Stormy Weather (27 page)

From the living room, Snapper called: “Who the hell was that? The wife again?” When he heard the garage door, he yelled, “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!”

Edie Marsh didn’t hear him. She was sneaking next door to clip the telephone lines, so that Neria Torres could not call Mr. Varga to check out the wild story about Tony and the young blonde and the Ryder truck.

The license tag on the black Cherokee was stolen from a Camaro on the morning after the hurricane, in a subdivision called Turtle Meadow. That’s where Augustine was headed when Skink directed him to stop at a makeshift tent city, which the National Guard had erected for those made homeless by the hurricane.

Skink bounded from the truck and stalked through rows of open tents. Bonnie and Augustine kept a few steps behind, taking in the sobering scene. Dazed eyes followed them. Men and women sprawled listlessly on army cots, dull-eyed teenagers waded barefoot through milky puddles, children clung fiercely to new dolls handed out by the Red Cross.

“All these souls!” Skink cried, simian arms waving in agitation.

The soldiers assumed he was shell-shocked from the storm. They let him alone.

At the front of a ragged line, Guardsmen gave out plastic bottles of Evian. Skink kept marching. A small boy in a muddy diaper scurried across his path. With one hand he scooped the child to eye level.

Bonnie Lamb nudged Augustine. “What do we do?”

When they reached Skink’s side, they heard him singing in a voice that was startlingly high and tender:

The little boy—scarcely two years old, Bonnie guessed—had chubby cheeks, curly brown hair and a scrape healing on his brow. He wore a sleeveless cotton shirt with a Batman logo. He smiled at the song and tugged curiously on a silver sprout of the stranger’s beard. A light mist fell from scuffed clouds.

Augustine reached for Skink’s shoulder. “Captain?”

Skink, to the boy: “What’s your name?”

The reply was a bashful giggle. Skink peered at the child. “You won’t ever forget, will you? Hurricanes are an eviction notice from God. Go tell your people.”

He resumed singing, in a nasal pitch imposed by tiny fingers pinching his nostrils.

The child clapped. Skink kissed him lightly on the forehead. He said, “You’re good company, sonny. How’s your spirit of adventure?”

“No!” Bonnie Lamb stepped forward. “We’re not taking him. Don’t even think about it.”

“He’d enjoy himself, would he not?”

“Captain, please.” Augustine lifted the boy and handed him to Bonnie, who hurried to find the parents before the wild man changed his mind.

The pewter sky filled with a loud thwocking drone. People in the Evian line pointed to a covey of drab military helicopters, flying low. The choppers began to circle, causing the tents to flutter and snap. Quickly a procession of police cars, government sedans, black Chevy Blazers and TV trucks entered the compound.

Skink said, “Ha! Our Commander in Chief.”

Five Secret Service types piled out of one of the Blazers, followed by the President. He wore, over a shirt and necktie, a navy-blue rain slicker with an emblem on the breast. He waved toward the television cameras, then compulsively began to shake the hands of every National Guardsman and Army soldier he saw. This peculiar behavior might have continued until dusk had not one of the President’s many aides (also in a blue slicker) whispered in his ear. At that point a family of authentic hurricane refugees, carefully screened and selected from the sweltering masses, was brought to meet and be photographed with the President. Included in the family was the obligatory darling infant, over whom the leader of the free world labored to coo and fuss. The photo opportunity lasted less than three minutes, after which the President resumed his obsessive fraternizing with anyone wearing a uniform. These unnatural affections were extended to a snowy-haired officer of the local Salvation Army, around whom the Commander in Chief flung a ropy arm. “So,” he chirped at the befuddled old-timer, “what outfit you with?”

A short distance away, Augustine stood with his arms folded. “Pathetic,” he said.

Skink agreed. “Check the glaze in his eyes. There’s nothing worse than a Republican on Halcion.”

As soon as Bonnie Lamb returned, they left for Turtle Meadow.

Skink had gotten the address from the police report, courtesy of Jim Tile. The mailboxes and street signs were down, so it took some searching to find the house. Because of his respectable and clean-cut appearance, Augustine was chosen to make the inquiry. Skink waited in the back of the pickup truck, singing the chorus from “Ventilator Blues.” Bonnie Lamb wasn’t familiar with the song, but she enjoyed Skink’s bluesy bass voice. She stood by the truck, keeping an eye on him.

