Star Island

by Carl Hiaasen

  "This house, it looks like a place where they'd eat eclairs."

  She was doing a poor job of trying not to stare. "Can I ask you something?"

  "The answer is six foot nine," Chemo said tersely.

  "Wow. Did you ever play--"

  "No."

  "Not even in college?"

  In a bladed voice, Chemo said, "Not even in prison."

  Tanner Dane Keefe's personal assistant seemed unfazed by the information. "How come no hoops? Because of the accident?"

  Chemo wondered if she was referring to his arm or his face. It amazed him that people could be so tactless. Being a disfigured felon carried weight in certain social circles, though apparently not on South Beach.

  He found himself thinking, for some reason, about the kidnapped actress, Annie. He recalled when they were in the hotel elevator together, and she'd asked him how she looked in her new dress. It had caught him completely off guard, her caring what he thought. Now she was gone and it was his fault. Chemo had long been immune to normal feelings of guilt, but he was angry at himself.

  "Was it a car crash?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "Where you got so messed up. I'm just curious."

  "Unbelievable."

  "You don't wanna talk about it, that's cool."

  "Let me try those." Chemo lifted the thin rectangular glasses from her nose. When he put them on, he noticed that his vision was unaltered. Everything looked the same.

  She said, "It's okay. They're non-prescriptions."

  "Then why the hell do you wear them?"

  "Are you kidding?" She laughed. "Because they're smokin' hot, that's why."

  "I see," said Chemo.

  He locked the personal assistant in the kitchen pantry and helped himself to two chocolate eclairs from the refrigerator. Then he went upstairs and extricated Cherry Pye from beneath Tanner Dane Keefe, who was grinding away with an expression of grim duty but no discernible lust. The actor seemed almost relieved when Cherry was whisked from the bed, and he floated facedown into the sheets.

  As Cherry bleated in protest, Chemo stuffed her mouth with a pair of dirty gym shorts that he'd grabbed off the floor. Then he inserted her into a baggy Dolphins sweatshirt, slung her over one shoulder and trudged downstairs, out the foyer door.

  The minivan sat idling at the bottom of the driveway. Chemo slid open a side door and shoved the former Cheryl Bunterman onto one of the bench seats. He squeezed himself upright beside her and told the driver/model to take them back to the hotel.

  Thad gave him a thumbs-up. "Nice frames, man."

  "Yeah," said Chemo. "They smoke."

  13

  Bang Abbott decided to flee the Comfort Inn after catching Ann on the phone in the bathroom. He assumed that she'd blabbed their location to some interested party, if not the cops.

  Before leaving, the paparazzo actually took a shower. He and the actress would be keeping company for a while, and he wanted no more wisecracks about body odor. He wasn't opposed to bathing; he simply had other priorities. Life as a tracker of celebrities was hectic and highly competitive--an hour spent grooming was an hour lost off the streets.

  It didn't improve Bang Abbott's sporadic relationship with soap that he had no one to clean up for; no wife or girlfriend, not even a dog waiting to greet him after those long nights chasing stars through the streets of Hollywood. He interacted almost exclusively with other paparazzi, whom he didn't mind offending. In fact, his humid cloud of reek often proved useful on the hunt, clearing a pathway through competing shooters to the front of the pack.

  Ann DeLusia said, "Claude, this is so wrong."

  He was making her wait on the toilet lid while he scrubbed himself behind the shower curtain, which was not sufficiently opaque. In one hand he clutched a sudsy washcloth, and in the other he brandished the Colt revolver, draped with a towel to shield it from the shower spray. He told Ann that he'd shoot her dead if she tried to run from the bathroom.

  She said, "Then can you please hurry it up?"

  "Hey, you don't have to look."

  "God, Claude. You ever heard of the Geneva Convention?"

  Even with water in his ears, Bang Abbott could tell he was being dissed. It was exasperating that Ann was so snarky in the presence of a loaded gun. As he struggled to dry himself off in the small tub, she buried her face in her hands and said, "Gimme a break."

  The photographer testily reminded her that Cherry Pye had voiced no complaints while jumping his bones on the Gulfstream.

  "She was high," said Ann.

  "How would you know?"

