“Hola, Pari-Mutuel Wagerers,” the voice said. “Welcome to the Revolution!”
Only the county commissioners seemed alarmed.
The third bomb was the one Jesus Bernal saved. He’d looked all over Miami for a gathering of Communists to blow up, but found none. He knew they were there—they had to be. Bernal didn’t want to waste this bomb because it was a real masterpiece; his ticket back to the First Weekend in July. He decided to save the bomb until some Communists popped up. If worse came to worst, he could always plant it at ACLU.
While Jesus Bernal scurried around town with his C-4 and blasting caps, Tommy Tigertail and Viceroy Wilson (back from Nassau, still celibate) picked off three more tourists.
“We need the stats,” Skip Wiley had urged by telegram.
“Stats?” mumbled the Indian.
Viceroy Wilson understood perfectly.
The kidnappings were nothing fancy: a young surfer at the Pompano Pier, lured to a waiting Cadillac with a lid of fresh Colombian red; and a middle-aged couple from White Plains who mysteriously vanished from their front-row table during Jackie Mason’s second show at the Diplomat.
At midweek, Tommy Tigertail delivered some grim news.
“Pavlov is sick,” he told Viceroy Wilson at the Everglades campsite.
“I’ll bet it was that goddamned surfer,” Wilson said.
“No,” the Indian said, “it’s the water. He needs salt water.”
Viceroy Wilson scanned the pond for the ominous brown log that was Pavlov’s snout. From a distance—a safe distance—the monster looked just fine.
“This is a North American crocodile. His habitat is salt water,” Tommy explained. “He’s been out here two weeks and now he needs to go home.”
“Fine with me,” Viceroy Wilson said.
The second they got the ropes on Pavlov, Viceroy saw what the Indian was talking about. The big croc was listless and cloudy-eyed. Even its hiss sounded anemic.
Hauling Pavlov from the bowels of the Glades to the shores of Biscayne Bay turned out to be a day-long endeavor. Even in a state of lethargy the crocodile was formidable cargo, and its disposition did not improve as the trip wore on. The Indian had rented a tractor-trailer for the journey, but there wasn’t enough room in the cab for all three commandos. Viceroy Wilson decided that Jesus Bernal, by virtue of his switchblade prowess, was best equipped to ride in back with the giant reptile. Every time Tommy Tigertail took a sharp corner the trailer came alive with muffled hissing and Spanish invective.
At dusk they pulled off the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, dragged Pavlov out of the rig, and prodded him into the salty shallows of Biscayne Bay. The croc swam east, never looking back, propelled by that massive rhythmic tail. Pavlov did not stop swimming for thirty hours. He crossed the bay, entered the Atlantic through Haulover Cut and churned north along the Gold Coast. It was as if, Skip Wiley mused later, the great beast somehow had been imbued with the spirit of Las Noches; as if it had drawn inspiration from its captors.
To Viceroy Wilson, the explanation was more elementary: Seminole magic. The damn Indian had worked a spell.
Pavlov stopped swimming when he reached the famous Ft. Lauderdale beachfront. There, in darkness, he dragged his thousand pounds ashore and made for the party lights of the Barbary Coast Hotel. Later, in daylight, beachgoers would trace the crocodile’s lethal path by the trench in the sand.
Wiley’s mystical notions aside, what probably happened was that the croc merely grew tired of fighting the ocean currents and came ashore to rest. Once on land, its nostrils got wind of the Barbary’s luxuriant saltwater swimming pool, and Pavlov had decided to enjoy himself.
Besides being young, drunk, and stupid, Kyle Griffith (University of Georgia, Class of ‘87) had no good reason to be in that swimming pool at four in the morning. A bad reason for being there—nude, save for a foam-rubber hat that said “Go Bulldawgs!”—was that Griffith’s dithering Sigma Nu brothers had dared him to jump thirty feet from the balcony of the hotel room to the warm pool, which lay in darkness so complete that even a seventeen-foot crocodile could be invisible.
Having eaten prodigiously in recent days, Pavlov was not very hungry. A snack would have been fine, perhaps a coot or a small garfish. But once Kyle Griffith hit the water, Pavlov’s dinosaural instincts took over. The crocodile seized the bewildered Sigma Nu by the legs and submerged to the bottom of the swimming pool, where the beast lay motionless for several minutes, as if contemplating the wisdom of its own gluttony. In the end, of course, the college kid was consumed, though Pavlov regurgitated the silly rubber hat.