by Tom Corcoran
Sam had suggested taking the offensive. I’d never gone wrong taking his counsel. Spur of the moment, I could think of only one way to hide from the law. That meant disguising myself as a tourist and riding the Conch Train for the next eight hours. I was down to only one other move. A ride up the Keys. It promised nothing but fresh air and scenery. And maybe some answers to questions, if the deputies didn’t have my Kawasaki’s tag number.
I slid out of the Hampton deep freeze. The motel had not always been there. I’d attended a county fair in that same location, in the 1970s. I recall riding a Ferris wheel to its top, watching a regatta in the harbor. Back to the southeast there’d been the miniature golf course, a near-empty HoJo motel. Farther in that direction, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Searstown with fewer than twenty cars in front of the old Winn-Dixie. I’d watched a Cessna 150 looping touch-and-gos with the airport landing pattern to itself. To the south and west, a view of the island’s old section, from Glynn Archer to the lighthouse to City Electric’s smokestacks. A peaceful island begging for business, praying for tourists in the pits of the gas crisis.
The pendulum of prosperity swings both ways. In good times it crowds the highways. I should have known.
Traffic up to Summerland Key was a zoo. No time to enjoy the scenery north of Big Coppitt. One-day visitors, the timid who vacation in Marathon and brave the wilds of Duval only in daylight. Motor homes headed back to the mainland, away from the skinny streets at road’s end. Delivery trucks from Hialeah that sprint the round trip twice a week and treat the Overseas Highway like Daytona International Speedway. Lights on for safety. Sales reps with totes full of stainless steel fasteners, or glow-in-the-dark condoms. Sly junior execs out of Coconut Grove who’ve played hooky from work, zipped to the island to chase women for a day. They’re hurrying home for supper with the wife and kids.
I saw a way out of it all. Ten seagulls sat on the Shark Channel seawall at Big Coppitt. I could perch there with them, blow off my worries, watch the crazy traffic pass.
Brochures hint at a leisurely drive. I spent fifty minutes accelerating and braking, hurrying and waiting. I should have gotten pissed, U-turned, gone back into town. Or stuck with the gulls.
No one out front at Big Crab Fish House. Three dirt devils danced in the scuffed marl that posed as a parking lot. Cellophane trash and old receipts blew in circles. A coffee-colored mongrel raised its leg, watered the rear tire of an old GMC pickup. I peered through a dirt-crusted window. No one in the office. Nothing in there but a lawn chair, humming flies, and a trash can full of fast-food containers. A fuzz of dirt over everything.
A true backdoor operation.
Four spindly sea-grape trees and a sad line of unkempt croton and aralia ringed the property. A fifties-vintage mobile home park snugged the dry dockage. This was not a gated community, not the Family Motor Coach Association. The old trailers must have belonged to pioneer caravanners who’d croaked at the ocean’s edge and bequeathed the homesteads, the twelve-by-twenty concrete slabs. I wondered how the relics had survived the 1998 hurricane. I wondered how special it was to inherit a corroded box.
I noted an odd absence of birds. Maybe they’d all found their way to neighborhood dinner tables.
I wandered around back. The dog ran when I neared, cowered behind the root structure of a stumped-out tree. Four LIVE BAIT signs, no evidence of vending efforts.
Five ugly dudes stood around a beached lapstrake lobster boat, twenty yards distant Dirty, with strangely shaped facial hair. Goatees, untrimmed Vandykes, drooping mustaches, long Elvis sideburns. In the John Prine vernacular, “illegal smiles.” Two of the mulletheads rolled their own coffin nails. One held a wrench larger than my forearm. Another tapped a rolled, greasy towel into his open palm. He wasn’t holding a billy club, but he was thinking one. None of them looked my way. Each was aware of every step I took.
I had sudden second thoughts about asking after Jemison Thorsby. I began to calculate the time it would take to reach the Kawasaki, crank the motor, rip down the highway before the Happy Crew laid hands on me, offered to help me find truth in pain. But that wasn’t the definition of “being on the offensive.” And I didn’t want to provide that much entertainment.
