Tampa Burn (47 page)

I touched my ear to the aluminum shell.

Modular trailers aren't built to be secure, and it didn't take me long to find a window that I could jimmy. I was just pulling myself up into the window when my cellular phone began its silent, vibrating alert.

I stopped, took it out of my pocket, checked the caller I.D., and saw that it was Harris.

I wasn't wearing the headset, so I held it to my ear and answered with a whispered, “Talk,” hoping he'd understand that I could not talk.

He did. With no more prompting, he said, “We've driven back and forth over the Skyway Bridge about nine times. I think he was waiting for a break in traffic. Finally, he had us throw both cases off the bridge. It was from one of the lower sections, maybe sixty feet down to the water, but I never got a clear look at who was down there. But we did make delivery. When your pal Kong asked about
your
package, the guy on the other end said that we'd make the exchange in a week or so, and that he'd be in touch.”

I doubted that Lourdes ever expected to release my son, but I didn't respond.

After a few long moments of silence, Harris said, “If you're in trouble, hit any key three times. The cavalry will be on its way.”

I whispered, “I'm fine,” then cleared the phone.

 

 

I pulled myself through the window into a small room that had an elevated stage, and various show props stacked in the corners. I took out the tiny tactical aluminum penlight I'd brought, but didn't use it because there was enough peripheral light to see. The wall behind me was covered with a mural depicting a white dog wearing a professorial mortarboard and holding a microphone.

Hello, Dezi.

The trailer had a barnyard smell. Not dirty, but of livestock, straw, grain, and paint. Judging from the smell, the freak bear, apparently, was a real live animal. That meant there would be a cage.

Where better to keep an active, kidnapped boy locked away than a bear cage?

I moved across the room, toward the hall into which dim light filtered. Just as I was about to enter the hallway, my cellular phone began to vibrate once again. I stepped back into the shadows, took it from my pocket, expecting to see Harris's number. I saw, instead, that the caller's I.D. was blocked.

Only one person had done that before.

I fought the urge to put the phone to my ear just on the chance that I might hear her voice. Instead, I waited until the thing quit buzzing. Then I deactivated it and slipped it back into my pocket.

There was better light in the hall, which ran the length along the front of the trailer. There was another exhibitor's room to my left, plus a small vendor's kitchen with a two-burner gas stove and a soft drink station.

A greasy pan was on the stove. Someone had been cooking there recently.

I found where they'd kept my son, Lake, imprisoned just a little farther down the hall. It was a box that was walled and roofed with steel bars. The cage was about half the size of a small bedroom. Like the performing dog's theater, a mural of the bear was painted in bright colors on the wall behind the cage. The animal had a weird-looking Cyclops eye in the middle of its forehead. But there was no bear in the cage, and there was no boy.

There was, however, lots of young boy residue. Several things I saw were characteristic of what I knew and loved about my son.

In the far back corner was a cot, neatly made. The top sheet was pulled and tucked so tightly that you could have bounced a quarter on it.

It was the way I made my own bed each and every morning of my life.

There was a simple table and chair in the opposite corner, with a reading light plugged into an extension cord. On the table was a tin plate, a cup, fork and spoon, all overturned and neatly laid out atop a towel. There was also a magnifying glass, a blunt scissors, and a blank sketchpad. The table was dominated, though, by stacks of books.

I hadn't used my little flashlight, but I did now, turning my head sideways to read the book spines.

Most of the books were nonfiction: books about fish, fishing, biology, and the other natural sciences. There were a couple of the small Audubon guides that I had in my own library. I noted that there were also several standard physician's reference books, as well as one called
Studies in Abnormal Psychology.

I wondered if Lake was reading that in an attempt to understand Lourdes. Or his mother?

It was a sad and touching question to consider.

They don't love anyone,
Tomlinson had said.
They're not capable of the emotion.

Could that possibly be true of Pilar when it came to her own son?

