The Bear in a Muddy Tutu (33 page)

“He’s s
ome sort of big time bird freak.
”
Lilly
began giving the rundown
to Bagg over the phone, about an hour later. “Got a pencil?
”

“Yeah, go ahead.
”
Bagg cradled
the
pho
ne with his shoulder and dug
out his reporter’s notebook and pencil. He sat down on the front step of the new building, the four men behind the door waiting on the news in the chill of the air-conditi
oning. “Tell me everything.
”

“Okay, so his name’s Michael Dupont, twenty-
nine
, from Charleston, South Carolina. Made a boatload of money designing video games, then sold his company to Sony for the tidy little sum of fifty-eight million dollars in January of
nineteen ninety-eight
.
”

“Wait, that would have made him twenty?
”

“Um, no, looks
like
he was still a teena
ger when he deposited the check.
”
Bagg could hear
Lilly
’s fingernails
click
ing away at
her keyboard.

“And the birds?
”

“Oh, yeah, there are a whole bunch of Google hits on him for buying up land along the East coast. Mostly wetlands, and all are empty spaces.
”

“For the birds? He’s some sort of conservationist?
”

“He’s given big checks to the Audubon Society, the Save the Migratory Birds Society, Project Puffin, and about three dozen other groups
.
”

“The other groups all invol
ve birds?
”
Bagg pictured
the slaughtered seagulls the boys with the stolen pellet guns had left for
Flint
to secretly bury.

“Hold on.
”
T
here was more clicking. “There
’s
a group called the Out of Africa Project
that
might be something else. And there’s a couple names of what sound like small town zoos. That any help?
”

“Yeah, Lilly
.
”
Bagg
was
a little hopeful, weighing the possibility of whether a sick lion and exotic zonkey would merit much sympathy from a philanthropic bird lover.

“He’s been buying the land t
o set aside as bird sanctuaries.
”

“Fish
Head Island is a bird sanctuary
.
”
It wasn’t a question. The guy bought this muddy stretch of land to set aside for the birds.

“I suppose, but it’s just a speck on the map, and there were
no press releases.
It’s
only
listed in the tax office as a property transfer. I found ten or eleven just like it without looking too hard. Guy must have a couple of realtors keeping an eye on properties, snapping them up when they hit the market.
”

“You have a current home address for him?
”

“Yes, but he’s p
robably not home.
There’s an AP wire story saying
that this Saturday
he’s at a ribbon-cutting for a bird sanctuary he funded in Bermuda. Says the Governor will be accepting a generous endowment for future care on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II, in someplace called Tucker’s Town.
”

“You’re sure it’s this Saturday?
”

“That’s what it says.
”

“How far from the airport?
”

“Ho
ld on.
”
T
here was more rapid-fire, fingernail on keyboard clicking. “Quick cab ride.
”

“One more favor?
”

“You want me to book you a plane ticket?
”

“Two, Lilly, m
ake it two tickets.
”

“You understand the risk involved in traveling to the Bermuda Triangle seated next to a man who is one bolt shy of being struck by lightning thirteen times?
”
Pete Singe asked Bagg. The stewardess was finishing her preflight safety speech, as a video version also
concluded
on the small screen on the back of each headrest.

“I’m not big on flying.
”
Bagg pulled
the nylon seat
belt as tightly as it would go, triple-checking that his tray was as
upright as it could possibly be and
making
sure his cell phone was not going to ring and cause the plane to explode.

“I read that on average a plane like this gets hit by lightning once a year,
”
Singe
added
. After a couple of years living and working so close to a guy with a mortal fear of lifting his head three inches off the grou
nd, Singe apparently
didn’t see any problem needling his friend with a simple case of a
viatophobia
. People with a fear of flying had it easy,
he told Bagg,
what with all the buse
s and trains. Bagg’s
phobia was a little like complaining about your hiccups to someone who’d just fallen into a shark tank.

“And you only get hit about once every f
our years?
”
Bagg twisted the knob for air but accidentally pressed
the button for the stewardess.

“Yeah, give or take. I suppose it means I’m about due.
”
Singe looked around the cabin roof as if deciding where the lightning would come from, as the captain
released the brakes and backed
the plane up.

“I don’t feel so good.
”

“Yeah, last time I was on a plane was the trip ba
ck from the Honduras cave.
”
Singe removed his baseball and tilted
the top of his head to show Bagg the scar. “It’s like lightning has a mind of its own.
”

Bagg was wearing fresh clothes he’d grabbed from his apartment while sneaking in for his passport. Lilly couldn’t find
any active warrants for him,
no
r any
mention of a police officer having been assaulted by a camera-wielding newspaper reporter. Not a thing inside had changed, other than the mold growing on dirty dishes. Cops had not searched his a
partment
and had not violated his
daughter’s room. It was stuffy
and the trash
stunk
. Otherwise, it was as if he’d just walked back in from a shift at the paper.

He’d taken a risk, with the chance some neighbor was holding a business card handed out by a detective, with instructions to call if they saw the dangerous guy from next door coming around. And being tossed in jail would have ended any last ditch attempt at saving the circus. But he
trusted Lilly’s thoroughness
and
absolutely had to have
his
passport.