Beyond the torn screening of a dockmaster’s cubicle, a warped sixty-foot dock drooped seaward. Driftwood repairs atop low-budget materials atop flimsier repairs. At the top of the pier an unpainted equipment shed, two wooden fish-filleting platforms, one eight-foot garden hose. At the end of the dock a man was stacking slat-built traps on a beamy workboat’s afterdeck. I thought I recognized him. The sun was in my eyes. I’d seen Thorsby’s picture in the newspaper, seen him in person twice, many years ago. Once at night, in a bar, trying to pick a fight with a treasure diver. Once in daylight, from a distance, being ejected from Oceanside Marina. Better to approach the man on the boat I thought, than the home team down the beach.
I’d taken four steps onto the weather-beaten wharf when a knife whizzed past my ear. It thwanged into the equipment shed. It had missed my face by less than a foot. By its angle in the wood, it had come from the Boy Scouts. Instead of looking their way, telegraphing fear, I inspected the weapon, touched my finger to it. A custom throwing knife: a leather-wrapped handle, a scroll design on the blade. It had made an eerie, crisp sound as it flew past my head, an elongated version of a bug hitting an electric zapper. You never hear the one that gets you. I was happy to have heard this one.
“Gawd dog. Too friggin’ bad there’s no witness.” Thorsby walked down the dock. “That was a close call, ‘less you consider how good his aim is.”
Jemison Thorsby look sun-dried. His furrowed skin resembled a desert wash. He was probably six-one, slender, with the oversized pecs and neck and shoulders of an excon who’d done fifteen hours of push-ups each day to kill time in the joint. But he’d added a gut and poor posture since gaining his freedom. His receding chin and bushy mustache made him look like a beaver. His eyes were orange puddles, his pupils pencil dots. He wore ankle-high work boots, olive-drab overalls from a uniform supply house. A patch on the upper section read JEMMY. Jemison had gone to Hair Club for Men and the School of Bad Advice. The hair on his forehead looked to have been transplanted from someone’s pubes. The toupee was thick and dark. It failed, in texture and tone, to match the pubic hair. Why an ex-con boat captain so concerned himself with grooming was beyond me. I didn’t really care.
I also didn’t care why someone had thrown a knife at my head. Why get into details? I heard my own freedom behind me: whining tires, diesel stacks at full cry, the rhythm of trucks and cars hurrying on U.S. 1. Someone didn’t like me. Why not just get on the motorcycle and leave?
Thorsby turned to face his henchmen. A stripe down his back, the oils of perspiration. “You boys think this pussy’ll ever come back to visit?”
That was the funniest thing any of them had heard all week. They were unanimous in their response.
He smiled. His teeth looked like the history of the gutter. “Any you grunts wanna buy that motorbike he drove down here? Take it a test drive?”
“Fuckin’-A, yes!” said one of the doctoral candidates.
Thorsby waved him off. “Shit, Elcock, they suspend your fuckin’ license so often, that judge downtown, he sold it to a Cuban.”
The second funniest line they’d heard in a while, except for Elcock.
Thorsby turned back to me. His stance spoke the perfect indifference of a lifelong screwup. “I seen you around,” he said. “Don’t know your name. I know who you are, know who you hang with. This dock, it’s ‘invitation only.’ You don’t come around here. You do your business out front, whatever. You stay off my dock, the rest of your life. Or we’ll shorten it Got my breeze?”
Thorsby got his own. The west wind gusted, his toupee jibed. If he hadn’t acted quickly, the mop would have flown away.
I reached behind my head, yanked the throwing knife out of the shed. “I’ve got some business with your boy, Bug.”
; Jemison’s face tightened to a scowl. “I divorced that son of a whore.” His voice developed a phlegm rattle. “You find his shitty ass, whoever you are, you piss in his boot Tell him it’s a love letter from his hateful daddy.”
“That’s about the same message I wanted to give him.”
“Whatever your grief, it ain’t nothing like he give me. I hope you find him. Now get the fuck gone, ‘fore that motorbike falls off the dock.”
So much for a family conspiracy.
I didn’t want to get close enough to Thorsby to hand him the knife. I held it by its handle, let the blade swing to point downward. I dropped it I wanted it to stick straight up-and-down in the dock. In the instant after I released it, I knew my error. If the weapon fell between slats, or struck a nail head and chipped its point, or fell sideways into the water, I’d be mincemeat. I held my breath for the longest fraction of a second I’d ever known. With a slight tap, to my relief, the knife entered a pine plank six inches from my foot. It lodged itself and remained upright.
Time to exit.
