Lyle wound up with a special trick. He made a fist with his right hand and pulled a red scarf from within it. Then he draped the scarf over his fist and tapped the plastic wand to it with a whispered incantation. He whipped the scarf away and a white pigeon flapped from its perch on his fingers. Gasps went up from the crowd, but none louder than the one from Nurse Coldwell, no doubt concerned about the sanitation hazard the bird might create. Lyle had promised no animals. Oh well.
He flicked his right hand and the pigeon flew to the other. He draped the bird with the scarf. A wand tap and the bird vanished. A smattering of applause floated around the room. He was done with this demonstration.
He raised a hand in the air and a quarter-sized gold coin appeared at his fingertips. The careworn edges hinted at its journey from antiquity to the twenty-first century. He bent and extended his hand to Shane so that the coin glimmered before the old man’s eyes.
“Last illusion,” Lyle said to the room. Then he looked straight at Shane. “It’s yours for the taking.”
Shane wrapped his hand around the coin and snatched it away. Lyle showed his empty hand to the audience with a theatrical flourish. Shane smiled in triumph. Then his face fell. He opened his hand and the coin was gone. Laughter rippled through the room. He went red with anger.
“I felt it,” Shane said. “I had it. Where did it go?”
“It’s magic,” Lyle said. He gave Shane a smiling fraternal clap to the base of his neck. When he pulled his hand away, his fingers gripped two stolen silver hairs.
Lyle thanked the residents and swept his props into his bag. He was out the front door before the first resident left the room.
Lyle had what he needed. An unknowing accomplice and the means to have him ready to take his role in the sorcerer’s Grand Adventure.
Having a room full of residents get a good laugh at Shane’s expense wasn’t sweet enough to chase away the taste Lyle left in Dolly’s mouth. He made the skin at the nape of her neck do a slow crawl. She shuddered. His cheesy tricks and empty banter played like a cheap perfume over rotting fruit. She could still smell the decay beneath. And Lyle wasn’t just smarmy, like Vicente at the used car lot. Lyle felt…wrong…black. She sought a second opinion from the man always in touch with the planet’s vibe.
“So,” she said to Walking Bear, “how’d you like the magician?”
“Anyone who gives a jab at Shane is worth having visit.”
“How did he…feel to you?”
Walking Bear mulled his response.
“I have some experience with clothing. I know a cut-rate suit when I see one.”
Dolly laughed. She let the creepy magician spark a bit too much of her imagination that afternoon.
“But I am much better with animals,” he added.
Chapter Sixteen
“Why do I need to be out here?” Juliana whined.
Vicente Ferrer wanted to backslap her. But then she’d collapse into a crying mess and be completely useless.
“Because I enjoy your pleasant company,” he said instead.
Juliana missed the dripping sarcasm. She gave her long black hair a nervous twirl between her fingers. She wore the usual micro shorts and a camisole over her obvious implants. The air conditioning was on high. Chill bumps up her legs and arms.
“Cente,” she said. “It’s so dark and there are things out there in the swamps.”
It was pushing midnight and the two of them were in Vicente’s big four-wheel-drive pickup on a side road south of town.
“Yes,” Vicente said. “Things like several hundred pounds of coke. Things we need to find before daylight.”
The truck bounced as it left the paved road for a sandy trail through the scrub. The drop coordinates were a hundred yards ahead, but that guaranteed nothing. After half again that distance Vicente stopped and doused the lights. Same shit every month.
“Well, it’s out here somewhere,” he said. “Let’s go find it.”
Juliana gave a horrified look. Her stilettos were at least three inches high.
“No, Cente,” she said. “I’m the lookout. I can’t go slogging around in a swamp dressed like this. These shoes cost $250!”
Vicente knew exactly what they cost. He bought the damn things. He slapped a flashlight into her midsection.
“Then leave the goddamn shoes here and go barefoot. We need to find the drop.”
