Tourist Season (36 page)

“I know.”

“Half the girls get boob jobs and butt tucks,” Kara Lynn said. “Nobody does anything about it.”

“What happens to them when there’s no more beauty pageants?”

“Two, three years of modeling. A few local TV commercials if you’re lucky. Guy once offered me three grand to lie on the hood of a Dodge truck and say:
I got my Ram Charger at Cooley Motors.
Real Shakespearean television. Daddy had a seizure when I turned it down.”

“What do you really want to do, Kara Lynn?”

“Stop world famine, of course.”

Keyes laughed. “And after that?”

“See Europe.”

Keyes cut another slice of pizza but it surrendered grudgingly. A web of cheese hung elastically from his mouth to the platter.

“What about you, Brian? Your life all mapped out?”

Keyes chewed pensively.

“Someday I’m going to buy a sailboat,” he said. “Move down to Islamorada, live off seaweed and lobsters. Let the sun fry me so brown that my hide gets tough as a turtle shell. I think I’d make a helluva good sea turtle—hey, don’t look at me like that.”

“But you’re serious!”

“A turtle’s got no natural enemies,” Keyes said.

Kara Lynn felt warm. She liked the cozy smell of the sweater. “Can I come visit you down there?”

“You bet. Fix up a nice big plate of sargassum. We’ll pig out.”

Kara Lynn watched him so closely that Keyes began to feel a little uncomfortable. She was zeroing in on something. The old Jenna antennae started to twitch.

“What do you think about me, Brian?”

“I like you,” he said. “I like you very much.”

“She really hurt you, didn’t she?”

Out of the blue. Just when he’d started to relax.

“Who?” he said inanely.

“Jenna. One look at the two of you together—”

“Forget the two of us together.”

“I’m sorry. No more soap opera, I promise.” She folded her arms and sat back. Her gray-green eyes captured him, froze him in one place. Nineteen years old, no one should have a look that good, Keyes thought.

“I can’t figure out what I like so much about you,” Kara Lynn said. “But I think it’s your attitude.”

“I’ve got a miserable attitude.”

“Yeah, you come on that way but it’s bullshit, isn’t it, Marlowe? Some of it’s an act.”

“Until I grow my turtle shell.”

“What I like,” said Kara Lynn, “is your attitude toward me. You’re the first man who hasn’t treated me like a porcelain doll. You don’t pamper, you don’t drool, and you don’t try to impress me.”

Keyes smiled wanly. “Somehow I knew there was no danger of that.”

“And I like the way you tell the truth,” she said. “For instance, I think you told the truth just now when you said you liked me. I think you really do.”

“Sure.”

“I think you wouldn’t mind if I kissed you.”

Keyes opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a little shaky. Like prom night, for God’s sake.

Kara Lynn reached over and took his arm. She pulled him gently. “Meet you halfway,” she said.

They kissed across the table. It was a long kiss, and Keyes nearly got lost in it. He also managed to plant his left elbow in the pizza.

“You’re nervous,” she said.

“You’re a client. That makes me nervous.”

“Naw. Pretty girls make you nervous.”

“Some of them, yeah.”

In the MG on the way home, she sat much closer.

“You’re worried about me,” Kara Lynn said.

“I don’t want you in this stupid parade.”

She held onto his right arm with both hands. “I’ve got to do it. It’s either me or some other girl.”

“Then let it be some other girl.”

“No, Brian.”

Things were changing—all of a sudden the stakes couldn’t be higher. The harrowing parameters of his nightmare had become perceptible; and locked inside them, Kara Lynn Shivers and Skip Wiley.

Keyes wondered if the maniac had phoned Cab Mulcahy, like he promised.

“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” Kara Lynn asked.

“Yup.”

“We’ll be all right,” she said. Like Jenna used to say.

The house was dark when Keyes pulled into the driveway. The shaggy-headed palms hung still in the crisp night. Crackles bickered high in the old ficus tree. From the flowerbed a disinterested calico cat watched them come up the walk.