  "Because she's always high. That's why they hired me."

  "I need another towel," Bang Abbott snapped.

  "Also, she's a ho. Let's be honest." Ann tossed him two towels.

  "You weren't there. You don't know how it was."

  "Wild guess: Quick and sloppy?"

  Bang Abbott elected to drop the subject. Unlike snotty Peter Cartwill at the Eye, the actress at least seemed to accept that the tryst with Cherry had really occurred.

  Modestly swathed, the photographer stepped from the tub. For the first time he noticed some scrapes and bruises on the otherwise-attractive legs of his captive. When he asked what had happened, Ann said she'd been in a car accident.

  "I had Pam Anderson lips for about a day and a half. You should've seen me." She stood up, self-consciously tugging the hem of the little black dress. "I'll be needing some privacy, Claude."

  "What for?" He didn't trust her for a second, not after he'd caught her making that phone call.

  "To take a bath," she said.

  "I don't think so."

  She rolled her eyes and pointed to the Axl-headed zebra on her neck. "I wanna soak off this stupid ink."

  "No, don't touch it!" he said, waving the gun. "Not yet."

  "Does this mean you've got a plan?"

  The photographer said, "Put your shoes on. We're outta here."

  Later, in the car, he secured the pistol beneath one thigh while he dialed information, trying to track down some of his contacts. Ann DeLusia watched with curiosity as he grew increasingly aggravated. When she asked what was wrong, Bang Abbott said he had tipsters all over Miami who were texting and calling his old number with star sightings, only he wasn't receiving any of the messages because you-know-who still had his you-know-what.

  Ann said, "Ah. The mystic BlackBerry."

  "Now all these shitheads, they'll expect to get paid."

  "Your tipsters."

  "They got no fucking loyalty," Bang Abbott complained. "Won't be long, they'll freeze me out and start selling to other shooters. Here." He handed the phone to Ann. "Your turn," he said. "Talk to Cherry's old lady--she's the one in charge of the circus, right?"

  "And tell her what?"

  "That you're a hostage."

  "And?"

  "And I want a straight-up trade--you for her daughter."

  Ann said, "It's almost a shame to spoil this moment by asking, but: Or else what, Claude? You gonna kill me?"

  He sniggered. "Hell, that's what they probably want."

  "Get out."

  "I'm serious. You're a big-time problem for them now."

  Ann fell silent, wondering if the photographer might be right. He wasn't quite loony enough that she could automatically discount everything he said.

  She asked, "So what's the big 'or else'?"

  "If they won't do a trade, then I go on the Internet and post some slutty topless pictures of Cherry that she took of herself at the Stefano--on my camera, the dumb flake."

  He was driving back toward Ocean Drive, and catching every red light.

  Ann said, "Cherry's people don't care about topless. A crotch shot, maybe, but her titties are already out there, Claude, all over the Web."

  Bang Abbott frowned, remembering Cherry's trip two years earlier to the Greek island of Santorini. Judging from the photos filed by the European paparazzi, Cherry hadn't bothered to put on a shirt for two weeks. Bang Abbott h
imself had missed that trip because he'd been at Aspen, staking out a house in which a famous NFL quarterback was rumored to have re-injured an ACL while cavorting on a defective futon with his supermodel girlfriend.

  "I've got a backup, don't worry," the photographer said.

  Ann sighed. "Gee, I wonder if it involves me."

  "You'll finally get to do some real acting."

  She said, "It won't work. Her fans'll figure out I'm not her."

  "Hey, you fooled me. You can fool the rest of the world," Bang Abbott said, "especially with that wicked tatt."

  Ann wasn't sure what he had in mind, and she didn't want to ask. It was her intention to escape from this loser as soon as possible, then reboot her life. In the meantime, she had her own reasons to call Janet Bunterman, who picked up on the seventh ring. Ann first explained the situation with Cherry's topless self-portraits, and laid out the paparazzo's peculiar demands.

  "Is he there now?" Janet Bunterman asked.

  "Yes indeed. And he has some sort of gun."

  "I better talk to Maury."

  Ann said, "You do that."

  "And the Larks."

  "Cherry, too. She's got the man's BlackBerry and he wants it back."

