Tampa Burn

TWENTY-FOUR

The next morning, Friday, I walked through my lab, going over the things-to-do list I was leaving for Janet Mueller, who’d be watching the place for me, and checked my big fish tank a final time.

Then, carrying my canvas duffel and a briefcase containing a half-million dollars in cash, I walked the creaky boardwalk through the mangroves to where my blue Chevy pickup sat, Maverick flats boat already racked on its galvanized trailer astern… and I stopped, frozen.

Leaning against my boat were the twin Nicaraguan hoods, Elmase and Hugo, the two stocky butcher-block thugs, beards heavier around their mustaches, still dressed in the same gaudy clothes.

The black Chevy was parked next to my pickup, the GPS locator right there on the dash, color screen aglow. Pilar’s satellite phone, I remembered, was locked inside my pickup, along with Tomlinson’s borrowed laptop.

So why was I surprised?

Judging from the beards and the wrinkled clothes, it looked like the Nicaraguans hadn’t been out of the Collier County jail for long. I hadn’t checked my phone messages, and so, presumably, had missed Tamara Gartone’s notification call.

Maybe Merlin Starkey’s call, too-if he hadn’t already fulfilled his threat and been reassigned to temporary duty by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In which case, he might already be in line behind these two, following me around.

Grinning at me, showing a golden tooth, wearing his black guayabera and shiny white shoes, Hugo said in Spanish, “Well, well, well, we been waiting for you. Waiting for the big gringo with glasses. Senor ‘If your hands don’t die before your brain’-I still think that such a funny thing to say, dude.”

Elmase was not smiling. Maybe that fresh black eye and swollen lip had something to do with his foul humor. He stood there with thick fists on thick hips, looking grim, his white straw Panama hat pulled low, his neon pink shirt torn in places. “Yeah, man, but callin’ us pimps, man, that not such a funny thing. Why you go and say something so mean like that? A pimp, man, he hangs out with whores, man. Hugo and me, we don’t got to pay the women we hang with. Hardly never.”

I would have chuckled if I hadn’t been so edgy. If these guys charged me both at once, I didn’t have much of a chance. They’d take the money, no problem.

I said, “You know what, Elmase? You’re right. That was a damn thoughtless thing for me to say. So please accept my apologies.” I touched my gray shorts, my blue chambray work shirt. “As if I know anything about clothes.”

Elmase looked at Hugo out of his swollen eye, placated, his expression saying, At least he admits it. He don’t know nothing about style.

As I stood there, I was trying to decide my best out if they came at me. I was gauging the distance to the boardwalk, estimating my chances of making it down the walkway and jumping into deep water before one of them caught me. If I got one or both of them into the water, the odds were instantly changed. The advantage was mine.

They’d come to finish the job for Balserio-why else would they be there?

So I was surprised, and momentarily relieved, to hear Hugo say, “The reason we come to find you is, we got a message for you from the General. Hey- relax, dude. It ain’t nothing bad. It’s our one last job for that crazy fool.”

I didn’t relax, but I swung my duffel into the back of the pickup, pretending as if I had. “Oh really? What’s the message?”

Elmase said to Hugo, “We supposed to give it to the woman, man. The General’s wife. Not just this dude.” Then to me, he said, “Where is Pilar Fuentes, man? We give you both the message, we’re outta here, I promise. All I want to do, man, is get back to Miami and change clothes. Like, we’re in a hurry. ”

Pilar was aboard No Mas with Tomlinson, but I said, “I have no idea where she is. I wouldn’t tell you, anyway. You know that. So just give the message to me. I’ll pass it along.”

The two of them had a short visual exchange before Hugo shrugged. “You’re O.K., dude. We kinda like you. And Balserio, hey, he’s a crazy fuck. So here it is. The crazy dude who kidnapped your son, he’s double-crossed the General. The Man-Burner-that’s what we call him in Nicaragua-he was supposed to kidnap the kid, but then make it easy for the General to rescue the kid back. Make the General look like a big hero. You know? Help make him be more popular and win the Revolution.