He exited the truck to preclude any more of her whining. If the bitch hadn’t been such a hot moaning whore in bed, he’d have no time for her. But he hadn’t gotten enough twenty-year-old action way back when he was twenty, so he’d bear the burden associated with doing a woman half his age.
Vicente stood a solid six feet tall, with a chest and abs chiseled hard with a weight set in his dealership shop. He wore his short hair slicked straight back to purposefully accentuate the close-cropped goatee on his strong jaw. He flicked on his flashlight.
The truck’s passenger door opened and Juliana heaved a resigned sigh. He knew she’d come around. His motivation to find the pallet of cocaine out here was financial. Hers was stronger; personal addiction. He passed his flashlight over the soggy ground at the edge of the Everglades.
“You sure they dropped it last night?” Juliana asked.
He’d stopped answering her more idiotic questions and had found it a great time saver. The Colombians never missed a drop. They’d flown over in a tropical storm to deliver the monthly shipment of cocaine on schedule. The Colombians were all about cash flow, out from the wallets of indulgent Americans and into their pockets.
Citrus Glade might no longer produce a legal white granular product, but it was perfectly situated to distribute an illegal replacement. Just a short swampy hop from the Gulf of Mexico, a low flying plane could skim the unlit treetops between the two populated coasts and arrive undetected. A dropped bundle needed no airport, so the vast empty space outside the town fit the bill as a delivery site. Thank God and the Federal Government for GPS.
Vicente’s flashlight played across something big. He spotlighted it and exhaled in exultation. One enormous cube of shrink-wrapped crystal gold, one-third buried in the muck. He could always count on the Colombians.
“Get over here,” he commanded Juliana.
She approached in a tiptoeing slog, face pinched in pain at each step. She passed Vicente without a word.
Vicente returned to the truck and pulled it within a few yards of the shipment. A shooting star arced across the sky as he returned to the bundle.
Juliana slit the shrink wrap with the tip of her manicured fingernail. She punched a hole in one five-kilo plastic-wrapped brick and extracted a fingernail full of coke. Halfway up to her nose, Vicente slapped it away. She whimpered a protest.
“What the hell? You aren’t out here to get fucked up. Toss me those bundles.”
She heaved one in Vicente’s direction. He caught it like a running back. He slid it into the truck’s open tailgate under the black tonneau cover and turned in time to field the next bundle.
“When does this go north?” Juliana said, trying and failing to make the question nonchalant.
Vicente knew she was far less concerned about the business than for her personal access to the blow. “A few days,” he said. “Only six wrecks on the back lot but I’ve got a line on a few more.”
For a small dying town, Vicente Ferrer ran a surprisingly thriving car business. He moved a serious amount of used steel off the main lot, most of it to out-of-towners. The big draw was his push/pull promise. Any vehicle you could roll into his lot by any method was worth three grand. Push in a Pinto, leave in a Lincoln. The sales gimmick brought in a regular supply of lead sleds down CR 12 every week and Vicente took them all.
With the last of the bundles in the truck, Juliana sat in the passenger seat while Vicente tamped the abandoned shrink wrap down into the muck. She gave her muddy feet a look of despair and cradled her shoes on her lap. Vicente returned to the driver’s seat and they headed back to the sho
p.
Vicente’s window was down and he let the brief moment of tolerably temperate air blow back through his hair. Once at the dealership, he’d stash this stuff in the tool room and dole out Juliana’s powdered allowance. She’d be in la-la land in fifteen minutes, he’d give her the once over, boot her ass out the door and be home before dawn. A solid night’s work all around.
Soon all this would be behind him. He had bigger plans than to be a dope-smuggling middleman, always looking over his shoulder for the DEA or some state trooper too dumb to take a payoff. This week he’d tap into a mother lode of cash. And it would be adios Juliana, adios Citrus Glade, hello house on Key Biscayne.
It couldn’t happen fast enough.
Chapter Seventeen
The next day dawned and Andy started it with road kill. Mrs. Martinez called in a dead gator out in front of her yard on south CR 12. Andy could handle that. As long as the gator wasn’t moving. Afghanistan had permanently satisfied his need for excitement. County Animal Control took care of the ones that could still bite off a hand.
