Balserio knew all the words and subtleties, and he pelted me with them as Hugo and Elmase steered me at gunpoint toward the rental Ford. He used the foulest, sickest phrases. Translated, though, he was telling me that I was a billy goat who slept with young billy goats on rusty mattress springs in my mother’s house.
Something perverse in me found that funny-or maybe I was just crashing emotionally after being threatened and assaulted-and as my anger dissipated, I began to laugh. Really laugh.
I was a cabron? A billy goat? The man who might soon be president of Masagua was calling me animal names.
Hilarious.
Hugo and Elmase seemed surprised, then puzzled. I might not be tied to a tree, awaiting the Crazy Machete, but they still had me captive at gunpoint.
But then Elmase stopped walking, head tilted because he heard what I’d already heard: the raceway sound of cars revving too fast around a curve.
“What’s that noise, man?”
“Shit! Cars coming, hide your gun!”
Then we could see them, white cars heading our way, seeming to flatten themselves at speed over the gravel road: county sheriff ’s vehicles, green on white, no sirens or lights, which is procedure when a person calling 911 says he thinks he’ll be killed if the bad guys hear help coming.
To Hugo and Elmase, I now said, “You’d better throw your weapons down. Quick.”
When they didn’t react immediately, I added, “When the police jump out, see you two guys dressed like pimps, holding automatic weapons-down here in the Everglades? They might think you’re dangerous.”
Convinced, they swung their guns into the bushes as I added, “But you’re going to jail anyway. I know you helped me out with that crazy asshole, but it’s still gotta be jail.”
Elmase seemed not to hear that, replying, “Pimps? Dressed like pimps? That’s not a very nice thing to say. These clothes got style, man.”
Standing there in his white Panama hat and metallic shirt, neon pink and blue, offended. About to be arrested, but his expression still telling me: You hurt my feelings, man.
Dial 911 and tell them you’re a respectable Sanibel Island resident crossing the Everglades in a car being pursued at high speed by strangers who are shooting guns, and the dispatcher will send out the cavalry.
The cavalry had assembled: sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and plainclothes detectives in unmarked cars, all vehicles jumbled in a line, the Loop Road blocked shut, emergency lights strobing high in the shadowed domes of cypress trees on this late South Florida afternoon.
Sunset was at a little after eight P.M. Probably less than an hour away. No way for me to know for certain, because I was handcuffed. Couldn’t see my watch.
Back on Sanibel and Captiva, the ceremonial cocktail crowds would already be gathering at South Seas Plantation, the Mucky Duck, Casa Ybel, among others, and at our little Dinkin’s Bay Marina. Same would be true up and down the Gulf Coast of Florida, Key West to Pensacola Bay.
It would soon be social hour in the dawdling May heat. The pearly time when friends meet with cold drinks in small, local places to watch the sun orbit into the Gulf and spark its universal blaze.
I wanted to get back to Dinkin’s Bay for sunset. Wanted to share some stories and laughs with Mack, Jeth, JoAnn, Rhonda, all the fishing guides, the live-aboards, and the rest of the marina community. That’s exactly what I needed to neutralize the image of Balserio coming at me, knife in hand, with that leering grin on his face.
It had been too close. Too ugly.
I wanted faces of friends to replace his in my memory, before the image seared itself.
But there wasn’t much chance I’d make it back in time.
Despite the handcuffs, and out of habit, I tried to check my watch anyway. I flinched to move my arms from behind me and sneak a glance. Impossible. Not sitting alone in the back seat of a Collier County Sheriff’s deputy’s vehicle.
I’d been placed there by a uniformed deputy with the briefest of explanations-“Relax. We’ll get back to you.”-and so had been waiting and watching a small army of law enforcement people move in busy silence outside my air-conditioned space.
I was thirsty. I also had to pee.
They’d treated Hugo, Elmase, Balserio, and me all the same.
When the first three squad cars came skidding toward us, the officers bailed with weapons drawn and pointed, screaming, “Get down! Show us your hands! Get down! Get down!”
So much for my theory that I’d be singled out as an innocent local and given special treatment.
We were approached cautiously, asked the whereabouts of weaponry, then handcuffed, frisked, I.D. s taken, then separated.
Because firearms were involved, they explained, and because there was a report of shots fired, everyone had to be constrained until officers figured out who was who and what had happened.
It took a while.
Finally, a woman in a starched deputy’s uniform opened the door and asked, “You’re the gentleman who called nine-one-one?”
Then she asked, “Do you mind answering a few questions?”
Sitting in the back of the squad car, I repeated my story separately to two different uniformed deputies. They were both articulate, professional.
After the first interview, I was told I had to remain in the back seat, but the handcuffs were removed, my driver’s license was returned, and I was allowed to take a whiz.
As I returned to the car, I noted that Elmase, Hugo, and the sadistic General were in separate vehicles, all getting lots of close attention from people both in uniform and out. They were still handcuffed, too, judging from their posture.
I was pleased.
After telling my story a second time, I was asked politely if I wouldn’t mind sticking around long enough to tell it again to a couple of officers from the Major Crimes Division who’d soon arrive.
It sounded like a request, though it wasn’t. I pretended to be magnanimous and cooperative.
In my account, I doctored the truth in several places. I didn’t mention that Tomlinson and Pilar had been with me, nor that my son had been kidnapped. I told them that while I was being pursued, someone had shot at my car on two different occasions from the Chevy.
Because I knew it was possible that Balserio had used a fake passport to enter the country, and because I didn’t want to risk being linked to press accounts about a Masaguan politico being arrested, I didn’t volunteer his last name.
“It was the tall guy,” I said. “The one who fired the shots is the same one who came at me with the knife. I could see him in the rearview mirror, shooting. I’ll swear to it.”
The knife idiocy was enough to put him in jail, but I had to include the shooting incidents. I’d already told the dispatcher it was happening when I dialed 911.
Aware that it’s the rare citizen who ever hears a weapon fired with lethal intent, I stammered and rambled to seem sufficiently upset, but managed to tell the officer precisely where Balserio had popped off the rounds: the curve where Ervin Rouse’s house had once stood-easy to describe-and then again on the straight-away.
I knew they’d go looking, and I knew they’d find the spent brass casings. Three rounds at each place, near the ditch, on the passenger’s side of the road.
I also knew they’d search the Chevy and find the weapon that had fired those rounds: my Sig Sauer. I’d slid it beneath the car’s passenger seat.
Finally, at ten till eight-when I would have much preferred to be roaming the marina docks of Dinkin’s Bay, cold beer in hand-two plainclothes detectives from the department’s Major Crimes Division tapped on the window, then opened the door and introduced themselves.
I followed them to their unmarked car and sat in the back.