Fortunately, by the time Keith was old enough to go out hunting, there was practically nothing left to shoot in Miami except for rats and low-flying seagulls. Every autumn, Keith badgered his father into taking him to the Big Cypress Swamp or private hunting camps in the Everglades, where the deer were chased into high water by airboats and shot at point-blank range. The elder Higstrom dreaded these excursions and found no sport in the killing, but his son couldn’t have been happier had he been lobbing grenades at crippled fawns.
It was on one such miserable morning that Keith Higstrom’s father swore off hunting forever. They were riding a tank-sized swamp buggy in hot pursuit of a scraggly, half-senile bobcat. Suddenly Keith began firing wildly at an object high in the sky—a bald eagle, it turned out, a federally protected species. The attempted felony was not consummated, due to the young man’s shaky aim, but in the fever of the moment he managed to blow off his father’s left ear.
Deafened, blood-drenched, writhing facedown in Everglades marl, the elder Higstrom experienced a peculiar catharsis, an unexpected soothing of the soul, as if a cool white sheet were slowly being drawn over his head. Yes, his injury was terrible, and the deafness would (if he came clean about it) cost him his job as an air traffic controller. On the other hand, he could never again be forced to go hunting with his excitable son!
Keith Higstrom couldn’t duck responsibility for the accident, nor the guilt that went with it. His father recovered from the gunshot wound, and was kind enough not to bring it up more than once or twice a day. Before long, Keith’s remorse gave way to an unspoken resentment, for he perceived that his father was using the missing ear as an excuse to avoid their weekend expeditions. A plastic surgeon had attached a durable polyurethane facsimile to the left side of the elder Higstrom’s head, while a high-tech hearing aid had restored the old man’s auditory capacity to eighty-one percent of what it was before the Everglades mishap. Yet he stubbornly refused to pick up a gun. Doctor’s orders, he squawked.
For Keith, outdoor companionship was increasingly hard to come by. His friends always seemed to have prior commitments whenever Keith invited them to go hunting. Frustrated and restless, he spent long sullen weekends cleaning his guns and watching videotapes of his favorite American Sportsman episodes. Whenever his trigger finger got itchy, he’d drive out the Tamiami Trail and park by the canal. As soon as darkness fell, Keith would load a double-barrel shotgun, strap on a headlamp and stalk along the shoreline. His usual targets were turtles and opossums; anything faster or smarter generally eluded him.
Shortly after the hurricane, Keith Higstrom noticed four dairy cows and a palomino mare grazing on his neighbor’s front lawn. Everyone on the block was gathered on the sidewalk, laughing and taking pictures; a light moment of relief in the otherwise somber aftermath of the storm. That night, drinking with his buddies at an Irish bar on Kendall Drive, Keith asked: “How much does a cow weigh?”
One of Keith’s friends said, “I give up, Higstrom. How much does a cow weigh?”
“It’s not a joke. More than a elk? Because I got cows loose on my street.”
One of his friends said, “From the hurricane.”
“Yeah, but how big do you figure? More than a mulie?” Keith Higstrom drained his Budweiser and stood up. “Let’s go hunting, boys.”
“Sit down, Higstrom.”
“You pussies coming or not?”
“Have another beer, Keith.”
With a burp, he charged out the door. He drove home, slipped into the den, and removed his grandfather’s old .30–06 from the maple gun cabinet. He dropped a box of bullets, and giggled drunkenly when nobody woke up. He pulled on his boots and his mail-order camo jump-suit, strapped on the headlamp, and went looking for a cow to shoot.
They were no longer grazing in his neighbor’s front yard. Dropping into an exaggerated half crouch, Keith Higstrom weaved down the block. He felt light as a feather, lethal as a snake. The rifle was slick and magnificent in his hands. His plan was to tie the dead cow on the front fender of his Honda Civic and drive all the way back to Kendall, back to the Irish bar where his chickenshit pals were drinking. Keith Higstrom chuckled in advance at the spectacle.
For cover he used mounds of hurricane debris, shuffling noisily from one to another. The street was empty and black and shadowless; the homes on the north side still had no electricity. Passing the Ullmans’ house, Keith Higstrom heard something in the backyard—deep raspy snorting. He thought it might be the runaway palomino. As he snuck around the corner of the garage, the beam of Keith Higstrom’s headlamp illuminated a pair of glistening indigo eyes, as large as ashtrays.
