Geezer Paradise (14 page)

             
"We can't take any chances with you passing out like that."  We turned the raft around and started paddling back. 

             
"You know, Barney," Willey said.  "It was the strangest thing.  "I dreamed we were coming back through the swamp, like we're doing now, but we were in the Wrangler and we were going backwards as fast as we could.  Because three large alligators were chasing us and biting at the wheels.  But the worst part was, Snydely was sitting on the hood of the Wrangler with a gun.  When he pointed the gun at you and pulled the trigger, I woke up." 

             
"Are you sure he pointed the gun at me and not at you?" I asked.

             
"I'm positive.  Because I wasn't really there.  I wasn't myself in the dream.  I was somebody else."

             
"Right, keep paddling."  I had to get him to a hospital before he started thinking he was Eleanor Roosevelt.  After a half-hour of paddling we came around a bend and Willey said, "There's the Wrangler."  Just then the Wrangler appeared out of the darkness.  There was nothing wrong with his eyesight.  We turned into shore and pulled the raft out of the water.

             
"Just leave it there," I said.  "We'll be back in a few hours."  We all climbed into the Wrangler and Willey gave directions to the nearest hospital. Willey was unusually quiet.  I hoped he wasn't going to pass out again. 

             
Twenty minutes later we were walking into an emergency room.  We had to leave Oscar in the Wrangler.  The emergency room was crowded.  It looked like the losers from every bar fight in Florida were there.  Willey showed his Medicare card and filled out some forms. 

             
A nurse came over to Willey and shined a flashlight into his eyes.  "You don't seem to have a concussion, Mister Pulaski, but the doctor will see you as soon as he can.  Please take a seat."

             
Three hours later I had checked on Oscar three times and had picked up a few words of Spanish, but we still hadn't seen the doctor.  Willey was still being quiet.  That worried me.  Willey was never quiet for long. 

             
"How are you feeling?" I asked. 

             
"I'm okay.  I just want to get out of here so I can get some sleep."  An hour later Willey got to see the doctor.  He checked Willey out and told him to take it easy for a couple of days and he'd be fine.  We got back into the Wrangler and headed back to the swamp.  Oscar was asleep in the back seat.  It was the middle of the night when we returned to the swamp.  We started paddling our way towards the chickee.  I hoped the chickee was still there, it had been years Willey last saw it.  I didn't want to sleep on the ground.  We were bone tired.  Oscar was sound asleep in the front of the raft.

              It was a small chickee with a thatched roof, about ten feet by twelve feet.  The Indians had lived in chickees similar to the one we were gliding towards.  It was sitting on one of the few areas of ground that was a couple of feet above the surface of the water.  It must have been what they call a hammock.  There were a dozen or so trees on it.  They would give us some protection from the sun come midday.  The chickee floor was raised the traditional couple of feet above the ground, but that's where the similarities ended.  It was built of wood and the walls were screened in from a few feet above the floor, with a screen door in the front. 

             
The bug spray was still doing its job.  The Seminoles didn't have any protection from the mosquitoes except the smudge fires they lit up-wind.  They would throw green leaves onto the fire and the smoke would drift their way.  I guess they hadn't been warned about the dangers of second hand smoke.  We beached the raft and tied it off, then we went to look inside our new home.  It was empty except for a few empty beer cans. 

             
"It's just like I remembered it," Willey said.  "Only smaller."  Twenty minutes later we were all moved in.  We had three sleeping bags on the floor, one for Oscar.  We even had three collapsible lawn chairs and some plastic crates to use as tables.  We couldn't use oil lamps for fear the light could be seen at a distance.  Instead, we got around by using pen lights.  We had canned and packaged food we could eat cold, and gallons of drinking water.  Finally, we climbed into our sleeping bags. 

             
I lay there listening to the swamp sounds.  I couldn't sleep, adrenaline was keeping me wired.  I wondered if saving my house was worth getting this involved with criminals, and putting myself into so much danger.  The money was tempting of course, but was the money worth being on the run, being chased by murderers who wanted to kill us? 

             
I said, "Hey, Willey, are you awake?"

             
Willey was half asleep, "I am now," he groused.

             
"I've been thinking."

             
"Did it hurt?"

             
"I'm thinking maybe we aren't cut out for this spy business.  Everything we do turns out wrong."

             
"We did okay at the nursing home," he said.

             
"Well, ah, yeah, that was alright," I lied.  "But tonight didn't work out at all.  What do you think?"

             
"I think if you'd shut your pie hole I could get some sleep."  So much for Willey's opinion. 

             
Around 5:am Willey woke me up.  "Barney, somebody's outside.  I can hear them moving around out there." 

             
"Out where?'

             
"Out in back."

             
"Do you think it's Flaherty's people?"  

             
"I don't know," Willey said.  "But I'm not going to stay here and wait for them to come to get me."  It was still dark.  I grabbed my gun.  Willey woke Oscar up and took his hand.  We crawled on our hands and knees to the door and stuck our heads up to see if anybody was out there--no one in sight.  I slowly open the screen door and we crawled out.  Once we were down the stairs we trotted, crouched over, into the dense brush.  It didn't take me long to realized we should have taken the bug spray.  We squatted there in the bushes, looking around.  Nothing was moving. 

