Native Tongue Part 28

"Model citizens," said Bud Schwartz. "That's us."

He lowered himself into a walnut captain's chair but stood again quickly, as if the seat were hot. He'd forgotten about the d.a.m.n thing in his pocket until it touched him in the right t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e. Irritably he removed it from his pants and placed it on an end table. He had wrapped it in a blue lace doily.

He said, "Can we do something with this, please?"

"There's a Mason jar in the cupboard over the stove," Molly said, "and some pickle juice in the refrigerator."

"You're kidding."

"This is important, Bud. It's evidence."

In the hall he pa.s.sed Danny Pogue carrying a teapot on a silver tray. "You believe this s.h.i.t?" Bud Schwartz said. He held up the doily.

"What now?"

"She wants me to pickle the G.o.dd.a.m.n thing!"

Danny Pogue made a squeamish face. "What for?" When he returned to the living room, Molly was rocking tranquilly in the chair. He poured the tea and said, "You must be feeling better."

"Better than I look." She drank carefully, watching Danny Pogue over the rim of the cup. In a tender voice she said: "You don't know what this means to me, the fact that you stayed to help."

"It wasn't just me. It was Bud, too."

"He's not a bad person," Molly McNamara allowed. "I suspect he's a man of principle, deep down."

Danny Pogue had never thought of his partner as a man of principle, but maybe Molly had spotted something. While Bud was an incorrigible thief, he played by a strict set of rules. No guns, no violence, no hard drugsa"Danny Pogue supposed that these could be called principles. He hoped that Molly recognized that he, too, had his limitsa"moral borders he would not cross. Later on, when she was asleep, he would make a list.

He said, "So what are you gonna do now? Stay at it?"

"To tell the truth, I'm not certain." She put down the teacup and dabbed her swollen lips with a napkin. "I've had some experts go over Kingsbury's files. Lawyers, accountants, people sympathetic to the cause. They made up a cash-flow chart, ran the numbers up and down and sideways. They say it's all very interesting, these foreign companies, but it would probably take months for the IRS and Customs to sort it out; another year for an indictment. We simply don't have that kind of time."

"Shoot," said Danny Pogue. He hadn't said "shoot" since the third grade, but he'd been trying to clean up his language in Molly's presence.

"I'm a little discouraged," she went on. "I guess I'd gotten my hopes up prematurely."

Danny Pogue felt so lousy that he almost told her about the other files, about the blackmail scam that he and Bud Schwartz were running on the great Francis X. Kingsbury.

He said, "There's nothing we can do? Just let him go ahead and murder off them b.u.t.terflies and snails?" Molly had given him a magazine clipping about the rare tropical snails of Key Largo.

She said, "I didn't say we're giving upa""

"Because we should talk to Bud. He"ll think a something."

"Every day we lose precious time," Molly said. "Every day they're that much closer to pouring the concrete."

Danny Pogue nodded. "Let's talk to Bud. Bud's sharp as a tack about stuff like thisa""

Molly stopped rocking and raised a hand. "I heard something, didn't you?"

From the kitchen came m.u.f.fled percussions of a strugglea"men grunting, something heavy hitting a wall, a jar breaking.

Danny Pogue was shaking when he stood up. The b.u.m foot made him think twice about running.

"Hand me the purse," Molly said. "I'll need my gun."

But Danny Pogue was frozen to the pine floor. His eyelids fluttered and his arms stiffened at his side. All he could think was: Somebody's killing Bud!

"Danny, did you hear me? Get me my purse!"

A block of orange appeared in the hallway. It was a tall man in a bright rainsuit and a moldy-looking shower cap. He had a damp silvery beard and black wraparound sungla.s.ses and something red fastened to his neck. The man carried Bud Schwartz in a casual way, one arm around the midsection. Bud Schwartz was limp, gasping, flushed in the face.

Danny Pogue's tongue was as dry as plaster when the stranger stepped out of the shadow.

"Oh, it's you," Molly McNamara said. "Now be careful, don't hurt that young man."

The stranger dropped Bud Schwartz b.u.t.t-first on the pine and said, "I caught him putting somebody's fingertip in a Mason jar."

"I'm the one who told him to," said Molly. "Now, Governor, you just settle down."

"What happened to you?" the stranger demanded. "Who did this to you, Miss McNamara?"

He took off the sungla.s.ses and glared accusingly at Danny Pogue, who emitted a pitiful hissing noise as he shook his head. Bud Schwartz, struggling to his feet, said: "It wasn't us, it was some d.a.m.n Cuban."

"Tell me a name," said the stranger.

"I don't know," said Molly McNamara, "but I got a good bite out of him."

"The finger," Bud Schwartz explained, still gathering his breath.

