“I’m askin’ the questions, here, yeah?”
“Yes, sir,” Gary nodded, cradling his cheek in his hand.
“Now, let’s try this again, shall we?” Dante leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. He was six inches from Gary’s face. “The details I would like to hear are the ones that pertain to my son and his untimely demise. Capiche?”
Whatever had been holding back the water inside Gary suddenly burst. Dante was sure the floor beneath his feet was going to be a puddle soon as much as the kid was sobbing. He was soon a bubbling, gurgling, hyperventilating, gasping, convulsing mess. Dante pulled back his hand to slap Gary’s other cheek, but Frankie suddenly spoke up.
“Hey, mister,” he shouted, wagging his index finger at Dante, “I don’t know you, but you do not realize what we have both just been through. I just lost my husband to a vicious, man-eating monster. Gary, from what I’ve been piecing together in the last few hours, has lost two people, one of whom I understand was your son. Well, you just stop and consider that we’ve lost people, too.”
Dante rose out of his chair faster than he himself thought possible and was close to punching Frankie in the mouth. Somehow, Sully managed to grab his arm and hold him back. When he was finally composed, the bar manager let him go. Dante straightened his tie and sat back down.
“The difference, Mary Kay,” Dante inhaled long and slow as he spoke, trying desperately to ignore the pain in his chest, “is that your bosom buddy here killed my son.”
“It’s true,” Gary sobbed. “It’s all true. I should never have gone out there. All I wanted was to take Matty on a kayak ride out into the mangroves. A little wine, a little cheese … I thought it might make him more … amenable to my advances.”
Dante’s mouth twisted up as if he’d eaten a rotten lemon.
“It was the same alligator,” Gary continued. “It has to be. He ate Matty, and then Dani when we tried to go find the kayak.”
“And then my Marty,” Frankie added, sniffing.
Dante shot a questioning glance over his shoulder at Sully. “You buyin’ this?”
“I dunno, boss.” Sully sucked air over his teeth. “I mean, the only way to really know is to go back out there. See if Matty’s really gone.”
Dante stood, walked to his desk, and picked up a hot-dog shaped napkin. He unrolled it slowly to reveal the finger with the Caparelli family ring still on it.
“This is,” his voice caught behind the lump in his throat, “all that was left of my boy?”
Gary nodded vigorously. “Dani found it when we reached what was left of the kayak.”
“But you didn’t see nothin’ else of his body?”
“No, that was it, but the alligator was huge and—”
“Sully, my friend,” Dante interrupted Gary, “looks like you’ve finally had a smart thought.”
“I did?” the white-haired bartender asked.
He turned back to Gary and leaned close again, holding the finger up under his nose. “Since you seem to know exactly where this kayak is, and since you’re the one who took Matty out there in the first place, I think it’s only fair that we take you out there.”
Gary’s mouth dropped open and he began to tremble and shake like a patient with a high fever. “No, no, no,” he moaned.
“It’s perfect,” he pulled the ring off the finger and tucked it into his jacket pocket, “we’ll let this gator finish what he started. Nice and tidy-like.”
“You can’t do this,” Gary sputtered. “You just can’t take someone out into the—”
He looked over at Frankie and scooted toward the man. Frankie pulled away from him as if his hands and arms were covered with leprosy.
“Frankie,” Gary motioned at Dante and Sully as he spoke, “you’ve got to tell them. They cannot do this!”
Frankie turned to Dante and raised a hand like a school child asking to go to the bathroom. “Could I get a ride back to my Winnebago since it’s on the way?”
The four of them ducked out the back door and walked around the building to Dante’s car. He shoved Gary into the back seat and slammed the door. Sully slid into the driver’s seat and the old Lincoln fired up with a protesting sputter. Frankie raised his arms as Dante walked around and opened the passenger door.
“What about me?” he asked, his tone threatening to be indignant. “You said you’d give me a ride.”
“I said nothin’ of the sort,” Dante said. “Besides, this ain’t the kind of ride you want to be takin’.”
Frankie opened his mouth to say something, but Sully rolled down his window before he could.
