Naked Came the Manatee (5 page)

"Why wouldn't they send his entire body?" Deal said. "It would be easier to revive than finding him a whole new body."

"Maybe somebody screwed up," she said. "Remember that pop singer from Caracas? He intended to have his body frozen but there was an accident with a circular saw during the packaging. All they could salvage was his head. It's still frozen here somewhere."

"This isn't getting Fay back," Jake muttered, painfully pacing the length of the small kitchen. He paused at the refrigerator to take out a beer, and tossed one to Deal. Britt passed, no longer hungry, or thirsty. Her mind was racing. Maybe this was the big one.

"Well, I tell you," she said, after peering again into the metal container. "It's either him or Mickey Schwartz."

"Why would those guys so desperately want the head of Mickey Schwartz?" Jake asked.

They stared at one another.

"Unless they want to pass it off as Castro," she said. "Every time there are rumors of Castro's demise, Little Havana erupts. Juan Carlos Reyes has offered a million-dollar reward for proof that Castro is dead."

Reyes, a politically connected Miami millionaire, was determined to become the next president of Cuba.

"W7hat exactly happened when they took Fay?" Britt was taking notes.

"She went skinny-dipping with a manatee."

Deal interrupted. "Do you think it could be the same manatee… ?"

"What?"

They told Britt the story of Deal's near-death experience and his amazing rescue from a watery grave. "Not too many manatees left these days," she said, "especially ones that would rescue a human."

"Doesn't the Navy use them?" Deal said.

"No, that's dolphins. They're smarter," Britt answered, noticing that his pupils appeared dilated.

"The old lady that pulled me out said she chats with him."

"That manatee is our only witness," Jake said. "Maybe we ought to go get the dive boat and find him."

Britt rolled her eyes. "What do you plan to do, let him sniff her bathing suit?"

Jake shrugged. "It works with police dogs."

Marion McAlister Williams was rocking in the dark on her front porch when they arrived, almost as though she had been expecting them. "He's out there," she said, nodding, "and something's wrong."

They went to the grotto. Booger was there, circling, in a state of agitation.

Booger experienced an unreasoning feeling of dread. He sensed trouble, cries for help, mortal danger. He swam as fast as he could, powerful flips of his tail propelling him southward. Dawn streaked the sky as the trio in the dive boat trailed him around a mangrove outcropping to a wooden boat dock with a million-dollar yacht appended to it.

Britt felt an odd sense of deja vu. Like a Lassie movie, she thought, with Timmy trapped down the well.

"I know who lives here," she said, squinting at the house. "I think it's some city official."

Jake idled down the Evinrude. As they let the boat coast, they heard a splash as something hit the water.

"Hurry!" Britt cried out.

Booger dove nose-down to where a burlap bag was sinking to the silty bottom.

Burrowing beneath the sack, the gentle giant rose, bursting through the surface of the shining water, showering those aboard with spray.

"Oh, shit," Lassiter said.

If Booger had found Fay, or what was left of her, it wasn't much.

Deal reached out, caught it, then gingerly dropped the sopping sack onto the floor of the dive boat.

They gasped collectively when it moved.

Something inside was alive.

"Could be a snake," Jake warned.

Cautiously, he loosened the thick twist tie that sealed the sack. Small, high-pitched sounds emerged.

Then he upended the bag and dumped the contents onto the deck.

Six drenched calico kittens crawled in all directions, mewing loudly for their mother.

"That's who lives here!" Britt said. "The Miami Beach city manager! I should have known." The man had been seething ever since his scheme to pay bounty hunters thirty-five dollars a head to exterminate the city's stray cat population had gone awry. "Damn," said Lassiter.

Booger dove and surfaced, dove and surfaced again, then struck out for open water, as though somehow aware that he had saved the furry little creatures now using the back seat of Britt Montero's new T-Bird for a litter box.

