Native Tongue (8 page)

“Joe,” Chelsea said, “this gentleman is from the FBI.”

“I can see that.”

Chelsea cleared his throat. “This is Agent Hawkins.”

Joe Winder stuck out his hand. “Billy, isn’t it? You worked a Coral Gables Savings job about four years back.”

The agent smiled cautiously. “And you were with the
Herald.”

“Right.”

“Dated one of the tellers.”

“Right again.”

Charles Chelsea was trying to set some sort of record for clearing his throat. “What a coincidence that you two guys know each other.”

Joe Winder sat down and stretched his legs. “Bank robbery. Billy here was the lead agent. Funny story, too—it was the Grou-cho guy.”

“Yeah,” said Hawkins, loosening up. “Wore the big nose and
the eyebrows, even carried a cigar. We finally caught up with him in Clearwater.”

“No kidding?” Winder said, knowing that it was driving Chelsea crazy, all this friendly conversation with a real FBI man. “All the way up in Clearwater?”

“Gentlemen,” Chelsea cut in, “if you don’t mind.”

“What is it, Charlie?”

“Agent Hawkins is here at Mr. Kingsbury’s personal request.” Chelsea lowered his voice. “Joe, there were three notes delivered to employees in the park. Each was signed by this Wildlife Rescue Corps.”

Winder reached in his pocket. “You mean like this?” He handed his copy to Billy Hawkins. He told him what had happened at the Rare Animal Pavilion—the old lady in the Easter bonnet, the phantom punch. Hawkins took it all down in a notebook.

Chelsea tried to contain his irritation. “Why didn’t you report this to Security?” he asked Joe Winder.

“Because I didn’t want to interrupt Pedro’s nap.”

Pedro Luz darkened. Every now and then he dozed off in the security office. “All you had to do was ring the buzzer,” he snapped at Winder. He glanced at the FBI man, whose expression remained impassive and nonjudgmental. “I’ve had a touch of the flu,” Pedro Luz added defensively. “The medicine makes me sleepy.” For a large man he had a high tinny voice.

“Never mind,” said Charles Chelsea. “The point is, everybody’s calling up for comment. The networks. The wires. We’re under siege, Joe.”

Winder felt his headache coming back. Agent Billy Hawkins admitted that the federal government didn’t know much about the Wildlife Rescue Corps.

“Most of these groups seem to specialize in rodents,” the agent said. “Laboratory rats, mostly. Universities, pharmaceutical
houses—those are the common targets. What usually happens, they break in at night and free the animals.”

“But we weren’t doing experiments.” Chelsea was exasperated. “We treated Vance and Violet as royalty.”

“Who?” the agent said.

“The voles,” Joe Winder explained cheerfully.

Charles Chelsea continued to whine. “Why have they singled out the Amazing Kingdom? We didn’t abuse these creatures. Quite the opposite.”

“You do any vivisections here?” asked Agent Hawkins. “These groups are quite vocal against vivisection.”

Chelsea paled. “Vivisection? Christ, we gave the little bastards fresh corn on the cob every morning. Sometimes even citrus!”

“Well, this is what we’ve got.” Hawkins flipped backwards in his notebook. “Two white males, aged twenty-five to thirty-five, fleeing the scene in a 1979 blue Ford pickup, license GPP-B06. The registration comes back to a convicted burglar whose current alias is Buddy Michael Schwartz. I might add that Mr. Schwartz’s rap sheet shows no history of a social conscience with regard to animal rights, or any other.”

“Somebody hired him,” Joe Winder said.

“Most likely,” agreed the FBI man. “Anyway, they dragged the truck out of a rock pit this morning. No bodies.”

“Any sign of the voles?”

Billy Hawkins allowed himself a slight frown. “We believe the animals are dead.” He handed Winder copies of the highway patrol reports, which described the incident with the tourist family in the red LeBaron, as well as the subsequent Winnebago attack. As Winder scanned the reports, Charles Chelsea reminded him to keep the news under his hat.

Agent Hawkins said, “I heard something on the radio about a million-dollar reward.”

“Right!” Winder said.

“How can you do that,” the FBI man said, “when you know these animals are dead?”

Joe Winder was having a wonderful time. “Go ahead,” he said to Charles Chelsea. “Explain to the gentleman.”

“Where’s Koocher?” Chelsea grumbled. “I left about a dozen messages.”

“Let’s ask Pedro,” said Joe Winder. “He sent one of his boys over to the lab yesterday. Must’ve had a reason.”

Charles Chelsea folded his hands on the desk, waiting. Agent Billy Hawkins turned slightly on the couch to get a better angle on the security chief. Joe Winder arched his eyebrows and said, “How about it, Pedro? Something else happen at the Rare Animal Pavilion?”

Pedro Luz scowled, his tiny black eyes receding under the ledge of his forehead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Nothing happened nowhere.” He fumbled with his clipboard. “See? There is no report.”

The Security Department at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills was staffed exclusively by corrupt ex-policemen, of which there was a steady supply in South Florida. The chief of Security, Pedro Luz, was a black-haired pinheaded giant of a young man who had been fired from the Miami Police for stealing cash and cocaine from drug dealers, then pushing them out of a Beechcraft high over the Everglades. Pedro Luz’s conviction had been overturned by an appeals court, and the charges ultimately dropped when the government’s key witness failed to appear for the new trial. The witness’s absence was later explained when bits and pieces of his body were found in a shrimper’s net off Key West, although there was no evidence linking this sad turn of events to Pedro Luz himself.

