Tampa Burn df-11

by Randy Wayne White

  There was, however, lots of young boy residue. Several things I saw were characteristic of what I knew and loved about my son.

  In the far back corner was a cot, neatly made. The top sheet was pulled and tucked so tightly that you could have bounced a quarter on it.

  It was the way I made my own bed each and every morning of my life.

  There was a simple table and chair in the opposite corner, with a reading light plugged into an extension cord. On the table was a tin plate, a cup, fork and spoon, all overturned and neatly laid out atop a towel. There was also a magnifying glass, a blunt scissors, and a blank sketchpad. The table was dominated, though, by stacks of books.

  I hadn’t used my little flashlight, but I did now, turning my head sideways to read the book spines.

  Most of the books were nonfiction: books about fish, fishing, biology, and the other natural sciences. There were a couple of the small Audubon guides that I had in my own library. I noted that there were also several standard physician’s reference books, as well as one called Studies in Abnormal Psychology.

  I wondered if Lake was reading that in an attempt to understand Lourdes. Or his mother?

  It was a sad and touching question to consider.

  They don’t love anyone, Tomlinson had said. They’re not capable of the emotion.

  Could that possibly be true of Pilar when it came to her own son?

  If accurate, it made Lake an emotional orphan of a sort-a description that I’d never applied to my own circumstances in life-and that possibility made me all the more desperate to find him.

  I tested the cage door. It swung open.

  I stepped inside, hoping that Lake had anticipated me coming and that he had left me one more clue; some kind of parting directive. As I did, though, I froze when a quivering voice, off to my right, said, “The boy, he gone, you know. They both gone. And they ain’t comin’ back no more.”

  Then the wagon’s dim overhead fluorescent lights flickered on.

  Startled, I jumped, turned, and found myself looking down into the face of a very old and thin, dwarf-sized black man. He was the color of a winter leaf, and so tiny that he looked as if a gust of wind might lift him skyward and float him away.

  I suspected he’d bought the blue denim coveralls he wore in the children’s section of some department store.

  The man didn’t have the oversized head and hands I associate with dwarfism, though. He appeared regularly proportioned in every way, and normal but for his eyes. Judging from the way he stood, with his head tilted back, and because of the blue film that covered his eyes, I suspected that the man was blind.

  Even so, I immediately stepped to the cell’s door so he couldn’t slam the thing and lock me in. As I did, he said in what sounded to be a Cajun accent, “Are you him? You the one the boy call ‘Doc’? Yeah, you must be. So I know it true, now. The boy said you’d come. I learn to never doubt that boy, Laken. He a good one, he is, jus’ a good li’l boo-boy. When Laken leave, I pass a big ol’ hug on him, I did. I’m gonna miss me that T-boy.”

  I said quickly, “That’s my son. Is he O.K.? If anyone’s hurt him for any reason-”

  “Your boy fine,” he interrupted. “He jus’ fine. I took care of him myself. Made him eat good every day.”

  As the man spoke, I noticed that he backed away slightly just before I pushed the cage door open. So maybe he wasn’t totally blind. Or maybe he just had the heightened sensory abilities that some say compensate for the loss of vision.

  I said to him, “Where is he now? My son. Where did Lourdes take him?”

  The old man’s expression showed puzzlement. “Who that name you using? Lourdes?”

  “Lourdes, the man who kidnapped Laken. Where are they?”

  “Oh… that be Jimmy Gauer you talkin’ about. Mean Jimmy Gauer. Jimmy, he used to live here when he jus’ a squirt. We all thought the Gauers, that whole family, that they long dead till Mean Jimmy come back here two, three years ago, and buy him a little place.”

  I said, “The guy I’m talking about is a big man. Broad, with burn scars on his hands and face. Is that who you’re calling Jimmy Gauer?”

  “Oh yeah, he got scars,” the old man said. “Mean Jimmy, that’s what we called him as a boy. He got him lots of scars. More than jus’ on his face, too. But me, I ain’t never seen ’im. Not the way you and him sees things, anyway. Why you think he let me watch your boy, and not kill me before he go off? I be a blind man, you know.”

