Sick Puppy (18 page)

When the Japanese failed to return on time from the expedition, an intense search was launched using ultralight planes, airboats, skiffs and swamp buggies. Governor Dick Artemus even dispatched a pair of state helicopters to assist (a modest favor, in his view, compared to the free membership he’d been given at Ocean Reef on the day of his inauguration). Meanwhile, Florida tourism officials gloomily pondered how many millennia it would take for the industry to recover if it came to pass that twelve foreign business executives had been devoured by crocodiles—or perished under some equally horrific circumstances—while vacationing in the Sunshine State.

Publicly, authorities stuck to the theory that the Japanese visitors were “lost” in the mangrove creek system, although reporters found no shortage of locals who were both skeptical and happy to be quoted. Steamboat Creek was about as complicated to navigate as Interstate 95, and a thousand times safer. Fear of foul play rose with the ominous discovery of the missing canoes, shot full of holes and strung together with blue ski rope. The canoes had been hung off the Card Sound Bridge to dangle and spin high over the Intracoastal Waterway, like the baubled tail of an oversized kite. Boaters stopped to snap pictures until police showed up and hastily cut down the rope. The spectacle of the bullet-riddled boats all but vanquished hopes that the MatsibuCom executives would be found safe. It now appeared that they’d been abducted by either psychopaths or terrorists—a far more devastating scenario, publicity-wise, than a simple crocodile attack. A dour-faced contingent from the Japanese consulate in Miami arrived by private jet at Ocean Reef, where they were given a suite of waterfront rooms and unlimited long-distance privileges. Meanwhile, in Washington, a team of FBI forensic experts already had packed for the trip to Florida—they awaited only the somber phone call, reporting that the decomposing bodies had been located.

Then the dozen Japanese canoeists surprised everybody by turning up alive, unharmed and closemouthed. By daybreak on April 30, the MatsibuCom men and women were on a chartered Gulfstream 5, speeding back to Tokyo. The local press milked what it could from the ecotour-gone-awry angle, but in the absence of first-person quotes (and corpses), the story faded quickly from the headlines.

Lt. Jim Tile had heard about it before it made the TV news; the state Highway Patrol sent five road troopers and its top K-9 unit to join the search for the important visitors. The discovery of the canoes—and the emphatic manner in which they’d been sabotaged and strung up for display—confirmed Jim Tile’s suspicions about the incident on Steamboat Creek. He was hopeful the Japanese would remain silent, so that no other authorities would make the connection. Obviously Dick Artemus had not. Jim Tile purposely hadn’t shared his theory about the ecotour abduction with the governor during their brief meeting in Tallahassee.

That afternoon, though, the trooper dialed the voice-mail number they customarily used to trade messages—he and his friend, the long-ago governor—and was annoyed to find the line disconnected. So he packed an overnight bag, kissed Brenda good-bye and drove south nonstop, virtually the full length of the state. The sun had been up an hour by the time he arrived at the gatehouse of the Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo. The trooper was admitted to the premises by a surly young security guard who apparently had failed the rudimentary knuckle-dragging literacy quiz required to join regular police departments. The guard reluctantly escorted Jim Tile to the club’s executive offices, where—after producing a letter of introduction from the attorney general—the trooper was permitted to examine a roll of film that had been found in a camera bag left behind by one of the Japanese canoeists.

The film had been developed into a black-and-white contact sheet by the local sheriff’s lab technician, who had understandably failed to recognize its evidentiary value: Thirty-five of the thirty-six frames were dominated by a blurred finger in the foreground—not an uncommon phenomenon, when a 35-mm camera was placed in the excitable hands of a tourist. But, to Jim Tile, the finger in the snapshots from Steamboat Creek did not appear to be the wayward pinkie of a slightly built Japanese business executive, but rather the fleshy, hairy, crooked, scarred-up middle digit of a six-foot-six Anglo-American hermit with a furious sense of humor.

The last photograph on the roll, the only photograph without the finger, was of equal interest to the trooper. He turned to the slug-like security guard and said: “Does the club have a boat I can borrow? A skiff would do fine.”

“We keep a twelve-footer tied up at the marina. But I can’t letcha take it out by yourself. That’d be ’gainst policy.”

Jim Tile folded the contact sheet and slipped it into a brown office envelope, the same envelope Dick Artemus had handed to him at the governor’s mansion.

“So, where’s the marina?” the trooper asked the security guard.

“You ain’t authorized.”

