Native Affairs (2 page)

“Cheese it, the cops,” Paula muttered, and Cindy grinned. There was something amusing about this scene, which shouldn’t have been funny. But the nonchalant stance of the man who had initiated it all, lounging with his hands in his pockets and greeting the policemen affably as if he were the host at a block party, struck her as absurd.

“Look at that guy,” she said to Paula. “You’d never think he just splintered a pane of glass with his head.”

Paula chuckled in response, and the two women watched as the police took charge of the prisoner and led him away to the patrol car. As soon as it pulled away, the crowd began to disperse and the tall man sauntered over to them, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

“Hi, short stuff,” he said casually, talking to Paula but looking at Cindy.

“You’re out of date, Fox,” Paula replied dryly. “My brother stopped calling me that when I was twelve.”

“You still look pretty short to me,” Fox observed, smiling just a little with his eyes, which remained on Cindy’s face.

“Everybody looks short to you,” Paula said.

“Are you ladies all right?” he asked. “Some of that glass came pretty close to you.”

“We’re fine,” Paula replied, for both of them. “But I can’t say the same for you. You do realize that you’re bleeding?”

Fox blinked, surprised, and put his hand to his head again. It came away stained red.

“I thought my hair felt wet,” he said. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and tied it around his head like a bandanna.

“Oh, very good,” Paula said. “Nice and sanitary. Why don’t you come by the emergency room tonight? I’ll tape that up for you.”

Paula was a nurse who worked the night shift at Lykes Hospital. “I just might do that,” Fox replied, still watching Cindy.

“I’m surprised to see you jumping through windows again, Drew,” Paula said. “It reminds me of the old days. I thought you’d long ago graduated to international criminal types.”

“I was doing a favor for Sheriff Tully,” Fox replied. “That joker escaped from his jail. I chased him into Barney’s store from the alley out back.” He glanced at Paula, then his gaze returned to Cindy. “Who’s your friend?”

“I’ve missed you too, Fox,” Paula observed acidly, and he grinned.

“Andrew Fox,” he said to Cindy, extending his hand. Cindy grasped it.

“Lucinda Warren,” she replied, her fingers lost in his big palm.

“Lucinda,” he repeated. “Sounds like the princess in a fairytale.”

“Everybody calls me Cindy,” she responded softly. She was mesmerized by his green eyes, which swept over her face, taking in every detail.

“But I’m not everybody, Lucinda,” he replied, continuing to hold her hand. He towered over her, his big, compact body at ease, and yet somehow alert, as if he were ready for anything at any moment.

He’s Indian, Cindy thought, gazing up at him in mute absorption. She could see it in his straight, midnight hair and in the dusky skin, a combination of copper and terra cotta, which complemented his high cheekbones and strong, prominent nose. His other features were European, however: light eyes and a finely molded, thin-lipped mouth. It was an arresting combination, a harmony of opposites that made him, not handsome, but unforgettable.

“What are you doing in town?” he asked, his tone muted, intimate.

“I’m researching my master’s thesis at Gulf Coast University. I’ll be staying with Paula for several weeks.”

He accepted this without comment and then released her hand slowly. As he let go, his two middle finger curled around hers possessively, and then fell away. He turned to Paula, as if remembering suddenly that she was present.

“Say hello to Johnny for me when you see him,” he directed. “I’ll try to stop by the hospital tonight for some T.L.C.” He smiled wickedly.

“Don’t forget,” Paula advised him. “That gash looks pretty bad; you shouldn’t neglect it.”

“I’ll live,” he said lightly. He looked at Cindy again and said, with a slight inclination of his dark head, “Welcome to Florida, ma’am.” Then he loped back to his truck and swung up into the cab, slamming the door shut behind him in one economical movement. Both women remained looking after him until the truck roared away into the distance.

“Kind of unsettling, isn’t he?” Paula commented, with a sly, sideward glance.

“What was all that about?” Cindy countered, ignoring the question. “What was he doing chasing that man, and handcuffing him, and then turning him over to the police. Is Fox a cop, too? Is he a plainclothes detective or something?”

“Whoa, there,” Paula said, laughing. She took Cindy’s arm and steered her in the direction of the parking lot where her car awaited them. “One thing at a time. First of all, Fox isn’t a cop; he’s a bounty hunter.”

Cindy stopped walking. ‘‘A bounty hunter! I thought they only existed in Westerns.”

“Well, Council Rock has at least one. Fox goes after and apprehends fugitives, prison escapees, some bail jumpers.”

“People waiting for trial who flee jurisdiction and forfeit their bail?” Cindy asked, falling into step alongside Paula again.

“Right. In return for bringing them back he collects a fee, which is a percentage of the set bail.”

“I see. So the higher the bail, the more money he makes.”

Paula nodded as they approached her car. “That’s why I was surprised to see him chasing down that guy today. He looked like a petty crook, and Fox doesn’t usually waste his time on them. But he was doing it for Sheriff Tully. He’s another Seminole, and they’re pretty tight.”

“I thought he was Indian,” Cindy said softly, as Paula unlocked her door and walked around to the driver’s side.

“Half,” Paula corrected. “His mother was a tourist from up North. But in his mind, his attitudes, his approach to life, Fox is all Indian.”

They got into the car, and Paula started the motor and drove off, pulling onto the main road which led out of town.

“You said he usually doesn’t bother with small time criminals,” Cindy went on, pursuing the subject. “He mainly chases the big ones, organized crime figures, people like that?”

“Anybody with a big price tag attached,” Paula replied. “He’s the best at what he does, and the cops call him in on the toughest cases, the ones they can’t crack. He goes out of state a lot, sometimes even out of the country. He went down to Mexico a few months back, after some drug kingpin, finally tracked him to Guadalajara. Johnny told me about it. Fox must have picked up a nice piece of change for that one.”

