Stormy Weather (40 page)

Snapper, panting, weaved toward Edie: “Hold the damn gun while I strangle this fucker.”

Halfheartedly she took the pistol and held it on Bonnie and Skink. Snapper fell upon Avila and breathlessly beat him. Avila was surprised by the clarity of the pain. When his nose exploded under Snapper’s fist, he realized he’d been foolhardy to count on beatific intervention. Evidently Chango hadn’t forgiven him for the aborted coati sacrifice.

As Snapper’s grimy fingernails closed upon his throat, Avila inventoried the multiple sources of his agony: the fractured nose, the sliver of broken whiskey bottle in his right thigh, the unhealed crucifixion hole in his left hand, the goat-related goring in his groin and, soon, a crushed larynx.

He thought: Forget the seven grand. Screw Gar Whitmark. It’s time to run.

Avila brought his right knee hard to Snapper’s crotch. Snapper’s eyelids fluttered but he didn’t release his grip on Avila’s neck. Avila kneed him twice more, ultimately producing the desired result. Snapper moaned and rolled away. Avila struggled to his feet. He took three steps and slipped. When he got up again, he heard Snapper rising behind him. Frantically Avila bolted for the road.

The rain made it hard to discern the details of the two men running along Highway One. Neither was large enough to be the governor, or physically fit enough to be Augustine. From where his Highway Patrol car was parked, a hundred yards away, Jim Tile was unable to see if the tall man had a crooked jaw. He might have been any old Keys drunk in a soggy pinstriped suit.

The black Jeep was still parked at the Paradise Palms. The trooper decided to sit still and wait.

Avila made it half a mile before he ran out of strength. He stopped on the Tea-Table Bridge and doubled over, sucking air. He tried to flag passing motorists, but none found room in their icy hearts for a bedraggled, saliva-flecked, blood-spattered hitchhiker. Avila was
further dejected to see, framed in the window of a speeding Airstream, a freckle-faced teenaged girl, snapping his photograph.

What a sick world, he thought, when an injured human being becomes a roadside amusement.

Meanwhile, out of the veil of rain came Snapper. He was shambling like a zombie across the bridge. For a weapon he’d selected a rusty axle from an abandoned Jet Ski trailer.

Avila raised both arms in supplication. “Let’s forget the whole thing, OK?”

“Don’t move.” Snapper gripped the axle at one end and brought it high over his head, like a sledgehammer.

With a morose peep, Avila hurled himself sideways off the bridge. The drop was only fourteen feet, but given his dread of heights, it might as well have been fourteen stories. Avila was mildly amazed to survive the impact.

The water was warm and the tide was strong. He let it carry him out the channel toward the ocean, because he wasn’t strong enough to swim against it. When the sodden weight of his clothing began to drag him under, he kicked off his shoes and pants, and stripped out of his shirt. Soon the lights from the Overseas Highway were absorbed by darkness and bad weather. Avila could see nothing but the occasional high-altitude flash of heat lightning. When a heavy object thumped him in the small of the back, he was sure it was the snout of a great white shark and that death was imminent.

But it was only a piece of plywood. Avila clung to it like a crippled frog. He thought of a sublime irony—what if the life-saving lumber had blown off one of the roofs that he’d been bribed not to inspect? Perhaps it was Chango’s idea of a practical joke.

All night long, adrift in the chop, Avila cursed the hurricane for bringing him such misery: the sadistic doughnut man, Whitmark and, of course, Snapper. The rainfall stopped at dawn but the sun never broke free of the clouds. It was midafternoon before Avila heard an engine. As he shouted for help, a tall white fishing boat idled within hailing distance. Avila waved. The skipper and his tropically garbed clients waved back.

“Hang in there,
amigo
,” the skipper yelled, and trolled away.

Twenty minutes later, a Coast Guard boat arrived and took Avila aboard. The crew gave him dry clothes, hot coffee and homemade chili. He ate in appreciative silence. Afterwards he was led belowdeck
to a small briefing room, where he was greeted by a man from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In halting Spanish, the immigration man asked Avila for the name of the Cuban port he had fled. Avila laughed and explained that he was from Miami.

“Then what’re you doing out here in your underwear?”

Avila said a robber was chasing him down the road, so he jumped off a bridge in Islamorada.

“Tell the truth,” the immigration man said sternly. “Obviously you’re a rafter. Now where did you come from—Havana? Mariel?”

