Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (45 page)

waited to hear the dynamite
hit the ground, but instead of the smack against hard rock, I heard
a soft
thump
.

Then I heard Blinky’s yell.
“Jake,
ay, mierda
!
Jake,
maldito sea
,
it’s on the timber over the ledge. I can see the fuse
burning.”

Then I heard Jo Jo. Her vocabulary hadn’t
improved. I watched the flashlight beam playing across the rocks
above the ledge. Finally it stopped at the juncture of a vertical
and horizontal timber. Wedged between them was a stick of dynamite
with a glowing fuse.

The timber was at least twelve feet off the
ground. In my younger days, I could dunk a basketball with a
running start, but the basket’s only ten feet. Twelve feet was out
of the question.

“
Jake, come here!” Jo Jo
shouted at me. She was directly in front of the Silver Queen, maybe
fifteen feet from the pedestal.

“
Why, you want a clean shot
at me?”

“
No, you’ve got to put out
the dynamite. Now!”

“
Throw your gun over here,
and I’ll do it,” I said, though I didn’t have the slightest idea
how.

“
Chingate!”

Well, at least she had expanded her stock of
words. “The gun. Throw it out.”

“
First, the
dynamite.”

“
No, first the
gun.”

“
Would you two stop arguing
and do something?” Blinky had picked up some rocks from where he
was lying and was tossing them at the dynamite. I couldn’t see
where they landed, but I didn’t think he was going to win a teddy
bear at the county fair.

“
Jake,” she said.
“Now!”

I quietly climbed up the rear pedestal of
the silver lady’s chariot. Jo Jo turned the other way, her
flashlight aiming a beam at the sizzling fuse. I hopped into the
back of Cleopatra’s barge and shimmied up a silver pedestal until I
could get my hands on top of the canopy. I hoisted myself up, swung
a knee on top, and looked out at the darkness. I was twenty feet
above the floor of the cavern. The fuse was still burning.

“
Jake, where are
you?”

The flashlight beam was there below me. I
could creep to the front of the canopy and leap at her. It wouldn’t
be chivalrous, two hundred twenty-some pounds smacking into her,
probably breaking some bones, but at the moment, she had the gun,
and I was out of tricks.

I took a step to the front of the
canopy.

“
Jake, where are you? There
isn’t time!”

“
Josie,” Blinky called out.
“We gotta get outta here. Help me into the tunnel.”

I took another step.

“
No,” she called back. “If
that timber goes, this whole chamber will be sealed off. The statue
will be crushed.”

I took a third step.

And the Silver Queen came to life. At first,
I thought the two Greek gods at her side were moving backward. But
they were standing still. Which meant we were moving forward.

The ship broke off the pedestal and sailed
down a step, then a second, and a third, gathering momentum like a
raft hitting the rapids of the Colorado River. When it smashed into
the floor, the queen pitched forward, and so did I.

The flashlight beam turned, and I heard a
gasp from Jo Jo.

The queen snapped in two at the waist. Her
head separated and bounced across the floor. The top half of the
queen’s torso flew straight ahead. I leapt from the canopy just
before it hit, and I rolled, this time on my bleeding shoulder, the
pain shooting through my arm. I bounded to my feet and tried to
stand, bracing myself with one hand against something soft and
spongy. I looked down and found my hand inside the queen’s head. I
tossed it away, thinking how much lighter it felt than I thought it
would.

I heard a cry from Jo Jo Baroso, an
animalistic shriek of horror and pain, followed by a sickening
gurgling sound. She was trying to say something but sounded as if
she were underwater. I turned to look. The flashlight lay on the
floor, pointing at her twitching feet. I picked up the light and
shined it on her face.

The queen’s scepter was lodged in her
throat, the point of the star buried just below the chin. Blood
poured from the wound, coating the oversized silver dollar that sat
just below the star. The life draining from her, Jo Jo said my
name, softly, and what sounded like, “Why ...”

I knelt beside her.

“
...did you leave
...”

Her lips were still moving when . . .

