Avila said, "Gimme the money."
"Eat shit," Snapper growled.
When he turned away, Avila hopped on his back.
Snapper shook him off. Avila pounced again, ripping Snapper's suit and knocking the Johnnie Walker from his hand. The two men locked together, spinning in the mist. Ultimately Snapper backed into a sabal palm tree, slamming Avila against the trunk. He made a true squeak as he slid to the ground.
Snapper, panting, weaved toward Edie: "Hold the damn gun while I strangle this fucker."
Halfheartedly she took the pistol and held it on Bonnie and Skink. Snapper fell upon Avila and breathlessly beat him. Avila was surprised by the clarity of the pain. When his nose exploded under Snapper's fist, he realized he'd been foolhardy to count on beatific intervention. Evidently Chango hadn't forgiven him for the aborted coati sacrifice.
As Snapper's grimy fingernails closed upon his throat, Avila inventoried the multiple sources of his agony: the fractured nose, the sliver of broken whiskey bottle in his right thigh, the unhealed crucifixion hole in his left hand, the goat-related goring in his groin and, soon, a crushed larynx.
He thought: Forget the seven grand. Screw Gar Whit-mark. It's time to run.
Avila brought his right knee hard to Snapper's crotch. Snapper's eyelids fluttered but he didn't release his grip on Avila's neck. Avila kneed him twice more, ultimately producing the desired result. Snapper moaned and rolled away. Avila struggled to his feet. He took three steps and slipped. When he got up again, he heard Snapper rising behind him. Frantically Avila bolted for the road.
The rain made it hard to discern the details of the two men running along Highway One. Neither was large enough to be the governor, or physically fit enough to be Augustine. From where his Highway Patrol car was parked, a hundred yards away, Jim Tile was unable to see if the tall man had a crooked jaw. He might have been any old Keys drunk in a soggy pinstriped suit.
The black Jeep was still parked at the Paradise Palms. The trooper decided to sit still and wait.
Avila made it half a mile before he ran out of strength. He stopped on the Tea-Table Bridge and doubled over, sucking air. He tried to flag passing motorists, but none found room in their icy hearts for a bedraggled, saliva-flecked, blood-spattered hitchhiker. Avila was further dejected to see, framed in the window of a speeding Airstream, a freckle-faced teenaged girl, snapping his photograph.
What a sick world, he thought, when an injured human being becomes a roadside amusement.
Meanwhile, out of the veil of rain came Snapper. He was shambling like a zombie across the bridge. For a weapon he'd selected a rusty axle from an abandoned Jet Ski trailer.
Avila raised both arms in supplication. "Let's forget the whole thing, OK?"
"Don't move." Snapper gripped the axle at one end and brought it high over his head, like a sledgehammer.
With a morose peep, Avila hurled himself sideways off the bridge. The drop was only fourteen feet, but given his dread of heights, it might as well have been fourteen stories. Avila was mildly amazed to survive the impact.
The water was warm and the tide was strong. He let it carry him out the channel toward the ocean, because he wasn't strong enough to swim against it. When the sodden weight of his clothing began to drag him under, he kicked off his shoes and pants, and stripped out of his shirt. Soon the lights from the Overseas Highway were absorbed by darkness and bad weather. Avila could see nothing but the occasional high-altitude flash of heat lightning. When a heavy object thumped him in the small of the back, he was sure it was the snout of a great white shark and that death was imminent.
But it was only a piece of plywood. Avila clung to it like a crippled frog. He thought of a sublime irony what if the life-saving lumber had blown off one of the roofs that he'd been bribed not to inspect? Perhaps it was Change's idea of a practical joke.
All night long, adrift in the chop, Avila cursed the hurricane for bringing him such misery: the sadistic doughnut man, Whitmark and, of course, Snapper. The rainfall stopped at dawn but the sun never broke free of the clouds. It was midafternoon before Avila heard an engine. As he shouted for help, a tall white fishing boat idled within hailing distance. Avila waved. The skipper and his tropically garbed clients waved back.
"Hang in there, amigo," the skipper yelled, and trolled away.
Twenty minutes later, a Coast Guard boat arrived and took Avila aboard. The crew gave him dry clothes, hot coffee and homemade chili. He ate in appreciative silence. Afterwards he was led belowdeck to a small briefing room, where he was greeted by a man from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
In halting Spanish, the immigration man asked Avila for the name of the Cuban port he had fled. Avila laughed and explained that he was from Miami.
"Then what're you doing out here in your underwear?"
Avila said a robber was chasing him down the road, so he jumped off a bridge in Islamorada.
"Tell the truth," the immigration man said sternly. "Obviously you're a rafter. Now where did you come from-Havana? Mariel?"
Avila was about to argue when it dawned, on him that there was no faster way to shed his burdens. What could he look forward to in his current life but an unforgiving wife, a traumatized mother-in-law, personal bankruptcy, the wrath of Gar Whitmark and a possible criminal indictment?
He asked the immigration man: "What will happen to me if I confess?"
"Nothing. You'll be processed at Krome and most likely released."
"If I am a political refugee."
"That's the usual procedure."
"Si," Avila said. "Yo soy balsero." I am a rafter.
The immigration man seemed so relieved that Avila was left to conclude (as a former civil servant himself) that he'd saved the man mountains of paperwork.
"Su nombre, par favor?"
"Juan," Avila replied. "Juan Gomez. From Havana."
"And your occupation in Cuba?"
"I was a building inspector."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They waited in the Jeep-Edie Marsh up front, holding the revolver; Bonnie Lamb pressed against the governor in the back seat.
It was Bonnie who said: "What if he doesn't come back?"
Edie was thinking the same thing. Hoping it. The problem was, Snapper had the damn car keys. She asked the man in the shower cap: "You know how to hot-wire one of these?"
"That would be illegal."
The cinematic smile startled her. She said, "Why aren't you afraid?"
"Of what?"
"The gun. Dying. Anything."
Bonnie said she was frightened enough for all of them. The rain slackened; still no sign of Snapper, or Avila. Edie had difficulty keeping her eyes off the man called Skink.
"What is it," he said. "My hat?"
She lifted the .357. "You could take this away from me anytime you wanted. You know it."
"Maybe I don't want to."
That's what scared her. What was the point of holding a gun on a person like this?
He said, "I won't hurt you." Again with the smile.
Edie Marsh was a sucker for laugh lines around the eyes. She said to Bonnie: "I think I know what you see in this guy."
"We're just friends."
"Really? Then maybe you can tell me," Edie said, "what's he got planned?"