Star Island (44 page)
Authors: Carl Hiaasen
“Hey, didn’t I call it?” he shouted gleefully. “Wasn’t I dead-on?”
“Yes, Claude. You’re so wise, it’s eerie.”
One of the other shooters, probably Teddy Loo, called out, “Yo, sugar, who
are
you?”
“Oh, I’m nobody,” said Ann.
“Not anymore!” crowed Bang Abbott.
Then Silvio, standing directly behind him, pulled out a gun.
When the 911 call came, Jimmy Campo and his partner were at Collins and Thirty-sixth, taping the ankle of a jogger who’d tripped over a stray Maltese. The paramedics raced down to Pubes and found bedlam. People were streaming out of the club, their bodyguards shoving and kicking at the swarm of photographers. Kanye, Lindsay, Wayne, Khloe, Fergie—yo, there’s Megan Fox! Jimmy Campo knew who they were only because his girlfriend had started buying the
Eye
.
The street was so jammed with black SUVs that the cops had to clear a path for the ambulance. Lying in a sweaty heap on the sidewalk was an overweight white male suffering from a gunshot wound to his lower torso. Jimmy Campo recognized the prone man as the same toad who ten days earlier had paid him a grand for a stretcher photo in an alley behind the Stefano. The guy’s wallet might be worth checking, Jimmy Campo thought, if he passes out.
Kneeling by the victim and holding his hand was a cute blonde in a short red dress who looked familiar. Jimmy Campo thought she couldn’t possibly be the man’s girlfriend, not if there was a God in heaven. The woman, who had dark glasses and a sketchy tatt on her neck, said the injured man’s name was Claude. Standing beside her was an uncommonly large individual wearing a pinstriped eye patch and a bolo tie. His shaved head was marked with bold Indian symbols, and his face was striped with phosphorescent gunk.
It was in all respects a routine South Beach emergency call—until the one-eyed Samaritan peeled down the victim’s pants to reveal a bloody perforation deep in the hairy cellulitic chasm of his scabbed buttocks.
“Behold!” the painted man boomed at the fallen paparazzo. “Somebody shot you a new asshole!”
Jimmy Campo stepped in and said, “Sir, we’ll take it from here.”
The bald man lifted the woman in red to his shoulders and carried her through the tumult. Jimmy Campo and his partner quickly began tending their new patient, who was pallid and clammy though still conscious.
The other photographers were more interested in chasing the spooked celebrities than consoling their stricken colleague; only Teddy Loo hung around to watch him hoisted on a stretcher.
“Does it hurt bad, bro?”
Bang Abbott shook off the oxygen mask and glared. “There’s a bullet up my butt crack, you dumb sonofabitch.”
“Yo, listen, before you go—who was the babe with the sick tatt?”
“What?”
“The one we just shot. That hot ringer for Cherry.”
“You don’t even know? Unfuckingbelievable.”
“Don’t be that way, bro. Share the love.”
“Bite me, Teddy.”
As the paramedics briskly rolled the stretcher toward the ambulance, Teddy Loo scurried to keep pace. He lifted one of his cameras and took aim.
Bang Abbott raised his head miserably. “Are you serious?”
C
HERYL
G
AIL
B
UNTERMAN
spent seven weeks at a rehab facility on St. Barts that specializes in holistic pomegranate cleansings. The concert tour was canceled and her album
Skantily Klad
sold poorly.
Rolling Stone
called it “wretchedly overproduced and underperformed” but praised the backup singer whose voice covered most of the tracks. The single “Jealous Bone” proved to be a modest success, selling 79,312 downloads after being plugged by Howard Stern on his radio program. Following her return from the Caribbean, Cheryl Bunterman announced she was changing her name from Cherry Pye to Chairish, the common spelling having been claimed by the Hasbro Company for a new self-wetting doll. Chairish’s first post-rehab CD, a collection of Christian verses set to Bahamian junkanoo tunes, was never released. She briefly joined the Church of Scientology but was expelled when a bong fell out of her handbag during an “introspection rundown.” Currently, she lives in Los Angeles, where she’s taping a reality show for TLC called
Almost Sober
. In the first episode, she persuades a reluctant neighbor to help her remove an unsightly tattoo.
Following the flop of
Skantily Klad
, N
ED AND
J
ANET
B
UNTERMAN
separated. Ned partnered with the Jorgensens to purchase a thirty-acre
vineyard in Mendocino County, while Janet moved in with her tennis instructor. The Buntermans continue to jointly manage their daughter’s career, such as it is, and will make occasional paid appearances on her television show.
M
AURY
L
YKES
was indicted for income-tax evasion and fled to Bangkok, where he purchased a popular tourist hotel and introduced topless karaoke. He was later attacked and dismembered in his fern garden by the enraged father of a young cabaret singer named Linga Li. The savage crime received so much publicity that an enterprising Chinese music producer signed Linga to a long-term recording contract. Her first album, to be released throughout Asia on her eighteenth birthday, will be dedicated to “my dear Uncle Maury.”
After the incident at Pubes, L
UCY AND
L
ILA
L
ARK
terminated their association with Cherry Pye and the Bunterman family. The twins’ publicity firm continues to thrive, rejecting all but the most recklessly unspooled celebrities. Most recently, the Larks have consented to represent a well-known star of action films who nearly garroted himself during a vigorous act of autoeroticism on the D train in midtown Manhattan. The sisters are said to have scored an exclusive interview for their client on an upcoming edition of
60 Minutes
, when he will reveal to Lesley Stahl a dark, gut-wrenching childhood secret that the Larks are now composing, and tweaking for maximum buzz.
