All night long, adrift in the chop, Avila cursed the hurricane for bringing him such misery: the sadistic doughnut man, Whitmark and, of course, Snapper. The rainfall stopped at dawn but the sun never broke free of the clouds. It was midafternoon before Avila heard an engine. As he shouted for help, a tall white fishing boat idled within hailing distance. Avila waved. The skipper and his tropically garbed clients waved back.
“Hang in there, amigo,” the skipper yelled, and trolled away.
Twenty minutes later, a Coast Guard boat arrived and took Avila aboard. The crew gave him dry clothes, hot coffee and homemade chili. He ate in appreciative silence. Afterwards he was led belowdeck to a small briefing room, where he was greeted by a man from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
In halting Spanish, the immigration man asked Avila
for the name of the Cuban port he had fled. Avila laughed and explained that he was from Miami.
“Then what’re you doing out here in your underwear?”
Avila said a robber was chasing him down the road, so he jumped off a bridge in Islamorada.
“Tell the truth,” the immigration man said sternly. “Obviously you’re a rafter. Now where did you come from-Havana? Mariel?”
Avila was about to argue when it dawned, on him that there was no faster way to shed his burdens. What could he look forward to in his current life but an unforgiving wife, a traumatized mother-in-law, personal bankruptcy, the wrath of Gar Whitmark and a possible criminal indictment?
He asked the immigration man: “What will happen to me if I confess?”
“Nothing. You’ll be processed at Krome and most likely released.”
“If I am a political refugee.”
“That’s the usual procedure.”
“Si,” Avila said. ” Yo soy balsero.” I am a rafter.
The immigration man seemed so relieved that Avila was left to conclude (as a former civil servant himself) that he’d saved the man mountains of paperwork.
“Su nombre, par favor?”
“Juan,” Avila replied. “Juan Gomez. From Havana.”
“And your occupation in Cuba?”
“I was a building inspector.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
They waited in the Jeep-Edie Marsh up front, holding the revolver; Bonnie Lamb pressed against the governor in the back seat.
It was Bonnie who said: “What if he doesn’t come back?”
Edie was thinking the same thing. Hoping it. The problem was, Snapper had the damn car keys. She asked the man in the shower cap: “You know how to hot-wire one of these?”
“That would be illegal.”
The cinematic smile startled her. She said, “Why aren’t you afraid?” ,
“Of what?”
“The gun. Dying. Anything.”
Bonnie said she was frightened enough for all of them. The rain slackened; still no sign of Snapper, or Avila. Edie had difficulty keeping her eyes off the man called Skink.
“What is it,” he said. “My hat?”
She lifted the .357. “You could take this away from me anytime you wanted. You know it.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
That’s what scared her. What was the point of holding a gun on a person like this?
He said, “I won’t hurt you.” Again with the smile.
Edie Marsh was a sucker for laugh lines around the eyes. She said to Bonnie: “I think I know what you see in this guy.”
“We’re just friends.”
“Really? Then maybe you can tell me,” Edie said, “what’s he got planned?”
•’I honestly don’t know. I wish I did.”
Edie was all clammy shakes, roiled emotions. In the motel room, depositing Mr Stichler with the two hookers, she’d caught something on the TV that got her daydreaming-a news clip of the President of the United States touring the hurricane damage. At his side was a tall, boyishly attractive man in his thirties, whom the TV newscasters identified as the President’s son. When they said he lived in Miami, Edie Marsh got a whimsical flash. So what if he wasn’t a Kennedy? And maybe he was too much of a good young Republican to pick up some hot girl in a bar and get raunchy. Or just maybe he’d been waiting his whole repressed life to do exactly that. And he was the President’s son. It was something to consider, Edie mused, for the future. Particularly if the hurricane scam continued to unravel at its current pace.