Augustine was met at the door by a tired-looking woman in a pink housedress. She said, “The trooper mentioned you’d be by.” Her tone was as lifeless as her stare; she’d been whipped by the hurricane.

“It’s been, like, three days since I called the cops.”

“We’re stretched pretty thin,” Augustine said.

The woman’s entire family—husband, four children, two cats—was bivouacked in the master bedroom, beneath the only swatch of roof that the hurricane hadn’t blown away. The husband wore a lime mesh tank top, baggy shorts, sandals and a Cleveland Indians cap. He had a stubble of gray-flecked beard. He tended a small Sterno stove on the dresser; six cans of pork and beans were lined up, the lids removed. The kids were preoccupied with battery-operated Game Boys, beeping like miniature radars.

“We still got no electric,” the woman said to Augustine. She told her husband it was the man the Highway Patrol sent about the stolen license plate. The husband asked Augustine why he wasn’t wearing a police uniform.

“Because I’m a detective,” Augustine said. “Plainclothes.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“These four kids pulled up and took the tag off my Camaro. I was out’n the yard, burying the fish—see, when the power went off it took care of the aquarium, so we had dead guppies—”

“Sailfin mollies!” interjected one of the kids.

“Anyway, I had to bury the damn things before they stunk up the place. That’s when this Jeep comes up, four colored guys, stereo cranked full blast. They take a screwdriver and set to work on the Camaro. Me standin’ right there!”

The woman said, “I knew something was wrong. I brought the children inside the bedroom.”

Her husband dumped two cans of pork and beans into a small pot, which he held over the royal-blue flame of the Sterno. “So I run over with a shovel and say what do you think you’re up to, and one of the brothers flashes a gun and tells me to you-know-what. I didn’t argue, I backed right off. Getting shot over a damn license plate was
not
on my agenda, you understand.”

Augustine said, “Then what happened?”

“They slapped the tag on the Jeep and hauled ass. You could hear that so-called music for about five miles.”

The wife added, “David’s got a pistol and he knows how to use it. But—”

“Not over a thirty-dollar license plate,” said her husband.

Augustine commended David for being so levelheaded. “Let me double-check the tag number.” He took out the folded piece of paper and read it aloud: “BZQ-42F.”

“Right,” said David, “but it’s not on that Jeep no more.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it the other day, goin’ down Calusa.”

“The same one?”

“Black Cherokee. Mags, tinted windows. I’d bet the farm it’s the same truck. I could tell by the mud flaps.”

The woman frowned. “Tell him about
those
.”

“Mud flaps like what you see on them eighteen-wheelers. You know, fancy, with naked ladies.”

“In chrome,” the woman said. “That’s how we knew it was the same one—”

Augustine said, “Where’s Calusa?”

“—only some white guy was driving it.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Not friendly,” said the husband.

The wife said, “Watch the beans, David. And tell him about the music.”

“That’s the other thing,” David said, stirring the pot. “He had that damn stereo all the way loud, same as the colored kids. Only it wasn’t rap music, it was Travis Tritt. I thought it was weird, this guy in a business suit and a niggered-up Jeep, listenin’ to Travis Tritt.”

“David!” The woman reddened with genuine offense. Augustine liked her. He surmised that she was the strength of the outfit.

Her husband, halfway apologizing for the slur: “Aw, you know what I mean. All that chrome and tint, the guy didn’t fit.”

Augustine recalled Brenda Rourke’s description of the attacker. “You’re sure about the suit?”

“Clear as day.”

The woman said, “We figured maybe he’s the boss. Maybe the kids who stolt our license plate work for him.”

“It’s possible,” said Augustine. He sort of enjoyed playing a cop, ferreting fresh trails.

“You say he looked unfriendly. What do you mean?”

David spooned the pork and beans into matching ceramic bowls. “His face,” he said. “You wouldn’t forget it.”

The wife said, “We were on our way to the Circle K for ice. At first I thought he had on a Halloween mask, the man in the Jeep. That’s how odd he was—wait, Jeremy, that’s too hot!” She intercepted her youngest son, lunging for the beans.

