Basket Case (41 page)

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.

29

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.

So, as anticipated, it will be impossible to pin the kidnapping on Jimmy's widow. After what happened last night, the crime is destined to remain unreported anyway. Mrs. Stomarti will get away with everything, except her dead husband's song.

I can live with that. We got Emma back.

While the omelette is frying, she ambushes me with a boisterous hug. "You are hereby forbidden from touching a loaded firearm ever again," she teases.

"I told you how much I hated those damn things."

"From what I remember, you were very gallant last night."

"Lucky I didn't shoot off my own fingers."

"You still saved our lives. Think about it, Jack."

I haven't told Emma what happened to Jerry and Loreal. She was in dreamland when Juan and I went to find them.

"The men who kidnapped you died in the airboat crash."

After a troubled pause, Emma asks: "You're sure?"

"You've heard of blunt trauma? This was the opposite."

"Should we call the police?"

"And tell them what—the dead guys tried to kill us to cover up the theft of a pop song? The cops would roll us both in bubble wrap and ship us to the psycho wing at Charity."

Breakfast turns into a quiet affair. Emma isn't angry; she's engrossed. It's no small weight to bear, the experience of a soul-rattling event that may never be acknowledged.

Yet that's how it must be. There was no abduction. No meeting on the lake. No lethal chase.

Emma says, "But what if somebody figures out—"

"Never. It was an accident. The weather was lousy, the sky was dark."

"I understand, Jack."

The Union-Register sits in a lawn wrapper on the counter; I haven't got the appetite to peek at the front page. Emma opens it and spies the headline. "What! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was waiting until the drugs wore off."

Excitedly she slips on her reading glasses and spreads the paper over the table, across the breakfast platters. "That figures—Old Man Polk finally dies and I'm not there to edit the story."

"Read it aloud," I say.

She gives me a peckish look. "Well, aren't you something."

"Please?"

So she reads to me:

The man who shaped and guided the Union-Register for nearly four decades passed away Friday after a long illness. Mac Arthur Polk was 88.

A community icon and fervid philanthropist, Polk died at his Silver Beach home with his wife Ellen at his side. Friends said the couple was playing Chinese checkers when he collapsed.

Though he had been in failing health for some time, Polk remained engaged and outspoken, never losing his passion for the newspaper he inherited from his father.

In an interview last week at Charity Hospital, he said, "There's no greater privilege than publishing a daily newspaper, and no greater responsibility than delivering the truth, even when it ain't so pretty."

Emma glances up. "He really say that?"

"Word for word. Did young Maggad's quote make it on the front?"

"If it didn't, somebody's out of a job." Emma continues:

Headstrong and visionary, Polk transformed the Union-Register from a folksy, small-town journal to a dynamic, award-winning newspaper with an increasingly urban circulation of 82,500 weekdays and nearly 91,000 on Sundays.

"We turned it into a first-class outfit," he said. "The conscience of the community."

The only son of the Union-Register's founder, Ford Polk, the kid known as Mac started in the newsroom fresh out of college as a telephone clerk, working his way up the ladder to managing editor.

When his father retired unexpectedly in 1959 to open a dwarf mink farm, Polk took over as publisher. His firm-handed stewardship of the paper continued until 1997, when he sold it to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for a reported $47 million.

"MacArthur Polk was like a second father to me," said Race Maggad III, the chairman and chief executive officer of Maggad-Feist. "He was a teacher, a friend and an inspiration."

This is too much for Emma, who blurts: "What a hypocritical little prick!"

The old man would be hopping mad, that's for sure.

"Otherwise I think he'd have liked the story," she says. "You did a nice job, Jack, considering all the distractions."

"What are you talking about?" The piece isn't badly done, but plainly it is not my style. "Fervid philanthropist"? Give me a break.

"What I mean," says Emma, "is that it must've been hard to sit down and write this yesterday, waiting for Cleo's goons to call."

"But I didn't write it, Emma. Look at the byline."

