“Not yet, but I will.”
“No rush,” Katie said.
“It’s OK. I’m going back tonight.”
“Must be some story.”
“It’s all relative, Katie. Not to change the subject, but you mentioned something about Art intending to kill me.”
“No, to have you killed.”
“Right. Of course. You’re sure he wasn’t just talking?”
“Possibly. But he’s pretty mad.”
“Did he hurt you?” Krome asked. “Would he?”
“Never.” Katie seemed amused by the question. “If you want to know the truth, I think it turned him on.”
“The confession.”
“Yes. Like suddenly he realized what he was missing.”
Krome said, “How about that.”
He paid the check. Outside in the parking lot, Katie touched his arm and asked him to let her know, please, if the $500 wasn’t enough to replace the busted windows. Krome told her not to worry about it.
Then she said, “Tommy, we can’t see each other anymore.”
“I agree. It’s wrong.”
The concept seemed to cheer her. “I’m glad to hear you say that.”
Judging from the note of triumph in her voice, Katie believed that by sleeping with Tom Krome and then confessing to her low-life cheating husband, she’d helped all three of them become better human beings. Their consciences had been stirred and elevated. They’d all learned a lesson. They’d all grown spiritually.
Krome graciously chose not to deflate this preposterous notion. He kissed Katie on the cheek and told her goodbye.
Demencio took the stool next to Dominick Amador at the counter at Hardee’s. Dominick was going through his morning ritual of spooning Crisco into a pair of gray gym socks. The socks went over Dominick’s hands, to cover his phony stigmata. The Crisco served to keep the wounds moist and to prevent scabbing—Dominick’s livelihood depended on the holes in his palms appearing raw and fresh, as if recently nailed to a cross. Should the wounds ever heal, he’d be ruined.
He said to Demencio: “I got a big favor to ask.”
“So what else is new.”
Dominick said, “Geez, whatsa matter with you today?”
“That dippy woman lost the Lotto ticket. I guess you didn’t hear.”
Demencio held the gym socks open while Dominick inserted his hands. One of the socks had a fray in the toe, through which oozed a white dollop of shortening.
Dominick flexed his fingers and said, “That’s much better. Thanks.”
“Fourteen million dollars down the shitter,” Demencio grumbled.
“I heard it was a robbery.”
“Gimme a break.”
“Hey, everybody in town knew she had the ticket.”
“But who’s got the balls,” Demencio said, “to do something like that? Seriously, Dom.”
“You got a point.” The only robberies to occur in Grange were the holdups committed by itinerant crooks on their way to or from Miami.
Demencio said: “My guess? She lost the ticket some stupid way, then cooked up the robbery story so people wouldn’t make fun of her.”
“They say she’s a strange one.”
“‘Scattered’ is the word.”
“Scattered,” said Dominick. He was eating a jelly doughnut, the sugar dust sticking to the socks on his hands.
Demencio told him about JoLayne’s turtles. “Must be a hundred of the damn things inside her house. Tell me that’s normal.”
Dominick’s eyebrows crinkled in concentration. He said, “Is there turtles in the Old Testament?”
“How the hell should I know.” Just because Demencio owned a weeping Virgin didn’t mean he’d memorized the whole Bible, or even finished it. Some of those Corinthians were rough sledding.
Dominick said, “What I’m thinking, maybe she’s putting some type of exhibit together. You know, for the tourists. Except I can’t remember no turtles in the Good Book. There’s lambs and fishes—and a big serpent, of course.”
Demencio’s pancakes arrived. Drenching the plate in syrup, he said, “Just forget it.”
“But didn’t Noah have turtles? He had two of everything.”
“Right. JoLayne, she’s building a fuckin’ ark. That explains it.” Demencio irritably attacked his breakfast. The only reason he’d mentioned the damn turtles was to show how flaky JoLayne Lucks could be; the sort of space cadet who could misplace a $14 million lottery ticket.
Of all the people to win! Demencio fumed. It might be a thousand years before anyone in Grange hit the jackpot again.