“Yo, Elton John,” he snorted, letting his left arm dangle out the window, pistol pointing at the ground. “Tell your story walking before we decide to take you with us.”
Frankie turned and ran, not one-hundred percent sure he was heading in the direction of his RV.
43
Brawlin’ After Midnight
When Cinnamon Starr waved goodbye to Olga as she pulled away in the white Jeep with the big gold eagle on the hood—she told the old woman to park it at the Quik Mart and she would Uber to it after her shift—the sound inside Woody’s changed from music to what she could only describe as a train wreck. Either someone was juggling steel trash cans or the band had taken on a whole new, demolition derby metal direction. She was so afraid to open the front door that she never saw Dante, Sully, and Gary sitting in the black Lincoln Towncar in the parking lot.
When she finally worked up the courage to go in, the sonic wave pushed at her like the fly stopping air machines that destroyed her hair every time she shopped at Walmart. The music was unrecognizable, with no discernible tune or tempo. It was as if each member of the band was playing a different song and playing louder and louder to be heard over the others. She lowered her head and shoved into the bar.
Inside, the noise was substantially louder and she wondered if she would have permanent damage to her ears after tonight. The girls were all sitting at tables, holding their hands to the sides of their heads, as were most of the patrons. No one was dancing.
The band looked as bad as they sounded. Cinnamon thought they all looked like they’d just come back from Bonnaroo and should’ve stayed home to sleep off the drugs.
John was shouting rather than singing and the few words she caught of the lyrics made her cock her head to the side in confusion. Is that “Midnight Rider?”
She had never heard a death metal version of the classic Allman Brothers song, but here it was. What should have been a rolling, Southern rock style guitar lead, was a screeching, squealing, eardrum piercing wail that made her head hurt. The bass player was sitting in a chair, surprisingly, not playing a single note. His face was impassive as if all of this was completely normal.
And then there was the drummer. The dude had rolled in a week ago when the band was without a rhythm section and claimed he would be better than any percussionist they had ever had. He had managed to dent more cymbals and break more drum heads in that time than Cinnamon had thought possible. The guy was dripping with sweat, hammering away at the tiny drum kit as if he was forging a battle ax—maybe in his mind, he was. Mjolnir, eat your heart out, Cinnamon thought, ducking through the tables toward the bar.
She jumped onto an empty stool next to an angry looking man holding out a twenty dollar bill. He held a piece of paper in one hand and the money in the other and was scanning back and forth behind the bar. Cinnamon noticed quickly that there was no one there. No bartender? Strange. Wonder where Sully is?
“Here, sweetheart.” The man shoved the twenty and his receipt at her. “I’m outta here. This is ridiculous. Man can’t even enjoy a good booby bar anymore. Do you kids call this crap music?”
He didn’t wait for an answer and speed-walked out the door. Cinnamon was vaguely jealous as she watched him disappear. She walked behind the bar and popped open the cash register. She stuffed the bill and receipt in and slammed it shut. As she did, she heard the booming voice of
Big Dick over the cacophony.
“You are fired, you jackass,” he shouted. “If you’re a drummer, then I’m Heidi Klum.”
That got a tentative laugh from the crowd, maybe they thought this was part of the show.
It wasn’t long before they realized it wasn’t as the drummer continued to bash the drums with one hand and flip Big Dick off with the other. Dick, aka Jack, had taken to performing the long sets that his band was famous for whilst sitting in a chair. He’d done so ever since the gout had gotten so bad in his ankles that his leg from his knee to his feet was a swollen, tree trunk of painful knots. His love—or perhaps addiction—to high gravity beer made him look like he was standing atop two tubular sacks of golf balls. He could no more stand for more than twenty minutes straight on stage than he could stand on the surface of the sun.
When the drummer tipped his cowboy hat back and flung a drumstick at Jack, the behemoth of a singer had finally had enough that he stood up. The entire bar full of drunks, strippers, strippers’ boyfriends, and mobster types gasped collectively. It reminded Cinnamon of watching the Jerry Springer show when they had an envelope-opening you’re-not-the-father moment. The room seemed to suddenly be devoid of oxygen as the guitar player stopped playing and Jack took two wobbly steps toward the drummer.
