Cumbaa sipped bourbon and smacked his lips. I looked at my glass of beer. I didn’t want any more of it. I was all beered out. I was trying to decide if I should move to rum.
Cumbaa said, “But suddenly the worm turns. Suddenly something is up with Darcy Whitehall. Suddenly he needs money and he needs it bad and he is cozying up to Freddie Arzghanian. It looks like they’re in business again.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Hey, we know. We know all kinds of shit.” Cumbaa sat back in his chair, stretched out his legs. “We know, for instance, that a U.S. citizen by the name of Zachary Taylor Chasteen came into possession of one hundred forty pounds of gold bullion last year, sold it to a dealer in Miami, and has yet to pay taxes on the profit, which was somewhere near two million dollars.”
I didn’t say anything. Cumbaa smiled.
“Hey, don’t go dark on me, Zack. I’m prepared to work with you here. You brought in a creep, you’re entitled to a little something.”
“That creep cost me two years in prison for something I didn’t do.”
“Yeah, yeah. You got screwed, it sucked, life’s unfair. But like I said, I’m willing to work with you here. Tit for tat. You help me, I help you.”
I didn’t say anything.
Cumbaa drained his bourbon, set the glass down on the table.
“You got a card?” he said.
“No card.”
“So what’s your cell-phone number?”
“No cell phone.”
“You’re shitting me.”
I shrugged.
“OK, jeez, here’s what I’m gonna do.” He opened the briefcase, rummaged around, and pulled out a cell phone. He handed it to me. “It’s old-school Nokia but it works. Got it on an international plan, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Here, got this, too.”
Cumbaa pulled an AC adapter and a charger from his briefcase.
“Now you don’t got no fucking excuse if I call you and you say the fucking phone lost its juice, know what I mean? I’m on the last flight to San Juan, then I’ll be in Mo Bay day after tomorrow. We’ll talk, OK?”
He got up, grabbed his briefcase, gave me a slap on the back.
He said, “And all the money you got, Chasteen? I’m letting you pick up the tab.”
53
It was a pretty good turnout for Monk’s memorial service, maybe a hundred of us in the chapel at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell. I sat beside Rina Murray, who had driven up from Tampa with Monk’s wife, Annie, and the two children. The little boy, Donnie, named after his dad, was four; the little girl, Taylor, three. Both cute as could be.
We sang a couple of hymns, and the chaplain said some prayers and made a few generic remarks about Monk and how he was such a fine man who had served his country well. While the chaplain was talking, little Donnie blurted out: “My daddy played football!” It got laughs out of everyone, and drew more than a few tears.
A few of Monk’s friends got up and told stories on him, but I wasn’t one of them. When the service was over, we all filed outside and walked down a path to the “Veterans Memory Garden.” There was a nice breeze moving through the pine trees, as pleasant as a day like that could be. The chaplain said a few more prayers, then Annie took the metal canister and placed it inside a vault that already had a brass plaque with Monk’s name on it.
An army bugler played taps, and a representative from the AmVets presented Annie with an American flag. As he was handing it to her, Donnie raised a hand to his forehead in a salute. Little Taylor copied her big brother. People were misting up like crazy, and I was one of them.
Some of Monk’s army buddies had reserved a room at the AmVets post, with a buffet and a bar. Most everyone dropped by for a while.
I stood around talking with a guy named Clint who had driven down from Toccoa, Georgia. He and Monk had known each other when they were stationed together at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
“Home of the 61st Ordnance Division,” Clint said. “We were a wild bunch, I’ll tell you. Had to relieve all that pressure somehow, blow off the steam, you know? Hell, one time, me and Monk and this fellow named Scotty Connigan . . .” He stopped. “You know Connigan?”
“No, sure don’t.”
Clint looked around the crowd.
“I’m surprised Scotty Connigan isn’t here. He and Monk were pretty tight, although they were opposite as day and night, Monk so big and outgoing, Scotty Connigan this skinny little guy, hardly ever said two words. Anyway, this one time, a bunch us . . .”
I half listened as Clint told a long story that involved stealing a jeep from Fort Sill and then driving around the nearby town of Lawton trying to pick up girls.
Clint said, “You ask me, the prettiest girls in the world, they come from Lawton, Oklahoma.”
When he was done I moved across the room and talked a bit with Annie and the kids. She was a shy, pretty woman who’d been through her share of hell in the last couple of years. She’d met Monk in Sarasota and been dazzled by his big personality, his house on the bay, his big plans for the future.
“He had this idea for selling time-shares in a fleet of fancy yachts at marinas all over the world. He was getting investors and buying boats, and then everything just kind of fizzled out,” Annie said.
They’d sold the house on the bay and moved to a smaller place outside of Brandon. There was a bankruptcy, which staved off creditors for a little while, but then Monk began racking up other debts and everything just kept piling up on them.
“I knew Monk had done some work for the government in the past, but he didn’t like to discuss it. Joked that it was one of those ‘if-I-tell-you-then-I-gotta-kill-you’ kind of things. But he started talking about getting in touch with some people he used to work with, and I had a feeling that’s what it was all about,” Annie said. “Then he came home one day, said he had a lead on a good job and was flying out that afternoon. Said he couldn’t tell me all the details, but that it was going to be something good. That was four months ago, the last I heard from him. I didn’t even know he was in Jamaica, until I got the call that, well, you know.”
