Stormy Weather Page 3

  "Is that right?" Max smiled to himself. Why would anyone shoot a monkey?

  "They're real sick. That's what my dad said."

  "Well, I'll certainly be careful," said Max Lamb. He heard footsteps as the strange boy ran off.

  Through the viewfinder, Max noticed the monkey's brow was twitching oddly. Suddenly it was airborne. Max lowered the camera just as the animal struck his face, knocking him backward. Miniature rubbery fingers dug at Max's nostrils and eyes. He cried out fearfully. The monkey's damp fur smelled awful.

  Max Lamb began rolling in the dirt as if he were on fire. Screeching, the wiry little creature let go. Max sat up, scrubbing his face with the sleeves of his shirt. The stinging told him he'd been scratched. For starters he would require a tetanus booster, and then something more potent to counteract the monkey germs.

  As he rose to his feet, Max heard chittering behind the palm tree. He was poised to run, until he spotted the monkey loping with an addled gait in the opposite direction. It was dragging something by a strap.

  Max Lamb was enraged. The damn thing was stealing his Handycam! Idiotically he gave pursuit.

  An hour later, when Bonnie Lamb went looking for her husband, he was gone.

  Two uniformed Highway Patrol troopers stood in the rain at the top of the bridge. One was a tall, powerfully built black man. The other officer was a woman of milky smooth complexion and medium height, with a bun of reddish-brown hair. Together they leaned against the concrete rail and stared down a long length of broken rope, dangling in the breeze over the choppy brown water.

  Five motorists had phoned on their cellulars to report that a crazy man was tied to the Card Sound Bridge. That was only hours before the hurricane, when every police officer within fifty miles had been busy evacuating the sane. Nobody had time for jumpers, so nobody checked the bridge.

  The black trooper had been sent to Miami all the way from Liberty County, in northern Florida, to help clear traffic for the rescue convoys. At the command center he'd caught a glimpse of the incident notation in the dispatch log—"White male, 40-50 yrs old, 190-220 lbs, gray hair/beard, possible psych, case"-and decided to sneak down to North Key Largo for a look. Technically he was assigned to Homestead, but in the post-storm chaos it was easy to roam and not be missed. He had asked the other trooper to ride with him, and even though she was off duty she'd said yes.

  Now motorists crossing the steetj bridge braked in curiosity at the sight of the two troopers at the top. What're they looking at, Mom? Is there a dead body in the water?

  Raindrops trickled from the brim of the black trooper's Stetson as he gazed across Biscayne Bay, leaden and frothy after the dreadful storm. He reached over the rail and hauled up the soggy rope. After examining the end of it, he showed the rope to the other trooper and said, with a weariness: "That's my boy."

  The rope hadn't snapped in the hurricane. It had been cut with a knife.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tony Torres sat in what remained of his living room and sipped what remained of his Chivas. He found it amusing that his "Salesman of the Year" award had survived the hurricane; it was all that remained hanging on the rain-soaked walls. Tony Torres recalled the party two months earlier, when they'd given him the cheap laminated plaque. It was his reward for selling seventy-seven double-wide house trailers, eighteen more than any other salesman in the history of PreFab Luxury Homes, formerly Tropic Trailers, formerly A-Plus Affordable Homes, Ltd. In the cutthroat world of mobile-home sales, Tony Torres had become a star. His boss had presented the Chivas and a thousand-dollar bonus along with the plaque. They'd paid a waitress to dance topless on a table and sing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

  Oh well, Tony Torres thought. Life's a fucking roller coaster. He stroked the stock of the shotgun that lay across his globe-shaped lap, and remembered things he wished he didn't. For instance, that bullshit in the sales pitch about U.S. government safety regulations ...

  The Steens had questioned him thoroughly about hurricanes. So had the Ramirezes and the pain-in-the-ass Stichlers. So had Beatrice Jackson, the widow, and her no-neck son. Tony Torres always said what he'd been coached to say, that PreFab Luxury Homes built state-of-the-art homes guaranteed to withstand high winds. Uncle Sam set the specs. It's all there in the brochure!