If accurate, it made Lake an emotional orphan of a sort—a description that I'd never applied to my own circumstances in life—and that possibility made me all the more desperate to find him.

I tested the cage door. It swung open.

I stepped inside, hoping that Lake had anticipated me coming and that he had left me one more clue; some kind of parting directive. As I did, though, I froze when a quivering voice, off to my right, said, “The boy, he gone, you know. They both gone. And they ain't comin' back no more.”

Then the wagon's dim overhead fluorescent lights flickered on.

 

 

STARTLED,
I jumped, turned, and found myself looking down into the face of a very old and thin, dwarf-sized black man. He was the color of a winter leaf, and so tiny that he looked as if a gust of wind might lift him skyward and float him away.

I suspected he'd bought the blue denim coveralls he wore in the children's section of some department store.

The man didn't have the oversized head and hands I associate with dwarfism, though. He appeared regularly proportioned in every way, and normal but for his eyes. Judging from the way he stood, with his head tilted back, and because of the blue film that covered his eyes, I suspected that the man was blind.

Even so, I immediately stepped to the cell's door so he couldn't slam the thing and lock me in. As I did, he said in what sounded to be a Cajun accent, “Are you him? You the one the boy call ‘Doc'? Yeah, you must be. So I know it true, now. The boy said you'd come. I learn to never doubt that boy, Laken. He a good one, he is, jus' a good li'l boo-boy. When Laken leave, I pass a big ol' hug on him, I did. I'm gonna miss me that T-boy.”

I said quickly, “That's my son. Is he O.K.? If anyone's hurt him for any reason—”

“Your boy fine,” he interrupted. “He jus' fine. I took care of him myself. Made him eat good every day.”

As the man spoke, I noticed that he backed away slightly just before I pushed the cage door open. So maybe he wasn't totally blind. Or maybe he just had the heightened sensory abilities that some say compensate for the loss of vision.

I said to him, “Where is he now? My son. Where did Lourdes take him?”

The old man's expression showed puzzlement. “Who that name you using? Lourdes?”

“Lourdes, the man who kidnapped Laken. Where are they?”

“Oh . . . that be Jimmy Gauer you talkin' about.
Mean
Jimmy Gauer. Jimmy, he used to live here when he jus' a squirt. We all thought the Gauers, that whole family, that they long dead till Mean Jimmy come back here two, three years ago, and buy him a little place.”

I said, “The guy I'm talking about is a big man. Broad, with burn scars on his hands and face. Is that who you're calling Jimmy Gauer?”

“Oh yeah, he got scars,” the old man said. “Mean Jimmy, that's what we called him as a boy. He got him lots of scars. More than jus' on his face, too. But me, I ain't never seen 'im. Not the way you and him sees things, anyway. Why you think he let me watch your boy, and not kill me before he go off? I be a blind man, you know.”

There was a curious lilt of a smile in his voice, and on his face, when he said that. I wondered why.

I said, “That's the guy I know as Lourdes. If you
did
know where they've gone, would you tell me?”

“Yes indeedy, I would, sir! I'll help you any way I can. Ol' Baxter Glapion—which be me—I got no good things to say about Mean Jimmy. And I sure do like that li'l boo-boy of yours, Laken. So come in, come on in”—he was waving his arm as if to drag me behind, already walking down the hall—“maybe Jimmy, he forgot something back behind that'll tell you where they is. Believe me, that man didn't tell me
nothin'.
”

I began to follow, then stopped. “Give me a second to look through my son's things first, O.K.?”

The old man waited patiently while I stripped the bed, looked through every book. I even got down on my hands and knees and looked under the table. Maybe something was written there.

Nothing.

As I was finishing, the old man said, “Laken, he left a book for me to give you. He knowed you was comin'. Called you ‘Doc.' Didn't say you was his daddy. That one smart boy you got there, mister.”

I stood quickly. “Show me the book.”

