Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy

by Double Whammy [lit]

  "'What's the matter, chief?"

  Gault stared numbly. What could he say? Curl looked like death on a bad day. His eyes were swollen slits, his face streaked with purple. Sweat glistened on his gray forehead and a chowder-white ooze flecked the corners of his lips.

  "What happened to you, Tom?"

  "Mrs. Decker's safe in the trunk, don't worry." Curl wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. "Say, chief, those the shiniest damn pajamas I ever saw."

  Dennis Gault's gaze fixed on Curl's right arm. "What... what the fuck is that?" he stammered.

  "Lucas is his name," Curl said. "He good boy."

  "Oh, Christ." Now Gault realized where the buzzing sound had come from. From the flies swarming around the dog head.

  "I's raised around puppies," Curl said, "mostly mutts."

  Gault said, "It's not good for you to be here."

  "But I got a few hours to kill."

  "Before you meet Decker?"

  "Yep." Curl spotted a decanter of brandy on a sideboard. Mechanically Gault handed it to him. Curl drew three hard swallows from the bottle. His eyes glowed after he put it down. "I'll need a bass boat," he said, smacking his lips.

  Gault scribbled a phone number on a napkin. "Here, this guy's got a Starcraft."

  "Anything'll do."

  "You all right?" Gault asked.

  "I'll be fine. Clear this shit up once and for all." Curl noticed Gault's fishing gear laid out meticulously on the carpet. "Nice tackle, chief. Looks straight out of the catalog."

  "Tom, you'd better go. I've got to be up early tomorrow."

  "I ain't been sleepin much, myself. Lucas, he always wants to play."

  Dennis Gault could scarcely breathe, the stink was so vile. "Call me day after tomorrow. I'll have a little something for you."

  "Real good."

  "One more thing, Tom, it's very important: everything's set for tonight, right? With Decker, I mean."

  "Don't you worry."

  Gault said, "You can handle it alone?"

  "It's my rightful obligation."

  At the door, Thomas Curl drunkenly thrust out his right hand. "Put her there, chief." Gault shook the rotted thing without daring to look.

  "Well, tight lines!" said Curl, with a sloppy but spirited sailor's salute.

  "Thank you, Tom," said Dennis Gault. He closed the door, dumped the brandy, then bolted into a scalding shower.

  The phone calls started as soon as they turned in.

  When Al Garcia answered, the voice on the other end said: "Why don't you go back to Miami, spic-face?"

  When Jim Tile answered, the message was: "Don't show your lips on the lake, nigger."

  After the fourth call, Garcia turned on the light and sat up in bed. "It's bad enough they give us the worst damn room in the place, and now this."

  "Nice view of the dumpster, though," Jim Tile said. When he swung his bare brown legs out from under the covers, Garcia noticed the bandage over Culver Rundell's bullet hole.

  "It's nothing, just a through-and-through," the trooper said.

  "One of these bass nuts?"

  Jim Tile nodded.

  "Well, shit," Garcia said, "maybe we oughta take the phone calls more seriously."

  "They're just trying to scare us."

  The phone started ringing again. Jim Tile watched it for a full minute before picking up.

  "You're gator bait, spook," the caller drawled.

  The trooper hung up. His jaw was set and his eyes were hard. "I'm beginning to take this personally."

  "You and me both." Garcia grabbed his pants off the chair and dug around for the cigarette lighter. When the phone rang again, the detective said, "My turn."

  Another Southern voice: "Lucky for you, grease floats."

  Garcia slammed down the receiver and said, "You'd think one of us would have the brains to pull the plug out of the wall."

  "No," said Jim Tile. He was worried about Skink, and Decker. One of them might need to get through.

  "I can't imagine these jerks are actually worried about us winning, not after seeing the boat," Garcia said. "Wonder what they're so damn scared of."

  "The sight of us," Jim Tile said. He lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. Garcia lit a cigarette and thumbed through a Lunker Lakes sales brochure that some lady had given him at the barbecue.

