Bud Schwartz waited until he heard the door slam. Then he said: “What the hell was that?”
“A friend,” Molly replied. They had known each other a long time. She had worked as a volunteer in his gubernatorial campaign, whipping up both the senior-citizen vote and the environmental coalitions. Later, when he quit office and vanished, Molly was one of the few who knew what happened, and one of the few who understood. Over the years he had kept in touch in his own peculiar way—sometimes a spectral glimpse, sometimes a sensational entrance; jarring cameos that were as hair-raising as they were poignant.
“Guy’s big,” said Danny Pogue. “Geez, he looks like—did he do time? What’s his story?”
“We don’t want to know,” Bud Schwartz said. “Am I right?”
“You’re absolutely right,” said Molly McNamara.
Shortly before midnight on July 23, Jim Tile received a radio call that an unknown individual was shooting at automobiles on Card Sound Road. The trooper told the dispatcher he was en route, and that he’d notify the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office if he needed back-ups—which he knew he wouldn’t.
The cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road a half-mile east of the big bridge. Jim Tile took inventory from the stickers on the bumpers: two Alamos, a Hertz, a National and an Avis. The rental firms had started putting bumper plates on all their automobiles, which served not only as advertisement but as a warning to local drivers that a disoriented tourist was nearby. On this night, though, the bright stickers had betrayed their unsuspecting drivers. Each of the vehicles bore a single.45-caliber bullet hole in the left-front fender panel.
Jim Tile knew exactly what had happened. He took brief statements from the motorists, who seemed agitated by the suggestion that anyone would fire at them simply because they were tourists. Jim Tile assured them that this sort of thing didn’t happen every day. Then he called Homestead for tow trucks to get the three rental cars whose engine blocks had been mortally wounded by the sniper in the mangroves.
One of the drivers, a French-Canadian textile executive, used a cellular phone to call the Alamo desk at Miami International Airport and explain the situation. Soon new cars were on the way.
It took Jim Tile several hours to clear the scene. A pair of Monroe County deputies stopped by and helped search for shell casings until the mosquitoes drove them away. After the officers had fled, and after the tourists had motored north in a wary caravan of Thunderbirds, Skylarks and Zephyrs, Jim Tile got in his patrol car and mashed on the horn with both fists. Then he rolled up the windows, turned up the air conditioner and waited for his sad old friend to come out of the swamp.
“I’m sorry.” Skink offered the trooper a stick of EDTIAR insect repellent.
“You promised to behave,” said Jim Tile. “Now you’ve put me in a tough position.”
“Had to blow off some steam,” Skink said. “Anyway, I didn’t hurt anybody.” He took off his sunglasses and tinkered unabashedly with the fake eyeball. “Haven’t you ever had days like this? Days where you just had to go out and shoot the shit out of something, didn’t matter what?”
Jim Tile sighed. “Rental cars?”
“Why the hell not.”
The tension dissolved into weary silence. The men had talked of such things before. When Clinton Tyree was the governor of Florida, Jim Tile had been his chief bodyguard—an unusually prestigious assignment for a black state trooper. After Clinton Tyree resigned, Jim Tile immediately lost his job on the elite security detail. The new governor, it was explained, felt more comfortable around peckerwoods. By the end of that fateful week, Jim Tile had found himself back on road patrol, Harney County, night shifts.
Over the years he had stayed close to Clinton Tyree, partly out of friendship, partly out of admiration and partly out of certitude that the man would need police assistance now and then, which he had. Whenever Skink got restless and moved his hermitage to deeper wilderness, Jim Tile would quietly put in for a transfer and move, too. This meant more rural two-lanes, more night duty and more ignorant mean-eyed crackers—but the trooper knew that his friend would have done the same for him, had fortunes been reversed. Besides, Jim Tile was confident of his own abilities and believed that one day he’d be in charge of the entire highway patrol—dishing out a few special night shifts himself.