Gator Wave

by David F. Berens

  Katerina had dialed 1-1-2 a few more times before telling Cinnamon that she was going to lock the store and take her down to the police station herself. Stubbornly, her champagne gold 1987 Buick Skylark—Morty’s pride and joy—refused to start. She cranked it several times and banged her fist on the dashboard for good measure, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t going to budge.

  “We will have to take your car, devushka,” she said, tossing the keys into her purse.

  “My car?” Cinnamon tilted her head sideways, obviously confused. “What do you mean, my car?”

  Katerina pointed her thumb back toward the gas pumps. “Yes, your car. Your, how do you say it, Daisy Duke Jeep.”

  “But I don’t know where the keys are.”

  The old woman held up a single finger. Dangling from it, with a pink fluffy rabbit’s foot, was Gary’s key ring.

  And that was how a 74-year-old Russian widow wrapped in a creamy white cotton shawl and a 20-something-year-old stripper dressed in … well, you remember it from earlier … ended up cruising north on the Overseas Highway in a 1980 Daisy Duke model Jeep CJ-7.

  34

  With One Headlight

  Troy Bodean could never be called an impatient man. If there was something worth taking your time doing, he was all for taking it. However, Dante Caparelli was apparently the type of person who chose a radio station, listened for approximately ten seconds, then flipped to the next station just as everyone else in the car—namely Troy—was getting into the song playing. The old mafia boss had scanned flippantly past The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Van Morrison, and a smattering of Spanish channels to finally curse and turn the radio off. The silence hung between them like a cloud of Lysol—aromatic, but obviously covering something up.

  As the first drops of rain splattered on the windshield of the car, Troy turned on the wipers to find that they were dry-rotted and did very little to clear the glass. Dante shrugged and told him he’d never driven this, or any other, car. In fact, he’d mostly forgotten how to drive, having used a driver since the early seventies. That was the first mistake Troy had made on the drive. Once the old man started talking, he didn’t stop. He seemed to feel it was necessary to fill the silence with incoherent ramblings about the club, the family, the sad state of American politics and their war on crime, and finally, about his son, Matty.

  “I love that boy,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “He was all I had. You ever had kids, Mr. Bodean?”

  Troy’s mind wandered back to the boy Ellie Mae and Daisy Mae Gallop had claimed was his. He wondered where T.J. was now and how he was doing. The last he’d seen of him had been seventeen hundred miles north of Islamorada. He opened his mouth to say something, but Dante continued without waiting for his answer.

  “He was a good kid, you know? Okay, so maybe he wasn’t gonna take over the world, but running the family business, yeah, he coulda done that.”

  Troy tried the wipers again and only succeeded in smearing the windshield into a greasy mess. In the growing darkness, he reached down and turned the headlights on. They were dim and did little to light the road ahead of them. Troy wondered if they were old and faulty like the wipers. Dante, however was on full tilt now, his lips flecked with spit as he railed about his son’s killer.

  “If I ever find the slimy son of a bitch who did this to my boy, I’m gonna take a pipe to him like Mickey Mantle to a hanging slider. There won’t be a bone in his body I ain’t gonna break. This guy is gonna wish he’d never been born.”

  Troy was afraid to interrupt Dante, but thought more than once about reaching down and casually turning the radio back on. He rubbed his right palm on his thigh and slid it closer to the power button. Before he could reach out and turn it on, Dante suddenly grabbed his arm. Dangit. He’d made his second mistake. He was sure he was headed back into the old man’s office to be bound, gagged, shot, or taken out for a swim in the middle of the ocean wearing concrete shoes.

  “Hey, cowboy,” Dante said, a strange glint in his eyes, “you ever managed a strip club?”

  Troy let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “No, sir. Worked as a disc jockey at The Peppermint Hippo back in Vegas, but that didn’t work out like I planned.”

  “Cause, ya know, I ain’t got no manager now, what with Matty being … gone and all.”

  Troy wasn’t sure how to answer that. “But, what about Sully? He’s your man, right?”

  Dante flipped his hand as if throwing off a bug. “Eh, Sully’s a good guy. Real good people. But in the brains department, he’s a couple bricks shy of a load, if you take my meaning.”

  Troy explained that he was already gainfully employed at the Islamorada Tennis Club. Dante said he knew about that on account as he had put a tail on him. Troy almost clicked together the puzzle pieces between that fact and the appearance of the strange assassin that had shown up there when he saw the red and blue lights blazing in the rearview mirror.

  Dante whirled around to look out the window at the police car coming up behind them. “Jiminy Christ, what the hell do these overgrown Boy Scouts want now? You weren’t speedin’ were you?”

  Troy shook his head as he eased over to the shoulder of the road. “No, sir. Kept her right on the limit the whole time. Not sure what this is about.”

  In the back of his mind, he wondered if perhaps the car was stolen and the cop had run the plate. He played the arrest scenario over and over in his mind and in each and every one, he ended up behind bars.

  “What should I tell him?” Troy asked Dante.

  “Son, you just let me do the talkin’. Ain’t no rent-a-cop gonna take me in.”

