The ship broke off the pedestal and sailed down a step, then a second, and a third, gathering momentum like a raft hitting the rapids of the Colorado River. When it smashed into the floor, the queen pitched forward, and so did I.
The flashlight beam turned, and I heard a gasp from Jo Jo.
The queen snapped in two at the waist. Her head separated and bounced across the floor. The top half of the queen’s torso flew straight ahead. I leapt from the canopy just before it hit, and I rolled, this time on my bleeding shoulder, the pain shooting through my arm. I bounded to my feet and tried to stand, bracing myself with one hand against something soft and spongy. I looked down and found my hand inside the queen’s head. I tossed it away, thinking how much lighter it felt than I thought it would.
I heard a cry from Jo Jo Baroso, an animalistic shriek of horror and pain, followed by a sickening gurgling sound. She was trying to say something but sounded as if she were underwater. I turned to look. The flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at her twitching feet. I picked up the light and shined it on her face.
The queen’s scepter was lodged in her throat, the point of the star buried just below the chin. Blood poured from the wound, coating the oversized silver dollar that sat just below the star. The life draining from her, Jo Jo said my name, softly, and what sounded like, “Why…”
I knelt beside her.
“…did you leave…”
Her lips were still moving when…
The explosion.
Echoing off the rock walls.
Sending a cloud of dust up and then down again.
Stillness. The roof didn’t fall in.
A couple of rocks tumbled from somewhere above, and the timber groaned. Then a couple more rocks fell.
Then quiet.
Nothing happened.
Until a boulder the size of a Buick crashed from above, splintering the pedestal, from which the Silver Queen so recently sailed. The timbers groaned louder. Smaller rocks began peppering the floor like a stinging hailstorm. A storm of dust rose from the floor.
“ Blinky,” I yelled in the darkness.
But there was no reply.
Around the chamber, wood timbers shrieked and split. A roar from above grew louder, like an approaching jet.
I scurried toward the ledge with short, quick strides, then dived across headfirst, pulling myself into the tunnel just as the horizontal timber crashed to the floor, followed by what sounded like the entire mountain collapsing into the chamber. In seconds, the opening was sealed tight by a thousand tons of rocks. I lay in the wet tunnel and listened to the rumble of thunder just a few feet away. The floor shimmied, and the black water rippled as the mountain coughed and sputtered and rearranged its parts. When the noise stopped and the shaking subsided, it was over, and the mountain had reclaimed a piece of itself.
CHAPTER 29
Have I ever told you about the time a Hialeah city commissioner walked out of his house to check his mail and found a human skull staring at him from inside the mailbox?”
Doc Riggs is a whiz at openers in conversation.
“ Not recently, Charlie,” I said.
“ Hush, Jake,” Granny cautioned me. “Listen to Doc, and you may learn something, and while you’re at it, don’t cut the squid so big. It would take a whale to swallow that bait.”
“ Orca or Moby Dick?” Kip asked.
We were anchored in about eighty feet of water near Spanish Harbor Key, a bit south of the seven-mile bridge. In the winter, just off the reef, it’s a decent place to catch yellowtail snapper, which unlike their suspicious cousins, red and mangrove snapper, are more likely to bite lines with visible leaders and are less likely to hide in caves. We came down in Charlie’s pickup, the one that nearly ran down a process server. In Islamorada, we hitched up Granny’s trailer with the twenty-foot Boston Whaler and headed past Lower Matecumbe Key, Conch Key, and Burnt Point, stopped for cold beer in Marathon, then took the bridge to Bahia Honda Key where we put the boat in the water, and nearly did the same with the pickup.
I know the Keys are commercialized and overpopulated, and you can’t go a mile on U.S. 1 without passing tacky strip shopping centers with your convenience stores, T-shirt shops, and souvenir stands, but they’re still the Keys where the sun rises in the Atlantic and sets in the Gulf, and you can sometimes exchange whispers with a pelican or spot a deer hightailing it across the highway. God’s stepping-stones, local sportswriter Edwin Pope describes these sandy spits of coral, and that’s good enough for me.
“ Anyway,” Charlie said, “here’s the commissioner and in his mailbox is this skull, and a coconut split in two, and a decapitated chicken, and fourteen pennies wrapped in a white cloth.”
“ An unusual campaign contribution,” I said, “but maybe not in Hialeah. Probably violates postal rules, too.”
“ Some weird voodoo,” Granny contributed.
“ Sounds like Black Sabbath with Boris Karloff,” Kip said.
Charlie let his bait drift to the bottom on a one-ounce sinker. He didn’t like to fish nearly as much as he liked to talk. “In a way, you’re all correct. It was a Santeria ceremony, a fascinating combination of African rituals and Catholicism. They consider one of their gods, Babalu-Aye, to be the embodiment of Saint Lazarus, Oggun is Saint Peter, and so on. A santero was using black magic to cast a spell on the commissioner, who had voted against allowing animal sacrifices within city limits.”
“ Now I remember,” I said. “Later the Supreme Court ruled the church had the same rights to kill chickens as Colonel Sanders. But what about the human skull?”
“ Excellent question, in fact, the only question as far as the authorities were concerned, since it’s not illegal to cast a spell on your antagonists.”
“ Remind me the next time I try a case against Abe Socolow.”
Charlie harrumphed and kept going. “Anyway, a lot of skulls and human bones began showing up at the Santeria ceremonies, and the police suspected the worst.”
“ Human sacrifices,” I said, trying a sidearm cast with my spinning rod, the only way I could do it with a mending hole in my shoulder. Earlier, from the foredeck, I tried to cast left-handed and nearly put a 1/0 hook in Granny’s ear. The hook was tied to the end of a thirty-pound leader on twelve-pound spinning tackle. Yellowtail don’t have great choppers, but I use the leader to keep from breaking the line on coral.
“ That’s what our local constabulary suspected because they had no experience with this sort of thing. As it turned out, there were plenty of dead chickens and goats, but no humans. The human bones were stolen from cemeteries.”
“ Wow, Night of the Living Dead,” Kip chipped in.
“ Metro kept delivering packages to the morgue marked ‘unknown human remains.’ We identified some from corpses whose coffins and tombs had been desecrated. Very upsetting to the families.”
“ I suppose so, if Uncle Harry’s femur turned up in a witches’ brew.”
We all thought about that for a while, then I dropped a frozen chunk of chum over the side in an effort to entice reluctant snapper out of the reef.
Granny held her nose and called out, “Whooee! What’d you put in that, some of Doc’s old chickens and goats?”
“ It’s my own recipe, Granny, and I’m not telling.”
