Crash.
“Cut! Cut!… What the hell happened to the narrator? He passed out…. Coleman!”
“I didn’t do anything. He was fine a minute ago.”
“Wonderful… Where’s the backup narrator?”
“Right here.” A young man in a starched dress shirt ran over with a pack of stapled pages.
“You’re on.”
“I am?” He nervously rustled pages and talked to himself. “This is what you’ve been waiting for. Get your head in the right spot. Narrator, narrator, narrator…”
“What are you waiting for? This is costing us money!”
“Okay…”
THEY FOUND THE body crucified upside down on the side of the bat tower.
Two Monroe County sheriff’s deputies got the call. Gus and Walter. The green-and-white cruiser rolled down a bumpy dirt road on Sugarloaf Key, coming around a bend in the mangroves until an old wooden tower came into view.
In 1929, a real estate developer named Richter Perky decided to make a killing on Sugarloaf, about fifteen miles from Key West. The only thing standing in the way were the mosquitoes. Millions of ’em.
But Perky had an angle. He erected a giant, gothic wooden tower covered with cedar shingles. It was hollow. Perky planned to fill the inside with bats, which were known to come out at night and feed voraciously on the insects. The tower’s interior contained a series of ascending louvers coated with bat guano, just the way Perky had heard they liked it.
On the appointed day, thousands of bats arrived in cages. They were released under the tower’s open bottom. And flew away, never to be seen again.
Three-quarters of a century later, the tower still stands anonymously on an isolated part of the island. No historic plaque or anything else to identify the enigmatic structure that has been described as a bladeless windmill. Now there was a guy nailed to it.
Gus parked the sheriff’s cruiser near the base of the tower. The deputies got out and looked up.
“I may be ill,” said Walter.
“I know him,” said Gus.
“You do?”
Gus nodded. “Drug smuggler named Hendry. Indicted yesterday. Was in the papers.”
“Who would do such a sick thing?”
“Who do you think? His employer. That’s why nobody can ever pin anything on him. Never leaves any witnesses.”
“You don’t mean…” Walter stopped short.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid to even say his name.”
“No, but some people are.”
“Not that stupid urban legend again.”
“They say he’s gone completely insane, especially since he started using that nickname… you know…”
“What?”
“Okay, I am afraid.”
“That’s silly.”
The medical examiner arrived, along with a small fire truck, because it had ladders.
“I’ll tell you something else,” said Gus.
“What’s that?”
“We’re about to have a whole lot more bodies. There were a bunch of other names in that indictment.”
Walter looked up again. “Nobody knows what he looks like. He stays hidden in that secluded place out on No Name Key. They say if you ever see him, you die.”
“More myth,” said Gus, helping prop one of the ladders against the side of the tower. “We’ve got hundreds of hermits like that way back in these islands who haven’t been seen in years.”
“Yeah, but this one’s running a drug empire. It’s like he’s a ghost. How does he come and go without anyone seeing him?”
“He drives this big white Mercedes, but the windows are tinted.”
Part One
1
IT WAS ANOTHER typically beautiful morning in the middle of the Florida Keys. People were drunk and people were screaming.
Patrons from the roadside bars heard the commotion and carried drinks outside to watch the routine mess on U.S. 1, the Nation’s Highway, 2,209 miles from Fort Kent, Maine, on the Canadian border, to the tip of Key West.
The road was snarled to the horizon in both directions. Standard procedure: midmorning congestion, then the chain reaction of rear-enders from inattention. Now a parking lot.
Drivers honked, shouted obscenities, turned off their engines and popped beers. A Mercury overheated and the hood went up. Ninety-nine degrees.
Two sheriff’s deputies stood at the window of their air-conditioned substation on Cudjoe Key. Veterans Gus DeLand and Walter St. Cloud. Drinking coffee. It was the beginning of the shift, the part where they were supposed to review the latest bulletins on all the serial killers and mass murderers heading their way.
Gus looked out the window with his hands on his hips. “We’ve got to do something about that road.”
“I’ve never seen a crucifixion before,” said Walter, holding a ceramic cup covered with swimsuit models. “Check out this new mug. I got it in Vegas. When you pour a hot beverage in it, like coffee, the bathing suits disappear. I don’t know how it works.”
The fax activated. Gus headed toward it.
He came back reading the all-points bulletin. “…Brown Plymouth Duster, brown Plymouth Duster, brown Plymouth…”
“What are you doing?” asked Walter, holding a coffee mug at eye level.
“Mnemonic device. Possible serial killer heading this way…. brown Plymouth Duster, brown…”
The fax started again.
Gus came back with another piece of paper. “…Metallic green Trans Am, metallic green Trans Am, metallic green…”
“I brought one back for you, too.”
“…Trans Am… What?”
“Coffee mug.” Walter set it on Gus’s desk. “Figured you might need it since you’re divorced.”
Gus stuck the mug in a bottom drawer.
“Aren’t you going to use it?”
“I’m not sure it’s appropriate in the office. But thanks for thinking of me.” Gus held up the second APB. “Spree killings in Fort Pierce. Six dead and counting. They got a partial license.” Gus began repeating a number.
Walter set his mug down on the first APB, making a round stain. “So, busy day already. Crucifixion, traffic jam and now two serial killers on the way.”
“No, the second is a spree killer.” Gus handed the fax to Walter.
“What’s the difference?”
“One’s in more of a hurry.”
“They always come down here.”
“And blend right in.”
“How’s that?”
“Just look at ’em all out there,” said Gus. “Hell-bent to lose their minds in Key West. A psychopath would be the quiet one.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” said Walter. “They’re on the run, and this is the ultimate dead end. What are they thinking?”
“Who says they’re thinking?”
THE LOGJAM STARTED at Mile Marker 27 on Ramrod Key, feeding on itself for an hour. New arrivals flying down the Keys in convertibles and motorcycles and pickups pulling boats, getting closer to Key West, anticipation busting out of the cage, coming upon stalled traffic way too fast.
It quickly backed up over the Seven-Mile Bridge. People with to-go cups of warm draft stood in front of the Overseas Lounge and watched a Chevy Avalanche sail into a Cutlass, knocking the next six cars together like billiards, a half dozen airbags banging open like a string of firecrackers. Three minutes later, the audience outside the Brass Monkey saw a Silverado plow into a Mazda, the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler on the pickup’s trailer catapulting over the cab.