Carl Hiaasen (50 page)

“You and me, two of the most cynical people on God’s green earth … It’s almost like a revelation, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is.”

He tried to throttle down and think like a reporter, beginning with a list of questions: Who in their right mind would give up a $14 million Lotto ticket? Why would they send it to him, of all people? And how’d they know where he was?

“It makes no damn sense.”

“None,” JoLayne agreed. That’s what was so wondrous. She’d been over it again and again—there were no sensible answers, because it was impossible. What had happened was absolutely impossible. She didn’t believe in miracles, but she was reconsidering the concept of divine mystery.

“The lottery agency said the other ticket was bought in Florida City. That’s three hundred miles away.”

“I know, Tom.”

“How in the world …”

“Honey, put it away now. Someplace safe.”

“What should we do?” he asked.

“‘We’? It’s your name on that envelope, buster. Come on, let’s get moving. Before it’s too dark.”

It was a few hours later, after they’d returned from their mission and JoLayne had drifted to sleep, when Tom Krome found the answer to one of the many, many questions.

The only answer he’d ever get.

He slipped out of bed to catch the late TV news, in case the men on Pearl Key had been found. He knew he shouldn’t have been concerned—dead or alive, the two robbers wouldn’t say much. They couldn’t, if they wished to stay out of prison.

Nonetheless, Krome was glued to the tube. As though he needed independent proof, a confirmation that the events of the past ten days were real and not a dream.

But the news had nothing. So he decided to surprise JoLayne (and demonstrate his domestic suitability) by washing the dinner dishes. He was scraping a tangle of noodles into the garbage when he spotted it in the bottom of the can:

A blue envelope made out to “Ms. Jo Lane Lucks.”

He retrieved it and placed it on the counter.

The envelope had been opened cleanly, possibly with a very long fingernail. Inside the envelope was a card, a bright Georgia O’Keeffe print.

And inside the card … nothing. Not a word.

And Tom Krome knew: That’s how the second lottery ticket had been delivered. It was sent to JoLayne, not him.

He could’ve cried, he was so happy. Or laughed, he was so mad.

Again she’d been one step ahead of him. It would always be that way. He’d have to get used to it.

She was too much.

Vultures starred in his nightmares, and Chub blamed the nigger woman.

Before boarding the skiff, she’d warned him in harrowing detail about black vultures. The sky over Pearl Key was full of them. “They’re gonna come for your friend,” she’d said, kneeling beside him on the shore, “and there’s nothing you can do.”

People think all buzzards hunt by smell, she’d said, but that’s not so. Turkey vultures use their noses; black vultures hunt purely by sight. Their eyeballs are twenty or thirty times more powerful than a human’s, she’d said. When they’re circling like that—the nigger woman pointing upward and, sure enough, there they were—it means they’re searching for carrion.

“What’s that?” Chub, fumbling to open his ragged eyelid, so he might see the birds better. Every part of him burned with fever; he felt infected from head to toe.

“Carrion,” the woman had replied, “is another word for dead meat.”

“Jesus Willy.”

“The trick is to keep moving, OK? Whatever you do, don’t lie down and doze off,” she’d said, “because they might think you’re dead. That’s when they’ll come for you. And once they get started, Lord … Just remember to do like I said.
Don’t stop moving
. Arms, legs, whatever. As long as they see movement, buzzards’ll usually keep away.”

“But I gotta sleep.”

“Only when it’s dark. They feed mainly in the daytime. At night you should be safe.”

That’s when she’d pressed the can of pepper spray into his crab-swollen fist and said, “Just in case.”

“Will it stop ’em?” Chub peered dubiously at the container. Bode Gazzer had purchased it at the Lauderdale gun show.

“It’s made to knock grizzly bears on their asses,” the
woman had told him. “Ten percent concentration of oleoresin capsicum. That’s two million Scoville Heat Units.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

“It means big medicine, Gomer. Good luck.”