“Instead,” Hugo said, “the Man-Burner stole eighty grand or so of the General’s money and took off with the kid. He’s somewhere in Florida, we think. He had fake passports, all the papers. We found the pilot who flew them to Havana. He says he thinks they maybe hopped a freighter. Which the General says is probably what happened, because Lourdes-that’s the crazy dude’s real name-Lourdes got a thing about traveling on ships. The guy can just up and vanish sometimes-” Hugo snapped his fingers for emphasis. “The General’s people think maybe it’s because he sometimes works the maritime ships. Or at least travels that way because, with a face like his, he don’t want to be seen.”

“Have you ever seen his face? Or a photo?”

“Nobody sees the dude’s face and lives,” Elmase replied softly. “They say he’s the devil. They say if you see his face, you gonna burn in hell, man.”

I said to him, “I’ll let you know about that,” before asking Hugo, “Do you have any idea where they might be in Florida? Or where they would have come in?”

Hugo said, “That’s why we were following you, man. We thought you’d lead us to him. Trouble was, the General lost his cool when he figured out who you are. But he’s back under control; still wants to help. ’Cause if Lourdes kills the boy, Balserio’ll never see the inside of the presidential palace again. People down there are gonna hate him, man, and he knows it.”

I said, “Balserio’s not planning on coming back to Florida, is he? I sure as hell don’t want to see him if he does. His kind of help, we don’t need.”

Hugo said, “No, he’s not allowed to come back. But if he gets information, he wants to be able to get it to you. He wants to help you, man. Or if you find out where Lourdes is, the General says he’ll pay Elmase and me to…” The stocky man shrugged and smiled. “He’ll pay us to take care of the problem. Make sure the Man-Burner never burns nobody again.”

I had taken two business cards from my billfold and was adding the phone number of my hotel on each. As I did, I said, “Does this mean you’re going to stop tailing me?”

“You got that right,” Hugo said. “Last thing we want, dude, is to end up in jail again. First night we was in the cage, a coupla big brothers said something about Elmase’s pink shirt. He’s touchy about that, you know. We ended up fightin’ four or five guys, just the two of us.”

Taking my card, looking at it, Elmase said, “They just like you, man. They don’t got no taste when it comes to dressing very cool.”

At a little after eleven A.M., I pulled my old blue pickup truck into the circular drive of the Renaissance Vinoy Resort Hotel, downtown St. Pete. It was a blustery, salt-heavy morning, and I stepped out into a southwest wind that smelled of ocean squalls and waterspouts.

Gray days are unusual for St. Pete. The city still claims to hold the world record for most consecutive sunny days: 764. In fact, for many years, the St. Petersburg Times, a great newspaper, was given away for free if the day started out cloudy.

The Times business office, on this day, would have made no profit on paper sales.

Looking at the Vinoy, though, with its Moorish gables and stucco columns, a four-story palace painted beach pink, trimmed in green, with its four hundred rooms quartered on lush grounds of gardens and pools, the day radiated a vivid tropical ambiance.

Florida still has a stock of classic hotels that have carried the atmosphere of previous eras into this new century. The Vinoy is one. It and resorts of similar distinction were designed for the peers of Roosevelt, Vanderbilt, Gable, Kennedy, Capone, and Dillinger, and the elegance of that era has been preserved. Places like the Vinoy seem to have absorbed enough sunshine and Caribbean heat over the years so that even on cloudy days, the land and water around them seem brightened via conduction. The Vinoy-era hotels are preserves of the tropics on their own private tropical preserve.

I’ve spent enough of my life hunkered down in jungle camps and Third World flophouses so that, when I have occasion to stay in a hotel, I splurge on good ones. I’d chosen the hotel for that reason, plus a couple of others. It has its own little marina, with instant access to Tampa Bay. I could keep my Maverick flats boat there in a wet slip. Could walk out the hotel’s ornate tile and marble lobby, across Fifth Street to the floating docks, step aboard, and be gone in a minute.

Another reason was that Tomlinson and Pilar were sailing up from Dinkin’s Bay, planned on arriving sometime early the next morning, and the marina basin had electric, water, and all the other modern umbilicals that most un-Tomlinson-like yachtsmen require.