The stranger knelt beside the rocking chair and gently examined the raw-looking cuts and bruises on Molly's face. "This is...intolerable." He was whispering to himself and no one else. "This is barbarism."

Molly touched the visitor's arm and said, "I'll be all right. Really."

Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue had seen men like this only in prison, and not many. Wild was the only way to describe the face...wild and driven and fearless, but not necessarily insane. It would be foolish, perhaps even fatal, to a.s.sume the guy was s.p.a.ced.

He turned to Bud Schwartz and said, "How about giving me that Cuban's nub."

"I dropped it on the floor." Bud Schwartz thought: Christ, he's not going to make me go pick it up, is he?

Danny Pogue said, "No sweat, I'll find it."

"No," said the man in the orange rainsuit. "I'll grab it on the way out." He squeezed Molly's hands and stood up. "Will you be all right?"

"Yes, they're taking good care of me."

The stranger nodded at Bud Schwartz, who couldn't help but notice that one of the man's eyes was slipping out of the socket. The man calmly reinserted it.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said to Bud Schwartz. "Well, actually, I did mean to hurt you."

Molly explained: "He didn't know you fellows were my guests, that's all."

"I'll be in touch," said the stranger. He kissed Molly on the cheek and said he would check on her in a day or two. Then he was gone.

Bud Schwartz waited until he heard the door slam. Then he said: "What the h.e.l.l was that?"

"A friend," Molly replied. They had known each other a long time. She had worked as a volunteer in his gubernatorial campaign, whipping up both the senior-citizen vote and the environmental coalitions. Later, when he quit office and vanished, Molly was one of the few who knew what happened, and one of the few who understood. Over the years he had kept in touch in his own peculiar waya"sometimes a spectral glimpse, sometimes a sensational entrance; jarring cameos that were as hair-raising as they were poignant.

"Guy's big," said Danny Pogue. "Geez, he looks likea"did he do time? What's his story?"

"We don't want to know," Bud Schwartz said. "Am I right?"

"You're absolutely right," said Molly McNamara.

Shortly before midnight on July 23, Jim Tile received a radio call that an unknown individual was shooting at automobiles on Card Sound Road. The trooper told the dispatcher he was en route, and that he'd notify the Monroe County Sheriff's Office if he needed back-upsa"which he knew he wouldn't.

The cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road a half-mile east of the big bridge. Jim Tile took inventory from the stickers on the b.u.mpers: two Alamos, a Hertz, a National and an Avis. The rental firms had started putting b.u.mper plates on all their automobiles, which served not only as advertis.e.m.e.nt but as a warning to local drivers that a disoriented tourist was nearby. On this night, though, the bright stickers had betrayed their unsuspecting drivers. Each of the vehicles bore a single.45-caliber bullet hole in the left-front fender panel.

Jim Tile knew exactly what had happened. He took brief statements from the motorists, who seemed agitated by the suggestion that anyone would fire at them simply because they were tourists. Jim Tile a.s.sured them that this sort of thing didn't happen every day. Then he called Homestead for tow trucks to get the three rental cars whose engine blocks had been mortally wounded by the sniper in the mangroves.

One of the drivers, a French-Canadian textile executive, used a cellular phone to call the Alamo desk at Miami International Airport and explain the situation. Soon new cars were on the way.

It took Jim Tile several hours to clear the scene. A pair of Monroe County deputies stopped by and helped search for sh.e.l.l casings until the mosquitoes drove them away. After the officers had fled, and after the tourists had motored north in a wary caravan of Thunderbirds, Skylarks and Zephyrs, Jim Tile got in his patrol car and mashed on the horn with both fists. Then he rolled up the windows, turned up the air conditioner and waited for his sad old friend to come out of the swamp.

"I'm sorry." Skink offered the trooper a stick of EDTIAR insect repellent.

"You promised to behave," said Jim Tile. "Now you've put me in a tough position."

"Had to blow off some steam," Skink said. "Anyway, I didn't hurt anybody." He took off his sungla.s.ses and tinkered unabashedly with the fake eyeball. "Haven't you ever had days like this? Days where you just had to go out and shoot the s.h.i.t out of something, didn't matter what?"

Jim Tile sighed. "Rental cars?"

"Why the h.e.l.l not."

The tension dissolved into weary silence. The men had talked of such things before. When Clinton Tyree was the governor of Florida, Jim Tile had been his chief bodyguarda"an unusually prestigious a.s.signment for a black state trooper. After Clinton Tyree resigned, Jim Tile immediately lost his job on the elite security detail. The new governor, it was explained, felt more comfortable around p.e.c.k.e.rwoods. By the end of that fateful week, Jim Tile had found himself back on road patrol, Harney County, night shifts.

