Beach Kennedy. “One forty-one? You sure, Mister Dove?”

“The structure, yes. Because of the swimming pool.”

“Of course.” She pressed closer, wishing she weren’t wearing a bra but suspecting it didn’t much matter. Poor Freddie’s brakes were already smoking. She feathered her eyelashes against his neck and felt him bury his face in her hair.

The insurance man labored to speak. “What is it you want?”

“A partner,” Edie Marsh replied, sealing the agreement with a long blind kiss.

Sergeant Cain Darby took his weekends with the National Guard as seriously as he took his regular job as a maximum-security-prison guard. Although he would have preferred to remain in Starke with the armed robbers and serial killers, duty called Cain Darby to South Florida on the day after the hurricane struck. Commanding Darby’s National Guard unit was the night manager of a Days Inn, who sternly instructed the troops not to fire their weapons unless fired upon themselves. From what Cain Darby knew of Miami, this scenario seemed not entirely improbable. Nonetheless, he understood that a Guardsman’s chief mission was to maintain order in the streets, assist needy civilians and prevent looting.

The unit’s first afternoon was spent erecting tents for the homeless and unloading heavy drums of fresh drinking water from the back of a Red Cross trailer. After supper, Cain Darby was posted to a curfew checkpoint on Quail Roost Drive, not far from the Florida Turnpike.
Darby and another Guardsman, the foreman of a paper mill, took turns stopping the cars and trucks. Most drivers had good excuses for being on the road after curfew—some were searching for missing relatives, others were on their way to a hospital, and still others were simply lost in a place they no longer recognized. If questions arose about a driver’s alibi, the paper-mill foreman deferred judgment to Sergeant Darby, due to his law-enforcement experience. Common violators were TV crews, sightseers, and teenagers who had come to steal. These cars Cain Darby interdicted and sent away, to the Turnpike ramp.

At midnight the paper-mill foreman returned to camp, leaving Sergeant Darby alone at the barricade. He dozed for what must have been two hours, until he was startled awake by loud snorting. Blearily he saw the shape of a large bear no more than thirty yards away, at the edge of a pine glade. Or maybe it was just a freak shadow, for it looked nothing like the chubby black bears that Cain Darby routinely poached from the Ocala National Forest. The thing that he now
thought
he was seeing stood seven feet at the shoulders.

Cain Darby closed his eyes tightly to clear the sleep. Then he opened them again, very slowly. The huge shape was still there, a motionless phantasm. Common sense told him he was mistaken—they don’t grow thousand-pound bears in Florida! But that’s sure what it looked like.…

So he raised his rifle.

Then, from the corner of his eye, he spotted headlights barreling down Quail Roost Drive. He turned to see. Somebody was driving toward the roadblock like a bat out of hell. Judging by the rising chorus of sirens, half the Metro police force was on the chase.

When Cain Darby spun back toward the bear, or the shape that
looked
like a bear, it was gone. He lowered the gun and directed his attention to the maniac in the oncoming truck. Cain Darby struck an erect military pose in front of the candy-striped barricades—spine straight, legs apart, the rifle held at a ready angle across the chest.

A half mile behind the truck was a stream of flashing blue and red lights. The fugitive driver seemed undaunted. As the headlights drew closer, Sergeant Darby hurriedly weighed his options. The asshole wasn’t going to stop, that much was clear. By now the man had (unless he was blind, drunk or both) seen the soldier standing in his path.

Yet the vehicle was not decelerating. If anything, it was gaining speed. Cain Darby cursed as he dashed out of the way. If there was
one thing he found intolerable, it was disrespect for a uniform, whether it belonged to the Department of Corrections or the National Guard. So he indignantly cranked off a few rounds as the idiot driver smashed through the barricade.

No one was more stunned than Cain Darby to see the speeding truck overshoot the Turnpike ramp and plunge full speed into a drainage canal; no one except the driver, Gil Peck. The sound of gunfire had destroyed his ragged reflexes, particularly his ability to locate the brake pedal. He couldn’t believe some peckerwood Guardsman was shooting at him.