             
Maybe they were waiting until morning before they ambushed us.  The sky was overcast now, and the swamp was steaming.  Then it started to rain.  I looked around for someplace to hide.  There was a pine tree off to our left.  I nudged Willey and pointed.  We ran to the tree and crawled under.  There was a dry blanket of pine needles on the ground and the mosquitoes weren't as bad there.  Oscar laid down on the pine needles and went to sleep.  Willey and I sat there and listened.  Once in a while we could hear somebody moving around in the brush, and then, nothing.  We heard the screen door on the chickee slam shut . . . then it slammed shut again.  There were two of them and they weren't afraid to make noise.

             
Soon we could hear our things being moved around.  They were looking for the film I took at Ransoms.  For a half-hour hour they knocked around looking for that film.  They could look all they wanted--the film was in my pocket.   Finally, Willey laid down on the pine needles, I stretched out too.  No need to sit up all night. 

             
When I woke up the sun was shining.  The rain had stopped and the swamp was hazy.  I nudged Willey awake.  We sat and listened.  They were still at it.                "These guys never give up," I said.  I crawled out from under the tree and peered through the bushes at the chickee.  I couldn't see anybody, but our things were still being moved around.  Were they on their hands and knees? 

             
Then a furry little head with a black mask popped up and looked around.  It was a raccoon.  Then another furry head popped up. 

             
"Damn," I said.  "We stayed up all night because of raccoons."  We went up to the chickee and opened the door.  The raccoons scurried out.  We went inside and found a mess of crackers all over the floor.  We weren't about to start cleaning up, so we straightened out our sleeping bags and spent the next four hours making up for lost sleep.  So far, camping out wasn't much fun.      

Chapter Nine

****

JOHN FLAHERTY SAT at his desk with his head in his hands.  He picked up the half- empty bottle of rum in front of him and took a swig.  How could Snydely be so stupid?  Didn't he know you hand over a bribe in a men's room, or a closet, or a private home?  Not in the parking lot of a restaurant in full view of the world.  The moron!  He was supposed to be a pro, a smooth operator.  He was useless.

             
Now Buckland will be blackmailed, and the idiot hasn't got the sense to pay the blackmailer off.  He'll end up spilling the beans during one of his coke fueled stupors.  There was no way to reach him, he wouldn't take any of Flaherty's calls.

   Not only that,
the attorney General thinks Flaherty killed his old man--thinks he had somebody shove the old fool into a trash compactor and squashed him.  How insane was that? 

             
Now Snydely was a liability.  If they question him he'll turn state's evidence to save his own skin.  He'd gladly throw Flaherty under the bus.  He would have to tell Stevens to arrange an accident for Snydely, and this time he'd better do it right, not like the sloppy job he did with the accountant, Harriet.  He knew it was just a matter of time until she started flapping her gums to the Attorney General, too. 

             
And why couldn’t Stevens take care of those old dimwits that were giving him this headache?  That's what his job was, not hanging over the bar at Frank's.  To top it off, while Flaherty's whole world was crashing down around him, all his dim-witted wife could think of was her next big party, so she could hobnob with her uppity friends. 

             
Flaherty grabbed the bottle of rum again, but then he put it down.  There wasn't enough booze in the whole world to solve his problems.  He let his head fall onto his desktop with a thud, and passed out.

****

             
The morning light was tinted green as it shone through the treetops.  We ate some crackers and drank some water as a sort of makeshift breakfast.  But what we really wanted was coffee.  Oscar was still asleep.  We were obsessing about coffee when a young couple walked by the chickee and waved hello to us.

             
We were stunned.  We were supposed to be in the middle of a vast swamp where no one could find us.  We had the good manners to wave back, but where had they come from?  As we pondered this, a pack of Boy Scouts came trooping by.  They wished us a good morning also.  We nodded and smiled until they were out of sight, then Willey and I jumped up and ran outside.  There, right by the side of the chickee was a bicycle trail. 

             
"What the hell," I said.  Willey just shrugged.  We walked the trail in the direction the people were coming from.  A minute later we came to a busy road.  Across the road was a K-Mart and a strip mall. 

             
"So much for hiding in a swamp," I said.

             
"Well," Willey said, "it's been a while since I was last here.  You know how fast things change.  I seem to remember train tracks running by the chickee, but no trains ever came by.  I guess they made it into that bicycle trail."

             
"When were you last here?" I asked. 

             
Willey looked up at the tree tops and said, "Let's see.  I'd say it was about fifty years or so.  But maybe it's still a good place to hide, Barney.  Nobody knows us here.  To them we're just campers.  But right now, I'm heading for that sign across the street."  I looked where he was pointing.  A sign said, Tom's Diner . . . coffee! 

             
The Diner was probably there the last time Willey was here.  It was straight out of the fifties.  All red leather and chrome.  The ham and eggs were just right and the coffee hit the spot.  I was feeling much better after we ate.  We sat there for a while watching the old folks who live on pensions scoop up the left over sugar packs and butter pats, and shove them into their pockets.  You wouldn't believe what goes on in the
All
You Can Eat
restaurants.  I guess they have to make ends meet somehow. 

             
All in all, wherever we were, it was a nice little place, and it was far away from Flaherty.  Maybe Willey was right, maybe we could stay here for a while.  On the way out of the Diner I spotted a bowl of bananas.  I bought one and a Styrofoam cup of orange juice to go, for Oscar.  After we paid the bill we walked along the strip mall looking for a cell phone store.  We needed to buy a cell phone charger that would plug into the Wrangler's cigarette lighter.  We found a phone store and bought a charger.  I wondered if the Wrangler was still where we left it at the edge of the swamp.  We walked back to the chickee, but when we opened the door Oscar was gone.