TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

Keyes found himself strangely unperturbed by Jenna’s emasculatory harangue; maybe there was hope for him yet. He hit the brakes and the MG skidded off the road into some gravel. He backed up to the gate of the Virginia Key marina.

“I believe that’s your car,” he said to Jenna.

“Where?”

He pointed. “Next to the boat ramp. The white Mercury.”

“My car’s in the shop,” Jenna snapped.

“Really? Shall we go check the license tag?”

Jenna turned away.

“Skip borrowed it,” she said almost inaudibly.

Keyes saw her hand move to the door handle. He reached across the seat and slapped the lock down.

“Not yet,” he warned her. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Hey, what is this?”

“It’s called deep trouble, and you’re in the middle, Miss Granola Bar.”

“All I ever knew were bits and pieces, that’s all,” she insisted. “Skip didn’t tell me everything. He was always dropping little hints but I was scared to ask for more. I didn’t know about the new boat and I sure don’t know where he is right now. Honest, Brian, I thought the stunt with the ocean liner was it; his big plan. I didn’t know anything about tonight, I swear. I wasn’t even sure he was still alive.”

Her eyes couldn’t get more liquid, her voice more beseeching. A metamorphosis in thirty seconds.

Keyes said, “You promised he wasn’t going to hurt Kara Lynn.”

“Maybe he’s not,” Jenna said ingenuously. “Maybe he’s already let her go.”

“Yeah, and maybe I’m the Prince of Wales.”

Keyes drove past the Miami Marine Stadium and turned down a winding two-lane macadam. The shrimper’s dock was at the dead end of the road, on a teardrop-shaped lagoon.

The shrimper’s name was Joey and he owned three small trawlers that harvested Biscayne Bay by night. He worked out of a plywood shack lighted by bare bulbs and guarded by a pair of friendly mutts.

Joey was dipping shrimp when Keyes drove up.

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Keyes said. “I interviewed you a few years back for a newspaper story.”

“Sure,” said Joey, peering past the end of his cigar. “You were askin’ about pollution, some damn thing.”

“Right. Look, I need a boat. It’s sort of an emergency.”

Joey glanced over at Jenna sitting in the car.

“Damn fine emergency,” he said. “But you don’t need a boat, you need a water bed.”

“Please,” Keyes said. “We need a ride to Osprey Island.”

“You and the girl?”

“That’s right. It’s worth a hundred bucks.”

Joey hung the net on a nail over the shrimp tank. “That island’s private property, son.”

“I know.”

“It’s black as a bear’s asshole and fulla bugs. Why the hell you wanna go over there on a night like this?”

“Like I said, it’s an emergency,” Keyes said. “Life and death.”

“Naturally,” Joey muttered. He took the hundred dollars and struggled into his oilskin raingear. “There’s more weather on the way,” he said. “Go fetch your ladyfriend. We’ll take the Tina Marie.”

Osprey Island was a paddle-shaped outcrop in east Biscayne Bay, about five miles south of the Cape Florida lighthouse. There were no sandy beaches, for the island was mostly hard coral and oolite rock—a long-dead reef, thrust barely above sea level. The shores were collared with thick red mangrove; farther inland, young buttonwoods, gumbo-limbo, sea grape, and mahogany. An old man who had lived there for thirty years had planted a row of royal palms and a stand of pines, and these rose majestically from the elevated plot that had been his homestead, before he fell ill and moved back to the mainland. All that remained of the house was a concrete slab and four cypress pilings and a carpet of broken pink stucco; a bare fifty-foot flagpole stood as a salt-eaten legacy to the old man’s patriotism and also to his indelible fear that someday the Russians would invade Florida, starting with Osprey Island.

Like almost everything else in South Florida, the islet was dishonestly named. There were no white-hooded ospreys, or fish eagles, living on Osprey Island because the nesting trees were not of sufficient height or maturity. A few of the regal birds lived on Sand Key or Elliott, farther south, and occasionally they could be seen diving the channel and marl flats around the island bearing their name. But if it had been left up to the Calusa Indians, who had first settled the place, the island probably would have been called Mosquito or Crab, because these were the predominant life forms infesting its fifty-three acres.

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