“God damn,” he exclaimed.
An enormous animal stood next to the Ullmans’ half-drained swimming pool. The light from Keith’s headlamp played up and down its blue-black flanks. This was no ordinary cow. For starters, it was as big as a tractor. Its sharp horns were lavishly curved and downslung, upside down from those of domestic American stock.
Keith Higstrom knew exactly what he was looking at. Hadn’t he watched Jimmy Dean and Curt Gowdy shoot one of the very same majestic bastards on The American Sportsman? But that was in Africa, for Christ’s sake. Not Miami, Florida.
It occurred to Keith that he might be suffering the effects of too much alcohol, that the gigantic oval-eyed ungulate glaring at him was merely a Budweiser-enhanced Angus.
Then it snorted again, expelling twin strings of dewy snot. The animal lowered its head and, with hooves the size of laundry irons, decisively pawed a trench in the Ullmans’ newly replanted Bermuda sod.
“Shit on a biscuit,” Keith Higstrom said, raising his grandfather’s rifle. “That’s a Cape buffalo!”
He fired and, naturally, missed. Twice.
The gunshots awakened Mr. Ullman, a banker by trade and a recent arrival from Copenhagen, who looked out the bedroom window just in time to see a tremendous bull galloping across his yard with a thrashing young American impaled on its rack. Mr. Ullman quickly telephoned the police and informed them, as urgently as his newly acquired English would allow, that an “unlucky cowboy is being perforated seriously.” Eventually the police figured out what Mr. Ullman was trying to say.
Two hours later, a police dispatcher phoned Augustine’s house with a message: His dead uncle’s missing Cape buffalo, identified by an ear tag, had turned up in the produce aisle of a storm-gutted supermarket. Unfortunately, there was trouble. The dispatcher requested that Augustine call Animal Control as soon as possible.
Augustine didn’t check his answering machine for several hours, because he was out on Biscayne Bay with Bonnie Lamb.
They had borrowed the speedboat from one of Augustine’s friends, an airline pilot. The pilot owed Augustine a favor from a long-ago divorce, when Augustine had let him bury $45,000 worth of gold Krugerrands behind Augustine’s garage, to conceal them from his future ex-wife’s private investigator. After the divorce litigation ended, the airline pilot was left with nothing but the hidden stash of coins. He immediately depleted them on a ninety-one-pound fashion model, who later abandoned him at a five-star hotel in Morocco. Although years had passed, the pilot never forgot Augustine’s act of friendship in a time of personal crisis.
The speedboat was on a trailer at a marina in North Miami Beach, untouched by the hurricane. Augustine and Bonnie Lamb met Jim Tile there. His eyes were red and his voice was raw. He told them that a close friend, a female trooper, had been savagely beaten by a car thief, and that he would have preferred to be out on road patrol, hunting for the gutless low-life sonofabitch.
As distracted as he was, Jim Tile also seemed visibly anxious about the boat trip. Even in the dark, the bay looked rough and tricky. Oddly, Bonnie Lamb wasn’t worried. Maybe it was the way Augustine handled himself behind the wheel; steering casually with two fingers as he aimed, with his free hand, the spotlight. Smoothly he weaved around massive tree limbs and wind-split lumber and ghostly capsized hulls. The scary ride temporarily took Jim Tile’s m
ind off the image of Brenda on an ambulance stretcher.…
Bonnie was anticipating her first sight of the man called Skink. She kept thinking about the bloodied corpse in the morgue—impaled on a TV dish, the trooper had said. Was Skink the killer? To hear the trooper tell it, the ex-governor was not a nut of the certifiable, Mansonesque strain. Rather, he was launched on a mission: a reckless doomed mission, boisterously outside the law. Bonnie was intrigued by bold eccentrics. She wasn’t afraid of Skink, not with the trooper and Augustine at her side. In an odd way, although she’d never admit it, she looked forward to confronting the kidnapper almost as much as to reuniting with her husband.…
Now Jim Tile and Augustine were struggling to drag the unconscious man over the gunwale of the speedboat. His clothes were soaked, adding to his considerable bulk. Bonnie Lamb tried to help. Augustine got a silvery handful of the man’s hair, the trooper had him by the belt loops, Bonnie dug her fingers in the tongues of his boots—and finally the kidnapper was on the deck, vomiting seawater.
