Tampa Burn (19 page)

The shots echoed in the tree canopy, then were absorbed by lichen, water, ascending birds.

The handgun ejected the empty brass casings automatically near the shoulder of the road. I noted where the brass fell, and was pleased that the casings were readily visible.

I hurried back to the car. As I turned the ignition key, I checked my watch: 6:28 P.M.

There couldn't be much time left before other vehicles began to arrive.

I put the car into gear, resisting the temptation to floor the accelerator, because I didn't want to leave obvious tire tracks. Then I drove down a straight-away, around a second curve, and toward what I remembered to be the location of a logging trail. At least, I hoped I remembered.

I did. There it was: a rutted, narrow lane overgrown with brush, but still getting some use, still maintained by someone, because the Ford banged down twenty yards or so of trail without difficulty. I drove in far enough to be hidden from the road, but not so far I couldn't back out in a hurry if needed.

Then I shoved Pilar's satellite phone into the crack of the front seat and looked at my watch once again: 6:33.

Under pressure, the brain begins to second-guess itself. It asks questions designed to contrive easy excuses for quitting, for giving up, or running away.

Now, though, the questions were meaningless. I was committed. There was no going back.

Head down, arms up to protect my face from brush and branches, I ran as fast as I could to the gravel road. I looked both ways—no cars or engine noise coming from either direction—then sprinted another thirty yards toward what had been Ervin's shack. Standing near the right side of the road, I fired off three more rounds from the SIG 9 mm. Again, I left the brass casings where they fell, clearly visible near the ditch.

After that, I had a hell of a tough decision to make. The safest thing for me to do—and I
preferred
the safest course—was to hide my old handgun away for later retrieval, then stand and wait by the rental car until the black Chevy arrived.

It wouldn't be long now.

The worst my pursuers might do would be slap me around some. Maybe a kick or punch or two. But they wouldn't kill me. They couldn't risk it. Not right away. I knew where Pilar and the money were. No matter how ruthless, they'd make a determined effort to squeeze the information out of me before taking harsher action.

So that's what I wanted to do. Stand and wait. Let them make the first big move, and thus give them the chance to make the first big mistake.

But my brain was still feeling pressured, and so it continued to second-guess. I kept asking myself:
What if they're not armed? What happens if they're not carrying weapons that fire 9 mm ammunition?

If they didn't have at least one weapon that matched the caliber of my handgun, I was screwed. I was screwed because the people following me had to be at least temporarily linked with the shell casings I'd left lying in the road.

A more reasonable voice reassured:
Of course they're armed. They're here to take your money.

Something else:
9 mm ammunition has become the world standard. The percentages are on your side.

And yet . . . and yet, I knew that if I guessed wrong, the entire scheme was doomed. Far worse, I would be putting Pilar, Tomlinson, and my own son in mortal danger. So there was no choice. I had to err on the side of caution.

Erring on the side of caution meant I had to take a big personal risk.

So I checked to make certain the hammer on my SIG-Sauer was down, then popped the magazine. As I did, I trotted along the road, away from the curve where Ervin Rouse's shack had been.

That morning, I'd loaded thirteen copper-blunt Hydra-Shok cartridges, 147-grain, into the magazine. The cartridges, specially designed as man-stoppers, were distinctive in appearance, short and stocky, with stemmed hollow points.

I'm not a gun aficionado. I don't collect firearms, don't frequent gun shows. I don't even enjoy shooting. To me, this handgun, these special loads, were
tools,
nothing more.

I'd fired six shots, so I knew how many rounds remained. But I'm also a freak for checking and rechecking my data. Doing the mental arithmetic wasn't good enough. I wanted to visually confirm that I now had six rounds in the magazine, plus one in the chamber.

Yes, the count was right.

Less than fifty yards beyond the logging road where I'd hidden the Ford, I found a place wide enough for a car to turn around. I pictured the black Chevy slowing at the wooded entrance where my car was hidden; imagined the men inside confirming the location of the rental on their GPS tracker, then squabbling about what to do, how to handle it.

Most likely, they would drive past, pull off the road, then walk back. They'd take their time. Be stealthy. Send just one or two guys to check things out. Or, depending on how they reacted, they might do an immediate U-turn. Come charging back.

Either way, this was the first section of road that was wide enough to turn.

It was here, I decided, that I would ambush them.

On one side of the road, cypress knees protruded from black water. Lily pads floated in shadows beneath arching limbs. Opposite the canal was a dense thicket of Brazilian pepper trees.

I climbed in among the trees, eyes searching the ground for fire ant mounds—ferocious, swarming insects. You don't want to stumble into those when you're trying to hide quietly.

I balanced the pistol in my hand, checked my watch once more.

6:51 P.M.

I was ready.

Pilar had described the man who abducted our son as a monster. A sociopath from a prison for the criminally insane who burned people, and who, I suspected, had used a portable torch to burn Lake's arm.

What brand of sadist could do such a thing to a child?

Standing quietly in the bushes, I thought again of my son. Felt the terror he must have felt the night he was abducted, and wondered about him now, in this instant. Was he still frightened? Was he even alive?

Masked Man, Praxcedes Lourdes, represented the kidnappers, in my mind. The people in the Chevy were more like jackals.

I couldn't deal with the monster until I'd found a way to pen the jackals.

I took Tomlinson's cell phone from my pocket. I dialed 911 for the second time, still thinking of my son.

SITTING
in the Toyota, with the brat bound and gagged in the trunk, Prax told the driver that, as a teenager, he and his parents had been cruising the coast of Nicaragua when the boat they were on hit a reef and sank.

Only he had made it to shore.

