The case of LaGort v. Save King Enterprises, Allied-Cagle Casualty, et al. was settled in a courthouse hallway after a pretrial conference lasting less than two hours. The attorneys for the supermarket’s insurance carrier, having detected in Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. a frosty and inexplicable bias, chose to pay Emil LaGort the annoying but not unpalatable sum of $500,000. The purpose was to avoid a trial in which the defense clearly would get no help from the judge, who’d already vowed to prohibit any testimony attacking the past honesty of the plaintiff, including but not limited to his very long list of other negligence suits. Emil LaGort attended the conference in a noisy motorized wheelchair with maroon mica-fleck armrests, and wore around his neck a two-tone foam cervical brace. The brace was one of nine models available in Emil LaGort’s walk-in closet, where he saved all medical aids acquired during the phony recoveries from his many staged accidents.
After the settlement papers were signed and the sourpuss insurance lawyers filed into the elevator and Emil LaGort rolled himself across James Street to a topless luncheonette, his lawyer discreetly obtained from Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. the number of a newly opened Nassau bank account, into which $250,000 would be wired secretly within four weeks.
Not exactly a king’s ransom, Arthur Battenkill knew, but enough for a fast start on a new life.
The judge’s wife, however, wasn’t packing for the tropics. While Arthur Battenkill was tidying up the details of the Save King payoff, Katie was on her knees in church. She was praying for divine guidance, or at least improved clarity of thought. That morning she’d read in The Register that Tom Krome’s estranged wife had come to town to receive a journalism award on her “late” husband’s behalf. Regardless of Tommy’s ill feelings toward the elusive Mary Andrea Finley, it seemed possible to Katie Battenkill that the woman might be mourning an imagined loss; that she still might love Tom Krome in some significant way.
Shouldn’t somebody tell her he’s not really dead? If it were me, Katie thought, I’d sure want to know.
But Katie had assured Tommy she wouldn’t say a word. Breaking her promise would be a lie, and lying was a sin, and Katie was trying to give up sinning. On the other hand, she couldn’t bear the thought of Mrs. Krome (whatever her faults) needlessly suffering even a sliver of widow’s pain.
Knowing Tom was alive became a leaden weight upon Katie’s overtaxed conscience. There was a second secret, too; equally troubling. She was reminded of it by another item in The Register, which reported that the human remains believed to be those of Tom Krome were being shipped to an FBI laboratory “for more sophisticated analysis.” This meant DNA tests, which meant it wouldn’t be long before the dead man was correctly identified as Champ Powell, law clerk to Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.
The devious shitheel with whom Katie was about to flee the country forever.
“What do I do?” she whispered urgently. Head bowed, she knelt alone in the first pew. She prayed and waited, then prayed some more.
God’s answer, when it eventually came, was typically strong on instruction but weak on details. Katie Battenkill didn’t push it; she was grateful for anything.
As she walked out of church, she removed her diamond solitaire and deposited it in the slot of the oak collection box, where it landed with no more fanfare than a nickel. Lightning didn’t flash, thunder didn’t clap. No angels sang from the rafters.
Maybe that’ll come later, Katie thought.
After the last of the pilgrims were gone, Shiner’s mother approached the besheeted Sinclair, who was sloshing playfully with the cooters in the moat. She said, “Help me, turtle boy. I need a spiritual rudder.”
Sinclair’s unshaven chin tilted toward the heavens: “Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo kattttkin.”
His visitor failed to decipher the outcry (KICKING BACK WITH ULTRA-COOL KATHLEEN—from a feature profile of the actress Kathleen Turner).
“How ’bout giving that a shot in English?” Shiner’s mother grumped.
Sinclair beckoned her into the moat. She kicked off her scuffed bridal heels and stepped in. Sinclair motioned her to sit. With cupped hands he gathered several baby turtles and placed them on the billowing white folds of her gown.
Shiner’s mother picked one up to examine it. “You paint these suckers yourself?”
Sinclair laughed patiently. “They’re not painted. That’s the Lord’s imprint.”
“No joke? Is this little guy ’posed to be Luke or Matthew or who?”
“Lay back with me.”
“They paved my Jesus this morning, did you hear? The road department did.”
“Lay back,” Sinclair told her.