  In the driver's seat, Bang Abbott nodded somberly. "Tell her I'm serious as a heart attack," he whispered.

  "He's as serious as a heart attack," Ann repeated.

  Janet Bunterman said, "You lost me. How'd Cherry get this guy's phone?"

  "She stole it after she banged him on the airplane." Ann wasn't one to sugarcoat bad news. "Anyhow, he needs it back ASAP. She can bring it when she shows up for the shoot."

  Cherry's mother lowered her voice. "Not gonna happen, Annie."

  "He says one day with her is all he needs."

  "You may tell him the answer is no."

  "Janet, you did call the cops, right? About what happened tonight?"

  "Of course we called the cops."

  "So they're looking everywhere for me," Ann said, "scouring the county."

  There was a pause on the other end, then a muffled noise that sounded like a cap being twisted off a water bottle. Janet Bunterman said, "They found the Suburban about an hour ago on Watson Island."

  "That's great, but I'm pretty sure they didn't find me."

  "Annie, it's a complicated scenario. Cherry's got the new CD coming out, not to mention the tour--I don't have to tell you how huge that is. What I'm trying to say is, we're still working out a strategy to get you back...."

  With the heel of her free hand, Ann pounded the dashboard. Bang Abbott poked her in the ribs with the barrel of the pistol and gave a querulous shrug.

  "Now take it easy," Cherry's mother was saying.

  "Nobody told the police I was in the Suburban? So, now what--case closed?" Ann was outraged, although she should have seen it coming. She was a secret that needed to be kept.

  Janet Bunterman said, "We'll put our heads together and figure things out."

  "You're really pissing me off," said Ann.

  "Has he hurt you?"

  "Thanks for asking. Really."

  Now fuming, Bang Abbott pulled to the side of the road and said, "What'd I tell ya? They'd cut you loose in a heartbeat."

  The photographer snatched the cell phone and got out of the car. He could hear Cherry's mother on the other end of the line, saying, "Annie? Are you still there? Annie?"

  He held the phone near the gun, aimed the barrel toward the sky and fired off a round that blew out a streetlight. "Fuck me!" he cried, and clambered back into the Buick. His ears rang and his hands trembled on the steering wheel as he sped west toward Alton. "That was so fucking loud!" he said excitedly. "Ask did I get her attention! Go ahead. Tell her it was a real bullet."

  Ann took the phone. "Janet, that was the gun. The dude is serious."

  But the line had gone dead.

  "Shit," Ann said.

  Bang Abbott stuffed the Colt under the front seat. "Those are some real slimeballs you work for," he remarked.

  "And you, sir, would be an expert."

  She kept glancing at the side-door mirror, hoping to see the flashing lights of a squad car, but the street behind them was empty. Evidently, random gunfire was no longer a top priority for police in Miami Beach. Bang Abbott permitted Ann to roll down her window halfway, so she could listen in vain for the sound of sirens.

  Detective Reilly stayed late again, surfing the databases, trying to learn more about Jackie Sebago. The man had no criminal record, though a Nexis search turned up newspaper articles about a bankrupt ski-in condo village in Montana, where disgruntled business partners had sued Jackie Sebago over missing funds and a no-show "executive assistant" who'd turned out to be his mistress. Jackie's name also popped up as a principal in a Maryland golf resort that was fined $37,000 for poisoning a flock of mallard ducks that kept crapping all over the thirteenth green.

  The information shed enough light on Sebago's character to bolster Reilly's belief that the developer had been the choice target of the raving bus hijacker in North Key Largo. How an unbalanced vagabond managed to plan and execute a crime of such precision intrigued the detective, but he was no closer to identifying the culprit, much less finding him.

  The detective would have been intrigued to know that among the hulking nomad's unlikely talents was marine navigation, and that as Reilly was heading home from the office his suspect was racing through ocean darkness in a striped Donzi speedboat, somewhere off the coast of Elliott Key.