Keyes waited on the second step while Kara Lynn unlocked the front door. He went in first, switched on a small lamp in the hall, checked around.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. And out of habit took a step toward the guest room where he slept.

“No,” Kara Lynn whispered, taking his hand. “Come upstairs.”

26

Wiley stormed into the warehouse shortly after noon on the twenty-ninth of December, the day after the bombing at police headquarters.

‘Where is Jesus?” Wiley demanded.

“Don’t know,” Viceroy Wilson said.

“He was gone when we got here,” said Tommy Tigertail.

Both men were shirtless, with leather carpentry belts strung from their waists. The Indian had a red bandanna around his neck, and his caramel chest was beaded with perspiration. Viceroy Wilson wore gray sweatpants and faded aqua wristbands, which kept his hands dry.

They had worked unceasingly since dawn, and the skeletal contraption had grown to fill the warehouse from floor to ceiling.

“It’s coming along,” Wiley said halfheartedly. “You’re doing fine.”

He paced with agitation, gnawing his lower lip, hands crammed in the pockets of his jeans. With each step his track shoes squeaked on the dusty concrete—a noise that only added to the tension.
El Fuego
was on the threshold of eruption; Viceroy Wilson and Tommy Tigertail could sense it.

In slow motion Skip Wiley picked up an iron mallet. He studied it methodically, weighed it in each hand, then began to pound the aluminum door like a gong. With every swing came a new expletive. “That crazy-cretinous-brain-less-shitheaded putz of a Cuban!” he grunted. “Worthless-misguided-suicidal-goddamn miscreant!”

Viceroy Wilson flinched each time the mallet landed, the noise amplified in his skull by forty freshly ingested milligrams of methamphetamine.

“Why didn’t he tell me about this?” Wiley cried. “Who ordered him to go bomb that reptile Bloodworth?”

“Maybe he thought it would make up for the tennis thing,” Tommy Tigertail said.

“Rubbish! Even after my lecture on solidarity, he pulls a silly stunt like this! No wonder the other crazy Cubans kicked him out. I should have known better—I should have listened to you guys.”

Viceroy Wilson resisted the temptation to rub it in. Actually he was somewhat puzzled by Skip Wiley’s anger. He figured that after all that had happened, Wiley ought to be elated to see Ricky Bloodworth go up in smoke. And if a new wave of counterpublicity was what Wiley sought, the bombing had been a bonanza:
Las Noches
were all over the morning papers and TV. But Viceroy Wilson listened unquestioningly to the harangue because he simply couldn’t bring himself to defend Jesus Bernal. He’d warned the little bastard to chill out until after New Year’s.

“Insubordination!” Wiley bellowed. “A group like ours can’t survive with insubordination. You know what this is? A test, that’s what. That slippery hot-blooded weasel is trying to push me as far as he can. He thinks I’m not tough enough. He wants
mucho macho.
He wants machetes and machine pistols and nightscopes. He wants us to dress in fatigues and crawl through minefields and bite the necks off live chickens. That’s his idea of revolution. No subtlety, no wit, no goddamn style.”

Wiley was getting hoarse. He dropped the iron mallet. Viceroy Wilson handed him a jar of cold Gatorade.

“We need to find him,” the Indian said.

“Damn soon,” added Wilson.

Wiley wiped his mouth. “Any clues?”

Viceroy Wilson shook his head. In one corner of the warehouse, on Bernal’s pitiful carpet remnant, sat the Smith-Corona typewriter. It was empty.

“He won’t be back,” Tommy Tigertail said.

“A loose cannon,” growled Wiley, subsiding a bit.

Viceroy Wilson decided there was no point in keeping Jesus Bernal’s secret. “The other night he was on the phone to his old dudes. Trying to get back on the A-team.”

“The First Weekend in July?”

“They told him no way,” Wilson said.

“So he decided to put on a one-man show,” Wiley said.

“Looks that way.”

“Well, that’s gratitude for you.”

“Let’s try to find him,” Tommy Tigertail repeated, with consternation.

