Carl Hiaasen (48 page)

Amber kept the engine running.

“You feel OK about it? Tell the truth.”

Shiner said, “Yeah, I feel pretty good.”

“Didn’t I tell ya?”

“You wanna come in? It don’t look like she’s home.” All the lights were off, including upstairs.

Amber said, “I can’t, hon. Gotta get back to Miami and see if I’ve still got a job. Plus I’ve already missed way too much school.”

Shiner didn’t want to say goodbye; he believed he’d found his true love. They’d spent two more nights together—one at a turnpike rest stop near Fort Drum, and the other parked deep in the woods outside of Grange. Nothing sexual had occurred (Amber sleeping in the back seat of the Crown Victoria, Shiner in the front) but he didn’t mind. It was rapture, being so near to such a woman for so long. He’d become intimate with the scent of her hair and the rhythm of her breathing and a thousand other things, all exotically feminine.

She said, “We did the right thing.”

“Yep.”

“But I still wonder who that was in the other car.”

I don’t know, Shiner thought, but I guess I owe him. He bought me a few more hours with my darling.

The first time they’d cruised past JoLayne Lucks’ place, the other car was idling at the curb: a squat gray Chevrolet sedan. The buggy-whip antenna said cop. Shiner had cussed and stomped the accelerator.

They’d tried again later, with Amber at the wheel. This time
the watcher had been parked around the corner, by a newspaper rack. Shiner had gotten a pretty good look at him—a clean-cut black guy with glasses.

“Don’t stop! Keep driving!” Shiner had urged Amber.

He’d been too freaked to go directly home. He feared that the Black Tide (and who else could it be, lurking around JoLayne’s?) would ransack his house and kidnap his mother to the Bahamas. Amber had been anxious, too. To her, the guy in the gray sedan looked like heavy-duty law enforcement—and he could be looking for only one thing.

So she’d kept driving, all the way past the Grange city limits to a stretch of light woods off the main highway. She’d spotted a break in the barbed-wire fence, and that’s where she’d turned. They’d spent a clear chilly night among the pines and palmettos; no big deal, after Pearl Key. Through the wispy fog at dawn they’d seen a herd of white-tailed deer and a red fox.

It was still early when they’d arrived back at JoLayne’s place. The gray cop car was gone; they’d circled the block three times to make certain. Amber had backed the Ford up to the house, getaway style, and said: “Want me to do it?”

Shiner had said no, he wanted to be the one.

The way she’d looked at him, damn, he felt like an honest-to-God champ. When all he really was trying to do was make something right again.

She’d passed him the blue envelope and he’d trotted to JoLayne’s porch—Amber watching in the rearview, to make sure he didn’t get any cute ideas. Afterwards they’d gone to breakfast, and now home. Shiner wished it wouldn’t end.

She motioned him closer in the front seat. “Roll up your sleeve. Lemme see.”

His muscle was a marquee of contusions, the tattoo lettering crusty and unreadable.

“Not my best work,” Amber remarked, with a slight frown.

“It’s OK. Least I got my eagle.”

“For sure. It’s a beauty, too.” With a fingertip she lightly traced the wings of the bird. Shiner felt strangled with desire. He squeezed his eyes closed and heard the pulse pounding in his ears.

“Whoa,” Amber said.

A stranger was peering through the windshield—an odd fellow with fuzzy socks on his hands.

“Hey, it’s Dominick,” said Shiner, pulling himself together. He rolled down the window. “How’s it goin’, Dom?”

“You’re back!”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Who’s your friend? Geez, what happened to your thumbs?”

“That’s Amber. Amber, this here’s Dominick Amador.”

The stigmata man reached into the car for a handshake. Amber obliged politely, although her face registered stark alarm at the creamy glop that oozed from the stranger’s sock-mitten.

Shiner told her not to worry. “It’s only Crisco.”

“That would’ve been my second guess,” she said, wiping it brusquely on his sleeve.

Dominick Amador was unoffended. “You lookin’ for your ma, Shiner?” he asked. “She’s over at Demencio’s. They hooked up on some kinda co-op deal.”

“What for?”

“The state come in and paved her stain. Didn’t you hear?”

“Naw!”

“Yeah, so she’s over with the Turtle Boy.”

“Who?”

“Y’know, it was me that first give Demencio the idea for the cooters—a Noah-type deal. Now you should see what they done with JoLayne’s bunch! It’s a damn jackpot.”

