Double Whammy (47 page)

With only ten minutes until deadline, and the winter sun nearly gone, forty-seven bass boats had checked in at the ramp. The empty scoreboard mocked Charlie Weeb. He could no longer summon the courage to look at the Happy Gland entourage.

Where were Eddie Spurting and his ringers?

Backstage the young hydrologist approached Reverend Weeb and said, “Bad news—the water's worse today than ever.”

“Get out of my sight,” Weeb said. He didn't give a damn anymore about the water—Eddie's fish would be fine, since they were coming out of the Everglades.

With a grave look, the hydrologist said, “You're about to have a major problem.”

“And you're about to get a size-ten Florsheim up your ass, so get lost.”

Weeb's earpiece crackled and the TV director said: “How much longer?”

“We got three boats out,” the preacher said. “Sit tight, it'll be worth it.”

It was.

 

Naturally Skink was first to hear them. He hopped off Decker's car and ambled down to the dock. The other onlookers gave way, recognizing him instantly as the deranged Cyclops whom Reverend Weeb had tried to cure. Skink stood alone until Decker and Catherine came down, holding hands.

“Listen,” Skink said.

Decker heard the boat. Whoever it was, he was approaching very slowly—a behavior virtually unknown in professional bass-fishing circles.

“Engine trouble?” Decker said.

Skink shook his head. A mischievous grin split his face.

Catherine said, “This ought to be good.”

Suddenly the dock was washed in hot light as the kliegs came on. An OCN cameraman, a wiry young man with curly red hair, hustled across the boat ramp with the Minicam balanced on one shoulder. Without explanation he handed the camera and battery pack to R. J. Decker, and bounded away.

“Prior engagement,” Skink explained. Catherine couldn't be sure, but she thought he winked his good eye behind the sunglasses.

Decker got the Minicam focused while Catherine fitted the headset over his ears. In the earphone he could hear the director hollering for Camera Two to get steady.

“This is a breeze,” Decker said. A four-year-old could work the zoom.

Skink rubbed his leathery hands together. “Lights! Camera!”

Decker aimed down the lake and waited. Before long a bass boat chugged into view. It was Fast Eddie Spurling, going slow. The reason was obvious.

He was towing two other boats.

“Is it Spurling?” the TV director barked at Camera Two.

“Yep,” Decker said.

The word was relayed to Reverend Weeb, who got on the PA system and beckoned all within earshot to return at once to the dock area. Even those who had fled to the buses emerged to see what was going on.

“Go tight, Rudy,” the director instructed Decker, and Decker obliged, as Rudy would have.

As the procession of boats tediously made its way up Lunker Lake Number One, a few people in the crowd (specifically, those with binoculars) began to react alarmingly. Curious, Charlie Weeb stepped down from the stage to join his congregation at water's edge.

R. J. Decker was doing quite well with the TV camera. Through the viewfinder everything was in perfect focus.

There was Eddie Spurling half-turned in the driver's seat as he checked the crippled boats on his towline.

The first was the wooden skiff—there were Jim Tile and Al García, sitting aft and stem. They toasted the TV lights with cans of Budweiser.

Charlie Weeb let out a whimper. “Mother of God, it's the Tile Brothers.” He had completely forgotten about the spic and the spade. “Get the camera offa them!” the preacher screamed.

Slowly R. J. Decker panned to the second boat, and when he did his knees nearly crimped.

It was the Starcraft, and it wasn't the way Decker had left it.

Catherine said, “Oh no,” and moved behind Skink. She leaned her head against his back, and closed her eyes.

The boat was full of buzzards.

There was a ragged cluster of at least a dozen—burly fearless birds; oily brown, stoop-shouldered, with raw pink heads and sharp ruthless eyes. They belched and shifted and blinked in the bright light, but they didn't fly. They were too full.

“Tough customers,” Skink whispered to Decker.

Numbly Decker let the TV camera peer into the boat. He ignored the disembodied voice shrieking from his earpiece.

