American Tropic (22 page)

A craggy old fisherman wearing fish-gut-stained khaki trousers and a frayed long-billed cap comes up next to Big and nudges him. “Hey, fella, what’d you hit her with?”

Big keeps his eyes on the marlin being hoisted as he answers. “Used a naked horse-ballyhoo rig at first. Can’t trust ’em, a bitch getting a solid hook setup. Kept losing fish all morning. Switched over to a braided polyethylene ballyhoo lead with a J-hook lure and no skirt attached. Nailed her.”

“That polyethylene lead is stronger than steel. No wonder you campaigned in such a whopper.”

“I’m not out there fun-fishing to catch and release, like you timid old-timers and castrated ecology boys.”

The chained marlin reaches the top of the scale. A white arrow spins in a circle around painted numbers and stops on the weight of the marlin. The fishermen all exhale in surprise. Big moans with disappointment.

The craggy old fisherman turns to Big. “Missed the record by only twelve pounds. Rare to catch ’em that big here—they’ve been fished out. Offshore of Cuba, yeah, maybe you can still reel in a whopper like this, but not around Key West. You should mount it, display it in the hotel lobby of your new Neptune Bay Resort.”

Big stares at the marlin swaying on the pulley chain.
He pulls off his cap and runs his hand over his head, slicking back his dyed blond hair. He claps the cap back on his head. “I only mount record breakers. I’ll have her chopped up so nobody else can claim her.”

The old fisherman shakes his head in dismay. “Shame to do that. She’s a seven-hundred-pound beauty. You should have released her if you weren’t going to keep her. That would’ve been the sporting thing to do.”

“Don’t talk to me about sport, old man. It’s not about sport. It’s about winning.”

The old fisherman fixes his crinkly gaze on Big. “I been around a long time. I seen things. That fish is bigger than the record breaker Hemingway caught between Key West and Cuba back in the 1930s. Crime to chop her up. Any guy standing here will give you ten grand so’s he can trophy-mount her and call her his own.”

“I’ll chop her up personally. She’ll be expensive sushi for the alley cats tonight.” Big’s broad tanned face breaks into a smile at the old fisherman. “And I don’t give a fuck about a fat, bearded dead writer who once caught a big fish in these waters.”

L
uz makes her way into the Police Chief’s crowded office. The Chief, Moxel, and a team of white-suited forensic investigators are huddled intensely over a black micro–digital recorder on the Chief’s desk. The
Chief speaks with urgent anticipation. “Just got this—copy of the recording sewn into Hard Puppy’s mouth. Could be our big breakthrough.”

Luz hunches toward the recorder with the others. The Chief presses the recorder’s play button. The recorder’s red indicator light flashes. The small speaker crackles with static and the eerie chant of an electronically altered voice.

The recorded voice stops. A low-frequency electronic hissing is heard. The recorder’s flashing red light dims and goes out. No one around the desk moves; they all barely breathe, waiting for the recorder’s dead light to flash back to life.

The Chief slams his fist on the desk, jolting everyone. “That’s him, mocking us! Bizango won’t communicate anymore!” He turns in frustration on the forensic investigators. “What have you got from Blue Hole?”

One of them shakes his head negatively. “Not even a footprint in the mud was left. Whatever prints had been there were compromised by those damn gators mucking around.”

“What about prints on the forest trail? What about prints on the spear shot into the tree? What about prints on Hard Puppy’s mutilated head? Must be something?”

“Nothing. It’s like he’s a ghost, or clever enough to know the tricks to stay invisible. We’re still waiting for
more results from our lab up in Miami. They’re close to getting the true voice-sound identity of whoever is speaking on the recordings.”

“The Blue Hole gators? You autopsied them?”

“Killed them and ran tests on everything in their digestive tracts and the feces in their bowels. Everything was what you’d expect.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Half-eaten fish, frogs, and human remains. DNA testing shows that the human remains are from one person, Hard Puppy.”

The Chief glares at the investigator. “I could’ve told you that. We don’t need DNA mumbo-jumbo to know those gators ate Hard. You guys are way above my pay grade and supposed to be brilliant, but you can’t figure out how one guy in a rubber suit is getting away with multiple murders.” The Chief fires a commanding look across the desk at Luz. “Don’t just stand there staring at me with those big brown eyes. What do you have for me?”

“Well, give me a chance to get it out. I traced all the calls made to Noah’s radio show. None turned up anyone who can be considered a suspect. The only two callers I couldn’t get a location fix on were Bizango and that Nam vet who keeps talking about Permian extinction. They both were using different public phone booths. I questioned the people at businesses around those booths, but nobody remembers seeing anything unusual. I had Forensics scour the booths for prints. I ran the prints through our database, the FBI’s database, even Homeland Security’s database. So far, nothing incriminating.”

“That Nam vet, he’s got me worried. You scare up anything, anything at all?”

“I tried everywhere, even went around to the veterans’ bars. Problem is, most guys hanging in those places are so baked on meds they’re no longer tightly wrapped. They sent me on wild-goose chases. I never found the radio vet.”