  It was half-past two when somebody outside fired a rifle through their window and ran.

  Angrily Jim Tile picked up the phone and started dialing.

  As he shook the broken glass out of his blanket, Al Garcia asked, "So who you calling, chico, the Fish and Game?"

  "I think it's important to make an impression," the trooper said. "Don't you?"

  To get on the dike, Eddie Spurling had to drive to the west end of Road 84, then zig north up U.S. 27 to the Sawgrass Fish Camp. Here the dike was accessible, but wide enough for only one vehicle; at three in the morning Eddie didn't anticipate oncoming traffic. He drove the Wagoneer at a crawl through a crystal darkness, insects whorling out of the swamp to cloud the headlights. Every so often he had to brake as the high-beams froze some animal, ruby-eyed, on the rutted track—rabbits, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, even a fat old female otter. Eddie marveled at so much wildlife, so close to the big city.

  It took an hour to make the full circuit back to where the flood levee abutted Lunker Lake Number Seven. When he reached the designated spot, Eddie Spurling turned off the engine, killed the lights, rolled down his window, and gazed off to the west. The Everglades night was glorious and immense, the sweep of the sky unlike anything he'd seen anywhere in the South; here the galaxy seemed to spill straight into the shimmering swamp.

  When Eddie looked east he saw blocked and broken landscape,mthe harsh aura of downtown lights, the pale linear scar of the nascent superhighway and its three interchanges, built especially for Charlie Weeb's development. There was nothing beautiful about it, and Eddie turned away. He put on his cap, snapped his down vest, and stepped out of the truck into the gentle hum of the marsh.

  Water glistened on both sides of the dike. Under a thin fog, Lunker Lake Number Seven lay as flat and dead as a cistern; by contrast, the small pool on the Everglades side was dimpled with darting minnows and waterbugs. The pocket was lushly fringed with cattails and sawgrass and crisp round lily pads as big as pizzas. Something else floated in the pool—a plastic Clorox bottle, tied to a rope.

  Eddie Spurling noticed how out of place it looked; obscene, really, like litter. The whole idea of it made him mad—Weeb and his damn Alabama imports. Eddie carefully made his way down the slope of the dike, his boots sliding in the loose dirt. At the edge of the pool he found a long stick, which he used to snag the floating bleach bottle.

  He got hold of the rope and pulled it hand over hand. The fish trap was unexpectedly heavy; leaden almost. Must've got tangled in the hydrilla weed, Eddie thought.

  When the cage finally broke the surface, he dropped the stick and grabbed the mesh with his fingers. Then he pulled it to shore.

  Eddie shone his flashlight in the cage and said, "My God!" He couldn't believe the size of it—a coppery-black bass of grotesque proportions, so huge it could've been a deep-sea grouper. It looked thirty pounds. The hawg glared at Eddie and thrashed furiously in its wire prison. Eddie could only stare, awestruck. He thought: This is impossible.

  On the other side of the pond something made a noise, and Eddie Spurling went cold. He recognized the naked click of a rifle hammer.

  A deep voice said: "Put her back."

  Eddie swallowed dryly. He was almost too terrified to move.

  The gun went off and the Clorox bottle exploded at his feet. After the echo faded, the voice said: "Now."

  Rubber-kneed, Eddie lowered the fish cage back into the pool, letting the wet rope pay through his ringers.

  Across the pond, the rifleman rose from the cattails. By the size of the silhouette Eddie Spurling saw that the man was quite large. His appearance was made more ominous by mili
tary fatigues and some sort of black mask. The man sloshed through the marsh and hiked up the side of the dike. Eddie thought about running but there was no place to go; he thought about swimming but there was a problem with snakes and alligators. So he just stood there, trying not to soil himself.

  Soon the rifleman loomed directly above him, on the dike.

  "Kill the flashlight," the man said.

