Carl Hiaasen (6 page)

“Visitation of what?” asked the hunter.

“The Madonna.”

“She die?” The ponytailed one spun toward his friend. “Goddamn, you hear that?”

Demencio dropped the garbage bag on the curb. “I’m talking about Madonna, the Virgin Mary. Jesus’ mother.”

“Not the singer?”

“Nope, not the singer.”

The hunter said, “What’s a ‘visitation’?”

“People travel from all over to pray at the Madonna’s statue. Sometimes she cries real tears.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” said Demencio. “Come back tomorrow and see for yourself.”

The ponytailed man said, “How much you charge?”

“Whatever you can spare, sir. We take donations only.” Demencio was trying to be polite, but the two men made him edgy. Hicks he could handle; hard-core rednecks scared him.

The strangers whispered back and forth, then the camouflaged one spoke up again: “Hey, Julio, we in Grange?”

Demencio, feeling his neck go tight: “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Is there a 7-Eleven somewheres nearby?”

“All we got is the Grab N’Go.” Demencio pointed down the street. “About half a mile.”

“Thank you kindly,” said the hunter.

“Double for me,” said the ponytailed man.

Before the pickup drove away, Demencio noticed a red-white-and-blue sticker on the rear bumper:
MARK FUHRMAN FOR PRESIDENT
.

Definitely not pilgrims, Demencio thought.

Chub was intrigued by what the Cuban had said. A statue that cries? About what?

“You’d cry, too,” said Bodean Gazzer, “if you was stuck in a shithole town like this.”

“So you don’t believe him.”

“No, I do not.”

Chub said, “I seen weepin’ Virgin Marys on TV before.”

“I’ve seen Bugs Bunny on TV, too. That make him real? Maybe you think there’s a real rabbit that sings and dances dressed up in a fucking tuxedo—”

“Ain’t the same thing.” Chub was insulted by Bode’s acid sarcasm. Sometimes his friend seemed to forget who had the gun.

“Here we are!” Bode declared, waving at a flashing sign that
spelled out
GRAB N’GO
. He parked in the handicapped space by the front door and flipped on the dome light inside the truck. From a pocket he took out the folded clipping from
The Miami Herald
. The story said the second winning lottery ticket had been purchased “in the rural community of Grange.” The winner, it reported, hadn’t yet come forward to claim his or her share of the prize.

Bode read this aloud to Chub, who said: “Can’t be many Lotto joints in a town this size.”

“Let’s ask,” said Bode.

They went into the Grab N’Go and picked up two twelve-packs of beer, a cellophane bag of beefalo jerky, a carton of Camels and a walnut coffee cake. While the clerk rang them up, Bode inquired about Lotto tickets.

“How many you want? We’re the only game in town,” the clerk said.

“Is that a fact.” Bode Gazzer gave a smug wink at Chub.

The clerk was eighteen, maybe nineteen. He was heavyset and freshly sunburned. He had a burr cut and a steep pimpled nose. A plastic tag identified him as
SHINER
.

He said, “Maybe you guys heard—this store had the winning ticket yesterday.”

“Go on!”

“God’s truth. I sold it to the woman myself.”

Bode Gazzer lit a cigaret. “Right here? No way.”

Chub said, “Sounds like a line a shit to me.”

“No, I swear.” With a finger the clerk crossed his heart. “Girl name of JoLayne Lucks.”

“Yeah? How much she win?” Chub asked.

“Well, first it was twenty-eight million, but come to find out she’s gotta split it. Someone else had the same numbers, is what the news said. Somebody down around Miami.”

“Is that a fact.” Bode paid for the beer and groceries. Then he
tossed a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Tell you what, Mister Shiner. Give me five Quick Picks, assuming you still got the magic touch.”

The clerk smiled. “You come to the right place. Town’s famous for miracles.” He pulled the tickets from the Lotto machine and handed them to Bodean Gazzer.

Chub said, “She’s a local gal, this Joleen?”

“Lives acrost from the park. And it’s
JoLayne.”

Chub, scratching his neck: “I wonder if she’s lookin’ for a husband.”

The clerk grinned and lowered his voice. “No offense, sir, but she’s a little too tan for you.”

They all had a laugh. Bode and Chub said goodbye and walked out to the truck. For a while the two men sat in the cab, drinking beer, gnawing on jerky, not speaking a word.

