"Anybody but Bobby Clinch," Decker said. "Steve and Eydie you weren't."
Of course then the tears came, and the next thing Decker knew he had moved to the bed and put his arms around Lanie and told her to knock off the crying. Please. In his mind's eye he could see himself in this cheesy scene out of a cheap detective movie; acting like the gruff cad, awkwardly consoling the weepy long-legged knockout, knowing deep down he ought to play it as the tough guy but feeling compelled to show this warm sensitive side. Decker knew he was a fool but he certainly didn't feel like letting go of Lanie Gault. There was something magnetic and comforting and entirely natural about holding a sweet-smelling woman in a silken nightie on a strange bed in a strange motel room in a strange town where neither one of you belonged.
A Bell Jet-Ranger helicopter awaited the Reverend Charles Weeb at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. Weeb wore a navy pinstriped suit, designer sunglasses, and lizard boots. He was traveling with a vice-president of the Outdoor Christian Network and a young brunette woman who claimed to be a secretary, and who managed to slip her phone number to the chopper pilot during the brief flight.
The helicopter carried the Reverend Charles Weeb to a narrow dike on the edge of the Florida Everglades. Looking east from the levee, Weeb and his associates had a clear view of a massive highway construction site. The land had been bulldozed, the roadbed had been poured, the pilings had been driven for the overpasses. Dump trucks hauled loose fill back and forth, while graders crawled in dusty clouds along the medians.
"Show me again," Weeb said to the vice-president.
"Our property starts right about there," the vice-president said, pointing, "and abuts the expressway for five miles to the south. The state highway board has generously given us three interchanges."
Generously my ass, thought Weeb. Twenty thousand in bonds to each of the greedy fuckers.
"Give me the binoculars," Weeb said.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I left them at the airport."
"I'm going to go sit in the helicopter," the brunette woman whined.
"Stay right here," Weeb growled. "How'm I supposed to see the lake system without the binoculars?"
"We can fly over it on the way back," the vice-president said. "The canals are almost done."
Vigorously Weeb shook his head. "Dammit, Billy, you did it again. People don't buy townhouses on canals. 'Canal' is a dirty word. A canal is where raw sewage goes. A canal is where ducks fuck and cattle piss. Who wants to live on a damn canal! Would you pay a hundred-fifty grand to do that? No, you'd want to live on a lake, a cool scenic lake, and lakes is what we're selling here."
"I understand," said the vice-president. Lakes it is. Straight, narrow lakes. Lakes you could toss a stone across. Lakes of identical fingerlike dimensions.
The company that OCN had hired was a marine dredging firm whose foremen were, basically, linear-minded. They had once dredged the mouths of Port Everglades and Government Cut, and a long stretch of the freighter route in Tampa Bay. They had worked with impressive speed and efficiency, and they had worked in a perfectly straight line—which is desirable if you're digging a ship channel but rather a handicap when you're digging a lake. This problem had been mentioned several times to Reverend Charles Weeb, who had merely pointed out the fiscal foolishness of having big round lakes. The bigger the lake, the more water. The more water, the less land to sell. The less land to sell, the fewer townhouses to build.
"Lakes don't have to be round," the Reverend Weeb said. "I'm not going to tell you again."
"Yes, sir."
Weeb turned to the west and stared out at the Glades. "Reminds me of the fucking Sahara," he said, "except with muck."
"The water rises in late spring and early summer," the vice-president reported.
"Dickie promises bass."
"Yes, sir, some of the best fishing in the South."
"He'd better be right." Weeb walked along the dike, admiring the spine of the new highway. The vice-president walked a few steps behind him while the secretary stayed where she was, casting glances toward the blue-tinted cockpit of the Jet-Ranger.
"Twenty-nine thousand units," Weeb was saying, "twenty-nine thousand families. Our very own Christian city!"
"Yes," the vice-president said. It was the name of the development that gnawed at him. Lunker Lakes. The vice-president felt that the name Lunker Lakes presented a substantial marketing problem; too colloquial, too red behind the neck. The Reverend Charles Weeb disagreed. It was his audience, he said, and he damn well knew what they would and would not buy. Lunker Lakes was perfect, he insisted. It couldn't miss.
Charlie Weeb was heading back to the chopper. "Billy, we ought to start thinking about shooting some commercials," he said. "Future Bass Capital of America, something like that. Fly Dickie down and get some tape in the can. He can use his own crew, but I'd like you or Deacon Johnson to supervise."
The vice-president said, "There's no fish in the lakes yet."
Weeb climbed into the chopper and the vice-president squeezed in beside him. The secretary was up front next to the pilot. Weeb didn't seem to care.
"I know there's no fucking fish in the lakes. Tell Dickie to go across the dike and shoot some tape on the other side. He'll know what to do."
The Jet-Ranger lifted off and swung low to the east.
"Head over that way," the vice-president told the pilot, "where they're digging those lakes."
"What lakes?" the pilot asked.
