Trapped (21 page)

imagine the stuffed wolverine coming to life, leaping on the

fat neck of Buster Nyles, the Collier County sheriff who took

bribes with both hands, and then betrayed low-level drug

smugglers like Roy’s father. The good old boys who ran the

show walked away, burying their millions in pickle jars and

offshore investments while swamp-cracker chumps like

Pappy shuffled into cells at Raiford. And yet the old man,

dumb as a load of cinder blocks, always aspired to be one of

the regulars who drank with Sheriff Nyles and his minions,

impressing the hell out of the sunburned tourists and occa-

sional movie stars who flocked to the fabled Hunt Club for a

taste of Old Florida ambiance. The huge gator hide nailed to

the red-cedar paneling, darkened by a century of cigar smoke.

The lovingly framed photo of Hemingway standing at the

famous veranda bar, his arm thrown over the shoulders of a

very young Buster, then a lowly game warden who told lies

outrageous enough to impress a famous novelist. The formal

menus signed by Clark Gable and Harry Truman, the fat, exu-

berant tarpon mounted over the entrance to the immense

screened-in porch where the movers and shakers, the elected

and the anointed, had for generations gathered to gorge on

blackened redfish caught by their guides.

In the glory days more bullshit flowed through the Glade

City Hunt Club than in all the saloons of Texas. The days when

local fishing guides moonlighted on the wrong side of the law,

jacking protected gators, piloting airboats full of forbidden

marijuana bales, and then bragging on it to Donny Nyles, the

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Hunt Club bartender, Buster’s little brother, and himself a

coke-sniffing smuggler and dissembler of some note.

Buster and Donny are both dead now—cancer and self-ad-

ministered gunshot respectively—but Roy still hates their

rotting bones. Hates them for sneering at Pappy, then shining

him on, setting him up. Wrecking his pathetic life because they

could, and because it amused them. Roy’s is a prideful hatred,

a blood hatred, the Whittle family having settled in these parts

at about the same time as the Nyles clan, difference being the

Whittles, barefoot and willfully ignorant—Pappy bragged he’d

never dirtied his mind by reading a newspaper—the Whittles

kept to their hidden whiskey stills and their secret gator holes

and never ran for office, or secured employment with law en-

forcement agencies. Therefore never had the leverage to enrich

themselves at the public trough, or avoid serving time because

they controlled both the jails and the courts.

What Roy would really like to do is take out his uncircum-

cised member and urinate all over the precious lobby, add a

little sheen to the hardwood floors. Instead he tucks in his

shirt, straightens out his Caterpillar ball cap, and presents

himself at the famous bar.

“Hey, um, Donny,” Roy says, addressing the barkeep by

the name pinned to the lapel of his Tommy Bahama shirt.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Stick around?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Stick Davis. Supposed to meet him here.”

The barkeep eyes the otherwise empty bar, the message

being, see for yourself, moron, nobody home.

“Gimme a Bud,” says Roy, taking a stool.

“Corona, Heineken, Harp, and Sapporo on tap,” he recites.

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163

“Bottled beer listed on the board. No Budweiser today. No

Budweiser tomorrow.”

“You ain’t from around here.”

The barkeep, a sly, surfer-blond dude about Roy’s age,

volunteers that he’s from Orlando. Roy has never been to Or-

lando. Fact is he’s never been north of Bradenton, and then

only once to visit his mother in the hospital.

“Orlando,” he says, rolling the word around on his tongue.

“That’s Disney World, right?”

“Yes, sir. Disney World, Sea World, lots of worlds in

Orlando.”

“And your name ain’t really Donny, am I right about

that, too?”

The barkeep glances warily at his own name tag. “It’s like

a tradition, I guess.”

“For Donny Nyles, yeah. This was his bar, back in the day.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. You know what he did once, Donny Nyles? Got in

a fight with some tourist, mighta been from Orlando, come

to think, and he hits the guy with one of those little clubs they

break ice with, and the guy is so drunk he’s knocked out cold.

So Donny decides to wake him up by throwing him off the

dock. Guy never woke up. He drowned. They stood there and

watched him drown in his sleep. Pretty funny, huh?”

The barkeep shrugs. “If you say so.”

No more “sir,” Roy notes. Apparently the “sir” time is

over. He wonders why he’s being ugly to a young man, a

stranger that’s never done him any particular harm, and then

he remembers why. He hates the Hunt Club and everybody

in it including, at the moment, himself.

“Donny Nyles thought it was real amusing,” Roy goes on,

unable to stop himself, the dangerous edge in his voice sharp-

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ening like a gutting knife on a grindstone. “Must have told

that story a hundred times, about how he drowned a guy try-

ing to wake him up. Most folks, prob’ly they thought it was

just a bar story, only it really happened. Donny, the guy

whose name you got on that little green tag on your skinny

little chest, he thought killing a loser was really funny, like

a good fart joke or a rubber crutch.”

The fake Donny is eyeing the intercom, wondering if he’ll

have to call in enforcements, when Stick Wilson enters the

bar and raises his straw cowboy hat. “Roy the boy!”

“Hey, Stick.”

Stick must be about forty now, and looks it, still skinny

everywhere but for his little vodka belly, straining the buttons

of his safari shirt. Aviator glasses covering bloodshot eyes the

color of a bleeding battle flag. When Roy was just a little tyke,

Stick got temporarily famous for putting a DC-3 down on Al-

ligator Alley after both engines flamed out. Deadstick, they

called him, then Stick, and it stuck. Almost as legendary was

how he persuaded a startled Florida State trooper that he’d

been hijacked, dadgum it, Officer, and that the cargo of

Jamaican marijuana now burning merrily within the wreckage

was not connected to him in any way, shape or form.