  So Tony's customers secured their mortgages and bought up the double-wides, and then the hurricane came and blew them away. All seventy-seven. The trailers imploded, exploded, popped off the tiedowns and took off like fucking aluminum ducks. Not one of the damn things made it through the storm. One minute they were pleasant-looking middle-class dwellings, with VCRs and convertible sofas and baby cribs ... and the next minute they were shrapnel. Tony Torres had driven to the trailer park to see for himself. The place looked like a war zone. He was about to get out of the car when somebody recognized him-old man Stichler, who began spluttering insanely and hurling jagged debris at the salesman. Tony drove off at a high rate of speed. Later he learned that the widow Jackson was found dead in the wreckage of the trailer court.

  Tony Torres was unfamiliar with remorse, but he did feel a stab of sorrow. The Chivas took care of that. How was I to know? he thought. I'm a salesman, not a goddamn engineer.

  The more Tony drank, the less sympathy he retained for his customers. They goddamn well knew.. Knew they were buying a tin can instead of a real house. Knew the risks, living in a hurricane zone. These were grown-ups, Tony Torres told himself. They made a choice.

  Still, he anticipated trouble. The shotgun was a comfort. Unfortunately, anybody who wanted to track him down had only to look in the Dade County phone book. Being a salesman meant being available to all of humanity.

  So let 'em come! Tony thought. Any moron customers got a problem, let 'em see what the storm did to my house. They get nasty, I turn the matter over to Sefior Remington here.

  Shouts rousted Tony Torres from the sticky embrace of his BarcaLounger. He took the gun and a flashlight to the front of the house. Standing in the driveway was a man with an unfortunate pin-striped suit and a face that appeared to have been modified with a crowbar.

  "My sister!" the man exclaimed, pointing at a pile of busted lumber.

  Tony Torres spotted the prone form of a woman under the trusses. Her eyes were half closed, and a fresh streak of blood colored her face. The woman groaned impressively. The man told Tony to call 911 rightaway.

  "First tell me what happened," the salesman said.

  "Just look-part of your damn roof fell down on her!"

  "Hmmm," said Tony Torres.

  "For Christ's sake, don't just stand there."

  "Your sister, huh?" Tony walked up to the woman and shined the flashlight in her eyes. The woman squinted reflexively, raising both hands to block out the light.

  Tony Torres said, "Guess you're not paralyzed, darling."

  He tucked the flashlight under one arm and raised the shotgun toward the man. "Here's the deal, sport. The phones are blown, so we won't be calling 911 unless you got a cellular in your pants, and that looks more like a pistol to me. Second of all, even if we could call 911 we'll be waiting till Halloween. Every ambulance from here to Key West is busy because of the storm. Your 'sister' should've thought of that before her accident—"

  "What the hell you—"

  Tony Torres took the pistol from the man's waist. "Third of all," the salesman said, "my damn roof didn't fall on nobody. Those trusses came off the neighbor's house. That would be Mister Leonel Varga, next door. My own personal roof is lying in pieces somewhere out in the Everglades, is my guess."

  From beneath the lumber, the woman said: "Shit, Snapper." The man shot her a glare, then looked away.

  Tony Torres said: "I'm in the business of figuring people out quick. That's what a good salesman does. And if she's your sister, sport, then I'm twins with Mel Gibson."

  The man with the crooked jaw shrugged.

  "Point is," Tony said, "she ain't really hurt. You ain't really her brother. And whatever fucked-u
p plan you had for ripping me off is now officially terminated."

  The man scowled bitterly. "Hey, it was her idea."

  Tony ordered him to lift the wooden trusses off his partner. When the woman got up, the salesman noticed she was both attractive and intelligent-looking. He motioned with the shotgun.

  "Both of you come inside. Hell, inside is pretty much outside, thanks to that goddamn storm. But come in, anyhow, 'cause I'd love to hear your story. I could use a laugh."