Moments later: the sound of an outboard engine revving. Sure as shit, they’d left him out here. She and the white guy—deserted him on this goddamn island with his dead friend, and the sky darkening with vultures.

They’d come down for Bode in the midafternoon, just as the woman predicted. At the time, Chub was squatting in the mangroves, huffing the last of the WD-40. It didn’t give a fraction of the jolt that boat glue did, but it was better than nothing.

Teetering from the woods, he’d spotted the buzzards picking eagerly at his partner’s corpse—six, seven, maybe more. Some had held strings of flesh in their beaks, others nibbled shreds of camouflage fabric. On the ground the birds had seemed so large, especially with their bare, scalded-looking heads and vast white-tipped wings—Chub had been surprised. When he ran at them they’d hissed and spooked, although not far; into the treetops.

On the bright sand around him he’d noticed the ominous shrinking shadows of others dropping closer, flying tighter circles. That’s when Chub decided to run far away from Bode’s dead body, to a safer part of the island. He grabbed the pepper spray and half lurched, half galloped through the mangroves. Finally he came to a secluded clearing and keeled in exhaustion, landing on his wounded shoulder.

Almost immediately the first nightmare began: invisible beaks, pecking and gouging at his face. He bolted upright, sopped in sweat. In his next dream, which followed quickly, the rancid scavengers encircled him and, by aligning wing to wing, formed a picket from which he couldn’t escape. Again he awakened with a shiver.

It was all her fault, the nigger girl from the Black Tide—she’d
put the crazy buzzard talk in his head. They were only birds, for chrissake. Stupid, smelly birds.

Still, Chub kept his good eye trained on their glide pattern, the high thermals.

At dusk he made his way back to the abandoned campsite, in hopes of finding a dry tarp and some beer. When he spotted the paper grocery bag in the bushes, he got an idea about how to pass the long nerve-racking night. He dumped out the crinkled tube of marine adhesive and gave one last squeeze, to make sure he hadn’t missed any. Then he shook the can of pepper spray and shot a stream inside the empty bag.

Thinking: Stuff’s gotta be heavy-duty to take out a fuckin’ grizzly.

Chub had never heard of “Scoville Heat” but he assumed from its potent-sounding name that a whiff of two million units would produce a deliriously illicit high—exactly what he needed to take his mind off the buzzards and Bodean Gazzer. Chub further assumed (also mistakenly) that the pepper spray was designed to impair only an attacker’s vision and that the fumes could be ingested as easily as those of common spray paint, and that he’d be safe from the caustic effects if he merely covered his eyes while inhaling.

Which is what he did, sucking the bag to his face.

The screams lasted twenty-five minutes; the vomiting, twice as long.

Chub had never known such volcanic misery—skin, throat, eyes, lungs, scalp, lips; all aflame. He slapped himself senseless trying to wipe off the poison, but it seemed to have entered chemically through his pores. Daft from pain, he clawed at himself until his fingertips bled.

When his strength was gone, Chub lay motionless, mulling options. An obvious one was suicide, a sure release from agony, but he wasn’t ready to go that far. Possibly, if he’d had his .357 … but
he surely couldn’t work up the nerve to hang himself from a tree or slice his own wrists.

A sounder choice, Chub felt, was to club himself unconscious and remain that way until the acid symptoms wore off. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the vultures and what the nigger woman had told him: Keep moving! Once the sun came up, blacking out would be dangerous. The deader you looked, the faster the hungry bastards would come for you.

So Chub made himself stay awake. In the end, what he most wanted was to be saved, plucked off the island. And he wasn’t picky about whether the rescue helicopter was black or red or canary yellow; or whether it was being flown by niggers or Jews or even card-carrying communist infiltrators. Nor did he give two shits whether they carried him back to Miami or straight to Raiford prison, or even to a secret NATO fortress in the Bahamas.

The main thing was to get away from this horrible place, as soon as possible.
Away
.