  Troy swallowed back the anxiety that was threatening to close his throat. He reached into his back pocket and pulled his wallet out. He fished out the driver’s license that had expired four months ago and rolled down the window an inch. The rain was heavier now and sprinkled his left arm as the officer approached.

  An impossibly bright LED flashlight blazed into the car, blinding Troy and infuriating Dante. The old man grumbled something about not going down like this, sending Troy’s pulse into three-digit territory. Trying desperately to keep calm, he asked the cop the ubiquitous question.

  “Is there a problem, officer?”

  For an eternity, the silhouette behind the flashlight just ran the beam back and forth over the license. Troy wondered if the man was going to make a big issue over the fact that it was expired. An oddly familiar voice spoke through the spattering rain.

  “You’ve got a headlight out,” he said. “Step out of the car, please.”

  Troy suddenly realized why the lights had been so dim when he turned them on. “But I—”

  “Step out of the car, now.”

  “Yep. Yes, sir,” Troy said, raising his hands in surrender.

  He reached down and opened the door, swinging it past the officer. He stood up and allowed the officer to turn him around, place his palms on the roof of the car, and frisk him. Then, seemingly sure that Troy wasn’t a threat, the officer pointed his flashlight back into the car.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Dante Caparelli.”

  And that’s when Troy realized where he recognized the voice. It was Ian Bass, the FDLE Officer who had suspected he was The Cowboy Killer. Something tickled the back of Troy’s mind, something about the case Ian was actually assigned to while he was undercover at the Islamorada Sheriff’s Department—a mafia case.

  “I’ve been looking into you for quite some time, Dante. Been up to no good, eh?”

  Dread filled Troy just long enough to fill the split second between Ian’s question and the impossibly loud bang. Ian Bass flew backwards, sparks and fire slamming into his chest. A vision of his buddy, Ned, being killed in Afghanistan crashed through walls of denial, sending Troy spinning back from the car in a daze.

  “Get in, cowboy!” Dante was yelling. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Troy stared at Ian’s
motionless body lying in the middle of the Overseas Highway near mile marker eighty and decided that he was indeed going to get the hell out of here, but not with the murderer in the black Lincoln Town Car in front of him. He turned and sprinted away as fast as his aching knee would let him. He dove off the road into a swampy tangle of trees. The murky black water came up to his waist and he wondered if he’d made his third mistake.

  He could hear the old man yelling and watched from under the twisted mangrove roots as Dante scooted into the driver’s seat. The door slammed shut and the tires erupted into screeching motion. The car fishtailed and swerved back and forth on the road as the mafia boss struggled to remember how to drive. In a few seconds, the car was roaring away, crossing into and out of the proper lane.

  When the sounds of the night took over around him, Troy began to trudge his way out of the mire and back onto the road. As his feet hit the pavement, he heard Ian Bass groan. He hobbled over to the man, hooked his hands under his arms, and dragged him off the highway. He knew he probably shouldn’t, in case there was some kind of spinal injury, but he figured a moved spine was better than a crushed spine if a car happened along.

  With a huge gasp and more grunting, Ian sat up. Troy was shocked, certain the man had taken a fatal bullet to the chest. As if he’d heard him, Ian opened his shirt a couple of buttons to reveal the mushroomed slug resting in the outer folds of his bulletproof vest. He picked it out between two fingers and held it up in the beam of the police car’s headlights.

  “Thirty-eight,” he said. “Thank goodness your buddy doesn’t use a bigger gun.”

  “Now, hold on just a second here,” Troy started, attempting to defend himself.

  But Ian held up a hand. “Not now. Which way did he go?”

  Troy pointed and said, “That way.”

  “Help me up and let’s get on him. Time is of the essence now that he knows I’m onto him. If I don’t get him in the next twenty-four hours, he’s gone.”

  Troy helped him up and walked him over to the driver’s side. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Ian said, wincing as he pulled himself up into the Islamorada Sheriff’s Department Ford Explorer. “Hop in.”

  Troy started around the front of the SUV, but Ian stopped him. “No, no. In the back. Can’t have a civilian riding up front.”

  Troy glanced over his shoulder at his hiding spot in the mangroves and wondered if he could make a break for it. He decided that he couldn’t and slid into the back seat of a police car … again.

  He tried to remember how many times he’d seen this exact view, but gave up when the number rose past ten.

  35

  Losing It In The Keys

  Gary John Suskind stumbled down the road with a gait resembling someone lost in the desert or a tourist three sheets to the wind. His pullover was torn in several places and his jeans were soaked through on the right side with rain and sweat. At first, he’d chalked up the odd one-side-only pattern of the wetness with the sideways nature of island rain. But as he slowed to a wobbly walking pace, he’d realized the pain in his side wasn’t just a stitch from sprinting.

  He dabbed his fingers in a particularly wide gash in the light sweater and found they came away red. He gasped and stopped in the road. He pulled open the tear and saw a matching gash in his side halfway up his ribcage. He tore the shirt away under his arm and let the rain wash the congealing blood away.

