I crash-landed on the tile floor.
And waited.
6
It would be wrong to call the bomb a dud, because it succeeded in scaring hell out of us. Still, it wasn’t much of an explosion. Just a muffled pop, like a firecracker going off beneath a pillow. Then came a flash and a hiss and a lot of smoke. It stunk up the place and stung my eyes, but that was as bad as it got.
I stood up behind the counter, wiping bits of shrimp and sushi off my clothes. The greenish splatter of remoulade sauce complemented all the other stains on my T-shirt. I smelled like bad rum. Wasn’t the first time.
Darcy Whitehall sat in the chair. He looked shaken but hadn’t stirred.
“You OK?” I said.
He nodded.
The bottom was blown out of the chair. Pieces of cardboard lay scattered around the skybox, along with fragments of plastic and bits of wire.
I stepped around the counter and started to pull the Kevlar blanket off Whitehall.
“Hold it!” shouted Kilgore. He sprung up from the floor, Monk at his side. “There might be a secondary. Just hang tight. Don’t let him move.”
Whitehall blew out air, exasperated.
“Well, if I must continue sitting in this bloody thing . . .” He looked at me. “Did you destroy all the liquor in your mad leap for cover?”
“Think there might be a few bottles left back there.”
“Then would you mind fetching me a tumbler of scotch?”
Kilgore turned on him.
“I don’t think drinking is a good idea. Not at a time like this.”
“On the contrary,” said Whitehall, “it’s a splendid time. It appears that I am still breathing air. Less than a minute ago, I had my doubts.”
Kilgore let it slide, but he didn’t like it.
I went behind the counter and poured Whitehall three fingers of Johnny Walker. I delivered it to him and watched as he finished two fingers of it on the first pull. Monk stood beside us, edgy, ready to get out of there.
Kilgore was with Syzmeski, who sat hunched up in her Kevlar suit behind a row of chairs. The guy who had been kneeling beside Whitehall was with her. The others in the unit were moving back inside the skybox.
Syzmeski looked mad enough to spit nails.
“Just a box of fucking squibs,” she said. “Some asshole . . .”
“You OK to eyeball it?” Kilgore said.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Syzmeski said.
She got down on her back and slid under Whitehall’s chair.
“Nothing here,” she said. “Looks clean.”
“OK then people, let’s shit and git,” said Kilgore. He slung the blanket off Whitehall and helped him to his feet.
The other bomb-squad guys fell aside as Kilgore led Whitehall out the skybox door. Monk and I followed them into the hallway.
A cop was standing by the elevator, holding the door open and waving us to get on.
“We got another couple hours of work up here, picking up the pieces, trying to figure out what the hell this is all about,” said Kilgore. “We’re going to have lots of questions for you.”
“I daresay I won’t have many answers, but I will cooperate in whatever way I can,” said Whitehall. “Meantime, I can’t thank you enough for your service.”
He raised the tumbler of scotch and gave Kilgore a crooked smile.
“Cheers, Captain,” he said.
Kilgore tilted his head.
“Back at ya,” he said.
The three of us stepped onto the elevator. The door closed behind us. We all exhaled at once. Then came one of those long, awkward elevator moments when no one says anything. The elevator started heading down.
Darcy Whitehall drained his scotch. He smacked his lips.
He said, “I knew the bastards were bluffing.”
7
“And what bastards would those be?” said Barbara.
“I don’t know. The elevator doors opened and it was a madhouse with the cops and everything. I had about two minutes with Monk before we found you, and then they were gone.”
It was long after dark. Barbara and I were on the road and heading back to my place. It’s a two-hour drive from Gainesville to LaDonna, a big chunk of it on a dismal stretch through the Ocala National Forest, where the most common forms of wildlife are rednecks in pickups foraging for beer.
As if in retribution for Monk’s smoke screen of an excuse for evacuating the stadium, a hellacious thunderstorm had indeed swept in from the Gulf. The roads were slick and I was going slow, the windshield wipers on my old Wagoneer not wiping nearly fast enough to keep up with the downpour.
Barbara was still in a funk. The cops hadn’t let her go back to our seats to get her copy of A House for Mr. Biswas. The book had been one of the last things Barbara’s mother had given her before she died. And the fact that it was a signed first edition made it . . . well, the money didn’t really matter since it was something Barbara never intended to part with.
“So when do you head down to Jamaica?” Barbara said.
“First thing Monday morning. Meeting Monk in Mo Bay.”
“So soon?”
“Monk wanted me to fly out with them tonight on Whitehall’s jet. I told him I needed a day to get ready,” I said. “You OK with all this?”
Barbara shrugged.
“As OK as I’m going to get.”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Zack, please. You know you have to go. It’s your nature.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you just don’t have it in you to turn your back on a friend. Even if it means getting killed.”
“So you’re not OK with it.”
“I’m OK with the helping a friend part. But the getting killed part? No, I’m not OK with that, Zack. I’m not OK at all.”
“I don’t plan on getting killed.”
