beef.
Their computer models tell them how many tankers will cruise the Gulf before one strikes a reef and the appropriate tonnage that will ooze into the precious estuaries. Mathematically, they can figure when the waters of the Everglades will become as deadly as a toxic dump, when the song of a million birds will be stilled. No problem. The boys in insurance gotcha covered. Five million primary for the basic risk, fifty million excess reinsured with Lloyd’s to protect the company’s net worth and their own pensions. The public-relations folks—experts at damage control—are ready to fax prepackaged news releases that explain the company’s profound concern at this unanticipated and unfortunate incident.
Just that morning Charlie and I heard thunder roll in the distance to the west. Not from the sky, but from underground explosions set by an oil company searching for a fortune beneath the river of grass. At dawn we watched their trucks, obscenely white, roll along the old levee, seismic sensors protruding like the antennae of steel-jacketed insects. Exploratory only, the company says, for it has no drilling permit. Just wait. After lobbyists pay their nighttime visits, it will only be a matter of time. The drilling will start, and some dark lonely night, through human error or computer breakdown or metal fatigue, the black gunk will belch into the marshy hammocks and over the sawgrass and through the canals. The crude will pour into the aquifer that supplies our fresh water. A bad enough spill and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami will go bone dry. The roaches will inherit the concrete shells of forsaken condos, which in the end might be what was intended all along.
***
“Itemize it for me,” Charlie Riggs ordered, as if I were a fuzzy-cheeked intern.
We were sitting on the wooden dock behind his cabin on an Everglades canal. Charlie wore hiking boots and khaki shorts that were stained with fish guts or worse. I wore gray practice shorts and an old tear-away jersey, number fifty-eight, which the Dolphins somehow managed not to retire. In the glare of the late-afternoon sun, I tried to talk and pull the porcelain stopper on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch at the same time.
“Two young women who live alone are strangled a week apart. They have no known enemies, no common friends. Neither was robbed. The first may have had sex shortly before death, though it could have been a solo flight. The second victim clearly had sex in close proximity to death. Seminal fluid revealed an assailant or lover with blood type A, according to young Dr. Whitson.”
“Assailant or lover?”
“No sign of a struggle,” I said. “Other than the injury to the neck, no contusions. Also no skin under the fingernails and no torn clothing. It appears consensual.”
“Unless it was postmortem.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well do, and please continue.”
Charlie gets ornery if you overlook anything.
I said, “A message at the first scene echoed Jack the Ripper and taunted us. A message at the second scene reflected animosity toward women. Other than that, there is no apparent connection between the two murders, except…”
Charlie yanked on the cane pole and came up with a palm frond.
“Except,” I continued, “both victims belonged to a sex-talk club. Both were frequent fliers on the computer wooing circuit, including the night each was killed.”
“Anything else?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the rippling canal.
“Victim one was having a fling with the politically ambitious state attorney. Didn’t seem too serious on either side. What the kids call a sport fuck.”
Charlie scowled and flipped his sunglasses down from the bill of his cap like a shortstop under a pop-up. “Our language,” he moaned, “In partibus infidelium. ‘In the hands of infidels.’”
“She may have been poking into Fox’s war record.”
“I assume you haven’t queried Fox whether she asked him about Vietnam.”
I
Their computer models tell them how many tankers will cruise the Gulf before one strikes a reef and the appropriate tonnage that will ooze into the precious estuaries. Mathematically, they can figure when the waters of the Everglades will become as deadly as a toxic dump, when the song of a million birds will be stilled. No problem. The boys in insurance gotcha covered. Five million primary for the basic risk, fifty million excess reinsured with Lloyd’s to protect the company’s net worth and their own pensions. The public-relations folks—experts at damage control—are ready to fax prepackaged news releases that explain the company’s profound concern at this unanticipated and unfortunate incident.
Just that morning Charlie and I heard thunder roll in the distance to the west. Not from the sky, but from underground explosions set by an oil company searching for a fortune beneath the river of grass. At dawn we watched their trucks, obscenely white, roll along the old levee, seismic sensors protruding like the antennae of steel-jacketed insects. Exploratory only, the company says, for it has no drilling permit. Just wait. After lobbyists pay their nighttime visits, it will only be a matter of time. The drilling will start, and some dark lonely night, through human error or computer breakdown or metal fatigue, the black gunk will belch into the marshy hammocks and over the sawgrass and through the canals. The crude will pour into the aquifer that supplies our fresh water. A bad enough spill and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami will go bone dry. The roaches will inherit the concrete shells of forsaken condos, which in the end might be what was intended all along.
***
“Itemize it for me,” Charlie Riggs ordered, as if I were a fuzzy-cheeked intern.
We were sitting on the wooden dock behind his cabin on an Everglades canal. Charlie wore hiking boots and khaki shorts that were stained with fish guts or worse. I wore gray practice shorts and an old tear-away jersey, number fifty-eight, which the Dolphins somehow managed not to retire. In the glare of the late-afternoon sun, I tried to talk and pull the porcelain stopper on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch at the same time.
“Two young women who live alone are strangled a week apart. They have no known enemies, no common friends. Neither was robbed. The first may have had sex shortly before death, though it could have been a solo flight. The second victim clearly had sex in close proximity to death. Seminal fluid revealed an assailant or lover with blood type A, according to young Dr. Whitson.”
“Assailant or lover?”
“No sign of a struggle,” I said. “Other than the injury to the neck, no contusions. Also no skin under the fingernails and no torn clothing. It appears consensual.”
“Unless it was postmortem.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well do, and please continue.”
Charlie gets ornery if you overlook anything.
I said, “A message at the first scene echoed Jack the Ripper and taunted us. A message at the second scene reflected animosity toward women. Other than that, there is no apparent connection between the two murders, except…”
Charlie yanked on the cane pole and came up with a palm frond.
“Except,” I continued, “both victims belonged to a sex-talk club. Both were frequent fliers on the computer wooing circuit, including the night each was killed.”
“Anything else?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the rippling canal.
“Victim one was having a fling with the politically ambitious state attorney. Didn’t seem too serious on either side. What the kids call a sport fuck.”
Charlie scowled and flipped his sunglasses down from the bill of his cap like a shortstop under a pop-up. “Our language,” he moaned, “In partibus infidelium. ‘In the hands of infidels.’”
“She may have been poking into Fox’s war record.”
“I assume you haven’t queried Fox whether she asked him about Vietnam.”
I
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