The Reluctant Prophet Read online

  “Hawaiian shirt at two o’clock,” I said to Bernard. “He’s just about ready.” I watched Shirt’s round little wife bustle ahead of him into the City Gate Gallery, pulled by the lure of all things Thomas Kinkade. “She isn’t.” I glanced at the sun blazing straight down on us. “Give it another five degrees.”

  I couldn’t take the carriage down this part of St. George. It was restricted to foot traffic, which saved the Old World feel that people came in droves to experience—from serious seekers of history to collectors of refrigerator magnets. Having grown up here, I tended to look at something like Castillo de San Marcos and gaze right through it, which was hard to do, seeing how the fort dominated the Bay Front, as if at any moment we were going to be attacked by Frenchmen bent on stealing our Spanish charm. Even when I paused with a carriage full to pontificate on its checkered past, I often wondered if it actually made any difference to anybody.

  So go buy a Harley, Allison.

  Bernard reared his head up, mane flying, and for an instant I thought he’d felt the Nudge too. Until I realized I had a stranglehold on the lines.

  “You for hire?”

  I jerked to look down at Hawaiian Shirt. Saddlebags of sweat were darkening his palm trees. The round little wife wilted beside him, laden with plastic shopping bags.

  “I want to go to the Fountain of Youth,” she said.

  “Well, who doesn’t?” I said. “Climb aboard and we’ll get your toes over there so you can dip them in it.”

  The man gave her rump a push and heaved himself up behind her. “I need to dunk my whole body in.”

  Bernard did his Fred Astaire, and the wife bobbed against her husband with a squeal. This was probably the most they’d touched each other in years.

  “Welcome to Camelot Carriage Service,” I said. “We are St. Augustine’s first and most reputable guide to the nation’s oldest city.”

  “As long as I can sit down and get out of this sauna,” hubby said.

  “You just relax,” I said. “And I’ll tell you all the secrets. You already know this is the oldest continuous European settlement in the United States, but you probably don’t know—”

  Blah, blah, blah.

  The doleful saxophone of a street busker sobbed behind us as we clopped away from St. George Street. It had to be my imagination that it said, “Buy a Harley, Allison. I’m telling you, go buy one.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hawaiian Shirt and Round Wife were from Michigan and ate up every off-the-wall morsel I tossed into the back of the carriage. The hubby showed his appreciation with a generous tip.

  The rest of the day’s fares, however, decreased steadily in quality—and gratuities—from there. The last group was so drunk that one of them threw up right in front of the former Ponce de Leon Hotel—still über-elegant as Flagler College. Henry Flagler had built his veritable castle for invited guests only; he would be banging his cane on the inside of his coffin right now if he saw this lush hurling in full view of his luxurious dream for St. Augustine. When I dropped the party off at Scarlett O’Hara’s tavern at five p.m., I had to wait for ten minutes while two females in kitten-heeled sandals hauled out the guy who was passed out on the backseat, presumably so he could go inside and drink some more. I made a mental note to wipe the drool off the tuck-and-roll when I got back to the stables, and pointed Bernard down Cordova. He knew there was food in his future; he didn’t need much urging.

  “Who pays big bucks for a carriage tour and then stands up and screams through the whole thing?” I said to him. “Nice work trying to get that one idiot to fall out. If he’d gone over, I would have left him in the gutter for the homeless guys to pick clean later.”

  At least I’d accomplished one thing in the course of the afternoon. When it had become obvious that group and the one before it weren’t interested in a thing I had to offer about Menendez or Henry Flagler, I’d had time to mull over the voice that said I was supposed to purchase a Harley. I’d come to the conclusion that it couldn’t be real.

  In the first place, Bonner was probably right: God didn’t give instructions like that one. Did he? If he was going to push you to something outrageous, wasn’t it more likely to be: “Sell everything you have and open a soup kitchen?”

  “Go buy a Harley” was more like some twenty-five-year-old punk’s wishful thinking. But if I were going to wish for something, it would be for a job that didn’t involve looking at a horse’s behind all day while I tried to make the absurdities of history sound noble to a carriage full of kids, all with their MP3s plugged in so they couldn’t hear their parents saying, “Isn’t that interesting, Justin?”

  A car horn blared, and both Bernard and I started. I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting at the sleepy intersection of Cordova and Treasury Streets, but for Pete’s sake, you didn’t honk at a horse unless you were delivering a kidney. Moron.

  I waved for the driver to go around me on the left, but he—or apparently a she in a BMW with stuff to do—leaned on the horn again. Normally at that point I would have inched forward and stopped in front of every house on the street, just to get her shorts in a wad, but Bernard was freaking out. He tried to rear his head back, careening the carriage sideways.

  “Whoa, Big Guy,” I said, easing on the line to keep him from turning the whole thing over. That only gave him permission to try again. He kicked the shaft and lifted the left wheels off the pavement. Behind me the driver gave three obnoxious honks that set Bernard writhing like a snake on a stick. Either I had to get him out of there or we were both going down in the middle of Cordova, where we’d undoubtedly be run over by the Beemer and left for dead.