He sloshed closer, taking her shoulders and lowering her baptismally. Shiner’s mother closed her eyes and felt the coolness of the funky water on her neck, the tickle of tiny cooter claws across her skin.
“They won’t bite?”
“Nope,” said Sinclair, supporting her.
Soon Shiner’s mother was enfolded by a preternatural sense of inner peace and trust, and possibly something more. The last man who’d touched her so sensitively was her periodontist, for whom she’d fallen head over heels.
“Oh, turtle boy, I lost my son and my shrine. I don’t know what to do.”
“Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo,” Sinclair murmured.
“OK,” said Shiner’s mother. “Kiki-kakeee-kooo. Is that the Bible in, like, Japanese?”
Unseen by the meditators in the moat was Demencio, who stood with knuckles on hips at a window. To Trish he said: “You believe this shit—she’s in with the turtles!”
“Honey, she’s had a rough day. The D.O.T. paved her road stain.”
“I want her off my property.”
“Oh, what’s the harm? It’s almost dark.”
Trish was in the kitchen, roasting a chicken for supper. Demencio had been mixing a batch of perfumed water, refilling the tear well in the weeping Madonna.
“If that crazy broad’s not gone after dinner,” he said, “you go chase her off. And be sure and count them cooters, make sure she don’t swipe any.”
Trish said, “Have a heart.”
“I don’t trust that woman.”
“You don’t trust anybody.”
“I can’t help it. It’s the nature of the business,” said Demencio. “We got any red food coloring?”
“For what?”
“I was thinking … what if she started crying blood? The Virgin Mary.”
“Perfumed blood?” said his wife.
“Don’t gimme that face. It’s just an idea is all,” Demencio said, “just an idea I’m playing with. For when we don’t have the turtles no more.”
“Let me check.” Trish, bustling toward the spice cabinet.
Under less stressful circumstances Bernard Squires might have enjoyed the farmhouse quaintness of Mrs. Hendricks’ bed-and-breakfast, but even the caress of a handmade quilt could not dissolve his anxiety. So he took an evening walk—alone, in his sleek pin-striped suit—through the little town of Grange.
Bernard Squires had spent a tense chunk of the afternoon on the telephone with associates of Richard “The Icepick” Tarbone and, briefly, with Mr. Tarbone himself. Squires considered himself a clear-spoken person, but he’d had great difficulty making The Icepick understand why Simmons Wood couldn’t be purchased until the competing offer was submitted and rejected.
“And it will be rejected,” Bernard Squires had said, “because we’re going to outbid the bastards.”
But Mr. Tarbone had become angrier than Squires had ever heard him, and made it plain that closing the deal was requisite not only for Squires’ future employment but for his continued good health. Squires had assured the old man that the delay was temporary and that by week’s end Simmons Wood would be secured for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. Squires was instructed not to return to Chicago without a signed contract.
As he strolled in the cool breezy dusk, Bernard Squires tried to guess why
the Tarbones were so hot to get the land. The likeliest explanation was a dire shortfall of untraceable cash, necessitating another elaborately disguised raid on the union pension fund. Perhaps the family intended to use the Simmons Wood property as collateral on a construction loan and wanted to lock in before interest rates shot up.
Or perhaps they really did mean to build a Mediterranean-style shopping mall in Grange, Florida. As laughable as that was, Bernard Squires couldn’t eliminate the possibility. Maybe The Icepick had tired of the mob life. Maybe he was trying to go legit.
In any case, it truly didn’t matter why Richard Tarbone was in such a hurry. What mattered was that Bernard Squires acquire the forty-four acres as soon as possible. In tight negotiations Squires was unaccustomed to losing and had at his disposal numerous extralegal methods of persuasion. If there were (as Clara Markham asserted) rival buyers for Simmons Wood, Squires felt certain he could outspend them, outflank them, or simply intimidate them into withdrawing.
Squires was so confident that he probably would’ve drifted contentedly into a long afternoon nap, had old man Tarbone not uttered what sounded over the phone like a serious threat:
“You get this done, goddammit! You don’t wanna end up like Millstep, you’ll fucking get this done.”