From the bow came a whine of disgust: Max Lamb, arms folded, face pinched, sucking a Bronco cigaret. Bonnie turned back to the tranquilized stranger. The trooper knelt beside him. With a handkerchief he cleaned the foul splatter off Skink’s face; the glass eye needed special attention.
Augustine said, “He’s breathing.”
A volcanic cough, and then: “I saw lobsters big as Sonny Liston.” Skink raised his head.
Jim Tile said, “Be still now.”
“My Walkman!”
“We’ll get you a new one. Now lie still.”
Skink lowered his head with a sharp clunk. Humming, he shut both eyes.
Bonnie Lamb asked, “What do we do with him?”
Max laughed acidly. “He’s going to jail, what’d you think?”
Bonnie looked at Augustine, who said, “It’s up to Jim. He’s the law.”
The trooper had a thermos open, trying to get some hot coffee into his groggy friend. Bonnie put her hands under the kidnapper’s head to help him drink. Augustine went to the console and started the boat. Over the noise of the engines, Bonnie asked Jim Tile if she should sit with the man during the ride back, in case he got ill again. The trooper leaned close and in a low voice said: “He’s all right now. Go check on your husband.”
“OK,” Bonnie said. She was glad for the darkness, so the trooper couldn’t see her blush. Neither could Max.
The conversation between Gar Whitmark and his wife was not a loving one. That she had handed seven thousand cash to a band of crooked roofers was infuriating enough; that she had failed to ask the name of the one taking the money was unforgivably stupid. The only clue in tracking the thieves was the piece of yellow paper that had been given by the phony roofing foreman to Mrs. Whitmark, the yellow paper intended to double as a receipt and an estimate, the yellow paper that Mrs. Whitmark had instantly misplaced.
Gar Whitmark’s anger had another facet. He was by trade a builder of residential subdivisions, and was therefore personally familiar with every honest, competent roofer in Dade County. The list was not voluminous, but from it Gar Whitmark had intended to select the crew that would rebuild the roof of his gutted home. He’d left messages with a half-dozen companies, and had explained (repeatedly) to his wife that it would take time to line up the job. The hurricane had launched a drooling Klondike stampede among roofers—the best ones were swamped with emergency work and likely would be engaged for months to come. Meanwhile out-of-towners were pouring into Miami by the truckload; some were capable and experienced, some were hapless and inept, and many were gypsy impostors. All arrived to find boundless opportunity.
The typical hurricane victim, frantic for shelter, was forced to trust his instincts when choosing a roof builder. Unfortunately, the instincts of the typical hurricane victim in such matters was not acute. Gar Whitmark, however, had the twin advantages of knowing the cast of characters and possessing the clout to divert the best of them to his own pressing needs. With little trouble he located a top-notch roofer who agreed to put all other contracts aside to tackle Gar Whitmark’s roof (Whitmark being one of the most prolific home builders—and employers of roofing contractors—in all South Florida). However, the craftsman whom Whitmark selected first had to replace two other roofs: his own, and that of his wife’s mother.
Gar Whitmark gave the man seven days to patch up the family roofs. The delay proved unbearable for Mrs. Whitmark, whose roaring anxiety at the chance of more rain-stained Chippendales was no match for her customary palliative dosages of sedatives, muscle relaxants, sleep aids and mood elevators. To Mrs. Whitmark, the unexpected appearance of willing roofers at the door had been a godsend. She thought her husband would be grateful for her initiative—it would be one less problem for him to worry about, what with all the nasty threats of negligence suits from customers whose Whitmark Signature homes had disintegrated like soggy cardboard in the hurricane.
Standing in the living room, the rain beating a tattoo on his blue-veined forehead, Gar Whitmark instructed his wife to immediately locate the goddamn receipt or estimate or whatever the goddamn so-called foreman had called it. After an hour’s search, the crucial yellow paper turned up neatly folded in Mrs. Whitmark’s high-school yearbook; Gar Whitmark couldn’t imagine why his wife had put it there, or how she found it. Nor could she explain it herself—her brain was too jumbled by the hurricane.