“I know. That’s why you’re coming with me.”

It was a shallow-draft johnboat, powered by a fifteen-horse outboard. The guard, whose name was Gale, cranked the engine on the third pull. Over his ill-fitting uniform he buckled a bright orange life vest, and told Jim Tile to do the same.

“Policy,” Gale explained.

“Fair enough.”

“Kin you swim?”

“Yep,” said the trooper.

“No shit? I thought black guys couldn’t swim.”

“Where you from, Gale?”

“Lake City.”

“Lake City, Florida.”

“Is they another one?”

“And you never met a black person that could swim?”

“Sure, in the catfish ponds and so forth. But I’m talking about the ocean, man.
Salt
water.”

“And that’s a different deal?”

“Way different,” the guard said matter-of-factly. “That’s how come the life jackets.”

They crossed Card Sound behind a northerly breeze, the johnboat’s squared-off hull slapping on the brows of the waves. Gale entered the mouth of Steamboat Creek at full throttle but slowed beneath the low bridge.

He said to the trooper, up in the bow: “How far you need to go?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there, Gale.”

“Is that a .357 you got?”

“It is.”

“I don’t got my carry permit yet. But at home I keep a Smith .38 by the bed.”

“Good choice,” said Jim Tile.

“I b’lieve I’ll get somethin’ heavier for the streets.”

“See the eagle? Up there in the top of that tree.” The trooper pointed.

“Cool!” exclaimed Gale the security guard. “Now for that, you need a pump gun, twenty-gauge minimum. . . . Hey, I gotta stop’n take a leak.”

“Then stop,” said Jim Tile.

“I drank about a gallon of Sanka this morning and I’m fit to ’splode.”

“Anywhere’s fine, Gale.”

The guard cut the engine and the boat coasted silently in the milky green water. Gale removed the life vest and modestly turned around to urinate off the stern. The featherweight boat swung sidelong in the current, and at that moment an ill-timed gust of wind disrupted Gale’s golden outflow, blowing it back on the front of his uniform. He let out a yowl and clumsily zipped himself up.

“Goddammit.
That
won’t work.” He started the engine and idled the nose of the boat into the trees, up against the bank. Stepping out, he snagged one foot on a barnacled root and nearly went down. “Be right back,” he told the state trooper.

“Take your time, Gale.”

To escape the messy effect of the breeze, the security guard clomped twenty yards into the woods before choosing a spot to unzip. He was midstream—and pissing gloriously, like a stallion—when he heard the
chuk-a-chuk
of the outboard motor. Gale strained to halt his mighty cascade, tucked in his pecker and charged back toward the water’s edge. When he got there, the johnboat was gone.

Jim Tile headed down Steamboat Creek at half throttle. A school of finger mullet scattered in silvery streaks ahead of the bow. From behind he heard Gale the security guard bellowing hoarsely in the mangroves. He hoped the young man wouldn’t do something completely idiotic, such as attempt to
walk
out.

As he followed the creek, the trooper closely scanned the shoreline along both sides. He wasn’t expecting an obvious sign; a flotilla of searchers had been up and down the waterway and found nothing. Jim Tile knew his friend would be careful not to leave tracks. The trooper shed the life vest and reached inside his shirt, where he’d hidden the brown envelope. He took out the contact sheet and glanced once more at frame 36.

The photo had been snapped with the camera pointed aimlessly downward, as if the shutter had been triggered by mistake. And even though the picture was underlit and out of focus, Jim Tile could make out a patch of water, a three-pronged mangrove sprout and—wedged in the trident-like root—a soda-pop can. Schweppes, it looked like.

A Schweppes ginger ale, of all the unlikely brands.

At least it was
something
. Jim Tile started scouring the waterline for cans, and he found plenty: Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper, Orange Crush, Budweiser, Busch, Colt .45, Michelob—it was sickening. People are such slobs, the trooper thought, trashing such a fine and unspoiled place. Who could be so inexcusably disrespectful of God’s creation? Jim Tile had grown up in neighborhoods where there was more broken glass than grass on the ground, but his mother would’ve knocked him on his scrawny black butt if she’d caught him throwing a soda can anywhere but in a trash bin. . . .

The trooper had twisted the throttle down so that the johnboat was barely cutting a wake. Back and forth across the creek he tacked, scooping up floating cans where he saw them; easy to spot, glinting in the bright sun. But no Schweppes. Jim Tile felt foolish for chasing such a weak clue—he knew that weather skidded flotsam all over these creeks. And if the tide rose too high, the trident-shaped mangrove bud would be submerged anyway; invisible. The trooper crumpled the photographic contact sheet and shoved it into his pocket.