  There was a curious lilt of a smile in his voice, and on his face, when he said that. I wondered why.

  I said, “That’s the guy I know as Lourdes. If you did know where they’ve gone, would you tell me?”

  “Yes indeedy, I would, sir! I’ll help you any way I can. Ol’ Baxter Glapion-which be me-I got no good things to say about Mean Jimmy. And I sure do like that li’l boo-boy of yours, Laken. So come in, come on in”-he was waving his arm as if to drag me behind, already walking down the hall-“maybe Jimmy, he forgot something back behind that’ll tell you where they is. Believe me, that man didn’t tell me nothin’. ”

  I began to follow, then stopped. “Give me a second to look through my son’s things first, O.K.?”

  The old man waited patiently while I stripped the bed, looked through every book. I even got down on my hands and knees and looked under the table. Maybe something was written there.

  Nothing.

  As I was finishing, the old man said, “Laken, he left a book for me to give you. He knowed you was comin’. Called you ‘Doc.’ Didn’t say you was his daddy. That one smart boy you got there, mister.”

  I stood quickly. “Show me the book.”

  Baxter Glapion moved with the gliding, sure-footed gait of a tightrope walker, or someone who navigates a room by memory. I followed him down the hall, past the main entrance, into a private living quarters. It was where the old man lived, apparently.

  As we walked, I listened to him tell me that the wagon we were in had belonged to Lourdes’ uncle, who’d died the previous year. Lourdes had inherited it. Lourdes’ family, the Gauers, were old carney folk, he said, sideshow performers mostly, and Baxter had been an old friend of the family.

  Lourdes had told the old man that he was keeping Lake locked up for his own safety, and as a favor to the boy’s mother. There was a war going on down in Central America, he’d said, and Lake was a prime candidate for abduction. Trouble was, the boy refused to stay away from his mother. Kept finding a way to sneak across the border home each time she sent him away.

  Partial truths always make the most convincing lies. But Baxter said he didn’t believe the man anyway. Only pretended to.

  We stopped inside the main living area. I turned on a light when he said he didn’t mind. There was a couch that folded out into a bed. There was a worn chair, a table with stacks of books on tape, and books in Braille. A reader. There was a television, too, and the walls were covered with framed carnival posters. He motioned vaguely toward one of the posters and said that it was Prax Lourdes’ mother.

  I stepped to the wall and looked at a red, blue, and yellow print painting of a huge, muscle-bound woman with improbably large breasts. She had curly blond hair and

  wore a wrestling singlet. The poster read: THE CANADIAN IRON WOMAN THE GRAPPLING BOZARK

  Remembering that Lourdes had used the strange word as his internet password, I asked Baxter, “What does it mean? ‘Bozark’?”

  “It an ol’-time carney bit. Bozark, that what we used to call a woman wrestler could beat a man. Edith Gauer, she could do that, too. She could beat most any man.

  “Men she beat most often, though, was her husband, Benny, and her boy Jimmy. Benny, he were like me, a li’l peeshwank runt of a man. Had him a balancin’ act. He used li’l Jimmy in the act until Jimmy fall and hit his head so bad. After that is when li’l Jimmy turn into Mean Jimmy.”

  “Because he fell. You’re saying he wasn’t always mean?”

  The old man was shaking his head.
“Nicest little boy you could meet even with his ma beatin’ him. Until the wire they was on snapped, and he knocked his brain in so bad, the boy nearly passed over. After that was when he become Mean Jimmy.”

  That was a startling thing to hear.

  Baxter had a drawer open, taking something from it, and now he handed me a book. “Your boy tell me to give you that.”

  It was the Audubon Guide to Florida, the same book I had at the lab.

  “Is there anything else? Any message?”

  “Oh Lord, you don’t know how mean Jimmy can be if you think the boy dumb enough to risk slippin’ a message to anyone; something dangerous as that. When Jimmy’s head got all healed up, that when he start likin’ to burn things. Cats and such. A chimp once, I’m pretty sure. He crazy mean. No, your boy woulda been riskin’ ol’ Baxter’s life if he’d slipped me a message.”