And if, at dawn the next morning, there actually had been a rescue chopper searching Florida Bay, and if it had flown low over Pearl Key, the crew would have noticed something that would have brought them banking around sharply for a second pass.

A lone naked man waving for help.

The spotter in the helicopter would’ve seen through his high-powered binoculars that the stranded man had a lank gray ponytail; that his body was dappled with dried blood; that one shoulder was heavily bandaged and one hand was swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt; that his sunburned face was raw and striated, and that one eye appeared scabbed and black.

And the crew would have been impressed that, despite the stranded man’s severe injuries and evident pain, he’d managed to construct a device for signaling aircraft. The crew would’ve admired
how he had lashed together mangrove branches to make a long pole, and on the end of it he had fastened a swatch of shiny fabric.

But in the end, there was nobody to see the stranded man. No helicopters were in the sky over Pearl Key at dawn the next day, or the day after, or for many days that followed.

No one was searching for Onus Gillespie, the person known as Chub, because no one knew he was missing.

Every morning he stood in the sunniest spot on the island and feverishly waved his makeshift flag at glistening specks in the blue—727s from Miami International, F-16s from Boca Chica, Lears from North Palm Beach, all of which were flying far too high over Florida Bay to see him.

Finally the beer was gone, then the beef jerky and then the last of the fresh water. Not long afterwards, Chub lay down in the coarse bleached sand and did not move. Then the vultures came, just like the bitch had said they would.

Nine months later a poacher would find a skull, two femurs, a rusty can of pepper spray and an oilskin tarpaulin. He would be appropriately intrigued by the doomed man’s handmade pole and the unusual streamer tied to it:

A pair of skimpy orange shorts, just like babes at Hooters wore.

On the drive to Simmons Wood, they went back and forth with the radio. Tom got a Clapton, while JoLayne took a Bonnie Raitt and a Natalie Cole (on the argument that “Layla” was long enough to count as two songs). They wound up in a discussion of guitarists, a topic as yet unexplored in the relationship. JoLayne was delighted to hear Tom include Robert Cray in his personal pantheon, and as a reward yielded the next two selections. “Fortunate Son” was playing full blast when they arrived.

JoLayne bolted from the car and ran to the
FOR SALE
sign, which she yanked triumphantly from the ground. Tom took the baby cooters out of the tank one at a time and placed them in a linen pillowcase, which he knotted loosely at the neck.

“Careful,” JoLayne told him.

A chapel-like stillness embraced them as soon as they entered the woods, and they didn’t speak again until they got to the creek. JoLayne sat on the bluff. She patted the ground and said, “Places, Mr. Krome.”

The sun was almost down, and the pale dome of sky above them was tinged softly with magenta. The air was crisp and northern. JoLayne pointed out a pair of wild mergansers in the water and, on the bank, a raccoon prowling.

Tom leaned forward to see more. His face was bright. He looked like a kid at a great museum.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m thinking anything is possible. Anything. That’s how I feel when I’m out here.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to feel.”

“Anyway, what’s a miracle? It’s all relative,” he said. “It’s all in somebody’s head.”

“Or in their heart. Hey, how’re my babies?”

Tom peeked in the pillowcase. “Excited,” he reported. “They must know what’s up.”

“Well, let’s wait till Mister Raccoon is gone.”

JoLayne smiled to herself and wrapped her arms around her knees. A flight of swallows came top-gunning out of the tree line, gulping gnats. Later Tom was certain he heard the whinny of a horse, but she said no, it was just an owl.

“I’ll learn,” he promised.

“There’s another piece of land, not far from here. Once I found a bear track there.”

In the twilight Tom could barely make out her expression.

“A black bear,” she said, “not a grizzly. You’ll still need to go to Alaska for one of those.”

“Any old bear would be fine.”

She said, “It’s also for sale, that land where I saw the track. I’m not sure how many acres.”