American Tropic (25 page)

Bizango raises the bloody trident and hurls it through the air at the wooden sign arched over the float. The steel prongs pierce the sign’s painted words,
NEPTUNE BAY RESORT
.

On the street, Noah runs alongside the still-rolling float. He tries to keep his footing in the terrified crowd. He pulls out the pistol tucked beneath his pants belt. He aims the pistol up at Bizango. “Stop! I know who you are!”

Bizango’s rubber skull face mask swerves around. The mask’s deep black eye sockets stare down at Noah with the aimed pistol.

Noah shouts above the screaming crowd at Bizango, “Don’t make me shoot you!”

Bizango’s skull eyes turn away from Noah. The skeleton leaps off the float, lands on the street, and races away into the panicked crowd.

Noah runs after Bizango as a police helicopter swoops in from overhead. From the copter’s open door, police riflemen aim down into the chaos. The copter’s searchlight beam flashes on a fleeing Bizango. The riflemen cannot fire without hitting others in the crowd. The searchlight keeps Bizango in sight. Bizango breaks off down a side street, with Noah close behind. In front of Bizango, a police car speeds up and brakes to a skidding sideways
stop, blocking the street. The car’s doors swing open; the Chief and his sharpshooters jump out.

Bizango stops in the middle of the street, trapped between the shooters and Noah. In a black-and-white blur, the skeleton races to a building with a sign above its entrance,
KEY WEST AQUARIUM
.
The building’s glass entrance door is shut with a padlocked iron chain. Bizango violently yanks the chain, trying to break the lock. The shooters from behind open fire. Bullets zing around Bizango. The entrance door shatters open in a hail of glass shards. Bizango runs through the blasted open doorway into the aquarium.

Darkness inside the aquarium is illuminated by blue neon light exposing fish exhibition tanks. Behind the thick glass walls moves the fin-flick and gill-sucking glide of obscure sea creatures. The tanks hiss with circulating water. The Chief and his shooters spread out and move between the tanks. The Chief’s attention is caught by a sudden black-and-white flash reflected on the glass of a tank. The flash disappears. The Chief looks quickly around. He sees another black-and-white flash. He raises his gun to fire, then pulls his finger quickly away from the trigger. The black-and-white flash is a large zebra fish, swimming straight at him from the opposite side of a tank’s glass wall. The zebra fish knocks against the glass barrier with a thud, then glides off.

A shooter shouts out in the darkness, “There he is!”

The back emergency door of the aquarium swings open, setting off a ringing alarm. Framed in the doorway by outside light is the skeleton figure of Bizango.

The shooters fire; bullets zing through the air, smashing
into the tanks, shattering glass, releasing a cascading avalanche of water and sea creatures.

The Chief runs as he yells above the alarm at the shooters, “Go after him!”

The Chief and the shooters race toward the open exit door. They slip on the wet floor, falling onto broken glass and sliding among floundering sea creatures. The Chief skids across the floor past a loose octopus flailing its tentacles, then bumps to a stop against a twisting leopard shark. He pushes away from the shark, yanks out his cell phone, punches in a number, and shouts, “Moxel! You read me?”

Moxel’s voice crackles back over the phone: “Chief! I can barely hear you! I’m in the fort hideout!”

“Bizango is headed there! He still thinks it’s safe! Get ready! Alert all riflemen! Shoot to kill!”

A
t the top of the soaring white column of the Key West Lighthouse, Noah stands on the outside circular iron catwalk. Above his head, the shining glass beacon revolves in the night. He gazes across the lights and shadows of the town. In the distance, police helicopters fly over the maze of streets, searching for Bizango.

Echoing up from the interior staircase behind Noah is the sound of approaching footsteps climbing to the top
of the lighthouse. He turns to the open doorway leading from inside onto the catwalk. He pulls out the Luger tucked behind his belt. The black-and-white skeleton of Bizango appears in the doorway. Noah raises his pistol. “It’s over.”

Bizango’s skull head swivels slowly; the impenetrable black sockets of the eyes fix on Noah. The rubber mouth and nose openings of the face mask pulsate with heavy breathing. Noah steps closer with the aimed pistol. “You can’t kill every wrongdoer. Even a hurricane can’t blow away all of man’s evils. This is the end.” Bizango’s chest heaves. Noah reaches out in a swift movement and grips the bottom of the mask. Bizango’s hand whips up, and skeletal fingers grab Noah’s wrist in a powerful grip. Noah holds tight to the mask. “Even a hurricane can’t blow away all of—”

Noah’s words are cut by the clatter from a helicopter swooping down over the lighthouse. The copter’s side door slides open. A sharpshooter leans out from the doorway with a scope-mounted rifle and pulls the trigger. Bizango slams Noah down onto the catwalk as the bullet blasts out a cement chunk of the wall where Noah was standing. Another bullet whams into Bizango. The skeleton raises clenched fists above its skull head in defiant rage at the copter; rifle fire zings; blood gushes from bullet holes ripping into Bizango’s rubber suit. Bizango collapses against the catwalk’s iron railing, struggling to hang on.