Avila was about to argue when it dawned on him that there was no faster way to shed his burdens. What could he look forward to in his current life but an unforgiving wife, a traumatized mother-in-law, personal bankruptcy, the wrath of Gar Whitmark and a possible criminal indictment?

He asked the immigration man: “What will happen to me if I confess?”

“Nothing. You’ll be processed at Krome and most likely released.”

“If I am a political refugee.”

“That’s the usual procedure.”

“
Sí
,” Avila said. “
Yo soy balsero
.” I am a rafter.

The immigration man seemed so relieved that Avila was left to conclude (as a former civil servant himself) that he’d saved the man mountains of paperwork.

“Su nombre, por favor?”

“Juan,” Avila replied. “Juan Gómez. From Havana.”

“And your occupation in Cuba?”

“I was a building inspector.”

They waited in the Jeep—Edie Marsh up front, holding the revolver; Bonnie Lamb pressed against the governor in the back seat.

It was Bonnie who said: “What if he doesn’t come back?”

Edie was thinking the same thing. Hoping it. The problem was, Snapper had the damn car keys. She asked the man in the shower cap: “You know how to hot-wire one of these?”

“That would be illegal.”

The cinematic smile startled her. She said, “Why aren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“The gun. Dying. Anything.”

Bonnie said she was frightened enough for all of them. The rain slackened; still no sign of Snapper, or Avila. Edie had difficulty keeping her eyes off the man called Skink.

“What is it,” he said. “My hat?”

She lifted the .357. “You could take this away from me anytime you wanted. You know it.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

That’s what scared her. What was the point of holding a gun on a person like this?

He said, “I won’t hurt you.” Again with the smile.

Edie Marsh was a sucker for laugh lines around the eyes. She said to Bonnie: “I think I know what you see in this guy.”

“We’re just friends.”

“Really? Then maybe you can tell me,” Edie said, “what’s he got planned?”

“I honestly don’t know. I wish I did.”

Edie was all clammy shakes, roiled emotions. In the motel room, depositing Mr. Stichler with the two hookers, she’d caught something
on the TV that got her daydreaming—a news clip of the President of the United States touring the hurricane damage. At his side was a tall, boyishly attractive man in his thirties, whom the TV newscasters identified as the President’s son. When they said he lived in Miami, Edie Marsh got a whimsical flash. So what if he wasn’t a Kennedy? And maybe he was too much of a good young Republican to pick up some hot girl in a bar and get raunchy. Or just maybe he’d been waiting his whole repressed life to do exactly that. And he
was
the President’s son. It was something to consider, Edie mused, for the future. Particularly if the hurricane scam continued to unravel at its current pace.

She put Snapper’s gun on the seat. “Get out of here,” she told Skink and Bonnie. “Go on. I’ll tell him you pushed me down and got away.”

Bonnie looked over at the governor, who said: “Now’s your chance, girl.”

“What about you?”

He shook his head. “I made a promise to Jim.”

“Who the hell’s Jim?” asked Edie Marsh.

Bonnie said: “Then I guess we’re staying.”

Skink encouraged her to make a dash for it. “Go call Augustine. Let him know you’re OK.”

“Nope,” Bonnie said.

“And your husband, too.”

“No! Not until it’s over.”

Edie was exasperated, her nerves worn ragged. Snapper was right; they
are
nuts. “Fine,” she said, “you two fruitballs stay if you want, but I’m outta here.”

Skink said: “Excellent decision.”

“Tell him I went to use the bathroom.”

“No problem,” said Bonnie.

“I got my period or something.”

“Right.”

Skink leaned forward. “Could you hand me the gun?”

“Why not,” Edie said. Perhaps the smiler would shoot Snapper dead. There were about forty-seven thousand reasons that Edie wasn’t upset at the idea, not including the barrel-shaped bruise on her right breast.

She was passing the .357 to Skink when he waved her off, saying: “On second thought—”

Edie turned and let out a gasp. It was Snapper’s face, dripping wet,
pressed to the window of the Jeep. The bent nose and misshapen mouth made him look like a gargoyle.

“Miss me, bay-beeee?” he crooned, pallid lips wriggling like flat-worms against the glass.

Jim Tile was tempted to call for backup, though it would spell the end of the governor’s elaborate reclusion.