"I am looking at the byline."

Lunging forward, I grab the story out of her hands.

Outrageous. That craven sonofabitch Abkazion crumpled like the bumper on a Tijuana taxi. He stuck my name on top of Old Man Polk's obituary!

"Evan wrote this," I protest, waving the newspaper at Emma, "while Juan and I were driving to the lake."

"I don't get it."

"Simple. Maggad ordered me assigned to the obit. Abkazion was scared to piss him off so he put my name on it, thus screwing a decent hardworking kid out of a byline."

"Pretty shitty," Emma concedes.

I turn to the jump page and skim the remainder of the obituary. There, below the last paragraph, is an italicized credit line: Staff intern Evan Richards contributed to this story.

I feel rotten and helpless. So does Emma. "You want me to read the rest of it?" she asks halfheartedly.

"Not aloud. No."

Another illustrious milestone in the career of Jack Tagger Jr. Finally I get back on the front page, and I didn't even write the damn story.

Soon I'll be getting that phone call from Charles Chickle offering the cushy trustee gig, yet even the prospect of being paid to torment Race Maggad III fails to cheer me. What happened to Evan sucks; I hate seeing any reporter get shafted.

Emma tries to help by reminding me that the kid cobbled the old man's obit from my notes, clips and interviews. "It was mostly a rewrite job," she says. "The bulk of the work was yours."

"Nice try." I reach for the phone. "Has our Evan got a listed number?"

He answers on the third ring, which is encouraging. I've known interns who would have already hung themselves in despair.

"Hi, Jack," he says quietly.

I launch a virulently indignant diatribe against shifty spineless editors, which Evan spoils by informing me that he is not the aggrieved party. He didn't write the MacArthur Polk obituary, either.

"I choked, man," he confesses. "Abkazion bailed me out. He grabbed all your notes, sat down at the city desk and banged the whole story out with, like, twenty minutes to deadline."

"I see."

Evan can't stop apologizing, and he's wearing on my nerves like a whining Chihuahua. "Once you told me the obit was for the front page," he says, "my brain locked up big-time. I'm really sorry, Jack."

"Don't be. It was wrong for me to dump it on you like that."

"What do you think Emma's gonna do?"

"To you? Nothing," I say. "I'm the one who's in trouble."

"Really?" the kid says anxiously.

"Oh, she's an animal sometimes. It's scary."

Emma peers curiously over the top of the newspaper. "Who's an animal?"

"See you Monday," I say to Evan, and hang up smiling.

We're back in bed when the telephone rings. Emma's head is resting on my chest and I'm not moving, period.

The answer machine picks up. The call is from Carla Candilla, her voice hushed and urgent.

"Derek really did it! 'Ode to a Brown-Eyed Goddess'—Jack, it was so fucking lame."

She's calling on her cellular from Anne's wedding, which I'd come tantalizingly close to forgetting.

"It took him half an hour to read," Carla says, "meantime I had to pee like a racehorse. I wrote down a couple lines 'cause I knew you could use a laugh."

Emma stirs against me. "Jack, who's that on the phone?"

"The daughter of an old friend. She's the one who loaned me the gun." The gun now resting somewhere in Lake Okeechobee, where I tossed it.

"Dig this," Carla is saying on the machine. " 'My heart melts anew each time your brown eyes light on me. Passion sings in my breast like the soaring sparrow's harmony.' "

"Ouch," says Emma.

"And that's a best-selling writer," I feel duty-bound to report. But at least he wrote her a poem, which is more than I ever did.

"Can you believe it—birds in his breast!" When Carla's giggle fades, her tone turns more serious. "Anyhow, Mom looks awesome and the champagne is killer, so I guess I'll survive. The real reason I called, I want to make sure you got home okay from your big adventure last night, whatever it was. And I hope your friend's okay, too. Someday I'll get you drunk and make you tell me about it. Oh, one more thing: Happy Birthday, Blackjack."

Oh Jesus, that's right.