Still he kept searching the banks, mechanically collecting other cans and bottles and paper cups. Soon the inside of the johnboat began to look like a Dumpster. He was turning a wide bend in the creek when something caught his attention—not a ginger-ale can or a three-pronged mangrove sprout, but a slash of canary yellow paint. It appeared as a subtle vector across a cluster of tubular stalks, a yard above the waterline, where somebody had dragged something heavy and brightly painted into the trees. Something like a canoe.

Jim Tile tied off the bow and rolled up his trousers and pulled off his shoes. He bird-stepped from the johnboat and gingerly made his way into the snarl of trees. His left foot poked something smooth and metallic: The Schweppes can from the photograph, trapped beneath the surface by its mangrove talon. The trooper moved ahead, excruciatingly, the soles of his feet rasped by roots and shards of broken mollusks. He slipped repeatedly, and twice nearly pitched onto his face. Jim Tile was aware that he sounded like a herd of drunken buffalo, and not for a moment did he entertain the fantasy that he could sneak up on the governor. It would have been impossible, even on dry land.

The trees thinned and the trooper found a bleached rocky ridge that led him to the edge of a shallow tannic-looking lake. He realized he had stumbled into the federal crocodile refuge, a fact that impelled him to sit down, slap the spiders off his ankles and reconsider the practical boundaries of friendship.

Jim Tile was parched, exhausted, well lacerated—and no great fan of carnivorous reptiles. He rose with rictus-grim determination. Rocking on tender feet, he cupped both hands to his mouth.

“HEY!” he yelled out across the lake. “IT’S ME!”

High overhead, a lone osprey piped.

“I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT!” Jim Tile shouted.

Nothing.

“YOU HEAR ME? GODDAMN CROCODILES—YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY? I GOT A WIFE, GOVERNOR! I GOT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITIES!”

The trooper was shouting nearly at the top of his lungs.

“COME ON OUT, MAN, I’M SERIOUS! SERIOUS AS A FUCKING HEART ATTACK! YOU COME OUT!”

Jim Tile sucked in his breath and sat down again. He folded both arms across his knees and rested his head. He would’ve strangled a nun for a drop of warm ginger ale.

Then came the gunshot, followed by two, three, four more. The trooper raised up and smiled.

“Melodramatic sonofabitch,” he said.

The man whom Jim Tile had been sent to find was almost sixty now, but he stood formidably erect and broad-shouldered. Beneath a thin plastic shower cap his pate gleamed egg pink and freshly shorn. He had taken to wearing a kilt and little else; a kilt fashioned from a checkered racing flag. Jiffy Lube 300, the man said, I sort of stole it. He offered no explanation whatsoever for the origin of his weapon, an AK-47.

The man had grown out his silver beard in two extravagant tendrils, one blossoming from each cheek. The coils hung like vines down his broad leathery chest, and were so intricately braided that Jim Tile wondered if a woman had done it. Fastened by a ribbon to the end of each braid was the hooked beak of a large bird. Vultures, the man acknowledged. Big fuckers, too. His tangled eyebrows were canted at a familiar angle of disapproval, and somewhere he had gotten himself a new glass eye. This one had a crimson iris, as stunning as a fresh-bloomed hibiscus. Jim Tile found the effect disarming, and somewhat creepy.

The one-eyed kilted man had once been a popular and nationally famous figure, a war hero turned political crusader; brash, incorruptible and of course doomed to fail. It was Jim Tile who had driven the limousine that finally carried the man away from the governor’s mansion, away from Tallahassee and a creeping volcanic insanity. It was Jim Tile who had delivered him—his ranting friend—into a private and sometimes violent wilderness, and who had endeavored for more than two decades to keep track of him, watch over him, stop him when he needed to be stopped.

The trooper had done the best he could, but there had been the occasional, unpreventable eruption. Gunplay. Arson. Wanton destruction of property. Even homicide—yes, his friend had killed a few men since leaving Tallahassee. Jim Tile was sure of it. He was equally sure the men must have behaved very badly, and that in any case the Lord, above all, was best qualified to judge Clinton Tyree. That day would come soon enough. In the meantime, Jim Tile would remain recklessly loyal to the man now known as “Skink.”