Carl Hiaasen (17 page)

Bode and Chub ducked behind the truck, Bode muttering: “This ain’t no good. Christ, this ain’t no good at all.”

Chub cursed harshly. “I need a goddamn drink.”

It took a few minutes for Shiner to relinquish the AR-15, after which he was restricted to harmless plinking with his old Marlin .22. At dusk the three of them, smelling of gunfire and
stale beer, returned to Chub’s trailer. When Bode Gazzer asked if anybody was hungry, Shiner said he could eat a whole cow.

Chub couldn’t tolerate another hour in the hyperactive nitwit’s presence. “You gotta stay here,” he instructed Shiner, “and stand guard.”

“Guard of what?” the kid asked.

“The guns. Plus all the shit we bought today,” Chub said. “New man always does guard duty. Ain’t that right, Bode?”

“You bet.” Bode, too, had grown weary of Shiner’s company. He said, “The tents and so forth, that’s important survivalist supplies. Can’t just leave it here with nobody on watch.”

“God, I’m starvin’,” Shiner said.

Chub slapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll bring you some chicken wings. You like the extry hot?”

According to the bank, JoLayne’s credit card had been used two nights consecutively at the same Hooters—a reckless move that Krome found encouraging. The Lotto robbers clearly were not master criminals.

JoLayne figured nobody would be ballsy enough to go there three times in a row, but Krome said it was the best lead they had. Now he and JoLayne were outside the restaurant, watching a red pickup truck park in a disabled-only zone.

“Is that them?” Krome asked.

“The guys who came to my house were not crippled. Neither of them,” JoLayne said gravely.

Two men—one tall, one short, got out of the truck. They entered the restaurant without the aid of a wheelchair, a crutch, or even a cane.

“Must be a miracle,” said Krome.

JoLayne wasn’t certain they were the same men who’d attacked her. “We’re too far away.”

“Then let’s get closer.”

He went in alone and chose a corner table. A minute later JoLayne came through the door—the floppy hat, Lolita sunglasses. She joined him, sitting with her back to the bar.

“You get the license tag?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. And how about that bumper sticker? ‘Fuhrman for President.’”

“Where are they?” she asked tensely. “Did they look at me?”

“If it’s the table I think it is, they didn’t notice either of us.”

On the other side of the restaurant, two very distinctive customers were chatting with a pretty blond waitress. Her electric smile solved to Krome’s satisfaction the mystery of why the shitkickers returned night after night with a hot credit card: They were smitten. One of the men was outfitted entirely in camouflage, including a cap. His companion wore a dirty ponytail and a vulcanized patch over one eye. Both men, Krome noted, bore deep cuts on their faces.

“You said one was dressed like a hunter.”

JoLayne nodded. “That’s right.”

“Take a peek.”

“I’m frightened.”

“It’s all right,” Krome told her.

She turned just enough to catch a quick look. “Lord,” she gasped, and turned back.

Tom Krome patted her hand. “We done good, pardner.”

JoLayne’s expression was unreadable behind the big sunglasses. “Give me the car keys.”

“What for?” Krome asked, knowing the answer. She didn’t want to open the car; she wanted to open the trunk.

JoLayne said, “Let’s wait till they leave—”

“No, not here.”

“Tom, we’ve got the Remington. What could they do?”

“Forget it.”

A waitress came, but JoLayne was unresponsive. Krome ordered hamburgers and Cokes for both of them. When they were alone again, he tried to make the case that a busy restaurant parking lot wasn’t the ideal place to pull a shotgun on anybody, especially two drunk white-trash psychopaths.

JoLayne said, “I want my damn lottery ticket.”

“And you’ll get it. We found the bastards, that’s the main thing. They can’t get away from us now.”

Again she peered over her shoulder, shivering at the sight of the ponytailed robber. “That face I’ll never forget. But the eye patch I don’t remember.”

“Maybe you blinded him,” Krome said.

JoLayne Lucks smiled faintly. “Lord, I hope so.”

