Night vision

CHAPTER 42

Charlie Riggs inserted the serrated knife at the base of the tail and sliced forward with a steady hand. He took care to avoid the razor-sharp bone at the outer edge of the gills. He cut off the gill plate and removed the stomach cavity. Then he slid what was left of the snook into the chicken-wire drawer of his homemade smoker, a six-foot-tall contraption with a brick floor, tarpaper roof, and cypress sides covered with wooden shim shingles. Charlie wore his hiking boots, old gray socks, a canvas hat, and khaki shorts with six pockets. He looked like a sixty-five-year-old Boy Scout.

I was wearing gray sweat pants, sneakers without socks, an old practice jersey, and an AFC Champions ball cap. I looked like an over-the-hill ex-jock. My job was to gather the wood and stay the hell out of the way. Get buttonwood or mangrove, Charlie commanded. Not hickory. If I had known this would be so much trouble, I would have chosen the veal porcini at Cafe Baci in the Gables. But Charlie wasn't much for cream sauces with mushrooms and wine, and besides, he knew that making me work for my dinner was a form of therapy.

The trick with the fire is to keep it burning, but not too hot. The idea is to smoke the fish, not dry it out. When the fire was going just right, we sat there in Charlie's battered lawn chairs, watching the tangy smoke seep out of the roof. He was waiting for me to start, but I couldn't find the words. So finally he asked me, and I told him of a sweltering Sunday night on the bridge.

"I killed her," I told him finally. "She was reaching to me for help, and I tried to save her, but I killed her."

He thought it over before speaking. A great blue heron circled low overhead in the drifting smoke, its long legs swept back. "She didn't want to be saved, Jake. She probably didn't even want to live, given the choices available to her. As Pliny wrote, Natura vero nihil hominibus brevitate vitae praestitit melius. "

"Something about the brevity of life," I said, taking a stab at it.

"'Nature has granted mankind no better gift than the shortness of life.' Pamela Maxson knew there was no cure for her. She knew better than anyone else what her remaining years would be like. Stop blaming yourself. You tried to save her."

The heron dropped its legs like the landing gear on a jumbo jet and drifted to the ground near the smoker. The big bird would settle for some fish innards in the scrap pile.

"No, Charlie, you don't understand. I really killed her. I've replayed the moment a thousand times. Trying to read my mind. It's harder than reading someone else's, but this is what I've come up with. I wanted her dead. In my mind I tried her and convicted her and sentenced her. And then I executed her. I just didn't know it at the time."

Storm clouds gathered in the west, and the wind was picking up. The temperature was falling in advance of a squall line. "The mind plays tricks on us all," Charlie said. "You don't know what you intended, Jake, trust me."

In the distance a thunderclap. "So much has happened," I said. "So much blood."

He let it hang there, and I rattled them off in my mind. Mary Rosedahl and Priscilla Fox dead at the hands of the insanely jealous ex-jockey. Marsha Diamond, Bobbie Blinderman, and Alejandro Rodriguez dead, too, killed by Pamela Maxson. And what about Pam, psychotic lady psychiatrist, a woman who moved me to-to what? I didn't know what. She was smart and beautiful…and homicidal. Deceptio visas, Charlie would say, and he was right. A deceptive vision, and I had only seen the illusion, not the truth.

"What about Nick Fox?" Charlie asked. "What will happen to him?"

Two laughing gulls circled overhead, guffawing at us, and I told him all about Nick Fox.

Police sirens were wailing from both sides of the causeway, Miami cops from the east, Beach cops from the west.

"Hey, we just have a minute, Jake," Nick Fox had said. "Let's close. Shit, neither of us needs any trouble. Come on. Name your price. Special counsel to the governor. Beachfront estate on Grand Cayman. Ten percent of my take."

"Too late, Nick."

"Twenty percent. You name it."

"Nick, I can see now."

"What…?"

"Night vision."

"What the fuck are you talking-"

"You were right about me. I couldn't see in the dark. The creepy crawlies come out at night, the beasties, too, and just like you said, they don't play by the rules. I don't like them, so I looked away. But now I see, and it's too late to close my eyes."

"Don't be an asshole. You've got nothing on me."

"Nothing but your own words. Say hello to the wire, Nick."

I pulled the hand-tied cockroach fly off my lamb's-wool patch. Underneath, where the hook should have been, was a tiny microphone. I said, "How'd we do, professor?"

