The electric door was open. In the driveway was his wife’s Buick, idling. Why she had come back, Avila didn’t know. Perhaps she’d decided to pilfer the buried Tupperware for extra bingo money. It truly didn’t matter.
Apparently her mother had emerged from the car first. The scene that greeted Avila was so stupefying that he temporarily forgot about the flaming lawn mower. For reasons beyond human comprehension, the overwrought coatimundi had jumped from its roost in the garage, dashed outdoors and scaled Avila’s mother-in-law. Now the creature was nesting in the woman’s coiffure, a brittle edifice of chromium orange. Avila had always believed that his wife’s mother wore wigs, but here was persuasive evidence that her fantastic mop was genuine. She shrieked and spun about the front yard, flailing spastically at the demon on her scalp. The jabbering coati dug in with all four claws. No hairpiece, Avila decided, could withstand such a test.
His wife bilingually shouted that he should do something, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! The pry bar was out of the question; one misplaced blow and that would be the end of his mother-in-law. So Avila tried the fire extinguisher. He unloaded at point-blank range, soaping the stubborn animal with sodium bicarbonate.
The coati snarled and snapped but, incredibly, refused to vacate the old woman’s hair. In the turmoil it was inevitable that some of the cold mist from the fire extinguisher would hit Avila’s mother-in-law, who mashed her knuckles to her eyes and began a blind run. Avila gave chase for three-quarters of a block, periodically firing short bursts, but the old woman showed surprising speed.
Avila gave up and trotted home to extinguish the fire in the garage. Afterwards he rolled the charred lawn mower to the backyard and hosed it down. His distraught wife remained sprawled across the hood of the Buick, crying: “Mami, mamt, luke what chew did to my mamil”
Above her keening rose the unmistakable whine of sirens-someone on the block had probably called the fire department. Avila thought: Why can’t people mind their own goddamn business! He was steaming as he hurried to his car.
At the very moment he fit the key in the ignition, the passenger window exploded. Avila nearly wet himself in shock. There stood his wife, beet-faced and seething, holding the iron pry bar.
“Chew fucking bastard!” she cried.
Avila jammed his heel to the accelerator and sped away.
“O Change, Change,” he whispered, brushing chunks of glass from his lap. “I know I fucked up again, but don’t abandon me now. Not tonight.”
A peculiar trait of this hurricane, Jim Tile marveled on the drive along North Key Largo, was the dramatic definition of its swath. The eye had come ashore like a bullet, devastating a thin corridor but leaving virtually untouched the coastline to the immediate north and south. August hurricanes are seldom so courteous. Its bands had battered the vacation estates of ritzy Ocean Reef and stripped a long stretch of mangrove. Yet two miles down the shore, the mangroves flourished, leafy and lush, offering no clue that a killer storm had passed nearby. A ramshackle trailer park stood undamaged; not a window was broken, not a tree was uprooted.
Phenomenal, thought Jim Tile.
He goosed the Crown Victoria to an invigorating ninety-five; blue lights, no siren. At high speeds the big Ford whistled like a bottle rocket.
Paradise Palms was a lead but not a lock. Augustine had done his best in a tough situation, the trick with the redial button was slick. Maybe the guy who’d beaten up Brenda was in the black jeep Cherokee. Augustine didn’t know for sure. Maybe they were headed to the Keys, maybe not. Maybe they’d stay with the Jeep, or maybe they’d ditch it for another car.
The only certainty was that they were transporting Skink and the tourist woman, Augustine’s girlfriend. The circumstances of the abduction, and its purpose, remained a mystery. Augustine had promised to lie back and wait at Paradise Palms, and the trooper told him that was an excellent idea. One-man rescues only worked in the movies.
The old road from Ocean Reef rejoined Highway One below Jewfish Creek, where it split into four lanes. The traffic thickened, so Jim Tile slowed to seventy miles per hour, weaving deftly between the Winnebagos and rental cars. It was the time of late summer when the setting sun could torment inexperienced drivers, but there was no glare from the west tonight. A bruised wall of advancing weather shaded the horizon and cast sooty twilight over the islands and the water. Lightning strobed high in distant clouds over Florida Bay. Its exquisite sparking was wasted on Jim Tile, who dourly contemplated the prospect of hard rain. A chase was tricky enough when the roads were bone dry.