  I leafed through the Audubon Guide more slowly than the other books, thinking that Lake may have, once again, used the animals noted in his e-mail as markers. It’s what I would have done.

  That’s just what he did.

  On page 307, under reddish egret, barely visible in pencil and written in miniature block letters, I read, “Lv Fl by ship, date X?”

  It took me only a moment to understand that my son was telling me that he believed that he and Lourdes, or just Lourdes, would be leaving Florida by ship, departure date unknown.

  As I looked up “bullfrog”-found nothing-then looked for “parrots”-not indigenous, so not listed-Baxter said with the same little prideful smile he’d had before, “When you look at the posters on the walls, anybody up there seem familiar?”

  I was in a hurry, but I paused long enough to take a quick glance around the room. Something that immediately caught my attention, because they seemed odd and out of place, were a dozen or so photos that were tacked next to a mirror on the far wall. The photos were close-ups of men’s faces-noses, cheeks, whole foreheads. They appeared to be from a medical journal, or a medical reference book. I realized that the photos were of male patients before and after they’d had various forms of plastic surgery.

  The list of drugs Lourdes had demanded popped into my mind, and I thought, What the hell is he up to?

  Baxter interrupted, pressing, “You don’t see my posters no more? Them posters still up there, ain’t they?”

  Once again leafing through the Audubon Guide, now searching for page 296, the American alligator, I looked in the direction the old man was staring.

  There was Baxter Glapion. His likeness was depicted on two posters that were mounted side by side.

  In one, he was dressed in a straw skirt, gnawing on a human skull, and billed as Kiki, the Cannibal Dwarf. On the other, he was wearing a similar grass skirt. But he also had a turban on his head, and was holding a crystal ball and a magic wand. He was sitting on a cushion, head thrown back, arms outstretched as if in a trance. He was billed as Mystivo, the Pygmy Fortune Teller.

  The smile still there, he said, “The fortune-teller bit, I can still do it. Let me think on you a moment now, and I’ll tell you something about yourself. Somethin’ nobody else ever knowed. It’s not a lie, man, it real. I’m from the New Orleans Glapions-our family descendants of Priestess Marie Laveau. I’ve got the voudon blood in me.”

  Concentrating on the book, I said, “Voodoo, huh? I’ve got a sister you’d love. But unless you can tell me where my son is, I’m not interested.”

  The old man had his head back, arms out, palms up, just like the poster. I heard him tell me my correct age, a figure close to my weight, and the month in which I was born.

  Still leafing through pages, I said, “You’re good, Baxter. You really are. I’ve always wondered how you carnival people did that.”

  I’d found alligators in the reptile section and was squinting, searching hard for my son’s tiny writing, as he said, “I only know how it is I do it, man. Back when my eyes was workin’, they seen so much ugliness, all the light leaked outta me. My real vision, my good vision, didn’t come back until I lost my sight.”

  He was silent for a moment before he added, “I see you had a bad time these last couple years. You and some a your friends, too. You were in the shadow time a your life. But better times here now. Your luck, and all the luck a those around you, done changed for the better. You got bright times ahead. Lots a laughin’ and bed-happy-makin’ love, and party times are ahead for you.”

  “Great,” I said, absently. “Good to hear it.”

  On the page opposite two photographs of gators, I discovered that Lake had written something, but the letters were so tiny that it was very difficult to read. I stood and held the book next to the light, my face close to the page, as Baxter said in a more somber tone, “But you got you a little bit more trouble comin’, too. I can see that. You got you some trouble comin’ with somethin’ that might happen to one of your two children. You maybe gonna lose one of them.”

  He moaned the next words very softly: “Ah Lordy, I sure hope that what I see ain’t true.”

  Irritated, I said, “I don’t have two children. I only have the one son, the boy you met. And a crazy man’s got him, so, yeah, he’s in trouble.”

  “No sir! I see two children!”

  I said, “Well, you’re wrong. Baxter-could you please be quiet for a while?”

  Squinting at the book, I could now make out the words “LOURDES WANTS…” as Baxter ignored me and continued anyway, “I see only one more thing in your future that’s bad, man. What I see is, I see that, one day… oh, this is a dark ’un… I see that you gonna have to kill a man who’s been a good friend to you. Whoo-whee-”

  That moan again, but this time the sound contained pain and surprise.