T
he firebombing of Tom Krome’s house was the most serious managerial crisis of Sinclair’s career. All afternoon he polished the exculpatory memorandum and awaited a summons from
The Register’s
managing editor. Like Krome’s, the managing editor’s training was in hard news and he viewed the world darkly. He was an angular, intense man in his mid-forties; prematurely gray, allergy prone, gruff, profane. He was famous for his laserlike glare and his lack of patience.

His last communication with Sinclair had come seven weeks earlier in a terse phone call: No frigging PMS column, you hear me! It had been one of Sinclair’s rare brainstorms—a regular feature devoted to coping with PMS. The column would run once a month, of course. The managing editor despised the idea, which Sinclair promptly blamed on one of his subordinates.

Even under the mildest circumstances, direct contact with the M.E. was nerve-racking. So Sinclair whitened when, shortly after six, he was called in to discuss the Tom Krome situation. Upon entering the office, Sinclair was brusquely motioned to a
covered armchair. On the other side of a mahogany desk, his boss skimmed a police report, although Sinclair (having never seen one) didn’t recognize it as such. What he knew about the burning of Krome’s home had come from a gossipy city desk reporter, in a brief conversation at the urinals. Of course Sinclair had been alarmed by the news, but he was more distressed that he hadn’t been notified formally, through channels. He was, after all, Krome’s immediate supervisor. Didn’t anybody believe in E-mail anymore?

With a contemplative snort, the managing editor turned and tossed the police report on a credenza. Sinclair seized the moment to present a crisp copy of the memorandum, which the managing editor crumpled and threw back at him. It landed in Sinclair’s lap.

The managing editor said: “I already saw it.”

“But … when?”

“In all its glorious versions, you schmuck.”

“Oh.”

Instantly Sinclair realized what had happened. With the touch of a button on his computer terminal, the managing editor could call up any story in the newspaper’s vast bank of editing queues. Sinclair had been led to believe his boss paid no attention to what went on in the Features department, but evidently it wasn’t true. The managing editor had electronically been tracking the Krome memo from the date of its perfidious inception.

Sinclair felt feverish and short of breath. He plucked the wadded paper from his lap and discreetly shoved it into a pocket.

“What I’ve found fascinating,” the managing editor was saying, “is the creative process—how each new draft painted a blacker picture of Tom’s mental state. And the details you added … well, I had to laugh. Maybe you missed your calling,
Sinclair. Maybe you should’ve been a writer.” The managing editor eyed him as if he were a turd on a carpet. “Would you like some water? Coffee?”

Sinclair, in an anemic murmur: “No, thank you.”

“May we stipulate that your ‘memo’ is pure horseshit?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Now I have some questions. One: Do you have any idea why Tom Krome’s house was torched?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you have a clue why anyone would want to harm him?”

“Not really,” Sinclair said.

“Do you know where he is?”

“The rumor is Bermuda.”

The managing editor chuckled. “You’re not going to Bermuda, Sinclair. You’re going to the last place you sent Tom, and you’re going to find him. By the way, you look like hell.”

“I’m sure I do.”

“Another question: Does Tom still work for us?”

“As far as I’m concerned, he does.” Sinclair said it with all the conviction he could summon.

The managing editor removed his glasses and began vigorously cleaning the lenses with a tissue. “What about as far as
Tom
is concerned? Any chance he was serious about quitting?”

“I … I suppose it’s possible.”

Woozy with apnea, Sinclair thought he might be on the verge of heart failure. He’d read many articles about critically ill patients who had eerie out-of-body experiences in ambulances and emergency rooms. Sinclair felt that way now—floating above the managing editor’s credenza, watching himself being emasculated. The sensation was neither as painless nor as dreamlike as other near-death survivors had described.

“The arson guys are going through the rubble tonight,” said
the managing editor. “They want to know if the fire could be connected to a story Tom was working on.”

“I can’t imagine how.” Sinclair gulped air like a hippo. Slowly the feeling returned to his fingers and toes.

The managing editor said: “Suppose you tell me exactly what he was writing.”

“A quickie feature. Hit and run.”

“About what?”