  He was close enough for Eddie to make out his features. He had long dark hair and a ratty beard and a flowered plastic cap on his head. The mask turned out to be sunglasses. The rifle was a Remington.

  "I'm Fast Eddie Spurling."

  "Who asked?"

  "From television?"

  "I watch no television," said the rifleman.

  Eddie tried a different approach. "Is it money you want? The Jeep? Go ahead and take it."

  Without blinking, the rifleman turned and blasted the tinted windshield out of Eddie Spurling's Wagoneer. "I got my own truck, thanks," he said. Then he shot out the fog lights, too.

  Eddie was sweating ice water.

  The man said, 'That's some fish, huh?"

  Eddie nodded energetically. "Biggest I ever saw."

  "Name's Queenie."

  "Real nice," Eddie said desperately. He was quite certain the hairy rifleman was going to kill him.

  "You're probably curious what happened to yours."

  "They weren't really mine," Eddie said.

  The man laughed thinly. "You just came all the way out here to say hello."

  Eddie said, "No, sir, I came to let 'em go."

  "How about I just shoot off your pecker and get it over with?"

  "Please," Eddie cried. "I mean it, I was about to set them fish free. Check the truck if you don't believe it. If I was gonna take 'em, I'd have brung a livewell, right? I'd have brung the damn boat, wouldn't I?"

  The rifleman seemed to be thinking it over.

  Eddie went on: "And why would I be here three hours before the tournament and risk having 'em croak on me?"

  The man said, "You're not one of the cheaters?"

  "No, and I don't aim to start. I couldn't go through with it, so screw Charlie Weeb."

  The rifleman lowered his gun. "I let those ringer bass go."

  Eddie Spurting said, "Well, I'm glad you did."

  "Three hawgsters. One must've gone at least eleven-eight."

  "Well," said Eddie, "maybe I'll catch him someday, when he's bigger."

  The man said: "What about Queenie? What would you have done about her?"

  Without hesitating Eddie said, "I'd a let her go too "

  "I bet."

  "What would be the point of killing her, mister? Suppose I took that monster home and stuffed her. Every time I'd walk in the den she'd be staring down from the wall, the awful truth in those damn purple eyes. I couldn't live with it, mister. That's why I say, you didn't need the gun. I'd a let her go anyway."

  The rifleman stood there, showing nothing. The sunglasses scared the hell out of Eddie.

  "I've got a boy, mister, age nine," Eddie said. "You think I could lie to my boy about a fish like that? Say I caught it when I didn't?"

  "Some men could."

  "Not me."

  The rifleman said: "I believe you, Mr. Spurling. Now, get the fuck out of here, please."

  Eddie obediently scrambled up the bank of the dike. He hopped in the Jeep without even brushing the broken glass off the seat.

  "Can you turn this thing around okay?"

  "Yeah," Eddie said, "I got four-wheel drive." In the dark he groped nervously for the keys.

  "The seam of the universe," the rifleman mused. "This dike is like the moral seam of the universe."

  "It's narrow, that's for sure," Eddie said.

  "Evil on the one side, good on the other." The man illustrated by pointing with the Remington.

  Eddie stuck his head out the window and said very politely: "Can I ask what you plan to do with that big beautiful bass?"

  "I plan to let her go," the man said, "in about five minutes." He didn't say where, on which side of the seam.

  Eddie knew he shouldn't press his luck, knew he should just get the hell away from this lunatic, but he couldn't help it. The fisherman in him just had to ask: "What's she weigh, anyhow?"

  "Twenty-nine even."

  "Holy moly." Fast Eddie Spurling gasped.

  "Now get lost," said the rifleman, "and good luck in the tournament."

  After Eddie had gone, Skink hauled the big fish out of the pool. He propped the cage yoke-style across his shoulders and carried it across the dike to Lunker Lakes. He put it back in the water while he searched the banks until he found the two beer cans marking the spot where Jim Tile and Al Garcia had sunk the brushpile.