I walked back to the Kawasaki. I calculated with each step my chance of making the highway should Jemison Thorsby change his mind, sic his yard bitches on the intruder. Ninety seconds later I was crossing Kemp Channel Bridge in the long line of late-day tourist arrivals, wondering what the hell kind of Twilight Zone drama had filled the past five minutes.
I also wondered what I’d hoped for. An amicable tête-à-tête with Bug? A little talk out of earshot from his remaining partner, to offer sympathy for the loss of his carpet trimmer? An admission of guilt, the name of his sponsor, if one existed? A truce, while we worked out the conflict?
My long shot hadn’t paid off. I’d almost cashed my own check. I probably needed another twelve hours’ sack time, a feast of broccoli and asparagus, a spinach salad sprinkled with vitamin B-12 pills.
For the second time that day I jammed my brakes. I missed rear-ending a halted line of eight or ten cars and SUVs. Someone up ahead turning left. I’d been thinking too hard about my dead-end dilemma. Not enough about now. The spike of adrenaline and heart rate prompted me to try an old trick to dispel the problem from my mind: change the subject, go for the overview. I turned my thoughts to traffic, the highway, the route ahead.
That didn’t work, either.
I mentally previewed my trek back to town as far ahead as the four-lane around Boca Chica Naval Air Station, then three miles farther. The image of Stock Island turned my dioughts to the tramp in his bush camp. I wondered if Liska’s investigators had covered all their bases.
It meant another long shot, but less traffic, less personal danger. And a chance to nail the last clue that might help me.
16
Shrimp Road hadn’t changed in two days. A spooky emptiness lay over the rubble and deserted pavement like pervasive evil, like the waiting for something that might never arrive, but if it did you’d regret it forever. Out of sight, far away, someone rode a two-stroke dirt bike. The staccato engine would fade, become loud, then drop away, become loud again. I wondered if the rider was testing plowed-over tabletops and gnarly berms, the canted valleys of the garbage dump, flying wheelies above coiled chain-link fence, performing spin-turns on trash dunes, bottoming out in the pallets.
Free to ride. We all find freedom in different ways.
My search took me beyond piles of dead Australian pines, rusted-out refrigerator compressors, truck wheels and loose tires where the pavement curves to Robbie’s Marina. I found broken, rusty bikes and a dingy pair of metal-wheeled roller skates. Rear-window louvers from an old Camaro. The tramp had moved his lean-to away from the road, deeper into the mangrove hammock. A tropical hobo’s version of a little grass shack. A normal person’s budget Caribbean vacation gone horribly wrong.
I parked in the roadside gravel, hung my helmet on the twist grip, looked again, up the side road. No signs of life. Nothing there but the tattered Lady Caribe I, waiting out red tape and repairs to become, in one man’s dreams, a car ferry to Havana. The vessel’s name and surrounding paint had faded to reveal its previous name, the Lucy Maud Montgomery. A shrimp boat’s diesel rumbled in the docks. The dirt bike sounded closer, still playing.
I called hello.
No answer, but a rustling in the vegetation, the frantic scramble of someone hiding, or concealing an item of value. This was not stealth, not a jungle warrior blending into the environment. It was quiet panic, a bird protecting the nest. I tried to think of an opener, a gambit to break the ice. Not wanting to impose myself, to demand a response so dear as the truth, I said: “What’s your name, buddy?”
More rustling in the mangroves. He’d worked out this defense drill in his head, but not in practice.
“I’m not looking for trouble here,” I said.
No answer. I took a few steps into the hard dirt. I looked straight down. A lame attempt at a trip wire. If I’d kicked it, I’d have rattled a bouquet of tin cans suspended from a bush branch. A backwoods early-warning system.
I said loudly: “Hello in there?”
Nothing.
“I’m not a cop. I’m not looking for refugee Cubans.”
A muffled, “Fuck off. Go away.”
“I’m not gonna do that,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“The Feck.”
“It’s what?”
A quarrelsome, odd, high-pitched voice: “The Feck. What d’you want?”
“Just askin’ your name, buddy. Need to shoot the shit a minute.”
“I ain’t got food. Nothin’ like that.”
“Buddy, I’m not hungry,” I lied. “I ate good this morning. You heard how I got here. What could I steal from you I can take away on a motorcycle?” I stopped talking, let him think about it.