Mrs. Martinez stood at her mailbox waiting as Andy pulled up in the city’s white strip job Chevy pickup. The dumpy widow wore an amorphous rose house dress and dark glasses so wide they looked like a visor prop from an X-Men movie. Her hair was a shade of red not known in nature. She fanned herself with a supermarket advertising insert.
Andy stopped at the curb. He opened the door to a thick blast of humidity. The truck didn’t have a radio but thank God it had air conditioning. He ambled over to Mrs. Martinez.
“It’s right there,” she said. Her non-fanning hand pointed to the fifteen-foot alligator carcass in the road, as if Andy could miss it. One of the cars passing by apparently had not. The gator’s head was crushed flat.
“I’ll take care of it, Mrs. Martinez.”
“I knew you would come,” she said. Her Hispanic accent made the you sound like Jew. “We count on the town’s war hero.”
Andy cringed and turned away. He hated the undeserved description. Anyone back from the Middle East was a hero, no matter their record. Mrs. Martinez would have had a whole different outlook if she knew Andy’s.
He pulled the truck up behind the dead gator. He dropped the tailgate and slid a ramp out of the bed. He locked it on place on the tailgate, donned a pair of gloves and began to unroll the cable from the bed-mounted winch. Mrs. Martinez shuffled up to gawk.
“Seen this fellow before?” Andy asked. Some of the gators were regulars with their own favorite ponds to haunt.
“No. There’s been no gators around here for years.”
Andy wrapped the steel cable around the gator’s rear legs and under the abdomen. He gave it a test yank.
This thing had been dead for hours. It was odd to have a gator out here, so far from water. And especially strange to have it lying in the road at night. Contrary to their generally torpid demeanor, the creatures could move fast when they needed to. One that grew this big learned long ago to stay off the roadways.
Andy flicked the switch and the winch ground to life. The gator began a slow scrape across the asphalt with a sound like someone sanding leather. Mrs. Martinez went back to her house. The winch dragged the gator up the ramp and into the truck bed. The shattered head hung a few inches off the tailgate’s edge. Close enough for government work. If wouldn’t fall off before he got it to the dump for disposal.
He pulled off his gloves, turned and nearly walked over Mrs. Martinez. She had returned with a can of generic orange diet soda in her hand. Beads of condensation rolled down its sides.
“For you,” she said.
Damn, Andy thought. I’m over thirty and here she is handing me a soda like I’m the teenage kid who just cut her lawn.
“You get rid of that thing,” she said. “You are a savior.”
Andy shivered in response. Yeah, that’s all it takes to be a savior here. Clean up road kill.
“Thanks, Mrs. Martinez. Glad to help.”
He got back in the truck. In the few minutes he’d spent retrieving the deceased reptile, the cab had turned oven-like. Andy started the clattery diesel and flipped the A/C fan to high. The soda can felt cool in his hand.
Diet orange soda. Probably fifteen cents per can. It was worth a laugh. In a state that grew much of America’s oranges, someone sold this soda which contained no orange products at all. And to add insult to injury, it was diet. He tossed it on the seat and dropped the truck into gear.
A mile down the road his growing thirst got the better of him. He grabbed the soda can and popped it open. He downed a big slug of it. It managed to taste worse than he had expected.
There were a few perks to being what amounted to the town handyman. Diet orange soda wasn’t one of them.
Chapter Eighteen
Autumn Stovall stood calf-deep in the still waters of the western Everglades. Marsh grasses brushed against her knees just over the top of her boots. Tiny fish darted in and out among the stalks. The chorused drone of buzzing insects filled the air. Off to her right, a large white wood stork shuffled in the shallows in search of breakfast among the reeds.
She nudged her broad-brimmed hat back from her forehead and wiped away sweat with the back of her hand. Sure it was eighty degrees before noon and fire ants had attempted an uphill march along her boots earlier, but all was harmonious. Mother Nature was taking her course, right on schedule.