The children were getting antsy. The little girl started to cry.
Annie said: “They’re ready for their naps. I need to see if there’s a place where they can lay down for a while.”
She stepped away, and Rina Murray joined me. The years had treated her well. She was wearing a black dress, but the way she filled it out was anything but somber. Her smile was just as big and real as it ever was. Monk had been a damn fool to leave her.
I said, “The other day, after I talked to you, they found Monk’s Super Bowl ring at the bomb site.”
“You bring it with you? I know that little boy and girl of his would like to have it, something to remember him by.”
“It’s still with the investigators, but I’ll make sure to get it when they’re done.”
Rina smiled a sad smile.
She said, “You know, they won the Super Bowl the year after we got married, the year Monk got traded from the Saints.”
“I remember. It was my last year with the Dolphins.”
“Gosh, he was proud of that ring. Even had our initials engraved on it, inside the band.” She was quiet for a moment. “They were some good years. Guess I was as happy then as I’ve ever been. When Monk was good he was very good.”
“And when he was bad?”
“Aw hell, even when he was bad he wasn’t awful, Zack. He tried, you know? Only nothing he did ever seemed to click. And he just didn’t have that sticking-around gene in him. That stay-faithful gene either.”
She let out a sigh, said: “You had a chance to go through all his papers yet?”
“No, not yet,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that they had been stolen from his cottage and confiscated by the U.S. government.
“I’m really hoping there’s some kind of life insurance policy. That poor Annie has gotta have something,” Rina said. “Her mom and dad are both bedridden. She’s
looking after them and the kids, got next to nothing coming in except some social security, barely pays the bills. I gave her a little something, thought I’d quietly ask around some of the people here today, see if I can’t get a few of them to chip in a little, too.”
I had plenty of cash on me and I gave most of it to Rina. Said I’d see about lining Annie up with something more once I had a chance to go through all of Monk’s papers.
Rina gave me a kiss and a hug. Then she stepped back and looked at me.
“How come you’re not married yet?” she said.
“Been saving myself for the right woman,” I said.
“You need to stop saving and start investing,” she said. “Life’s too short, Zack. It’s way too goddam short.”
54
The rental-car place in Tampa had issued me a Mustang, a red one, a retro model with a scooped hood and racing stripes. Not my style, but it was fast, and just a little more than an hour after getting on I-75 near Bushnell and pointing north, I was in Gainesville.
I stopped at the stadium. There was a lost-and-found department, but the woman in charge of it told me she didn’t think anyone had turned in a first-edition signed copy of A House for Mr. Biswas after the stadium was evacuated on Saturday.
“I’d have remembered a book; no one ever brings a book to a ballgame,” the woman said.
“It was kind of a special book,” I said.
“Honey, the clean-up crews probably just chucked it,” the woman said. “But you’re welcome to take a look around.”
I spent the next half hour rummaging through all kinds of wayward stuff—ponchos, handbags, binocular cases, backpacks—but no Mr. Biswas. I’d been hoping to surprise Barbara with it, but no deal. Damn.
On the way out of town, I swung by the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department. Captain Kilgore was in. He invited me back to his office.
“We had to turn everything over to the feds after what happened down in Jamaica,” Kilgore said. “They’re working to see if there’s some kind of connection.”
“You can tell that, even after things get all blown to hell?”
“Oh yeah, there’s most always something, little piece of this or that. Building a bomb’s like leaving a fingerprint. Something unique about every one of them.”
“What about the one in the skybox?”
“Well, I can tell you this: It was a damn elaborate dud. One of those LOL designs.”
“LOL?”
“Layer on layer. Made to look like one thing, winds up being something else. Whoever put it together was a pro. It was almost like he was showing off,” said Kilgore. “All that time Mr. Whitehall was sitting in that chair, afraid to move, we thought we were dealing with something had an ADP.”
“ADP?”
“Anti-disturbance penalty. You fuck with it, you move, you try to open it, and it goes off. Only, turns out it wasn’t like that. Darcy Whitehall could have stood up from that chair and nothing would have happened,” said Kilgore. “We found an SCR.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“You know what that is?”
“Got no idea,” I said. “Just trying to pretend like I knew something for a change. Didn’t want to look dumb.”
“Hard being you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A constant struggle.”
“SCR stands for silicon-controlled rectifier,” said Kilgore. “Like in a garage-door opener. Got a remote gadget on one end that sends out an electrical impulse and it completes the circuit on the other end.”
“And kablowie.”
“And kablowie,” said Kilgore. “Or in this case, just a bunch of squibs that stunk up the skybox and made our eyes water. And whoever did it was sitting back laughing at us.”
“You mean, they were right there in the stadium?”
“No, not necessarily. They could have been anywhere. Some SCRs have a longer range than others. Rig it up right with a cell phone and you can detonate it from the other side of the world, provided you got a decent carrier. But chances are, whoever did it, they were fairly close by, just to make sure,” said Kilgore. “You want some coffee?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Black.”