The buzzards stood in a litter of human bones. The bones were dean, but occasionally one of the rancid birds would bend down and pick savagely, as a possessive gesture to the others. The biggest buzzard, a disheveled male with a stained crooked beak, palmed a bare yellow skull in its talons.

“Looks like a dog,” Skink said, puzzled.

“It's Lucas,” Catherine sighed. “Rage, I want to go home.”

 

As soon as Eddie Spurling tied off the boats, Charlie Weeb barged forward and said, “Why'd you tow those fuckers in?”

“Because they ast me to.”

“So where's the fish?”

“No fish,” Eddie Spurling reported. “I got skunked.”

Weeb sucked on his upper lip. He had to be careful what he said. There was a decent-sized crowd now; the other contestants had hung around just to see how the famous TV fisherman had fared.

“What do you mean, no fish—how is that possible?” Weeb spoke in a low strained voice. He used his eyes to grill Eddie about the ringers—where the fuck were they!

“Damn rascals just weren't bitin'.”

“You're in big trouble, Eddie.”

“Naw, I don't think so.”

The sports reporter from OCN poked his microphone into Spurling's face and asked the star of
Fish Fever
what had happened.

“Just one of those days,” Fast Eddie mused, “when you feel like a spit-valve on the trombone of life.”

Al Garcí́a and Jim Tile climbed out of the skiff with the Igloo cooler. Skink was waiting for them.

“We didn't get Queenie,” Garcí́a said.

“I know.”

García looked at Jim Tile, then at Skink.

Skink said, “Bet you boys had some engine trouble.”

“I don't believe this,” García said. He realized what had happened, but he didn't know why.

“What's going on, jungle man?”

“Change of plans,” Skink said. “Late-breaking brainstorm.”

Jim Tile was thinking about it. “The Starcraft isn't one of the tournament boats.”

“No,” Skink said, “it's not. Ask Decker about that one.”

García said, “That means there's another guy still out on the water.”

“Right,” said Jim Tile. “Dennis Gault.”

Skink looked pleased. “You boys are pretty sharp, even for cops.”

Al García remembered what Skink had taught him about the huge fish. “Just what the hell have you done?” he asked.

“It's not me,
sen̄or
. I just arranged things.” Skink flipped open the lid of the Igloo and saw García's little bass, darting in the clean water. “I'll be damned, Sergeant, I'm proud of you.”

Jim Tile said, “Sir, there's something you ought to know.”

“In a minute, Trooper Jim. First let's get this little scupper to the weigh station.” By himself Skink hoisted the heavy cooler and elbowed his way through the crowd. “You won't believe this,” he was saying over his shoulder to Tile and García, “but I believe you're the only boat that caught fish.”

“That's what we're trying to tell you,” García said, huffing behind.

Skink climbed the stage and carried the cooler to the scale. He took out the little bass and carefully set him in the basket. Behind them onstage the digital scale lighted up with glowing six-foot numerals: “14 oz.”

“Ha-ha!” Skink cawed. He found the stage mike and boomed into the PA system: “Attention, K-Mart shoppers! We've got a winner.”

“Shitfire,” Charlie Weeb muttered. The voice on the PA sounded just like the blind man. First a boatload of buzzards, and now what?

As the queasy preacher followed the OCN camerman to the weigh station, it occurred to him it wasn't red-haired Rudy, but someone else with the Minicam, someone Weeb didn't recognize. It made little sense, but in the unremitting chaos of the day it seemed a negligible mystery.

The blind man was not onstage when Charlie Weeb got there, but another nightmare awaited him.

The Tile Brothers.

 

“Hola,”
Jim Tile said to Charlie Weeb.
“es muy grande
fish, no?”

“Check it out, bro,” Al García said.

Charlie Weeb got a bilious taste in his throat. “It appears that you are indeed the winner,” he said. The Minicam was right in his face—all America was watching. Somehow Weeb composed himself and raised the puny bass for the camera. Two girls in orange bikinis rolled out the immense trophy, and two more carried out a giant cardboard facsimile of the check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“That's righteous,” Al García said, causing Jim Tile to wince, “but where be the real thing?”

