Tampa Burn (2 page)

The tarpon spawning project Doc Ford references is an actual project. It began in the mind of Craig A. Watson, director of Aquaculture Lab at the University of Florida, and the first attempt took place at my home and dock at Pineland, Florida. I'd like to thank Craig, Doug Colle, Jeff Hill, Scott Graves, John Baldwin, and Dan Conklin for allowing me to play a small role. Running home from Boca Grande Pass at night in my skiff during a full-moon eclipse, with scientists and my youngest son, Rogan, aboard—along with a live 100-pound anesthetized tarpon—will never be forgotten. The same is true about the night several unnamed fish guides sunk a police boat.

Something else I'll never forget is the first time I saw America in concert. It was in San Diego. I was on a book signing tour. I seldom go out; avoid crowds like the plague. But being back in Southern California, listening to them nail hit after hit, was one of the truly great nights.

Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell are two of our finest composers. For them to allow Tomlinson to work as a roadie, and for them and Warner Brothers Records also to allow me to use their lyrics in this novel, is a great honor. I would like to thank Dewey, Gerry, Willie Leacox, Michael Woods, Rich Campbell, Pete Leonardo, and Bill Crook for their generous hospitality while on the road. America's road manager, Erin Edwards, deserves special thanks. She is a great and gifted lady.

Also providing valuable aid or information were Tom Taylor, Dr. David Melzer, Major Robert Macomber, Captain Kerry Griner, and Sergeant Jim Brown of the Lee County Sheriff's Department, and Carol Wirth, who contributed information on anesthesiology.

My close pals Dr. Brian Hummel, Kristin Hummel, Gary Terwilliger, Donna Terwilliger, Bill Spaceman Lee, Genny Amsler, Sue Williams, Roberta Petish, Debbie, Pete, and Maggie Flynn all deserve thanks, as do Rob and Phyllis Wells for letting me hide out and write in the boathouse.

These people all provided valuable guidance and/or information. All errors, exaggerations, omissions, or fictionalizations are entirely the fault, and the responsibility, of the author.

It has become my habit, during the last weeks of work on a novel, to disappear to some remote place so that the common, daily interruptions don't impose. For this book, I chose Anse Chastanet (Ons Chas-ta-nee) on St. Lucia in the Windward Islands. Anse Chastanet is a five-star tropical wilderness resort; six hundred acres of coastal mountain rainforest and beach. In a lifetime spent traveling, I have never stayed at a more beautiful place.

I'd like to thank my new friends there, and hope we meet again soon: Nick Troubetzkoy, a new addition to my list of Mad Russian pals; Karolin Troubetzkoy; Michael and Karyn Allard; Dr. John Wassel; Luci New; Gillian Hurtig; Ike Ononye; and Sharon Brown-Horton.

Finally, I would like to thank dear, dear Debra Jane Objartle White for her kindness, friendship, guidance, and support over many years, and Lee and Rogan White, once again, for helping me finish a book.

Humanity has a limited biological capacity for change, but an unlimited capacity for spiritual change. The only human institution incapable of evolving spiritually is a cemetery.

 

—S. M. TOMLINSON

 

 

God, why'd you send me down here with a trigger finger and a tallywhacker, if you didn't expect me to use 'em?

 

—TUCKER GATRELL

Several hours before Praxcedes Lourdes abducted Marion Ford's son, he was sitting in a smoky cantina with his getaway driver, bragging about his new fame.

In Spanish, he said, “‘The visitor who burns men alive.' It's what the poor assholes in Nicaragua call me. The peasants. And in Guatemala. The ‘night visitor.' They use my name to scare hell out of children. To make brats behave when they disobey. Understand? At a certain age, kids stop believing in Santa Claus. Even some of the saints. But they'll never stop believing in me.”

Prax was smoking a Cohiba cigar. He inhaled, perhaps smiling, though it was impossible to tell because he wore a mask made of thin wire mesh. Guerrilla fighters wore identical masks during Nicaragua's Contra war to hide their identities. Eyebrows and pink cheek flush were painted on the outside—a clownish touch.