  Skink hoisted the cage once more and moved it to the secret spot. This time he removed the big bass, pointed her toward the submerged obstruction, and gently let her go. The fish kicked once, roiled, and was gone. "See you tonight," Skink said. "Then we go home."

  Rifle in hand, he stood on the dike for two hours and watched the night start to fade. On the Everglades side, a heron croaked and redwings bickered in the bulrushes; the other side of the dike lay mute and lifeless. Skink waited for something to show in Lunker Lake Number Seven—a turtle, a garfish, anything. He waited a long time.

  Then, deep in worry, he trudged down the dike to where he'd left his truck. To the east, at the dirty rim of the city, the sun was coming up.

  At that moment R. J. Decker parked his car behind a row of construction trailers at Lunker Lakes. Dawn was the best time to move, because by then most rent-a-cops were either asleep or shooting the shit around the timeclock, waiting to punch out. Decker spotted only one uniformed guard, a rotund and florid fellow who emerged from one of the trailers just long enough to take a leak, then shut the door.

  Decker checked the camera again. It was a Minolta Maxxum, a sturdy thirty-five-millimeter he'd picked up at a West Palm Beach discount house that took credit cards. He was thinking that a Kodak or a Sure-Shot might have worked just as well, but he'd been in such a hurry. He opened the back of the frame and inspected the loading mechanism; he did the same with the motor-drive unit.

  Satisfied, Decker capped the lens, closed up the camera, and locked it in the glove compartment of Al Garcia's car. Then he got the bolt-cutters out of the trunk and snuck up to the supply shed, where he went to work on the padlock.

  The blast-off for the Dickie Lockhart Memorial Bass Blasters Classic was set for six-thirty, but the anglers arrived very early to put their boats in the water and test their gear and collect free goodies from tackle reps up and down the dock. The fishermen knew that whoever won this tournament might never have to wet a line again, not just because of the tremendous purse but because of the product endorsements to follow. The bass lure that took first prize in the Lockhart undoubtedly would be the hottest item in freshwater bait shops for a year. There was no logic to this fad, since bass will eat just about anything (including their own young), but the tackle companies did everything in their power to encourage manic buying. Before the opening gun they loaded down the contestants with free plugs, jigs, spinners, and of course rubber worms, displayed in giant plastic vats like so much hellish purple pasta.

  The morning was cool and clear; there was talk it might hit eighty by midafternoon. Matronly volunteers from The First Pentecostal Church of Exemptive Redemption handed out Bible tracts and served hot biscuits and coffee, though many contestants were too tense to eat or pray.

  At six sharp a burgundy Rolls-Royce Corniche pulled up to the ramp at Lunker Lake Number One. Dennis and Lanie Gault got out. Lanie was dressed in a red timber jacket, skintight Gore-Tex dungarees, and black riding boots. She basked in the stares from the other contestants and dug heartily into a bag of hot croissants.

  With an air of supreme confidence, Dennis Gault uncranked his sparkling seventeen-foot Ranger bass boat off the trailer into the water. One by one, he meticulously stowed his fishing rods, then his
toolbox, then his immense tacklebox. Hunkering into the cockpit of the boat, he checked the gauges—water temperature, trim tilt, tabs, tachometer, fuel, batteries, oil pressure. He punched a button on his sonic fish-finder and the screen blinked a bright green digital good-morning. The big Johnson outboard turned over on the first try, purring like a tiger cub. While the engine warmed up, Dennis Gault stood at the wheel and casually smoothed the creases of his sky-blue jumpsuit. He squirted Windex on the lenses of his amber Polaroids and wiped them with a dark blue bandanna. Next he slipped on his monogrammed weather vest, and tucked a five-ounce squirt bottle of Happy Gland into the pocket. In accordance with prevailing bass fashion, he spun his cap so that the bill was at his back; that way the wind wouldn't tear it off his head at fifty miles an hour.