Max Lamb’s voice dissolved into fuzzy pops and echoes. Augustine hung up. He walked Bonnie back to the pickup.
She got in and said, “This is making me crazy.”
“We’ll call again from my house and get it on tape.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll jolt the FBI into action. Especially the poetry.”
“Actually I think it’s from a book.”
“What does it mean?” she asked.
Augustine reached across her lap and placed the .38
Special in the glove compartment. “It means,” he said, “your husband probably isn’t as safe as he thinks.”
By and large, the Highway Patrol troopers based in northern Florida were not overjoyed to learn of their temporary reassignment to southern Florida. Many would have preferred Beirut or Somalia. The exception was Jim Tile. A trip to Miami meant precious time with Brenda Rourke, although working double shifts in the hurricane zone left them scarcely enough energy to collapse in each other’s arms.
Jim Tile hadn’t counted on an intrusion by the governor, but it wasn’t totally surprising. The man worshipped hurricanes. Ignoring his presence would have been selfish and irresponsible; the trooper didn’t take the friendship that lightly, nor Skink’s capacity for outstandingly rash behavior. Jim Tile had no choice but to try to stay close.
In the age of political correctness, a large black man in a crisply pressed police uniform could move at will through the corridors of white-cracker bureaucracy and never once be questioned. Jim Tile took full advantage in the days following the big storm. He mingled authoritatively with Dade County deputies, Homestead police, firelighters, Red Cross volunteers, National Guardsmen, the Army command and antsy emissaries of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Between patrol shifts, Jim Tile helped himself to coffee and A-forms, 911 logs, computer printouts and handwritten incident reports- he scanned for nothing in particular; just a sign.
As it happened, though, madness flowed rampant in the storm’s wake. Jim Tile leafed through the paperwork, and thought: My Lord, people are cracking up all over town.
The machinery of rebuilding doubled as novel weapons for domestic violence. Thousands of hurricane victims had stampeded to purchase chain saws for clearing debris, and now the dangerous power tools were being employed to vent rage. A gentleman with a Black 8c Decker attempted to truncate a stubborn insurance adjuster in Homestead. An old woman in Florida City used a lightweight Sears to silence a neighbor’s garrulous pet cockatoo. And in Sweetwater, two teen-aged gang members successfully detached each other’s arms (one left, one right) in a brief but spectacular duel of stolen Homelites.
If chain saws ruled the day, firearms ruled the night. Fearful of looters, vigilant home owners unloaded high-caliber semiautomatics at every rustle, scrape and scuff in the darkness. Preliminary casualties included seven cats, thirteen stray dogs, two opossums and a garbage truck, but no actual thieves. Residents of one rural neighborhood wildly fired dozens of rounds to repel what they described as a troop of marauding monkeys- an episode that Jim Tile dismissed as mass hallucination. He resolved to limit his investigative activities to daytime hours, whenever possible.
Nearly all the missing persons reported to authorities were locals who had fled the storm and lost contact with concerned relatives up North. Most turned up safe at shelters or in the homes of neighbors. But one case caught Jim Tile’s attention: a man named Max Lamb.
According to the information filed by his wife, the Lambs drove to Miami on the morning after the hurricane struck. Mrs Lamb told police that her husband wanted to see the storm damage. The trooper wasn’t surprised-the streets were clogged with out-of-towners who treated the hurricane zone as a tourist attraction.
Mr Max Lamb had left his rental car, in pursuit of video. It seemed improbable to Jim Tile that anybody from Manhattan could get lost on foot in the flat simple grid of a Florida subdivision. The trooper’s suspicions were heightened by another incident, lost deep in the stack of files.
A seventy-four-year-old woman had called to say she had witnessed a possible assault. It was summarized in two short paragraphs, taken over the telephone by a dispatcher:
“Caller reports suspicious subject running along 10700 block of Quail Roost Drive, carrying another subject over his shoulder. Subject One is described as w/ m, height and weight unknown. Subject Two is w/m, height and weight unknown.