  I took a firmer hold on the lines and pulled his head to the left to turn onto King Street. The driver chose that moment to wrench the car out from behind me and squeal into the left turn lane. I veered Bernard right with the carriage still teetering.

  After a litany of whoa-buddy-whoa-it’s-okays—as well as some general hoping under my breath that the wench in the BMW would arrive at her destination with serious horse poo on her tires—I was finally able to coax Bernard to a stop and get my bearings. Uneasiness crept up my spine.

  “Great part of town you wound us up in,” I said, though Bernard didn’t seem to mind that we’d just landed in front of a boarded-up storefront with the remains of yellow crime scene tape dangling from its eaves. As long as he was away from sports cars with horns, he was momentarily happy.

  There weren’t too many vehicles of any kind on West King Street—the notoriously “bad” end of the otherwise elegant avenue—and there wouldn’t be until dark, at least as far as I knew. I wasn’t in the habit of hanging out down here, nor was anybody else unless they were interested in a good drug deal or a hookup with a prostitute.

  In the still-stark light of late afternoon, it looked like a neighborhood everyone had abruptly abandoned and left to decay. The few remaining businesses—several bars with smoke-filmed glass doors, a dubious auto-repair shop, a tattoo parlor that practically screamed, “Get your Hepatitis C here!”—were in various stages of dissipation. They matched the man and mutt who slept in the shade of a Dumpster.

  But by all reports, once darkness fell, it took on an entirely different tone. More violent crimes were committed on these few blocks than in the rest of the old city put together. Now and then my boss, Lonnie, would hire guys from down here to clean the stables, but they never lasted long. Some overdosed. One had been the perpetrator of one of those violent crimes, another the victim. But most just sort of gave up on the idea of working in a dead-end job. They didn’t have to leave home to find a dead end.

  “This isn’t on our tour route, Big Guy,” I said, although I had to admit it would be an interesting addition to my sightseeing spiel. “West King Street, gateway to the Lincolnville District of our fair city, where you can get you some crack cocaine, a littl
e heroine, some hooker action …”

  I squirmed on the seat. It wouldn’t be my best material. We were only two blocks from Henry Flagler’s dream. Eight blocks from the house I grew up in, where I still lived, oblivious to the slow death going on down here. I couldn’t make it funny.

  The mongrel dog by the Dumpster began to stir from his coma, making this a good time to move on. Not so much with Bernard and canines. I picked up the lines, a U-turn in mind, but the man rolled over and stretched out his arm. The dog stopped eyeing Bernard and turned around three times before settling into the crook of his elbow. The man gave a contented groan, and they both sank back into sleep.

  “It’s not dead,” I said to Bernard.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m serious.” Somewhere beneath the death pall, something else was trying to get its breath. Something I couldn’t name; I could only feel it, and it Nudged me—with a capital N—straight down West King Street.

  I went with it.

  The Camelot stables were on the corner of Ribiera and LaQuinta, not street names a tourist would find on the sightseeing map. It wouldn’t do to mix the smell of horse manure with the scent of fine cuisine. There was only one way to get there from our tour routes, and the other side of the San Sebastian River wasn’t it.

  That fact wasn’t lost on Lonnie, whose skinny form stood at the fence like a stick figure as I trotted up with Bernard and carriage. Not that he would have missed our arrival even if he’d been in the back of the barn. Bernard had an exhausting day for a horse that was normally content to amble one fare around the fort and call it good, and he wasn’t wasting any time getting to the feed trough.

  “Where were you?” Lonnie said—in lieu of “Hey, how’d it go today?”

  He pushed back the rim of the inevitable cowboy hat to look up at me and shifted the equally as inevitable toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “Had to take a detour,” I said.

  I jumped down from the seat and loosened Bernard’s girth.

  “Anything I want to know about?” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Anything I’m gonna hear about later?”

  “You mean from a dissatisfied customer? No. Some of them were so wasted they won’t even remember they took a carriage ride.”

  “That’s all I need to know,” Lonnie said.

  I gave him a grunt. As long as the company owners didn’t get ticked-off phone calls from customers, Lonnie’s job was secure, and so was mine. He reminded me regularly that horse poop always runs down hill.

  I got the trace free and led Bernard out from between the shafts and nuzzled my nose against his. He dodged like a six-year-old boy looking around to make sure none of his friends could see his mom kissing him. In Bernard’s case it was oats he was looking for.

  “Water first, Big Guy,” I said, “or you’ll puke your guts.”

  “I’ll get you a bucket.” Lonnie turned to grab one from the stack, revealing his somewhat comical profile. Skinny as he was, his blossoming beer belly gave him the appearance of a teenage girl who was six months pregnant. You had to wonder how he’d developed a gut like that at only thirty years old.

  He stopped in front of us, empty pail in hand. Bernard poked at it with his nose. “Seriously—how come you came from that direction? No matter what you run into, that’s not on the approved route. Ever.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “You want to give me that bucket or are we going to let this animal dehydrate? I still have to bathe him—”

  “I’d hate to have to terminate you. The owners would make me do it if they heard you were prancin’ this horse down West King. Not to mention PETA—those bleeding hearts would be all up in our business.”