What really impressed the good old boys in Glade City,

who had financed the venture, was that Stick, barely twenty

years of age, an outsider hailing from Mobile, Alabama, had

the good sense to torch the aircraft, thereby eradicating not

only the evidence but any possible connection to their august

selves. What really impressed five-year-old Roy was that the

famous pilot actually seemed to like Roy’s father, treating

Pappy like an equal and wanting to know about cool and in-

teresting things like running jars of whiskey to the Indians,

and did bull gators really mate with their dead prey.

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Near as Roy’s been able to determine in the intervening

years, Stick wasn’t one of those involved in betraying the old

man. One of the very few. Which is precisely why he’s de-

cided to go out on a limb and trust Stick, despite his reputa-

tion as a major league juicehead and plane-wrecker, the old

DC-3 being the first of many.

They take their drinks, a beer for Roy and two tall triple-

vodka tonics for his guest, and retire to the far frontier of the

veranda. Few couples having dinner, seated in high-back

wicker chairs, around white-clothed tables overlooking the

canal. Very civilized. Very Hunt Club, the sleepy afternoon,

flooded with dappled sunlight version.

“Yawl still lookin’ out for your brother?” Stick wants to

know.

“Dug? Yeah, I guess.”

“That’s a fine thang, takin’ care of family.”

Stick looks around the old club, never raising his shades,

a faint smile twitching on his thin chapped lips.

“Same place, different people,” he drawls. “Less puke, too.

Old days, somebody’d be whoopin’ over the rail by now,

messin’ up their Top-Siders.”

“Yeah,” says Roy. “The good old days.”

Stick smiling with his teeth and drinking gulps of chilled

vodka like ice water, waiting for young Roy Whittle to make

his move, say his piece.

Roy puts down his empty glass.

“What if I was to help you put your hands on a pretty little

thing worth a whole lot of money?” Roy asks, trying to see

through the dark glasses, into those bloodshot eyes.

Stick sits up straighter in his high-back wicker chair, ca-

ressing his hard little belly. “Pretty little thang? What kind

of pretty little thang?”

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6. Get This Party Started

Back in civilization, the concrete, steel and palm tree variety,

we’re scheduled to meet with a local FBI guy, who is supposed

to bring us up to speed. I assume we’ll go to the office, like

they do on the TV shows, all those nicely dressed, unfailingly

polite agents focused on making us safe, on getting our children

back. But Shane directs me to a drowsy shopping mall in a

Miami neighborhood called Miramar, where Special Agent

Sean Healy eventually finds us staking out a table at a Denny’s.

It seems the field office is nearby, but since we’re not on board

in an official capacity it’s better we don’t make ourselves

known—the way Agent Healy puts it, we’re off the books. Plus

he’s dying for a spicy buffalo chicken melt and a side of

seasoned fries, and this, he says pointedly, won’t take long.

After the waitress takes his order he goes, “So. You’re

Randall Shane, huh? Heard of you,” he adds, without any par-

ticular enthusiasm. “You took early retirement, whatever that

is.”

“Yup,” Shane says, nodding. “That I did.”

“Obviously you’ve still got friends in high places.”

“What makes you say that?” Shane asks, all innocent.

Healy is a good-looking guy in his late-thirties, kind of a

hunk, actually, if you think for instance that Josh Hartnett is

a hunk. You know, rangy and slim and masculine but some-

how boyish, with good bones and really nice hair and plump,

kissable lips. Except Healy looks vaguely pissed off, and that

makes him unattractive in a faintly disturbing way. Some-

thing to do with the fact that his default expression seems to

be a sneer, and the sly way he’s clocking my boobs, it makes

me form a negative impression of the man inside the body.

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Nice to look at but definitely a don’t-touch, because the more

you see the less you’ll like.

“What makes me say you got pull?” Healy responds,

snorting. “Reality makes me say that. Reality is, we got more

than two hundred agents actively working cases from here to

Key West, and we never work a case without opening a file, not

ever, and along comes this former agent, and suddenly we got

six people, more you count support, six agents and who knows

how many staff gathering information regarding a certain in-

dividual, even though no file as been opened and officially

we’re not looking at the individual, if you know what I mean.”

Shane says, “I know what you mean.”

“That was a figure of speech. What they call a rhetori-

cal question.”

“Uh-huh. Is this where I’m supposed to apologize for put-

ting you out?” Shane asks, ever so sweetly.

“That would be nice,” says Healy, sipping a tall glass of

ice water and eyeing the kitchen door, where his spicy

chicken melty thing has yet to emerge.

“I’ll have to work on it,” Shane says. “Get my apology all

spiffy. Until then, what can you tell us about Edwin Manning

and any connections he may have, financial or otherwise, to

this area?”

Healy glances at me. My actual face, not my chest.

“Maybe I’d share with you, Mr. Former Agent, but I’m not

sharing with a civilian. No way. Not without an official in-

vestigation, a file open, on the books.”

Shane has been sort of going along with Healy, feeding

the banter, but that changes in an instant. There’s a sudden

chill in the air and it’s not the AC at Denny’s. “Mrs. Garner

is not a civilian,” he reminds Healy. “She’s the mother of a

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missing child. She’s the reason I’m here. She’s the reason

you’re here. Show some respect.”

Give Healy credit, he recognizes the change in Randall

Shane’s attitude and right away he backs off. Probably pretty

much the way a lion tamer backs off when the lion makes a

certain kind of noise in its great big throat. Like, careful or

I’ll get all snarly and have you for breakfast, and we don’t

want that, do we?

Healy glances at me, nods. “Right, no disrespect intended.

Just for the record, this violates every procedure but what the

heck, this is between friends, right?”