Bird Brained Read online

  I went to sleep with Sophie’s laughter still ringing in my ears, only to dream of being locked out in the cold, all alone.

  Six

  The next morning found me jamming with the rest of the traffic heading west on the Dolphin Expressway. It was time to show my face at work. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife office is tucked away in the duty-free zone just past the airport, an area rife with industry. Its charms include trucks belching exhaust and enough convenience stores to keep me from running low on caffeine.

  I walked in to find my boss, Carlos Cardenas, in his usual pose: staring at a computer screen while sniffing the barrel of his unloaded gun. I had the feeling he wasn’t all that happy with his promotion. The title and pay were good, but now he was stuck behind a desk in charge of more paperwork than one man could handle, responsible for an office that battled an unusually high number of scandals.

  I’d heard various rumors of what he’d done to cause the gods of Fish and Wildlife to strap him with Miami. They ranged from carrying on investigations without prior approval to telling the top brass just what he thought of them. He’d been branded a crazy man, making him sound like my kind of guy. I’d arrived in Miami hoping we’d hit it off. After all, neither of us was on the Service’s A-list, but were token minorities in a whitebread, old-boy world. Instead, Carlos had viewed me as his version of the Cuban man’s burden from the first morning I’d walked through the door.

  “I want you to know that you’re here against my will,” he’d told me. “I’ve got enough to deal with. What I don’t need in Miami is having a white female who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish foisted upon me because of some affirmative-action hooey.”

  “Hola to you, too,” I’d responded, making good use of my one Spanish word.

  He hadn’t been amused. “They’re really out to shaft me this time, aren’t they?”

  See, that was another thing we had in common. I felt exactly the same.

  Maybe it was this sense of unwarranted bad luck that caused him to have such a foul temper. Or maybe it was just Carlos’s way. But his moods were a lot like the prize at the bottom of Cracker Jacks: I always pretty much knew what to expect, and it was never what I wanted.

  I’d just settled down at what I presumed was my desk, disguised as a blizzard of paperwork, when Carlos beckoned me into his office in his own gentle way.

  “Porter! Now!”

  We’d quickly developed a shorthand that takes other couples years to perfect. I looked upon it as an updated Lucy-Desi routine. I walked in, prepared for my latest Cracker Jack prize.

  “Oy vay. You’re one royal pain in the ass.” His head was resting heavily in his hands.

  “Is that a gun over there, or are you just happy to see me?” I pointed to the unloaded pistol on his desk.

  “Actually, I’m thinking of using it on you,” he glumly responded. The bags beneath his eyes would have made a bloodhound proud. “Chances are the brass in Washington would give me a medal, and I’d stand a better chance of getting out of this hole.”

  “Rough weekend?” I inquired, mustering up as much sympathy as I could.

  “Nice of you to ask, especially since it’s your actions that are screwing me over,” Carlos retorted.

  I didn’t have to spend much time pondering exactly what that was; Cardenas quickly informed me.

  “I got a call from Tony Carrera yesterday. He says he’s suing your ass for all it’s worth.”

  Boy, was he in for a big disappointment. “Just what is he suing me for?” As far as I could tell, I’d saved Carrera’s life. Call me crazy, but I’d expected something more like a thank-you note. Maybe even a bottle of wine.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Porter, but the paperwork on his shipment had already been cleared.” Carlos opened his desk drawer, pulled out a container of aspirin and popped the lid, upending the contents into his mouth.

  More than 14,000 annual wildlife shipments flow into Miami, forcing our six inspectors to pick and choose what they look at—Fish and Wildlife triage. That meant rubber-stamping was the general modus operandi. Tony Carrera used that to maximum advantage.

  “I thought a surprise inspection might help keep Tony on the straight and narrow,” I explained.

  “That’s beside the point, Porter. The paperwork was cleared, yet you forced him to open the crates. As a result the man was bitten by a venomous snake, which means he could very well have died. Does that sum it up?” Carlos had begun to slowly twirl the gun round and round in a tight circle. “To say nothing of the fact that inspections aren’t even part of your damn job!”

