Every winter transients flock to Florida as sure as the tourists and turkey buzzards. Their numbers are not so great, but often they are more visible; sleeping in the parks and public libraries, panhandling the street corners. The weather is so mild that there is almost no outdoor place that a bum would find uninhabitable in southern Florida. Paradise is how many of them would describe it. Some towns address the problem with less tolerance than others (Palm Beach, for example, where loitering is treated the same as ax-murder), but usually the bums get by with little fear of incarceration. The reason is simple, and in it lies another prime attraction for the nation’s wandering winos: there is no room for them in South Florida’s jails because the jails already are too crowded with dangerous criminals.
Beginning in late December, then, the transients start appearing on the streets. Rootless, solitary, and unwelcome, they are ideal victims for the randomly violent. Kyle and his high-school friends discovered this the very first time. On a five-dollar bet from Cole, Kyle slugged a wino under a bridge. The boys ran away, but nothing happened. Of course the transient never reported the attack—the local cops would have laughed in his face. A week later the teenagers tried it again when they discovered an old longhair sleeping on a golf course in Boca Raton. This time Jeff and Cole pitched in, while Kyle added a few whacks with his stepfather’s four-iron. This time when they ran away, the kids were laughing.
Soon bum-bashing became part of the weekly recreation; a thrill, something to do. The boys were easily bored and not all that popular at school, shunned by the jocks, dopers, and surfers alike. So whenever Kyle could get the car and swipe some beer money, Jeff and Cole were raring to go. Shooting the rifle always seemed to put them in the right mood.
As soon as they left the dump they started scouting for bums to bash. It was Jeff who spotted the guy curled up beneath the Turnpike overpass. Kyle drove by once, turned the car around, and drove past again. This time he parked fifty yards down the road. The three teenagers got out and walked back. Kyle liked the way it was shaping up—a dark stretch of highway with practically no traffic.
Skink was nearly asleep, stretched out halfway up the concrete embankment and faced away from the road. He heard someone coming, but assumed it was only Decker and the Cuban detective. As the men got closer, their footsteps did not alarm Skink nearly so much as their whispering. He was turning over to take a look just as Kyle ran up and kicked him brutally in the head.
Skink rolled down the embankment and lay still, facedown on the flat ground.
“Hey, Mr. Hobo,” said Kyle, “sorry I busted your shades.” He held up the broken sungiasses for the others to see.
Jeff and Cole each took a turn kicking Skink in the ribs. “I like his outfit,” Jeff said. He was a bony kid with volcanic pustular acne. “This’d be great for hunting,” he said, fingering the rainsuit.
“Then take it,” Kyle said.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Cole said, “even though it’s about ten sizes too big.”
“You’ll look like an orange tepee,” Kyle teased.
Jeff knelt and tried to roll Skink on his back. “He’s a big sumbitch,” he said. “Gimme a hand.”
They turned Skink over and stripped him.
“He looks dead,” Cole remarked.
“Check out the ponytail,” Jeff said. He had climbed into Skink’s enormous rainsuit. The hood flopped down over his eyes, and the legs and arms were way too long. The other boys laughed as Jeff did a little jig under the highway bridge. “I’m Mr. Hobo!” he sang. “Dead Mr. Hobo! Have a drink, make a stink—”
Jeff stopped singing when he saw the stranger. The man was sprinting toward them from across the road. Jeff tried to warn Kyle but it was too late.
The man took down both Kyle and Cole with a diving knee-high tackle. On the ground it was madness. The man hit Cole three times, crushing his nose and shattering his right cheekbone with an eggshell sound that made Jeff want to gag. While this was going on, Kyle, who was taller than the stranger, managed to get on his feet and grab the man around the neck, from behind. But the stranger, still on his knees, merely brought both elbows up sharply into Kyle’s groin. Sickened, Jeff watched his other friend crumple. Then the man was on top of Kyle, aiming tremendous jackhammer punches at the meat of his throat.
Jeff turned from the scene to run but he stumbled inside the baggy rainsuit, got up, faltered again. A hand gripped the back of his neck and something cold pressed against the base of his skull. A gun.
