I glanced toward the fence, seeing that Javier was now on marina property, still holding the gun but that it was pointed at the ground. He appeared stricken, the central figure in a shrinking circle as deputies moved into position.
Something else I saw: Cowboy was headed our way carrying the five-gallon bucket he’d taken from my boat. The bucket, plus the jumble of cable dragging it behind, and a couple of wet towels under his arm—the Nazi artifacts.
“Javier!” Jeth shouted, and ran toward the fence. His voice finally registered with Tomlinson, who had the confused expression of a man trying to disentangle reality from a bad dream. He looked into Heller’s plum-bright face for a moment, then slowly removed his hands from the man’s neck. He stared at his fingers as if they were strangers.
Before Heller could recover, I had Tomlinson by the arm, pulling him. “This guy wants them to shoot Javier. Let’s get over there.”
J avier appeared dazed by what was going on around him, a man who’d paddled an inner tube across a hundred miles of ocean but who now looked as indecisive as a child, standing motionless in his red T-shirt and ball cap.
He was encircled by uniformed deputies who were using whatever they could find for cover—a fifty-gallon drum, abandoned pontoons, trees—as they kept their guns trained on the man, leapfrogging into position. More than once they’d told him to drop the weapon, get down on the ground, don’t make them shoot.
Javier just stood there.
But the cops were taking it slow, which told me Javier had gotten lucky. These were pros who’d read the signs correctly: The man was frozen; immobilized by emotional overload, the same way some kids freeze when they get to the highest limb on the tree.
“Javier! Don’t move.”
Jeth’s voice. Magic today because it was like watching Tomlinson again, the way Javier’s face changed: puzzled, then aware but confused.
He focused; saw Jeth and Tomlinson running toward him, me not far behind. His face came alive. Javier smiled wanly, and shrugged his shoulders: See the stupid thing I’ve done?
The cops were not reassured. They wanted Javier to remain catatonic, not suddenly alert and maybe thinking of doing something stupid to impress his friends. They also didn’t want civilians running toward them, screwing up their lines of fire—something made clear when a pair of deputies faced us, one of them yelling, “Stop! Get on the ground!” Pointing a left index finger at us but his weapon drawn.
We were close enough to hear Javier call out, “Hey, those are my friends. Don’t shoot my friends, okay? They didn’t do nothin’. If you want, I’ll drop my pistol. Okay? Watch. That’s what I’m doing. I’m dropping my pistol”—the deputies had Javier’s chest centered above their gunsights, leaning as he let the pistol roll off his finger to the ground—“See? I tell you something, I do it. My friends, though, they just want to help—”
Which is as far as he got before he was tackled from behind. Other deputies charged in, one of them kneeling to take Javier’s pistol.
“It’s not even loaded, man, ’cause I couldn’t find the bullets.” Javier, now being handcuffed, sounded apologetic. “That storm, the cabrone, Carlos. Everything in my house is wet, piled up like garbage. But I don’t want to shoot nobody anyway. I just want my boat.”
They had him on his feet, frisking him again. “See the pretty green boat over there? That’s mine, man.”
A deputy checked the cuffs as he told Javier that he was under arrest, then began to recite his Miranda rights.
As they were leading him away, Javier called to Jeth, “I didn’t tell you but I shoulda. Anita, she left me, and the girls, too. The storm took them, it was the same thing. That cabrone, the hurricane. That fishing client of mine who’s an attorney, call him, okay? You know his name.”
Javier’s bemused look again: God’s shitty jokes!
B ehind me, I could hear Bern Heller yelling, “That’s it? That’s all? The guy’s obviously crazy, comes on my property with a gun, and all you do is talk to him?” His throat was hoarse. His voice was shaking, he was so mad.
“Mr. Castillo is on his way to jail. What did you want us to do, Mr. Heller? Shoot him?”
Heller nearly said, Yes, but caught himself. Instead, he pointed at us. “What about these three jerks? They’re not only trespassing, we caught them stealing. We already recovered our things from their boat.”
I turned to see the deputy rip a sheet of paper from his clipboard at the same instant he lifted his head, seeing me. He spent a moment looking at my bloody shirt, at the gash on my face caused by the head butt.
“Whose boat?”
“The guy wearing glasses. His boat.”
“The man who’s bleeding, you mean.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He stole from me and wouldn’t give the stuff back, so I detained him.”
The deputy said slowly, “Your employees removed property from a private vessel?”
“Because we saw them stash it in his boat. They stole it from us!”
The officer moved his eyes to Jeth, then to Moe, who was on his knees trying to wipe the fish stink off his hands having already tried the towels. The deputy looked at Tomlinson, with his hippie hair, wearing the magic green goggles around his neck.
“I’m going to get my tape recorder,” the officer told us. “A couple more deputies, too, to take statements.” His tone saying: This is going to take awhile.
8
Bern looked forward to telling Moe that he was fired, then slapping the man stupid. Stupider. The loser: he’d just stood there and admitted to the cops that he’d taken the stuff from that jerk’s boat. Moe had time, he could have made up a story.
When they unfolded the towels and saw the Nazi badges, even the cops didn’t say anything for a while, all of them breathing through their noses as they moved closer to look. A diamond swastika. Silver skull with diamond eyes. A German eagle on metal that might have been brass, it was so black.
In Milwaukee, by the airport, there was a shop that sold stuff like that. On the south side, near the nudie bars Bern frequented whenever he was in town, always staying at the best hotel in the world, the Pfister, down by the convention center.
The store called itself a war museum, but was really a place that sold retail. Japanese samurai swords, uniforms, old medals, a German Luger pistol engraved with SS lightning bolts—Bern had bought a working replica for his collection—and similar things. Expensive.
Nothing in the place, though, as impressive as the diamond swastika. Probably nothing as valuable, either.
“Who knows what else was in that glob of stuff?” Bern had said to Moe as the cops pulled away, the lunatic Cuban handcuffed in back of a squad car. “Damn it, we may never know now!”
Which was true because the cops had made Moe give back everything he’d taken from Ford’s boat.
Ford, being a smart aleck even with his swollen face, had thanked the cops for the diamond swastika, and offered to let Heller keep the bucket, which the jerk had filled with rotten fish. His tone had been so easygoing, eager to be fair, that the deputies had actually said, “There you go, Mr. Heller. Dr. Ford’s not filing charges, and he’s willing to compromise.”
Redneck Cracker jerks, sticking together, even though the cops pretended to be impartial—they’d as good as told Ford he should press charges. They probably bowled together on weekends. Belonged to the same lodge.
He’d like to get Ford alone. The man thought he’d taken a beating? Bern hadn’t even gotten started good. On his grandfather’s farm outside Baraboo, what they’d done to pigs to get a laugh before slaughtering them—that’s what he wanted to do to Ford. No…the hippie first, then Ford. Catch them someplace in the middle of nowhere, nobody around to hear.