  As it turned out, the boat--which Skink took from a slip at Ocean Reef--hadn't been run wide open for months. The owners, who spent their summers on Cape Cod and their autumns in the Berkshires, paid a mechanic to come service the big twin Mercury outboards only twice a year. The mechanic never took the Donzi from the dock, just kicked back in the cockpit with a six-pack of Land Shark and let the engines idle. Sometimes he brought along a girlfriend or a spinning rod. Because the boat didn't go anywhere, there was no need for the mechanic to top off the gas tanks, which is why Skink found the gauge nearing empty as he passed to the east of Fowey Rocks.

  By good fortune he came across a twenty-eight-foot Aquasport waylaid by fouled spark plugs, which the governor was pleased to fix in exchange for six gallons of fuel. The snapper fishermen aboard the Aquasport were alarmed by his tattered appearance and also the shotgun, but they remained calm. He dismissed them with a rousing quote from Melville, and they motored with relief back to Black Point, where their wives had been stewing since sunset.

  A mile off the shoreline of Miami Beach, Skink shut down the Donzi and opened a bottle of beer he'd found in a refrigerator beside the fish box. Peering out at the flickering neon filament of Ocean Drive, he felt a clenching in his gut that had nothing to do with the roll of the sea swells. City life derailed him; the crowds, the noise, the walls, the lights. And this particular city was a minefield of incivilities and pretension. Surely there would be incidents, moments of vertiginous risk, but what choice did he have?

  Annie was there.

  Skink drank another beer and yowled at the sky. Decades of hermitage had kept him barely on keel but his turbulent aversions never waned. He'd fled the governor's mansion with his values intact but his idealism extinguished, his patience smashed to dust. Politics had scrambled his soul much worse than the war, and he left behind in Tallahassee not only his name but the discredited strategy of forbearance and compromise. The cherished wild places of his childhood had vanished under cinder blocks and asphalt, and so, too, had the rest of the state been transformed--hijacked by greedy suckworms disguised as upright citizens. From swampy lairs Skink would strike back whenever an opportunity arose, and the message was never ambiguous. Even schmucks like Jackie Sebago got the point.

  The governor rocked back and looked up at the stars and began to sing in a papery falsetto. It was a Celtic lullaby he'd learned from his mother, long gone, but he remembered every verse. When he was done, he sang it again.

  Then he turned the ignit
ion and aimed the stolen boat full throttle toward South Beach.

  14

  The next morning, while the former Cheryl Bunterman was posing for the cover of Us Weekly, Maury Lykes convened a meeting of concerned parties and ordered two dozen sesame bagels with lox and cream cheese. Chemo's late arrival seemed to affect the usually unflappable Larks, whose surgically fixed expressions seemed to grow more taut and goggle-eyed.

  Maury Lykes began by stating the obvious. "This situation with Ann is a huge fucking problem." He waggled a bent finger at the bodyguard. "You first. What's our next move?"

  "Depends," said Chemo, "whether you want this shithead dead or you just want the girl back. Or maybe both."

  "Both," said the promoter.

  "Not so fast," interjected one of the Larks.

  Maury Lykes laughed hollowly. "I was just kidding. We're not killin' anybody."

  Chemo shrugged and reached for a bagel. "Suit yourself."

  Janet Bunterman recounted the late-night call from Ann DeLusia, and the alarming way it ended--gunfire, and a dead phone line.

  "Jesus, you think he really shot her?" Maury Lykes asked.

  "Get serious," Chemo said, chilling the proceedings with his smile.

  An uneasy silence took hold. The promoter cocked his head. "What'm I missing here?"

  "The big picture," Lila Lark said. "That's what you pay us for."

  Taking turns, the sisters enumerated the public-relations perils facing Team Cherry if Annie's role in the organization became known, which was certain to happen if she became the subject of a police search.

  "Which is why we didn't tell them she was in the Suburban," Cherry's mother said.

  Maury Lykes nodded impatiently. "Yeah, yeah, I get all that."

  "So let's say this guy went bonkers and shot Annie," Lucy Lark continued, trying not to glance at Chemo, "or for some other reason, she doesn't come back. Yes, it's horrible. Yes, it's a heinous tragedy. But, on the other hand ... "

  Janet Bunterman picked up the ball. "Look, Maury, it would be one thing if money was all he wanted. That's a controllable situation. We could pay a ransom and bring Annie home ourselves. But he wants to do a trade--Annie's life for one day with Cherry!"