“Don’t move, you little fuckwad.” A tough-looking dark man with a mustache.
He dragged Jeff back to the overpass, where the bigger stranger was still straddling Kyle and wordlessly redesigning the young man’s face.
“Stop it!” yelled the dark man with the gun. “Decker, stop!”
But R. J. Decker couldn’t stop; he couldn’t even hear. Al Garcίa’s voice echoed under the bridge but not a word reached Decker’s ears. All that registered in his consciousness was the sight of a face and the need to punish it. Decker was working mechanically, his knuckles raw and bloody and numb. He stopped punching only when heavy damp arms encircled his chest and lifted him in the air, as if he were weightless, and suspended him there for what seemed like a very long time. Coming down, unwinding finally, the first thing Decker could hear was the furious sound of his own breathing. The second thing, from the beast with the big arms, was a tired voice that said, “Okay, Miami, I’m impressed.”
23
Skink slipped unconscious in the back seat. His head sagged against R. J. Decker’s shoulder and the breath rattled deep in his ribs. Decker felt warm drops seeping through his shirt.
“He’s lost that eye,” Al Garcίa said grimly, chewing on a cigarette as he drove.
Decker had seen it too. Skink’s left eye was a jellied mess—Kyle, the big kid, had been wearing Texas roach-stomper boots. A whitish fluid oozed down Skink’s cheek.
“He needs a doctor,” Decker said.
So did the teenage thugs, Garcίa thought, but they would live—no thanks to Decker. Barehanded he would have killed them all if Skink hadn’t stopped him. Garcίa felt certain that the kids wouldn’t tell the police about the beating–jeff, the acne twerp, was the type to spill the beans and the others knew it. Together they’d invent some melodramatic story of what had happened under the bridge, something that would play well at school. Garcίa was pretty sure two of them would spend the rest of the semester in the hospital, anyway.
Decker felt exhausted and depressed. His arms ached and his knuckles stung. He touched Skink’s face and felt a crust of blood on the big man’s beard.
“Maybe I ought to give up,” Decker said.
“Don’t be a moron.”
“Once we get him to a doctor, you drop me off on the highway and haul ass back to Dade County. Nobody’ll know a thing.”
“Fuck you,” Garcia said.
“Al, it’s not worth it.”
“Speak for yourself.” It was Skink. He raised his head and wiped his face with the sleeve of his rainsuit. With a forefinger he probed his broken eye socket and said, “Great.”
“There’s a hospital near the St. Lucie exit,” Garcia said.
Skink said, “Naw, just keep driving.”
“I’m sorry, captain,” Decker said. “We shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“Alone is how I like it.” He slid over to the corner of the back seat. His face sank into the shadow.
Garcίa pulled off the Turnpike at Fort Pierce and stopped at a Pic ‘n’ Pay convenience store. Decker got out to make a phone call. While he was gone Skink stirred again and straightened up. In the washhouse light his face looked pulpy and lopsided; Garcίa could tell he was in agony.
He said, “Hang in there, Governor.”
Skink stared at him. “What, you lifted some fingerprints?”
Garcίa nodded. “From a brass doorknob. That night at the chiropractor’s house. Got a solid match from the FBI on an ancient missing-persons case.”
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“A closed case,” Skink said.
“A famous case.”
Skink gazed out the window of the car.
“Who else knows?” he said.
“Nobody but me and some G-7 clerk at the Hoover Building.”
“I see.”
Garcίa said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t like quitters, Mr. Tyree, but I suspect you had your reasons.”
“I’ll make no goddamn apologies,” Skink said. After a pause he added: “Don’t tell Decker.”
“No reason to,” said Al Garcia.
Decker came back with hot coffee and Danish. Skink said he wasn’t hungry. “Keep your eyes out, though,” he added when they were back on the road.
“I got you something.” Decker handed him a brown bag.
Skink opened it and grinned what was left of his TV smile.
Inside the bag was a new pair of black sunglasses.