The part of the deviant surfer was completely edited from the final cut of Quentin Tarantino’s much-anticipated
Blister Beach
. Infuriated, T
ANNER
D
ANE
K
EEFE
fired his manager and legally changed the sequence of his name to D
ANE
K
EEFE
T
ANNER
. After their calamitous date at Pubes, he never contacted Cherry Pye again. On the advice of a barmaid, he switched chemical dependencies from
hydrocodone to oxycodone, and took up free weights. He is now working on a Showtime miniseries about the Battle of the Little Bighorn in which he plays the role of Kyle, General Custer’s loyal but headstrong groom.
After failing nine consecutive urine screens, M
ETHANE
D
RUDGE
was fired by the Poon Pilots and replaced on tour by the longtime drummer from the heavy-metal Canker Crew. Frantic to salvage his rock career, Drudge pleaded with the Lark sisters to become his publicists, but they turned him down. He fled the L.A. scene to join an obscure peyote cult, and was later found dead and half-eaten by coyotes in a homemade sweat lodge on the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The man who killed J
ACKIE
S
EBAGO
was apprehended after the unusual murder weapon was traced to a Miami dive shop equipped with video cameras in the parking lot. A surveillance tape revealed the license number of the hit man’s rental car, and the Avis Company helpfully supplied his driver’s license information. Upon his arrest, the killer immediately ratted out W
ILLIAM
S
HEA
, the person who’d hired him, and whose travel agent had failed to get him an upgrade from coach to first class. While Shea currently awaits trial for Sebago’s murder, he and the other investors are aggressively suing the dead developer’s estate to recover their stake in the Key Largo town-house project, which remains red-tagged and abandoned to this day.
After solving the Sebago homicide, D
ETECTIVE
R
OB
R
EILLY
received a commendation and a handsome glass paperweight from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. He has kept an open file on the person he believes to be C
LINTON
T
YREE
, a former governor of Florida, and has returned several times to the remote campsite on North Key Largo. There is no sign of recent habitation.
• • •
Asserting that its home-owner policies don’t cover bacterial contamination of household appliances, the Gulfstream Insurance Co. refused to buy a new washing machine for D. T. M
ALTBY
. The ex–lieutenant governor of Florida eventually lost his house at the Ocean Reef Club to his fourth wife, who divorced him in favor of a local fishing guide. Maltby moved back to Tallahassee, slipped into renal failure and on his deathbed told friends about the harrowing visitation by Clinton Tyree. They all thought he was delirious.
R
UBEN
“W
HADDUP
” C
OYLE
was cut from the Miami Heat after wrecking another leased Jaguar convertible. Unable to find work in the NBA, he moved to Athens and is now playing point guard for Olympiacos, one of the top basketball teams in Greece. He is not allowed to drive a car, or drink ouzo on game nights.
The memory cards containing the Star Island photographs of Cherry Pye were ruined by her own vomit, and in any event had attracted no interest from book publishers. B
LONDELL
W
AYNE
T
ATUM
, also known as Chemo, gave up bodyguarding celebrities after that chaotic night on South Beach. The money paid to him by Maury Lykes was misspent on a series of experimental dermatological procedures that failed to improve his tragic facial appearance. Afterward, the doctor who performed the technique—known as “extreme laser brasion”—vanished from his Coconut Grove clinic and was never found. Chemo worked as an eviction specialist for several Florida banks until the real-estate market turned around, when he returned full-time to the home mortgage business.
Police never found out who shot B
ANG
A
BBOTT
, or why. A photograph of the wounded paparazzo being borne away on a stretcher was published on page three of the
National Eye
, accompanied by a
caption reading:
CATFIGHT CASUALTY—
Photog felled by sniper after Cherry’s wild SoBe slapdown
. Abbott underwent five hours of emergency surgery to repair bullet damage in his lower intestinal tract. Because of its problematic location, the entry wound was left open and a tube was inserted to serve indefinitely as a drain. Two days after the shooting, while still in the ICU, Abbott scribbled out a personal check to F
REMONT
S
PORES
for the sum of two hundred dollars, which was hand-delivered by T
EDDY
L
OO
. Abbott recovered from his injuries, although it was many months before he again picked up a camera. Today he rents a small studio in Culver City, where he specializes in portraits of toddlers, prom couples and small pets. He is also available for corporate functions.
A
NN
D
E
L
USIA
became a star, though on her own terms. She chose
People
over
Us Weekly, Details
over
Vanity Fair
, Larry King over Mario Lopez, Ellen over Tyra, Kimmel over Leno, Tribeca over Sundance, ICM over CAA, and Revlon over Garnier. She still doesn’t employ a stylist, publicist or bodyguard. In interviews she speaks pensively of her time as Cherry Pye’s secret double, and always expresses compassion for the troubled singer. Ann steadfastly refuses to discuss what occurred while she was held captive by a “deeply disturbed fan” who’d mistaken her for the pop singer. She never brought criminal charges against Claude Abbott, and never publicly identified him. Three book publishers offered contracts in the mid–six figures, but Ann turned them down because they all insisted on pairing her with a ghostwriter. She also declined promising roles in films by Judd Apatow and the Coen brothers because she’d previously committed to appear in a Pedro Almodóvar project about three women hang gliders who become stranded on Gibraltar during a tsunami. She hasn’t seen Skink since their motorcycle ride on the night Abbott was shot, although she occasionally speaks with J
IM
T
ILE
, who reports that the former governor is in a good place.
Carl Hiaasen is the author of eleven previous novels, including the best-selling
Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy
, and
Lucky You
, and three popular children’s books,
Hoot, Flush
, and
Scat
. His most recent work of nonfiction is
The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport
. He also writes a weekly column for
The Miami Herald
.