He went down the hall to get some. When he came back we sat there, blowing on the coffee, cooling it off, talking about football. The Gators had another soft weekend coming up at home, against Wyoming, then it was the real deal, Tennessee. The Vols were preseason No. 1 in both the AP and the USA Today polls. They were opening up that weekend against Fresno State, and to bet on them you’d have to give twenty-seven points.
“What about videotape in the skybox?” I said. “Stadium security get anything on that?”
“Nada,” Kilgore said. “Turns out the only cameras on skybox level are out in the halls, nothing inside the boxes themselves. Think it’s because a lot of high rollers use the skyboxes to entertain politicians and none of them want any of that on tape, lest it come back and bite them in the ass. But someone else is working on that, and it’s probably been kicked up to the feds, too. I’ll ask around, though. I’d like to know myself.”
The coffee wasn’t bad, and it had cooled off just about enough where I could enjoy it. I wrote down my contact info on a sheet of paper, gave it to Kilgore, and asked him to give me a holler if anything else popped up that he thought I should know.
“Will do,” he said. “And Zack?”
“What?”
“I expect you to do likewise.”
55
I was back at my house in LaDonna by five o’clock. I walked down to the boathouse and looked out on the lagoon. There was a falling tide, and I would have liked nothing better than to have grabbed a rod and reel and headed out in the Hewes to make some casts under the edge of the mangroves where the water runs deep and cool and the reds like to hang on summer days when you can’t find them on the flats. Would have liked nothing better, but . . .
I turned around and walked to the house. I could make it to Orlando International by seven, maybe catch something that would get me back to Jamaica that night. There was no real urgency; I could just as easily wait until tomorrow, but I was sensing something that felt strangely like momentum and, since I had little else going for me, I thought maybe I shouldn’t squander it. Needed to keep moving.
I went to my bedroom and opened the closet. I started throwing shirts and shorts into a bag. Not a good approach to packing. So I got out a bigger bag and transferred everything to it. I’d have to check luggage, but what the heck. It would be nice to wear clothes that fit me for a change.
I was sitting on the bag, fighting with the zipper, when I heard steps in the hall and looked up to see Karly Altman standing in the doorway.
“Whoa, this is weird,” she said.
“What? You’ve never seen a grown man wrestling a suitcase before?”
“No, not that. It’s just . . .” She stopped, laughed to herself. “This morning we were sitting down to eat breakfast when Boggy, just out of the blue, said: ‘Zack comes.’ And now here you are. Spooky.”
“That’s Boggy.”
“You swear you didn’t call him and tell him you were on your way?”
“Yeah, right. You know Boggy doesn’t answer telephones. Or even talk on them unless he has to.”
“Well, ever since then he’s been acting sort of strange,” Karly said. “He wouldn’t eat what I made for breakfast. Or for lunch, but he went out and picked all this stuff from that little garden of his—I recognized liverwort and dandelion, but not much else—and he made something out of it. Then he drank at least a gallon of water. It must have made him sick because I heard him outside and it sounded like he was throwing up.”
“He’s not sick. He’s cleansing himself. It’s a Taino thing.”
“But why would he be cleansing himself?”
“That’s probably something you should talk to him about.”
She shook her head, smiled.
“He never ceases to amaze me.”
“Makes two of us,�
� I said. “Say, you mind holding this end of the bag while I pull on the zipper?”
She knelt down to help me out. We didn’t make much progress.
Karly said, “I really didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“Me, neither.”
She obviously hadn’t heard anything about what was going on down in Jamaica.
“Well,” she said, “I’m pleased to report that the palm world is abuzz about your carossier. With your permission, I’d like to have a little gathering here in a couple of weeks. Some of my associates from Fairchild want to come up and see this for themselves. Thought I might also invite some friends from IPS.”
“That the International Palm Society?”
“I’m impressed. You’re learning the lingo.”
“It’s been a big day for me and acronyms,” I said. “LOL. ADP. SCR. All kinds of interesting crap.”
Karly looked at me.
“Zack, what on earth are you talking about?”
So I filled her in on everything, and when I was done she said: “Omigod, I had no idea. We haven’t watched TV or looked at a newspaper since you left. I feel so removed from everything here. It’s nice.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Wish I could stick around and enjoy it.”
The back door slammed and there were footsteps in the hall. Karly said: “I’ll be right back.”
I heard her talking just outside the bedroom door. The other voice was Boggy’s.
I got rid of some clothes, kept yanking on the zipper, finally got the bag closed and dragged it into the hall.
Karly had just finished giving Boggy a hug. He turned and looked at me. He travels light. Everything he needed was wrapped tight inside a cotton hammock that doubles as his gobag. It was slung over a shoulder.
He said, “I am ready to go, Guamikeni.”
Just like I knew he would be.
56
It was after midnight when Boggy and I arrived at Libido. We dropped off our bags at the cottage. I washed up while Boggy hung his hammock on the porch. Then we went to Darcy Whitehall’s house and checked in with Otee.
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