Stormy Weather

by Carl Hiassen

  "Need some help?"

  It was a clean-shaven young man in a Federal Express uniform. He had an envelope for Neria Torres. She signed for it, laid it on the front seat of Tony's Chevy.

  The kid said, "I got jumpers in the truck."

  "Would you mind?"

  They had the car started in no time. Neria idled the engine and waited for the battery to recharge. The FedEx kid said it sounded good. Halfway to the truck, he stopped and turned.

  "Hey, somebody swiped your license plate."

  "Shit." Neria got out to see for herself. The FedEx driver said it was probably a looter.

  "Everybody around here's getting ripped off," he explained.

  "I didn't even notice. Thanks."

  As soon as he left, Neria opened the FedEx envelope. Her delirious shriek drew nosy Mr. Varga to his front porch. He was shirtless, a toothbrush in one cheek. In fascination he watched his neighbor practically bound up the sidewalk into her house.

  The envelope contained two checks made out to Antonio and Neria Torres. The checks were issued by the Midwest Life and Casualty Company of Omaha, Nebraska. They totaled $201,000. The stubs said: "Hurricane losses."

  Shortly after noon, when Detective Brickhouse arrived at 15600 Calusa, he found the house empty again. The Chevrolet was gone, as was the widow of Antonio Torres. A torn Federal Express envelope lay on the driveway, near the rusty Oldsmobile. Mr. Varga, the neighbor, informed the detective that Neria Torres sped off without even waving good-bye.

  Brickhouse was backing out of the driveway when a rental car pulled up. A thin blond man wearing round eyeglasses got out. Brickhouse noticed the man had tan Hush Puppies and was carrying a box of Whitman chocolates. High-pitched barking could be heard from the back seat of the visitor's car.

  The detective called the man over. "Are you looking for Mrs. Torres?"

  The man hesitated. Brickhouse identified himself. The man blinked repeatedly, as if his glasses were smudged.

  He said, "I don't know anybody named Torres. Guess I've got the wrong address." Speedily he returned to his car.

  Brickhouse leaned out the window. "Hey, who's the candy for?"

  "My mother!" Fred Dove replied, over the barking.

  The detective watched the confused young man drive away, and wondered why he'd lied. Even crackheads know how to find their own mother's house. Brickhouse briefly considered tailing the guy, but decided it would be a waste of time. Whoever crucified Tony Torres wasn't wearing Hush Puppies. Brickhouse would have bet his pension on it.

  Augustine parked at a phone booth behind a gas station. The governor had them wait while he made a call. He came back humming a Beatles tune.

  "Jim's alive," he said.

  Edie Marsh leaned forward. "Your friend! How do you know?"

  "There's a number where we leave messages for each other."

  Bonnie asked if he was hurt badly.

  "Nope. He took it in the vest."

  Augustine shook a fist in elation. Everybody's mood perked up, even Edie's. Skink told Bonnie she could call her mother, but make it fast. It went like this:

  "Mom, something's happened."

  "I guessed as much."

  "Between Max and me."

  "Oh no." Bonnie's mother, laboring to sound properly dismayed, when Bonnie knew how she truly felt.

  "What'd he do, sweetie?"

  "Nothing, Mom. It's all me."

  "Did you have a fight?" her mother asked.

  "Listen, I've met two unusual men. I believe I've fallen in love with one of them."

  "On your honeymoon, Bonnie?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "What does he do?"

  "He's not certain," Bonnie said.

  "These men, are they dangerous?"

  "Not to me. Mom, they're totally different from anyone I've ever known. It's a very ... primitive charisma."

  "Let's not mention that last part to your father."

  Next Bonnie phoned the apartment in New York. When she got back to the Seville, she told Skink to go on without her.

  "Max left a message on the machine." She didn't look at Augustine when she said it. Couldn't look at him.

  Bonnie repeated her husband's message. "He says it's over if I don't meet with him."

  "It's over regardless," Skink said.

  "Please."

  "Call back and leave your own message." The governor gave her the details-the place, the time, who would be there.

  After Bonnie finished with the phone, Skink made another call himself. When they got back in the car, Augustine punched the accelerator and peeled rubber. Bonnie put her hand on his arm. He gave a tight, rueful smile.

  They made the 905 turnoff in the nick of time. Already the northbound traffic was stacked past Lake Surprise; Skink surmised that the police had raised the Jewfish Creek drawbridge for their roadblock. He predicted they'd set up another one at Card Sound, as soon as more patrol cars arrived from the mainland.

  Edie Marsh said, "So where are we going?"

  "Patience."

  The two of them sat together in the back seat. On the governor's lap was a Bill Blass suitcase, removed from the Cadillac's trunk to make space for the blacked out Snapper.

  Skink said, "Driver, dome light! Por favor." Augustine began pushing dashboard buttons until the ceiling lights came on. Skink broke the locks off the suitcase and opened it.

  "What have we here!" he said.

  The troopers waited all night at Jewfish Creek. As Jim Tile predicted the black Jeep Cherokee never appeared, nor did the silver Cadillac stolen from a customer at a Key Largo convenience store. The French victim had dryly described the armed carjacker as "a poster boy for TMJ."