The plan had sounded slightly more feasible while sitting around an old, beaten
-
up card table with a group of men eager to say how perfect it all sounded. But here, on an Embraer 190, with its unique “double-bubble
”
design and single-class configuration of one hundred seats, the plan seemed utterly impossible. Bagg stuck the airplane brochure back into the pouch by his knees, knowing they were going to crash into the si
de of a mountain and that memorizing
the nearest exit was pointless. To convince a twenty-something multimillionaire that a broken-down collection of sickly animals and even more sickly humans would be appropriate caretakers for Fish Head Island seemed ludicrous in the crisp light of the airplane’s cabin.

“We have almost three thousand dollars left t
o offer him,
”
Billy Wayne
had said
.
There on the card table,
Bagg briefly tried to imagine what three grand would look like stacked next to fifty-eight million.

“I read the chances of a plane crashing after being struck by lightning is less th
an one in a hundred thousand,
”
Singe said, as the engines roared, pushing the vibrating aircraft down the rubber-streaked runway.

“So it’s possible.
”
Bagg gripped the armrests as
the plane rose and banked into the clear morning air, a sliver of moon still visible off to the west. Bagg’s knuckles were still white as the plane began to level. From the brochure, Bagg knew the plane could go over five
hundred miles per hour but hoped there wouldn’t be any need for such a rush.
T
he plane could cruise at over forty
thousand feet
,
but
he
prayed they’d stay closer to the ground.

“Notice how e
mpty the plane is?
”
Singe lifted
himself by the
chair in front
to scan the cabin. The plane was maybe one third full, probably just the people who absolutely had to get home, or flew enough to believe the old saying about how much more dangerous it was to ride in a car.

“So?
”

“It’s probably the weather,
”
Singe said, and despite Bagg’s churning stomach and clogged ears, he detected something weirdly disturbing in his friend’s voice. Was it hope? “The forecast was calling for a pretty bad storm on the islands.
”

Bagg craned his neck to look past Singe and out the small window, convinced the old storyteller was still just messing with him.

But he wasn’t.

Dr. Frank Pillbright’s favorite thing in life was observing the birth of a tropical storm, especia
lly one
that grew up strong, made a name for
itself
, and
was
remembered long after
it had
died
from the cold.
P
il
l
bright could just as easily have become a pediatrician
, if only
his grades
had
been a little better and his fear of blood a little less
severe
.
Because he was a meteorologist c
onsumed by tropical storms, P
i
l
lbright spent
a great deal of his time observing radar maps and satellite images concerning the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara Desert is a big place
—
almost as big as all of the United States
—
way over on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean
from
P
i
l
lbright’s
tiny
home in St. Augustine, Florida
.
His home was also his office, or at least had b
een taken over by office things.
His
living room
was
cluttered by eleven computer monitors, all displaying a highway of sorts, one made of winds that ran from the African continent to North America.
It had been as hot as hell during the first week of September in th
e
northern part
of Africa, and the North Atlantic had gotten toasty warm, as well. The Sahara had begun its annual custom of sending hot swirling winds out over the warm ocean water, one after another, like a very large game of Frisbee.

One wave of spinning hot air
that
came out of the desert was promptly named Five by meteorologists
in charge
of
those
details
, sending the birth
announcement
out i
n a
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration e
-
mail to news organizations around the planet
.
It was
Pillbright
’s job to double
-
check these e
-
mails for accuracy
before they were released
, confirm
ing
the barometric pressure levels, wind speeds, and that sort of thing. It might not seem like
terribly interesting
work to most other people, but
to Pillbright,
it was
like
the thrill of weighing a newborn baby.

The rotation of the Earth and the flow of the ocean helped keep the spinning alive, as the growing disc headed west across the open water, feeding itself with the warm moisture below, nudged by the northeast trade winds.

The storm had no particular interest in finding land,
Pillbright knew,
let alone the people who lived on it. Land, as it happened, made the storm feel weak, drained of its energy. But the storm had no choice but to go where it was pushed by more important winds and currents.

Nine days after
observing
t
he storm’s
birth,
Pillbright
watched it
skirt along the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, then spen
d
an entire lazy day moving nowhere, enjoying the bathwater temperatures north of Puerto Rico.
After
a gentle shove from behind on day eleven, the storm resumed its travels, leaving some of its energy behind in the Dominican Republic, and
then
a little more as it passed directly over the Bahamas.

The storm wanted to grow
, Pillbright sensed,
but kept running into
cluster
s of land surrounded by shallow water
that
couldn’t keep up with its thirst.
To Pillbright’s relief
, a subtropical high over the Gulf of Mexico turned it north, helping
it
avoid the quick death Florida would have caused.

The prevailing westerly winds plotted a new path for the storm, urging it to the northeast and toward yet another speck of land called Bermuda. The waters were cooler up here, and
Pillbright knew
the storm felt sluggish and exhausted. The cold had that effect. The time to die was approaching, and the storm didn’t have the strength to protest its fate.

With all the disappointment of its winds never reaching the magical thirty-nine miles per hour, it did not receive a proper name.
N
o wonder meteorologists called them depressions
, Pillbright thought
. What could be more depressing for a raging storm
—
with all kinds of haughty potential
—
than to be called only by a number?
Tropical Depression Five
, w
ith just a
smidge
better luck
,
might
have been known as Dean, as it snuck up on Bermuda, and any airplanes happening by.

Pillbright opened another e
-
mail from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then turned to adjust his computer monitors back to
ward
a lovely, rotating
newborn
infant
over the Sahara Desert.
Disappointment was short-lived this time of year.