Carl Hiaasen (29 page)

They’d stopped at a twenty-four-hour sub shop on the mainland, Shiner being in no hurry to get down to Jewfish Creek. It was possible his white brethren were already waiting there, but he wasn’t concerned. He wanted nothing to spoil these magical moments with Amber. In her skimpy Hooters uniform she was drawing avid stares from the dining public. Shiner despaired at the thought of turning her over to Chub.

She said, “What about you, Shiner? What do you do?”

“I’m in a militia,” he replied without hesitation.

“Oh wow.”

“Saving America from certain doom. They’s NATO troops gonna attack any day from the Bahamas. It’s what they call a international conspiracy.”

Amber asked who was behind it. Shiner said communists and Jews for sure, and possibly blacks and homos.

“Where’d you come up with this?” she said.

“You’ll find out.”

“So how big is this militia?”

“I ain’t allowed to say. But I’m a sergeant!”

“That’s cool. You guys have a name?”

Shiner said, “Yes, ma’am. The White Clarion Aryans.”

Amber repeated it out loud. “There’s like, a little rhyme.”

“I think it’s on purpose. Hey, remember what you said about fixin’ my tattoo? What I need is somebody knows how to make the
W.R.B
. into a
W.C.A.”

She said, “I’d like to help. Really I would, but first you’ve got to promise to let me go.”

Not this again, Shiner thought. Nervously he rolled the screwdriver between his palms. “How ’bout if I pay ya instead?”

“Pay me what?” Amber said, skeptically.

Shiner saw her cast a glance at his dirty bare feet. Quickly he said: “The militia’s got a shitload a money. Not right now, but any day.”

Amber leisurely finished her soup before she got around to asking how much they had coming. Fourteen million, Shiner answered. Yes, dollars.

What a laugh
that
brought! This time he felt compelled to interject: “It’s no lie. I know for a fact.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Decisively he lit a cigaret. Then, in a tough voice: “I helped ’em steal it m’self.”

Amber was quiet for a while, watching a long white yacht glide under the drawbridge. Shiner worried that he’d said too much and now she didn’t believe any of it. Desperately he blurted, “It’s the God’s truth!”

“OK,” said Amber. “But where do I fit in?”

Shiner thought: I wish I knew. Then he got an idea. “You believe in the white man?”

“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.”

D
emencio 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 contact 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.