Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [71]
When his head cleared, Albury pulled in Teal’s boat and tied it off close to the stern. From it he took two jerrycans of gasoline. Bascaro lay moaning on the deck.
Albury went into the cabin and came back with a life jacket. It was covered in mildew. He threw it at Bascaro’s feet.
“Put it on or not, it’s up to you.”
Methodically, Albury drenched the engine compartment and the wheelhouse with gasoline. Bascaro watched from the deck with dead man’s eyes.
Albury stepped over the rail into the skiff.
“Adios, Willie.”
“No, no, par favor. No quiero morir. Por favor.”
The Cuban scrambled to his feet and staggered toward the skiff, beseeching. A trickle of urine ran down his pant legs and onto the deck.
Albury watched him coldly for a full minute.
“No, I’m not going to kill you, Willie. Not yet. Come aboard.” He gestured to the bow of the skiff. Willie Bascaro stumbled into the skiff. He fell heavily onto his broken arm and screamed. Then he cowered quietly in the bow, like a beaten dog.
From twenty-five yards away, Albury fired El Gallo with a shell from Teal’s flare pistol. It burned like a wrecker’s beacon on the dark sea. Then he turned the skiff toward shore.
“Policia, Willie, mucha policia,” said Albury. He put a hand around his neck and squeezed. A noose.
Six miles off the coast, the skiff came abreast of a drumstick-shaped island. Albury reduced speed as the water shoaled to less than two fathoms. Albury saw that his prisoner had noticed the shallow water and was gauging the distance to shore. Albury left the wheel and bent in the stern, fiddling with the outboard engine.
Willie Bascaro went overboard in a clumsy dive. He found his feet and began slogging toward the beach.
Albury laughed out loud. Willie had snapped at the bait the way a crawfish tears at horse meat.
“One more monkey,” Albury grinned.
The island was called Loggerhead Key. The University of Miami ran it as a research center for the study of the rhesus monkey. There were at least a thousand of the noxious, quarrelsome beasts on the mangrove island. And nothing else. They had taken over.
Every third day, Albury knew, a boat would come. Young researchers would quickly shovel a mountain of dog food onto the beach and hastily retreat. The monkeys would gulp the food and remain with nothing to do but fight and fornicate until the next boat came. Willie Bascaro would be a diversion.
With a phone call from Christine’s apartment, Albury had learned that the next food boat would not come for two days. That was time enough. For two days Willie Bascaro could grovel in the sand for leftover dog chow and battle one-handed with the monkeys for his clothes.
Unsuspecting, Willie was in knee-deep water now near the beach. He looked back, as though disbelieving his good luck.
“Adios, Willie,” Albury called. In the instant before he opened the throttle, Albury heard the monkeys shrieking their hatred for the intruder.
Chapter 20
LAURIE RAVENEL urged the old Pontiac down Whitehead Street, one eye on the temperature gauge. Breeze had often warned her about the radiator, which leaked itself dry every couple of days.
She parked across from a laundromat and brushed her auburn hair in the rearview mirror. The Cowrie was only two blocks away, and Laurie was early, an hour at least. But she knew that Bobby was already there, setting up for lunch. She checked her lipstick.
Suddenly the passenger door swung open and a bundled-up man slid into the car. Laurie instinctively grabbed for her purse. Then she saw who it was.
“Breeze! God, oh my.” They hugged each other in silence, awkwardly bunched on the front seat. Laurie kissed him wetly, lightly, on the lips and held him back by the shoulders. “I love the hat.”
Albury sheepishly snatched the blue knit cap off his head. “Borrowed it from a shrimper at the West Key Bar.”
“And the jacket? Looks like it might have fit you back in junior high school.”
The navy slicker belonged to Christine’s ex, though Albury didn’t say so. “I’m not much