After a pit stop for Kitten Chow at an all-night convenience store, it was nearly eight a.m. Britt would only have time for a shower and a cup of coffee. She was not tired, she had never been more awake. This could be the big one, the event Miami had awaited for more than three decades. The phone rang just as she was leaving.

Hoping it was Jake with word on Fay, she felt her heart sink when she heard the deep-throated growl that had launched a thousand fan clubs. Damn, she had forgotten screen star Dash Brandon.

"You're up early," she said, trying grimly to shake off a kitten fastened by its needle-sharp claws to the right leg of her linen slacks.

"Tell you the truth, dollface, I haven't slept yet. Been partying in South Beach since I left you. You been to one a these foam parties? A trip. I met up with some of the crew, and we need your help."

"You must be too exhausted to join me today," she said, trying without success to sound regretful.

"Yeah, but we need to see you. It's important." He sounded serious. "Meet us for lunch tomorrow."

"I usually don't eat lunch," Britt said. "It's tough to eat anything on deadline." She pushed back her hair impatiently, watching a kitten dig industriously in her potted begonia. "And I'm pretty busy right now."

The movie star refused to take no for an answer. "Didn't they say you were assigned to help me?" he pouted.

5. THE OLD WOMAN AND THE SEA—James W. Hall

Marion McAlister Williams was naked in the moonlight. Her body wasn't what it used to be. But name something that was. Especially something 102 years old. She was ankle-deep in Biscayne Bay standing in the soft marl of her own small beach, gazing out at a prairie of moonlight that glazed the still water. It was two in the morning on Tuesday. The Grove was quiet, the sky was densely salted with stars, there was no breeze, no mosquitoes, no boats moving across the water, no birds coasting low, not even the plaintive warble of the owl who lived in her stand of gumbo-limbos and strangler figs.

Marion waded deeper into the bay. The water was the same heat as her flesh. She might have been melting into a sea of warm blood, dissolving, as she went deeper, the water to her deflated breasts, to her neck, lifting her. She lay back, let it hold her up to the moon, an offering, this woman who had seen enough of this world, what it had become, its garish pleasures, its quick and easy gratifications, its incessant noise pulsing like fevered blood. She let the tide carry her body, buoyant as a funeral pyre, let it take her out into that luminous water, so bright tonight it was as if a tablecloth of iridescent silk were floating on the surface of the bay, a cloth that was miles across.

Marion McAlister Williams was nearly the oldest thing in Miami. Older than any tree, older than any building or car or house or boat or stick of wood. She was older than the streets, older than the bridges or boardwalks or seawalls. She was older than anything but the water or the rocks or the land. Though she had to admit, one or two sea turtles still lurking in the bay might be nearly as old.

Marion drifted farther out, nearly a mile from the shore, effortless and serene, her arms spread wide, taking the last of the outgoing tide. She would float out there during the slack hour, then ride back in with the welling tide. She might have to swim a stroke or two to reach her shoreline again, but usually not. She knew the currents, the small silent streams and eddies that snaked through the bay. She knew the cycling seasons of their movements. As regular as airplane schedules, step aboard, ride out, hover for a while, and ride back in. She had been doing it for most of a century. One of the virtues of age. What you knew, you knew well. What you didn't, no longer mattered.

Ears underwater, she could hear the ripples of noise, the subtle pings and gurgles of passing creatures. She knew some of their names, some family lineages. There was also a deeper sound, a nearly mystical hum in the bay that vibrated far below the surface, a quiet throb of power that somehow fed her, renewed her strength on these nightly swims. She'd dared to reveal this to her granddaughter some months back, calling it a "soft drumroll of energy," and the girl, a modern woman, skeptical and tough-minded, had fired back that Marion was probably only hearing the chug of sewage as it pumped from the city's vast network of toilets and drainpipes beneath the bay across to Virginia Key.

The slack hour passed without event, and Marion sculled the water, readjusted her body into a fast-moving channel so she could begin her return voyage. As she glided back toward the shore she was joined, as she so often was, by Booger.

