I said shoot it! For Christ’s sake, he’s gonna bite me!
The Kid suddenly stands, Don’t shoot! he cries. He’s friendly! He won’t hurt you!
The cop swings his helmeted head around and peers through night-vision glasses at the Kid and Larry Somerset. He looks like a giant bug standing on its hind legs. He brings his gun up and aims it at the Kid.
You got ten seconds to get the fuck outa here. You and the other guy. Otherwise you’re busted back to prison.
For what? We haven’t done nothing!
Obstructing a police officer. Now get the fuck outa here you disgusting little creep before I change my mind and bust both of you and your fucking lizard for resisting arrest.
The Kid turns and runs. He’s got no alternative. Larry tries to follow him but he doesn’t know the camp in the dark the way the Kid does and after a few steps he stumbles and falls. The Kid hears his face smack against the concrete—Kid, help me! I’m hurt! I’m bleeding! — but keeps on running anyhow. The hell with him. It’s every man for himself. As he races past the civilians at the bottom of the pathway he sees that they actually are reporters — they’re holding skinny notebooks and are writing furiously in them and a couple of them are talking into digital recorders. They have strange little smirks on their faces like they’re customers at a sex show who don’t want you to know it’s turning them on.
The Kid keeps running. He sees bright red and yellow and white lights flashing up on the Causeway and hears sirens wailing as ambulances and paddy wagons and more cruisers arrive. TV crews too. He keeps running. He makes it up the path to the guardrail, jumps over the rail onto the Causeway, then races panting down the ramp onto the highway that leads to the Barriers. He’s still running. His heart is pounding. His lungs feel like they’re on fire. Turning back he sees a pair of patrol boats cutting full speed across the Bay toward the encampment. Coming to pick up the guys who couldn’t make it up to the ambulances and paddy wagons parked on the Causeway — probably including the Rabbit, oh Jesus, the poor fucking Rabbit who looked like his leg got broken and Larry Somerset who looked too scared and bloody to get up and run after he fell. The hell with them. Nothing he could do for them anyhow. He slows to a jog. Then he walks.
The Kid wishes he had taken his bike but there was no way that cop would have let him. He’s lucky he thought to grab his backpack. He’s lucky he slept with his clothes on because he was creeped out by Larry Somerset even though he’s not gay. He’s worried about Iggy but figures once he and Larry took off there was no reason for the cop to shoot Iggy anymore. If they do anything they’ll turn him over to the SPCA or Animal Rescue and he’ll end up in Reptile Village. As soon as the Kid has a new home set up he’ll check in with the SPCA and Animal Rescue people and try to retrieve him. If he’s not with the SPCA or Animal Rescue he’ll be at Reptile Village, which is probably where he ought to be anyhow. Living with other reptiles instead of with humans.
The Kid is rationalizing, he knows. He is going to miss Iggy. But the iguana was getting harder and harder to feed and care for properly especially down under the Causeway and he knows that Iggy will be better off living a more natural life with his own kind than chained to a cinder block down where there isn’t much sunlight and there are no other snakes or lizards for company. Just rats and homeless sex offenders. And no trees to climb.
The sun has broken the horizon and the rumpled silver gray clouds overhead are pushed halfway back by the emerging blue sky. The Bay on either side glistens in the clean new light. Palm trees clatter in the offshore breeze. Traffic has started to build as commuters from the mainland head for work on the islands and the residents of the islands start the daily drive from their homes to their jobs on the mainland. The Kid still has a couple hours to kill before he has to show up for work at the Mirador. The eastbound cars flash past him and to get safely out of their way he steps over the guardrail onto the grass and walks there.
Things could be worse, he thinks. He escaped. And no one’s chasing him. He could be locked in a paddy wagon like Larry Somerset probably is: on his way to court and hauled back to jail for breaking parole by resisting arrest or refusing to disperse or whatever phony charge they come up with. He could be injured or worse like the Rabbit and a couple others he saw getting clubbed by the cops. But he’s not, he’s a free man. More or less. And it’s morning in Calusa.
CHAPTER SIX
IT TAKES THE KID OVER AN HOUR TO WALK from the Causeway over to the Barriers and south onto Clifton Road and then the half-mile residential curl alongside the Bayshore Golf Club. From the sidewalk at Clifton and West Twenty-third he watches with a willed curiosity the retirees out for their first eighteen holes. His legs are still wobbly weak and his lungs burn from the long run to safety and ten years of smoking cigarettes, a habit he caught back when he was twelve and hoped that dangling a ciggie from his lips might make him seem older because people kept mistaking him for nine or ten due to his being short and skinny and big-eared. He was eager to be noticed back then but not for that.
Now he’s eager not to be noticed for anything.
He tries distracting himself with the sight of elderly pink people in pastel shorts and shirts whacking with sticks at little white balls, the kind of people he’s never known personally or even spoken to except to say, May I clear, sir? at the restaurant, people whose thoughts he cannot imagine, whose past, present, and future lives are incomprehensible to him. As if they were members of a different species. He wants to understand what it must feel like to be them. To wake in the morning and shower and shave and read the Wall Street Journal or whatever at breakfast — freshly squeezed orange juice and bacon and eggs cooked just the way you like them by a Jamaican lady who is employed by you — and then you take your bag of golf clubs from the trunk of your S-Class Benz and walk from your walled-in rancho de luxe across Clifton Road to the Bayshore Golf Club where you meet two or three fellow retirees from New York or Philadelphia and stroll out to the first tee chatting knowledgeably about yesterday’s Dow Jones average and the gross national product.
Whatever they are.
Who are those fucking people? the Kid wonders and beneath his wondering hopes that the question will keep him from thinking about what he just went through back at the encampment beneath the Causeway. He can keep the shock of the police and press raid pretty well out of his mind almost as if it never happened but it’s harder for him to ignore the fact that now he’s scared of being picked up by the cops and charged with resisting arrest or unlawful flight or any of the other dozen charges they could easily stick on him if they wanted to because no one will believe that he’s innocent of anything. Even of just being alive. He’s guilty of that too. Being alive. Besides that he’s lost his squat, his safe haven, his home. And he’s worried about Otis the Rabbit and Iggy and feels sorry and a little ashamed that he abandoned Larry Somerset in spite of finding the guy creepy. Guilty and ashamed. Like he did something immoral by running for his life.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE’S SITTING ALONE AT A CAFÉ TABLE outside a small bookstore on the fifteen-block-long section of Rampart Road that’s given over to pedestrians — a chic sprawl of sidewalk cafés, restaurants, bars, brasseries, and upscale shops for people who want to be seen by each other alongside souvenir stores for short-term sunburnt tourists and sunglass and sneaker stores for young people who like to think of themselves as raging against the machine. A fine mingling spot for people-watching if you’re into that but the Kid is here because it’s still early in the day and there aren’t many customers and no one wants his table so he’s free to idle away a few hours over a cup of coffee and not get nudged off it by the waiter. It’s a bookstore café with a newsstand and a sprinkling of people are sitting nearby reading newspapers just as he is although he’s not reading his newspaper exactly. He’s cashed one of Larry Somerset’s hundred-dollar bills at the bank on the corner of Clifton and Rampart and has bought a city map at the newsstand and a cup of coffee and an apricot muffin at the café. He’s opened the paper to the real estate section and is working his way down the listings for studio apartment rentals.