Just before midnight he suddenly groaned and passed out again. Decker tore up his own shirt for a compress bandage and wrapped the bad eye. He held Skink’s head in his lap and told Garcia to drive faster.
Minutes after they crossed the county line into Harney, a highway-patrol car appeared in the rearview mirror and practically glued itself to the Chrysler’s bumper.
“Oh hell,” Al Garcίa said.
But R. J. Decker was feeling much better.
Deacon Johnson was proud of himself. He had gone down to the welfare office near the Superdome and found a nine-year-old blond girl who was double-jointed at the elbows. When she popped her bony arms out they looked magnificently grotesque, an effect that would be amplified dramatically by Charlie Weeb’s television cameras. Deacon Johnson asked the girl’s mother if he could rent her daughter for a couple of days and the mother said sure, for a hundred bucks—but no funny business. Deacon Johnson said don’t worry, ma’am, this is a wholesome Christian enterprise, and led the little girl to his limousine.
At the downtown production studios of the Outdoor Christian Network, Deacon Johnson took the little girl, whose name was Darla, to meet the famous Reverend Charles Weeb.
Twirling his eyeglasses in one hand, Weeb looked relaxed behind his desk. He wore a powder-blue pullover, white parachute pants, and a pair of black Nike running shoes. A young woman with astounding breasts was trimming his famous cinnamon-blond eyebrows.
Deacon Johnson said, “Darla, show the preacher your little trick.”
Darla took one step forward and extended both arms, as if awaiting handcuffs.
“Well?” said Charlie Weeb.
Darla closed her eyes, strained—and chucked her elbows out of joint at preposterous angles. The sockets emitted two little pops as they disengaged.
The statuesque eyebrow barber nearly wilted.
“Bravo!” said Charlie Weeb.
“Thank you,” said Darla. Her pale arms hung crookedly at her sides.
“Izzy, whadya think?” Weeb said. “I think we’re talking the big P.”
“Polio?” Deacon Johnson frowned.
“Why the hell not?”
Deacon Johnson said, “Well, it’s very uncommon these days.”
“Perfect.”
“Except everybody knows there’s a vaccine.”
“Not in the bowels of Appalachian coal country,” Charlie Weeb said. “Not for a poor little orphan girl raised on grubworms and drainwater.”
Darla spoke up. “I live in a ’partment on St. Charles,” she said firmly. “With my momma.”
“talk to this child,” Charlie Weeb said to Deacon Johnson. “Explain how TV works.”
It was a good thing for Charlie Weeb that there was no audience for the dress rehearsals. At first Darla insisted on popping her elbows in and out, in and out—just to show of—and it took Deacon Johnson quite some time to make her understand the theatrical importance of timing. At a given cue Darla was supposed to roll her eyes, loll her tongue, and fall writhing onto the stage; when she rose again to face the cameras and audience, her polio would be cured. To demonstrate the success of his ministrations, the Reverend Charles Weeb would then toss her a beach ball.
The cue for Darla’s fit was to be when Weeb raised his arms and implored: “Lord Jesus, mend this poor Christian creature!” The first few times, Darla jumped the gun badly, collapsing on the word “Jesus” so that the sound of her limp form hitting the stage stepped all over Charlie Weeb’s big climax. Once Deacon Johnson had coached Darla past this problem, the next challenge was teaching her to catch the beach ball. The first few times she simply let the ball bounce off her chest, and the noise of it smacking the lanyard mike nearly blew out the engineer’s eardrums. Darla dropped the ball so many times in rehearsal that the Reverend Weeb lost his Christian temper and called her a “palsied little twat”—a term which, fortunately, the child did not understand. When Weeb demanded that they go back to the lidocaine-injection method, Deacon Johnson quickly intervened and suggested now was a good time for lunch.
Miraculously, the live Sunday broadcast went off without a hitch. The crew did an extraordinary job making Darla appear sallow and gray and mortally ill. When the cue came, she collapsed perfectly and—after much thrashing—arose beaming and cherubic and healed. Reviewing the videotapes later, the Reverend Weeb marveled aloud at how deftly and invisibly little Darla had reengaged her elbow joints. Only on slo-mo could you see her do it. And, at the end, she even caught the beach ball. Charlie Weeb had been so genuinely overjoyed that he hadn’t even needed the glycerine tears.
