“Accountability,” Mick Stranahan said.
“An ending,” said Joey. “Maybe some peace of mind.”
Tool flapped his dripping arms in exasperation. “But come on! Life don’t work like that!”
“Oh, sometimes it does,” Stranahan said.
Thirty
Charles Perrone slept in his own bed, spooning the suitcase. He awoke before dawn, chewed up five cherry Maalox tablets, tossed a toothbrush and three pairs of clean underwear into a grocery bag, then sat down to write out a suicide note.
“To all my friends and loved ones,” he began without irony.
Life alone is unbearable. I am reminded of my precious Joey with every sunrise. Although I’ve tried to stay strong, I’m afraid it’s impossible. I clung to hope as long as possible, but now it’s time to face the awful truth. She is never coming back and it’s all my fault—how could I let her out of my sight that rainy night at sea?
I pray that all of you can forgive me. I only wish I could forgive myself. Tonight I shall reunite with my beloved, so that we may embrace each other on our journey to a dear and better place.
Get my swan costume ready!
Yours in sorrow, Dr. Charles Perrone
Chaz foresaw that his integrity would be called into question once Joey surfaced and went to the police. It was his vainglorious hope that a heart-wrenching farewell message might cast enough doubt upon his wife’s lurid story to gain him some getaway time. The salient phrases he had, of course, purloined from an Internet site devoted to memorable suicide notes and famous last words. Chaz was especially fond of the final sentence, supposedly uttered in 1931 by ballerina Anna Pavlova as she exited the mortal stage.
After taping the note to the refrigerator, he manually shredded the paper contents of his backpack. Special attention was given to the handwritten tables denoting minimal levels of phosphorus in the waste from Red Hammernut’s farms. The dweebs at the water district would have been vexed to see that Chaz’s charts had been completed and signed well in advance of upcoming sampling dates. Chaz had considered saving the forged documents in case he ever needed to blackmail Red, or testify against him. Now, thanks to Chaz’s half-million-dollar windfall, his most promising option was to disappear without a trace. He would miss his yellow Hummer, but only until he bought a new one.
Assuming there was a dealership in Costa Rica.
He was waiting on hold with the cab dispatcher when the doorbell rang. Quietly he hung up the phone and padded to Tool’s room, where he found a rusty revolver in a moldy gym bag. As he hurried back to the front of the house, the bell rang again. Chaz remained silent until the pounding started, as if someone was attacking the door with a croquet mallet.
“Yo, knock it off! Who’s there?”
“The cleaning lady.”
“Ricca?” he said incredulously.
“Open up or I’ll scream bloody murder.”
“Don’t do that.” Her yowls could shatter crystal, as Chaz well remembered from their lovemaking.
Ricca said, “What’d you think the cops are gonna do with a guy who tries to rape a cripple?”
Chaz hastily wedged the handgun into his waistband and let her in. She glared as she clomped past him. The door was scuffed and dented where she had bludgeoned it with her cast.
“How’s the leg?” Chaz inquired tepidly.
“Fuck you.”
“How’d you know I was home?”
“I tried calling all night long, and then it’s six in the morning and your line’s busy.” Ricca skidding the plaster heel along the tile floor.
“I was on the computer. Have a seat,” Chaz said.
With an impatient sigh she lowered herself onto the couch. “I’ve been thinking about my new car—forget the Mustang, I want a Thunderbird convertible instead.”
“Sweet,” said Chaz. The timing of her visit could not have been worse.
“P.S., where’s my money?”
“I’m working on it. Are you thirsty?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got whole milk,” she said.
Chaz retreated to the kitchen and pretended to search the refrigerator, stalling while he improvised a new plan. When he stood up, Ricca was there—how she’d crept up so stealthily with a bum leg, Chaz couldn’t imagine, but her expression was one of toxic contempt. While he had been rooting leisurely through the beer and Mountain Dew, she’d been perusing his suicide note.
“Clever boy,” she said. “You’re making a run for it.”
“What if I told you I was actually going to kill myself. I’m serious, honey, I’ve been super-depressed.”