“Whatchu gonna do, fatass?” the drummer cackled, flinging his remaining drumstick at Jack.
The wooden missile whizzed past the corpulent singer and smacked Harley Doug on the right side of his face. It whacked like a Rocky Balboa punch to a hanging side of beef. (If you don’t know who Harley Doug is, picture a defensive end-size biker dude with a slick, bald head, fists like cantaloupes, a long, graying goatee tied in two wiry braids, and an indiscernible number of tattoos covering his arms in a tapestry of naked women and various symbols of death.) The air that had gone out of the room seconds earlier, wooshed back in as people exhaled in disbelief as Harley Doug stood up.
His face twisted in rage, all sunglasses and grinding teeth. He clenched and unclenched his fists in time with his grunts and snorts like a bull readying to charge the matador. Jack had lurched to a stop, the Titanic had hit its iceberg. Before Cinnamon could comprehend what was about to happen, Harley Doug took four, heavy steps toward the stage, bent and picked up a fallen crash cymbal, and smashed it on top of the drummer’s head.
Cinnamon was sure it was going to flatten the drummer’s skull, but as fate would have it, his stool—a cheap piece of yard sale crap that had always a faulty hydraulic lift lever—collapsed under him as the brass Zildjian cymbal hit him with a splashing bang worthy of John Bonham’s epic drum solos.
Jack Snipes watched his band erupt into an instrument throwing brawl, clutching his chest. Later, he would find out he had survived what doctor’s sometimes call a widow maker heart attack and would need a stent in his left anterior descending artery. After that, he would live another six months. But for now, he turned his head to the left and vomited a foul mixture of half digested buffalo wings and beer on the table of frat guys that had stopped in on the way to Key West. He wasn’t altogether disappointed as the obnoxious boys had been hurling insults at the dancers all night.
The boy who had gotten the worst of the river of barf all over his custom coral Ralph Lauren polo with the lime green embroidered logo and the leader of his gang of college idiots, stood and flipped their small table. Seventeen empty bottles of beer and a half full bottle of Jaegermeister went flying. Each bottle seemed to have radar and hit a patron who had not yet been involved in the brawl.
Cinnamon watched as the fight spread like a virus through the room and before she could move, every single person in the bar was throwing a punch or a kick except for her. She picked up the phone at the end of the bar and dialed Dante’s number.
“What?” he snapped when he answered. “This better be frickin’ good. I’m doin’ business right now.”
“Dante,” she yelled into the receiver, “it’s me, Cinnamon. Where the hell is Sully? The floor looks like WrestleMania came to town and they’re all getting in a practice bout.”
“What the … where are you? Are you inside?” Dante demanded.
“Yeah,” she said, looking over her shoulder as Harley Doug threw someone—maybe the weird drummer guy past her.
He slammed into the back wall behind the bar, smashing into the bottles of liquor there. Glass and alcohol rained down around her as he fell between the sink and the dusty margarita machine.
“Jesus, Dante,” she shouted. “This is about to get out of control.”
As she said it, she realized it was the understatement of the year, maybe the decade. She could barely hear Dante yelling something to someone in the background.
“Me and Sully are on the way in,” he said. “Just keep that shit from getting too rowdy and we’ll cool it down.”
The old man hung up and Cinnamon dropped the receiver, not bothering to hang it up. As hot and loud as it was, she looked down and a sudden icy chill shot into her spine.
The drummer was staring up at her, his eyes glinting. Blood trickled from a myriad of cuts to his face and his teeth were pink from a busted lip. Amazingly, his cowboy hat was still stuck on top of his head. But that wasn’t what frightened her. No, what really terrified her was that the dude was … laughing.
He hacked and coughed and spat blood as he howled with laughter.
“Now, this is what I call a party,” he said. “You ready to dance, chica?”