Finally Chub said, “So it’s just like you said.”

“Yup. Just like I said.”

“Goddamn. A
Negro.”
With both hands Chub tore into the coffee cake.

“Eat quick,” Bode told him. “We got work to do.”

Tom Krome spent three hours with JoLayne Lucks. To call it an interview was a stretch. He’d never met anyone, politicians and convicts included, who could so adroitly steer conversation in a wrong direction. JoLayne Lucks held the added advantage of soft eyes and charm, to which Krome easily succumbed. By the end of the evening, she knew everything important there was to know about him, while he knew next to nothing about her. Even the turtles remained an enigma.

“Where’d you get them?” he asked.

“Creeks. Hey, I like your wristwatch.”

“Thanks. It was a gift.”

“From a lady friend, I’ll bet!”

“My wife, a long time ago.”

“How long you been married?”

“We’re divorcing….” And away he’d go.

At half past ten JoLayne’s father called from Atlanta. She apologized for not picking up when he’d phoned earlier. She said she’d had company.

When Tom Krome rose to leave, JoLayne told her father to hang on. She led Krome to the door and said it had been a pleasure to make his acquaintance.

“May I come back tomorrow,” he asked, “and take some notes?”

“Nope.”

She gave him a gentle nudge. The screen door slapped shut between them.

“I’ve decided,” she said, “not to be in your newspaper.”

“Please.”

“Sorry.”

Tom Krome said, “You don’t understand.”

“Not everybody wants to be famous.”

He felt her slipping away. “Please. One hour with the tape recorder. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

That was the lie, of course. No matter what Krome wrote about JoLayne Lucks winning the lottery, it wouldn’t be fine. Nothing positive could come from telling the whole world you’re a millionaire, and JoLayne was smart enough to know it.

She said, “I’m sorry for your trouble, but I prefer to keep my privacy.”

“You really don’t have a choice.” That was the part she didn’t understand.

JoLayne stepped closer to the screen. “What do you mean?”

Krome shrugged apologetically. “There’s going to be a story in the papers, one way or another. This is news. This is the way it works.”

She turned and disappeared into the house.

Krome stood on the porch, contemplating the hum and bubble of the aquarium pump. He felt like a shitheel, but that was nothing new. He took out one of his business cards and wrote on the back of it: “Please call if you change your mind.”

He inserted the card in the doorjamb and returned to the bed-and-breakfast. In his room he saw a note on the dresser: Katie had phoned. So had Dick Turnquist.

Krome sat heavily on the edge of the bed, pondering the slim likelihood that his New York divorce lawyer had tracked him down in Grange, Florida, on a Sunday night to deliver good tidings. He waited twenty minutes before making the call.

JoLayne Lucks worked as an assistant to Dr. Cecil Crawford, the town veterinarian. JoLayne had been trained as a registered nurse, and easily could have earned twice as much money at the county hospital if she hadn’t preferred animal patients over human ones. And she excelled at her job. Everyone in Grange who owned a pet knew JoLayne Lucks. Where Doc Crawford could be cranky and terse, JoLayne was all tenderness and concern. That she was rumored to be eccentric in her private life was intriguing but immaterial; she had a special way with the animals. Just about everybody was fond of her, including a number of lifelong bigots who confided that she was the only black person they’d ever trusted. JoLayne found it interesting that so many of the local racists owned small, neurotic, ill-tempered breeds of dogs. The women favored toy poodles; the men, grossly overfed Chihuahuas. In Dade County, where JoLayne grew up, it was German shepherds and pit bulls.

The job at Dr. Crawford’s clinic was only JoLayne’s second since leaving nursing school. Her first job was at the infamously exotic emergency room of Jackson Memorial Hospital, in downtown
Miami. That’s where JoLayne had met three of the six serious men in her life:

Dan Colavito, the stockbroker, who on a daily basis would promise to give up cigars, cocaine and over-the-counter biotechs. He’d arrived on a Saturday night at Jackson with four broken toes, the consequence of dashing into the middle of Ocean Drive and kicking (for no apparent reason) what turned out to be Julio Iglesias’s personal limousine;

Robert Nossario, the policeman, who would spend his road shifts stopping attractive young female drivers, few of whom had committed an actual traffic offense. Officer Nossario had been brought to the emergency room complaining of a severely bruised testicle, the result (or so he said) of falling on his nightstick while trying to subdue a burglary suspect;

Dr. Neal Grossberger, the young chiropractor, who would phone JoLayne at least twice an hour when she was home, and who would weep like a drunk when she’d refuse to wear the portable pager he’d bought her (baby blue, to match her hospital scrubs), and who couldn’t get dressed in the morning without calling to ask what socks he should wear. Neal had come breathlessly to the hospital after consuming a suspect gooseneck clam, and had waited seven hours in the emergency room for what he’d predicted would be a virulent onset of salmonella, which never arrived.