They ran the 800 number for five full minutes on the TV screen following Darla’s performance. That evening, when Charlie Weeb got the final figures from the phone bank, he called Deacon Johnson at home.
“Guess the totals, Izzy.”
“I really don’t know. A million?”
Weeb cackled and said, “Guess again, sucker.”
Deacon Johnson was too tired to guess. “I don’t know, Charles,” he said.
“How does a million-four sound?” the Reverend Weeb exulted.
The deacon was amazed. “Holy shit,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Charlie Weeb. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Thomas Curl had been thoroughly enjoying himself at the Grand Bay Hotel and was annoyed that he had to depart so suddenly. One morning, while eating eggs Benedict in the sunken bathtub, he had received a strange and unsettling phone call. Thomas Curl could tell by the scratchy connection that it was long distance, and he could tell by the voice that it wasn’t either Dennis Gault or his Uncle Shawn, the only two men who knew where to find him. The voice sounded to Thomas Curl like it might belong to a nigger, but Curl couldn’t be sure. Whoever it was had called him by name, so Curl had hung up the phone immediately and decided to check out of the hotel. He was worried that the black-sounding voice might turn out to be Decker’s crazy gorilla friend Skink, who would think nothing of breaking into a fancy suite and drowning somebody in a sunken tub.
Thomas Curl took a more modest room at the Airport Marriott and shrewdly registered under the name “Juan Gómez,” which he figured was the Miami equivalent of John Smith. The fact that Thomas Curl looked about as Hispanic as Cale Yarborough didn’t stop him, and his Juan Gómez signature drew scarcely a raised eyebrow from a desk clerk named Rosario.
That evening, after a room-service steak, Thomas Curl went to work. R. J. Decker’s address was in the phone book, and now it was only a matter of finding a decent map of Dade County.
The Palmetto Expressway, Thomas Curl decided, was worse than anything in New Orleans, worse even than Interstate 4 in Orlando. Thomas Curl had always considered himself a fast and sharp-witted driver, but the Palmetto shattered his confidence. It was as if he’d stalled out in the center lane, with bleating semis and muffler-dragging low-riders and cherry Porsches speeding past on both sides. Thomas Curl had heard the wild tales about Miami drivers, and now he could go back home and say it was all true. They were moving so damn fast you couldn’t even flip them the finge
r.
He was delighted when he found his exit and got on a street with actual traffic lights. The trailer park was at the dark end of a dead-end street. Thomas Curl poked the car around slowly until he found the mailbox to R. J. Decker’s mobile home. The lights were off and the trailer looked empty, as Thomas Curl knew it would be. An older grey sedan, a Dodge or Plymouth, sat in the gravel drive; the rear tires looked low on air, as if the car hadn’t been driven recently. Curl parked behind it and cut off his headlights. He took a sixteen-inch flathead screwdriver from under the front seat. He was not the world’s greatest burglar but he knew the fundamentals, including the fact that trailers usually were a cinch.
Another cardinal rule of burglary was: Leave your gun in the car unless you want another nickel tacked onto your prison sentence. Thomas Curl began to have second thoughts about this rule after he had gotten the screwdriver stuck in Decker’s back door, and after a neighbor’s sixty-five-pound pit bulldog came trotting over to investigate the racket. As the dog bared its teeth and emitted a tremulous rumble, Thomas Curl could not help thinking how nice it would have been to be holding either the shotgun or the pistol, both locked in the trunk of his car.
The pit bull got a running start before it leapt, so it landed on Thomas Curl with maximum impact. He crashed against the aluminum wall and lost his wind, but somehow kept his balance. The dog crouched at his feet and snarled hotly. The animal seemed genuinely surprised that it had failed to knock its victim down, but Thomas Curl was a muscular and stocky fellow with a low center of gravity.