Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [19]
Jimmy could see trouble. Albury wouldn’t look at him; he was smoking furiously.
“I’ll stay with you.”
“You’ll go!”
“Aw, Breeze,” was the last thing Jimmy managed before the big man seized him under the arms and heaved him like a sack of stone crabs over the gunwale. The diesel was hacking and the Miss Alice was back in the channel by the time Jimmy exploded from the surface. He paddled for the mangroves and scrabbled ashore.
Within minutes, Albury was navigating the finger cut, a black ribbon of water that snaked up to the off-loading site on Ramrod Key. A short, rotting pier jutted from a clearing in the mangroves; the creek surrendered seven feet at low tide, enough for most crawfish boats. Beyond the sagging dock was a disused wooden warehouse, two junked cars, and a stack of old, broken lobster traps. At dead slow, Albury let the Miss Alice glide toward the dock. He had sweated off most of the bug spray, so the ravenous Keys mosquitoes were having a feast.
The accident happened five minutes too late to save Albury. Two out-of-town college kids, liquored up and luded out, lost it on the Stock Island Bridge. Their Camaro jumped the median and crashed head-on into a pickup driven by a black electrician on his way home from an emergency repair job at the Pier House.
The first patrol car reached the scene quickly and without sirens, the officer remembering Chief Huge Barnett’s warnings about a possible red herring. He got out of the car and vomited as he inspected the wreck. Then he called for help.
“We’ve got two or three fatalities. Get an ambulance down here and a couple more patrol units,” he pleaded.
“Everybody else is up at Ramrod with the chief,” blurted the dispatcher. “I think they got their radios off.”
“Shit,” gagged the young patrolman, “then call me a state trooper.”
Crystal reacted quickly. With one hand he turned down the volume on his police scanner and with the other he nimbly adjusted his VHF to the frequency he and Breeze Albury had agreed upon. There was only one sorry reason that Barnett would be up on Ramrod.
“Lucky Seven, Lucky Seven! You got weather comin’. Hit it, man.”
Albury was already running. Miss Alice was only a few yards from the old dock when the private alarm bells rang. Everything was wrong. There was nobody waiting, no campers or trucks. There was nothing, just Albury and a slow boat full of grass. It was an ambush.
Albury slammed the Miss Alice into reverse and gave her full throttle. The diesel coughed thick gray smoke and the old engine whimpered. Albury thought the boat must be aground; she didn’t seem to be moving at all. He put the wheel hard over.
Huge Barnett, crouching awkwardly behind one of the abandoned cars, knew what the sound meant.
“Now!” he screamed.
Light flooded the tiny inlet. Armed men sprang from behind the lobster traps. Albury had the fleeting image of a rotund man in a Stetson, pistol waving, waddling like a bloated duck toward the water’s edge. From around a bend in the inky creek two motor-boats appeared like angry bees. They hummed on intersecting courses towards the turning Miss Alice.
Albury nearly made it. He clipped the bow of one police boat and might have successfully intimidated the second, but someone on shore, provoked no doubt by the sound and fury of Huge Barnett, loosed a cool, sharp burst of automatic weapons fire that sent Albury diving for the deck of the wheelhouse and kept him there, hands over his head, until the Miss Alice, undirected, backed blindly and harmlessly into the mangroves.
Chapter 5
ARCHIE WAS a drunk. He mewled, he hawked, he spat. His Adam’s apple fluttered like a trapped moth. When he started singing, Breeze Albury rattled the bars and demanded a new cell.
He had stayed on the salty wheelhouse floor for what had seemed a long time, keeping his head down long after the gunfire had ended. Albury had noticed the thud of a small boat alongside and instantly been bathed in a police spotlight. He’d heard the wheeze of a fat man.
“Breeze Albury, goddamn,” Huge Barnett had