Noah, facedown on the catwalk floor, reaches out and grabs Bizango’s skeleton ankle. He pulls back hard on the ankle, trying to keep Bizango from falling off the lighthouse. The helicopter banks hard and hovers directly in front of Bizango. The copter’s blades whip waves of wind
against Bizango, who clings to the railing. The crack of five rapid rifle shots from the copter tear into Bizango. Noah feels Bizango’s ankle wrench away from his grip. Bizango plunges off the side of the lighthouse. The helicopter shines its searchlight on Noah. He staggers to his feet, grips the catwalk railing, and looks over. Far below is the sprawled black-and-white body of Bizango.

Noah races down the lighthouse staircase and outside. He kneels next to Bizango. The skeleton’s rubber suit oozes blood. Noah leans over Bizango’s face mask and hears faint breathing. He takes hold of the mask and begins lifting it up.

Behind Noah, a police car skids to a stop. The Chief and the riflemen jump from the car. The Chief yells, “Is he alive or dead?”

Noah swings around furiously. “Stay the hell away!”

The Chief signals his riflemen. “Stand back! Give them room!”

Noah turns back to Bizango and pulls hard at the tight skull mask. The mask peels off the face with a loud sucking sound. The Chief and the riflemen stare in disbelief at unmasked Bizango, stunned at the exposed face of Luz.

Noah bends close to Luz, trying to hear the words she struggles to get out. Her dim eyes stare up at the beam at the top of the lighthouse; her lips barely move. “Look … Cuban doves … returned … not … extinct … hope.”

Noah looks up to the solitary beacon of light high above. “I can see them, Luz. The Cuban doves are flying. Your doves have returned.”

T
he rising sun illuminates Noah’s boat, with its radio antenna bolted to the deck, adrift on the ocean. Inside the pilothouse, Noah sits at his console. He swivels in his chair and leans close to the microphone, his words stripped to raw emotion.

“I’ve had calls all morning about Luz Zamora. Many of you are convinced Luz was a senseless cold-blooded murderer, a coward hiding behind a mask. Others believe she was a brave avenger, proving that it takes a woman to do a man’s job. Some think that as Bizango she only murdered corrupt souls, making her a heroic eco-vigilante defending those in nature who cannot defend themselves. We cannot accept what Luz did, killing those who kill the environment, but we can try to understand. The world our children are now born into has thousands of toxic chemicals that did not exist until recently. Unknown poisons invade our air, our water, our homes, our food, our blood. Luz believed that this environment caused her daughter Nina’s childhood leukemia, that it caused her father’s lung cancer, that it caused her own cancer. Who’s to say Luz wasn’t right? There are over two hundred different types of cancer. Who’s to say that all of us are not dying a slow death from rancid rivers, poisoned oceans, defiled land, polluted air, and perverted food?

“Luz thought of herself as the ultimate judge, Bizango the great corrector. Her Bizango believed that man cannot destroy his environment without consequence, that a price must be paid, that accountability must come home to roost. The philosophers say that no man is an island;
well, Key West is a real island in the current of the Gulf Stream, it is affected by the totality of the biodiversity swirling around it in air and water. Each and every one of us is no different; no matter where we are on this earth, we are all islands affected by civilization’s implacable currents of consequence bearing down on us.”

Noah stops. He picks up a can of Red Bull from the console and takes a long swig. He leans forward toward the microphone, his voice thickening with conviction.

“Loyal pilgrims, the feds are about to shut down my radio broadcasts, but they aren’t shutting me up. Don’t despair, I remain your Truth Dog, an old dog with new tricks. I’ve been reinstated as an attorney; my battles now will be in the halls of justice. I intend to fight on as another kind of corrector—a small one, not a great one. I believe that it will take millions of small correctors to defeat the great injustices surrounding us. I leave you today with words of wisdom from a poet back in the 1960s, when something new and radical swept the land called the Environmental Movement. The Movement’s true believers carried the torch forward as today’s Green Movement, the New Ecology, or whatever the hell name is slapped on it. The 1960s poet sang his words as if each one was a razor blade cutting his throat with its truth. His was a final cri de coeur, a fierce lament of human frailty. He knew in the end we must lay down the sword after the war is over. I’ll play the poet’s song. I bid you all farewell until my next and very last broadcast.”

Noah pushes a disc into the CD player on the console. From the big battered wood speakers, the song of the poet plays in an undulating rhythm, its words smoldering on the surface.

The words fade away, and Noah switches off the speakers. He pushes his chair back, closes his eyes tight, and sits in silence. The trawler sways gently. He opens his eyes and looks down at Chicken, resting at his feet.

“Come on, lover boy, let’s take a breather.”

The dog trots after Noah out onto the deck of the boat, into the fresh salty air. Noah blinks in the bright sunlight. There are no white cumulus clouds as big as Spanish galleons sailing through the sky. There are no spread-wing
seabirds skimming across the vast ocean’s blue surface. All is empty, except for a black dot on the far horizon. The dot grows larger as it gets closer, then comes into focus, revealing itself as a speeding Sea Ray boat.

The boat’s twenty-four-foot hull skips over the water. It comes alongside Noah’s trawler and pulls up. Zoe stands at the stainless-steel wheel of the helm. She turns off the engine and calls to Noah on his deck:

“There’s something stuck in a bottle that belongs to me. Will you help get it out?”

She tosses up an empty corked rum bottle and he catches it. She pulls off her sunglasses; her blue eyes are gazing. “So, pirate, what do you think?”