cabin-cruiser turns. He finally found Bernstein Park, the million-dollar sports facility that no one used. He goosed the pedal again, missed his turn-off. He spun a one-eighty in the Rusty Anchor parking lot threw gravel on four men lurking around a pole-mounted pay phone. He whipped south toward a long line of bulldozed twenty-foot mounds of rubble. After all these years in Key West my first visit to Shrimp Road.
We skidded, halted in gravel. A crescent of idling vehicles bore audience to a particular pile of trash. SheriffLiska’s civilian car, his maroon Lexus sedan, was parked to one side. I swung the cruiser’s door and bolted. I felt like a sailor back on the wharf after a long, brutal storm, thankful for solid land. The breeze tossed the mangrove branches west of the road. Stifling air reigned low. It would help me defrost.
Liska walked toward me. He twirled keys on his index finger. No cigarette in his hand. His annual New Year’s resolution to cut back gradually usually held until mid-February. He wore blue jeans with white sneakers and a white belt His white satin shirt looked like a piece Elvis might have thrown from the stage late in his career. Through the years I’d known him, Chicken Neck had affected an extensive seventies wardrobe. He’d toned it down since being elected sheriff, had gravitated to a
Northern Exposure
look. The Lower Keys hosted many eccentricities. Goofy attire was a minor aberration.
I gave him a “what’s-up” look.
“Some shrimper lost his head—”
“Sounds right” I said.
“Not as funny as it sounds. That roscoe over there, the arm bandages? Says his legal name is Nameless Aimless. He’s our poster boy for twenty-first-century rickets. Aimless found himself sleeping next to a body without a head when he woke up an hour ago. A wild dog woke him, chewing on his wrist Three dogs, total. They’d worked on the corpse, too. I guess the one dog thought Nameless was tastier, rum-flavored and all. We had to call SPCA to remove the animals.”
A lovely Sunday had become a twofer. “Nameless a suspect?”
“Claims the last thing he recalls, he took drunk at sunrise on the fantail of
Midnight Creeper,
a steel-hulled trawler out of Beaufort South Carolina. Captain Smith Jones, or else Jones Smith—we can’t understand his Geechee accent—verified the drunkenness. The captain figured Aimless’d hurt himself and sue the boat owner. He kicked him off around ten A.M . But even piss-drunk shrimpers don’tintentionally bunk down with headless dead men.”
“So a murderer dropped a body next to a passed-out drunk?”
“Probably. Not much blood on the sofa, no weapon to be found, no head. Even broad daylight, around here, no risk of witnesses. Our victim was stabbed—or speared, the standard deal around the fleet. My guess, he died before decapitation.” Liska waved at the huge mounds of trash. “The head could be anywhere in a hundred-yard radius; it’d take us a week to find it. It could be in Miami. It could be in the ocean.”
I wanted Liska to keep jabbering, to postpone my photo gig. As he spoke I gazed at a mound that paralleled the pavement a quarter mile to the south. Someone had built a rubbish barrier to block access to the docks. Beneath tall clusters of yellow chalice-vine flowers lay rotted pallets and cable reels, flattened outboard motors, twisted Dumpsters. I saw two collapsed school buses, an upside-down tractor trailer. A rusted Toyota tailgate with TO and TA painted out, YO outlined by chipped reflector tape. Fuchsia bougainvillea grew from the shell of a Winnebago. Evidence of misery and poverty, of quick departures by workboat or sudden arrest Evidence, too, of vicious storms that had struck the Keys in the late nineties. Mud, marl, tangled fishnets. Lengths of yellow rope dangled from crumbled Styrofoam floats.
A weird, dull silence hung between the mangroves and the mounds. Only rustling shrub tops and the distant rumble of engines at the shrimp
We skidded, halted in gravel. A crescent of idling vehicles bore audience to a particular pile of trash. SheriffLiska’s civilian car, his maroon Lexus sedan, was parked to one side. I swung the cruiser’s door and bolted. I felt like a sailor back on the wharf after a long, brutal storm, thankful for solid land. The breeze tossed the mangrove branches west of the road. Stifling air reigned low. It would help me defrost.
Liska walked toward me. He twirled keys on his index finger. No cigarette in his hand. His annual New Year’s resolution to cut back gradually usually held until mid-February. He wore blue jeans with white sneakers and a white belt His white satin shirt looked like a piece Elvis might have thrown from the stage late in his career. Through the years I’d known him, Chicken Neck had affected an extensive seventies wardrobe. He’d toned it down since being elected sheriff, had gravitated to a
Northern Exposure
look. The Lower Keys hosted many eccentricities. Goofy attire was a minor aberration.
I gave him a “what’s-up” look.
“Some shrimper lost his head—”
“Sounds right” I said.
“Not as funny as it sounds. That roscoe over there, the arm bandages? Says his legal name is Nameless Aimless. He’s our poster boy for twenty-first-century rickets. Aimless found himself sleeping next to a body without a head when he woke up an hour ago. A wild dog woke him, chewing on his wrist Three dogs, total. They’d worked on the corpse, too. I guess the one dog thought Nameless was tastier, rum-flavored and all. We had to call SPCA to remove the animals.”
A lovely Sunday had become a twofer. “Nameless a suspect?”
“Claims the last thing he recalls, he took drunk at sunrise on the fantail of
Midnight Creeper,
a steel-hulled trawler out of Beaufort South Carolina. Captain Smith Jones, or else Jones Smith—we can’t understand his Geechee accent—verified the drunkenness. The captain figured Aimless’d hurt himself and sue the boat owner. He kicked him off around ten A.M . But even piss-drunk shrimpers don’tintentionally bunk down with headless dead men.”
“So a murderer dropped a body next to a passed-out drunk?”
“Probably. Not much blood on the sofa, no weapon to be found, no head. Even broad daylight, around here, no risk of witnesses. Our victim was stabbed—or speared, the standard deal around the fleet. My guess, he died before decapitation.” Liska waved at the huge mounds of trash. “The head could be anywhere in a hundred-yard radius; it’d take us a week to find it. It could be in Miami. It could be in the ocean.”
I wanted Liska to keep jabbering, to postpone my photo gig. As he spoke I gazed at a mound that paralleled the pavement a quarter mile to the south. Someone had built a rubbish barrier to block access to the docks. Beneath tall clusters of yellow chalice-vine flowers lay rotted pallets and cable reels, flattened outboard motors, twisted Dumpsters. I saw two collapsed school buses, an upside-down tractor trailer. A rusted Toyota tailgate with TO and TA painted out, YO outlined by chipped reflector tape. Fuchsia bougainvillea grew from the shell of a Winnebago. Evidence of misery and poverty, of quick departures by workboat or sudden arrest Evidence, too, of vicious storms that had struck the Keys in the late nineties. Mud, marl, tangled fishnets. Lengths of yellow rope dangled from crumbled Styrofoam floats.
A weird, dull silence hung between the mangroves and the mounds. Only rustling shrub tops and the distant rumble of engines at the shrimp
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