Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [3]
One of the crewmen laughed harshly, but the captain silenced him with a grunted command: “Bring him aboard.”
By daybreak the Night Owl was gone.
Chapter 1
ALL OF HIS FRIENDS in Coconut Grove had gone to ten-speed bicycles, but Meadows thought that was absurd. He didn’t race, and there wasn’t a hill for three hundred miles. Three gears were enough. As a matter of fact, the sturdy brown Raleigh he was pedaling along Main Highway had only one gear; the other two had rusted to perdition long since.
It was summer, one of those afternoons when the clouds build over the Everglades and march with thunder and drenching rain out to sea.
The temperature stood at eighty-eight; the humidity, even higher. Sweat poured from him as he pedaled a narrow strip of asphalt alongside the road, protected from the traffic by majestic banyan trees, their thick branches casting a dappled shade over roadway and bike path. Lizards darted across the path. He heard the cry of a family of wild parrots that lived in an old royal palm near the bay.
The hotter the better, as far as Chris Meadows was concerned. It was the time of the year when all the tourists went home and left Florida to the Floridians. At least that was how it used to be. Now more and more people were moving in, calling themselves Floridians, and with each one of them there was that much less of Florida.
Meadows glanced over at the long line of traffic moving in the opposite direction past an ivy-covered church. Three cars in five had their windows closed, air conditioners growling. He felt sorry for the drivers. They missed the lizards, the parrots, the tantalizing breeze being sucked off the bay into the building clouds. In another hour they would miss the cloudburst that in a furious few moments would wash the streets, drop the temperature twenty degrees and reward all those wise enough to enjoy it with new sights, sounds, sensations.
Meadows was of two minds about the coming storm. On the one hand, he could pedal home before it and watch from his porch with a shot of Jack Daniel’s as it beat on the bay, or he could take off his shirt and pedal home in the rain. Either would do.
Indeed, it would not have been hard to please T. Christopher Meadows that afternoon. The hospital in New Mexico had been a tremendous tonic. He had done it for the cab fare, liking the idea of science cloaked in white adobe on the sere shank of a mountain. The hospital was for children, and Meadows had suffered it: every block, every window, every angle. He had paced the hillsides around the growing structure, weighing, examining, analyzing. Then one day he had walked no more. The building belonged. Even the sallow consulting architects who made their living designing hospitals had found no flaws.
Usually Meadows made a point of being somewhere else when the time came to inaugurate buildings he had designed. It was curiosity that had led him to break his own rule in New Mexico two days before. He had left room in the vaulted hospital lobby for a cross on the wall facing the wood-framed doorway. Meadows understood that without the crucifix the hospital would never be complete in the eyes of the nuns for whom he had built it. To carve their cross, the nuns had improbably picked a wispy kid, self-taught, thin as a reed and spacy as hell. Meadows wouldn’t have hired him to chop firewood.
Meadows had been wrong. He realized that the instant he had walked into the completed lobby. The boy had carved a breathtaking Christ, bony as himself, stretched in agony on the mahogany cross. The cross had seemed to envelop the lobby and everything in it; the anguished Christ had spoken more of forgiveness than of pain. Meadows had been astonished. And now, back home in Miami, the delight still warmed him.
THE BUSINESS DISTRICT OF Coconut Grove slept in the afternoon sun. Few people walked the streets. Meadows passed a darkened theater, an empty park, an earnestly fashionable line of boutiques of the sort that had made Coconut Grove so chic Meadows was thinking about moving out.
Meadows won an inviting smile