Over the years he had stayed close to Clinton Tyree, partly out of friendship, partly out of admiration and partly out of cert.i.tude that the man would need police a.s.sistance now and then, which he had. Whenever Skink got restless and moved his hermitage to deeper wilderness, Jim Tile would quietly put in for a transfer and move, too. This meant more rural two-lanes, more night duty and more ignorant mean-eyed crackersa"but the trooper knew that his friend would have done the same for him, had fortunes been reversed. Besides, Jim Tile was confident of his own abilities and believed that one day he'd be in charge of the entire highway patrola"dishing out a few special night shifts himself.

Usually Skink kept to himself, except for the occasional public sighting when he dashed out of the pines to retrieve a fresh opossum or squirrel off the road. Once in a while, though, something triggered him in a tumultuous way and the results were highly visible. Standing on the crowded Fort Lauderdale beach, he'd once put four rounds into the belly of an inbound Eastern 727. Another time he'd crashed the Miss Florida pageant and tearfully heaved a dead baby manatee on stage to dramatize the results of waterfront development. It was fortunate, in such instances, that no one had recognized the h.o.a.ry cyclopic madman as Clinton Tyree; it was even more fortunate that Jim Tile had been around to help the ex-governor slip away safely and collect what was left of his senses.

Now, sitting in the trooper's patrol car, Skink polished his gla.s.s eye with a bandanna and apologized for causing his friend so much inconvenience. "If you've got to arrest me," he said, I'll understand."

"Wouldn't do a d.a.m.n bit of good," said Jim Tile. "But I tell you whata"I'd appreciate if you'd let me know what's going on down here."

"The usual," Skink said. "The bad guys are kicking our collective a.s.s."

"We got a dead body off the bridge, a guy named Angel Gaviria. You know about that, right?" The trooper didn't wait for an answer. "The coroner is saying suicide or accident, but I was there and I don't think it's either one. The deceased was a well-known sc.u.m-bucket and they don't usually have the decency to kill themselves. Usually someone else does the honor."

"Jim, we live in troubled times."

"The other day I pull over a blue Ford sedan doing eighty-six down the bridge. Turns out to be a Feeb."

"FBI?" Skink perked up. "All the way down here?"

"Hawkins was his name. He badges me, we get to chatting. Turns out he's working a case at the Amazing Kingdom. Something to do with militant bunny b.u.g.g.e.rs and missing blue-tongued rats." Jim Tile gave a lazy laugh. "Now this is the FBI, interviewing elves and cowboys and fairy princesses. I don't suppose you can fill me in."

Skink was pleased that the feds had taken notice of events in North Key Largo. He said, "All I know is bits and pieces."

"Speaking of which, what can you tell me about killer whales? This morning a semi rolls over and I got stinking gobs of dead whale all over my nice clean blacktop. I'm talking tonnage."

Skink said, "That would explain the buzzard s.h.i.t on this state vehicle." Secretly he wished he could have been there to witness the spectacle.

"You think it's funny?"

"I think," said Skink, "you should prepare for the worst."

Jim Tile took off his Stetson and lowered his face in front of the dashboard vents; the cool air felt good on his cheeks. A gumdrop-shaped sports car blew by doing ninety-plus, and the trooper barely glanced up. He radioed the dispatcher in Miami and announced he was going off duty. "I'm tired," he said to Skink.

"Me, too. You haven't seen anybody from Game and Fish, have you?"

"The panther patrol? No, I haven't." Jim Tile sat up. "I haven't seen the plane in at least a month."

Skink said, "Must've broken down. Else they're working the Fokahatchee."

"Listen," the trooper said, "I won't ask about the dead guy on the bridge, and I won't ask about the whalea""

"I had nothing whatsoever to do with the whale."

"Fair enough," said Jim Tile, "but what about torching those bulldozers up on 905? Were you in on that?"

Skink looked at him blankly. The trooper described what had happened that very afternoon at the Falcon Trace construction project. "They're looking for a guy who used to work at the Kingdom. They say he's gone nuts. They say he's got a gun."

"Is that right?" Skink tugged pensively at his beard.

"Do you know this person?"

"Possibly."

"Then could you possibly get him a message to stop this s.h.i.t before it gets out of hand?"

"It's already out of hand," Skink said. "The sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes are beating up little old ladies."

"d.a.m.n." The trooper stared out the window of the car. A trio of mosquitoes bounced off the gla.s.s and circled his head. Skink reached over and s.n.a.t.c.hed the insects out of the air. Then he opened the window and let them buzz away into the thick fragrant night.

Jim Tile said, "I'm worried about you."

Skink grinned. "That's a good one."

"Maybe I should haul you in after all."