The explosion.

Echoing off the rock walls.

Sending a cloud of dust up and then down
again.

Stillness. The roof didn’t fall in.

A couple of rocks tumbled from somewhere
above, and the timber groaned. Then a couple more rocks fell.

Then quiet.

Nothing happened.

Until a boulder the size of a Buick crashed
from above, splintering the pedestal, from which the Silver Queen
so recently sailed. The timbers groaned louder. Smaller rocks began
peppering the floor like a stinging hailstorm. A storm of dust rose
from the floor.

“
Blinky,” I yelled in the
darkness.

But there was no reply.

Around the chamber, wood timbers shrieked
and split. A roar from above grew louder, like an approaching
jet.

I scurried toward the ledge with short,
quick strides, then dived across headfirst, pulling myself into the
tunnel just as the horizontal timber crashed to the floor, followed
by what sounded like the entire mountain collapsing into the
chamber. In seconds, the opening was sealed tight by a thousand
tons of rocks. I lay in the wet tunnel and listened to the rumble
of thunder just a few feet away. The floor shimmied, and the black
water rippled as the mountain coughed and sputtered and rearranged
its parts. When the noise stopped and the shaking subsided, it was
over, and the mountain had reclaimed a piece of itself.

CHAPTER 29

CHUMMING

Have I ever told you about the time a
Hialeah city commissioner walked out of his house to check his mail
and found a human skull staring at him from inside the
mailbox?”

Doc Riggs is a whiz at openers in
conversation.

“
Not recently, Charlie,” I
said.

“
Hush, Jake,” Granny
cautioned me. “Listen to Doc, and you may learn something, and
while you’re at it, don’t cut the squid so big. It would take a
whale to swallow that bait.”

“
Orca or Moby Dick?” Kip
asked.

We were anchored in about eighty feet of
water near Spanish Harbor Key, a bit south of the seven-mile
bridge. In the winter, just off the reef, it’s a decent place to
catch yellowtail snapper, which unlike their suspicious cousins,
red and mangrove snapper, are more likely to bite lines with
visible leaders and are less likely to hide in caves. We came down
in Charlie’s pickup, the one that nearly ran down a process server.
In Islamorada, we hitched up Granny’s trailer with the twenty-foot
Boston Whaler and headed past Lower Matecumbe Key, Conch Key, and
Burnt Point, stopped for cold beer in Marathon, then took the
bridge to Bahia Honda Key where we put the boat in the water, and
nearly did the same with the pickup.

I know the Keys are commercialized and
overpopulated, and you can’t go a mile on U.S. 1 without passing
tacky strip shopping centers with your convenience stores, T-shirt
shops, and souvenir stands, but they’re still the Keys where the
sun rises in the Atlantic and sets in the Gulf, and you can
sometimes exchange whispers with a pelican or spot a deer
hightailing it across the highway. God’s stepping-stones, local
sportswriter Edwin Pope describes these sandy spits of coral, and
that’s good enough for me.

“
Anyway,” Charlie said,
“here’s the commissioner and in his mailbox is this skull, and a
coconut split in two, and a decapitated chicken, and fourteen
pennies wrapped in a white cloth.”

“
An unusual campaign
contribution,” I said, “but maybe not in Hialeah. Probably violates
postal rules, too.”

“
Some weird voodoo,” Granny
contributed.

“
Sounds like
Black Sabbath
with Boris
Karloff,” Kip said.

Charlie let his bait drift
to the bottom on a one-ounce sinker. He didn’t like to fish nearly
as much as he liked to talk. “In a way, you’re all correct. It was
a Santer
í
a
ceremony, a fascinating combination of African rituals and
Catholicism. They consider one of their gods, Babalu-Aye, to be the
embodiment of Saint Lazarus, Oggun is Saint Peter, and so on. A
santero was using black magic to cast a spell on the commissioner,
who had voted against allowing animal sacrifices within city
limits.”