“Just some woman who won the lottery,” Sinclair said. Impulsively he added: “A black woman.” Just so the boss would know Sinclair was on the lookout for feel-good stories about minorities. Maybe it would help his predicament, maybe not.

The managing editor squinted. “That’s it—a lottery feature?”

“That’s it,” Sinclair asserted.

He didn’t want it known that he’d rejected Tom Krome’s request to pursue the robbery angle. Sinclair believed the decision would make him appear gutless and shortsighted, particularly if Krome turned up murdered in some ditch.

“Where is this Lotto woman?” asked the managing editor.

“Little town called Grange.”

“Straight feature?”

“That’s all it was.”

The managing editor frowned. “Well, you’re lying again, Sinclair. But it’s my own damn fault for hiring you.” He stood up and removed his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “You’ll go to Grange and you won’t come back until you’ve found Tom.”

Sinclair nodded. He’d call his sister. She and Roddy would let him stay in the spare room. They could take him around town, hook him up with their sources.

“Next week they’re announcing the Amelias,” said the managing editor, slipping into his jacket. “I entered Krome.”

“You did?”

Again Sinclair was caught off guard. The “Amelias” were a national
writing competition named after the late Amelia J. Lloyd, widely considered the mother superior of the modern newspaper feature. No event was too prosaic or inconsequential to escape Amelia Lloyd’s sappy attention. Bake sales, craft shows, charity walkathons, spelling bees, mall openings, blood drives, Easter egg hunts—Amelia’s miraculous prose breathed sweet life into them all. In her short but meteoric career, her byline had graced
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Tampa Tribune, The Miami Herald
and
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
. It was in Cleveland that Amelia J. Lloyd had been tragically killed in the line of duty, struck down by a runaway miniature Duesenberg at a Masonic parade. She was only thirty-one.

All but an elitist handful of newspapers entered their feature sections in the annual Amelias, because it was the only contest that pretended fluff was worthwhile journalism. At
The Register
, staff entries for such awards came, as policy, from the Assistant Deputy Managing Editor of Features and Style. Sinclair had chosen not to submit Tom Krome in the Amelias because his stories invariably showed, in Sinclair’s opinion, a hard or sarcastic edge that the judges might find off-putting. In addition, Sinclair feared that if by cruel fate Krome actually won the contest (or even placed), he would physically attack Sinclair in front of the staff. Krome had been heard to remark that, even with its $500 prize, an Amelia was a badge of shame.

So Sinclair was rattled to learn the managing editor had, without informing him, replaced Sinclair’s handpicked entry with Tom Krome.

“I meant to drop you a note,” the managing editor said, not apologetically.

Sinclair measured his response. “Tom’s turned out some super stuff this year. What category did you pick?”

“Body of work.”

“Ah. Good.” Sinclair, thinking: Body of work? The rules called for a minimum of eight stories, and it was generally assumed they should be upbeat and positive—just like the ones Amelia J. Lloyd used to write. Sinclair doubted whether Tom Krome had used eight upbeat
adjectives
in his whole career. And where had the boss found time to cull a year’s worth of clips?

“Do you know,” said the managing editor, packing his briefcase, “how long it’s been since
The Register
won a national award?
Any
national award?”

Sinclair shook his head.

“Eight years,” the managing editor said. “Third place, deadline reporting, American Society of Newspaper Editors. Eight fucking years.”

Sinclair, sensing it was expected of him, asked: “What was the story?”

“Tornado creamed an elementary school. Two dead, twenty-three injured. Guess who wrote it? Me.”

“No kidding?”

“Don’t look so shocked.” The managing editor snapped the briefcase shut. “Here’s another hot flash: We’re about to win a first-place Amelia for feature writing. As in ‘grand prize.’ I expect Tom to be in the newsroom next week when it moves on the wires.”

Sinclair’s head swam. “How do you know he won?”

“One of the judges told me. An ex-wife, if you’re wondering. The only one who still speaks to me. When are you leaving for Grange?”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“Try not to embarrass us, OK?”

The managing editor was three steps from the door when Sinclair said, “Do you want me to call you?”

“Every single day,
amigo
. And seriously, don’t fuck this up.”