Baxter Glapion moved with the gliding, sure-footed gait of a tightrope walker, or someone who navigates a room by memory. I followed him down the hall, past the main entrance, into a private living quarters. It was where the old man lived, apparently.

As we walked, I listened to him tell me that the wagon we were in had belonged to Lourdes' uncle, who'd died the previous year. Lourdes had inherited it. Lourdes' family, the Gauers, were old carney folk, he said, sideshow performers mostly, and Baxter had been an old friend of the family.

Lourdes had told the old man that he was keeping Lake locked up for his own safety, and as a favor to the boy's mother. There was a war going on down in Central America, he'd said, and Lake was a prime candidate for abduction. Trouble was, the boy refused to stay away from his mother. Kept finding a way to sneak across the border home each time she sent him away.

Partial truths always make the most convincing lies. But Baxter said he didn't believe the man anyway. Only pretended to.

We stopped inside the main living area. I turned on a light when he said he didn't mind. There was a couch that folded out into a bed. There was a worn chair, a table with stacks of books on tape, and books in Braille. A reader. There was a television, too, and the walls were covered with framed carnival posters. He motioned vaguely toward one of the posters and said that it was Prax Lourdes' mother.

I stepped to the wall and looked at a red, blue, and yellow print painting of a huge, muscle-bound woman with improbably large breasts. She had curly blond hair and wore a wrestling singlet. The poster read:

Remembering that Lourdes had used the strange word as his internet password, I asked Baxter, “What does it mean? ‘Bozark'?”

“It an ol'-time carney bit.
Bozark,
that what we used to call a woman wrestler could beat a man. Edith Gauer, she could do that, too. She could beat most any man.

“Men she beat most often, though, was her husband, Benny, and her boy Jimmy. Benny, he were like me, a li'l peeshwank runt of a man. Had him a balancin' act. He used li'l Jimmy in the act until Jimmy fall and hit his head so bad. After that is when li'l Jimmy turn into
Mean
Jimmy.”

“Because he fell. You're saying he wasn't always mean?”

The old man was shaking his head. “Nicest little boy you could meet even with his ma beatin' him. Until the wire they was on snapped, and he knocked his brain in so bad, the boy nearly passed over. After that was when he become
Mean
Jimmy.”

That was a startling thing to hear.

Baxter had a drawer open, taking something from it, and now he handed me a book. “Your boy tell me to give you that.”

It was the
Audubon Guide to Florida,
the same book I had at the lab.

“Is there anything else? Any message?”

“Oh Lord, you don't know how mean Jimmy can be if you think the boy dumb enough to risk slippin' a message to anyone; something dangerous as that. When Jimmy's head got all healed up, that when he start likin' to burn things. Cats and such. A chimp once, I'm pretty sure. He
crazy
mean. No, your boy woulda been riskin' ol' Baxter's life if he'd slipped me a message.”

I leafed through the
Audubon Guide
more slowly than the other books, thinking that Lake may have, once again, used the animals noted in his e-mail as markers. It's what I would have done.

That's just what he did.

On page 307, under reddish egret, barely visible in pencil and written in miniature block letters, I read, “Lv Fl by ship, date X?”

It took me only a moment to understand that my son was telling me that he believed that he and Lourdes, or just Lourdes, would be leaving Florida by ship, departure date unknown.

As I looked up “bullfrog”—found nothing—then looked for “parrots”—not indigenous, so not listed—Baxter said with the same little prideful smile he'd had before, “When you look at the posters on the walls, anybody up there seem familiar?”

I was in a hurry, but I paused long enough to take a quick glance around the room. Something that immediately caught my attention, because they seemed odd and out of place, were a dozen or so photos that were tacked next to a mirror on the far wall. The photos were close-ups of men's faces—noses, cheeks, whole foreheads. They appeared to be from a medical journal, or a medical reference book. I realized that the photos were of male patients before and after they'd had various forms of plastic surgery.