TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

Wiley. Stealing the oar from the canoe was the sort of stunt Wiley would pull, Keyes thought. But why didn’t I hear anything? Where could he be hiding? And what was he waiting for? For Christ’s sake, the joke was over.

Keyes sat up slowly in the canoe, suddenly aware that the crickets and the nighthawks had fallen silent. The Everglades had become perfectly still.

Something was wrong.

Keyes knew, from watching Tarzan movies as a kid, that whenever the jungle became quiet, something terrible was about to happen. The cannibals were about to attack or the elephants were about to stampede or a leopard was about to get dinner—any of which seemed preferable to one of Skip Wiley’s surprise visits. Keyes wished like hell that he’d brought the cane bough with him on board the canoe.

A shadow materialized on the porch of Wiley’s cabin.

It was a man’s form, erect but motionless. In the emptiness of the night Keyes could hear the man breathing. He also heard the frantic hammering of his own heart.

“Wiley?”

The figure didn’t move. Featureless, it appeared to face him with folded arms.

“Skip, get me outta here, dammit.” Keyes forced a laugh, brittle with fear. With bloodless knuckles he clutched the gunwales of the canoe. “Skip?”

The shadow on the porch stepped back until it filled the frame of the cabin door. Muscles knotting, Keyes peered at the mute figure. He felt a cool drop of sweat trickle down his spine, and he shuddered. He was ready to dive from the canoe at the first glint of a gun.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but I don’t mean any harm,” Keyes said.

Nothing from the specter.

“Please, wave your hand if you can hear me,” Keyes implored.

To his astonishment, the pensive shadow raised its right hand and waved. Keyes smiled inwardly, thinking: At last, progress!—not realizing that the man’s gesture was not a wave at all, but a signal.

Idiotically Keyes raised his own right hand in amiable reciprocation. He remained so transfixed by the figure at the cabin that he didn’t see what he should have seen: a dark brown hand, bare and smooth, rising from the water and alighting on the starboard side of the canoe, precisely where his own hand had been.

When Keyes finally was distracted from the silent watcher, it was not by other sights or sounds, but by a paralyzing centrifugal sensation.

The canoe was spinning out from under him.

He was in the air.

He was in the water.

He was blinded, and he was choking.

He was swallowed into the throat of the swamp.

11

Wake up, Jungle Boy!”

Brian Keyes blinked the sting from his eyes and started coughing up swamp water.

“Not even a civil hello. How do you like that?”

“Hello, Skip,” Keyes said, between hacks.

They were in a clearing, deep in a cypress hammock. Smoke hung sweetly in the night air and a fire crackled, shooting sparks into the canopy. Hands bound, Keyes sat on bare ground against the trunk of a dwarf cypress. A cool breeze announced that he’d been stripped to his underwear. A tendril of wet hydrilla weed clung to his forehead.

“Cut me loose, Skip.”

Wiley grinned, his huge elastic face full of good humor.

“What do you think of the beard, Brian?”

“Very nice. Cut me loose, you asshole.”

Chuckling, Wiley ambled back to the camp-fire. Keyes saw that he wasn’t alone; other figures moved quietly on the fringe of the clearing, conversing in low tones. Soon Wiley returned carrying a coffee mug.

“Hot tea,” he declared. “All natural herbs. Here, it’ll put lead in your pencil.”

Keyes shook his head. “No thanks.”

“So how’re things in the private-eye business?”

“A little strange, at the moment.”

Wiley was barefoot. He wore pleated khaki trousers and a cream-colored smock with two red horizontal stripes (pseudo-African, Keyes guessed). His rebellious hair had been raked straight back, giving a blond helmet effect, and the new beard bristled thick and reddish. Keyes had to admit that Skip Wiley was still a man of considerable presence.

“I guess you want an explanation.”

“Naw,” said Keyes. “This happens all the time.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *