Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [47]
“At least make him answer for the Ramrod Key fiasco. There were tons there, all right. And then what do we get? Headlines one day, and the next day everybody goes home and it’s all forgotten. Isn’t that real bad trouble, Barnett?”
Barnett reined his temper.
“You’re out of order, Bobby,” the mayor shouted. He pounded his gavel with one hand and with the other wrenched Freed back into his chair.
“With your permission, mayor, I would like to talk about the Ramrod Key incident,” Barnett said. “I didn’t put it in the report because I did not consider it one of our successes. But it’s important, and it’s the sick kind of thing that is happening all over the country today. It’s the kind of thing that happens when the police are handcuffed and criminals coddled.”
Barnett spoke slowly: Margie, the middle-aged divorcée who covered council meetings for the local paper, God bless her patient soul, took lousy notes.
“Now, I had that scu … criminal dead to rights. I had ’em with probably the biggest load of dope anybody has ever tried to smuggle into the Keys. So it was a few miles outside the city limits, so what? Does that make it right? I knew that dope was comin’, and I knew it was intended to be sold on the streets of this city to our children, yours and mine. So I went out and got it. And I didn’t tell the feds and I didn’t tell the state; I didn’t tell anybody. It’s not anybody else’s kids, it’s ours. I did it and I’m glad. No loophole justice is going to stop me from doing my job of protecting this city, no sir.”
Loophole justice. It had taken Barnett hours to think it up. He bestowed an avuncular smile on openmouthed Bobby Freed.
Barnett hitched his belt and adjusted his cowboy hat in that special way so it would not mess up his hair.
Bobby Freed’s voice cut like a knife.
“That is the most hypocritical bullshit I have ever heard in all my life.”
Barnett boiled to his feet. His overworked chair collapsed behind him. He snarled.
“Now look, princess …”
“Order, order,” the mayor yelled and watched in perplexity as the head of the gavel parted from its stem and shot across the room to bounce harmlessly off Huge Barnett’s belly.
Freed was like a virus that would not die.
“And what about the campaign of violence against businessmen in this city? Whose kids are behind that? And why does our police department stand by and watch it? Tell me about that, Fatso!”
“Faggot! Freak!” Barnett bulldozed across the floor toward the defiant Freed.
It was the precise and normally timid clerk of the council who averted bloodshed. He could not abide disorder and there he sat, the council in uproar, his minutes in shreds.
“Motion on the floor!” the clerk hollered with all his might. “There is a motion on the floor. The council must vote on the motion before proceeding to the next order of business.”
Somehow that was enough to restore sanity. Freed was led back to his seat. The council voted 4-1 to accept their chief’s report.
Outside, Barnett savagely slammed the custom Chrysler into gear. He ignited the flashing blue lights and switched on the siren. He was late for an important appointment.
In the trunk of the police car lay a neat, brown-wrapped parcel. Drake Boone had dropped it off at headquarters. Inside the parcel was fifteen thousand dollars.
Barnett reckoned it would take only about a third of that to convince the accommodating bureaucrat he was meeting to arrange the quick, quiet transfer of a hospital patient named Julie Clayton to a public hospital upstate.
Bobby Freed walked home alone down Simonton Street in deeper depression than he had ever known.
Chapter 12
THE SOUND of a lone mosquito buzz-bombing a bloodied ear rattled Breeze Albury from a four-hour sleep. He rolled off his bunk and clutched his head with both hands to suppress the vertigo. His arm stung and his stomach roiled. His skull burned where Oscar had clubbed him with the pistol.
Albury dragged himself to the deck where Jimmy and Augie lay like gaping, snoring corpses. He let them