Tourist Season (14 page)

But the oar was gone.

It
couldn’t
be. But it was.

Fore and aft, the bottom of the canoe was empty.

Keyes carefully turned around so he could see the cabin—it couldn’t be more than twenty yards away. He needed to get back there, to get his feet on something solid. Then he’d try to figure out what the hell was going on.

He inched to the prow and found a comfortable position. With both hands Keyes began to paddle vigorously, fracturing the calm of the pond. Yet the canoe scarcely moved.

The boat was nestled firmly in a patch of hyacinth weeds. The fat green bulbs and fibrous stems clung to the hull and made it impossible to get up a head of steam. Keyes desperately needed something to hack the boat free.

The uneasiness in his gut started to feel a little like panic. He feared that he was being watched; that whoever owned the western boots had stolen the oar from the canoe, and that whoever had stolen the oar didn’t want him to go.

“Skip!” Keyes shouted. “Skip, are you there?”

But the marsh swallowed his voice, and only the shrill cicadas replied.

Keyes decided it was vital not to abandon the canoe. He regarded himself a competent swimmer, but realized that this was not Lake Louise at scenic Camp Trailblazer—this was serious swamp. With no buddy system, unless you counted eels.

Keyes couldn’t be sure how deep the tea-colored water was, but he knew the weeds would make swimming treacherous. He was scared of getting tangled underwater, or sucked down by the muck. True, it was only twenty yards to the cabin, but it was a nasty goddamn twenty yards.

He leaned across the bow and began ripping up the hyacinths and tossing them aside in sodden stringy slumps. Painstakingly Keyes labored to clear a channel for the stymied canoe, but night came too quickly. He tried again to paddle by hand; this time the canoe moved six, seven, maybe eight feet before the knotted lilies seized it.

Brian Keyes was stuck. Robbed of detail, the cabin became a blocky shape in the darkness; to the east, the dike formed a perfectly linear horizon. Keyes sat back on his heels, his hands dripping water down the gunwales. His face was damp, and gnats were starting to buzz in his ears and eyes. He wasn’t thinking about Mel anymore. He was thinking that this could be the worst night of his life.

Overhead, nighthawks sliced the sky, gulping bugs, and a big owl hooted twice from a faraway oak. The wind was dead now, so Keyes could hear every secret rustling in the swamp, though he could see almost nothing. After an hour he stopped trying to see at all, and just imagined—imagined that the sharp splash near the dike was only a heron spearing a minnow; imagined that the creaking plank was just a wood rat exploring the empty cabin; imagined that the piercing wail that seemed to float forever across the Glades was only a bobcat ending a hunt.

Keyes lay down in the canoe and propped his head on the leather binocular case. Even the sky was blank, held starless by the high clouds. With some effort he managed to close his eyes and tune out the traffic of the wilderness.

He thought of Jenna and felt stupid: she’d done it to him again, with one lousy dinner. He was marooned out here because he’d listened to her, and because he’d enjoyed the improbable notion that she needed him. He should have known there’d be trouble; with Jenna, you could bank on it. Keyes imagined her at that moment, puttering around the kitchen making dinner, or doing those damn Jane Fonda leg-lifts on the living-room rug. If she were worried at all, it was about Skip Wiley, not him.

Wiley. Stealing the oar from the canoe was the sort of stunt Wiley would pull, Keyes thought. But why didn’t I hear anything? Where could he be hiding? And what was he waiting for? For Christ’s sake, the joke was over.

Keyes sat up slowly in the canoe, suddenly aware that the crickets and the nighthawks had fallen silent. The Everglades had become perfectly still.

Something was wrong.

Keyes knew, from watching Tarzan movies as a kid, that whenever the jungle became quiet, something terrible was about to happen. The cannibals were about to attack or the elephants were about to stampede or a leopard was about to get dinner—any of which seemed preferable to one of Skip Wiley’s surprise visits. Keyes wished like hell that he’d brought the cane bough with him on board the canoe.

A shadow materialized on the porch of Wiley’s cabin.

It was a man’s form, erect but motionless. In the emptiness of the night Keyes could hear the man breathing. He also heard the frantic hammering of his own heart.