Once the corruption and murder charges had been dismissed,
Pedro Luz promptly sued the police department to reclaim his old job, plus back wages and vacation time. Meanwhile, to keep his hand in law enforcement, Pedro Luz went to work at Francis X. Kingsbury’s vacation theme park. The pay was only $8.50 an hour, but as a perk Pedro was given free access to the executive gym, where he spent hours of company time lifting weights and taking anabolic steroids. This leisurely regimen was interrupted by the embarrassing daylight theft of the prized voles—and a personal communication of urgency from Francis X. Kingsbury himself. Chief Pedro Luz immediately put the security staff on double shifts, and rented a cot for himself in the office.

Which is where he snoozed at one-thirty in the afternoon when he heard a knock on the bulletproof glass.

Pedro Luz sat up slowly and swung his thick legs off the bed. He stood up, strapped on his gun, straightened the shoulders of his uniform shirt. The knocking continued.

Through the glass, Pedro Luz saw a wiry brown man in a sweaty tank top. The man battled a spastic tic on one side of his face; it looked as if a wasp were loose in one cheek.

Pedro Luz opened the door and said, “What do you want?”

“I’m here for the money,” the man said, twitching. He clutched a grocery bag to his chest. “The million dollars.”

“Go away,” said Pedro Luz.

“Don’t you even want to see?”

“The voles are dead.”

The wiry man said, “But I heard on the news—”

“Go away,” said Pedro Luz, “before I break your fucking legs.”

“But I found the mango voles. I want my money.”

Pedro Luz stepped out of the office and closed the door. He stood a full foot taller than the man with the grocery bag, and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

“You don’t listen so hot,” Pedro Luz said.

The man’s face twitched uncontrollably as he tried to open the bag. “Just one look,” he said, “please.”

Pedro Luz seized the man by the throat and shook him like a doll. The grocery bag fell to the ground and tore open. Pedro Luz was so involved in assaulting the derelict that he didn’t notice what came out of the bag: two half-starved, swaybacked ferrets, eyes glazed and bluish, lips flecked with foam. Instantly they settled in chewing on Pedro Luz’s right ankle, and did not stop until he tore them off, bare-handed, and threw them with all his might against the nearest wall.

One hour later, the Publicity Department of the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills faxed the following statement to all media, under the caption “Rare Voles Now Believed Dead”:

In the cafeteria, Charles Chelsea handed Joe Winder the fax and said, “Nice job, big guy.”

Winder stopped on the last sentence. “You’re charging money? For a goddamn slide show?”

“Joey, we’re running a business here. We’re not the
National Geographic
, okay? We’re not a charity.”

“A rodent slide show.” Joe Winder wadded up the press release. “The amazing thing is not that you’d do it, because I’d think you’d charge tourists twenty bucks to watch the pelicans fuck, if they’d let you. The amazing thing is, people will actually come and pay.”
He clapped his hands once, loudly. “I love this business, Charlie. Every day I learn something new.”

Chelsea tightened his necktie. “Christ, here we go again. I try to pay you a compliment, and you twist it into some sort of cynical …
commentary.”

“Sorry,” said Winder. He could feel his sinuses filling up like a bathtub.

“For your information,” said Chelsea, “I got people calling all the way from Alaska, wanting to buy Vance-and-Violet T-shirts.” Chelsea sighed, to show how disappointed he was in Joe Winder’s attitude. Then he said, with an edge of reluctance, “You did some nice writing on this piece, Joe. Got us all off the hook.”

“Thanks, boss. And you’re right—it was a piece.”

Chelsea sat down, eyeing the fast-food debris on Joe Winder’s tray. One of Uncle Ely’s Elves, sitting at the other end of the table, belched sonorously. Charles Chelsea pretended not to notice. He said, “Not to brag, Joey, but I think I did a pretty fair job with this ditty myself. Mr. X loved his quotes. He said I made him sound like a real human being.”

With the tips of his fingers, Joe Winder began to rub both his temples in a ferocious circular motion.

Chelsea asked, “Now what’s the matter?”

“Headache.” Winder squinted as tightly as he could, to wring the pain out of his eyeballs. “Listen, I called Dr. Koocher’s house. He didn’t go home last night. His wife is scared out of her mind.”

“Maybe he just got depressed and tied one on. Or maybe he’s got a girlfriend.”

Joe Winder decided not to tell Chelsea that Koocher had tried to reach him. “His wife’s eight months pregnant, Charlie. She says he usually calls about nineteen times an hour, but she hasn’t heard a word since yesterday.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Worry like hell,” said Winder. He stood up. “Also, I’d like
your permission to talk to Pedro Luz. I think he’s hiding something.”

Charles Chelsea said, “You can’t talk to him, Joe. He’s in the hospital.” He paused wearily and shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

“Come on, Charlie.”

“For rabies shots.”

“I should’ve guessed,” Winder said. “My condolences to the dog.”

“It wasn’t a dog,” Chelsea said. “Can’t this wait till tomorrow? Pedro’s in a lot of pain.”

“No,” said Joe Winder, “that’s perfect.”

Pedro Luz had been taken to the closest emergency room, which was Mariners’ Hospital down on Plantation Key. The nurse on duty remembered Pedro Luz very well, and directed Joe Winder to a private room on the second floor.

He didn’t bother to knock, just eased the door open. The impressive bulk of Pedro Luz was propped up in bed, watching a Spanish-language soap opera on Channel 23. He was sucking on one end of the plastic IV tube, which he had yanked out of his arm.

“That doesn’t go in your mouth,” Winder told him.

“Yeah, well, I’m thirsty.”

“You’re bleeding all over the place.”

“What do you care?” said Pedro Luz. With a corner of the sheet he swabbed the blood from his arm. “You better get out of here. I mean right now.”

Joe Winder pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. Pedro Luz smelled like a fifty-five-gallon drum of rubbing alcohol. His luxuriant hair stood in oily black spikes, and his massive neck was covered with angry purple acne, a side effect of the fruit-and-steroid bodybuilding diet.