Dominick Amador said, “Why you so pissed—it wasn’t your money.” Dominick didn’t know JoLayne very well, but she’d always been nice to his cat, Rex. The cat suffered from an unsavory gum disorder that required biweekly visits to the veterinarian. JoLayne was the only person besides Dominick’s daughter who could manage Rex without the custom-tailored kitty strait-jacket.
“Don’t you see,” Demencio said. “All of us woulda cashed in big—you, me, the whole town. The story we’d put out, think about this: JoLayne won the Lotto because she lived in a holy place. Maybe she prayed at my weeping Mary, or maybe she got touched by your crucified hands. Word got around, everybody who played the numbers would come to Grange for a blessing.”
Dominick hadn’t thought of that: a boom for the blessing trade.
“The best part,” Demencio went on, “it wouldn’t be only Christians coming, it’d be anybody who does the Lotto. Jewish people, Buddhists, Hawaiians … it wouldn’t matter. A gambler’s a gambler—all they care about is luck.”
“A gold mine,” Dominick agreed. With a sleeve he wiped a smear of jelly from his chin.
“And now it’s all turned to shit,” said Demencio. In disgust he tossed his fork on the plate. How could anybody lose a $14 million lottery ticket? Lucy Fucking Ricardo couldn’t lose a $14 million lottery ticket.
Dominick said, “There’s more to what happened than we been told, I guarantee.”
“Yeah, yeah. Maybe it was Martians. Maybe a UFO flew down in the middle of the night—”
“No, but I heard she was all beat up.”
“I’m not surprised,” Demencio said. “My theory? She’s so mad at herself for losing the ticket, she takes a baseball bat and clobbers herself in the goddamn head. That’s what I’d do if I fucked up that bad.”
Dominick Amador said, “I don’t know,” and went back to eviscerating doughnuts. After a few minutes, when it seemed Demencio had cooled off, Dominick asked another favor.
“It’s regarding my feet,” he said.
“The answer is no.”
“I need somebody to drill ’em.”
“Then talk to your wife.”
“Please,” said Dominick. “I got the shop all set up.”
Demencio laid six dollars on the counter and slid off the stool. “Drill your own feet,” he told Dominick. “I ain’t in the mood.”
JoLayne Lucks knew what Dr. Crawford thought:
Finally the girl gets a boyfriend, and the boyfriend beats her to a pulp.
“Please don’t stare. I know I’m a sight,” JoLayne said.
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Truly? No.” That would clinch it with Doc Crawford, the fact that she wouldn’t talk. So she added: “It’s not what you think.”
Dr. Crawford said: “Hold still, you little shit.”
He was addressing Mickey, the Welsh corgi on the examining table. JoLayne was doing her best to control the dog but it was squirming like a worm on a griddle. The little ones always were the hardest to handle—cockers, poodles, Pomeranians—and the nastiest, too. Biters, every damn one. Give me a 125-pound Dobie any day, JoLayne thought.
To Mickey the corgi, she muttered: “Be good, baby.” Whereupon Mickey sank his yellow fangs into her thumb and did not let go. As painful as it was, the attachment enabled JoLayne Lucks to control the dog’s head, giving Dr. Crawford a clear shot at
the vaccination site. The instant Mickey felt the needle, he released his grip on JoLayne. Dr. Crawford commended her for not losing her temper.
JoLayne said, “Why take it personally. You’d bite, too, if you had a dog’s brain. I’ve seen men with no such excuse do worse things.”
Dr. Crawford buttered her thumb with Betadine. JoLayne observed that it looked like steak sauce.
“You want some on that lip?” the doctor asked.
She shook her head, bracing for the next question. How did that happen? But all he said was: “A couple sutures wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Nope.” With her free hand she patted the bald spot on Doc Crawford’s head. “I’ll be OK,” she told him.
