He had captured somebody else’s fugitive monkey.
“What now?” asked Bonnie Lamb, reasonably. She reached out to pet the stunned animal, then changed her mind. The rhesus studied her through dopey, half-closed eyes.
“You’re a good shot,” she said to Augustine.
He wasn’t listening. “This isn’t right,” he muttered. He carried the limp monkey to the grapefruit tree and propped it gently in the crook of two boughs. Then he took Bonnie back to his truck. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “I forgot to bring a flashlight.”
They drove through the subdivision for fifteen minutes until Bonnie Lamb spotted the rental car. Max wasn’t there. Somebody had pried the trunk and stolen all the luggage, including Bonnie’s purse.
Damn kids, Augustine said. Bonnie was too tired to cry. Max had the car keys, the credit cards, the money, the plane tickets. “I need to find a phone,” she said. Her folks would wire some money.
Augustine drove to a police checkpoint, where Bonnie Lamb reported her husband missing. He was one of many, and not high on the list. Thousands who’d escaped their homes in the hurricane were being sought by worried relatives. For relief workers, reuniting local families was a priority; tracking wayward tourists was not.
A bank of six phones had been set up near the checkpoint, but the lines were long. Bonnie found the shortest one and settled in for a wait. She thanked Augustine for his help.
“What will you do tonight?” he asked.
“I’ll be OK.” -~_
Bonnie was startled to hear him say: “No you won’t.”
He took her by the hand and led her to the pickup. It occurred to Bonnie that she ought to be afraid, but she felt illogically safe with this total stranger. It also occurred to her that panic would be a normal reaction to a husband’s disappearance, but instead she felt an inappropriate calmness and lucidity. Probably just exhaustion, she thought.
Augustine drove back to the looted rental car. He scribbled a note and tucked it under one of the windshield wipers. “My phone number,” he told Bonnie Lamb. “In case your husband shows up later tonight. This way he’ll know where you are.”
“We’re going to your place?”
“Yes.”
In the darkness, she couldn’t see Augustine’s expression. “It’s madness out here,” he said. “These idiots shoot at anything that moves.”
Bonnie nodded. She’d been hearing distant gunfire from all directions. Dade County is an armed camp. That’s what their travel agent had warned them. Death Wish Tours, he’d called it. Only a fool would set foot south of Orlando.
Crazy Max, thought Bonnie. What had possessed him?
“You know why my husband came down here?” she said. “Know what he was doing when he got lost? Taking video of the wrecked houses. And the people, too.”
“Why?” Augustine asked.
“Home movies. To show his pals back North.”
“Jesus, that’s-”
“Sick,” Bonnie Lamb said. ” ‘Sick’ is the word for it.”
Augustine said nothing more. Slowly he worked his way toward the Turnpike. The futility of the monkey hunt was evident; Augustine realized that most of his dead uncle’s wild animals were irretrievable. The larger mammals would inevitably make their presence known-the Cape buffalo, the bears, the cougars-and the results were bound to be unfortunate. Meanwhile the snakes and crocodiles probably were celebrating freedom by copulating merrily in the Everglades, ensuring for their species a solid foothold in a new tropical habitat. Augustine felt it was morally wrong to interfere. An escaped cobra had as much natural right to a life in Florida as did all those retired garment workers from Queens. Natural selection would occur. The test applied to Max Lamb as well, but Augustine felt sorry for his wife. He would set aside his principles and help find her missing husband.
He drove using the high beams because there were no street lights, and the roads were a littered gauntlet of broken trees and utility poles, heaps of lumber and twisted metal, battered appliances and gutted sofas. They saw a Barbie dollhouse and a canopy bed and an antique china cabinet and a child’s wheelchair and a typewriter and a tangle of golf clubs and a cedar hot tub, split in half like a coconut husk-Bonnie said it was as if a great supernatural fist had snatched up a hundred thousand lives and shaken the contents all over creation.