Long ago they’d made a pact: no cavalry, unless innocent lives were in peril. The trooper was thinking of the tourist woman as more or less innocent. She and Skink might be dead already.

Glumly Jim Tile watched the rain drench the passing cars on Highway One. Again he castigated himself for letting his emotions get the better of his brain. Brenda was alive. He should’ve thanked God, then let it go.

But he didn’t. And the governor had had little trouble talking him out of the license-tag number.

“Pest control” was what Skink had called it, as they were leaving the hospital.

“Whoever did that to Mrs. Rourke is not a viable member of the species. Not a welcome donor to the gene pool. Wouldn’t Darwin himself agree?”

And the trooper had merely said: “Be careful.”

“Jim, we’re infested with these mutant shitheads. Look what they’ve done to the place.”

The trooper, locked in some cold distant zone: “The tag’s probably stolen off another car. It may lead you nowhere.”

The governor, momentarily shaking loose of his friend’s firm grip: “They’re turning it into a sump hole. Some with guns, some with briefcases—it’s all the same goddamn crime.”

“Pest control.”

“We do what we can.”

“Be careful, captain.”

Then he’d flashed those movie-star pearlies, the ones that had gotten him elected. And Jim Tile stood back and let him go. Let him stalk the man in the black Jeep Cherokee.

Which was now parked in a windy drizzle outside the Paradise Palms. The trooper counted three figures inside the truck; two of them, he hoped, were Skink and Bonnie Lamb.

A dark shape near the road caught his attention.

The tall man in the suit was hurrying along the gravel shoulder of Highway One. There was a tippiness to his gait; he seemed well challenged to keep a straight course, clear of the speeding cars. He flinched when the high beams of a gasoline tanker caught him in the face.

This time Jim Tile got a good look at the misaligned jaws.

He watched the man pass beneath the bright electric sign in front of the motel. He saw him walk up to the Jeep, lean close to a window. Then the man ran around to the driver’s side, opened the door and got in. Smoke puffed from the truck’s exhaust pipe. The brake lights flickered.

Jim Tile said, “Hello,” and started his engine.

Suddenly, all around, the night was diced into blues and whites.

Snapper was backing the Jeep out, chortling about what had happened to Avila: “Dumb fuck went straight off the bridge, you shoulda seen—Hey! Hey, what the hell…”

Bright lights started strobing everywhere. In the reflection of the puddles. On the coral-colored walls of the motel. In the fronds of the sabal palms.

Snapper shoved the Jeep into Neutral. “Fucking cops!”

“No way,” Edie said. But she knew he was right.

A figure in gray was approaching the Cherokee. Snapper rolled down the window. It was a state trooper; big black sonofabitch, too. He’d parked his patrol car at an angle, to block the exit.

Snapper’s mind raced, half drunk, half wired: Christ Almighty, would Momma and Pappy pitch a fit they ever heard I got taken down by a nigger cop. Momma especially.

In a flash Snapper figured out what must’ve happened: The lady trooper either was alive, or had survived long enough after the beating to give a description of the Jeep, and maybe even of Snapper himself.

So this was the big black posse.

Snapper knew he should’ve ditched the Cherokee after it happened. Sure, park the fucker in the nearest canal and call it a deal. But, oh Jesus, how he loved that stereo system! Reba, Garth, Hank Jr., they’d never sounded so sweet. His whole life Snapper had wanted a car with decent speakers. So he’d stayed with the stolen Jeep because of its awesome stereo—and here was the price to be paid.

A big black motherfucker of a cop, coming across the parking lot, drawing his gun.

The one-eyed man tapped him on the shoulder. “Haul ass, chief.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I’d do.”

“No,” murmured Edie Marsh. “We’ve had it.”

Snapper told her to shut up. He snatched the .357 off the seat, pointed it out the window and somehow managed to shoot the trooper in the center of the chest. The man fell backward, landing with a splash.

“Good night, nigger,” Snapper said.

Skink went rigid. Bonnie and Edie screamed. Snapper slammed the Jeep into gear and peeled rubber.

“You see thaa-aatt?” he whinnied. “One shot, one nigger cop! Whooheee! One shot!”

In the cargo well of the Cherokee, Augustine popped up on one knee. The stubby dart rifle was at his shoulder, the sights trained on the ragged hairline of Snapper’s neck. He was surprised when Skink turned and shoved him back to the floor.