Skink was late to the airport. R. J. Decker was not the least bit surprised. He slipped into a phone booth and called the Harney Sentinel to see if anything had broken loose about the shootings. He had a story all made up about going to meet Ott at the pancake house but Ott never showing up.
Sandy Kilpatrick got on the phone. He said, "I've got some very bad news, Mr. Decker."
Decker took a breath.
"It's about Ott," Kilpatrick said. His voice was a forced whisper, like a priest in the confessional.
"What happened?" Decker said.
"A terrible car accident early this morning," Kilpatrick said. "Out on the Gilchrist Highway. Ott must have gone to sleep at the wheel. His truck ran off the road and hit a big cypress."
"Oh Jesus," Decker said. They'd set up the wreck to cover the murder.
"It burned for two hours, started a mean brushfire," Kilpatrick said. "By the time it was over there wasn't much left. The remains are over at the morgue now, but... well, they're hoping to get enough blood to find out if he'd been drinking. They're big on DUI stats around here."
Ott's body would be scorched to a cinder. No one would ever suspect it had been in the water, just as no one would guess what had really killed him. The cheapest trick in the book, but it would work in Harney. Decker could imagine them already repainting the death's-head billboard on Route 222: "drive safely. don't be fatality no. 5."
He didn't know what to say now. Conversations about the newly dead made him uncomfortable, but he didn't want to seem uncaring. "I didn't think Ott was a big drinker," he said lamely.
"Me neither," Kilpatrick said, "but I figured something was wrong when he didn't show up for the basketball game night before last. He was the team mascot, you know."
"Davey Dillo."
"Right." There was a pause on the end of the line; Kilpatrick pondering how to explain Ott's armadillo suit. "It's sort of an unwritten rule here at the newspaper," the editor said, "that everybody gives to the United Way. Just a few bucks out of each paycheck—you know, the company's big in civic charity."
"I understand," Decker said.
"Well, Ott refused to donate anything, said he didn't trust 'em. I'd never seen him so adamant."
"He always watched his pennies," Decker said. Ott Pickney was one of the cheapest men he'd ever met. While covering the Dade County courthouse he'd once missed the verdict in a sensational murder trial because he couldn't find a parking spot with a broken meter.
Sandy Kilpatrick went on: "Our publisher has a r
igid policy about the United Way. When he heard Ott was holding back, he ordered me to fire him. To save Ott's job I came up with this compromise."
"Davey Dillo?"
"The school team needed a mascot."
"It sure doesn't sound like Ott," Decker said.
"He resisted at first, but he got to where he really enjoyed it. I heard him say so. He was dynamite on that skateboard, too, even in that bulky costume. Someone his age—the kids said he should have been a surfer."
"Sounds like quite a show," Decker said, trying to imagine it.
"He never missed a game, that's why I was worried the other night when he didn't show. Only thing I could figure is that he'd gone out Saturday night and tied one on. Maybe went up to Cocoa Beach, met a girl, and just decided to stay the weekend."
Ott sacked out with a beach bunny—the story probably was all over Harney by now. "Maybe that's it," Decker said. "He was probably on his way home when the accident happened." This was Ott's old pal from Miami, lying through his teeth. If Kilpatrick only knew the truth, Decker thought. He said, "Sandy, I'm so sorry. I can't believe he's dead." That part was almost true, and the regret was genuine.
"The service is tomorrow," Kilpatrick said. "Cremation seemed the best way to go, considering."
Decker said good-bye and hung up. Then he called a florist shop in Miami and asked them to wire an orchid to Ott Pickney's funeral. The best orchid they had.
Jim Tile was born in the town of Wilamette, Florida, a corrupt and barren flyspeck untouched by the alien notions of integration, fair housing, and equal rights. Jim Tile was one of the few blacks ever to have escaped his miserable neighborhood without benefit of a bus ride to Raiford or a football scholarship. He attributed his success to good steady parents who made him stay in school, and also to his awesome physical abilities. Most street kids thought punching was the cool way to fight, but Jim Tile preferred to wrestle because it was more personal. For this he took some grief from his pals until the first time the white kids jumped him and tried to push his face in some cowshit. There were three of them, and naturally they waited until Jim Tile was alone. They actually got him down for a moment, but the one who was supposed to lock Jim Tile's arms didn't get a good grip and that was that. One of the white kids ended up with a broken collarbone, another with both elbows hyperextended grotesquely, and the third had four broken ribs where Jim Tile had squeezed him in a leg scissors. And they all went to the hospital with cowshit on their noses.
After high school Jim Tile enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee, majored in criminal justice, was graduated, and joined the highway patrol. His friends and classmates told him that he was nuts, that a young black man with a 4.0 grade average and a college degree could write his own ticket with the DEA or Customs, maybe even the FBI. Jim Tile could have taken his pick. Besides, everybody knew about the highway patrol: it had the worst pay and the highest risks of any law-enforcement job in the state—not to mention its reputation as an enclave for hardcore rednecks who, while not excluding minority recruits, hardly welcomed them with champagne and tickertape parades.
