Tourist Season (45 page)

Keyes kissed her softly. “Your folks are waiting inside. Somebody from a model agency is supposed to call.”

“Who cares?”

“Your old man. Besides, I'm worn out.”

“Hey, don't look so blue. We made it.” Playfully she took his hands and placed them on her buttocks. “The mother lode is safe,” she said, kissing him hard. “Good work, kiddo.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

A yellow porch light came on over the front door.

“Daddy waits,” said Kara Lynn, frowning.

Keyes climbed into the MG and started the engine. Kara Lynn scooped up her gown and pecked him on the cheek. “Did I mention,” she said in a breathy Marilyn voice, “that I wasn't wearing any panties tonight?”

“I know,” Keyes said. “It wasn't all bad, the view from the octopus.”

On the way back to his apartment, he stopped at the office to check for burglaries and collect his mail, which consisted of a dozen bills, two large checks from the Miami
Sun
and a
National Geographic
with an albino something on the cover. Lost somewhere in the debris on Keyes's desk was a checkbook, and he decided to locate it, just in case he ever needed to buy groceries again. Afterward he tried to clean the aquarium, which had been consumed by an advancing greenish slime that threatened to overtake its borders.

These chores were undertaken mainly to stuff his mind with distractions and delay the inevitable. It was nearly one A.M. when Keyes finished, and he lay down on the battered sofa and fell asleep. Before long he felt the coarse grip of the Browning semiautomatic in his right hand. He looked down and saw that his hand was covered with lustrous black mosquitoes, which were swelling up and bursting one by one, little blood balloons. A bony-looking puppet appeared and began to dance, and the Browning went off. The bullets traveled slowly, leaving orange contrails. One after another they puffed into the limestone around the puppet's feet. Just as the puppet's likeness changed from Jesus Bernal to Ernesto Cabal, one of the bullets smashed its head into a thousand wooden splinters. The slivers flew in all directions, twanging the puppet strings which led to the sky. In the dream Brian Keyes saw himself racing toward the broken puppet and snatching the strings with blood-splashed hands. Then he was airborne over the ocean, clinging for life. In a wispy cloud high above, a familiar man with long blond hair and Gypsy eyes twitched the puppet strings and muttered about the usurious price of coffins.

For the first time in nearly half a century, the front page of the Miami
Sun
on New Year's Day did not lead with a story or photograph of the Orange Bowl Parade. Instead, the paper was dominated by three uncommon pieces of journalism.

The farewell column of Skip Wiley appeared in a vertical slot along the left-hand gutter, beneath Wiley's signature photo. Stripped across the top of the newspaper, under the masthead, was a surprisingly self-critical article about why the
Sun
had failed to connect Wiley to
Las Noches de Diciembre
even after his involvement became known to a certain high-ranking editor. This piece was written, and written well, by Cab Mulcahy himself. Therein shocked Miami readers learned that Wiley's cryptic “where I've got to go, and what I've got to do” referred to the planned, but unconsummated, kidnapping of the Orange Bowl queen during the previous night's parade.

The other key element of the front page was a dramatic but incomplete account of the killing of fugitive terrorist Jesus Bernal on a limestone spit in North Key Largo. This story carried no byline because it was produced by several reporters, one of whom had confirmed the fact that private investigator Brian Keyes had fired the fatal shots from a nine-millimeter Browning handgun, which he was duly licensed to carry. Keyes's presence at the remote jetty was unexplained, although the newspaper noted that he recently had been hired as part of a covert Orange Bowl security force. The only other witness to the Bernal shooting, Metro-Dade Police Sergeant Alberto García, was recovering from surgery and unavailable for comment.

 

When Brian Keyes woke up in the dinginess of his office, Jenna sat at the desk, reading the morning paper.

“When are you gonna learn to lock the door?” she asked. She handed him the front page. “Take a look. The puddy tat's out of the bag.”

Keyes sat up and spread the newspaper across his knees. He tried to read, but his eyes refused to focus.

“I figured you'd be decked out in black,” he said groggily.

“I don't believe he's dead,” Jenna said. “I will not believe it, not till I see the body.” Case closed. She forced a smile. “Hey, Bri, seems you're a big hero for killing that Cuban kidnapper.”

“Yeah, I look like a big hero, don't I?”

He glanced at Wiley's column. “December 28—the day before the helicopter crash. When's the last time you heard from him?”

“Same day. I got a telegram from Haiti.”

“What did he say?” Keyes asked.

“He said to spray the lawn for chinch bugs.”

“That all?”

She pursed her lips. “He also said if anything happens, he wants to be buried in that pine coffin he got from the swap meet. Buried with all his old newspaper clippings, of course.”

“Very touching.”

“I think he stole the idea from the Indian,” Jenna said. “Seminole warriors are always buried with their weapons.”

Keyes stumbled downstairs to a vending machine and bought three cups of coffee. Jenna took one look and said she didn't want any, so Keyes drank them all.

It put him in a perfect mood for Skip Wiley's farewell column, which Keyes found mawkish and disorganized and only slightly revelatory. He was more interested in Cab Mulcahy's companion story. In it, the managing editor explained that Wiley's key role in the Nights of December had not been exposed because of a threat that many more tourists and innocent persons would be murdered. For several days the information about Wiley was withheld while an investigator hired by the Sun searched for him; in retrospect, Mulcahy had written, this decision was ill-advised and probably unethical.

“Poor Cab,” Keyes said, not to Jenna but himself. He felt hurt and embarrassed for his friend.

Jenna came around from behind the desk and sat on the tattered sofa next to Keyes. “Skip really got carried away,” she said, stopping just short of remorse.

“He carried all of us away,” Keyes said, “everyone who cared about him. You, me, Mulcahy, the whole damn newspaper. He carried all of us right into the toilet.”

“Brian, don't be this way.”

Jenna wasn't wearing any makeup; she looked like she hadn't slept in two days. “It was a good cause,” she said defensively. “Just poor administration.”

“What makes you think he's not dead?”

“Intuition.”

“Oh really.” Keyes eyed her with annoyance, as he would a stray cat.

He said, “I can't imagine Skip passing up that parade. National television, half the country tuned in. It was too good to resist—if he's not dead, he's in a coma somewhere.”

“He's not dead,” Jenna said.

“We'll see.”

Jenna had never heard him so snide.

“What's with you?” she asked.

“Aw, nothing. Blew a guy's head off last night and I'm still a little bushed. Wanna go for a Danish?”

Jenna looked shaky. “Oh Brian,” she said.

A plaintively rendered
oh Brian
usually would do the trick; a guaranteed melt-down. This time Keyes felt nothing but a penetrating dullness; not lust or jealousy, rage or bitterness.

“He was supposed to meet me at Wolfie's this morning, but he never came,” she admitted. “I'm kind of worried.” Her eyes were red. Keyes knew she was about to turn on the waterworks.

“He can't be dead,” she said, choking out the words.

Keyes said, “I'm sorry, Jenna, but you did the worst possible thing: you encouraged the bastard.”

“I suppose,” she said, starting to sob. “But some of it sounded so harmless.”

“Skip was about as harmless as a 190-pound scorpion.”

“For instance, dropping those snakes on the ocean liner,” she said. “Somehow it didn't seem so terrible when he was arranging it. The way he told it, it was supposed to be kind of funny.”