Ten feet away Gerald Prince took off his earflapped hat and lifted his plaid work shirt. A pair of earphones were on his head. A miniature tape recorder was taped to his belly. "Despite the atrocious acoustics, the audio is quite acceptable, guv'nor," Prince said. Then he did a perfect impression of Nick Fox: "'I told you I killed Evan Ferguson. I ran dope out of 'Nam, and I skimmed shipments here. I dumped some cases, and I took major-league bread from some very bad actors.'"

Fox reached for his gun, just as I knew he would. Just as he did with Evan Ferguson. He didn't want to do it, but he had no choice. The hand was halfway out of the shoulder holster when I hit him with a straight left that made him blink. The gun clattered to the pavement. I followed with a right hand over the top that caught him on the point of the chin and sat him down. I rubbed my knuckles. Hitting hurts the hitter, but it's still better than being the hittee.

Two police cars pulled to a stop in front of the shack. The tender leaned out the door and stabbed a shaking finger toward us.

Nick felt his jaw and started to say something. Somehow he looked smaller. "I'm going be all right," he said. "I'll be okay."

There was bile in my throat and I told myself that my eyes stung from the wind. "Who gives a shit?" I said.

Two big uniformed Miami cops took their sweet time getting out of their cars and walked toward us. They blocked traffic in both directions.

"I can cut a deal with the feds," Nick said. "I know all the major dealers in the southeast and who supplies them. I know staging areas and which ships haul which shit. I'll be in the witness protection program in two weeks."

"Great, Nick. You'll have every drug thug in two hemispheres looking for you."

"I'll be okay."

"Sure you will. Just keep your ass down. Maybe it won't get shot off."

Charlie Riggs was opening the drawer to the smoker, painting the snook with some butter and sprinkling it with salt. Heavy gray thunderheads moved over Shark Valley, heading toward the city. Farther west, above Onion Bay and Big Lostman's Key, the squall had already begun. Overhead, the first bolt of lightning creased the sky, followed a five-count later by a boom of thunder. Fat drops of cool rain pelted us, but we didn't move. Charlie shot a sheepish glance at me.

An unusual sorrowful look, maybe thinking it was his job to bring me out of my despair and he didn't know how.

But it wasn't his job. All of us live with our own demons, do penance in our private ways. We need our friends for support and advice, but we draw our strength from within. In the end we are alone.

Charlie's eyes were wishing me better times. Now I was depressing him, and Charlie has always been irrepressibly chipper.

Okay, Lassiter, stop wallowing in it. Stop telling yourself you really must be a great guy to be broken up over your loss. Wait. What loss? Pam Maxson had said it: You can't lose what you don't have. And while you're at it, obliterate the guilt. Self-flagellation is an insufferable ego trip all its own; undeserved guilt is just another form of indulgent self-pity.

A flash of lightning backlit the low, dark clouds that scudded overhead, and a burst of thunder filled the sky. A couple of scrub lizards, brown with blue patches, scurried into the bushes. Cold water dripped down my neck. "Charlie, have I ever told you how much you mean to me?"

He looked up skeptically from under his soggy canvas hat. "Gracious no, and don't start now."

"Okay, it's up to you. I was just going to tell you that you'd have made somebody a fine father. Now, let's get out of the rain. Do you still keep cold Dutch beer in that cabin of yours?"

He nodded a yes.

"You have any stories to tell I haven't heard for a while?"

He smiled. "Have I told you about the carnival dummy that turned out to be the mummified body of a homicide victim?"

"Don't remember that one," I said.

We started up the muddy path to his cabin. A bright green tree frog with white pinstripes studied me a moment, concluded I wasn't a spider, and hopped away.

"Well, it's quite a story. The dummy was in the haunted house, hanging by the neck from a rope, covered with phosphorescent paint. In the dark it would glow purple when an ultraviolet light was switched on. Of course, the idea was to give the customers an old-fashioned funhouse scare. One day this college boy wants to show off for his girlfriend, so as they're going by he yanks on the dummy's shoe, tearing its leg off, and lo and behold, he's left holding the stub of a real tibia."

"Got his money's worth," I said, scraping my muddy shoes on Charlie's steps and holding the screen door for him. Inside, it was dark but dry.

Charlie was getting into it now, tales of murder and mayhem lifting his spirits. "Well, the authorities were intrigued, as you can well imagine. So many unanswered questions. How did the man die? Who was he? How did the body get into a carnival?" He paused to tamp some tobacco into his pipe. The matches were soggy and it took three tries to light up. He looked at me apologetically. "Jake, I'm afraid this story will take a while. It involves an Oklahoma train robber, a shoot-out with the police, embalming with arsenic, and it all starts back in-"

"Take your time," I told my old friend. "I got nowhere to go."