  He gingerly touched the fresh wound and winced at the stinging pain shooting up under his arm. The old woman at the gas station must have grazed him. In the darkness, he could easily see that he would require plastic surgery—the horrendously expensive kind of plastic surgery employing thousands of micro-stitches—to keep it from being visible to his ever-burgeoning Instagram following. If there was one thing he knew for sure, it was that none of the top male influencers—even those who had obviously had some work done—on the platform had any visible scars. He leaned his head back, shaking the brass dolphin and its dangling bathroom key at the dark sky in the falling rain.

  “Why?” he yelled. “Why would you bring this deformity upon me?”

  But he knew why. He had been a party to the deaths of two people he loved. First, Matty, then Dani. If only he’d listened to his instincts. Matty wasn’t interested, he liked girls. Actually, Matty didn’t seem to show interest in either sex according to Cinnamon. Gary shook the thought away and started ambling down the street again. And why had she gone psycho on him back at the gas station. He still couldn’t figure that out.

  Now all he had left in this world was Dani’s purse. He wondered if she might have some gauze or a bandaid or something. The sooner he could get something on the gunshot in his side, the better the scarring would be.

  Tears and rain streamed down his face as he sat down on the side of the road and began to rummage through the bag. It seemed strangely empty, as he tossed aside pointless objects: paperclips, hair clips, lipstick, cotton swabs, and a ticket stub from Les Miserables at the Waterfront Playhouse. He wadded up the cotton swabs and dabbed them at the wound, but hadn’t found anything to hold them on—no tape or bandages or anything like that. He stuck his hand back into the bag and came out with a strange prize. Matty’s finger and the ring. He pulled his arm back in classic quarterback fashion—or at least what he imagined that might feel like—preparing to fling the ring and the finger as far into the mangroves as he could. He wanted no connection between Matty and his gruesome death to be anywhere near him. But before he could throw it, he heard a strange squeaking sound coming up the road, closer and closer. This section of the highway was dark, but he thought he could make out the shape of a person riding a bike, headed straight towards him.

  He squinted, trying desperately to make out more detail thinking what a terrible night it was to be riding a bicycle. And then he began to laugh, a strange, foreign sound. To his ears, it sounded like a mixture of Cesar Romero’s rendition of the Joker and a stray Key West rooster announcing dawn. The figure riding in the deluge got closer and seemed to intentionally surge through a puddle on the side of the road in front of Gary, splashing him with what smelled like a vile mixture of mud, water, vomit, and urine.

  Gary could only laugh harder as the man on the old green bike looked over his shoulder and shouted at him. He had a myriad of strange little cuts on his face as if old acne scars had decided to erupt and burst open and his arms were covered with mud and bits of rock.

  “Get a job, ya bum,” the man yelled.

  Gary laughed again and shook his head. Who’s the real bum here, fella? It struck him that there was something familiar about the man, even in the dim light and sheets of rain. He thought he might have heard the man muttering about tourists and bums and corrupt politicians as he disappeared into the night.

  As the highway went dark and empty, the rain continued to drizzle down on him. It was salty and warm, like a medicinal bath. Gary looked down and realized he was still clutching Matty’s finger. The heavy ring on it glinted and a thought occurred to him. Much like Dani had said, before being eaten, this ring could bring in a couple grand. It wasn’t likely to pay for all his plastic surgery, but it would put a dent in it.

  Headlights broke through the night and grew from pin pricks to saucers in no time. Air Brakes hissed as the old Winnebago slowed to a stop in front of Gary. He shoved the finger into his pocket and tried to wipe his face. The passenger’s side window rolled down about an inch and the man inside craned his head to put his lips up to the opening. Gary jumped up out of the muck.

  “Hey, there,” a kindly voice said. “You doin’ okay, son?”

  The accent reminded Gary of his favorite television show, Jersey Shore on MTV, but the man’s face was all Ian McKellen. The man had a slight lisp and spoke softly, so Gary stood on his tiptoes and leaned a little closer.

  “I’m okay, thank you.”

  The driver leaned over and said, “Are you sure? You lost or something?”

  Gary could now
see that both men wore bright, Hawaiian shirts, one with a pink background, and one with a purple background. The passenger wore a rainbow lei around his neck and the driver wore a pair of rhinestone-encrusted glasses.

  “I might have been,” Gary said, smiling, “but it looks like I’ve been found.”

  Martin Russo, who was sitting on a pink satin donut-shaped pillow in the driver’s seat, looked as if he’d walked off the set of The Soprano’s—only the gay edition. Thick, dark, wavy hair combed back on his head showing off an incredible hairline, considering his obvious age, and slightly grey temples under the faux gemstones on his glasses made him look distinguished if not downright yummy. If not for the purple Hawaiian shirt and cutoff denim shorts—slightly shorter than appropriate—Gary might not have known they were “playing for the same team.”

  His partner, Frankie Russo, was a bit more … obvious. He wore the pink Hawaiian shirt and a grass skirt, and the ubiquitous rainbow lei. He had been the one to bring Gary into the RV, get a towel to dry him off, and found some suitable clothes for him to change into. He also passed Gary a couple of large bandages, some medical tape, and a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide to clean his side. In the light of the cramped bathroom, the wound didn’t look as bad as Gary had originally thought. Maybe with a little Neosporin, he could reduce the scarring.