Amber had heard enough. She whispered emphatically to
Shiner that she had to leave. He acknowledged with a lugubrious nod.

“That’s where I’ll end up, too,” Dominick rambled, “workin’ for Demencio, I ’xpect. He’s got a good setup, plus on-street parking for them pilgrim buses. Him and me got a ’pointment tomorrow. We’re pretty close on the numbers.”

Amber was about to interrupt even more forcefully when the man flung himself on the grass and thrust both legs in the air. Proudly he displayed his bare soles. “Look, I finally got ’em done!”

“Nice work.” Shiner forced a smile.

Amber averted her eyes from the stranger’s punctured feet. Surely this could be explained—a radiation leak in the maternity ward; a toxin in the town’s water supply.

Dominick hopped up and gave each of them a pink flyer advertising his visitations. Then he limped away.

Shiner felt himself being nudged out of the car. Slump-shouldered, he circled to the driver’s side and rested his forearms on the door.

He said to Amber, “I guess this is it.”

“I hope things are OK between you and your mom.”

“Me, too.” He brightened at the sight of the three roses in the back seat. They were gray and dead, but Amber hadn’t discarded them. To this slender fact Shiner attached unwarranted significance.

Amber said, “If it doesn’t work out, remember what I told you.”

“But I never bused tables before.”

“Oh, I think you can handle it,” she said.

Certainly it was something to consider. Miami scared the living piss out of Shiner, but a gig at Hooters could be the answer to most, if not all, of his problems.

“Are they like you?” he asked. “The other waitresses, I mean. It’d be cool if they all was as nice as you.”

Amber reached up and lightly touched his cheek. “They’re all just like me. Every one of them,” she said.

Then, leaving him wobbly, she drove off.

Later Shiner’s mother would remark that her son seemed to have matured during his mysterious absence from Grange, that he now carried himself with purposefulness and responsibility and a firm sense of direction. She would tell him how pleased she was that he’d turned his heathen life around, and she’d encourage him to chase his dreams wherever they might lead, even to Dade County.

And not wishing to cloud his mother’s newfound esteem for him, Shiner would elect not to tell her the story of the $14 million Lotto ticket and how he came to give it back.

Because she would’ve kicked his ass.

It wasn’t a loaded firearm in Mary Andrea’s purse. It was a court summons.

“Your attorney,” she said, waving it accusingly, “is a vicious, vicious man.”

Tom Krome said, “You look good.” Which was very true.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“OK. Where did Slick Dick finally catch up with you?”

“At your damn newspaper,” Mary Andrea said. “Right in the lobby, Tom.”

“What an odd place for you to be.”

She told him why she’d gone there. “Since everybody thought you were dead—including yours truly!—they asked me to fly down and pick up your stupid award. And this is what I get: ambushed by a divorce lawyer!”

“What award?” Tom asked.

“Don’t you dare pretend not to know.”

“I’m not pretending, Mary Andrea. What award?”

“The Emilio,” she said sourly. “Something like that.”

“Amelia?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

He shot a wrathful glare toward the house, where Sinclair was holed up. That asshole! Krome thought. The Amelias were the lamest of journalism prizes. He was appalled that Sinclair had entered him in the contest and infuriated that he hadn’t been forewarned. Krome fought the impulse to dash back and snatch the yellow-bellied slider from the editor’s grasp, just to see him whimper and twitch.

“Come on.” Tom led his wife away from the bustle of the shrine, around to the backyard. He set the bulky aquarium in the sun, to warm the baby cooters.

Mary Andrea said, “I suppose you saw it on television, Turnquist’s big coup. You probably got a good laugh.”

“It made the TV?”

“Tom, did you set me up? Tell the truth.”

He said, “I wish I were that clever. Honestly.”

Mary Andrea puffed her cheeks, which Tom recognized as a sign of exasperation. “I don’t think I’m going to ask about those turtles,” she said.

“It’s a very long story. I like your hair, by the way. Looks good short.”

“Stop with that. You hear me?” She very nearly admitted she’d started coloring it because it had become shot full of gray, no thanks to him.

Tom pointed at the summons, with which Mary Andrea briskly fanned herself. He had to grin. Fifty-nine degrees and she’s acting like it’s the Sahara.

“So when’s our big day in court?”

“Two weeks,” she said curtly. “Congratulations.”

“Oh yeah. I’ve already ordered the party hats.”