  At daybreak the cops gave up the roadblock and fanned through the Upper Keys. It would take three days to locate the Seville, abandoned on a disused smugglers' trail off County Road 905, only a few miles from the exclusive Ocean Reef Club. The police would wait another forty-eight hours before announcing the discovery of the vehicle. They omitted mention of the bullet hole in its dashboard, as they didn't wish to unduly alarm Ocean Reef's residents and guests, which included some of the most socially prominent, politically influential and chronically impatient taxpayers in the eastern United States. Many were already in a cranky mood, due to the inconvenient damaging of their vacation homes by the hurricane. News that a murderous criminal might be lurking in the mangroves would touch off heated high-level communiques with Tallahassee and Washington, D.C. The Ocean Reef crowd didn't mess around.

  As it turned out, there was no danger whatsoever.

  Most newly married men, faced with unexpected desertion, would have been manic with grief, jealousy and anger. Max Lamb, however, was blessed by a hearty, blinding preoccupation with his career.

  A nettlesome thought kept scrolling across his mind, and it had nothing to do with his runaway wife. It was something the nutty kidnapper had told him: You need a legacy.

  They'd been riding in the back of a U-Haul truck, discussing unforgettable advertising slogans. Max hadn't anything zippy to brag about except the short-lived Plum Crunchies ditty. Since the failure of the cereal campaign, the sixth floor had deployed him more often for billboard concepts and print graphics, and not as much on the verbally creative side.

  Which stung, because Max considered himself a genuinely glib and talented wordsmith. He believed it was well within his reach to write an advertising catchphrase that would embed itself in the national lexicon-one of those classics the kidnapper had mentioned. A legacy, if you will.

  Now that Bronco cigarets were history, Max was left to review the potential of his other accounts. The hypercarbonated soda served on the plane to Miami put him in mind of Old Faithful Root Beer. Old Faithful's popularity had peaked in the summer of 1962, and since then its share of the global soft-drink market had fizzled to a microscopic sliver. Rodale's mission was to revive Old Faithful in the consciousness of the consumer, and to that end the eccentric Mormon family that owned the company wa
s willing to spend a respectable seven-figure sum.

  Around Rodale & Burns, the Old Faithful Root Beer account was regarded as a lucrative but hopeless loser. Nobody liked the stuff because one sixteen-ounce bottle induced thunderous belching that often lasted for days. At a party, Pete Archibald drunkenly offered a joke slogan: "The root beer you'll never forget-because it won't let you!"

  Lying there alone in Augustine's house, Max Lamb savored the prospect of single-handedly resuscitating Old Faithful. It was the sort of coup that could make him a legend on Madison Avenue. For inspiration he turned on the Home Shopping Network. Into the wee hours he tinkered determinedly with beverage-related alliterations, allusions, puns, verses and metaphors. Bonnie didn't cross his mind.

  Eventually Max struck on a winner, something that sounded like good silly fun to kids, and at the same time titillating to teens and young adults: "Old Faithful Root Beer-Makes You Tingle in Places You Didn't Know You Had Places!"

  Max Lamb was so excited he couldn't sleep. Once more he tried calling the apartment in New York. No Bonnie, but the answering machine emitted a telltale beep. He punched the three-digit code and waited.

  Bonnie had gotten his message-and left him a reply that caused him to forget temporarily about the Old Faithful account. The flesh under Max's shirt collar prickled and perspired, and stayed feverish until dawn.

  He wasn't surprised by the symptoms. The downside of seeing his wife would be seeing the deranged kidnapper again. Only an idiot wouldn't be scared shitless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Snapper regained consciousness with the dreamy impression of being someplace he hadn't been in twenty-two years-a dentist's chair. He sensed the dentist hovering, and felt large deft hands working inside his mouth. The last time Snapper had a cavity filled, he'd reflexively chomped off the top joint of the dentist's right thumb. This time he was becalmed by the ejaculate of the dart rifle.

  "Lester Maddox Parsons!" The dentist, attempting to wake him.

  Snapper opened his eyes in a fog bank. Looming out of the psychedelic mist was a silvery-bearded grin. A dentist in a plastic shower cap? Snapper squirmed.

  "Whhaannffrr?" he inquired.

  "Relax, chief."

  The dentist's basso chuckle rolled like a freight train through Snapper's cranium. His jaws were wedged wide, as if awaiting the drill. Come on, he thought, get it over with.

  He heard buzzing. Good!

  But the buzzing wasn't in his mouth; it was in his ears. Bugs. Fucking bugs flying in his ears!

  "Hrrrnnnff!" Snapper shook his head violently. It hurt. All of a sudden he was drenched by a wave of salty water. What he didn't cough up settled as a lukewarm puddle in his protruded mandible, which functioned as a natural cistern.

  Now he was completely awake. Now he remembered. The fog cleared from his mind. He saw a campfire. Edie, sweaty and barefoot. And the young broad, Bonnie, with her arms around the asshole punk who'd shot him.

