“God damn,” he exclaimed.
An enormous animal stood next to the Ullmans’ half-drained swimming pool. The light from Keith’s headlamp played up and down its blue-black flanks. This was no ordinary cow. For starters, it was as big as a tractor.
Its sharp horns were lavishly curved and downslung, upside down from those of domestic American stock.
Keith Higstrom knew exactly what he was looking at. Hadn’t he watched Jimmy Dean and Curt Gowdy shoot one of the very same majestic bastards on The American I Sportsman? But that was in Africa, for Christ’s sake. Not Miami, Florida.
It occurred to Keith that he might be suffering the effects of too much alcohol, that the gigantic oval-eyed ungulate glaring at him was merely a Budweiser-enhanced Angus.
Then it snorted again, expelling twin strings of dewy snot. The animal lowered its head and, with hooves the size of laundry irons, decisively pawed a trench in the Ullmans’ newly replanted Bermuda sod.
“Shit on a biscuit,” Keith Higstrom said, raising his grandfather’s rifle. “That’s a Cape buffalo!”
He fired and, naturally, missed. Twice.
The gunshots awakened Mr Ullman, a banker by trade and a recent arrival from Copenhagen, who looked out the bedroom window just in time to see a tremendous bull galloping across his yard with a thrashing young American impaled on its rack. Mr Ullman quickly telephoned the police and informed them, as urgently as his newly acquired English would allow, that an “unlucky cowboy is being perforated seriously.” Eventually the police figured out what Mr Ullman was trying to say.
Two hours later, a police dispatcher phoned Augustine’s house with a message: His dead uncle’s missing Cape buffalo, identified by an ear tag, had turned up in the produce aisle of a storm-gutted supermarket. Unfor-
tunately, there was trouble. The dispatcher requested that Augustine call Animal Control as soon as possible.
Augustine didn’t check his answering machine for several hours, because he was out on Biscayne Bay with Bonnie Lamb.
They had borrowed the speedboat from one of Augustine’s friends, an airline pilot. The pilot owed Augustine a favor from a long-ago divorce, when Augustine had let him bury $45,000 worth of gold Krugerrands behind Augustine’s garage, to conceal them from his future ex-wife’s private investigator. After the divorce litigation ended, the airline pilot was left with nothing but the hidden stash of coins. He immediately depleted them on a ninety-one-pound fashion model, who later abandoned him at a five-star hotel in Morocco. Although years had passed, the pilot never forgot Augustine’s act of friendship in a time of personal crisis.
The speedboat was on a trailer at a marina in North Miami Beach, untouched by the hurricane. Augustine and Bonnie Lamb met Jim Tile there. His eyes were red and his voice was raw. He told them that a close friend, a female trooper, had been savagely beaten by a car thief, and that he would have preferred to be out on road patrol, hunting for the gutless low-life sonofabitch.
As distracted as he was, Jim Tile also seemed visibly anxious about the boat trip. Even in the dark, the bay looked rough and tricky. Oddly, Bonnie Lamb wasn’t worried. Maybe it was the way Augustine handled himself behind the wheel; steering casually with two fingers as he aimed, with his free hand, the spotlight.
Smoothly he weaved around massive tree limbs and wind-split lumber and ghostly capsized hulls. The scary ride temporarily took Jim Tile’s mind off the image of Brenda on an ambulance stretcher….
Bonnie was anticipating her first sight of the man/ called Skink. She kept thinking about the bloodied corpse in the morgue-impaled on a TV dish, the trooper had said. Was Skink the killer? To hear the trooper tell it, the ex-governor was not a nut of the certifiable, Mansonesque strain. Rather, he was launched on a mission: a reckless doomed mission, boisterously outside the law. Bonnie was intrigued by bold eccentrics. She wasn’t afraid of Skink, not with the trooper and Augustine at her side. In an odd way, although she’d never admit it, she looked forward to confronting the kidnapper almost as much as to reuniting with her husband….
Now Jim Tile and Augustine were struggling to drag the unconscious man over the gunwale of the speedboat. His clothes were soaked, adding to his considerable bulk. Bonnie Lamb tried to help. Augustine got a silvery handful of the man’s hair, the trooper had him by the belt loops, Bonnie dug her fingers in the tongues of his boots-and finally the kidnapper was on the deck, vomiting seawater.