“Wiley?”

The figure didn’t move. Featureless, it appeared to face him with folded arms.

“Skip, get me outta here, dammit.” Keyes forced a laugh, brittle with fear. With bloodless knuckles he clutched the gunwales of the canoe. “Skip?”

The shadow on the porch stepped back until it filled the frame of the cabin door. Muscles knotting, Keyes peered at the mute figure. He felt a cool drop of sweat trickle down his spine, and he shuddered. He was ready to dive from the canoe at the first glint of a gun.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but I don’t mean any harm,” Keyes said.

Nothing from the specter.

“Please, wave your hand if you can hear me,” Keyes implored.

To his astonishment, the pensive shadow raised its right hand and waved. Keyes smiled inwardly, thinking: At last, progress!—not realizing that the man’s gesture was not a wave at all, but a signal.

Idiotically Keyes raised his own right hand in amiable reciprocation. He remained so transfixed by the figure at the cabin that he didn’t see what he should have seen: a dark brown hand, bare and smooth, rising from the water and alighting on the starboard side of the canoe, precisely where his own hand had been.

When Keyes finally was distracted from the silent watcher, it was not by other sights or sounds, but by a paralyzing centrifugal sensation.

The canoe was spinning out from under him.

He was in the air.

He was in the water.

He was blinded, and he was choking.

He was swallowed into the throat of the swamp.

11

Wake up, Jungle Boy!”

Brian Keyes blinked the sting from his eyes and started coughing up swamp water.

“Not even a civil hello. How do you like that?”

“Hello, Skip,” Keyes said, between hacks.

They were in a clearing, deep in a cypress hammock. Smoke hung sweetly in the night air and a fire crackled, shooting sparks into the canopy. Hands bound, Keyes sat on bare ground against the trunk of a dwarf cypress. A cool breeze announced that he’d been stripped to his underwear. A tendril of wet hydrilla weed clung to his forehead.

“Cut me loose, Skip.”

Wiley grinned, his huge elastic face full of good humor.

“What do you think of the beard, Brian?”

“Very nice. Cut me loose, you asshole.”

Chuckling, Wiley ambled back to the camp-fire. Keyes saw that he wasn’t alone; other figures moved quietly on the fringe of the clearing, conversing in low tones. Soon Wiley returned carrying a coffee mug.

“Hot tea,” he declared. “All natural herbs. Here, it’ll put lead in your pencil.”

Keyes shook his head. “No thanks.”

“So how’re things in the private-eye business?”

“A little strange, at the moment.”

Wiley was barefoot. He wore pleated khaki trousers and a cream-colored smock with two red horizontal stripes (pseudo-African, Keyes guessed). His rebellious hair had been raked straight back, giving a blond helmet effect, and the new beard bristled thick and reddish. Keyes had to admit that Skip Wiley was still a man of considerable presence.

“I guess you want an explanation.”

“Naw,” said Keyes. “This happens all the time.”

“You’re deep in the Everglades,” Wiley said. “This is my camp. I’m hiding out.”

“And doing the worst Kurtz I ever saw.”

“Let’s wait for history to make that judgment. And stop that funny business with your hands. That’s not rope, it’s oiled sawgrass. You keep trying to get loose and it’ll cut through the veins of your wrist. Bleed to death in nine minutes flat.”

Keyes craned a glance over his shoulder and saw that Wiley was telling the truth. He stopped struggling.

“Where are my clothes?”

“We’ve got ‘em hung by the fire, drying out.”

“We?”

“Los
Noches de Diciembre.
The Nights of December.”

“Oh, Skip, no,” Keyes said dispiritedly. It had not occurred to him that Wiley was mixed up with the kidnappings, yet it made perfect sense. Wiley had never been predictable, except in his passion for extremes. The symbolism of Bellamy and Harper was so obvious that Keyes felt dim and stupid.

“Don’t look so bummed out,” Wiley said. “Now’s a good time to meet the rest of the guys.” He clapped his enormous hands. Three figures emerged from the shadows and assembled behind him. Keyes looked up to their faces, backlighted by the fire.

