American Tropic (23 page)

Luz’s cell phone beeps loudly in her shirt pocket. She grabs the phone and holds it to her ear.

The Chief’s voice shouts over the phone, “You hear what the Nam vet is saying?”

“I’m listening.”

“He’s our guy.”

“That’s not the Bizango voice we heard on the recordings. He’s a different guy.”

“No. It’s Bizango. He’s trying to head-fake us.”

“Quick, give me a GPS if you’ve got it.”

“Just a sec, something’s coming in. He’s using a landline this time. We’re tracking … getting a location. Here it comes.… One-four-five Hurricane Court.”

Luz throws the cell phone down on the car seat, jams her foot on the accelerator, and roars the Charger away from the southernmost continental point. She speeds up Whitehead Street toward the lighthouse towering above the palm trees. She passes the long brick wall in front of the two-story Hemingway House, where tourists are lined up taking photographs. She wheels the car around a corner and comes to a stop in Hurricane Court with its circle of ramshackle houses. She jumps from her car and looks around. No other police are there. She sees across a dead lawn a shabby house with windows blacked out by inside blinds. The number on the house’s paint-peeling front door is 145.

A police car pulls up to a stop, and Moxel gets out. “Hold up a minute, Luz.” He nods toward the house with the blacked-out windows. “That guy in there is a psycho killer. The SWAT team is on their way. Let’s wait.”

“I’m not waiting.” Luz pulls her Glock out of its holster. “Back me up. I’m going in.”

“That’s crazy. The guy’s a Nam vet. He could have the place booby-trapped to explode. He was trained to do that shit.”

Luz ignores Moxel and runs across the dead lawn to the front door. She grabs the door handle; it is locked. She stands back, gripping her pistol tightly in both hands. She kicks the door, banging it open. She bursts inside a living room darkened by closed blinds covering the windows. She whips her pistol around in every direction, her head snapping from side to side, ready for someone to jump up from behind the shadows of cluttered furniture. She steps cautiously across the room toward a splinter of light creeping along the bottom of a closed door. She stops at the door and listens for sounds on the other side. She hears nothing. She places her hand on the handle and twists it quietly to an open position. She throws the door back, and a sudden burst of light from a brightly lit room illuminates her completely.

Facing Luz on the far side of the room is a man in his sixties, his fierce face etched with a spider web of wrinkles, his large wedge-shaped head shaved; a thick gray walrus mustache hangs over his top lip and down the sides of his mouth. He sits at stiff-backed attention in a battered aluminum wheelchair with worn duct tape wrapped tightly on its two arched handles. A coarse green military blanket covers the man from the waist down. On the wall behind hangs a Vietnam-era Missing in Action flag with the silhouette of a soldier’s head bent forlornly in front of a prison guard-tower. The flag’s logo declares, in blood-red letters,
POW-MIA, YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN
.

The man stares pointedly at Luz as if he has been expecting her. His words rush out. “Welcome to the Casbah!”

“Police! Raise your hands and put them behind your head!”

The man’s hands move quickly toward the blanket covering him below the waist.

Luz grips her pistol harder and splays her legs apart into a firing stance. “One more move toward that blanket and I’ll blow you to hell. Hands up!”

Moxel bursts in behind Luz, his gun out. He looks at the man in the wheelchair and whoops. “We got Bizango! Keep him covered! I’m cuffing him!” The man’s hands move toward the top of the blanket. Moxel shouts at Luz, “There’s a gun under the blanket! I can see its bulge! Shoot him if he moves!”

Luz steps closer to the man, her pistol held in firing position at his head.

Moxel grabs the edge of the man’s blanket. “I’ve got your Bizango ass now!” He rips the blanket away from the man’s lap and looks down.

Aimed straight at Moxel are two blunt fleshy stumps of the man’s legs, amputated above his knees. He throws his head back and laughs. “You thought I was Bizango! Fools! Everyone with a brain and heart is Bizango now, even those of us who can only dream of what he does! Bizango said to boogie till you bounce, bop till you drop. I boogied in Nam. The parachute didn’t open fully when I jumped out of a plane and bopped down; I bounced. Lost my legs. And this country doesn’t give a shit now. I’m forgotten history, political roadkill. Just like that Vietnam girl runnin’ down the road with napalm burnin’ her skin off. Just like that pathetic pelican covered in oil from the
Deepwater Horizon blowout, its wings spread out, tryin’ to fly. I’ll never be airborne again.”

Behind Luz, a stomping commotion breaks out. She swings around as a SWAT team storms in from the hallway. The muscular men are protected by heavy body armor; antiballistic helmets are clamped tight over their heads; strapped around their waists are belts of bullets and grenades. Gripped in their gloved hands are submachine guns. They aim at the legless vet in the wheelchair.

The vet raises his arms and flaps them in the air. His mocking voice shouts at the armored men: “I’ll never be airborne again! You gonna napalm me too? You gonna drown me in oil? Bring it on! I’m ready to rock and roll! You chickenshit killers! You won’t get him, you know! Bizango is too smart for you! You dumb bastards only know
how
to kill. Bizango knows
who
to kill!”

L
ight shines out in the night from an open-sided canvas party tent set up on the earth-scraped construction site of Neptune Bay Resort. Inside the tent, a band of musicians dressed as bare-chested mermen play a bouncy Caribbean tune. Cocktail waitresses in fishnet mermaid costumes circulate through the well-dressed crowd with trays of tropical cocktails and exotic appetizers. At the center of the crowd, Big Conch holds court. He is outfitted as Neptune, god of the sea, wearing a toga and leather sandals; a gold plastic crown circles the top of his
long white wig. He grips in one hand a pitchfork, its handle and three sharp steel prongs painted silver to represent Neptune’s trident spear. He pumps the trident in the air. “Silence!” The band of mermen cease their music; the cocktail waitresses stop and balance their service trays on their bare shoulders.

