Air Dance Iguana Read Online Free PDF Page B

program?”
    Bohner sniffed and shook his head. “I expect his deepest thoughts come during TV wrestling. If they had dog fights, he’d watch them, too.”
    “Sounds like perfect inner workings for a detective,” I said.
    “The reason I brought up fighting dogs, I once heard him compared. He sinks his teeth into something, he doesn’t let go. Back there he got his feeding eye on you.”

4
    I aimed my old Triumph motorcycle at the dropping sun, rode across the Saddlebunch, where concrete utility poles like prison bars hacked my south view. Along this stretch the preferred move was to look north to where shallow channels snaked out of the Gulf of Mexico into basins carpeted with sea grass, vegetation thrived, pockets of mangroves expanded as they had for centuries. Stark, stained boats had anchored in bay shallows not a hundred yards from U.S. 1, their boxy shapes pure function, their work gear simple and worn. A line of menacing clouds filled the gulf horizon and fed a gray squall that washed the Mud Keys. Even the stench of dead plankton at the tide line drew me to calm.
    On Stock Island I looked for and didn’t find Liska’s car at his office. I U-turned and rode into Key West against the flow of mainland-bound single-day tourists and workday commuters rushing home to the Lower Keys. After inspecting two corpses and having my rational chat with Billy Bohner, I was too wiped to deal with the gas grill or a restaurant meal. I had emptied my kitchen stock so I could vacate the cottage and make room for Johnny Griffin. My best option was a chilly six-pack and slippery chicken from Dion’s.
    Before going home, I stopped on Olivia to give the Marathon film to Duffy Lee Hall, my darkroom tech and friend for years. I found him in cut-off Levi’s and work boots piling coconuts on his yard trash, stacking them like cannonballs.
    “Why did Liska, of all people, bring me your film?” said Duffy Lee. “I figured you were in jail.”
    I explained my day, the road miles and similar victims.
    “Awful way to go,” he said. “I ran a proof sheet. I assume that geezer on Ramrod had to listen to the davit’s electric motor in the dark.”
    “Wait till you see the shots on this new roll. Different rules, same result.”
    “Liska was not wearing, by the way, a vintage polyester shirt.”
    “He’s abandoned his seventies look,” I said. “Now that he’s more in the public eye, he’s working a new dimension.”
    “He wants me to scan the best prints and e-mail him JPEGs.”
    “Our nostalgia king is wiring himself into the future.”
    “I don’t know,” said Duffy Lee. “He looked rough, like he was wired to a bad habit. Maybe all these years on the job have caught up with him.”
     
    I shut off my motor and coasted past my porch into the backyard.
    During the winter I had paid a carpenter to build a shed for my vintage Triumph. He made it sturdy, big enough to also hold my bicycle and a gas can. He strapped it to a concrete base and painted it two-tone gray. Its shingle-roof runoff goes to my mango tree. My neighbor in the lane, my dear friend Carmen Sosa, joked that if I ever fell short of cash, I could disguise it with trellises, hook it to cable, and lease it as a trundle-bed bungalow.
    My small home on Dredgers Lane offers a credible version of paradise. I’m walking distance from saloons, fine food, not-so-fine food, a convenience store, a hardware, and a bike-repair shop. It felt great to be back, and I sensed my first twinge of guilt for having peddled my right to live there for the next eight weeks. Then I put the guilt in perspective: years ago I joked that all I needed was a boat outside my door and a canal with backcountry access. Al Manning’s stilt house on Little Torch would deliver those two perks in less than twenty-four hours. I looked forward to a change of scenery, however temporary. I also looked forward to cutting back on my work schedule, at least locally.
    Inside the house I put the chicken