“We don’t have to talk about it,” Kara Lynn said. She stirred against him. “Let’s just lie here for a little while.”
“I had no choice. He shot Garcia.”
“This was the same man we saw outside the country club. You’re certain?”
Keyes nodded.
He said, “Maybe I ought to say a prayer or something. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you kill somebody?”
“Only in spaghetti westerns.” She slid her arms around his waist. “Try to get some rest. You did the right thing.”
“I know,” he said dully. “The only thing I feel guilty about is not feeling guilty. The sonofabitch deserved to die.”
The words came out soulless. Kara Lynn shuddered. Sometimes he frightened her, just a little.
“Hey, Sundance, you want to see my gown?”
“Sure.”
She bounced up from the bed. “Stay right here, don’t move,” she said. “I’ll model it for you.”
“I’d like that,” Keyes said. “I really would.”
At noon Al Garcia awoke. He gazed around the hospital room and felt warmed by its pale yellow walls and the slivered shadows from the Venetian blinds. He was too drugged to pay much attention to the burning in his arm or the huge knot on the base of his neck or the burbling sound from inside his chest. Instead the detective was washed by a mood of elemental triumph: he was alive and Jesus Bernal was dead. Deader than a goddamn cockroach. Al Garcia relished the role of survivor, even if he owed his life not to his own faltering reflexes, but to Brian Keyes. The kid had turned out to be rock steady, and strong as a bear to haul him out of the ocean the way he had.
Groggily Garcia greeted his wife, who offered spousely sympathy but peppered him with questions that he pretended not to hear. Afterward, an orthopedic surgeon stopped in to report that although Garcia’s left arm had been saved, it was too early to know if the muscles and bones would mend properly; the shoulder basically was being held together by steel pins and catgut. Garcia worriedly asked if any shotgun pellets had knicked the spine, and the doctor said no, though the initial fall on his neck had caused some temporary numbness. Garcia wiggled the toes on both feet and seemed satisfied that he would walk again.
He was drifting off to sleep when the chief of police showed up. Garcia winked at him.
“The doctors say you’re going to make it,” the chief whispered.
“Piece-a-cake,” Garcia murmured.
“Look, I know this is a bad time, but the media’s gone absolutely batshit over this shooting. We’re trying to put together a short release. Is there anything you can tell me about what happened out there?”
“Found the body?”
“Yes,” the chief replied. “Shot four times with a nine-millimeter. The last one really did the trick, blew his brains halfway to Bimini.”
“Fucker blasted me with a sawed-off.”
“I know,” the chief said. “The question is, who blasted him?”
“Tomorrow,” Garcia said, closing his eyes.
“Al, please.”
“Tomorrow, the whole story.” Or as much of it as was absolutely necessary.
“Okay, but I’ve got to say something to the press this afternoon. They’re tearing around like a pack of frigging hyenas.”
“Tell ‘em you don’t know nuthin’. Tell ‘em I haven’t regained consciousness.”
“That might work,” the chief mused.
“Sure it’ll work. One more thing … “ Garcia paused to adjust the plastic tube in his nose. “Tell the nurses I want a TV.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“A color TV for tonight.”
“Sure, Al.”
“Don’t want to miss the parade.”
30
In the mid-1800’s Miami was known as Fort Dallas. It was a mucky, rutted, steaming, snake-infested settlement of two hundred souls, perennially under attack from crafty Seminoles or decimated by epidemics of malaria. This was a time long before Fisher, Flagler, and the other land grabbers arrived to suck their fortunes out of North America’s most famous swamp. It was a time when the local obsession was survival, not square footage, when the sun was not a commodity but a blistering curse.
No one knew what Fort Dallas might eventually become, not that knowing would have altered its future. The dream was always there, sustenance against the cruel hardships. Then, as now, the smell of opportunity was too strong to ignore, attracting a procession of grafters, con artists, Confederate deserters, geeks, bushwackers, rustlers, Gypsies, and slave traders. Their inventiveness and tenacity and utter contempt for the wilderness around them would set the tone for the development of South Florida. They preserved only what was free and immutable—the sunshine and the sea—and marked the rest for destruction, because how else could you sell it? In its natural state, the soggy frontier south of Lake Okeechobee simply was not marketable. Still, the transformation of the face of the land began slowly, not so much because of the Indians or the terrain as because of the lagging technology of plunder. Finally came the railroads and the dredge and the bulldozer, and the end of Fort Dallas.