“Honey, I’ll believe in Kermit the Frog if he leaves twenty percent on the table.” She reached over and took hold of Shiner’s left arm, causing him to tremble with enchantment. “Let’s have a look at that tattoo,” she said.
Chub was in no mood to hear whining about the pickup truck.
“Leave it,” he snapped at Bode Gazzer.
“Here? Right by the water?”
“Won’t nobody fuck with it, you got the handicap deal on there.”
“Yeah, like they care.”
“They who?”
“The Black Tide.”
“Look here,” Chub said, “the boat thing was your idea, so don’t go chickenshit on me now. Not after the motherfucker of a day I’ve had.”
“But—”
“Leave the goddamn truck! Jesus Willy, we got twenty-eight million bucks. Buy a whole Dodge dealership, you want.”
Sullenly Bode Gazzer joined Chub in loading the stolen boat. The last thing to come out of the pickup was the rolled-up chamois.
“The hell’s in there?” Chub said. “Or shouldn’t I ast. Sounds like a bag a Budweiser cans.”
Bode said, “The AR-15. I took it apart to clean.”
“God help us. Let’s go.”
Bode knew better than to ask for the wheel; he could see there’d been problems on the boat. Chub’s clothing was soaked, and his ponytail was garnished with a strand of cinnamon-colored seaweed. The deck and vinyl bucket seats were littered with small broken pieces of what appeared to be bluish ceramic, as if Chub had smashed a plate.
As they idled away from the ramp, Bode turned for one last look at his red Ram truck, which he fully expected to be stripped or stolen outright by dusk. He noticed a man standing a short distance up the shore, at the fringe of some mangroves. It was a white man, so Bode Gazzer wasn’t alarmed; probably just a fisherman.
As the boat labored to gain speed, Bode shouted: “How’s she run?”
“Like a one-legged whore.”
“What’s all the mud and shit in here?”
“I can’t hear you,” Chub yelled back.
Given the slop on deck and the halting performance of the outboards, it was pointless for Chub to deny that he’d run the thing aground. He saw no reason, however, to tell Bodean Gazzer how close he’d come to losing half the lottery jackpot.
Bravely kicking back to the shallows.
Flailing and groping in the marl and grasses until he’d found it in eighteen inches of water: the Lotto ticket, waving in the current like a small miracle.
Naturally it was in the claws of a blue crab. The nasty fucker had staked a claim to the moldy Band-Aid on which the ticket was stuck. The delirious Chub hadn’t hesitated to leap upon the feisty scavenger, which gouged him mercilessly with one claw while clinging with the other to its sodden prize. With the crab fastened intractably to his right hand, Chub had clambered over the transom and thrashed the little bastard to pieces against the gunwale. In this manner he had reclaimed the Lotto ticket, but victory came with a price. The only intact segment of the defunct crab was the cream-blue pincers that hung from the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger; a macabre brooch.
Bodean Gazzer noticed it immediately, but decided not to say a word. Thinking: I shoulda kept drivin’ straight to Tall’hassee. I shoulda never turnt around.
“I got a map,” he shouted over the hack of the mud-choked Mercurys.
No audible response from Chub.
“I picked out a island, too.”
Chub seemed to nod.
“Pearl Key!” Bode shouted. “We’ll be safe there.”
Chub launched a gooey hawker over the windshield. “First we gotta make a stop.”
“I know, I know.” Bode Gazzer let the engines drown his words. “Jewfish goddamn Creek.”
19
Demencio spent all day painting the rest of JoLayne’s cooters. Without a reliable biblical archive, it was difficult to find thirty-three separate portraits for duplication on turtle shells. In the interest of time Demencio chose a generic saintly countenance, varying the details only slightly from cooter to cooter.
While the reptiles were drying, Trish burst into the house and exclaimed: “Four hundred and twenty bucks!”
Demencio’s eyebrows danced—it was a gangbuster of a visitation.
“They flat-out love this guy,” said his wife.
“Sinclair? My theory, it’s more the apostles.”
“Honey, it’s the whole package. Him, the weeping Mary, the cooters … There’s a little something for everybody.”
