Big Trouble

Police reported two unusual incidents in Coconut Grove. In one, a man identified as Jack Pendick, twenty-eight, of the Harbour Oakes Manour Trailer Court in Cutler Ridge, had been apprehended after firing a handgun several times near the Coco Walk shopping complex. Nobody had been hurt, but the incident and subsequent apprehension of Pendick had attracted a crowd of tourists, who had temporarily blocked Grand Avenue. A few hours later, in a residential section of the Grove, a Miami police officer identified as Walter Kramitz had been discovered in the middle of Garbanzo Street handcuffed to a large metal object, along with a local business executive identified as Arthur Herk. This apparently was the result of a home-invasion-style robbery at Herk's home, but the details of the incident, and especially how Kramitz and Herk ended up in the street, were still sketchy.

Finally, traffic on busy Le Jeune Road had been shut down completely for several hours when a group of goats had somehow gotten loose on the roadway.

 The newspaper ran this story as a "bright" on the bottom right-hand comer of the front page, with a picture of a sweating animal-control officer, surrounded by cars, chasing a frisky, cheerful-looking goat. This picture produced identical reactions in thousands of readers: They shook their heads, smiled, and said, "Only in Miami."

epilogue

In the weeks that followed, oceanographers up the Atlantic coast detected elevated radioactivity levels in the waters of the Gulf Stream; in addition, some mariners noted an unusually large quantity of dead deepwater fish floating on the ocean surface. Various explanations were offered for these phenomena, including the possibility that they, and the rogue wave, were caused by a catastrophic malfunction aboard a nuclear submarine. This allegation was aggressively advanced on the Internet by a number of people, most notably Pierre Salinger; the fact that the U.S. government said there had been no submarines of any kind in that area only reinforced their belief that they were right. But no concrete evidence ever surfaced, and eventually the matter became just another random piece of conspiracy-nut lore.

The Federal Aviation Administration immediately suspended all flights on Air Impact!, which soon filed for bankruptcy. In response to outrage expressed by the public and political leaders over the apparently lax security at Miami International Airport, a high-level task force was formed to root out problems and recommend solutions. After months of hearings, a number of measures were implemented, the most significant being the hiring of an expert consulting firm to oversee passenger checkpoint operations. This lucrative contract was awarded to See-Cure Tech, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Penultimate, Inc.

Eddie Porter was visited at the hospital by investigators from various law-enforcement agencies, some of them quite curious about how he came to be on Flight 2038. But the FBI took over the investigation and ultimately found no reason to detain Eddie, who returned to Coconut Grove, where he joined the local Hare Krishna temple and became known as Ram Baba Ram.

Nobody ever asked what happened to Snake.

Henry Algott was arrested and tried on several weapons-related charges stemming from the incident in front of the Delta counter. At the trial, the prosecution introduced evidence showing that Algott was a convicted felon and suggesting that he was linked to organized crime. Henry's lawyer—who coincidentally was one of the lawyers Henry had lectured on cigar etiquette, specifically Lawyer C—received permission from the judge, over heated prosecution objections, to bring a mature python into the courtroom, so the jury could appreciate the threat Henry had courageously confronted in the airport. The snake somehow—the prosecution claimed it was intentional—got loose and had to be subdued in a struggle that left the courtroom in a shambles and one bailiff with a dislocated shoulder. The jury took less than ten minutes to return a "not guilty" verdict. Henry returned to East Orange, where he and Leonard continued to operate a successful freelance business killing people, although they refused to take any more jobs in South Florida.

Daphne's owner sued Dade County for pain and suffering related to getting knocked out, plus the loss of a beloved pet. A jury awarded him $3.2 million.

After Arthur Herk got out of the mental hospital, he went to the U.S. attorney's office and told a wild story about corruption and payoffs and hit men and a place in Coconut Grove that sold bombs and missiles. But when investigators went to the address, all they found was a deserted, boarded-up bar, with nothing inside but old beer signs and a busted TV. Arthur died a few months later in what was ruled a fishing accident, which seemed odd because nobody could ever remember his having gone fishing before.