It was Pilar’s decision to travel with Tomlinson. I was neither surprised nor upset.

The main reason I’d chosen the hotel, though, was that I’m a fan of downtown St. Pete, and nearby downtown Tampa, and their outlying barrier islands. The area is among Florida’s great, unheralded metropolitan treasures, and the two cities have much in common. I appreciate their eclectic architecture: bootlegger 1930s meets the twenty-first century; Little Havana meets Manhattan; Southern Californian beach Deco joins Steubenville-by-the-Sea.

I like the copper and earth-tone colors of space-age skyscrapers standing girder-to-dormer with churches built of stone and handmade brick. I like the funky backwater canals with rusting shrimp boats that lead to elegant waterfront neighborhoods, plus all the great restaurants, cigar factories, museums, galleries, beaches, and bars.

Tampa and St. Pete have all those things. And St. Pete’s downtown baseball park, Al Lang Field, is one of the great ball yards of the world. I used to love playing there at night, under the lights, so close to Tampa Bay that the smell of chalk and rosin and Bermuda grass would sometimes mix with the smell of a prevailing Gulf Stream breeze and warm, ballooning gusts of air that drifted northward out of Cuba.

So I’d chosen the Vinoy.

I’d already launched my skiff at the city boat ramp, idled to the marina, then jogged back for my truck-the logistics of trailering a boat always requires similar pain-in-the-butt maneuverings.

So now I handed my keys to the valet. Listened to him say about my old Chevy pickup, “I bet you’re into fixing up antique cars. Is that right, sir?” before I went to the front desk, checked in, and got a receipt for the briefcase that I had them put in the hotel safe.

I had a second, bigger briefcase, as well. On the drive to St. Pete, I’d stopped at a photography supply and bought a shockproof case big enough to hold the medicine, as I’d been directed.

I checked that at the front desk and got a receipt for it, as well.

I then proceeded to order something that I thought I’d never order in my life: a cellular telephone.

I told the concierge to get me a rental phone and to set up a temporary account. Because I didn’t know where I was going to be using it, or under what conditions, I told him I wanted all the little cellular phone options I wouldn’t have considered in my normal life: micro headphone set for hands-free use, caller I.D., and call waiting.

I told the concierge he didn’t have to explain it all to me, I’d figure it out as I went.

The reason I wanted the phone was simple: I wanted a way for Dewey to get in touch with me. I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to talk with her, and this was the only way.

When I was finished signing the papers, I carried my single canvas backpack, satellite phone therein, along with Tomlinson’s borrowed laptop, to my water-view Room 578.

I am a methodical person with orderly habits. When I settle into a hotel, the ceremony seldom varies. If I’m in an equatorial region, I turn the air on high, open all the windows, hang my shaving kit so it’s ready when I need it, put beer atop the air conditioner if it’s appropriately configured, then change into shorts and go for a swim.

Now, though, I immediately checked my e-mail, then Pilar’s.

Nothing new.

Next, I walked to the balcony, slid the door open, and stepped out to see the view from my fifth-floor room.

I could look over the tops of palms and see the St. Pete skyline: high-rises and stadium lights, and the Jell-O-lucent swimming pool below. And there was the bay, a waterscape nine miles wide, Tampa’s skyscrapers and storage tanks on the other side, barges and tugs and ocean liners moving out there on the Intracoastal Waterway, working their way to and from Florida’s busiest west coast commercial port.

Slightly to the south, the horizon dropped to a rim of blue-green: mangroves and pines mostly, only a few radio towers and smoke stacks showing above.

To celebrate a recent birthday, I’d swum across Tampa Bay; started a few miles north of where I now stood, then finished four miles, and a little less than two hours later, wading ashore at a park above the Howard Frankland Bridge. Even though I’d done the swim on a ragged, windy day, the bay and surrounding city had seemed a safe and cheerful harbor; an extension of my Sanibel homeplace. Now, though, the area seemed shadowed with grim and dangerous potential.

Standing on the Vinoy’s balcony, searching the horizon, taking it all in, I thought of Lourdes, and of my smart, smart son who was being held captive.