  “And what is? Sitting at a desk and shuffling a pile of papers?” Damn—yep, it was. Fastest mouth east of the Mississippi.

  Carlos glared at me and pulled on his mustache, a sure sign that a black mood was kicking in. The bureaucratic demand for paperwork was a sore point with him, with good reason. Although smugglers focused on Miami, our territory also ran from Martin County, down through Broward, to Dade, to the tip of Key West, with manatee and sea-turtle problems topping the list. And that wasn’t even counting the other thirty-eight endangered species that call Florida home. The state was considered the Mission Impossible of the critter world. With all this going on, the thought of planting my fanny in front of a stack of paperwork was absurd.

  “Can Carrera really sue me?” I was counting on some moral support.

  Carlos was back to sniffing his gun. “Sure. Why not?”

  It was nice to know the Service was solidly behind me, as usual. I filled Carlos in on the Dominguez case, hoping that 250 disappearing parrots would interest the man.

  Carlos sighed and fingered an unfinished report. “Local theft of wildlife isn’t a federal problem. That belongs to Dade County and the state. Don’t waste our time.”

  But I’d been trained under Charlie Hickock, the most ornery, infamous, and best agent to have ever passed through the Service. Besides learning the ropes, I’d learned to depend on my instincts and wiles when it came to a case, latching on tight and not letting go. I pressed my point with Carlos.

  “This involves more than just theft; it could be the tip of a large smuggling operation. I caught Willy muling parrot eggs for Alberto just the other night.”

  Carlos’s eyes narrowed to two thin slits as he timed his opening shot. “You wouldn’t happen to have some of that evidence by any chance, would you?” He watched as his point hit its mark. “Don’t tell me, Porter. It all flew away?”

  I felt my face redden. “Willy flushed everything before I could reach him. But I kept his vest, which has some dried yolk on it as evidence,” I said eagerly.

  “Weed is just one of hundreds of two-bit smugglers here in Miami. We don’t have the time to be chasing our tails, running after them for piss-ass crimes.”

  He pointed a finger past me, clearly aimed at my desk. “You’ve got more than enough right there to keep you busy. Unless you’d like some extra paperwork, that is.”

  I’d sooner have played with a crate full of tarantulas. It was time to throw down my trump card. “Willy may be a two-bit smuggler, but he has enough savvy to have lined up contacts that are providing him with a pipeline of hyacinth and Cuban Amazon birds straight out of the wild.”

  Carlos’s head snapped up at the mention of endangered parrots. He’d once told me about his grandmother’s love for such birds. And right now, Amazons were hot, hot, hot to own. Especially in the Cuban community, where the bird was a living link to their homeland.

  All I had to do was reel him in. “Alberto was running some kind of illegal courier service that dropped off American goods in exchange for Cuban birds and cigars.” I told him about the sack of birds.

  Carlos beat his hands lightly on his desk as if it were a bongo, his brow scrunched into a canvas of wrinkles. “All right, Porter. It could be worth looking into—just on the slim chance that you’re really onto something.”

  I was about to pull out the hyacinth feather when Carlos added a footnote.


  “But I’m assigning the case to Phil.” He gave his hands one final hard slap on the desk, turning the bongo into a kettledrum.

  “What!” I felt incredibly tactful by not lunging for his gun.

  “Listen, Porter: We’re talking about dealing with the Hispanic community. They aren’t going to respond well to a female agent going around and questioning them.”

  I wasn’t about to swallow that line. “Don’t you think that might be your own bias?”

  “Number two. Phil’s been based in Miami a lot longer than you and already has good informants in place,” Carlos continued.

  “If his informants are so good, why hasn’t he come up with his own smuggling case involving endangered parrots?” I challenged.

  Carlos conveniently turned a deaf ear. “And, number three, Phil speaks Spanish.”

  Damn! If only I hadn’t fallen for that line in school about French being the language of love!

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Carlos cut me off at the pass. “End of discussion, Porter. Finish that paperwork on your desk and we’ll talk about sending you out on dove detail.” He smirked.