Tonight Booger pressed close to her, scraped her arm with one of his barnacles, drew blood. Her skin was papery these days, easily torn. They glided along together, soundless, and the fleshy sea cow continued to bump her, continued to urge her forward with something like impatience. Marion did not resist. Long ago she'd abandoned the need for overmanaging her destiny.

There was nothing she absolutely needed to do anymore. She had won her prizes, taken her bows, had shaken the hands of a half-dozen presidents. Now her most reliable pleasures came from these nightly rides, from giving herself over to the vagaries of the natural world. So she let Booger speed her along to the shallows just off her beach. It was there that she had made a habit of grooming Booger, clearing him of the flotsam and jetsam that he regularly snagged in his journeys around the bay.

She let her legs dangle down, caught the bottom, then trudged up to the shore, shedding water like sparkling confetti. Booger bobbed nearby, his skin silvered by the moon. Tonight he was even more of a mess than usual. He looked like a honeymoon car with strings of tin cans dragging behind him. Fishing line was wrapped around his fins, twigs and broken driftwood trapped in the line. There were two plastic six-pack holders caught on a notch near his back flipper, and knotted to them was a mooring line that trailed off behind him for twenty feet.

Marion dragged the line hand over hand, hauling the heavy mass across the soft bay bottom. It was a wonder that Booger had been able to swim at all so entangled in trash. She hauled it out of the water and held it up to the soft moonlight. Splintered wood and elastic cords and another nest of snarled fishing line that ensnared a silver canister.

Marion patted Booger, told him to wait, then walked up the shore to her chikee hut, where she kept a razor-edged fillet knife for just such tasks as this. She came back to Booger, cut him free of his clutter of trash, gave him a stroke along his broad slick forehead, and watched him turn and wrallow away into the night.

Hector and Phil took Fay to their hideout. Actually, it was an efficiency apartment off Tigertail Avenue in the Grove. But Hector liked calling it their hideout even though they hadn't had to hide out in it yet, 'cause they hadn't succeeded in doing anything bad enough to be pursued.

Hector had found the apartment, liked the view of the pool, and given the manager first and last month's rent on the spot. Then he'd found he couldn't afford it, and asked Phil if he wanted to share the rent. Phil, recently split from his wife, had said sure. So they'd laid out two pool floats on the middle of the living room floor, the red one for Hector, the blue one for Phil, and called it home. Fine by Hector. Pool floats were better beds than he'd had at the Dade County Jail or Raiford. Better than when he was growing up in Havana, sleeping on the mud floor of the little barn. A goat for a roommate, chickens for companions.

This apartment was a perfect spot for spying on the babes who used the pool. Lots of them, secretaries mainly, a couple he'd gotten to know lately. Or at least he'd said a couple of words to them and given them a tongue flick. That tongue flick almost always worked on the average woman. But no luck so far with the fussy secretaries.

"Hey, man," Hector said. "I got an idea what we can do with this pretty lady she doesn't tell us what she knows."

Phil was sitting up on the kitchen counter, legs dangling. They didn't have furniture yet, so counter-sitting was about it for taking a load off your feet, except for the floats, and you couldn't use them too much or they'd spring more leaks.

Phil was staring at Fay, a weird look in his eyes. Fay was dressed in the yellow plastic foul-weather gear they'd found on the Whaler. Looking cute. Pouty lips, with some bite in her green eyes.

Hector liked women with sharp teeth, women who liked to bite. He liked teeth marks on his shoulders. He liked giving them back, a nice oval bruise on their inner thighs. Yeah. Hector had a way with women.

Phil told Hector to stop looking at Fay that way. And Hector said a very bad thing to Phil. Phil said a very bad thing back to Hector. Hector said two very bad things. And Phil replied with three very bad things.

"Knock it off," Fay said. She stalked around, staring at each of them. Hector smiling at her, trying to decide where he wanted to plant his first teeth marks.