…How much time has passed? And why is my head laying like this on top of the bar? Got to sit up straight — summon the will. Come on, you can do it. There. Mission accomplished…. Who’s that waving at us from the front door?… You got to be kidding! They’re actually going to start again? Now?… I am so screwed! There’s no way I can pull this off. Where are my breath mints? Freakin’ Coleman. He doesn’t go on for several pages. They’re waving for me again. Coming, just give me a minute. What the hell am I going to do?… What’d you say, Coleman? Are you sure? I just take this other pill of yours, and it will counteract the first one as well as all the beer? Damn, what a fix…. All right, gimme that thing. Coming!…
A-hem. So far so good. Nobody notices I’m bent. But that second pill better kick in soon. I guess this would make me what professors call the “undependable narrator,” except that’s usually some schizo character using first-person voice-over who’s supposed to be the sympathetic detective, but in a hairpin twist is revealed as the psychotic killer dressed in drag and suffering stress-induced blackouts. Man, am I fucked up. What the hell was I just talking about? That second one’s kicking in like a mother. I remember my place now. That undependable narrator guy? Well, that’s not me. I won’t steer you wrong. It’s going to be hard enough as it is. This story’s a mess. But it’s about the Florida Keys, which means it’s a documentary. And frig some fancy setup. Let’s slice through that elliptical fogbank of piffle right now! Here’s the conceit: And if you haven’t driven down to the Keys, you’ll just have to take my word on this. But you know how if you are driving down to the Keys, the people in all the other cars are freaks? Everyone flying down U.S. 1 for a million different reasons, and all of them are wrong. And the ones who don’t look like freaks — they’re the worst. Because that’s the thing about the Keys: Nobody is who they seem to be. It’s the perfect place to hide out and reinvent yourself. And that’s the story. Got it?
What?… Oh, right, the plot. Okay, mixed in with all the freak cars is one very important plot car — a white Mercedes with tinted windows. That’s the key to everything. Remember sea monkeys when you were a kid? Doesn’t have anything to do with this book, but my brain is starting to fizz. The crew is giving me weird looks — need to wrap this up fast, get the hell out of here. So I was supposed to tell you in this prologue what balls to keep your eyes on, and I just did. Cross that off the list. There’s lots of other cars and buses and boats and planes racing south, too many to count. Hey, that’s the Keys. Every day the entire island chain is this Idiot’s Gumball Rally. Get used to it. Just pay attention to that white Mercedes and you’ll be fine. It all starts with this massive traffic jam on U.S. 1. Wait, no, it starts when they find a body. But right after that there’s this big tie-up clogging everything. You guessed it — Coleman again. He didn’t mean to cause it. Trouble just seems to find him like he’s some kind of big trouble-type thing like a magnet or something. What are those twinkling lights? These beautiful bugs are circling my head. Let me catch one and inspect its bioluminescent ectoskeleton. Ho. Wha—? Blubbrsg. Shnbeb? Gfhljlsm. Lijloiejlkme…
Crash.
“Cut! Cut!… What the hell happened to the narrator? He passed out…. Coleman!”
“I didn’t do anything. He was fine a minute ago.”
“Wonderful… Where’s the backup narrator?”
“Right here.” A young man in a starched dress shirt ran over with a pack of stapled pages.
“You’re on.”
“I am?” He nervously rustled pages and talked to himself. “This is what you’ve been waiting for. Get your head in the right spot. Narrator, narrator, narrator…”
“What are you waiting for? This is costing us money!”
“Okay…”
THEY FOUND THE body crucified upside down on the side of the bat tower.
Two Monroe County sheriff’s deputies got the call. Gus and Walter. The green-and-white cruiser rolled down a bumpy dirt road on Sugarloaf Key, coming around a bend in the mangroves until an old wooden tower came into view.
In 1929, a real estate developer named Richter Perky decided to make a killing on Sugarloaf, about fifteen miles from Key West. The only thing standing in the way were the mosquitoes. Millions of ’em.
But Perky had an angle. He erected a giant, gothic wooden tower covered with cedar shingles. It was hollow. Perky planned to fill the inside with bats, which were known to come out at night and feed voraciously on the insects. The tower’s interior contained a series of ascending louvers coated with bat guano, just the way Perky had heard they liked it.