At the mention of Jimmy Millstep, Bernard Squires had felt his silk undershirt dampen. Millstep had been a lawyer for the Tarbone family until the Friday he showed up twenty minutes late at a bond hearing for Richard Tarbone’s homophobic nephew Gene, who consequently had to spend an entire weekend in a ten-by-ten cell with a well-behaved but flamboyant he-she. Attorney Millstep blamed a needful mistress and an inept cabbie for his tardiness to court, but he got no sympathy from Richard Tarbone, who not only fired him but ordered him murdered. A week later, Jimmy Millstep’s bullet-riddled body was dumped at the office of the Illinois Bar Association. A note pinned to his lapel said: “Is this one of yours?”
So it was no wonder Bernard Squires was jumpy, a condition exacerbated by the abrupt appearance of a rumpled stranger with bloody punctures in the palms of his hands.
“Halt, sinner!” said the man, advancing with a limp. Bernard Squires warily sidestepped him.
“Halt, pilgrim,” the man implored, waving a sheaf of rose-colored advertising flyers.
Squires snatched one and backed out of reach. The stranger muttered a blessing as he shuffled off into the twilight. Squires stopped beneath a streetlamp to look at the paper:
ASTOUNDING STIGMATA OF CHRIST!!!!
Come see amazing Dominick Amador,
the humbel carpenter who woke up one day
with the exactly identical crucifiction wounds of
Jesus Christ himself, Son of God!
Bleeding 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
Saturdays Noon to 3 p.m. (Palms only).
Visitations open to the publix. Offerings welcomed!
4834 Haydon Burns Lane
(Look for The Cross in the front yard!)
And in small print at the bottom of the paper:
As feachered on Rev. Pat Robertson’s “Heavenly Signs” TV show!!!
Bernard Squires crumpled the flyer and tossed it. Sickos, he thought, no matter where you go on this planet. Sickos who never learned to spell. Squires stopped at the Grab N’Go, where his request for a New York Times drew the blankest of stares. He settled for a USA Today and a cup of decaf, and headed back toward the b-and-b. Somewhere he made a wrong turn and found himself on a street he didn’t recognize—the chanting tipped him off.
Squires heard it from a block away: a man and a woman, vocalizing disharmoniously in some exotic tongue. The tremulous sounds drew Squires to a floodlit house. It was a plain, one-story concrete-and-stucco, typical of Florida tract developments in the 1960s and ’70s. Squires stood out of sight, behind an old oak, watching.
Three figures were visible—four, counting a statue of the Virgin Mary, which a dark-haired man in coveralls was positioning and repositioning on a small illuminated platform. Two other persons—the chanters, it turned out—sat with legs outstretched in a curved trench that had been dug in the lawn and filled with water. The man in the trench was cloaked in dingy bed linens, while the woman wore a formal white gown with lacy pointed shoulders. The pair was of indeterminate age, though both had pale skin and wet hair. Bernard Squires noticed V-shaped wakes pushing here and there in the water; animals of some kind, swimming …
Turtles?
Squires edged closer. Soon he realized he was witness to an eccentric religious rite. The couple in the trench continued to join arms and spout gibberish while scores of grape-sized reptile heads bobbed around them. (Squires recalled a cable-television documentary about a snake-handling cult in Kentucky—perhaps this was a breakaway sect of turtle worshipers!) Interestingly, the dark-haired man in coveralls took no part in the moat-wallowing ceremony. Rather, he intermittently turned from the Madonna statue to gaze upon the two chanters with what appeared to Bernard Squires as unmasked disapproval.
“Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo kattttkin!” the couple bayed, sending such an icy jet down Squires’ spine that he crossed the street and hurried away. He was not a devout man and certainly didn’t believe in omens, but he was profoundly unsettled by the turtle handlers and the stranger with blood on his palms. Grange, which initially had impressed Squires as a prototypical tourist-grubbing southern truck stop, now seemed murky and mysterious. Weird vapors tainted the parochial climate of sturdy marriages, conservatively traditional faiths and blind veneration of progress—any progress—that allowed slick characters such as Bernard Squires to swoop in and have their way. He returned straightaway to the bed-and-breakfast, bid an early good night to Mrs. Hendricks (taking a pass on her pork roast, squash, snap beans and pecan pie), bolted the door to his room (quietly, so as not to offend his hostess), and slipped beneath the quilt to nurse a hollow, helpless, irrational feeling that Simmons Wood was lost.
