He heard the boy’s quick intake of breath. Heard the boy whisper, “Jesus Christ, it’s… You’re real?”
Prax answered, “Oh, yeah. Every fucking story you’ve ever heard. I’m real.”
Oh, man, he liked that. Loved the timing of it, the kid’s reaction, and the way he’d listened, frozen, as Prax spoke his best line, laid out the words just right. Now, readjusting his mask, he motioned with the blowtorch. “Get your clothes on. Do what I say, you won’t get hurt. Move. ”
When the boy didn’t budge, he turned, walked across to the aquarium, and plunged the nozzle into the water. A portable torch burns at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and within seconds, the fish and large moray began to contort in the super-heated bubbles.
“Stop! Quit it.”
“Your voice. Too loud.”
“You’re killing them.”
“I’ll stop when you move.”
“Go to hell. I won’t.”
Stubborn little son-of-a-bitch.
Looking at the kid, trying to read him, Prax said, “You do what I tell you to do, or… my partners are in your mother’s room right now. I’ll call them, they’ll bring her in here, and I’ll use this on your mother. How’d you like that? I’ll burn her fucking face right off.”
“You leave my mother alone!”
That did it. Prax Lourdes could hear it in the boy’s voice. From now on, anything he wanted, anything, all he had to do was threaten to have someone harm the woman.
The torch was still in the water. He watch the moray writhe on the bottom. Then the clown-colored fish began to explode into fleshy clouds as their air bladders ruptured.
“Get your clothes on. You’d better hurry.”
The boy leaped out of bed and found the reading lamp: Big kid with blond hair, shoulders like they were built from planks, square jaw, and pale eyes. He wore boxer underwear, his abdominal muscles symmetrical.
“I’m hurrying. Enough. ”
He didn’t sound so self-assured now.
Prax lifted the torch from the tank and closed the valve as he watched the boy dress. He was already dreading the trip back through the tunnel, having to squeeze through that darkness.
To take his mind off it, he settled his attention on the boy, concentrating on the boy’s face, the way it was constructed. Along with all his Internet research on plastic surgery, it was something else he’d been doing lately: studying the facial makeup of other men-particularly young men.
There were interesting, subtle differences.
Staring at the boy, Prax was startled to realize that the kid was handsome; had a face that was nicely proportioned. Maybe even beautifully proportioned. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, considering his famous mother.
Jesus, to have that face, his soft skin.
Prax Lourdes was torn.
The most innovative reconstructive surgeon in America was Dr. Valerie Santos. She wasn’t like that strung-out Mexican quack he’d been using.
Yeah, Dr. Valerie. That’s what the press called her. Cool lady who went by her first name. All those awards, her photo in People, and a great web page where someone answered e-mails from potential patients who had questions.
He’d already received several detailed replies.
Fake profiles, that’s the way he was playing the Internet con. His most ingenious was posing as a teenage South American burn victim who was working on a film script.
Dr. Santos and Prax were destined. He knew it the instant he read about her, because of where she did her magic: Tampa General Burn Unit, right across the bay from the little carney trailer park where he still remembered spending winters as a boy.
Lourdes loved the idea of cornering the big-shot lady doctor, referencing one of her e-mails, then pointing to the kid’s face and telling her, “Harvest that. ”
There was something else, however, he’d been coveting: the chance to light the boy’s clothes on fire.
What a rush that would be, watching this pretty child run.
ONE
The morning that Pilar Santana Fuentes arrived at Dinkin’s Bay and told me that our son had been kidnapped, I was in waist-deep water, a couple hundred yards down the mangrove shore from my rickety stilt house, wrestling with a sixty-pound tarpon.
I heard a woman’s voice calling in Spanish, “Marion? Marion! I thought you were expecting me.”
She sounded irritated. Demanding. Which didn’t fit with my image of who Pilar is, or was in terms of her normal behavior, but I let it go.
She’d telephoned from Central America. So, yes, I’d been expecting her. Even so, I was unprepared for the thumping heart and twittering, nervous jolt I got when I saw her. Nervous, because I believed her to be my long-lost love.
I like interesting-looking women, and women who are interesting. I have zero interest in the Hollywood concept of beauty unless humor, character, and intellect are added to the mix. Those are the sexiest of qualities. I try to maintain those standards, all the while understanding that I am not the most attractive of men at first glance. Maybe not even at third or fourth glance.
I like women as people. That is a grounding common denominator.
Pilar undoubtedly has all the feminine qualities that attract males of our species. Her body is so achingly, obviously female that the first time I saw her, I felt an actual sensation of physical pain. At the time, she was married. I suspect I felt pain because I believed that I had no chance of winning her as a lover.
Wrong.
Later, after we became lovers, I felt the same radiating ache at the thought of losing her. I thought I never would.
Wrong again.
Now, seeing her for the first time in years, my reaction was familiar though unexpected, and so was the powerful lancet of pain.
I had my right hand clamped on the tarpon’s lower jaw, the fish’s body cradled in my left arm. Tomlinson was in the water with me. Tomlinson, my storklike friend with his blond and gray hippie hair braided into samurai shocks. He was shirtless and had one of his old sarongs tied Gandhi-style between his legs, like baggy shorts or diapers.
Wearing his hair like a samurai was his new thing. He’d taken to wearing samurai robes on his boat, too, and around my house when he visited. Something to do with his decision to re-enter this life as “a spiritual warrior.”
Whatever that meant.
That was the kind of question I asked only when I had a lot of time-and a lot of his favorite rum on stock, which is El Dorado, a superb but little-known rum from Guyana. Tomlinson had found El Dorado on a recent South American “rum quest” and was never without the stuff.
He was holding a clear plastic water-gun. In the squirt gun, I’d diluted several milligrams of metomidate. Metomidate is a potent, effective tranquilizer. Tomlinson’s job was to squirt the mixture through the tarpon’s mouth very, very slowly, irrigating its gills until the fish began to show signs of light sedation.
After that, I would steer the tarpon back to my lab and into the big galvanized holding tank I’d stationed there just for this project.
Working with biologists from the University of Florida, we were trying to be the first to spawn and hatch tarpon in captivity. Interesting work.
To get an idea of what a tarpon looks like, imagine a giant, prehistoric herring. With its chromium scales and massive tail, it’s one of the world’s great game fish. For Florida, the tarpon is a swimming, breathing precious metals industry-pure silver. Same with much of the Caribbean.
Sportsmen travel from around the world just for the chance of a hook-up. The fish brings millions of tourism dollars annually into the state.
Yet, few seem to appreciate the animal’s economic worth.
Over the last few decades, loss of habitat and deteriorating water quality have impacted the tarpon population. Fishing guides from the islands, Key West to Cedar Key, have been saying for years what we biologists have been slow to prove: Each year, there are fewer fish.