These acres had been Apex Sugar’s farmland for decades. But the government had bought them out and turned the deed back over to the original owner. All man-made improvements had been stripped away, the land leveled and access restricted. The first rainy season hit and the acreage went underwater, just as planned. Plants and animals exploited the new habitat with a vengeance. Just a few miles from Citrus Glade, the Everglades was making a comeback.
And the government paid Autumn to watch the show. Witnessing the advance of wilderness was a biologist’s dream job. Every day she documented the return of a new species or the bloom of a plant long absent. She’d never felt so attuned to nature.
And the job offer came as she was completely out of tune with humanity. Years of graduate lab research had left her burned out on the hard science half of biology. After graduation she wanted to get back to the aspects that happened above the cellular level, to be immersed in nature. The job near Citrus Glade was about as far south as she could go without getting wet, and as far from civilization as she thought she wanted to be. So she graduated, spent a week in her New York hometown of Sagebrook with her mother, and then headed to Florida.
She pulled her smart phone from her pocket, typed in some observational notes and turned for home. The commute was the best part of the job.
Her small RV was parked at the end of the road. Porky, as she called the van-based camper, was her first post-graduate investment. The brochure said that it slept four and that was as accurate as the “servings” count on most packaged foods. In reality, it was perfect for one person with a minimalist lifestyle. Six years of college had her well prepared for a minimalist lifestyle. She’d traded her car at the dealership, tossed her clothes in the back and piloted the RV south on I-95. She hadn’t looked back.
She slipped out of her boots, stepped into home-sweet-home and tossed her hat on the table. Her light red hair had always been at least shoulder length but she’d cut it short for the hot south Florida field work. She gave it a quick, cooling fluff with both hands. A generous helping of freckles still dotted her cheeks, despite her mother’s prediction that she would grow out of them. Sweat soaked her shirt and shorts but the wet clothes did not reveal much of a figure. She called herself a lean, mean observational machine.
Her schedule was about three days in field and then a trip into town. Satellite TV and radio made the isolation much more bearable than the average person would think. Plus, she wasn’t really alone.
“Where’s my Oscar?” she called.
A big orange tabby lifted a sleepy head off of the small sleeping bunk. He blin
ked twice, assessed that Autumn was no threat, and returned to the land cats spent most of their day.
“Good job, Watch-cat,” Autumn said. Oscar had joined her south of Richmond. On a whim she visited a shelter and rescued the old codger. At ten, all the annoying kitten traits were long gone. He was housebroken and trained to travel. Plus he had climbed up into Autumn’s lap when she sat down at the shelter. Experience told her redheads had to stick together, so she liberated him for a life on the road.
Today was the day to run into town. Fresh food, new water, top off the gas. She started up the RV and slipped it into gear. It rocked like a ship at sea over the rough sand road before it hit smoother sailing on CR 12. Minutes later she was in Citrus Glade. When Porky pulled into the Food Bonanza supermarket parking lot, she parked him next to an aging white pickup with county exempt tags. The truck didn’t pique her interest. Its cargo did.
The gator that hung across the tailgate had to be fifteen feet long. This specimen was to gator length what Michael Jordan was to human height: a major outlier. Of course her length estimate was more of a guess than usual. The head had been crushed flat. She reached down to open the jaws and inspect the teeth.
“Hey, hey. You don’t want to do that!”
She turned to see a man in a city DPW uniform jogging up to the truck.
“It’s okay,” Autumn said. She pulled out her ID from the National Parks Service that listed her name with her Ph.D. “My name’s Autumn. You can trust me. I’m a doctor.” She winked at him. “This is a hell of a gator you have here.”
“He was my morning project,” Andy said. “I’m Andy Patterson, by the way.”
“Road kill your specialty?”
“One of my many areas of expertise,” Andy said, voice tinged with sarcasm. “It’s a small town with a small-town budget. Gator’s your specialty?”
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