“Brian, I’d like you to meet the group. The big fellow here is Viceroy Wilson—you may have heard of him.”

Keyes said, “I think we met at Pauly’s Bar.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, “my fist met your head.”

“And this,” Wiley said cheerfully, “is Jesus Bernal.”

Bernal was a jittery little Latin in a stringy undershirt. Keyes immediately noticed a strong resemblance in stature and complexion to Ernesto Cabal; no wonder Al Garcia’s witnesses had been eighty percent sure.

Jesus Bernal shot Keyes a contemptuous glance before slipping into the shadows. Wilson followed in a sullen gait.

“Viceroy hates you ‘cause you look like a cop, and Jesus is just a little shy,” Wiley explained. He threw his arm around the third man. “But here’s the guy who made all this possible. Tom Tigertail. Tommy, say hi to Mr. Keyes.”

Tommy Tigertail leaned forward to study the half-naked prisoner. Tommy was a handsome young Seminole: late twenties, medium height, lean but showing plenty of muscle. He had longish black hair and a classic Creek face, with high cheekbones and Oriental eyes. He wore jeans but no shirt, just a towel slung around his neck.

“You’re not hurt,” he said to Keyes.

“Naw, a little queasy is all.”

“You put up a strong fight,” Tommy said. “Swallowed half the pond.”

“You were the one under the canoe?”

Wiley piped, “Tommy’s one helluva swimmer!”

Expressionless, Tommy walked back to the fire to join the others.

“That young man,” Wiley whispered proudly, “is worth five million dollars. Can you believe it? He made it all on Indian bingo. Got four bingo halls in South Florida—see, gambling’s legal on the reservations. Perfectly legal. You can’t put a casino on Miami Beach but you could open one smack in the middle of the Big Cypress. It’s goddamn brilliant irony, isn’t it, Brian? Little old blue-hair paleskins from all over creation come to bet Seminole bingo and the Indians make a killing. Ha! Bury my heart at Chase Manhattan! Tommy’s the business manager so the tribe cuts him in for the biggest chunk. Already he’s put away five fucking million dollars!”

“So what’s he doing out here instead of the Galt Ocean Mile?”

Wiley looked disappointed at the remark. “Tommy’s out here,” he said, “because he
believes
in me. He believes in what we’re doing.”

“And what is that, Skip?”

“Well, in Tommy’s case, we’re launching the Fourth Great Seminole War. In the case of my little Cuban friend, we are advancing the cause of international right-wing terrorism. And as far as Mr. Viceroy Wilson is concerned, we are kicking the living shit out of whitey.” Wiley bent over and dropped to a whisper again. “See, Brian, each of these guys has his own particular constituency. My job, as I see it, is to make them feel equally important. It’s a delicate balance, believe me. These are not the most stable human beings in the world, but they’ve got loads of energy. It’s damned inspiring.”

Keyes said, “What about you, Skip? What’s your constituency?”

“Come on!” Wiley’s brow furrowed. “You don’t
know?”

Somewhere in the brush an animal scampered, emitting a high-pitched trill. Keyes glanced toward the darkness apprehensively.

“Relax,” Wiley said. “Just a raccoon. My constituency, Brian. Along with the eagles, the opossums, the otters, the snakes, even the buzzards. All of this belongs to them, and more. Every goddamn acre, from here west to Miami Beach and north to the big lake, belongs to them. It got stolen away, and what we’re going to do … “ Wiley made a fist and shook it. “ … is get it back.”

Keyes thought: A cross between Dr. Dolittle and Che Guevara. Wait’ll I tell Cab Mulcahy.

“Don’t give me that you-poor-sick-boy look,” Wiley said. “I’m just fine, couldn’t be better. You’re the one who’s got a problem, Brian. A big goddamn problem, I might add. Before this is over you’re gonna wish you were back at the
Sun,
covering the bozos in the mayor’s race.”

Keyes said, “I’ll take some of that tea now.”

He was trying to slow Wiley down, keep him from getting too wound up. Keyes remembered what Wiley could be like on one of his fast burns, all reckless fury.