  "Yo, Lester." It was the giant one-eyed fruitcake, holding an empty bucket. There was no dentist.

  But Snapper definitely felt a cold steel object bracing his jaws open, digging into the roof of his mouth, pinching the tender web of flesh beneath his tongue; something so heavy that it caused his head to nod forward, something that extended diagonally upward from his chin to beyond his forehead.

  A heavy bar of some type. Snapper crossed his eyes to put it in focus. The bar was red.

  Oh fuck.

  He wailed, trying to rise. His legs tangled. With rubbery arms he flailed uselessly at the thing locked in his mouth.

  Skink held up a small chrome key and said, "Accept no imitations."

  "Nnnnngggggoooo!!"

  "You shot my friend. You called him a nigger." Skink shrugged in resignation. "You beat up a lady, stole her momma's wedding ring, dumped her on the roadside. What choice have you left me?"

  He took Snapper by the hair and dragged him, blubbering, to the shore of a broad milky-green creek.

  "What choice?" Skink repeated, softly.

  "Unngh! Unnnggghhhh!"

  "Sure. Now you're sorry."

  Edie, Bonnie and Augustine appeared on the bank. Skink crouched in the mud next to Snapper.

  "Here's the deal. Most any other species, you'd have been dead long ago. Ever heard of Charles Darwin?"

  Mosquitoes tickled Snapper's eyelids as he nodded his head.

  "Good," Skink said. "Then you might understand what's about to happen." He turned to the others. "Somebody tell Mister Lester Maddox Parsons where we are."

  Augustine said: "Crocodile Lakes."

  "Yes indeedy." Skink rose. Once more he displayed the chrome key, the only thing that could unlock The Club from Snapper's achingly prolongated jowls.

  Skink threw it in the water. He said, "Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge. Guess how it got its name."

  Mournfully Snapper stared at the circle of ripples where the key had plopped into the creek.

  They'd stopped once along County Road 905, so Skink could snatch a dead diamondback off the blacktop.

  "Don't tell me," said Edie. "It tastes just like chicken."

  The governor, coiling the limp rattlesnake at his feet, pretended to be insulted. He told Edie she was much too pretty to be such a cynic. He snapped off the snake's rattle and presented it to her for a souvenir.

  "Just what I always wanted." She dropped it in the ashtray.

  After ditching the car, Skink made a torch from a gummy stump of pine. For nearly two hours he led them through a shadowed canopy of buttonwoods, poisonwoods, figs, pigeon plums and mahogany. He'd slung Snapper over his shoulder like a sack of oats. In his right hand he held the torch; in his other was the Bill Blass suitcase. Edie Marsh followed along a path hardly wide enough for a rabbit. Bonnie went next, with Augustine close behind, carrying (at Skink's instruction) the tranquilizer rifle and The Club. The .38 Special was in his belt.

  Eventually they entered a small clearing. In the center was a ring of sooty stones; a campfire site. A few yards away sat a junked truck with freckles of rust and a faded orange stripe. Bolted to the roof was a bar of cracked red lights. Bonnie and Augustine stepped closer-it was an old Monroe County ambulance, propped on cinder blocks. Augustine opened the tailgate and whistled appreciatively. The ambulance was full of books.

  The governor deposited Snapper on the ground, propped against a scabby tree trunk. He went to a spot on the other side of the clearing and kicked at the leaves and loose twigs, exposing an olive-drab tarpaulin. Rummaging beneath it, he came out with a tin of bread crumbs, a jar of vegetable oil, a five-gallon jug of fresh water and a waxy stick of army insect repellent, which he passed around.

  While he collected dry wood for the fire, Edie Marsh came up beside him. "Where are we?"

  "Middle of nowhere."

  "Why?"

  "Because there's no better place to be."

  They gathered to watch him skin the rattler. Edie was impressed by his enormous hands, sure and swift and completely at ease with the knife.

  As the fire sparked up, Augustine pulled Bonnie closer and buried his face in the silkiness of her hair. He was soothed by the soft crackle of tinder; the owl piping on a distant wire; raccoons trilling and fussing in the shadows; the whoosh of nighthawks scooping insects above the firelit treetops. The sole discordant note was the stuporous snore of Lester Maddox Parsons.

  The air tasted fresh; the rain was done for a while. Augustine wouldn't have traded places with another soul. Crocodile Lakes on a warm September night was fine. He kissed Bonnie lightly, having no special plans beyond the moment. He willed himself not to worry about Max Lamb, who would be coming tomorrow on a mission to retrieve his bride.

  Skink began spooning out chunks of pan-fried snake. Edie Marsh facetiously said it was impolite not to save some for Snapper. Skink declared that he wouldn't so dishonor the memory of a dead reptile.

  That's when he'd asked Augustine for The Club.

  He turned his back to the others w
hile he fitted it under Snapper's papery gray lips. Bonnie believed the procedure would have been physically impossible, were it not for the preexisting crookedness of those saurian jawbones. Afterwards nobody said a word, until Snapper made a groggy inquisitive murmur.

  Skink bent over him. "Lester?"

  "Mmmmmfrrrttthh."