Lourdes
liked
that.

The man always kept his face covered. When he traveled or went out at night, he wore surgical gauze, the kind that protects from germs. Because of certain Asian viruses, it was no longer an oddity.

At other times, he wore a bandana or a bandage wrap, plus sunglasses—except for now, in this dark bar. The Contra mask, though, was his favorite because he could smoke and drink, and also because it provided him with a face when he looked in the mirror.

The driver watched smoke sieve through the mesh. He averted his eyes.

“Not long after General Balserio paid me to come to Masagua, your people started calling me
Incendiario.
Using only the one word. That's a better name, don't you think? It sounds like a rock singer in the United States. It's got star appeal.
Sexy
—not that you coffee peons know anything about show business.”

Prax made a card-fan with his hands, as if creating a marquee above the table, and said with flair, “The great
Incendiario.
Like I'm star of this half-assed revolution, more famous than your generals. Which I am. In the mountains, when people say my name, they
whisper.
You know why?”

The driver was staring at the table, aware the man was not speaking to him; an answer wasn't expected. He was bragging to please himself. Even so, the driver replied, “It's because the people of Masagua are superstitious. They don't believe that you are—” He paused. He'd almost said “human.” “That you really exist.”

Lourdes leaned forward slightly. His Spanish was unusually accented—French Canadian with a dose of Florida cracker. The accent was amplified when he grew strident, and he became strident now.

“No. It's because Masaguans are stupid turds, like most people. No smarter than a bunch of sheep, including your genius generals. What I had to teach them was, if you kill a couple thousand enemy, nothing changes. But if you scare
two hundred thousand
of them shitless—make their families afraid to leave the house at night—
that's
when a war starts going your way.”

The mask seemed to bob oddly. Another smile?

“But not you, Reynaldo. I don't scare you. Do I?”

The driver reached to take a drink of his rum, but stopped because he realized his hand would shake if he lifted the glass. He said, “Why should I be scared? In my village, we speak well of you. We hear the rumors”—he shrugged as if unconcerned, but his laughter was strained—“crazy stories. Lies. But we fight for the same cause, so we know you're a good man.”

In reply to Lourdes' dubious gesture—the way he tilted his head—the driver spoke a little too loudly when he added, “It's
true.
We teach our children that you are a great revolutionary. That they have no reason to fear you.”

“No reason to fear me?”

“As God is my witness! That is what we teach children.”

Signaling the waitress for another drink, Praxcedes said softly, “Talking to God like he's your pal. That's brave. They send a hero like you to drive the car.”

Sarcasm? Reynaldo couldn't be sure.

He was glad when Prax changed the subject, saying, “The boy and his mother live in what used to be a nunnery,
Claustro la Concepción.
It's across from the presidential palace, next to the market.”

He was back discussing the kidnapping.

Reynaldo nodded. “I know the market. We sold vegetables at the
Mercado Central
every Sunday. I know the city as well as any man.”

“Um-huh. Brave and a genius, too.”

That inflection again.

“If you know the city, then you know about the tunnel that connects the convent with the park.”

Reynaldo answered, “A tunnel? A tunnel runs beneath the street from the convent?”

Praxcedes blew a stream of smoke into the older man's face. “There's something you don't know? Then keep your mouth closed while I explain.”

The driver sat motionless, silent, as Prax told him that the convent, where the boy lived, had been built in the 1500s. The tunnel had been built in the 1600s, during the Inquisition.

He said, “The nuns dug the tunnel to save dumb Indios, just like you, who were sentenced to death. I was telling you about my fame? History, that's how it started.

“During the Inquisition, Spaniards burned Indians at the stake if they wouldn't turn Catholic. Thousands of them. When the Indios screamed, if they called out to God—like for mercy?—the priests wrote their words on paper. To those assholes, that was a form of
conversion.
It's what they
wanted.