Augustine thanked them, on behalf of the Metropolitan Dade County Police, for their cooperation. He promised to do his best to retrieve the stolen license plate. “I’ve only got one more question.”

“Where’s Calusa?” said David, smiling.

“Exactly.”

“Margo can do you a map. Use one them napkins.”

Avila’s wife found him writhing on the floor of the garage, near the Buick. He was bleeding from a large puncture in the groin. One of the sacrificial billy goats, anticipating its fate, had gored him.

“Where are they?” demanded Avila’s wife, in Spanish.

Through clenched teeth, Avila confessed that both goats had escaped.

“I tole you! I tole you!” his wife cried, switching to English. She rolled Avila on his back and opened his trousers to examine the injury. “Chew need a tennis shot,” she said.

“Take me to the doctor.”

“Not in
my
car! I done wanno blood on de 'polstery.”

“Then help me to the goddamn truck.”

“Chew a mess.”

“You want me to die right here on the floor? Is that what you want?”

Avila had purchased the billy goats from the nephew of a
santero
priest in Sweetwater. The nephew owned a farm on which he raised fighting cocks and livestock for religious oblations. The two goats had cost Avila a total of three hundred dollars, and they didn’t get along. They’d butted heads and kicked at each other continually on the return trip to Avila’s house. Somehow he had managed to wrestle both animals into the open garage, but before he could attach the tethers and shut the door, a liquid wildness had come into their huge amber eyes. Avila wondered if they’d sensed Chango’s supernatural presence, or merely smelled the blood and entrails from past
santería
offerings. In any event, the goats went absolutely berserk and destroyed a perfectly good riding mower, among other items. The larger of the two billies gouged Avila cleanly with a horn before clacking off into the neighborhood.

Avila’s wife scolded him zealously on the drive to the hospital. “Three hunnert bucks! Chew fucking crazy!” When swearing she customarily dropped her Spanish for English, due to the richer, more emphatic variety of profanities.

Avila snarled back: “Don’t talk to me about money. You and
mamí
been losin’ your fat asses at the Miccosukee bingo, no? So don’t talk to me about crazy.”

He checked the wound in his groin; it was the size of a fifty-cent piece. The bleeding had stopped, but the pain was fiery. He felt clammy and light-headed.

Oh, Chango, Avila thought. What have I done to anger you?

In the emergency room, a businesslike nurse eased him onto a gurney and connected him to a glorious bag of I.V. Demerol. Avila told the doctor that he’d fallen on a rusty lawn sprinkler. The doctor said he was lucky it didn’t sever an artery. He asked about the dirty bandage on Avila’s left hand, and Avila said it was a nasty golfing blister. Nothing to worry about.

As the pain receded, his mind drifted into a fuzzy free fall. Snapper’s lopsided face appeared in a cloud.

I will find you, coño!
Avila vowed.

But how?

Dreamily he recalled the night they’d first met. It was in a supper club on LeJeune Road. Snapper was at the bar with two women from an escort service. The women wore caked mascara and towering hair. Avila made friends. He had cash in his pocket, having moments earlier collected a bribe from a fellow who retailed fiberglass roof shingles of questionable durability. The hookers told Avila the name of the escort service was Gentlemen’s Choice, and it was open seven days a week. They said Snapper was a regular customer, one of their best. They said he was taking them out on the town to celebrate, on account he was going off to prison for three to five years and wouldn’t be getting much pussy, professional or otherwise. Snapper told Avila he’d killed some shithead dope dealer that nobody cared about. Prosecutors had let him cop to a manslaughter-one, and with any luck he’d get out of the joint in twenty months. Avila didn’t believe a word the guy was saying, but he thought the manslaughter routine was a pretty good line to use on the babes. He bought several rounds of drinks for Snapper and the prostitutes, in hopes that Snapper might start feeling generous. And that’s exactly what happened. When Avila returned from the men’s room, the one he liked—a gregarious platinum blonde, Morganna was her name—whispered in his ear that Snapper said it was OK, as long as Avila paid his share. So they’d all gone to a fleabag motel on West Flagler and had quite a time. Morganna proved full of energy and imagination, well worth the shingle money.