TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

The sound of the screen door slamming.

The taste of the sidewalk.

The cough of an automobile’s ignition.

He remembered opening one eye with the dreadful thought that he was about to be run over.

And he remembered a glimpse of a vanity license tag—”GATOR 2”—as the car peeled rubber.

But Keyes didn’t remember shutting his eyes and going nighty-night on the cool concrete.

“Hello?”

Brian Keyes stared up at the round, friendly-looking face of a middle-aged woman.

“Are you injured?” she asked.

“I think my spine is broken.” Keyes was lying outside Pauly’s Bar. The pavement smelled like stale beer and urine. Unseen shards of an ancient wine bottle dug into his shoulder blades. It was eleven o’clock and the street was very dark.

“My name is Nell Bellamy.”

“I’m Brian Keyes.”

“Should I call an ambulance, Mr. Keyes?”

Keyes shook his head no.

“These are my friends Burt and James,” Nell Bellamy said. Two men wearing mauve fez hats bent over and peered at Brian Keyes. They were Shriners.

“What are you doing here?” one of them asked benignly.

“I got beat up,” Keyes replied, still flat on his back. “I’ll be fine in a month or two.” He ran a hand over his ribs, feeling through the shirt for fractures. “What are you doing here?” he asked the Shriners.

“Looking for her husband.”

“Theodore Bellamy,” Nell said. “He disappeared last Saturday.”

“Give me a hand, please,” Keyes said. The Shriners helped him to his feet. They were big, ruddy fellows; they propped him up until the vertigo went away. From inside Pauly’s Bar came the sounds of breaking glass and loud shouting in Spanish.

“Let’s take a walk,” Keyes said.

“But I wanted to ask around in there,” Nell said, nodding toward the bar, “to see if anybody has seen Teddy.”

“Bad idea,” Keyes grunted.

“He’s right, Nell,” one of the Shriners advised.

So they set off down Washington Avenue. They were a queer ensemble, even by South Beach standards. Keyes walked tentatively, like a well-dressed lush, while Nell handed out fliers with Teddy’s picture. The Shriners ran interference through knots of shirtless refugees who milled outside the droopy boardinghouses and peeling motels. The refugees flashed predatory smiles and made wisecracks in Spanish, but the Shriners were imperturbable.

Nell Bellamy asked Keyes what had happened inside the bar, so he told her about Viceroy Wilson.

“We saw a black fellow speeding away,” Nell said.

“In a Cadillac,” Burt volunteered.

“Burt sells Cadillacs,” Nell said to Keyes. “So he ought to know.”

The four of them had reached the southern point of Miami Beach, near Joe’s Stone Crab, and they were alone on foot. This part of South Beach wasn’t exactly the Boardwalk, and at night it was generally deserted except for serious drunks, ax murderers, and illegal aliens.

With Nell leading the way, the entourage strolled toward the oceanfront.

Burt remarked that he once had seen the Dolphins play the Chicago Bears in an exhibition game, and that Walter Payton had made Viceroy Wilson look like a flatfooted old man.

“That was in 75,” the Shriner added.

“By then his knees were shot,” Keyes said half-heartedly. He didn’t feel much like defending any creep who’d sucker-punch him in a place like Pauly’s. In all his years as a reporter he had never been slugged. Not once. He had been chased and stoned and menaced in a variety of ways, but never really punched. A punch was quite a personal thing.

“You should file charges,” Nell suggested.

Keyes felt silly. Here was this stout little woman searching godforsaken neighborhoods in the dead of night for her missing husband, while Keyes just moped along feeling sorry for himself over a lousy bump on the neck.

He asked Nell Bellamy about Theodore. She mustered herself and told, for the sixteenth time, all about the convention, the venomous jellyfish, the unorthodox lifeguards, and what the cops were saying must have happened to her husband.

“We don’t believe them,” Burt said. “Teddy didn’t drown.”

“Why not?”

“Where’s the body?” Burt said, swinging a beefy arm toward the ocean. “There’s been an easterly wind for days. The body should have floated up by now.”

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