“Ah,” Weeb said. How could he go on TV and say that, after all this, the check was missing? That he and Deacon Johnson were the only two human beings with the combination to the safe, and now Deacon Johnson was gone?

Sensing trouble, Jim Tile asked,
“¿Donde está el cheque?”

“I'm sorry,” Reverend Weeb said, “but I don't speak Cubish.”

By way of translation, Al García said: “Where's the fucking bread,
por favor?”

Weeb attempted several explanations, none persuasive and none contradicting the fact that he had promised to present the check to the winners on national television on the day of the tournament. The crowd, especially the other bass anglers, became unruly and insistent; as much as they resented the Tile Brothers, they resented even more the idea of any fisherman getting stiffed. Even the sulking Happy Gland contingent joined the fracas.

“I'm sorry,” Weeb said finally, raising his palms, “there's been a slight problem.”

Al Garcia and Jim Tile looked at one another irritably.

“You do the honors,” Garcia said.

Jim Tile dug a badge and some handcuffs out of his jacket.

Charlie Weeb's lushly forested eyebrows seemed to wilt. A buzz went through the audience.

“Cut, Rudy, cut!” the director was hollering into R. J. Decker's ear, but Decker let it roll.

In perfect English, Jim Tile said, “Mr. Weeb, you're under arrest for fraud—”

“And grand larceny,” Garcia interjected. “And any other damn thing I can think of.”

“And grand larceny,” Jim Tile continued. “You have the right to remain silent—”

Just then a sorrowful cry sheared the dusk. It rose up from the water in a guttural animal pitch that made García flinch and shiver.

Jim Tile bowed his head. He'd tried to tell him.

Decker dropped the Minicam and ran toward the boat ramp.

Skink was on his knees in the shallow water. All around him fish were rising in convulsions, finning belly-up, cutting the glassy surface in jerky zigzag vectors.

Skink scooped up one of the addled bass as it swam by and held it up, dripping, for Decker and the others to see.

“They're all dying,” he cried.

 

“Take my boat,” Eddie Spurling offered. “I got six of the damn things.”

“Thank you,” Skink said hoarsely. Decker and Catherine climbed in after him.

“I hope you find her,” Fast Eddie called as the boat pulled away. He would never forget the sight of that magnificent beast in the fish cage; he couldn't bear the thought of her dying in bad water, but it seemed inevitable.

In the bass boat Skink stood up and opened the throttle. First the straw hat blew off, then the sunglasses. Skink didn't seem to care. Nor did he seem to notice the gnats and bugs splatting against his cheeks and forehead, and sticking in his beard by the glue of their own blood. In the depthless gray of early night, Skink drove wide open as if he knew the canals by heart, or instinct. The boat accelerated like a rocket; Decker watched the speedometer tickle sixty and he clenched his teeth, praying they wouldn't hit an alligator or a log. Catherine turned her head and clung to his chest with both arms. Except for the bone-chilling speed, it might have been a lovely moment.

Over the howl of the engine, Skink began to shout.

“Confrontation,” he declared, “is the essence of nature!”

He shook his silvery braid loose and let his hair stream out behind him.

“Confrontation is the rhythm of life,” he went on. “In nature violence is pure and purposeful, one species against another in an act of survival!”

Terrific, Decker thought, Marlin Perkins on PCP. “Watch where you're going, captain!” he shouted.

“All I did with Dennis Gault,” Skink hollered back, “was to arrange a natural confrontation. No different from a thousand other confrontations that take place every night and every day out here, unseen and uncelebrated. Yet I knew Gault's instincts as well as I knew the fish. It was only a matter of timing, of matching the natural rhythms. Putting the two species within striking distance. That's all it was, Miami.”

Skink pounded the steering wheel ferociously with both fists, causing the speeding boat to skitter precipitously off its plane.

“But goddamn,” he groaned. “Goddamn, I didn't know about the water.”

Decker rose beside him at the console and casually edged his knee against the wheel, just in case. “Of course you didn't know!” Decker shouted. He ducked, unnecessarily, as they roared beneath an overpass for the new superhighway.