The remainder of JoLayne’s workday: cat (Daisy), three kittens (unnamed), German shepherd (Kaiser), parrot (Polly), cat (Spike), beagle (Bilko), Labrador retriever (Contessa), four Labrador puppies (unnamed), and one rhinoceros iguana (Keith). JoLayne received no more bites or scratches, although the iguana relieved itself copiously on her lab coat.
Arriving home, she recognized Tom Krome’s blue Honda parked in the driveway. He was sitting in the swing on the porch. JoLayne sat down next to him and pushed off. With a squeak the swing started to move.
JoLayne said, “I guess we’ve got a deal.”
“Yep.”
“What’d your boss say?”
“He said, ‘Great story, Tom! Go to it!’”
“Really.”
“His exact words. Hey, what happened to your coat?”
“Iguana pee. Now ask about my thumb.”
“Lemme see.”
JoLayne extended her hand. Krome studied the bite mark with mock seriousness.
“Grizzly!” he said.
She smiled. Boy, did it feel good, his touch. Strong and gentle and all that stuff. Which was how it always started, with a warm dumb tingle.
JoLayne hopped out of the swing and said: “We’ve got an hour before sunset. I want to show you something.”
When they got to Simmons Wood, she pointed out the FOR SALE sign. “That’s why I can’t wait six months for these jerkoffs to get caught. Any day, somebody’s going to come along and buy this place.”
Tom Krome followed her over the fence, through the pine and palmettos. She stopped to point out bobcat scat, deer tracks and a red-shouldered hawk in the treetops.
“Forty-four acres,” JoLayne said.
She was whispering, so Krome whispered back. “How much do they want for it?”
“Three million and change,” she said.
Krome asked about the zoning.
“Retail,” JoLayne answered, with a grimace.
They stopped on the sandy bluff overlooking the creek. JoLayne sat down and crossed her legs. “A shopping mall and a parking lot,” she said, “just like in the Joni Mitchell song.”
Tom Krome felt he should be writing down everything she said. His notebook nagged at him from the back pocket of his jeans. As if he still had a newspaper job.
JoLayne, pointing at the tea-colored ribbon of water: “That’s where the cooters come from. They’re off the logs now, but you should be here when the sun’s high.”
Still whispering, like she was in church. Which he supposed it was, in a way.
“What do you make of my plan?”
Krome said, “I think it’s fantastic.”
“You’re making fun.”
“Not at all—”
“Oh yes. You think I’m nuts.” She propped her chin in her hands. “OK, smart guy, what would you do with the money?”
Krome started to answer but JoLayne motioned for him to hush. A deer was at the creek; a doe, drinking. They watched it until darkness fell, then they quietly made their way back to the highway, Krome following the whiteness of JoLayne’s lab coat weaving through the trees and scrub.
Back at the house, she disappeared into the bedroom to change clothes and check her phone messages. When she came out, he was standing at the aquarium, watching the baby turtles.
“Treasure this,” she said. “Chase Bank called. The assholes have already charged a truckload of stuff on my Visa.”
Krome spun around. “You didn’t tell me they got your credit card.”
JoLayne reached for the kitchen phone. “I’ve got to cancel that number.”
Krome grabbed her arm. “No, don’t. This is wonderful news: They’ve got your Visa, plus they seem to be total morons.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t be happier.”
“You wanted to find them, right? Now we’ve got a trail.”
JoLayne was intrigued. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a box of Goldfish crackers. The salt stung the cut on her lip, made her eyes water.
Krome said: “Here’s what you do. Call the bank and find out exactly where the card’s been used. Tell them you loaned it to your brother, uncle, something like that. But don’t cancel it, JoLayne. Not until we know where these guys are headed.”
She did what he told her. The Chase Bank people couldn’t have been nicer. She took down the information and handed it to Krome, who said: “Wow.”
“No kidding, wow.”
“They spent twenty-three hundred dollars at a gun show?”
“And two hundred sixty at a Hooters,” JoLayne said. “I’m not sure which is scarier.”
The gun show was at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale, the Hooters was in Coconut Grove. The robbers seemed to be traveling south.