“He ought to buy himself a new truck,” Cindy commented, smiling. “The one he has looks like it’s about to disintegrate.”

Paula shook her head. “He loves that old piece of junk, fixes it himself.” Paula craned her neck at an intersection and then gunned the motor. “Fox is hard to understand. Johnny says he has expensive equipment, a whole roomful of computers—some of them tied in to the government banks—to assist in his investigations. But he’ll drive that raggedy pickup until it collapses into a heap of rubble. He just doesn’t seem to care much about anything but his work.”

“He sounds like an independent type,” Cindy said.

“Oh, he is that, all right. He’s descended from a long line of renegade Seminoles who chose to stay in Florida and live as hunters and fishermen rather than accept reservation life in the West. His father and grandfather made their living from the land.”

“What happened to his mother?” Cindy asked.

Paula glanced at her quickly, then looked back at the road. “She left him with his father and went back North. His father’s family raised him.” She paused and added, “He’s illegitimate. The story goes that his mother viewed his father as a good time, a little distraction during her vacation. She discovered she was pregnant and had the child up North, returning just long enough to leave the baby here—deposit him on the Fox doorstep, so to speak. As far as I know they never saw her again.”

“How horrible for him,” Cindy said softly, thinking of the green eyes, surely the stamp of his absent mother.

“Yeah, I guess it must have been pretty rough, being a half breed in a Southern town, and a bastard to boot. He was pretty much of a hellraiser when he was a kid. My brother Johnny wasn’t supposed to play with him.”

“Because of his background?” Cindy asked, dismayed at such prejudice toward an innocent child.

“No. Because he was always in trouble. My grandmother used to call him ‘that desperado’ and told Johnny that she would box his ears if she saw him with Drew. Which only made Johnny anxious to tag after him at every opportunity.”

“Desperado,” Cindy repeated, laughing. “Isn’t that a little dramatic?”

“Well, she was Spanish, you know, given to colorful expressions in her native language. She also called my father ‘that gringo’ until the day she died, at which point my parents had been married for thirty years.”
 

“Where is Johnny now?” Cindy inquired.
 

“Up in Atlanta. My father got him a job when my parents moved there. It was during our junior year, remember?”

“I remember. So you’re the only one of your family left in this area now.”

“Yup,” Paula said, pulling into the driveway of an apartment complex. “I wanted to come back here when we graduated; this place will always be home to me. And Johnny looks Fox up every time he comes to visit me. They were great friends.”

“Fox was raised by his father’s family, then?”
 

“Until he was sixteen. He left home then, taking a number of lunatic jobs until he found his calling.”
 

“Lunatic jobs?”

“Jobs only a lunatic would take. He has a natural cunning and amazing agility, so he always wound up doing things nobody else would try. Johnny told me about some of his adventures.”

“Such as?” Cindy asked curiously, as Paula pulled into a reserved parking space in front of an ultra-modern brick building.

Paula sent her an arch glance. “He fascinates you, doesn’t he?”

“Answer the question.”

Paula chuckled, shutting off the motor. “Let’s see. He was a bonded courier for a while, those guys with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists and pistols in their shoes.”

“Briefcases full of diamonds, you mean.”

“Right. He got shot doing that, so he switched to something safer, high rise construction work, teetering on six inch girders five stories above the ground.”

Cindy burst out laughing.

“But that was too dull, I guess, because the next thing I heard, he was riding shotgun on armored trucks transporting government payrolls.”

“Good lord,” Cindy said, shaking her head.

“So you can see how his training and experience were perfectly suited to his current occupation. He can go his own way, work when he wants to, and slake his thirst for adventure at the same time.” Paula gestured expansively at the building before them. “El Rancho Desmond, the second floor of it anyway. Let me help you take your luggage out of the trunk.”

Each of the women took a bag, and Cindy followed Paula up an exterior flight of stone steps. They passed the potted palms flanking the entrance and went through glass doors, which admitted them to the first floor landing. The air inside was blessedly cool. Paula led the way up an additional series of carpeted stairs to her apartment.

“This is it,” she announced, unlocking the door and hefting Cindy’s suitcase over the threshold. “I was on a waiting list six months to get this place.”

“It’s lovely,” Cindy said, looking around at the luxurious apartment. A living room with a cathedral ceiling and a balcony overlooking the street opened into a dining area with a mirrored wall facing them and a gleaming galley kitchen with all the latest appliances. A hall led away from the living room to the bedrooms at the back. The whole place was done in pleasant neutral tones: beige carpeting, furniture and draperies in cocoa, sand and taupe, with warm accents of orange and peach in the throw pillows and in the modern paintings on the walls. “How does a humble nurse afford a place like this?”

“She doesn’t,” Paula replied. “I am also the assistant manager of the complex, for which I get a considerable break on the rent. I collect checks, take complaints, and serve as general dogsbody for the outfit that owns the buildings.”

“I see.”

Paula dropped what she was carrying and headed for the kitchen. “You should have seen this apartment before I took it. I was so anxious to get in here I agreed to take on the mess. I needed two weeks to clean it up before I could move in.”

“It was dirty?” Cindy asked, fingering a china cat on an end table.

“Not exactly. The person who lived here before me had some rather unusual decorating ideas. The walls in the living room were black. When you pulled the drapes closed it was like a full blackout during the London blitz. And as if to make up for that, the master bedroom was fluorescent green, and there were orange flowers all over the bathroom walls.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I almost went blind when the real estate agent showed it to me. I had it all stripped and painted before I brought one stick of furniture through the door.” She pointed to the back of the apartment, at the same time poking around in the freezer for ice. “Just put your things in the guest room on the left.”