“And you’re packing a suitcase for the hereafter?” She pointed at the gray Samsonite, which sat upright in the hallway.
“Oh, that,” Chaz said. “I can explain.”
She’d left him no choice but to kill her, really kill her this time. He pulled out Tool’s second gun.
“Not this again,” Ricca sighed.
“Have you got a car?”
Chaz had taken a taxi home from Miami, since the Hummer was at the marina and the keys to the Hummer were in Tool’s pocket and Tool was at the bottom of Biscayne Bay.
“Where we going this time?” Ricca asked.
Chaz herded her to the living room. He peeked through the shades and saw that she’d arrived in a generic white compact, an Alamo plate on the front bumper. The trunk appeared adequate for the Samsonite and possibly a carry-on, but not in addition to a corpse with one leg in a bulky cast.
No problem, Chaz told himself. I’ll do it in the sticks somewhere, dump her body, then take her car to the airport. There was plenty of time—American had a 5:00 p.m. nonstop to San José.
“Your fish are starved.” Ricca peered with maternal concern at the aquarium.
“Fuck ’em,” Chaz said. Why was she reaching into the damn tank?
“Lookie here.” She held up a small platinum wedding band. “It was hanging from the mast of that little pirate ship.”
Struggling to remain calm, Chaz ordered her to put the ring back in the water. She recited the inscription aloud: “ ‘To Joey, the girl of my dreams. Love, CRP.’ Aw, that’s so romantic.”
He indulged Ricca her sarcasm. Perhaps she already knew that his missing wife was alive and well and determined to ruin his life; that the wedding band obviously had been placed in the aquarium to infuriate him. Perhaps they were even co-conspirators in the plot, Ricca and Joey. Why not? Chaz thought. Nothing could shock him anymore.
Ricca was unable to fit the ring on the proper finger, so she slipped it on her pinkie. “What d’ya think?” she cooed theatrically.
Chaz resisted the urge to shoot her on the spot.
“Don’t you move,” he said, and for good measure swiped away the crutches and tossed them into the foyer.
“Why was your wife’s wedding ring in with the fishes?” she asked, wiggling the platinum-adorned pinkie. “There must be a story.”
Back in the kitchen, Chaz fitted the revolver into his battered left hand and hoped that Ricca wouldn’t try anything nutty this time. He winced at the memory of her ballsy dash for freedom at Loxahatchee.
With his good hand Chaz rolled the Samsonite toward the door, marveling at the cumbersome weight of wet cash. He shoved the crutches at Ricca and snapped, “Come on, get your butt in gear.”
“I dyed my pubes green for you, and this is the thanks I get?”
It was unnerving that she could crack jokes; that she wasn’t shaking in fear and begging for her life. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said.
“How dumb do you think I am?”
“We can debate that later.”
“I’m not going anyplace with you, thimbledick.”
All that prevented him from shooting her was knowing that a woman’s bloodstains on his wall would vastly complicate the suicidal-widower scenario that he had so artfully crafted. He’d invested too much effort in his farewell note to discard it.
“Get up, Ricca. Now.”
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“Nope. You’ll have to carry me.”
Wouldn’t it be a treat, Chaz thought, to have just one goddamn day when nobody fucked with my head?
Outside, a car horn honked three times. Ricca smiled.
“What now?” Chaz groused to himself.
“Listen, I wasn’t serious about the Thunderbird,” she confessed, “or the two hundred and fifty grand.”
“Then I don’t understand. . . .”
“Of course you don’t,” she said.
The door burst open and there loomed Earl Edward O’Toole, his broad chest crosshatched with white tape.
In a voice as dry as ashes, Charles Perrone said, “You have got to be shitting me.”
First Joey, then Ricca, now the goon. How can it be so hard to kill somebody? Chaz wondered.
With an incensed squawk he leveled the gun, his bruised and misshapen index finger picking impotently at the trigger. Tool casually clocked him with a left hook to the jaw.