The receipt bore the name of “Fortress Roofing,” which brought a bitter cackle from Gar Whitmark. At least the scammers had a sense of irony! Gar Whitmark dialed the number and got an answering machine. He hung up and called the director of the county building-and-zoning department, who owed his job to seven of the county commissioners, who owed their jobs to Gar Whitmark’s generous campaign contributions. As Gar Whitmark anticipated, the building director expressed shock and alarm that a fraud was perpetrated on Gar Whitmark’s wife, and promised a thorough criminal investigation.
No, he hadn’t ever heard of Fortress Roofing—but he’d damn sure find out who was behind it.
Sooner the better, said Gar Whitmark, toweling the rainwater from his stinging scalp, which bristled with fifty pink-stemmed, freshly implanted hair plugs.
Fifteen minutes later, the building director phoned back to report, mournfully, that Fortress Roofing had never obtained a valid Dade County contractor’s license and was therefore an unknown outlaw entity.
In a fury, Gar Whitmark began contacting roofers he knew—some honest, some not. The name Fortress struck a note with one or two, who said they’d recently lost crew to the new company. The sonofabitch owner, they said, was an ex-inspector named Avila. Dirty as they come, the roofers warned.
Gar Whitmark knew Avila quite well, having successfully bribed him for many years. All those times Gar Whitmark’s subcontractors had slipped booty to the greedy bastard! Cash, booze, porn—Avila had a taste for the hard stuff; girl-on-girl, if Gar Whitmark remembered correctly.
He called his secretary, whose fingers swiftly punched up a highly confidential computer file of corrupt and/or corruptible officials in Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Lee and Monroe Counties. It was a lengthy roster, alphabetized for convenience. Avila’s name and unlisted home phone number winked fatefully at the bottom of the first screen.
Gar Whitmark waited until three in the morning before phoning.
“This is your old friend Gar Whitmark,” he said. “Your crew of gypsy fakers hit my wife for seven grand. My wife is not well, Avila. If I don’t see my money by tomorrow morning, you’ll be in the county jail by tomorrow night. And I will arrange for you to share a cell with Paul Pick-Percy.”
The threat brutally jarred Avila wide awake. Paul Pick-Percy was a notorious cannibal. Currently he awaited trial on charges of killing and eating his landlord, who had neglected to repair a leaky ball cock in Paul Pick-Percy’s toilet tank. Recently Paul Pick-Percy had also been found guilty of killing and eating a tardy cable-TV repairman and a rude tollbooth attendant.
Avila said: “Seven thousand? Mister Whitmark, I swear to God I don’t know nothing about this.”
“Suit yourself—”
“Wait, now hold on.…” Avila sat upright in bed. “Tell me supposedly what happened, OK?”
“There is no fucking ‘supposedly.’” Gar Whitmark related his wife’s pitiable tale.
“And the truck was ours, you’re sure?”
“I’m holding the receipt, dipshit. ‘Fortress Roofing’ is what it says.”
Avila grimaced. “Who signed it?”
Gar Whitmark said the signature was illegible. “My wife said the guy had a fucked-up jaw made him look like a moray eel. Plus he wore a bad suit.”
“Shit,” Avila said. Exactly what he’d feared.
“Is this ringing a bell?” Gar Whitmark’s sarcasm was heavy and ominous.
Avila sagged against the headboard of his bed. “Sir, you’ll get your money back first thing.”
“Damn straight. And a new roof as well.”
“What?”
“You heard me, noodle dick. The seven grand your people stole, plus you’re picking up the bill when my new roof gets done. By real roofers.”
Avila’s stomach pitched. Gar Whitmark probably lived in a goddamn ranch house way down south, with all the other millionaires. Avila figured he’d be looking at twenty thousand, easy, for a new roof job. He said, “That ain’t really fair.”
“You’d rather do dinner with Chef Pick-Percy?”
“Aw, Christ, Mister Whitmark.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Avila got out of bed and went to the backyard to round up two roosters, which he took to the garage for beheading. He hoped the sacrifice would be favorably received. After a short scuffle, the deed was done. Avila dripped the warm blood into a plastic pail filled with pennies, bleached cat bones and turtle shells. The pail was placed at the feet of a ceramic statue of Chango, the saint of lightning and fire. The child-sized statue wore a robe, colored beads and a gold-plated crown. Kneeling in beseechment, Avila raised his blood-flecked arms toward the heavens and asked Chango to please strike Snapper dead as a fucking doornail for screwing up the roofer scam.