Then Prax told him about the night the soldiers came to the village of his adopted Moskito Indian family and set their hut on fire.

His story had changed several times over the years, along with the lies he used to keep the story believable.

As Prax Lourdes talked, though, the truth came into his own mind's eye: the sailboat he'd set ablaze, and the shrieks of his biological parents as he paddled away in a dinghy. Then, two years later, the windstorm
woosh
of his adopted Moskito father, clothes on fire, a human torch chasing him, catching him, as the man screamed, “You witch, you evil witch! You're going to burn
with
us.”

To hear that arrogant man crackle was worth the pain that came later.

To set a human being on fire: what an incredible kick; what a sensation of
power
. To trigger an absolute and frantic loss of control in another man was to dominate him completely. A woman, the same thing, only somehow the feeling was more physical . . . sustained . . .
sweeter.

Fire did that. No method was as instantaneous, more intimate. In the first microseconds, fire stripped away all the crap, all the superiority games and social fakery. Flames unveiled the pathetic little monkey that lived at the core inside all people.

Even thinking about it, hearing his adopted father's cries, Prax would feel again the flooding abdominal tension, and he could remember the very instant when he realized that awe-some feeling could be duplicated.

His adopted father caught him, but Prax awoke. He survived.

His adopted father didn't.

Aware he might go to prison, Lourdes spent his waking moments perfecting the details of his alibi. In the burn unit of Managua's peasant hospital,
Hospital Escuela,
speaking through bandages, he told student doctors a detailed story about soldiers attacking in the night.

Unconvinced, they sent a volunteer psychologist to interview him. She was a blond woman who tried to hide her breasts beneath baggy scrubs and vests. She reminded him of his biological mother, whom he'd despised.

Lourdes was so heavily drugged, and in such pain, that he had to concentrate with all his will to lie convincingly. That was nothing new—he was used to dealing with pain. He'd endured excruciating headaches for as long as he could remember. So he managed to keep his answers consistent when she asked her questions in different ways, trying to trick him.

Did he enjoy setting fires? Did he prefer to play alone? Had he ever wet his bed? Had he ever successfully masturbated to completion? Did he feel sorrow that his adopted mother, father, and three sisters had all died in the blaze? Had he ever intentionally burned himself, and taken pleasure from it?

One question, he just played dumb. X rays, the woman said, showed that he'd had a serious head injury years before as a child. Why had he lied to them when they'd ask if he'd had any head injuries?

He said he didn't remember anything about it. Which was close to the truth.

One morning, the nurse brought a tall black woman. The black woman said to him in French, then in English, and, finally, in Spanish, “Why don't you tell us your real name, my love? About your real parents. From your accent, and when you talk in your sleep, we know that you seem to be French, but that you know a lot of American English, too. Why won't you talk to me?”

Actually, he and his family were French Canadian, though they barned in Florida when not sailing. As with many carnival and circus people, there was a small town in Florida, populated almost entirely by show people, that was their winter home.

The town was on the Gulf Coast, across the bay from Tampa. His family had a mobile home in a trailer park on a little river there, where he learned about boats and water. It was a weird little place, with midgets and clowns, elephants, chimps, and carney freaks for neighbors.

That's why it spooked Prax to learn he'd been talking in his sleep.

Carnival society was a closed society. Had its own vocabulary, and dialect. After ten years working carnivals all across Canada, working his family's sideshow acts, and the center joints and cook shacks, Prax knew that if a savvy person heard him speak English, they'd know right away who he was, the kind of work he'd done.

Not that carnies didn't cover for one another. It was part of the deal. You never gave straight information to cops or strangers, and you didn't give up a fellow carney, no matter what. That didn't mean all or even some carnies were crooked. It's just the way it was among people who were always among strangers, no matter where they were.

That was no guarantee the Mounties or the cops couldn't nail him, though. So Lourdes kept his mouth shut. At night, he slept with a tongue depressor between his teeth.

 

 

THE
only time he came close to speaking openly was after the black woman had left and the nurse said to him, “I don't understand why you won't tell us. You shouldn't be living in Nicaragua with Indians. We should send you home to be with your people.”

Prax replied, “I've spent nearly two years as a Suma. I like way the Suma deal with problems, their assholes, the ways of Yapti Tasba.”

It was true. He liked the freedom of the culture. Men were expected to spend long periods of time away from the village, wandering or lobster diving, while women stayed home and worked.

That kind of freedom, always moving, it had a carney feel.

He wasn't surprised when the psychologist answered, “But your village doesn't want you back. We've contacted them. We think they're afraid of you. Why would they be afraid of a boy?”

Prax ignored her, replying, “Then I'll find another village. I'm staying. This is home.”

Nicaragua was cool. The place had potential. He was smart enough to realize that. Even though he was only fifteen, Prax was shrewd from years of living on the road, conning money out of local marks.

Better preparation, though, was a lifetime of being
different.
A lifetime of having to give the appearance of being normal every waking minute because if he didn't, he'd be busted, and that would be the end.

Prax knew he was different, had known it since earliest memory. Knew because of the withering headaches that came shooting up his spine a couple hours after sunset almost every night. Knew it because of the rage the pain created in him—a redness that flooded in behind his eyes with a pressure so great that he thought he'd burst.

Sometimes he did.

The first time was when he experimented with a cat that strayed onto the carnival grounds. Then he tried more cats, then dogs. Much later, he doused a sideshow chimp with kerosene.

His parents knew that he was different, too. But different was commonplace in their far-out world. His mother was a
real
freak, which she'd used in various sideshow bits. She had the size and strength of a linebacker, and Prax had inherited both. His father was a runt who, aside from sailing skills, was an idiot.