“
Now I remember,” I said.
“Later the Supreme Court ruled the church had the same rights to
kill chickens as Colonel Sanders. But what about the human
skull?”

“
Excellent question, in
fact, the only question as far as the authorities were concerned,
since it’s not illegal to cast a spell on your
antagonists.”

“
Remind me the next time I
try a case against Abe Socolow.”

Charlie harrumphed and kept going. “Anyway,
a lot of skulls and human bones began showing up at the Santeria
ceremonies, and the police suspected the worst.”

“
Human sacrifices,” I said,
trying a sidearm cast with my spinning rod, the only way I could do
it with a mending hole in my shoulder. Earlier, from the foredeck,
I tried to cast left-handed and nearly put a 1/0 hook in Granny’s
ear. The hook was tied to the end of a thirty-pound leader on
twelve-pound spinning tackle. Yellowtail don’t have great choppers,
but I use the leader to keep from breaking the line on
coral.

“
That’s what our local
constabulary suspected because they had no experience with this
sort of thing. As it turned out, there were plenty of dead chickens
and goats, but no humans. The human bones were stolen from
cemeteries.”

“
Wow,
Night of the Living Dead
,” Kip
chipped in.

“
Metro kept delivering
packages to the morgue marked ‘unknown human remains.’ We
identified some from corpses whose coffins and tombs had been
desecrated. Very upsetting to the families.”

“
I suppose so, if Uncle
Harry’s femur turned up in a witches’ brew.”

We all thought about that for a while, then
I dropped a frozen chunk of chum over the side in an effort to
entice reluctant snapper out of the reef.

Granny held her nose and called out,
“Whooee! What’d you put in that, some of Doc’s old chickens and
goats?”

“
It’s my own recipe,
Granny, and I’m not telling.”

“
I don’t blame you. Ye
gads, it smells toxic, or maybe radioactive.”

“
Radioactivity doesn’t
smell,” Kip informed us.

Charlie reeled in an empty line and said, “I
don’t mind the smell of chum.”

“
Of course not!” Granny
yelled at him. “After ten thousand autopsies, fish guts would smell
like roses.”

“
What
did
you put in that?” Charlie asked,
sniffing the breeze.

I gave in and disclosed my secret sauce.
“Equal parts dolphin entrails, grunt heads, and ballyhoo so old the
fish market threw them in the Dumpster a week ago. Chopped
everything into a slurry that looks like Granny’s blueberry pancake
batter, then froze it all in milk cartons.”

“
Chopped how?” Granny
asked. “You didn’t use my blender again?”

I didn’t answer.

“
Damn, boy, that’s for
making frozen margaritas. I got a meat grinder in the pantry, you
know.”

“
I know, but it takes twice
as long, and it hurts my shoulder to crank it.”

“
Pantywaist,” she said.
“You know, Doc, the boy could never handle pain ...”

“
Granny!”

“
Or women…”

“
C’mon.”

“
Or a real job.”

We bantered for a while longer, then the
talk turned to fishing. Granny claimed she pulled a seven-pound
yellowtail from this very spot a week before, so it must be my chum
that was chasing the fish to Omaha or somewhere. Nobody had a bite,
but we were all enjoying the warmth of the winter sun. The sky was
a Caribbean blue. Not as deep as a Colorado blue sky, but with a
hint of turquoise. The breeze was soft, and the temperature an even
eighty degrees. I was wearing cutoffs and was barefoot. My shoulder
was healing, and so was my reputation.

Granny squinted at me and said, “That
persecutor fellow called when you were gassing up the boat this
morning.”

“
Socolow, and he’s a
prosecutor.”

“
Same
difference.”

“
What’d he say?”

“
Said you’d want to know he
squashed the indictment for the murder of that phony-baloney
salesman.”

“
Quashed,” I told her, but
she paid me no mind.

“
Then, not ten minutes
later, like it was all planned, the persecutor fellow from Colorado
called.”

“
McBain.”

“
That’s him. Dismissed all
charges up there, plus he said to make sure to tell you he’s
impinging all records of your arrest.”