“Hopeless,” Skip Wiley said. “Anyway, he’ll crawl back when he gets lonely—or when he can’t stand the heat from Garcia.”

“Oh fine,” Viceroy Wilson grumbled. “Just what we need.”

Wiley said, “Besides, I hate to completely give up on the guy.” What he really hated was the thought that anyone could resist his charisma or so blithely spurn his leadership. Recruiting a hard-core case like Jesus Bernal had been a personal triumph; losing him stung Skip Wiley’s ego.

“Look, I’ve got to know,” he said. “Are you boys still with the program?”

“Tighter than ever,” Viceroy Wilson said. The Indian nodded in agreement.

“What about the chopper?”

“Watson Island. Nine tonight,” Wilson said. “The pilot’s cool. Free-lance man. Does some jobs for the Marine Patrol, the DEA and the blockade-runners, too. Long as the price is nice.”

“And the goodies?” Wiley asked.

“Safe and sound,” Tommy Tigertail reported.

“Nobody got hurt?”

The Indian smiled—these white men! “No, of course not,” he said. “Everybody had a ball.”

Wiley sighed. “Good, then we’re on—with or without our Cuban friend.” He reached into a pocket and came out with something in the palm of his hand. To Viceroy Wilson the object looked like a pink castanet.

“What the hell,” Wiley said. He carefully placed the object on the keyboard of Jesus Bernal’s abandoned typewriter. “Just in case he comes back.”

It was a brand-new set of dentures.

Cab Mulcahy had waited all night for Skip Wiley to call again. He’d attached a small tape recorder to the telephone next to the bed and slept restlessly, if at all. There was no question of Wiley reaching him if he’d wanted—Skip knew the number, and had never been shy about calling. Back when he was writing in full stride, Wiley would phone Mulcahy at least once a week to demand the firing or public humiliation of some mid-level editor who had dared to alter the column. These tirades normally lasted about thirty minutes until Wiley’s voice gave out and he hung up. Once in a while Mulcahy discovered that Skip was right—somebody indeed had mangled a phrase or even edited a fact error into the column; in these instances the managing editor would issue a firm yet discreet rebuke, but Wiley seldom was satisfied. He was constantly threatening to murder or sexually mutilate somebody in the newsroom and, on one occasion, actually fired a speargun at an unsuspecting editor at the city desk. For weeks there was talk of a lawsuit, but eventually the poor shaken fellow simply quit and took a job with a public-relations firm in Tampa. Wiley had been remorseless; as far as he was concerned, anyone who couldn’t weather a little criticism had no business in journalism anyway. Cab Mulcahy had been dismayed: firing a spear at an editor was a sure way to bring in the unions. To punish Wiley, Mulcahy had forced him to drive out to the Deauville Hotel one morning and interview Wayne Newton. To no one’s surprise, the resulting column was unprintable. The speargun episode eventually was forgiven.

As a habit Skip Wiley called Mulcahy’s home only in moments of rage and only in the merciless wee hours of the morning, when Wiley could be sure of holding the boss’s undivided attention.

Which is why Cab Mulcahy scarcely slept Friday night, and why he was so fretful by Saturday morning when Skip still hadn’t phoned. Keyes called twice to see if Wiley had made contact, but there was nothing to report; both of them worried that Skip might have changed his mind. By midafternoon Mulcahy—still unshaven, and rambling the house in a rumpled bathrobe—was battling a serious depression. He feared that he had missed the only chance to reason with Wiley or bring him in for help.

He was fixing a tuna sandwich on toast when the phone finally rang at half-past five. He hurried into the bedroom, closed the door, punched the tape recorder.

“Hello?”

“You viper!”

“Skip?”

“What kind of snake would let Bloodworth sodomize a Christmas column!”

“Where are you, buddy?”

“At the Gates of Hell, waiting. I told ‘em to save you a ringside seat at the inferno.”

Mulcahy was impressed by Wiley’s vitriol; not bad for a five-day-old rage. “I’m sorry, Skip. I should never have done it. It was wrong.”

“Immoral is what it was.”