“What happened to your face?”

“A man stomped it. He’s dead now.”

“Go on!” But she saw he wasn’t kidding. “My God, Tom, did you kill him?”

“Let’s just say I was a contributing factor.” That would be as much as he’d tell; let her make up her own yarn. “Well,” he said, “what’s it going to be? Are you going to keep fighting me on this?”

“Oh, relax.”

“Gonna take off again? Change your name and all that nonsense?”

“If you want the truth,” Mary Andrea said, “I’m tired of running. But I’m even more tired of road tours and working for scale. I need to get back East and jump-start this acting career of mine.”

“Maybe look for something off Broadway.”

“Exactly. I mean, God, I ended up in the middle of
Montana”

“Yeah?” Krome thinking: Not a megamall for a thousand miles.

“Me in cowboy country! Can you imagine?”

“All because you didn’t want a divorce.”

“I’ll be the first Finley woman in five centuries to go through with it.”

“And the sanest,” Tom said.

Mary Andrea gave a phony scowl. “I saved your goodbye note. The lyric you ripped off from Zevon.”

“Hey, if I could write worth a lick,” he said, “I wouldn’t be working for schmucks like Sinclair.”

“What about your novel?” she asked.

Stopping him cold.

“Your girlfriend told me about it.
The Estrangement
. Catchy title.”

Mary Andrea’s tone was deadly coy. Tom angled his face to the sky, shielding his eyes; pretending to watch a flight of ducks. Buying time. Wondering when, why and under what unthinkable circumstances JoLayne Lucks and Mary Andrea Finley Krome had met.

“So how far along are you?”

“Uh?” Tom, with a vague, sidelong look.

“On your book,” prodded Mary Andrea.

“Oh. Bits and pieces are all I’ve got.”

“Ah.”

A knowing smile was one of her specialties, and now she wore a killer. Just as Tom was about to surrender and ask about JoLayne, Katie Battenkill came around the corner, humming contentedly. Then he understood.

“Ex-girlfriend,” he whispered to Mary Andrea.

“Whatever.”

Katie rushed up and unabashedly hurled her arms around his neck. “We rode over together,” she said. “Your wife and I.”

“So I gather.”

The information had a paralytic, though not entirely disagreeable, effect. Tom had never before been bracketed by two women with whom he’d slept. Though awkward, the moment enabled him to understand perfectly why he’d been attracted to each of them and why he couldn’t live with either one.

“Tell her she looks great,” Mary Andrea said archly to her husband. “We
all look
great.”

“Well, you do.”

Katie said, “I think you guys need to be alone.”

Tom snagged her around the waist before she could slip away. “It’s all right. Mary Andrea and I have finished our serious chat.”

His wife asked: “What’s that on your hand, Katie? Did you cut yourself?”

“Oh no. That’s an actual teardrop from the world-famous weeping Madonna.” Katie gaily displayed a red-flecked ring finger. “My guess is tap water, food coloring and perfume. ‘Charlie’, it smells like.”

After a discreet sniff, Mary Andrea concurred.

Krome said to Katie: “I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

“That it’s not real? Geez, Tommy, you must think I’m a total sucker. It’s a beautiful shrine, that’s what matters. The tears are just for hype.”

Mary Andrea was on the verge of enjoying herself. “His book,” she reported confidentially to Katie, “is still in the very early stages.”

“Eeeeek.” Katie covered her face in embarrassment. She knew she shouldn’t have mentioned to Tom’s wife his idea for a divorce novel.

“What else did you tell her,” he said, “or am I foolish to ask?”

Katie’s green eyes widened. Mary Andrea responded with a quick shake of the head.

Krome caught it and muttered: “Oh, terrific.” Katie and her carnal scorecard. “You should get a job on the sports desk,” he told her.

She smiled wanly. “I might need it.”

Mary Andrea gave her new friend’s arm a maternal pat and suggested it was time to leave. “We’ve got a long drive, and you need to get home.”

“It’s Art,” Katie volunteered to Tom. “He’s been arrested—it was all over the radio.”

Krome couldn’t fake so much as a murmur of sympathy. His house burned down because of Arthur Battenkill; burned down with a man inside. The judge deserved twenty to life.

“The police want to talk to me some more,” Katie explained.

“It’s good you’re cooperating.”

“Of course, Tommy. It’s the only honest thing. Oh, look at all the little cooters—they’re adorable!”