“Funny, I don’t remember you planning on that bomb being in the skybox either.”
She turned away and looked out the window. There wasn’t anything to see. Just rain and darkness.
I flipped on the radio, found a news station and caught the tail end of a story about what had happened at the stadium. The thing that exploded under Darcy Whitehall’s chair was no longer being called a bomb but a “bombing device.” A little bit of spin from the university and the cops, trying to diminish the fact that someone had sneaked it into the stadium past several layers of security and placed it in the skybox.
A spokeswoman for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department was saying, “Whoever assembled it knew what they were doing. It was expertly rigged. With more explosives it could have caused a great deal of damage.” She said FBI investigators had been called in to examine the remains of the device.
Commercials came on and I flipped off the radio.
Barbara loosened her seat belt so she could lean against the passenger door and stretch out her legs on the seat.
She said, “There are a few things I don’t understand.”
“The BCS ranking system? Quark physics? Why human beings invent things like Splenda?”
Barbara flashed me her cut-the-shit look. I cut it.
“Why would someone plant a bomb that wasn’t very much of a bomb? Seems like a great deal of risk.”
“Just to show that they could,” I said. “To get attention.”
“Darcy Whitehall’s?”
“Who else? The phone call came to him. The bomb was under his chair.”
“Do they have any idea at all what might have prompted something like this?”
“Like I said, Monk and Whitehall were pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, but Monk said he’d fill me in on everything when I got down there.”
We crossed over the St. Johns River in Astor and the rain let up a bit. I put the Wagoneer on cruise control as we hit the long straightaway on the Barberville Road.
“Something else I don’t understand,” Barbara said. “It seems like whoever planted the bomb was leaving a wh
ole lot to chance. I mean, anyone could have sat down in that chair, couldn’t they have?”
“I thought the same thing. But afterward I heard Bill Barnett telling the cops that all the seats were reserved with name tags on them. Apparently, it was a very well-behaved crowd, the type of folks who pay attention to stuff like name tags and where they are supposed to sit.”
“The Distinguished Alumni Association.”
“Excuse me?”
“The event in the president’s skybox. It was to honor the newest members of the Distinguished Alumni Association. Alan Whitehall was one of them.”
“Darcy Whitehall’s son? The kid in the suit?”
Barbara nodded.
“He’s not a kid. He’s thirty-two. The youngest-ever inductee into the association. That’s why they all came up here from Jamaica. The university held the ceremony at a luncheon at the president’s house. It ran a little long and they didn’t make it to the skybox until well after the game had started. And that’s why it was almost halftime before Darcy Whitehall finally sat down in his chair.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I spoke with Alan and his sister while we were waiting for the rest of you to get blown to smithereens,” Barbara said. “Plus, I picked this up.”
Barbara reached for her purse and pulled out a brochure. She switched on the dome light and read from it.
“‘As founder of Homes for the People, Alan Whitehall has brought hope to thousands of the Caribbean’s most unfortunate residents. In just ten years, his nonprofit foundation has aided in the construction of more than seven hundred and fifty single-family residences and fought to improve basic living conditions in blighted neighborhoods throughout the region. Born and raised in Jamaica, Whitehall graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration and . . .’”
Barbara stopped reading and switched off the dome light.
“The rest is pretty much straight bio, but you get the idea,” she said. “He’s made quite a name for himself.”
“Nice guy?”
“From what I could tell. I mean, the setting wasn’t really conducive for casual conversation. But he’s a rich guy, or at least the son of a rich guy, and he builds houses for poor people. So I guess that translates into nice guy.”
“What about the sister?”
“She had her back up about something, that whole scene with her brother in the skybox.”
“Why was she blaming him?”
Barbara shook her head.
“No idea,” she said. “I only know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I loved that outfit she was wearing.”
I looked at her.
“You loved the outfit.”
“Yes, it was darling. The two of us, we talked about it.”
“While everyone else was running around worried about a bomb, the two of you were talking about her outfit?”
Barbara smiled.
“That skirt, she made it herself. Lovely, wasn’t it?”
“Lovely,” I said.
And I thought: They are an entirely different species. They will walk this earth long after we with the Y-chromosome are gone. And they probably deserve to.
“I know something else, too,” said Barbara. “I am suddenly exhausted.”
She undid her seat belt, flipped around in the seat, and rested her head on my thigh. She looked up at me.
“Are you a member of the Distinguished Alumni Association, darling?”
“So far that honor has eluded me,” I said. “Maybe if I started wearing nicer T-shirts. Something without food stains on them.”
Barbara squirmed around and got comfortable.
“Well, I love you anyway,” she said. “And, for the record, I think you have a very distinguished lap.”
8
I woke up early that Sunday, just before dawn. Barbara was still asleep, so I slipped out of bed and into some clothes and headed for the kitchen to make coffee, trying to tread lightly down the hall so the oak floors would creak as little as possible.