Twelve hours later, the Humvee rumbled down the L-39 levee, Faith Hill singing sweetly on the radio, Red Hammernut mouthing an ivory toothpick while meticulously unspooling the videocassette he had removed from Chaz’s VCR.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Red was saying to Tool. “How come that Ricca girl knew to call me? I’m damn glad she did and all, but it’s strange how she come to have my name and phone number.”
Tool, who was driving, said he had no earthly idea. “You ask her?”
“She said some fella wrote it on a prayer card and gave it to her at Joey Perrone’s church service. Whether that’s true or not, I guess it don’t matter now.” Red Hammernut pocketed the toothpick and hawked out the window. “This whole deal has been a royal goat fuck from start to finish. I damn near lost track of which way’s up and which way’s down.”
Tool could have enlightened Red about the doctor’s botched attempt to murder not only Ricca Spillman but Mrs. Perrone, but he didn’t feel much like chatting. Every rut in the levee reminded him of the fresh slug in his armpit. The discomfort was amplified by his sobriety, Tool having given his last fentanyl patch to Maureen.
From the corner of his eye he saw the tangled remains of the Sun Duchess videotape fly out of the Hummer, Red saying he couldn’t afford to have that nosy damn detective get hold of it. Earlier, at the office, Red had destroyed his own copy.
He said, “I still can’t believe that yuppie cocksucker shot you point-blank. We had such a good plan, too.”
Not entirely, thought Tool.
Red had ordered him to kill Chaz Perrone before they got to Stiltsville, but Tool had privately scotched the idea. He’d been doing a lot of heavy thinking over what Maureen had said about making changes—that you were never too old to pick a positive new direction for your life. Tool knew that if he whacked the doctor he’d end up blabbing to Maureen, and he couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting her when she was feeling so poorly. So he’d decided that instead of murdering Perrone he would simply heave him off the boat and make him swim to shore. Warn him to never again show his skeeter-bitten puss in Florida.
But the fucker shot him first.
As for the blackmail meeting, it had been Tool’s intention—and Red’s firm instruction—to deliver the money peaceably. When Tool had expressed surprise that Red was willing to kiss off five hundred grand, Red laughed so hard that a string of snot had shot out of his nose. He told Tool about a James Bond–type gizmo that he’d found at “a Cuban spy shop” in Miami; a transmitter, Red had explained, no bigger’n a pack of Winstons. Tool had tucked it into the Samsonite when he was loading the cash. Meantime, Red was lining up some heavyweight shitkickers to track the suitcase back on the mainland, and to take care of the blackmailer, the mystery girlfriend, whoever else was in on the scam.
But Charles Perrone stole the money first.
Afterward, when Chaz ditched the boat and waded to shore, the Samsonite must have sprung a leak and the transmitter shorted out. Tool had listened to Red pitch a conniption about the money going missing but then the phone rang, the woman named Ricca on the other end saying: “Chaz Perrone’s back in Boca, if you’re interested.”
Red, telling her to wait for him to get there, slamming down the phone and saying to Tool: “Let’s get a move on. The dumbass went straight home.”
Now the suitcase was stowed safely in the back of the Humvee, along with Charles Perrone, who was headed to the Everglades for the very last time.
“See, it’s all workin’ out,” Red Hammernut said.
Except that Tool still didn’t have much appetite for killing Perrone, even though the man had shot him and left him for dead in Stiltsville. It was the strangest sensation. All day long Tool had worried about how to get out of the chore, since Red was coming along to make sure it got done right.
“I sure like this Faith Hill gal,” Red was saying. “Know who else? That Shania Twain.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“I read where she might be related to the writer fella Twain. The one wrote that famous huckleberry book.”
“Is that right?”
“ ’Bout this smarty-pants white kid and a big nigra feller and they’s on a raft together down some river.”
“Okay.” Tool assumed that Red Hammernut had been drinking.
“Shania, see, she’s like Mark Twain’s great-great-great-grand-niece. That’s what the article said anyhow.”
“Maybe she could do her next video on a raft,” said Tool, playing along. “Her and the band.”
“Son, that girl could do a video in a Jiffy John and make it look like the Taj Mahal.” Red turned to peer in the back of the Hummer. “Hey, our friend finally got quiet.”