  The woman smoothed the front of her dress. "We made a bad mistake. Just let us go, OK?"

  Tony Torres smiled. "That's funny, darling." He swung the Remington toward the house and pulled the trigger. The blast tore a hole the size of a soccer ball in the garage door.

  "Hush," said the drunken salesman, cupping a hand to one ear. "Hear that? Dead fucking silence. Shoot off a twelve-gauge and nobody cares. Nobody comes to see. Nobody comes to help. Know why? Because of the hurricane. The whole place is a madhouse!"

  The man with the crooked jaw asked, more out of curiosity than concern: "What is it you want with us?"

  "I haven't decided," said Tony Torres. "Let's have a drinkypoo."

  A week before the hurricane, Felix Mojack died of a viper bite to the ankle. Ownership of his failing wildlife-import business passed to a nephew, Augustine. On the rainy morning he learned of his uncle's death, Augustine was at home practicing his juggling. He had all the windows open, and the Black Crowes playing on the stereo. He was barefoot and wore only a pair of royal-blue gym shorts. He stood in the living room, juggling in time to the music. The objects that he juggled were human skulls; he was up to five at once. The faster Augustine juggled, the happier he was.

  On the kitchen table was an envelope from Paine Webber. It contained a check for $21,344.55. Augustine had no need for or interest in the money. He was almost thirty-two years old, and his life was as simple and empty as one could be. Sometimes he deposited the Paine Webber dividends, and sometimes he mailed them off to charities, renegade political candidates or former girlfriends. Augustine sent not a penny to his father's defense lawyers; that was the old man's debt, and he could damn well settle it when he got out of prison.

  Augustine's juggling was a private diversion. The skulls were artifacts and medical specimens he'd acquired from friends. When he had them up in the air– three, four, five skulls arcing fluidly from hand to hand– Augustine could feel the full rush of their faraway lives. It was inexplicably and perhaps unwholesomely exhilarating. Augustine didn't know their names, or how they'd lived or died, but from touching them he drew energy.

  In his spare time Augustine read books and watched television and hiked what was left of the Florida wilderness. Even before he became wealthy-when he worked on his father's fishing boat, and later in law school Augustine nursed an unspecific anger that he couldn't trace and wasn't sure he should. It manifested itself in the occasional urge to burn something down or blow something up-a high-rise, a new interstate highway, that sort of thing.

  Now that Augustine had both the time and the money, he found himself without direction for these radical sentiments, and with no trustworthy knowledge of heavy explosives. Out of guilt, he donated large sums to respectable causes such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy. His ambition to noble violence remained a harmless fantasy. Meanwhile he bobbed through life's turbulence like driftwood.

  The near-death experience that made Augustine so rich had given him zero insight into a grand purpose or cosmic destiny. Augustine barely remembered the damn Beechcraft going down. Certainly he saw no blinding white light at the end of a cool tunnel, heard no dead relatives calling to him from heaven. All he recalled of the coma that followed the accident was an agonizing and unquenchable thirst.

  After recovering from his injuries, Augustine didn't return to the hamster-wheel routine of law school. The insurance settlement financed a comfortable aimlessness that many young men would have found appealing. Yet Augustine was deeply unhappy. One night, in a fit of depression, he violently purged his bookshelves of all genius talents who had died too young. This included his treasured Jack London.

  Typically, Augustine was waiting for a woman to come along and fix him. So far, it hadn't happened.

  One time a dancer whom Augustine was dating caught him juggling his skulls in the bedroom. She thought it was a stunt designed to provoke a reaction. She told him it wasn't funny, it was perverted. Then she moved to New York. A year or so later, for no particular reason, Augustine sent the woman one of his dividend checks from Paine Webber. She used the money to buy a Toyota Supra and sent Augustine a snapshot of herself, smiling and waving in the driver's seat. Augustine wondered who'd taken the picture and what he'd thought of the new car.