  I’d joined the Service to take on the bad guys and save the critters of the world. I’d already done my share of duck duty, sitting on my rear end in the swamps of Louisiana. I had no desire to spend my time in Florida playing nanny again to a group of hormonally challenged hunters with the hots to shoot birds.

  “Write up a report on Dominguez and Weed, and the parrots that you saw in that sack. I’ll look it over and pass it on to Phil,” Carlos commanded.

  I hadn’t seen Phil voluntarily leave his desk for anything other than lunch in the entire six months that I’d been here. I was damned if I was about to hand my case over to him.

  Maybe my fanny was the property of Uncle Sam, but it sure didn’t belong to Carlos. It was time to practice the fine art of backpedaling, no matter how stupid it made me sound.

  “I don’t really feel comfortable with putting anything down on paper,” I began.

  Carlos raised his head, beginning to sense trouble. “And just why is that?”

  I demurely lowered my eyes, wondering how Lucy Ricardo would have gotten out of this one. “Well, to tell you the truth, it all happened so fast that I’m not really sure what it was I saw in that sack. I only had enough time to see there were some large blue and green birds.” I topped it off with an apologetic shrug.

  “I knew it!” Carlos exploded. He squeezed his head tightly between his hands, as if it were about to burst. “It’s the sixty eggs, all over again! Forget it, Porter. Just do your damn paperwork!”

  I headed to my desk, silently fuming even though I’d kept my case out of Phil’s lackadaisical paws.

  The infamous sixty eggs case took place one month after I’d arrived in Miami, gung ho to make my mark. I’d received a tip about a small-time smuggler flying in from Brazil with illegal goods, and had watched and waited, my adrenaline revved, as a customs inspector gave the smuggler a cursory one-two glance and passed him through. I’d immediately stopped the mule, explaining that I needed to do my own inspection. The customs inspector had shot me an unappreciative look as I tore the smuggler’s luggage apart and triumphantly found a small wooden box, its lid tightly nailed closed as if it were a miniature coffin. Except for the tiny airholes that had been drilled in its top.

  My pulse raced as I pried the crate open to discover a cobalt blue bird nestled as quiet as a corpse inside. Its beak and legs had been tightly taped and a thimble of tequila used to keep it tranquilized. Worst of all, the hyacinth’s beautiful tail feathers had been crudely hacked off in order to fit the bird inside its cramped quarters.

  I opened a second box, where sixty eggs had been packed as carefully as a treasure trove of pearls. My heart pounded, certain I’d discovered endangered hyacinth eggs.

  The customs inspector hurriedly informed a U.S. Department of Agriculture agent about what I had found, fully aware that foreign eggs are routinely destroyed for fear of disease.

  “But these are from an endangered species!” I’d argued, keeping tight hold of the box in a precious tug of war.

  The fight escalated until I threatened to have the USDA agent thrown into jail for breaking the Endangered Species Act. Carlos was immediately called to the scene, with the expectation that he’d force me to hand over the tainted goods. Instead Carlos joined in the act, his Cuban dander riled to a tizzy as he yelled “death to anyone who would harm endangered birds!”

  The fight took flight up the ranks all the way to Washington, D.C., where it was finally decided the parrots would be allowed to hatch, and then tested for disease. Carlos had gone to bat for me like a trooper, even managing to finagle an incubator out of USDA’s hands. Then we’d waited with bated breath, anxious to savor the fruits of our victory. I should have been clued in on what to expect when it was my customs inspector who made the call.

  “Hey, Porter. Looks like you finally got yourself a cock. Sixty of them, to be exact,” he’d gloated triumphantly.

  My hyacinth macaws had hatched into fighting cocks. For the next few months, Carlos and I were the butt of endless chicken jokes. My presence inside the terminal was still met with calls of “cock-a-doodle doo,” and “how’s it hanging?” But Carlos and his macho pride had taken the hardest hit. I was paying for it now.

  I sat at my desk feeling comatose at the mere sight of so much paperwork, when my phone rang, allowing me a momentary reprieve. My savior turned out to be none other than Tony Carrera.

  “Hi, Tony. I hear you’re so overwhelmed at my saving your life that you’re planning to sue me,” I said, feeling unappreciated all the way around.

