Gator A-GO-GO

“Is that the bridge?”

“Elvis lives!”

The Challenger skidded to a stop on the tiny span. Serge got out with his camcorder, filming the surrounding marsh. “Coleman, there’s much to do. We must get down on that bank and fashion a bivouac like the Kwimpers’ from available natural materials. Then I’ll buy a guitar and rehearse the theme song while you round up extras from the day-labor office. Nothing in the universe can make me waver until this mission is complete.”

“What about the guy in the trunk?”

“Or we can do that.”

Chapter Eight

MEANWHILE…

A British Airways jumbo jet cleared the Dolphin Expressway and touched down at Miami International. The control tower had to-the-horizon visibility for minimum landing separation. Minutes later, another transatlantic from Berlin. And Rome. And Madrid. Then the domestics, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Nashville.

The cadence of swooping turbines rattled the inside of a tiny bar on the back of an ill-stocked package store with Honduran cigars and a bulletproof Plexiglas cage for night sales that was so thick it was like looking at the cashier through an aquarium.

Only four customers in the late afternoon. Guillermo and his boys. The bar sat just north of the airport on the side of Okeecho-bee Boulevard. The interior was dark, choked with cigarette smoke from insufficient ventilation, which consisted of an open back door on a windless day. Out the door: roosters and roaming dogs pulling wet clothes from laundry lines. Beyond that, an unassuming drainage canal that began a hundred miles away near Clewiston, cutting south through a million sugarcane acres, then the Everglades, past western quarries and jumping the turnpike for a perfect, man-made straight diagonal shot through Hialeah, eventually assuming natural bends when it became the Miami River before dumping into Biscayne Bay.

The connectivity of that waterway could stand as a spiritual metaphor for the irreversible series of events Guillermo and his colleagues were about to set in motion, but that would just be shitty writing. Before coming to the lounge, they’d fished the bullet from Miguel’s shoulder with tweezers and tequila. Not a bad job of swabbing the wound. Now Miguel wanted more tequila, and Guillermo wanted quiet as the TV over the bar went Live at Five from the so-called Lottery Massacre in West Perrine. When the report finished, Guillermo asked the bartender to change the channel. There it was again. And the next channel. Guillermo exhaled with relief. He’d been worrying that they had jumped the gun and removed ski masks too soon in their rush out the door. Another channel, CNN taking the south Florida fire-fight to the nation. But still no surveillance footage of the assailants, because the low-grade convenience store couldn’t afford real security cameras and went instead with decoy boxes and blinking red lights.

“We lucked out,” said Guillermo.

“Tequila,” said Miguel.

BIRD CREEK

Serge stood in the middle of the bridge with coils of white rope. He threw one end over the west side and the other over the east.

“What are you doing?” asked Coleman.

“Making a guitar.”

Serge walked twenty yards and tied monofilament fishing line to the bridge’s railing. Then he went forty yards the other way and tied another.

“Guitar?” Coleman looked around. “Where?”

“The bridge is the guitar.“ Serge tested a hitch knot.”Elvis deserves only the biggest.”

“But how can a bridge be a guitar?”

“Just a matter of proportion. The tones of an instrument’s strings are determined by their thickness.” Serge pointed. “That braided, inch-thick nylon would be the E string”-he turned-“and the fishing line is-let me think. Treble scale. ‘Every good boy deserves fudge’- probably G.”

Serge ran to the end of the bridge and down the bank.

A horn-honker lay in the mud, gagged, hands behind his back.

Serge grabbed two discarded crab traps and splashed out into the shallow creek. He stacked them beneath the bridge.

Ten minutes later, the hostage stood on top of them.

“That rope gives you balance,” said Serge, clamping a D-ring. “Which is important because you definitely don’t want to fall off those crab traps.”

Coleman stood knee deep with a Pabst. “No noose?”

“Been there, done that.” Serge crouched and stretched fishing line. He looked up at his captive. “Remember: The traps are everything. If you can stay balanced on them long enough, someone’s bound to find you. If not, they’ll still find you, but you won’t like it.”

Coleman crumpled his empty can and pointed. “What are those for?”

Serge knotted lines through crab trap wires. “Refreshment.”

The hostage stared in front of his face at a pair of gerbil dispensers hanging from the underside of the bridge and inserted through his mouth gag.

“Well, time to run.” Serge stood and smiled. “Gotta follow that dream!”

MIAMI

Transcontinental flights continued thundering over a bar next to Okeechobee Boulevard.

Miguel got deeper into the tequila.

TV still on CNN.

The bartender started changing the channel to Marlins spring training.

“Stop!” shouted Guillermo. “Keep it on this.”

The bartender withdrew his arm and went back to his own drink.

Guillermo leaned for a better look at the screen, now into the next segment from the cable channel’s Boston affiliate.

“… I don’t feel like a hero…”

Below the interviewee’s face: HERO P ATRICK M CK ENNA.

“So that’s what he goes by now.”

“Who?” asked Raul.

“You’re too young to remember,” said Guillermo. “Son of a bitch looks exactly the same.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Quiet.” He flipped open his cell and dialed. “… Madre?… It’s me, Guillermo… No, there aren’t any complications from our business meeting… You’re not going to believe this. Sitting down?… Because I just found an old friend.”

HIGHWAY 98

A ’73 Challenger blazed north on the desolate stretch with scarce traffic lights. Otter Creek, Chiefland, Fanning Springs, Perry, through forested hunting country-Woody’s Famous Cajun Boiled Peanuts- and west into the Panhandle.

Coleman burnt his fingertips on the nub of a joint. “Are we there yet?”