“What about Noah? You keeping him pointed in the right direction?”

“He knows what to do. He’s throwing out more red meat to provoke Bizango into calling. The moment Bizango calls, we’re on him if we get the GPS location of where he’s phoning from. Noah knows the stakes.”

“When’s his next broadcast?”

“About an hour.”

“Good. I’ll have the SWAT team ready to roll.” The Chief looks around at everyone in the crowded room. “I want you all to stay on the razor’s edge—stay on that edge until your feet bleed. We’re gonna get this guy now.”

T
ruth Dog back on the air. Let me hit you with a pressure drop of info. One-quarter of all mammals and one-third of all amphibians are headed for extinction on this fouled-up planet in ten years. That’s a fact. Right here in Florida, we lose thousands of acres a day to development. Half of the Everglades have already been drained and bulldozed, devoured by greed. Check it out. Okay, I see I’ve got a brave pilgrim calling in. Show me the rage.”

“I’m a young mother of three kids; I’ve got bigger problems
than saving mammals and amphibians. I’m terrified about this Bizango character. He’s going to be at the Fantasy Parade. I don’t care what the cops say about how safe it is to be out, something horrible is going to happen. People I know are scared to death. They’re staying home. They aren’t going to the Fantasy Parade.”

“Not everyone is afraid. The tourist bureau expects eighty thousand thrill-seekers showing up for our annual party. Anything goes at the Fantasy Parade—the shocking, the vulgar, the perverted. If the threat of a category-three hurricane couldn’t keep the merrymakers away from the parade some years back, what makes you think they’ll be afraid of our own homegrown Jack the Ripper stalking them in the streets? Just gives Fantasy Parade an air of spooky realism.”

“You’re making me more frightened with talk like that. I’m hanging up.”

“Wait! You’ve got to understand, a guy like Bizango, he has his thoughts banging and boiling in his head. He believes in his righteous crusade. He believes the voices that only he hears come from God’s lips to his ears. The problem is, the truly evil ones who walk among us in this world don’t show that they are evil—that’s why they are so lethal. They hide in the shadows of anonymity, hunker down in the crevices of their cowardice, waiting to strike.”

“Now I’m really terrified.”

“I’m trying to help you get a philosophical grip on reality. And, uh, one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“What are your kids going to dress up as this Halloween?”

“That’s the last thing on my mind. I’m not letting them out of the house.”

“I’ve got what they should be.”

“What?”

“Skeletons.”

“That’s not funny! You sicko!”

“Whoops, she’s gone. We need a good jolt of gallows humor when there’s a killer out there wanting us to jump through our assholes with fear. Hey, pilgrims, you’ve stopped calling. Maybe nobody is awake. Nobody except Bizango. I know you’re out there, Bizango. I challenge you to crawl out from your cowardly crevice. Put your serpent lips to the phone and kiss me with your hate.”

A
t the Atlantic Ocean’s edge, Luz sits in her parked Charger in front of the monument marking
SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A
.
On the ocean’s distant horizon, toward Cuba, black clouds obliterate the stars. Jagged bolts of lightning stab down from the clouds; the flashes appear to be a fearsome army of bright giants marching in. Luz looks through the car’s windshield at the lightning as she listens to Noah’s broadcast.

“I’ve got a call! Hello, who is this? Answer me! Don’t hang up! Why did you hang up? Call me back. I’m waiting. Punch me with your pain.”

Luz turns the radio volume up and listens closely as a new call comes in to Noah.

“
Hola
, Truth Dog, brave crusader. This is the Nam vet.”

“Welcome back to the show, Permian-theory man. Extinction is your karma. Let’s talk about it. It’s now or never.”

“Do you know how many oil wells are in the Gulf of Mexico?”

“I used to be an environmental attorney fighting to keep corporate-oil bloodsuckers from drilling in the Gulf, so I know the answer to that. There are four thousand offshore oil and gas rigs out there. The disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout caused millions of gallons of oil to flow into the pristine Gulf. The toxic dispersants used to break up the oil and hide the crime created a hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf bigger than the state of New Jersey, a floating black hole of death where nothing lives, grows, moves, or swims.”

“You’ve got facts.”

“Hell yeah, I’ve got facts. One of our planet’s great fisheries is becoming a gigantic dead pond. And people ask why I’m so pissed off!”

“That’s right, but I’ve got even bigger rage!
Homo sapiens
are invasive predators who are goin’ to blow sky-high in a second Permian Extinction Event. Won’t even be enough time to load your
Noah’s Lark
with a few animals. It’s the Gulf of Mexico oil drillin’ that’s goin’ to bring it on. The corporations are crackin’ open the ocean’s floor, tappin’ into a mega-vault of methane gas. Those four thousand oil and gas rigs in the Gulf you mentioned are goin’ to detonate at the same time, creatin’ a force greater than pullin’ the trigger on every stockpiled atomic weapon. And you mumble, don’t fool with Mother Nature or Mother Nature will fool with you. I’m sayin’, man has fucked Nature, so
Nature’s goin’ to obliterate man. The mother of all explosions is comin’!”