Big steps to a table covered by a cloth canopy. “It’s been a vicious four-year fight. I’ve had countless work stoppages and spent a fortune on attorneys. I was opposed by every environmental group. Today, the government approved Neptune Bay Resort. Free enterprise prevailed!” The crowd hoots their approval. Big puts down his trident and pops a bottle of champagne. He sloshes the bubbly liquid into a plastic silver chalice and raises it high. “Neptune Bay will stand forever as a monument to my dearly departed partners, Dandy Randy and Bill Warren. Damn, I miss those boys; I wish they were here to share this slam-dunk victory.” He grabs the edge of the cloth canopy covering the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present the most ambitious development ever built in the Florida Keys, a world-class resort that will put thousands to work and fatten our tax rolls with the fruit of hardworking capitalism, the fabulous Neptune Bay!” He whips off the cloth canopy. The crowd applauds at a fiberglass scale-model display of the vast complex. Big raises his silver chalice triumphantly in the air. “Construction of Neptune Bay resumes tomorrow. I will—”

His words are cut off by the roar of a boat engine. Everyone looks out from the open-sided party tent at the concrete pier jutting into the ocean. At the end of the pier is Big’s powerboat, with its engine roaring. Big grabs his steel-pronged trident and runs out onto the pier to his
boat. No one is in the boat; its two-hundred-horsepower engine idles with a turbo-fueled growl, and exhaust steams from beneath its chrome spoiler back fin. On the boat’s sleek hull the name
Big Conch
is spray-painted over by a slashed red
X
.

Big jumps into the boat and turns off the engine. An eerie whistle breaks the sudden silence. Big looks across the water. There is no one in the darkness. Big raises the trident spear gripped in his hand and shakes it angrily. “Whoever you are—I will get you! I will cut off your head and piss down your neck and have you tell me it’s raining!”

A
massive redbrick fort built during the Civil War dominates the entrance to Key West Harbor on a spit of land hooked out into the Atlantic Ocean. The fort’s towering walls are surrounded at their base on three sides by a deep water-filled moat. The fort’s one open entrance is guarded by two large iron-barrel cannons. Police cars speed up to the entrance, skidding to a stop. The Chief and his policemen, outfitted in riot gear and bulletproof vests and carrying heavy automatic weapons, jump from the cars and run into the fort. They race to the end of an arched brick corridor where Moxel stands waiting, with his rifle at the ready. The Chief catches his breath, looks behind Moxel at a six-foot hole opened up in a brick wall, and huffs. “So this is it?”

Moxel nods at the hole. “Yeah, the fort’s restoration
crew was doing structural work on this old wall when they realized it closed off what once was a doorway. Probably bricked in way back in Abe Lincoln’s time. When the crew broke through, they discovered a passageway leading into a hidden room. They found weird stuff and got out fast.”

“What kind of weird stuff?”

“Really spooky. Bizango stuff.”

“We got an alert that this is Bizango’s hideout. Did anybody see him?”

“I was the first one here, immediately sized up the situation, and issued the alert.”

“Did you see him? Did you go in?”

“No, I was waiting for backup.”

The Chief grips his rifle in one hand and unhooks the long metal flashlight hanging from his belt as he barks orders at the surrounding men. “Guard this entrance. Moxel and I will go in. If we’re not out in twenty minutes, two of you follow us—never more than two at a time. I don’t want to lose a whole squad to this maniac; he could be hiding anywhere.”

The Chief clicks on his flashlight and steps through the brick wall’s opening into a passageway barely the width of a man. He shines the flashlight into the darkness, exposing twisting curves ahead. Moxel follows him in. They duck their heads beneath the low arch of the brick ceiling as they squeeze forward. The Chief stops, sweat pours down his face. “Jesus, must be a hundred and ten degrees in here.”

Moxel’s nostrils twitch as he inhales the stifling air. “Smells like a sewer. Smells like there might be dead Civil War guys rotting in here. Let’s turn around.”

“We can’t turn around. It’s too narrow.”

“We can walk out backward.”

“No. We’re going through to the end.”

Moxel slaps at his face. “Fucking mosquitoes. I’m being eaten alive. During the Civil War, more soldiers died from mosquito malaria than were shot in battle. I saw that on the History Channel.”

“Keep your voice down. Is the safety of your rifle off?”

“Of course.”

“You sure your rifle’s loaded?”

“Shit, I forgot.”

“Goddamn it, man. Load your rifle.”

Moxel loads his rifle in the semidarkness, snapping cartridges into the clip. “I’m ready now.”

“Good. I hope this passageway doesn’t go on too much farther.”

Moxel follows close behind the Chief. The passageway becomes narrower and tighter. They squeeze forward, and emerge into a dark room. The Chief shines his flashlight around the room, exposing old wooden crates stacked along one wall. The crates are stamped
MUSKET ROUNDS, BLACK POWDER
.

The Chief whistles under his breath. “Looks like we’re in a Civil War munitions room.”

“Shit! This stuff is so old it can blow if we even talk too loud.”

“Don’t get excited.”

The Chief aims his flashlight at a wall. The beam lights up a giant red
X
spray-painted across the wall. Below the red
X
, on the floor, is a Pelletier speargun. Next to the speargun is an open box full of four-foot-long steel spears.