The sales pitch worked. After about thirty seconds the hobo made his appearance. A short, dark-skinned man, Latin or a veteran of the outdoors, no immediate way to tell. Stringy dark hair hung from a Budweiser cap that had faded to pink, then grimed to four dull shades of brown. An oversized shirt of indeterminate color, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Even his beard stubble lacked spirit He waved some bugs away from his face. “I’m Wiley Fecko. The street calls me the Feck.”
No trace of Spanish accent The pigmentation either sunburn or years of accumulated dirt Whatever there’d been of Wiley Fecko, there wasn’t much left. Frail, malnourished, he was in danger of being lifted aloft by a wind gust His wrists and forearms matched the circumference of a flashlight His neck dripped with extra skin.
I said, “I’m Rutledge.”
From twenty feet away he looked me over. “How you get money?”
“I take pictures.”
He squinted, continued to size me up. “Who from?”
The mind-set: It’s not gainful if it’s not a scam.
“I’m a photographer. People pay me. I use a camera to take pictures.”
Fecko had lost so many teeth, his gums and lower jaw had shrunk. His lips canted inward. “Saw one yesterday, over in the road.”
I checked a trash heap behind me. “A picture?”
Wiley stared, new concern on his wizened face. He waved away the bugs, then enunciated so I’d get his drift: “A picture taker.”
He’d meant me. On Sunday, with the deputies. Don’t push this too hard. “Was he taking pictures of the road?”
“Nope, corpse. Or most of a corpse. Lots of police hanging out. All of ’em afraid to look right at that dead man. Most of ’em too ashamed of their spit and polish to look at me.”
Right to the point Fecko was no softie.
“Did the police ask you questions?”
Fecko shook his head. His mannerisms became those of a small kid being naughty, his furtive, distracting movements made not to duck punishment but to minimize pain. “I’d tried to talk to one, you know. He tell me to get on back, tell me I stink like Knights Key. He got some prissy cologne, I don’t tell him he stink like a French whore. Look like he shined his face with a floor buffer.”
> Knights Key, the island at the north end of the Seven-Mile Bridge, often smells of rotting seaweed and plankton. Permanent halitosis.
“What were you trying to tell him?”
“ ‘Bout the funeral parlor truck leaving them goods in the open. Probably charged the kin for a pine box and a hole. But they ripped ’em. They left that dead man in the hot sun. Ugly black birds startin’ to think, Here’s supper.”
“Funeral truck?”
“Black truck, fancied up. Kinda like your minority automobiles. I’m not a prejudice guy, you know, but it’s a description.”
Bug Thorsby’s truck? When I was scrambling around the house, getting ready to shoot Dexter Hayes’s pictures on Caroline Street, I’d had an image of Bug’s pickup truck pulling up to the emergency room entrance at Florida Keys Memorial. That’s why I’d asked Carmen to follow up, to call the hospital. I’d wanted to identify the man with the busted face and teeth, the man now a murder victim. She couldn’t get a name because the man never made it to the hospital.
Had the victim’s teammates beheaded him because he’d failed to cause me pain? Was he punished for weakness in battle? Or was it so he couldn’t be identified? Was Bug Thorsby that cold? Would he kill to avoid being linked to a mugging?
He’d shoot his toe to cure an ingrown nail.
Why not shoot me, instead?
I suddenly was aware of an idling chain saw. I wondered for a moment if someone still was cutting tree trunks felled by old storms, but that made little sense. The instant I smelled raw gasoline, I knew what I’d heard. A loud burst of high-pitched exhaust racket cut the silence. I felt dread, I knew—
My Kawasaki exploded with a percussive woof. I felt the blast against my back, heard the bike crunch as it toppled onto the pavement’s edge. With a rapid series of pop-clutch shifts, the dirt bike made its departure. I crouched in expectation: a moment later the tank exploded, then one of the tires, then the other tire. The complete package. The stench of scorched petroleum hit my nose, acrid fumes of melting plastic, burning rubber. Fecko had fallen straight to a sitting position, flat on his butt, mouth agape. I waited for movement, to make sure he hadn’t been struck by a piece of shrapnel. He moved. He was fine. I stayed where I was. I couldn’t bear to witness what I knew was happening. The torch had split, faded up the road. I wasn’t going to identify or nab anyone. My only reaction was to feel my pockets.