What did not surprise Gil Peck, considering his heavy cargo of stolen bricks, was how swiftly the flatbed sunk in the warm brown water. He squeezed through the window, swam to shore and began weeping at his own foul luck. All his hurricane booty was lost, except for the package of hash, which bobbed to the surface at the precise moment the first police car arrived.

Yet the drugs weren’t the most serious of Gil Peck’s legal concerns. As he was being handcuffed, he declared: “I didn’t kill him!”

“Kill who?” the officer asked.

“The guy, you know. The guy at the trailer park.” Gil Peck assumed that’s why the cops were chasing him—they’d found the body of the crucified man.

But they hadn’t. Gil Peck’s nausea worsened. He should’ve kept his damn mouth shut. Now it was too late. Pink and blue bikini panties began to float up, like pale jellyfish, from the bed of the sunken truck.

The officer said: “What guy at what trailer park?”

Gil Peck told him about the dead man impaled in the TV dish. As other policemen arrived, Gil Peck repeated the story, and also his impassioned denials of guilt. One of the officers asked Gil Peck if he would take them to the body, and he agreed.

After the paramedics checked him for broken bones, the thief was toweled off and deposited in the back-seat cage of a Highway Patrol car. The trooper at the wheel was a large black man in a Stetson. On the way to the trailer court, Gil Peck delivered yet another excited monologue about his innocence.

“If you didn’t do it,” the trooper cut in, “why’d you run?”

“Scared, man.” Gil Peck shivered. “You should see.”

“Oh, I can’t wait,” the trooper said.

“You a Christian, sir?”

It was amazing, thought the trooper, how quickly the handcuffs induced spiritual devoutness. “Anyone read you your rights?” he asked the truck driver.

Gil Peck thrust his face to the mesh of the cage. “If you’re a Christian, you gotta believe what I’m sayin.’ It wasn’t me that crucified the poor fucker.”

But Jim Tile hoped with all his Christian heart that it was. Because the other prime suspect was someone he didn’t want to arrest, unless there was no choice.

Skink eavesdropped leisurely while Max Lamb made two calls. The phone booth was at a truck stop on Krome Avenue, the fringe of the Everglades. Longbeds overloaded with lumber, sheet glass and tar paper streamed south in ragged convoys to the hurricane zone. Nobody glanced twice at the unshaven man on the phone, despite the collar around his neck.

When Max Lamb hung up, Skink grabbed his arm and led him to the airboat, beached on the bank of a muddy canal. Skink ordered him to lie in the bow, and there he remained for two hours, his cheekbone vibrating against the hull. The howl of the aviation engine filled his ears. Skink was no longer singing harmony. Max Lamb wondered what he’d done to further annoy his abductor.

They stopped once. Skink left the airboat briefly and returned with a large cardboard box, which he set in the bow next to Max. They traveled until dusk. When Skink finally lifted him to his knees, Max was surprised to see the Indian village. They didn’t stay long enough for Max to negotiate the return of his video camera. Skink borrowed a station wagon, put the box in the back, and buckled his prisoner on the passenger side. There was no sign of the monkey, and for that Max Lamb was grateful.

Skink put on the shower cap and started the car. Max needed to pee but was afraid to ask. He was no longer confident that he could talk his way out of the kidnapping.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Skink shot him a stony look. “I remember your wife from the hurricane video. Hugging two little Cuban girls.”

“Yes, that was Bonnie.”

“Beautiful woman. You zoomed in on her face.”

“Can we stop the car,” Max interrupted, squirming, “just for a minute?”

Skink kept his eyes on the road. “Your bride’s got a good heart. That much is obvious from the video.”

“A saint,” Max agreed. He jammed both hands between his legs; he’d tie his dick in a Windsor before he’d wet himself in front of the governor.

“Why she’s with you, I can’t figure. It’s a real puzzler,” Skink said. He braked the car sharply. “Why didn’t you try to phone her tonight? You call your buddy in New York. You call your folks in Milan-fucking-Italy. Why not Bonnie?”