It was true; Demencio had never seen a group of pilgrims so enthralled.
Trish said, “Just think what we could clear, Christmas week. When did JoLayne say she’ll be back?”
“Any day.” Demencio began capping the paint bottles.
“I bet she’d loan us the cooters over the holidays!”
One thing about Trish, she had a ton of faith in human nature. “Loan or rent?” said Demencio. “And even if she did, what about him?”
“Sinclair?”
“He ain’t wrapped for the long haul. By tomorrow he’s liable to be flashin’ his weenie at old ladies.”
Trish said, “You should go have a talk.”
Demencio reminded her that he couldn’t understand very much Sinclair said. “It’s like his tongue come off the hinges.”
“Well, Mister Dominick Amador doesn’t seem to have any trouble communicating.” Trish stood at the front window, parting the drapes to get a view of the shrine.
Demencio jumped up. “Sonofabitch!”
He hurried outside and chased Dominick from the property. In retreat the stigmata man hastily discarded his new crutches, slick with Crisco, which Demencio snatched up and beat to pieces against a concrete utility pole. Demencio meant the outburst to serve as a warning. He scanned the distant ficus hedge into which Dominick Amador had disappeared, and hoped the pesky con artist was watching.
To Sinclair he admonished: “That guy’s bad news.”
Sinclair sat Buddha-style among the apostolic turtles. The white sheet he wore was bunched and soiled, crisscrossed with diminutive muddy tracks.
Demencio said, “What’d that asshole want? Did he ask you to work with him?”
Sinclair’s expression was quizzical and remote, an accurate reflection of his state of mind.
“Did he show you his hands?” Demencio demanded.
“Yes. His feet, too,” Sinclair said.
“Ha! Now here’s a bulletin: He did that to himself. Bloody holes and all. That Dominick, he’s one twisted sonofabitch.”
Demencio felt he could speak freely, since the tourists were gone. “He bothers you again, let me know,” he said.
“Oh, I’m fine,” said Sinclair, which was the truth. Never had he felt such a spiritual peace. Watching the clouds was as good as floating: cool and weightless, free from earthly burdens. Except for lemonade breaks, he’d scarcely moved a muscle all day. Meanwhile the turtles had explored him—up one arm, down one leg, back and forth across his chest. The march of miniature toenails tickled and soothed Sinclair. One of the cooters—was it Simon?—had made it up the steep slope of Sinclair’s skull and settled on his vast unlined forehead, where it sunned itself contentedly for hours. The sensation had put Sinclair into a Zen-like trance; he lolled among the tiny creatures like a Gulliver, without the ropes. The crushing guilt of sending Tom Krome to his death evaporated like a gray mist. The Register’s frenetic newsroom and the job that Sinclair had once taken so seriously receded into the vaguest of recollections, appearing to him in cacophonous and incoherent flashes. Every so often, all the headlines he’d ever composed would scroll through his consciousness one after another, like a demonic Dow Jones ticker, causing Sinclair to yodel alliteratively. He understood these eruptions to mean he was forever finished with daily journalism, a revelation that contributed in no small way to his serenity.
Demencio dropped to a crouch, to secure better eye contac
t with the dreamy turtle boy. “Can I get you anything—soda? Half a sandwich?”
“Nuh-uh,” Sinclair said.
“You wanna stay for supper? Trish is doing one of her angel foods for dessert.”
“Sure,” said Sinclair. He was too drowsy for the walk to Roddy and Joan’s house.
“Sleep over, if you like. There’s a daybed in the spare room,” Demencio offered, “and plenty of clean sheets to wear, in case you wanna hang around tomorrow.”
Sinclair had given no thought whatsoever to the future, but for the moment he couldn’t imagine parting with the holy cooters.
Demencio said, “Plus I got a surprise for you.”
“Ah.”
“But you gotta promise not to faint or nothin’, OK?”
Demencio ran into the house and came out lugging the aquarium, which he placed at Sinclair’s feet. In breathless reverence Sinclair gazed at the freshly painted turtles; he reached out, tenuously fingering the air, like a child trying to touch a hologram.