Cinnamon turned to run, but his hand grabbed her ankle and she fell. Glass bit into her palms as she tried to crawl away, but he had her in a grip so strong it might as well have been a vise. Strangely, he had her leg in his right hand, and in his left he held a Zippo, flickering gently sending a spray of bright sparkles out all around them, reflecting off the broken bottles.
“Where you going, sweetie?” he pulled her back toward him. “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.”
44
Light My Fire
Troy and Ian were nearing mile marker eighty on the Overseas Highway when a Jeep raced past them going the opposite direction. Though it was mostly a blur, it was obvious to Troy that it was a very unique Jeep made popular by a very unique actress, Catherine Bach, on a very unique TV show from the early eighties called The Dukes of Hazzard. The eagle on the hood flew past them, wings outstretched, as if it were diving to skewer a rodent for dinner.
“Well, I’ll be,” Troy said, just before Ian Bass jerked the wheel, preparing to pull a U-turn to intercept the vehicle.
Ian picked up the radio and was about to call in the sighting of the 1980 model Jeep CJ-7 that belonged to the murderer who had last been seen walking down south of Dion’s Quik Mart. Troy was slammed into the passenger’s side door of the Explorer and the door popped open. It swung open and he was thrown halfway out of the car and found his right elbow, right hip, and right leg dangling over the road as it screamed underneath the SUV.
Fortunately, he had somehow managed to grab the buckle of the seat belt under his butt before he was flung completely out of the open door. He squeezed it with his fingers, but felt it slipping as sweat dripped down his wrist. His Outback Tea-Stained straw cowboy hat flipped off his head and flew out into the night, tumbling down the road.
“What the hell are you doing back there?” Ian yelled.
“Tryin’ not to end up a grease spot on the highway,” Troy grunted.
Thankfully, Ian swerved a bit and Troy’s weight shifted back into the car. The door slammed shut and locked tight. That was close, Troy thought as he fought to get his breathing under control. And then he realized with a start, that his hat was gone—the hat. For a long time it had been part of what defined him, part of his character, part of his ethos.
“Say, officer,” he said, turning to look over his shoulder through the back windshield, “you wouldn’t want to turn around and go back for my—”
His thought stopped abruptly as he turned back around and saw the smoke and flames dancing
out in front of them like a lava lamp after it really got going. The sky was dark, but an orange glow lit up the trees surrounding the strip club known as Woody’s. Smoke billowed out of the top of the building, roiling toward the sky like a nuclear bomb had gone off inside.
“Dangit,” Troy gasped.
He felt the Explorer slow as Ian comprehended what was happening, then abruptly he sped up again. Troy wondered why he wasn’t calling this in. Had to be a four alarm or five alarm fire, though he doubted there were that many fire departments on the island.
“Must’ve had some kind of kitchen fire,” Ian said.
Troy tried hard to remember if they served any food at Woody’s. All he could remember ordering there was beer and the occasional shot of something or other. He squinted to jog his memory and then it came to him. Fries. They served something called sour cream and onion potato wedges. He did have a plate of those one night and guessed maybe they were deep-fried in a vat of grease—a vat that probably didn’t meet the current safety codes. And then he realized he was worried about the wrong things. Cinnamon. What if she was in there? What if the fire was so big no one could get out. She would be burned alive with all the other ugly dancers. Big Dick and the Extenders would be a great loss if they were trapped inside as well.
“Hurry,” Troy muttered, his eyes suddenly wet with tears.
“Goin’ as fast as I can, cowboy,” Ian snapped.
Troy felt the familiar surge of anxiety wrap its fingers around his spine. His lungs tightened and his breath became ragged. The awful image of Ned, gunned down in Afghanistan, raged in his mind. He tried to shove it away, but it insisted on taking over. He watched as his friend pulled himself, legs gone, bloody mess from the waist down, toward him. He reached out to grab Ned’s hand, but the gunfire started again, pelting the sand between them. He looked up to see the flames bursting out of the end of a rifle above and raised his arms to shield his eyes from the sun. He must have fainted at that point, because the next thing he knew, they were screeching into the parking lot at Woody’s.
Gator Wave Page 22
