Carl Hiassen - Basket Case

Delicately I slip the Lady Colt into my waistband, the challenge being not to shoot myself. I move forward to sit beside Emma, who is wobbly and shuddering. I wrap one arm around her and with the other I point the Q-beam at twelve o'clock, so that Juan is able to see where we're heading. In his fist the GPS screen glows a cozy green, and the unanimous hope is that it will guide us back to Ernie Bo Tump's marina.

For all the neurotic ruminating I do about death, I never before felt the ice-cold breath of the beast. In all my life I cannot recall a singular moment I thought would be my last. Even when no-neck Jerry was whaling on me in the apartment, I was more angry than scared, which doesn't say much for my survival instinct. Tonight a large-caliber handgun was pointed at my nostrils, and my response was cinematic defiance. Whether that was brave or merely idiotic, it plainly reveals a new, more flexible attitude toward the concept of dying. Emma has no frame of reference, but Anne might call it a breakthrough.

In any case, I'm not off the hook. None of us are.

"Jack, look! Look!" Juan points ahead. Emma stiffens in my embrace. Streaking off our port side is another white light—the air-boat, angling on a course to intercept us. Instantly I kill the Q-beam and start fumbling for the gun. I tell Juan not to slow down, no matter what.

Jerry the goon is wilier than I thought. He circled far around us to get downwind, so that we couldn't hear him coming until it was too late to hide. And he's not going to leave us full of bullet holes, which would arouse suspicion. Instead he intends to run us down, making it appear as if we accidentally wrecked the johnboat. Jerry figures that even if the cops wonder about the mess, nobody will put it all together.

The lake was dark, they must've hit something ...

Their spotlight slashes back and forth as Cleo's boys feverishly try to find us again. We're all crouched low, Juan panting and Emma's fingers digging into my leg. We're holding to a steady speed, a daring strategy in inky darkness. If we strike another log, the chase is over.

"Shit," I hear Juan say. "Jack! They're ... "

His warning is smothered by the rising roar. I twist around to see the airboat skimming up our wake, not more than fifty yards behind us. Loreal is braced in the bow, manning the spotlight. The beam is fixed on the back of Juan's head, radiating an unwanted halo. In the glare I can't see Jerry on the driver's perch, but he most certainly can see us.

The gap shrinks with a sickening inevitability—powered by a cropduster-sized aviation engine, the airboat is nearly twice as fast as our dinky outboard. It's also twice as wide and probably three times as heavy. At fifty miles an hour it will flatten us like a lily pad. Either we'll die on impact or go down screaming.

In any event, we will be long past caring by the time the gators get around to us.

Juan thumps my arm and gestures disgustedly at our motor. The prop is picking up weeds and we're slowing steadily. Jerry has taken dead aim at our flimsy transom.

"Grab Emma," Juan tells me, "and jump."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"Jack, please!" Emma says. It's the same tone she uses in the newsroom when I'm being impossible.

"Everybody get down!" I hear myself yelling, though I'm standing as straight as a fence post. Carla's gun is gripped with both hands and my arms are extended, the way the cops showed me that day at the firing range. I'm squinting because Loreal is blasting the spotlight in my face. The airboat bears down with a rising backbeat of heavy pistons, like an oncoming locomotive. At roughly one hundred feet I start pulling the trigger, the pistol jumping in my hands. The odds of me actually hitting these pricks with a .38 slug are slender indeed, but Loreal appears to have taken due notice of the muzzle flashes. A yelp of alarm goes up from both men in the airboat, and the spotlight beam wavers madly. A heated downshifting can be heard, then a sibilant rush of air.

Unfortunately, we're no longer moving. The outboard has quit. As I throw myself upon Emma, Juan jumps off the stern.

The next sound isn't the expected crunch of impact but rather a long turbulent splash, followed by the thumping, fading grind of the aircraft engine. A gargled cry arises before silence reclaims the darkness.

In a whisper I ask Emma if she's all right.

"Yes, but I'm very thirsty, Jack. Thirsty and tired." Her voice is somnolent and hollow, from another galaxy. They must have drugged her with a goddamn horse tranquilizer. Hastily I make a bedding of the yellow tarp and lay her down on the deck. Meanwhile Juan has jetted out of the water like an otter. Wordlessly he cleans the duckweed off the outboard's lower unit while I re-attach the Q-beam cables to the battery.

The crashed airboat is easy to find. Bow skyward, it rests in a dense bank of cattails. The gunshots evidently spooked Jerry into cutting the rudders sharply, a maneuver for which flat-bottomed watercraft traveling at high speeds are not favorably designed. Also working against him was the lack of one eye, which undoubtedly affected his depth perception as he struggled to control the boat. It spun violently before tipping backward at a radical cant, its stern embedding in the mud.

I'm guessing Jerry got bucked off when the airboat began to whirl. He was probably sitting on his ass in the cattails, gaping in dull wonderment as the boat upended and wallowed back on him, the blade still very much a blur. His head should be landing in Pahokee any time now.

Loreal went next, though not as instantly. His fall appears to have been stopped by the frame of the driver's seat, but his silken ponytail slipped unluckily through the mesh of the engine cage. The propeller must have snagged it and continued to rotate, dragging his face in a brutally concentric pattern across the metal grid, until the scalp ripped loose. It now hangs like a soggy red pennant from one tip of the blade.

What this looks like is a dreadful accident. Two joyriders in a stolen airboat.

The lake was dark, they must've hit something ...

Emma is breathing softly—in the sudden quiet she has fallen asleep. I hear Juan slap at a mosquito. I hang over the gunwale and vomit as discreetly as possible.

"It's getting late," Juan says.

"Maybe I hit 'em with a shot."

"Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera."

"That bad, huh."

"Yeah, but it sure did the trick."

Not far from Jerry's body, my spotlight snares the flash of an object submerged on the muddy lake bottom: a black plastic box, slightly larger than an eight-track cassette.

Jimmy Storm's widow will be mighty disappointed.

Emma and I lounge in bed until nearly noon. Juan calls to check on us.

"That was a bad scene out there." He sounds tired though unshaken. "Those guys got what they deserved, Jack."

"The case could be made. But what a godawful mess."

"So, from now on you'll be sleeping with the lights on. Welcome to the club," he says. "How is Emma? That's the most important thing."

"Emma is strong."

In fact, she has insisted on preparing a lumberjack's breakfast—an omelette, flapjacks, sausages, grapefruit and toast. I hang up the phone in time to dart out of her path as she twirls through the kitchen wearing nothing but my Jaguars jersey and mint-green toenail polish.

Bravely she relates the details of her abduction. Jerry and Loreal were staking out my place the night I returned from Los Angeles, then tailed Emma home from the pancake house the next morning. She thinks they got in through the front door, which she'd left unlocked after letting in the cat. The men waited as she dressed for work, then tossed the burlap hood over her head as she came out of the bedroom. She was dosed with sleeping pills, bundled in the trunk of a car and driven to an unknown location—based on a whiff of bathroom cleanser, Emma believes it was a cheap motel. There she was kept for thirty hours until they doped her again, took her to the lake and placed her aboard the airboat. She never saw the faces of her captors, and never once heard them mention Cleo Rio by name.