  “Yeah. That’s right. I almost died ’cause of you, Porter. All I need to do is make one call to my lawyer and your ass is grass,” Tony answered in a cocksure tone.

  I could almost hear him gnawing on the soggy nub of his cigar.

  “But maybe there’s something you can do for me instead.”

  “What are we playing, Tony? Let’s Make a Deal?” I asked, curious as to what the favor would be.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Tony snickered. “You be nice to me and maybe I’ll consider dropping the charges against you.”

  “You don’t have a case, Tony,” I said, calling his bluff.

  “Don’t screw with me, Porter,” Carrera warned. “Your boss wasn’t too happy when I told him about what you did. He gave a scream like he’d swallowed a hot tamale.”

  I sighed, knowing there was no sense trying to enlighten him that Mexicans ate tamales, not Cubans. “What’s your problem, Tony?”

  “I got this crazy neighbor who don’t like my flamingos. Can ya imagine that?” Carrera sounded sincerely hurt.

  I had heard about the flock of pink Chilean flamingos that Tony kept on his grounds. Supposedly they made the ones at Parrot Jungle look chintzy.

  “You gotta see my birds—they’re gorgeous. And very well behaved, too. I gotta great place for them here, ya know? I gotta pond and everything. Okay, so once in a while a couple of ’em get a little rowdy and wander next door. They’re like kids. So what’s the big deal, huh?” Tony paused, waiting for me to respond.

  “I don’t know, Tony. You tell me.”

  “The big goddamn deal is that they poop a little on this guy’s lawn. That’s what’s giving him a heart attack! I told him, ‘Schmuck! That stuff is what they call organic. It’s good for your lawn, putz.’ But he’s one of these anal assholes,” Carrera fumed.

  “I’m sure you can work something out with him,” I replied. “There’s nothing official I can do.”

  “I ain’t done yet, Porter!” Tony gave a dramatic pause. “This morning the bastard escalated the battle. He nailed one of my birds that innocently wandered over. Now the sick fuck’s got it rigged to the grille of his Rover and is driving back and forth in front of my place beeping his horn and driving me nuts! The guy’s a lunatic and I want his ass thrown in jail!”

  There was the distinct
sound of a car horn beeping in the background.

  “Ya hear that? I’m supposed to be recuperating! I’m a sick man, and I can tell you, this ain’t helping things any!” Tony wailed.

  I found myself commiserating with him. “I’d really like to help you, Tony, but this falls under the state’s jurisdiction. You need to call the Game and Freshwater Fish Commission.”

  “Bullshit. I need a fed showing up on the scene to scare the shit out of this guy. He ain’t gonna listen to no state agent.”

  “I can’t get involved in this,” I tried to explain.

  Carrera interrupted, his voice rising above the sound of his neighbor’s car horn. “Let me ask you something, Porter. Just how much does that insurance company of yours cover your ass for?”

  His point was well taken. “I’ll be right over,” I replied.

  Carlos had stepped out, allowing me to make a quick getaway. I left a note that an emergency call had come in and hopped into my Tempo, setting sail for the posh suburb of Coral Gables in search of Tony Carrera’s domain.

  “I’ll be right there” stretched into an hour as I fought my way down the Palmetto, turning off to land smack in the traffic of Miracle Mile. A four-block-long shopper’s extravaganza, the miracle is that there are actually people who can afford to buy anything there. I crawled along, my dented slice of American sandwiched between a silver-blue Jaguar and a metallic gold Mercedes, both the exact color of their owners’ hair.

  I followed Tony’s directions out to the burbs where the streets began to curve, winding and ending with no apparent rhyme or reason. Even more infuriating, all the addresses were painted in tiny black letters on obscure white stones that sat low to the ground. I was just about to give up, drive home, and start totaling up my meager net worth, when the god of insurance companies smiled down upon me. A life-sized street sign appeared and pointed me in the right direction.

  Carrera’s hideaway lay fortressed behind a high brick wall. It was immediately evident that the reptile biz had been very, very good to the man. The neighborhood was a hot zone for the rich, famous, and corrupt.