  Augustine had no brothers and sisters, his mother was in Nevada and his father was in the slammer. The closest relative was his uncle Felix Mojack, the wildlife importer. As a boy, Augustine often visited his uncle's small cluttered farm out in the boondocks. It was more fun than going to the zoo, because Felix let Augustine help with the animals. In particular, Felix encouraged his nephew to familiarize himself with exotic snakes, as Felix himself was phobic (and, it turned out, fatally incompetent) when it came to handling reptiles.

  After Augustine grew up, he saw less and less of his busy uncle. Progress conspired against Felix; development swept westward, and zoning regulations forced him to move his operation repeatedly. Nobody, it seemed, wished to build elementary schools or shopping malls within walking distance of caged jungle cats and wild cobras. The last time Felix Mojack was forced to relocate his animals, Augustine gave him ten thousand dollars for the move.

  At the time of Felix's death, the farm inventory listed one male African lion, three cougars, a gelded Cape buffalo, two Kodiak bears, ninety-seven parrots and macaws, eight Nile crocodiles, forty-two turtles, seven hundred assorted lizards, ninety-three snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and eighty-eight rhesus monkeys.

  The animals were kept on a nine-acre spread off Krome Avenue, not far from the federal prison. The day after the funeral, Augustine drove out to the place alone. He had a feeling that his uncle ran a loose operation, and a tour of the facility corroborated his suspicion. The fencing was buckled and rusty, the cages needed new hinges, and the concrete reptile pits hadn't been drained and cleaned in months. In the tar-paper shed that Felix had used for an office, Augustine found paperwork confirming his uncle's low regard for U.S. Customs regulations.

  It came as no surprise that Felix had been a smuggler; rather, Augustine was grateful that his uncle's choice of contraband had been exotic birds and snakes, and not something else. Wildlife, however, presented its own unique challenges. While bales of marijuana required no feeding, bears and cougars did. Lean and hungry was a mild description of the illegal menagerie; Augustine was appalled by the condition of some of the animals and presumed their deterioration was a result of his uncle's recent financial troubles. Fortunately, the two young Mexicans who worked for Felix Mojack graciously agreed to help out for a few days after his death. They stocked the freezers with raw meat for the large carnivores, bought boxloads of feed for the parrots and monkeys, and restocked on white mice and insects for the reptiles.

  Meanwhile Augustine scrambled to locate a buyer for the animals, somebody qualified to take good care of them. Augustine was so preoccupied with the task that he didn't pay enough attention to news reports of a tropical storm intensifying in the Caribbean. Even when it bloomed into a hurricane, and Augustine saw the weather bulletin on television, he assumed it would do what most storms did in late summer-veer north, away from South Florida, on the prevailing Atlantic steering currents.

  Once it became clear that the hurricane would strike southern Dade County with a direct hit, Augustine had little time to act. He was grimly aware what sustained one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds would do to his dead uncle's shabby farm. He spent the morning and afternoon on the telephone, trying to find a secure location for the animals. Interest inva
riably dropped off at the mention of a Cape buffalo. At dusk Augustine drove out to fasten tarps and tie-downs on the cages and pens. Sensing the advancing storm, the bears and big cats paced nervously, growling in agitation. The parrots were in a panic; the frenetic squawking attracted several large hawks to the nearby pines. Augustine stayed two hours and decided it was hopeless. He sent the Mexicans home and drove to a nearby Red Cross shelter to wait out the storm.

  When he returned at dawn, the place was destroyed. The fencing was strewn like holiday tinsel across the property. The corrugated roofing had been peeled off the compound like a sardine tin. Except for a dozen befuddled turtles, all his uncle's wild animals had escaped into the scrub and marsh and, inevitably, the Miami suburbs. As soon as phone service was restored, Augustine notified the police what had happened. The dispatcher laconically estimated it would be five or six days before an officer could be spared, because everybody was working double shifts after the hurricane. When Augustine asked how far a Gaboon viper could travel in five or six days, the dispatcher said she'd try to send somebody out there sooner.