“Get packed,” Tom Krome said.
“Lord, I forgot about the turtles. You know how hungry they get.”
“They’re not coming with us.”
“Course not,” JoLayne said.
They stopped at the ATM so she could get some cash. Back in the car, she popped a handful of Goldfish and said: “Drive like the wind, partner. My Visa maxes out at three thousand bucks.”
“Then let’s pay it off. Put a check in the mail first thing tomorrow—I want these boys to go hog wild.”
Sportively JoLayne grabbed a handful of Krome’s shirt. “Tom, I’ve got exactly four hundred and thirty-two dollars left in my checking.”
“Relax,” he told her. Then, with a sideways glance: “It’s time you started thinking like a millionaire.”
7
Chub’s real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus’s father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie’s womb had been as welcome as “a cockroach on a wedding cake.”
Nonetheless, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a secondhand ski boat on a trailer in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Book encyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus’s siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there, too, had he not by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy.
He moved out of his parents’ home and took up with a bad crowd. He got a job in the photo department of a drugstore, where he earned extra money sorting through customers’ negatives, swiping the racy ones and peddling the prints to horny kids at the high school. (Even after entering adulthood, Onus Gillespie remained amazed there were women in the world who’d allow their boyfriends or husbands to take pictures of them topless. He dreamed of meeting such a girl, but so far it hadn’t happened.)
When he was twenty-four, Onus accidentally landed a well-paying job at a home furnishings warehouse. Thanks to an aggressive union local, he managed to remain employed for six years despite a wretched attendance record, exhaustively documented incompetence and a perilous affinity for carpet glue. Stoned to the
gills, Onus one day crashed a forklift into a Snapple machine, a low-speed mishap that he parlayed into an exorbitant claim for worker’s compensation.
His extended “convalescence” involved many drunken fishing and hunting excursions. One morning Onus was observed emerging from the woods with a prostitute on one arm and a dead bear cub slung over his shoulders. The man watching him was an investigator for an insurance company, which was able to argue convincingly that Mr. Onus Gillespie was not injured in the least. Only then was he fired from the warehouse. He chose not to appeal.
Moira and Greve wrote one last check to their errant spawn, then disowned him. Onus needed no special encouragement to leave the state. In addition to the pending felony indictments for insurance fraud and game poaching, Onus had received a rather unfriendly letter from the Internal Revenue Service, inquiring why he’d never in his adult life bothered to file a tax return. To emphasize its concern, the IRS sent a flatbed and two disagreeable men to confiscate Onus’s customized Ford Econoline van. It was easy to spot. An elaborate mural on the side of the vehicle depicted Kim Basinger as a nude mermaid, riding a narwhal. Onus had fallen for the beautiful Georgia actress in the movie 9½ Weeks and conceived the mural as a love tribute.
It was the seizure of his beloved Econoline that turned Onus Gillespie bitterly against the U.S. government (although he was similarly resentful toward his parents, who not only had refused to pay his tax lien but had also tipped off the IRS agents about where to find the van). Before bolting, Onus burned his driver’s license and renounced the family name. He began calling himself Chub (which is how his brothers and sisters had referred to him when he was younger and had something of a weight problem). He couldn’t make up his mind on a new surname, so he decided to wait until something good popped into his head. He hitchhiked to Miami with only the clothes on his back, seventeen dollars in his wallet and, in a zippered pocket, his only tangible asset—the disabled-parking permit he’d scammed off the company doctor for the workmen’s comp claim.
Pure good fortune and a round of free beers led to a friendship with an amateur forger, who entrusted Chub with his printing equipment while he went off to state prison. In no time, Chub was cranking out fake handicapped stickers and selling them for cash to local motorists. His favorite hangout was Miami’s federal courthouse, infamous for its dearth of parking spaces. Among Chub’s satisfied customers were stenographers, bondsmen, drug lawyers and even a U.S. magistrate or two. Soon his reputation grew, and he became known throughout the county as a reliable supplier of bootleg wheelchair emblems.