They’d hog-tied the biologist, hauled him back to LaBelle and stashed him in a refrigerator truck with seventeen hundred pounds of fresh-picked cabbage and celery. Tool had driven himself home to get some clean overalls and irrigate the grassy field where his highway crosses were planted, while Red Hammernut had spent the afternoon entertaining two state senators who’d come up with a promising scheme to subvert the NAFTA treaty and fuck over the tomato growers in Mexico.
Later, when everybody else was gone, Tool and Red had come back to remove Chaz Perrone, blue-lipped and shivering, from the frigid truck. Then, utilizing the latest vegetable-packing technology, they had shrink-wrapped him from head to toe. He was expected to expire from asphyxiation before they arrived at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. That was where Red had chosen to get rid of the body, a comfortable distance from Hammernut Farms.
“Guess I’ll have to find me another so-called scientist who loves money more’n saw grass and mud fish,” Red was saying. “Otherwise Uncle Sam’s gonna make me dig some goddamn filtration pond to clean up my water. We’re talkin’ millions of dollars, not countin’ the lawyers and politicians I gotta pay. And they wonder how come the American farmer is a dyin’ breed!”
Looking at Red’s buffed fingernails and bleached teeth, Tool wondered when was the last time he’d touched a shovel or a hoe. It was a known fact that Red’s late daddy had made a killing off natural gas in Arkansas, and that Red had used his inheritance to buy up row-crop operations all over the Sun Belt.
“Hey, there’s the truck,” Red said.
Tool braked to a halt next to a dusty Dodge pickup. It had been parked on the levee an hour earlier by one of Red’s trusted crew bosses, so that Red and Tool would have transportation out of the Loxahatchee preserve. They intended to abandon the Hummer at the edge of the rim canal, Chaz Perrone’s suicide message attached to the dashboard. Red said the note was a bonus, though he wasn’t sure what to make of the part about the swan getup.
Dragging their captive out of the Hummer, they were surprised to find that he wasn’t dead. With the tenacity of a psychotic gopher, Chaz had gnawed a ragged hole in the shrink wrap, through which he now labored to breathe. It sounded like molasses being sucked down a drainpipe.
“Damnation,” Red said. He snatched a Remington
twelve-gauge off the backseat and ordered Tool to cut the sumbitch loose.
“You sure?”
“Hell yes.”
Tool used a pocket knife to skin off the plastic cocoon. Chaz levered himself to a squat, his clothes sopping and his face flushed.
“Thank you,” he wheezed.
Red Hammernut said, “What the hell for? We’re still gonna wax your thieving ass.”
“Red, I’m so truly sorry about the money.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me.”
The doctor cowered there, shrunken and hollow-eyed, a squalid portrait of guilt. While Tool had no sympathy, neither was he in the mood to watch a man’s brains get splattered like oatmeal.
Red said, “It was a setup from day one, right? There wasn’t no damn blackmail, just you and some greedy asshole pals.”
“That’s not true!” Chaz protested.
“I always figured you killed your wife. That much I put together from the get-go,” Red said. “But for you to video the whole thing, that’s some sick shit. Just to squeeze some cash outta me? Son, you are one evil little bastard.”
“Listen, Red. I did not kill Joey. She’s alive!”
Red glanced over at Tool, who shrugged blankly.
“Hey, then, what you’re sayin’—she must be in on this, too.”
“Exactly!” Chaz exclaimed. “She’s the one behind the blackmail.”
“Your dead wife.”
“Yes! I found out last night.”
Red nodded. “Well, son, you just answered my next question.”
“What’s that?”
“How low can you go?”
“Aw, Red, I’m telling the God’s truth.”
“Let’s get Mr. O’Toole’s opinion.”
Tool was watching the sun go down, thinking about the hot, throbbing knot under his arm. “Gimme the shotgun,” he said.
Red grinned in relief. “That’s my boy.”
In the distance, a bull alligator grunted. Tool took the Remington and slotted a shell into the chamber. He told Chaz Perrone to stand up and turn around.