The Reel Luv smelled of urine, salt and crab parts. How could it not?
Shiner slouched over the wheel. They were cruising at half-speed to conserve gas. Bode Gazzer’s marine chart was unrolled across Amber’s lap. The route to Jewfish Creek had been marked for them in ballpoint pen by the helpful Black Tide lady.
Florida Bay had a brisk chop; no rollers to make the travelers queasy. Still, Shiner’s cheeks took on a greenish tinge, and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“You all right?” Amber asked.
He nodded unconvincingly. The pudge on his arms and belly jiggled with each bump. He steered gingerly; the Black Tide lady had popped his dislocated thumbs back into the sockets, but they remained painfully swollen.
“Stop the boat,” Amber told him.
“I’m OK.”
“Stop it. Right now.” She reached across the console and levered back the throttle. Shiner didn’t argue because she had the gun; Chub’s Colt Python. The tip of the barrel peeked from beneath the chart.
As soon as the boat stopped moving, Shiner leaned over the side and puked up six of the eight Vienna sausages he’d wolfed down for breakfast on Pearl Key.
“I’m sorry.” He wiped his mouth. “Usually I don’t get seasick. Honest.”
Amber said, “Maybe you’re not seasick. Maybe you’re just scared.”
“I ain’t scared!”
“Then you’re a damn fool.”
“Scared a what?”
“Of getting busted in a stolen boat,” she said. “Or getting the shit beat out of you by my crazy jealous boyfriend back in Miami. Or maybe you’re just scared of the cops.”
Shiner said, “What cops?”
“The cops I ought to call the second we see a phone. To say I was kidnapped by you and nearly raped by your redneck pals.”
“Oh God.” Noisily Shiner launched the remainder of breakfast.
Afterwards he restarted the engines and off they went, the hull of the Reel Luv pounding like a tom-tom. Amber was still trying to sort out what had happened on the island. Shiner hadn
’t been much help; the more earnestly he’d tried to explain it, the nuttier it sounded.
This much she knew: The woman with the shotgun was the one the rednecks had robbed of the lottery ticket.
“How’d she find you guys all the way out here?” Amber had wondered, to which Shiner had proposed a fantastically muddled scenario involving liberals, Cubans, Democrats, commies, armed black militants, helicopters with infrared night scopes, and battalions of foreign-speaking soldiers hiding in the Bahamas. Wisely Shiner had refrained from tossing in the Jews, although he couldn’t stop himself from asking Amber (in a whisper) if her last name was actually Bernstein, as Chub had raged.
“Or d’you make that up?”
“What’s the difference,” she’d said.
“I don’t know. None, I guess.”
“You’d still marry me, wouldn’t you? In about ten seconds flat.” Amber winking at her joke, which had caused Shiner to redden and turn away.
That was after Chub had been shot and the colonel had been knocked out and Amber had fixed herself up and put on some clean clothes. Then the black woman and the white guy had collected the militia’s guns—the AR-15, the TEC-9, the Cobray, the Beretta, even Shiner’s puny Marlin .22—and heaved them one after another into the bay. The only thing that didn’t get tossed was a can of pepper spray, which the black woman placed in her handbag.
Afterwards she’d told Shiner and Amber to take the stolen boat back to the mainland. The black woman (JoLayne was her name) had marked the way on the chart and had even given them bottled water and cold drinks for the journey. Then the white guy had pulled Shiner aside, into the woods, and when they’d returned Shiner was ashen. The white guy had handed Chub’s Colt Python to Amber with instructions to “shoot the little creep if he tries anything funny.”
Amber didn’t have much faith in the big revolver since it had misfired once already, but she didn’t mention that to Shiner. Besides, he looked too sick and dejected for mischief.
Which he was. The white guy, JoLayne’s friend, hadn’t laid a hand on him in the mangroves. Instead he’d looked the kid square in the eyes and said, “Son, if Amber doesn’t get home safe and sound, I’m going straight to your momma in Grange and tell her everything you’ve done. And then I’m going to put your name and ugly skinheaded picture on the front page of the newspaper, and you’re going to be famous in the worst possible way.”