Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen Page B

hands, bankrupt and all—rubbing elbows with a bunch of pukes at Pauly’s. Viceroy Wilson didn’t belong in a rathole dive on South Beach; Viceroy Wilson belonged in Canton, Ohio, at the Football Hall of Fame.
    “I’ll get him for you,” the wino volunteered, oozing off the bar stool.
    “Hey, what if he don’t want to be got?” the bartender said. “Viceroy’s a very private man.”
    “Twenty bucks,” the wino said. Keyes handed it to him and ordered another beer. Twenty dollars apparently was now the going rate for everything at Pauly’s. The wino shuffled out the door.
    “Kiss your money good-bye,” the bartender said reproachfully.
    “Relax,” Keyes told him, knowing it would only have the opposite effect. People in bars don’t like to be told to relax.
    “I’m beginning to think you’re a narc!” the bartender said loudly. He calmed down when Keyes laid another twenty bucks on the bar next to the beer glass.
    Forty minutes later the screen door wheezed open and stayed that way for several moments. A cool salty breeze tickled Keyes’s neck. He longed to turn around but instead just sipped on the beer, pretending that the 235-pound black man (Carrera sunglasses dangling on his chest) who loomed in the tavern mirror wasn’t really glaring at him as if he were the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.
    “I don’t think I know you,” Viceroy Wilson growled.
    Brian Keyes was in the process of spinning around on the barstool, about to say something extremely witty, when a black fist the approximate size and consistency of a cinder-block slammed into the base of his neck.
    At that instant Keyes’s brain became a kaleidoscope, and he would later be able to recall only a few jagged pieces of consciousness.
    The sound of the screen door slamming.
    The taste of the sidewalk.
    The cough of an automobile’s ignition.
    He remembered opening one eye with the dreadful thought that he was about to be run over.
    And he remembered a glimpse of a vanity license tag—”GATOR 2”—as the car peeled rubber.
    But Keyes didn’t remember shutting his eyes and going nighty-night on the cool concrete.
     
    “Hello?”
    Brian Keyes stared up at the round, friendly-looking face of a middle-aged woman.
    “Are you injured?” she asked.
    “I think my spine is broken.” Keyes was lying outside Pauly’s Bar. The pavement smelled like stale beer and urine. Unseen shards of an ancient wine bottle dug into his shoulder blades. It was eleven o’clock and the street was very dark.
    “My name is Nell Bellamy.”
    “I’m Brian Keyes.”
    “Should I call an ambulance, Mr. Keyes?”
    Keyes shook his head no.
    “These are my friends Burt and James,” Nell Bellamy said. Two men wearing mauve fez hats bent over and peered at Brian Keyes. They were Shriners.
    “What are you doing here?” one of them asked benignly.
    “I got beat up,” Keyes replied, still flat on his back. “I’ll be fine in a month or two.” He ran a hand over his ribs, feeling through the shirt for fractures. “What are you doing here?” he asked the Shriners.
    “Looking for her husband.”
    “Theodore Bellamy,” Nell said. “He disappeared last Saturday.”
    “Give me a hand, please,” Keyes said. The Shriners helped him to his feet. They were big, ruddy fellows; they propped him up until the vertigo went away. From inside Pauly’s Bar came the sounds of breaking glass and loud shouting in Spanish.
    “Let’s take a walk,” Keyes said.
    “But I wanted to ask around in there,” Nell said, nodding toward the bar, “to see if anybody has seen Teddy.”
    “Bad idea,” Keyes grunted.
    “He’s right, Nell,” one of the Shriners advised.
    So they set off down Washington Avenue. They were a queer ensemble, even by South Beach standards. Keyes walked tentatively, like a well-dressed lush, while Nell handed out fliers with Teddy’s picture. The Shriners ran interference through knots of shirtless refugees who milled outside the droopy