  “Ye-e-eah, oh Lord, I see this event very clearly. You be an unusual creature, Doc Ford! Yes, you are! That day gonna come. The day gonna come when you kill your friend, that be the darkest time of all.”

  I let him push on without comment-uneasy, though, with what I was hearing-and let him finish, saying, “But mostly… yes, I see… you got happy times and good feelin’s ahead. You gonna be a smilin’ man comin’ up very soon-if you help that child of yours that’s in so much trouble.”

  I looked at him sharply, wishing he’d shut up so I could concentrate. I said, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” then turned away from him and hurried down the hall to the cage where they’d kept Lake.

  From the desk, I took up the magnifying glass and found some decent light. The magnifying glass made his tiny block letters swell off the page.

  When I read what he’d written, the photos of surgery patients tacked to the wall, and the drugs Lourdes had demanded now all gathered in my brain with terrible clarity, and I finally understood the intent of my son’s abductor.

  Lake had written: LOURDES WANTS MY FACE. HELP ME!

  I dropped the magnifying glass and book, and jogged back to the living room, feeling the wagon tremble beneath my weight. I had to force myself to appear calm as I said to the old man, “Did Lourdes-the guy you call Mean Jimmy-did he ever mention a local plastic surgeon, a woman by the name of-”

  I stopped because I was blanking on her name-probably because I was so scared, so adrenaline charged. Harris had said her name a couple of times. Finally, it came to me, and I continued, “Did Lourdes ever mention a Dr. Valerie Santos? Or did he show any interest in Tampa General Hospital? Particularly, the burn unit there?”

  The old man was staring over my shoulder, not looking at me, but seeing me, shaking his head as he said, “No, Mean Jimmy never tell me nothing like that. But I heard what happened on the news. I know what you talkin’ about. The pretty woman doctor who got stolen off the street. But he never say anything, and I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.

  “Understand-Mean Jimmy, he not like other people. His brain different. It never speak to my eyes. What he thinkin’, his thoughts, they never did come into my head like your’n do, or other people’s do. His thoughts is all scrambled. Inside Mean J
immy’s head, all my old eyes ever saw were gibberish. Lots of swearin’, and a bright red anger. It like an outsider comin’ to Gib’town and hearing our carney talk.”

  I stood for a moment, my lungs struggling against panic. Considering the drugs Lourdes had demanded, what were the odds that he was not involved with the abduction of the famous plastic surgeon?

  Without speaking again to Baxter Glapion, I charged out the wagon’s front door. I didn’t slow until I reached my boat.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I touched a button on my plastic watch and saw that it was 9:40 P.M.

  I also saw that my hands were trembling.

  I’m supposed to be the icy one. The cold professional. I’ve been in so many tight spots, in so many places and circumstances in which my life or someone else’s life was at risk, that I should know by now how my brain and body will react.

  I’ve come to expect this response: The pressure to think and perform seems to banish emotion, and a kind of predatory chill moves in to fill that emotional void. My concentration becomes intense, as does my sensory awareness, although, oddly, color perception diminishes-as if color is an unnecessary frill.

  This time, however, that’s not how I reacted. Maybe it was because my son was involved. But I certainly didn’t stay cool and collected. In fact, never in my life had I felt so frightened, so panic-stricken.

  As I stood at the wheel of my skiff, steering at fast idle down Bullfrog Creek, I had to fight to keep from hyperventilating. My body trembled uncontrollably each time I exhaled. My hands shook when I took the cell phone and dialed Harris Lilly’s number.

  I’ve seldom used a cellular phone, but I discovered that, thanks to the little headphone unit, even while running a boat at speed, I could hear pretty well if I turned the ear containing the receiver into the wind.

  When my friend answered, that’s what I did.

  Harris was alone, in his own vehicle now, he told me. Then he listened in stunned silence as I told him that I had reason to believe that Prax Lourdes, my son, and the abducted surgeon were aboard a commercial vessel somewhere in or around Tampa Bay.