One day after the state trooper was shot in the parking lot, paramedics again were summoned to the Paradise Palms Motel in the Florida Keys. This time a guest named Levon Stichler had suffered a mild myocardial infarction. On the ride to the emergency room, the old man deliriously insisted he'd been held captive at the motel by two bossy prostitutes. Doctors at Mariners Hospital notified Levon Stichler's daughter in Saint Paul, who was understandably alarmed to learn of her father's hallucinations. After hanging up the phone, she informed her children that Grandpa would be coming to stay for a while.
The gnawed remains of Ira Jackson, identified by X-rays, were cremated and interred at a private ceremony on Staten Island. Several Teamster bosses sent flowers, as did the retired comptroller of the Central States Pension Fund. Three weeks after the hurricane, the African lion that attacked Ira Jackson was captured while foraging in a Dumpster behind a Pizza Hut in Perrine. The tranquilized animal was dipped, vaccinated, wormed and nicknamed "Pepperoni." It is now on display at a wildlife park in West Palm Beach.
The murder of Tony Torres remains unsolved, although police suspect his wife of arranging the crime so that she could hoard the hurricane money from Midwest Casualty. Detectives seeking to question Neria Torres learned that she'd moved to Belize, leased an oceanfront villa and taken up with an expatriate American fishing guide. A court-ordered inspection of her late husband's bank records revealed that before leaving the United States, Mrs. Torres moved $201,000 through a single checking account. The house at 15600 Calusa was never repaired and remained abandoned for twenty-two months, until it was finally condemned and destroyed.
Five weeks after the hurricane, Fred Dove went home to Omaha and presented ,his wife with two miniature dachshunds orphaned by the storm. He, Dennis Reedy and eight other Midwest Casualty adjusters were honored for their heroic work on the Florida crisis-response team. To publicize its swift and compassionate processing of hurricane claims, the company featured the men in a national television commercial that aired during the Bob Hope Christmas Special. Fred Dove was hopeful that Edie Marsh would contact him after the commercial was broadcast, but he never heard from her again.
Faced with a class-action lawsuit by 186 customers whose homes had more or less collapsed in the hurricane, builder Gar Whitmark declared bankruptcy and revived his construction companies under different names. He was killed thirteen months later in a freak accident on a job site, when high winds from a tropical storm knocked a bucket of hot tar off a roof and through the windshield of his Infiniti Q45. His troubled widow gave up prescription medicine and joined the Church of Scientology, to which she donated her late husband's entire estate.
The body of Clyde Nottage Jr. was flown from Guadalajara to Durham, North Carolina, where-at his family's request-an autopsy was performed at the Duke University Medical Center. Four days later, Mexican authorities arrested Dr. Alan Caulk, seized his laboratory and deported him to the Bahamas. Oddly, no sheep were ever found at the Aragon Clinic.
Despite contradictory affidavits from two preeminent psychiatrists, attorneys for Durham Gas Meat & Tobacco persuaded a judge in Raleigh to declare Clyde Nottage Jr mentally unfit. The posthumous certification was based on disturbing medical evidence supplied by Mexican officials, and sealed forever by the North Carolina courts. Sixty days after Nottage's death, DGM&T resumed production of Bronco cigarets. The advertising contract with Rodale & Burns was not renewed.
Eleven months after the hurricane, a biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service made a gruesome find in a remote upland area of the Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo: a deformed human jaw. Locked to the bone was an adjustable iron bar popularly used to deter auto theft. Dental X-rays identified the owner of the mandible as Lester Maddox Parsons, a career felon and convicted killer wanted for violent assaults on two Florida Highway Patrol officers. According to the Monroe County Medical Examiner, evidencd at the scene indicated that Parsons likely starved to death. A search of the hammocks turned up the remaining pieces of his skeleton, except for the skull.
Augustine Herrera sold his late uncle's wildlife farm and moved with Bonnie Brooks to Chokoloskee, a fishing village on the edge of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands. There he bought a crab boat and built a pineboard house with space for a large library, including a wall for his collection of skulls, now numbering twenty.
Bonnie Brooks took up watercolors, cycling and outdoor photography. Her remarkable picture of a pair of bald eagles nesting in the boughs of a cypress made the cover of Audubon magazine.
Most of the wild animals that escaped from Felix Mojack's farm during the hurricane were recaptured or, unfortunately, killed by armed home owners. The exceptions include one female cougar, forty-four rare birds, more than three hundred exotic lizards, thirty-eight snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and twenty-nine adult rhesus monkeys, which have organized into several wily troops that roam Dade County to this day.
THE END.