The lusty aroma off the lagoon mingled with the sweet scent of gardenias on the bush by the bay window. Mourning doves coo-cooed from under the front porch eaves. Two more arguments against installing central AC in the house my forebears had built.
I’d been going back and forth about the AC. In the cool of the morning, it seemed an atrocity to cut vents in the ceilings and run ducts behind the walls and let the relentless mechanical drone of a compressor drown the outdoor sounds. But come the swelter of afternoon, which extended long into evening, it seemed foolish not to embrace the temperature-altering benefits of what my grandfather referred to as “Dr. Gorrie’s goddam ice machine.” According to him, Florida had been on a slow slide to ruin ever since the invention of air-conditioning had made living indoors somewhat tolerable down here.
It was September. Only two more months of Florida summer before the interlude that qualified as neither fall nor winter, but simply not-summer. I figured I could endure the heat for a little while yet and protect the house from the indignity of so-called improvement.
There was a light on in the kitchen. I stopped in the doorway. A woman I’d never seen before was tending a pot on the stove.
She was lean and rangy, her brown hair falling halfway down her back. She wore a khaki shirt and khaki pants, like she was going on safari or something. She was pretty enough, in an outdoorsy way, humming a tune as she watched whatever was in the pot boil.
Boggy had mentioned something about a friend coming to visit. Beyond that, my illustrious housemate had been typically vague regarding the details. Boggy plays a close hand when it comes to women. Hell, he plays a close hand when it comes to everything.
The woman in the kitchen spotted me and smiled.
“Oh, you must be Zack,” she said. “I’m Karly Altman.”
She stuck out a hand, and I stepped across the kitchen to shake it.
I peeked into the pot on the stove. It held a simmering jumble of roots and stems and leaves. The aroma was somewhere between suitcase-full-of-dirty-socks and floor-that-has-just-been-mopped-with-Pine-Sol.
I said, “That some of Boggy’s bush tea?”
Karly Altman nodded.
“He got up early and gathered it, then went out to the nursery to check on the irrigation. I’m supposed to take him a cup when it’s ready,” she said. “Only, how do you know when it’s ready?”
“When the paint starts peeling off the walls,” I said.
Karly Altman smiled. She had a great smile—big and honest, and when she smiled her eyes did, too.
“Boggy said it was medicinal.”
“So’s this,” I said, measuring a big scoop of Café Bustelo and packing it into the espresso machine.
Karly gave the pot on the stove a stir, unleashing another wave of odors so pungent that both of us had to stifle back coughs. She leaned against the counter, leaving the bush tea to simmer on its own.
“So,” I said, “how do you know Boggy?”
Karly cocked her head. She looked amused.
“Is this the part where you grill me?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Boggy warned me that you might ask a lot of questions. He says you get in everyone’s business.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“Yeah, he did. He called you something. I can’t remember it exactly. Gommy-something.”
“Guamikeni. It’s a Taino word. Means ‘lord of land and water.’”
“Whoa, impressive.”
“Not really. It’s what the Taino called Christopher Columbus when he showed up out of nowhere and started getting in their business. Everything pretty much went down the toilet for them after that. I think Boggy calls me that sometimes just to be a smart-ass.”
“Like if someone calls their boss Hitler.”
“A tad extreme. But like that, yeah.”
“Taino humor.”
“Such as it is.”
She shrugged.
“Whatever. It’s your place. You’re entitled to ask questions and know who your houseguests are.”
“I am indeed,” I said. “So how do you know Boggy?”
She smiled.
“I met him a few weeks ago when he was in Miami. He dropped by Fairchild.”
“Fairchild? The botanical gardens?”
She nodded.
“I work there,” she said. “Curator of palms.”
“How about that,” I said. “My grandfather and David Fairchild were good friends. Went on collecting expeditions together—Malaysia, New Guinea, Madagascar. My grandfather used to drag out the photo albums and show me all those far-off places.”
Karly Altman looked impressed.
“Well, that explains a lot. I was wondering how you came to have so many different specimen palms out there on your property,” she said. “This place is amazing, just amazing. Boggy said there used to be a town here or something?”
“Yeah, LaDonna, it was called. Founded back at the tail end of the nineteenth century. That’s when my great-grandfather built the house.”
“So what happened to everyone?”
“Government kicked them out. Started buying up land to buffer Cape Canaveral and the space center, turned everything surrounding LaDonna into national park. They made people sell, but my grandfather fought them on it. He contended that his palm nursery represented a unique business that was tied to this piece of land and couldn’t be restarted anywhere else. Said the government was robbing him not only of his homestead but his livelihood. A federal court agreed with him. When my grandfather died, I inherited the place.”
“So now you’re the one and only resident of LaDonna?”
“Well, I guess there’s two of us counting Boggy.”
Karly found some mugs in a cupboard and set them on the counter. I heated milk to go with the Café Bustelo.
She said, “You don’t mind me asking, what exactly is the relationship between you and Boggy?”
“Well, it’s damn sure platonic, I can tell you that.”
She laughed.
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