Demencio said, “Here you go. Enjoy!”
When he tipped the tank on one side, thirty-three newly sanctified cooters swarmed forth to join the others in the moat. Sinclair joyfully scooped up several and held them aloft. He tossed back his chin and began to croon, “Muugghhh meeechy makk-a-mamma,” a subconscious rendition of the classic MUGGER MEETS MATCH AGAINST MARTIAL-ARTS MOM.
Demencio edged away from the ranting turtle boy and returned to the house. Trish was in the kitchen with the cake mix. “Did you ask about the T-shirts? Will he give us permission?”
Her husband said, “The guy’s so far gone, he’d let us yank out his kidneys if we wanted.”
“So I should fix up the guest room?”
“Yeah. Where are the car keys?” Demencio patted his pockets. “I gotta make a lettuce run.”
Also disengaging from the newspaper business was Tom Krome, though in the opposite manner of his editor and without the mystic balm of reptiles. While Sinclair escaped transcendentally from the headlines, Krome had become one of them. He’d hurled himself into a tricky cascade of events in which he was a central participant, not a mere chronicler.
He’d become a news story. Off the sidelines and into the big game!
Joining JoLayne Lucks meant Krome couldn’t write about her mission; not if he still cared about the tenets of journalism, which he did. Honest reporters could always make a good-faith stab at objectivity, or at least professional detachment. That was now impossible regarding the robbery and beating of a black woman in Grange, Florida. Too much was happening in which Tom Krome had sway, and there was more to come. Absolved of his writerly duties, he felt liberated and galvanized. It was an especially good buzz for someone who’d been declared dead on the front page.
Yet Krome still caught himself reaching for the spiral notebook he no longer carried. Sometimes he could still feel its stiff, rectangular shape in his back pocket; a phantom limb.
Like now, for instance. Watching the bad guys.
Ordinarily Krome would’ve had the notebook opened on his lap. Hastily jotting in what Mary Andrea once described as his “serial killer’s scrawl.”
3:35 pm Jewfish Crk.
Camo, Ponytail fueling boat.
Arguing—about what?
Buying beer, food, etc.
Joined by 2 people, unidentif. m and f. He bald and barefoot.
She blond w/orange shorts.
Who?
These observations compiled automatically in Tom Krome’s brain as he sat with JoLayne in the scuffed old Boston Whaler she’d rented. Both of them were stiff and tired from a long night aboard the cramped skiff. They’d closed the gap on the rednecks, only to watch the stolen ski boat plow sensationally into a shallow grass bank. It was the first of several detours, as the robbers would spend hours pinballing from one nautical obstruction to another. Tom and JoLayne, astounded at their quarry’s incompetence, followed at a prudent distance.
Now their skiff was tied to a PVC stake at the mouth of a shallow inlet. The makeshift mooring afforded a partially obstructed view of the busy docks at Jewfish Creek, where the rednecks finally had managed an uneventful landing.
Krome grumbling, for the second time: “I should’ve got some binoculars.”
JoLayne Lucks saying she didn’t need any. “It’s the kid. I’m sure of it.”
“What kid?”
“Shiner. From the Grab N’Go.”
“Hey … you might be right.” Krome, cupping both hands at his eyes to cut the glare.
JoLayne said, “The rotten little shit. That explains why he lied about my Lotto ticket. They gave him a piece of the action.”
All things considered, Krome thought, she’s taking it well.
“Guess what else,” she said. “The girl in the shorts and T-shirt?—it looks like the Hooters babe.”
Krome broke into a grin. “The one they were hitting on the other night. Yes!” He could see them boarding the stolen boat: Bodean Gazzer first, followed by the skinhead Shiner, then the ponytailed man, tugging the blond woman behind him.
Pensively JoLayne said, “That’s four of them and two of us.”
“No, it’s fantastic!” Krome kissed her on the forehead. “It’s the very best thing that could happen.”
“Are you nuts?”
“I’m talking about the babe. Her being there changes everything.”
“The babe.”
“Yes. Whatever grand plan these guys had, it’s in tatters as of this moment!”
