TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

Reed Shivers and almost everyone else in the Orange Bowl did not yet realize that the Nights of December were alive and well. Nor did they know with what ease Skip Wiley’s troops had carried out the assault on the Nordic Princess, the ditching of the stolen Huey, and the staging of their own deaths: the gang had simply performed flawlessly (minus Jesus Bernal, who’d vanished before Wiley had revealed the scheme’s final refinement, and who’d gone to his death haplessly believing that the helicopter crash was an accident).

Tommy Tigertail had played a heroic role as captain of the clandestine rescue boat, a twenty-one-foot Mako powered by a two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude. Posing as a mackerel fisherman, he had plowed rough seas for an hour, staying close to the ocean liner but attracting no notice. His night vision had proved crucial when they had all bailed out—the pilot, Skip Wiley, and Viceroy Wilson. The ocean had been a turbid and treacherous soup, littered with sinking or half-sunk chopper wreckage, but within minutes the Indian had found all his comrades and pulled them safely into the speedboat.

The daring helicopter pilot had been rewarded with twenty thousand dollars of bingo skim, a phony passport, and a first-class plane ticket to Barbados. The Nights of December had dried off, checked into a Coconut Grove hotel, and gone back to work.

The news of Jesus Bernal’s violent fate had darkened Skip Wiley’s mood, but he’d refused to let it drag him down. Bernal’s passing had not similarly moved Viceroy Wilson, who merely remarked how inconsiderate it was for Hay-Zoos to have ripped off his private shotgun, and how supremely stupid to have used it on a cop. Tommy Tigertail had had absolutely nothing to say about the neurotic Cuban’s death; he had understood Jesus even less than Jesus had understood him.

In truth, Bernal’s death had changed nothing. Las Noches had gone ahead with the mission, working with a vigor and esprit that had warmed Wiley’s heart. At the vortex of the plan was a rejuvenated, rock-hard, and recently drug-free Viceroy Wilson, much more than a shadow of his former self.

Viceroy had had no trouble choosing Notre Dame’s uniform over the apple-red jersey of the University of Nebraska.

The reasons were simple. First, Nebraska’s agri-business hegemony represented a vile anathema to Wilson, whose radical sympathies were more logically drawn to the Irish Republican Army, and thus Notre Dame.

Second, and most important, Notre Dame was the only one of the teams with a number thirty-one on its roster.

In reconstructing Viceroy Wilson’s movements about the stadium that night, it was determined that several fans saw him emerge from the broom closet at 9:40 P.M. Ten minutes later he was observed, in uniform, ordering a jumbo orange juice at the concession stand in Section W.

Four minutes after that, he was seen eating a raisin bagel in a box seat at the Notre Dame twenty-yard line. When the rightful occupant returned from the souvenir shop and requested that Viceroy move elsewhere, Wilson inconsiderately mutilated the man’s shamrock umbrella and popped him in the face. No one in the stands called the police; it seemed more properly a matter for the NCAA.

An eight-minute period elapsed during which no one reported seeing number thirty-one—then half the households of America did, courtesy of NBC.

While the other football players clustered in the southwest tunnel, Viceroy Wilson broke onto the field in a casual but self-assured trot. Many Notre Dame fans applauded, thinking the halftime show was finally over but wondering why the rest of the green-and-gold did not follow. They wondered, too, why a second-rate fumbler like David Lee would be given the honor of leading the Fighting Irish into battle.

They were stunned by what happened next.

Number thirty-one ran a perfect beeline down the center of the football field, each great stride splashing in the soggy turf. For Miami Dolphin fanatics, it was an unmistakable if ghostly reprise—the familiar numeral on the jersey; the right shoulder, drooping ever so slightly, as if bracing for a high tackle; the thick arms pumping like watchgears, the black hands locked in fists; and of course that triangular wedge of muscle from the shoulders to the hips. All that was missing was a football.

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