In the 1970s the usual fate of black troopers was to get assigned to the lousiest roads in the reddest counties. This way they could spend most of their days writing tickets to foul-mouthed Klansmen farmers who insisted on driving their tractors down the middle of the highway in violation of about seventeen traffic statutes. Two or three years of this challenging work was enough to inspire most black troopers to look elsewhere for employment, but Jim Tile hung on. When other troopers asked him why, he replied that he intended someday to become commander of the entire highway patrol. His friends thought he was joking, but when word of Jim Tile's boldly stated ambition reached certain colonels and lieutenants in Tallahassee he was immediately reassigned to patrol the remote roadways of Harney County and faithfully protect its enlightened citizenry, most of whom insisted on addressing him as Boy or Son or Officer Zulu.
One day Trooper Jim Tile was told to accompany a little-known gubernatorial candidate on a campaign swing through Harney. The day began with breakfast at the pancake house and finished with a roast-hog barbecue on the shore of Lake Jesup. The candidate, Clinton Tyree, gave the identical slick speech no less than nine times, and out of utter boredom Jim Tile memorized it. By the end of the day he was unconsciously muttering the big applause lines just before they came out of the candidate's mouth. From the reactions—and penurious donations—of several fat-cat political contributors, it was obvious that they had gotten the idea that Clinton Tyree was letting a big black man tell him what to say.
At dusk, after all the reporters and politicos had polished off the barbecue and gone home, Clinton Tyree took Jim Tile aside and said:
"I know you don't think much of my speech, but in November I'm going to be elected governor."
"I don't doubt it," Jim Tile had said, "but it's because of your teeth, not your ideals."
After Clinton Tyree won the election, one of the first things he did was order Trooper Jim Tile transferred from Harney County to the governor's special detail in Tallahassee. This unit was the equivalent of the state's Secret Service, one of the most prestigious assignments in the highway patrol. Never before had a black man been chosen as a bodyguard for a governor, and many of Tyree's cronies told him that he was setting a dangerous precedent. The governor only laughed. He told them that Jim Tile was the most prescient man he'd met during the whole campaign. An exit survey taken on election day by the pollster Pat Caddell revealed that what Florida voters had liked most about candidate Clinton Tyree was not his plainly spoken views on the death penalty or toxic dumps or corporate income taxes, but rather his handsome smile. In particular, his teeth.
During his brief and turbulent tenure in the governor's mansion, Clinton Tyree confided often in Jim Tile. The trooper grew to admire him; he thought the new governor was courageous, visionary, earnest, and doomed. Jim Tile was probably the only person in Florida who was not surprised when Clinton Tyree resigned from office and vanished from the public eye.
As soon as Tyree was gone, Trooper Jim Tile was removed from the governor's detail and sent back to Harney in the hopes that he'd come to his senses and quit the force.
For some reason he did not.
Jim Tile remained loyal to Clinton Tyree, who was now calling himself Skink and subsisting on fried bass and dead animals off the highway. Jim Tile's loyalty extended so far as to driving the former governor to the Orlando airport for one of his rare trips out of state.
"I could take some comp time and come with you," Jim Tile volunteered.
Skink was riding in the back of the patrol car in order to draw less attention. He looked like a prisoner anyway.
"Thanks for the offer," he said, "but we're going to a tournament in Louisiana."
Jim Tile nodded in understanding. "Gotcha." Bopping down Bourbon Street he'd be fine. Fishing the bayous was another matter.
"Keep your ears open while I'm gone," Skink said. "I'd steer clear of the Morgan Slough, too."
"Don't worry."
Skink could tell Jim Tile was worried. He could see distraction in the way the trooper sat at the wheel; driving was the last thing on his mind. He was barely doing sixty.
"Is it me or yourself you're thinking about?" Skink asked.
"I was thinking about something that happened yesterday morning," Jim Tile said. "About twenty minutes after I dropped you guys off on the highway, I pulled over a pickup truck that nearly broke my radar."
"Mrnrnm," Skink said, acting like he couldn't have cared less.
"I wrote him up a speeding ticket for doing ninety-two. The man said he was late for work. I said where do you work, and he said Miller Lumber. I said you must be new, and he said yeah, that's right. I said it must be your first day because you're driving the wrong damn direction, and then he didn't say anything."
"You ever seen this boy before?"
"No," Jim Tile said.
"Or the truck?"
&n
bsp; "No. Had Louisiana plates. Jefferson Parish."
"Mmmm," Skink said.
"But you know what was funny," Jim Tile said. 'There was a rifle clip on the front seat. No rifle, just a fresh clip. Thirty rounds. Would have fit a Ruger, I expect. The man said the gun was stolen out of his truck down in West Palm. Said some nigger kids stole it."
Skink frowned. "He said that to your face? Nigger kids? What the hell did you do when he said that, Jim? Split open his cracker skull, I hope."
"Naw," Jim Tile said. "Know what else was strange? I saw two jugs of coffee on the front seat. Not one, but two."
Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy Page 12
