Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [15]
Jimmy tossed a beer to Albury. “That kind of thing makes me nervous,” he said.
Albury stripped off his clothes. “Time for a swim,” he declared, perching himself on the side of the boat. For a delicious instant he hung in the air, then crashed feetfirst into the blue sea. He paddled for about a minute, then floated effortlessly on his back. Albury heard the whoosh as Jimmy hit the water in a clean dive, and for an instant he felt like laughing aloud.
At dusk, they anchored off Looe Key, waiting. A northeasterly breeze carried pesky clouds of no-see-ems towards the boat from the island. Albury and Jimmy basted themselves in Cutter’s insect spray.
At about nine, Crystal checked in over the VHF radio.
“Lucky Seven, this is Smilin’ Jack. Your weather for the evening is clear with light winds out of the northeast. Seas three to four feet, increasing around midnight.”
Albury gave him a ten-four. Midnight was the key. He lifted a hatch and pulled out two plywood boards. The words “Elizabeth Marie Tampa” were freshly painted on each. One went on the bow and the other on the transom; Jimmy slipped into the water to help attach them. Albury was no artist and the bogus name obviously was hand-lettered, but it covered the legend Diamond Cutter and the registration number. If there was a chase, and if a name was all the cops could see at night, it would give Albury an edge. It never hurt to have an edge.
He and Jimmy ate bologna and cheese sandwiches and drank two Pepsis each. Albury had abandoned the beer by nightfall. After the snack, there was nothing to do but smoke quietly and listen for engines and watch the stars announce another stunning tropical night. They had three hours to kill.
“NOBODY ELSE. No Customs, no Coast Guard, no Marine Patrol. Just us. Is that clear? We will do it alone, and we will do it right for once.” One of the young patrolmen masked a snicker with a cough. Huge Barnett marked him for a month of midnights.
“My informant,” he said for emphasis, “my informant says this is quite a haul.” Barnett rocked back and forth on his three-inch cowboy boots, as though testing for spring. “He says there’ll probably be a red herring, something to throw us off at just the wrong time. Captain Whitting will give you your assignments and explain how it’s gonna go down. Pay attention.”
Barnett lumbered to one side of the room, revealing an easel blackboard that his bulk had all but obscured. The blackboard showed a dock, a house, and converging roads. Wavy lines marked the water, crosshatches the mangroves.
Huge Barnett was a legend in his own time. He was a lawman and a tourist attraction, a Falstaffian figure equally adept with his fists and his grin. “Is This Southern ‘Sheriff’ the Model for Those TV Commercials?” People magazine once had asked. No, he was not, and not a sheriff, either, but an ole-boy chief of police who had a small genius for PR. Once, when a hotel computer threw an unaccountable fit that left peak-season tourists sleeping in cars, Huge Barnett had thrown open the doors of the Key West jail to shelter them from a cold snap. Made the network news. Once, in gun belt, Stetson, and all his chiefly finery, he had hurled himself into a shallow canal with hippopotamian zeal to save a child who might or might not have been drowning. For that, the Governor had summoned Barnett to Tallahassee and awarded him a bronze medallion.
Huge Barnett liked to boast that he knew everybody on the Rock and everything worth knowing about each of them. He had been chief so long that no one any longer remembered his real first name. Each year the city council unanimously voted an appropriation to equip their famous chief with a new white Chrysler, with special air conditioning and heavy-duty shocks to accommodate his 315 pounds.
Barnett rocked benignly, hands behind his back, jaw thrust forward purposefully, as a tall, balding captain with a dentist’s stoop advanced to the blackboard with a pointer. Shorty Whitting was everything Huge Barnett