JoLayne Lucks finally quit the hospital after meeting and marrying Lawrence Dwyer, the lawyer. Like JoLayne’s other lovers, Lawrence had good qualities that were instantly obvious and bad qualities that took a bit longer to surface. It was Lawrence who’d suggested to JoLayne that they move upstate to Grange, where he could concentrate on fighting his disbarment, absent big-city distractions such as vengeful ex-clients. Such was JoLayne’s affection for Lawrence (and her determination to make the marriage work) that she’d declined to read the four
loose-leaf volumes of trial transcripts from his Miami fraud conviction. She’d chosen instead to believe her husband’s claim of complete innocence, which relied on a complicated theory of prosecutorial entrapment, judicial conspiracy and a careless bookkeeper whose “zeroes looked exactly like sixes!”

In Grange it had been JoLayne who’d found the old house on Cocoa and Hubbard, and JoLayne who’d put up the down payment. She had been touched and secretly proud when Lawrence took the job as a toll taker on the Beeline Expressway—until he got arrested for stealing the jumbo-sized bag of change. That evening, after boxing all her husband’s clothes, jewelry and toiletries for the Salvation Army, JoLayne made a backyard bonfire of his law books, files, depositions and correspondence with the Florida Bar. After the divorce she asked Dr. Crawford if she could cut back to three days a week at the animal clinic; she said she needed time to herself.

That’s when she started exploring Simmons Wood, a rolling splash of oak, pine and palmetto scrub on the outskirts of town. Once or twice a week, JoLayne would park on the main highway, hop the short wire fence and disappear into the tree line. Every green thicket was an adventure, every clearing was a sanctuary. She kept a spiral notebook of the wildlife she saw: snakes, opossums, raccoons, foxes, a bobcat, a half dozen species of tiny warblers. The baby turtles came from a creek—JoLayne didn’t know the name. The creek water was the color of apricot tea, and it ran through a stand of mossy oaks down to a sandy, undercut bluff. That was where JoLayne usually stopped to rest and eat lunch. One afternoon she counted eleven little cooters perched on flat rocks and logs. She loved the way they craned their painted necks and poked out their scaly legs to catch the sunlight. When a small alligator swam by, JoLayne tossed it part of her ham sandwich, to keep its mind off the turtles.

She never thought of taking the little fellows out of the creek,
until that day she’d parked on the edge of Simmons Wood and noticed a freshly painted
FOR SALE
sign facing the highway: 44 acres, zoned commercial. At first JoLayne thought it was a mistake. Forty-four acres couldn’t be right—it sounded too small. The Wood seemed to go on forever when JoLayne was walking there. She’d driven straight back to town and stopped at the Grange courthouse to check the plat book. On paper Simmons Wood was shaped like a kidney, which surprised JoLayne. On her hikes she’d tried not to think of the place as having boundaries, but there they were. The
FOR SALE
sign had been correct on the acreage, too. JoLayne had hurried home and phoned the real estate company named on the sign. The agent, a friend of JoLayne’s, told her the property was grandfathered for development into a retail shopping mall. The next morning, JoLayne started taking the baby turtles from the creek. She couldn’t bear the thought of them being buried alive by bulldozers. She would have tried to save the other animals too, but almost everything else was too fast to catch, or too hard to handle. So she’d concentrated on the cooters, and from a pet-supply catalog at Dr. Crawford’s she’d ordered the largest aquarium she could afford.

And when JoLayne Lucks learned she’d won the Florida lottery, she knew immediately what to do with the money: She would buy Simmons Wood and save it.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, working up the numbers on a pocket calculator, when she heard a sharp knock from the porch. She figured it must be Tom, the newspaperman, giving it one more shot. Who else would be so brash as to drop by at midnight?

The screen door opened before JoLayne got there. A stranger stepped into her living room. He was dressed like a hunter.