JoLayne had never seen him so excited. “In one small boat,” he said, “we’ve got three smitten morons and one beautiful woman. Honey, there’s an incredible shitstorm on the horizon.”
She said, “I’m inclined to be insulted by what you just said. On behalf of all womanhood.”
“Not at all.” He untied the Whaler from the trees. “It’s men I’m talking about. The way we are. Look at those googans and tell me they know how to cope with a girl like that.”
JoLayne realized he was right: The stolen boat had become a time bomb. Any kind of a dispute would set the men off—over cigarets, the last cold beer … or a stolen lottery ticket.
Krome said, “We needed these boys to be distracted. I would say our prayers have been answered.”
“Then God bless Hooters.” JoLayne jerked her chin towards the docks. “Tom, they’re heading back this way.”
“So they are.”
“Shouldn’t we duck?”
“Naw,” Krome said. “Just stay cool until they go past. Turn toward me, OK?”
“Hold on a second. Is this another kiss?”
“A long romantic one. To make sure they don’t see our faces.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. was an intelligent man. He knew Champ Powell’s remains would eventually be identified. A medium-rare lump of tissue was already on its way to the FBI for DNA screening, or so the judge had heard.
A dead law clerk in the torched house of your wife’s lover was not easy to explain, especially if the lover was to return and make an issue of the arson. Which that bastard Tom Krome likely would.
Arthur Battenkill knew his judicial career would soon end in scandal if he didn’t take the bull by the horns. So, being as practical as he was smart, he began making plans to quit the bench and leave the country.
Starting over would be expensive. As a matter of convenience, the judge decided that the insurance carrier for Save King Supermarkets should pay for his new life in the Bahamas, or wherever he and Katie chose to relocate. This meant placing a call to Emil LaGort’s lawyer.
Emil LaGort was a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit filed in Arthur Battenkill’s court. In fact, Emil LaGort was a plaintiff in numerous lawsuits from Apalachicola to Key West—a habitual fraud, a renowned slip-and-fall artist. He was also seventy-four years old, which meant that one of these days he would really slip and fall.
Why not now? mused Arthur Battenkill. Why not in the aisle of a Save King
Supermarket?
Emil LaGort was suing the store for $5 million, but he gladly would’ve settled out of court for fifty grand and costs. He did it all the time. Therefore his attorney was greatly surprised to receive a phone call, at home, from Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.
As a rule, Emil LaGort shied from judges—if a deal couldn’t be cut, he’d quietly drop the case. Going to trial was a time-consuming inconvenience that Emil LaGort simply could not afford, what with so many irons in the fire. He had a good thing going with the quickie settlements. Most insurance companies were pushovers when it came to frail senior citizens who claimed to have fallen on their policyholders’ premises. Most insurance companies wished to spare jurors the sight of Emil LaGort, enfeebled in a neck brace and a wheelchair. So he got paid to go away.
The complaint scheduled to be heard in Arthur Battenkill’s court was fairly typical. It alleged that, while shopping one morning at the Save King, Emil LaGort had slipped and fallen, causing irreparable harm to his neck, spine and extremities; furthermore, that the accident was due to the gross negligence of the store, whereas an extra-large tube of discount hemorrhoid ointment was left lying on the floor of the health-care-and-hygiene aisle, where it subsequently was run over by one or possibly more steel-framed shopping carts, thus distributing the slippery contents of the broken tube in a reckless and hazardous manner; and furthermore, that no timely efforts were made by Save King or its employees to remove said hazardous ointment, or to warn customers of the imminent danger, such negligence resulting directly in the grave and permanent injury to Emil LaGort.
Emil LaGort’s attorney figured that Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr., like everyone else familiar with the case, knew that Emil had purposely knocked the tube of goop off the shelf, stomped it with both feet and then laid himself very gingerly on the floor of the health-care-and-hygiene aisle. The attorney certainly was not expecting the judge to call him at home on a Sunday morning and say:
“Lenny, it would be in your client’s interest to hang tough.”
“But, Your Honor, we were preparing to settle.”
“That would be precipitous.”