Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [87]
“Get back in your fucking cars!” Barnett yelled. The tourists retreated, eyeing the police chief as if he were rabid.
“You on your way to Homestead?”
“No, damnit. I was just going up to Marathon for a drink. Ask the lady.” Barnett waved his Stetson at the car.
Haller peered. “What lady is that, chief?”
The Chrysler was empty. Barnett surveyed his squad car with a simple, disbelieving expression.
“She was here,” he offered faintly.
With a screech, the turntable bridge finally began to close again. Across the chasm, near the bridge tender’s house, southbound cars had begun to honk. Huge Barnett had nowhere to run.
“Chief, would you please turn around?”
“Fuck you.”
Haller went to his Blazer and withdrew a small short-barreled shotgun. He walked back to Barnett, pulled the hammer, and held the gun to the chief’s cascading midsection.
“Spread your cheeks, bubba.”
Barnett felt dizzy. He turned and fastened his chalky hands to one of the railroad ties. It was scalding to the touch, but he did not flinch. He felt Haller’s hands patting him down in the coarse, perfunctory way of veteran cops. Barnett’s ears filled with the pounding of his own bloody rage. Somewhere in the stalled traffic, the children on the church bus from Macon sang “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” in rounds.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Mark Haller recited.
Barnett leaned with all his might on the guardrail, grinding his teeth. Before him, stretched out in alternating aqua and indigo hues, was the Atlantic. It was serene and empty to the horizon, except for the crawfish boat, which had slowed in the channel not far from the Seven Mile Bridge.
“If you can’t afford a lawyer,” Haller was saying, “one will be appointed for you. However”—then the handcuffs, sharp on the wristbones—“I suspect you can afford a lawyer, chief.”
Barnett was hearing, but not listening. Something about the lobster boat had seized his attention. He blinked several times to make sure he was not imagining it: the vision of a woman, buxom and statuesque, her dark hair slick, her blouse damp and clinging. She stood on the deck of the boat, dabbing at her face with a towel.
As the boat’s big diesel came to life and the bow swung around to meet the Atlantic, Huge Barnett swallowed the dry ashes of his fury. The dying sun caught the boat perfectly in its coral light, and the name seemed to glow from the stern.
“Let’s go, chief, we’re blocking the bridge,” Mark Haller said, steering him by the elbows. “Time to go back to the Rock.”
Chapter 23
IT WAS a good hotel overlooking the ocean on Miami Beach, not tasteful perhaps, but less plastic than most. The dark businessman in the corner suite on the eighth floor was a prime tipper, so the waiter was careful to include a newspaper each morning with breakfast.
That day a headline midway down the front page caught the businessman’s eyes:
KEYS “SWIM-IN” COP
JAILED AS POT SMUGGLER
It took the businessman only one phone call then to arrange the rest of his life.
“I’d like a first-class seat on this afternoon’s flight to Paris.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“One-way, please.”
“And are you an American citizen?”
“My passport is Canadian.”
Before he left the hotel, Manolo used a razor blade to meticulously clip the newspaper article. He would carry it in his wallet as vaccination against ever going back.
“WHAT A BEAUTIFUL morning!” Bobby Freed signaled for another piece of Key Lime pie and smiled at Laurie, who sat before the remains of a gargantuan brunch. “We did it,” she said.
“The reign of King Barnett is over. He’s finished; humiliated, even if he doesn’t go to jail. The rest of them will be easier. Will you help me get them, Laurie?”
“Yes, Bob, I will.”
All night she had been manic, laughing at the memory of Barnett’s jostling rolls of fat as he tried to zipper his pants before hundreds of gawking motorists. Then, unaccountably, she had wept. For Albury, Freed knew.
“Let’s take a walk,” he urged. “I like this town again.”
They