Brian Keyes closed the door quietly and locked it. He took Kara Lynn's hand and led her to the bed. They lay down and held one another; he, hugging a little tighter. Keyes realized that he had crossed a cold threshold and could never return to what he was, what he had trained to be—a professional bystander, an expertly detached voyeur who was skilled at reconstructing violence after the fact, but never present and never participatory. For reporters, the safety net was the ability to walk away, polish it off, forget about it. It was as easy as turning off the television, because whatever was happening always happened to somebody else; reality was past tense and once removed, something to be observed but not experienced. Two years ago, at such a newsworthy moment, Keyes himself would have been racing south with the wolf pack, jogging through the hammock to reach the jetty first, his notebook flipped open, his eyes sponging up each detail, counting up the bullet holes in the corpse, by now gray and bloodless. And two years ago he might have gotten sick at the sight and gone off to vomit in the woods, where the other reporters couldn't see him. Later he would have stood back and studied the death scene, but could only have guessed at what might have happened, or why.
"We don't have to talk about it," Kara Lynn said. She stirred against him. "Let's just lie here for a little while."
"I had no choice. He shot Garcia."
"This was the same man we saw outside the country club. You're certain?"
Keyes nodded.
He said, "Maybe I ought to say a prayer or something. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you kill somebody?"
"Only in spaghetti westerns." She slid her arms around his waist. "Try to get some rest. You did the right thing."
"I know," he said dully. "The only thing I feel guilty about is not feeling guilty. The sonofabitch deserved to die."
The words came out soulless. Kara Lynn shuddered. Sometimes he frightened her, just a little.
"Hey, Sundance, you want to see my gown?"
"Sure."
She bounced up from the bed. "Stay right here, don't move," she said. "I'll model it for you."
"I'd like that," Keyes said. "I really would."
At noon Al Garcia awoke. He gazed around the hospital room and felt warmed by its pale yellow walls and the slivered shadows from the Venetian blinds. He was too drugged to pay much attention to the burning in his arm or the huge knot on the base of his neck or the burbling sound from inside his chest. Instead the detective was washed by a mood of elemental triumph: he was alive and Jesus Bernal was dead. Deader than a goddamn cockroach. Al Garcia relished the role of survivor, even if he owed his life not to his own faltering reflexes, but to Brian Keyes. The kid had turned out to be rock steady, and strong as a bear to haul him out of the ocean the way he had.
Groggily Garcia greeted his wife, who offered spousely sympathy but peppered him with questions that he pretended not to hear. Afterward, an orthopedic surgeon stopped in to report that although Garcia's left arm had been saved, it was too early to know if the muscles and bones would mend properly; the shoulder basically was being held together by steel pins and catgut. Garcia worriedly asked if any shotgun pellets had knicked the spine, and the doctor said no, though the initial fall on his neck had caused some temporary numbness. Garcia wiggled the toes on both feet and seemed satisfied that he would walk again.
He was drifting off to sleep when the chief of police showed up. Garcia winked at him.
"The doctors say you're going to make it," the chief whispered.
"Piece-a-cake," Garcia murmured.
"Look, I know this is a bad time, but the media's gone absolutely batshit over this shooting. We're trying to put together a short release. Is there anything you can tell me about what happened out there?"
"Found the body?"
"Yes," the chief replied. "Shot four times with a nine-millimeter. The last one really did the trick, blew his brains halfway to Bimini."
"Fucker blasted me with a sawed-off."
"I know," the chief said. "The question is, who blasted him?"
"Tomorrow," Garcia said, closing his eyes.
"Al, please."
"Tomorrow, the whole story." Or as much of it as was absolutely necessary.
"Okay, but I've got to say somethingto the press this afternoon. They're tearing around like a pack of frigging hyenas."
"Tell 'em you don't know nuthin'. Tell 'em I haven't regained consciousness."
"That might work," the chief mused.
"Sure it'll work. One more thing ... " Garcia paused to adjust the plastic tube in his nose. "Tell the nurses I want a TV."
"Sounds reasonable."
"A color TV for tonight."
"Sure, Al."
"Don't want to miss the parade."
In the mid-1800's Miami was known as Fort Dallas. It was a mucky, rutted, steaming, snake-infested settlement of two hundred souls, perennially under attack from crafty Seminoles or decimated by epidemics of malaria. This was a time long before Fisher, Flagler, and the other land grabbers arrived to suck their fortunes out of North America's most famous swamp. It was a time when the local obsession was survival, not square footage, when the sun was not a commodity but a blistering curse.
No one knew what Fort Dallas might eventually become, not that knowing would have altered its future. The dream was always there, sustenance against the cruel hardships. Then, as now, the smell of opportunity was too strong to ignore, attracting a procession of grafters, con artists, Confederate deserters, geeks, bushwackers, rustlers, Gypsies, and slave traders. Their inventiveness and tenacity and utter contempt for the wilderness around them would set the tone for the development of South Florida. They preserved only what was free and immutable—the sunshine and the sea—and marked the rest for destruction, because how else could you sell it? In its natural state, the soggy frontier south of Lake Okeechobee simply was not marketable. Still, the transformation of the face of the land began slowly, not so much because of the Indians or the terrain as because of the lagging technology of plunder. Finally came the railroads and the dredge and the bulldozer, and the end of Fort Dallas.
For thirty years, beginning around the turn of the century, South Florida grew at an astonishing pace. Rabid opportunists seized as much land as they could, swapped it, platted it, sold it. Where there was no land they dredged it from the bottom of Biscayne Bay, manufactured an island, named it after a flower or a daughter or themselves, and peddled it as a natural oasis. All this was done with great efficiency and enthusiasm, but with no vision whatsoever.
Those wheeler-dealers who didn't blow their brains out after the Hurricane of '26 or hang themselves after the real-estate bust were eventually rewarded with untold wealth. Today they were venerated for their perseverance and toughness of spirit, and some even had public parks named after them. These characters are regarded as the true pioneers of South Florida.
It is their descendants, the heirs to paradise (and to the banks and the land), who put on the annual Orange Bowl Parade.
The pageant began a half-century ago as an honest parade, Main Street entertainment for little children and tourists. But with the ascension of television the event grew and changed character. Gradually it became an elaborate instrument of self-promotion, deliberately staged to show the rest of the United States (suffering through winter) a sunny, scenic, and sexy sanctuary. The idea was to make everybody drop their snow shovels and hop the next jumbo jet for Florida. To this end, the Orange Bowl Parade was as meticulously orchestrated as a nuclear strike. Those who would appear on camera were carefully selected: high-school bands from Bumfuck, Iowa, awe shining from their sunburned faces as they bugled down Biscayne Boulevard; a sprinkling of Caribbean blacks and South American Hispanics, evidence of Miami's exotic but closely supervised cultural mix; the most innocuous of TV celebrities, delighted to shill for the tourist board in exchange for comped rooms at the Fontainebleau.