“I've got a laptop computer with a wireless connection,” Lourdes said. “I'm not like the rest of you ignorant hicks. I do research. All the time, I'm learning. The Catholic thing, burning men alive to win a war. When I read it, I thought,
Perfect.
Even though it was years after what the soldiers did to me.”

Lourdes stopped and stared at his driver. “You've probably heard all kinds of stories. About why I look the way I look.”

Reynaldo dipped his head twice, slowly.
Yes.

“Later, when we've got the boy, if you don't screw up, maybe I'll tell you what really happened. The details. Would you like that?”

He watched the driver think about it for several seconds.

“Yes.”

“Then you'll
understand.
The church, the government, they're both the same. Big shots trying to screw you if they can.”

With a whistle of scorn, Prax took a kitchen match, struck it, and leaned close to refire his cigar.

Reynaldo looked long enough to see, floating above the flame, one sleepy gray eye and one lidless blue eye leering out at him from the mask. Prax wore a hooded brown monk's smock that was common in Central America. The hood was back, so Reynaldo could also see the damage that fire had done to the man's scalp. The top of his head appeared to be a human skull over which gray skin had been stretched too tight, torn, then patched with melted wax. There were tufts of blond hair growing out of white bone.

When Prax spoke certain words, he lisped, which suggested that his lips and face were also scarred.

When Reynaldo had first received the assignment to drive
Incendiario,
he'd been excited. He'd hoped, in a perverse way, that he would be among the few to see the great man's face.

After only a few hours, though, Reynaldo regretted his decision to drive the car.

Prax didn't behave like a great man. His Spanish was a Yankee's Spanish, rude and profane. He talked incessantly, always about himself, and he wore his monk's robe and mask like a costume—even his hand gestures were theatrical.

The exaggerated mannerisms reminded him of something; something he'd seen as a child. At a circus, perhaps?

Reynaldo couldn't bring the memory to the front of his brain.

In the light of a flaming match, the driver looked at the eyes inside the mask. He was glad the mask separated them.

 

 

IN
the morning darkness, Praxcedes said to Reynaldo, “The entrance to this thing, this tunnel, it's too small. My shoulders won't fit. I can't believe the stupid bastards didn't warn me about this!”

Straining, beginning to sweat, Prax whispered to himself in English, “Jesus Christ, you'd have to be a freak show contort to squeeze through this bastard.”

“Con-tort” was carnival slang for contortionist. Prax, whose name had once been Jimmie Gauer, remembered lots of slang. As a child, his family had worked carnivals all summer, then wintered in Florida. They had a trailer there in a tiny carney town.

Sweating, now beginning to panic, Lourdes added, “I get down there, what if it caves in? Then what?”

Reynaldo said, “Well, the General will still pay you your money. If we can find you.”

Lourdes thought,
You'll suffer for that, smart-ass.

It was dark in the park at 2:30 A.M., shadows of trees above. Beyond, the lighted windows of the presidential palace created a citreous checkerboard against a loft of mountain peaks and stars.

They'd found the Mayan stele that marked the entrance, then strained together to lift the stone. Now, stuck in the tunnel's mouth,
Incendiario
was balking.

Reynaldo said carefully, “Some people are not comfortable in narrow places. There's a word for it that I can't remember. Shall I crawl through and get the boy while you wait here? There is no shame in being frightened.”

Lourdes snapped, “You're calling me a coward?
Screw
you. You'll regret that mouth of yours one day.”

He took a deep breath as if about to submerge, exhaled, and forced his body through the entrance.

Underground, he had to pull his elbows against his ribs and wiggle to turn. He rushed to find his micro light. The tunnel was walled with brick, and smelled of mold and water. The floor was brick and broken stone that was etched with Mayan hieroglyphics a thousand years old: grotesque faces; birds clutching snakes.

Crawling, Prax stopped several times, panting, so much sweat dripping off his face that he removed the mask. He felt as if his lungs might implode.

Finally, he saw frail bands of light ahead. Then he came to a grate that moved easily in his big hands. Prax rolled out into a hallway, stood, and fitted the mask, feeling his lungs expand to normal.