They were out there.

The exercise had perverse appeal: If I moved my head back and forth, I knew that at some unrealized intersection, my eyes made contact.

Where?

When you’ve spent a lifetime running around in small boats in the worst kinds of conditions, at night, in fog, and in squalls, you come to understand early on the importance of learning your area of operation and, as best as you can, memorizing key range markers and landmarks before you get on the water.

So I changed into jogging shorts and took swim goggles plus my brand-new nautical chart of Tampa Bay down to the hotel pool. Swam a few hundred yards to relax, then sat with a huge glass of ice water with lime, and studied the minute details of the chart as if their importance could mean the difference between life and death.

Fact of the matter was, they might.

Uncharacteristically, though, I had trouble concentrating. It was difficult because early that morning Tomlinson and I had gone for a long walk down the beach toward Sanibel’s lighthouse point. Walked slowly, side by side, past occasional stoop-shouldered shell hunters and joggers, and past shore birds that skittered like pockets of ground fog, moving rhythmically in and out with the wash and fall of waves.

During that walk, he’d finally confessed to me what he should have confessed long ago. He also told me some things that he could not have shared in a more timely fashion. There was a reason for the lapse. I believed his excuse, and what he told me.

Some of the details of my talk with Tomlinson kept banging around in my skull, interrupting the mechanics of the memorization process as I tried to imprint details from the chart onto my brain.

Finally, I said to hell with it. When things aren’t going well in the classroom, it sometimes helps to get out into the field. So I went back up to the fifth floor, where I changed into fishing shorts, tank top, and boating Tevas.

As I was getting ready, my cell phone arrived, battery already charged. I checked out the little headphone set. It seemed comfortable enough. I could drop the phone in my pocket and chatter away.

I called my lab immediately, hoping to get Janet Mueller, but I got my recorder instead. Using the remote function on my home answering machine, I changed the outgoing message so that anyone who called would hear my voice recite my new cellular number. I did it for Dewey, no one else.

Maybe Tomlinson’s right. Maybe it’s inevitable that we will all end up slaves to the microchip.

Next, I tried to call Harris Lilly, an old friend of mine who is in naval intelligence. Tried him first at his home, and then on his cell phone.

I got lucky. He just happened to be deployed on some kind of duty for U.S. Central Command-he didn’t say what, of course-and was working just across the bay from me at MacDill Air Force Base. MacDill is a massive military preserve that takes up much of Tampa’s southern peninsular tip, and it is from there that the United States military ran the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I said to Harris, “I’m in town for a few days, so how’d you like to go boating?”

As if I’d just invited him on a Sunday picnic, he replied, “Ah, a boat ride. As if I don’t spend enough time on the water. And what a pleasant day for it. Gray and windy, and it’s almost certainly going to rain. Sounds lovely. ”

“A perfect afternoon,” I said, playing along. “Maybe I’ll pack a lunch. There’s a lot I need to see. Just you and me banging around Tampa Bay.”

Suddenly serious, he said, “Screw lunch. Neither one of us is the recreational type, so you wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t have something interesting going on. I’m assuming there’s a damn good reason you want me to go.”

“Exactly right, Commander. It’s called local knowledge. You’ve got it. I need it. I trailered my skiff up. Do you have some time this afternoon?”

“I can manage. If it’s that important.”

“It’s that important. So do you want me to pick you up at MacDill? I think I can find my way to the docks at the south-east inlet. I ought to be able to.”

Laughing, Harris Lilly said, “Yeah, blindfolded, I think you could find those docks. But these days, our security teams get very nervous about civilian vessels approaching the base. They’re prone to blow little boats out of the water with great big guns. Even someone like you. So why don’t you pick me up somewhere around Ballast Point, just up from the base? At the Tampa Yacht Club or the fishing pier. I’ll give you the tour from there.”

I said, “How about the Yacht Club. In an hour?”

Harris said, “An hour, yeah. That’ll give me time to change out of my Superman suit into civvies. Which will allow me to pound down several of the excellent beers you’ll be bringing in deepest gratitude for my help.”