  “Lonnie, you’re killin’ me here,” I said. “Either fill that thing or I’ll do it myself.”

  “Just tellin’ ya,” he said as he headed for the spigot.

  “Just hearin,’” I said.

  I guessed I should have been anxious about that. Lonnie chastised me about something I could be “terminated” for at least once a week, but this was one he really might have to follow up on if it happened again. That was the thing. I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t be Nudged to go up West King Street—or do anything else weird for that matter. I knew it like I knew that Bernard was going to kick over his water bucket.

  And the instant Lonnie set it down, he did.

  All right. I could at least go look at Harleys.

  After all, when had the approved routes ever taken me anywhere anyway?

  It was Tuesday afternoon before I could get to the Harley dealership. Since it was located out by Interstate 95, way west of the historic district, I had to take my van, which started after only four or five cranks. It didn’t get used that much because most of where I normally needed to go was within walking distance of my house. The Harley-Davidson store didn’t qualify as “normally.”

  Once you get beyond US 1, St. Augustine looks like just about every other town in the continental US—a Chili’s, a McDonald’s, a Mapco station. Its only distinguishing feature at that intersection was what its owners claimed to be the Largest Adult Store in the State of Florida. Who knew—maybe it was the Oldest, too. It was, in fact, right next door to St. Augustine Harley-Davidson, and needless to say I’d never been in either one of them.

  The Harley place was a lot classier than I’d expected. I was almost bowled over by the smell of leather when I walked through the door—that and the gleam of chrome. Bonner would’ve been going for his Ray-Bans.

  Ignoring the cowhide bustiers on display—because if God told me to buy one of those we were going to have an issue—I threaded my way back to the actual showroom. And then I stopped before a sea of tailpipes and handlebars and studded seats and got an immediate case of dry mouth. It was like entering a classroom to take a final I hadn’t studied for—hadn’t even attended the class for. It had definitely been a long time since I’d had that feeling.

  Okay. How hard could this be? Just check them out one at a time. I was only there to look anyway.

  The bikes in the first row were almost as big as compact cars, with backseats and trunks and full sound systems. “Electra Glide,” some tags said. “Ultra Glide,” said those on larger ones. I’d seen men older than the Reverend Howard on bikes like these, tooling across the Bridge of Lions in post-midlife crisis. “Geezer Glides,” I muttered.

  I moved on to the next row, somewhat smaller but still intimidating with their wide, bright hips, and three-eyed stares. I liked the names better, though. Road King. Street Glide. Road Glide. Street Bob.

  I turned over one tag and snorted. No way I was sitting on a bike called Fat Boy.

  “You gon’ let him buy one, huh?”

  I looked up into a pair of grinning blue eyes, fixed into the forty-ish face of a guy with “Stan” embroidered on his polo shirt. Sandy hair brushed the top of his collar.

  “Him?” I said.

  “Husband? Boyfriend?”

  The little chauvinist.

  “I’m looking for myself,” I said.

  The covering of surprise was, I have to say, professionally done.

  “Well, there you go,” he said. “We get a lot of women buyers in here. What are you ridin’ now?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What kind of bike do you have?”

  “Oh,” I said, vaguely. “It’s been a while.”

  That was true. In California, between the surf shop job and the gig at the nail polish boutique, I dated a guy with a rice rocket who seemed intent on killing us both every time I got on it with him. I hadn’t gone near a motorcycle since.

  “Your first Harley. All right!” Stan rubbed his hands together. “So—did you have one in mind?”

  Yeah, I really should have
studied.

  “There’s sure a lot to choose from,” I said.

  “Well, to begin with—what’s your name?”

  “Allison—Allison Chamberlain.”

  “Chamberlain as in Enterprises?”

  I could almost hear his mind whirring like a calculator.

  “I’m not associated with them,” I said. “And I don’t really need anything too fancy.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you ride as long as you ride, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, Allison, anything trip your trigger so far?”

  “Why don’t you pitch something to me?” I said.

  He went into salesman mode, which gave me fewer opportunities to reveal that I had no idea what I was looking at.

  “You want one that’s gon’ be a good fit,” he said, leading me past the Geezer Glides and Road Kings and, thankfully, Fat Boys and Bobs. “You get a good fit and then you can make it your own personal ride.” He grinned with his eyes again. “You put the Screaming Eagle package on and ride up on that—people gon’ be rollin’ up their windows right quick and lockin’ their doors.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be so me.”

  “You’re familiar with the five families of Harleys,” he said. “You’ve got your touring bikes, your Softails, your Sportsters, and the V-Rods.” He looked at my legs and nodded. “I’m thinking maybe an FXDL—for you. That’s in the Dyna line.”

  “Who is she?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Dinah.”

  Stan couldn’t quite maintain his professional cover this time. “You really don’t know a thing about Harleys, do you?”

  “Nada,” I said.

  “It’s D-Y-N-A—”