Carl Hiaasen (7 page)

Krome asked, “Did you find her?”

“Yes,” said Dick Turnquist.

“Where?”

“I hesitate to tell you.”

“Then don’t,” said Krome. He lay on the sheets with his fingers interlocked behind his head. To keep the receiver at his ear he’d propped it in the fleshy pocket above his collarbone. Years of talking to editors from motel rooms had led him to perfect a supine, hands-free technique for using the telephone.

Turnquist said, “She’s checked herself into rehab, Tom. Says she’s hooked on antidepressants.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Says she’s eating Prozacs like Pez.”

“I want her served.”

“Tried,” Turnquist said. “The judge says leave her alone. Wants a hearing to find out if she is of ‘diminished mental capacity.’”

Krome cackled bitterly. Turnquist was sympathetic.

Mary Andrea Finley Krome had been resisting divorce for almost four years. She could not be assuaged with offers of excessive alimony or a cash buyout. I
don’t want money, I want Tom
. No one was more baffled than Tom himself, who was acutely aware of his deficiencies as a domestic companion. The dispute had been brutally elongated because the case was filed in Brooklyn, which was, with the possible exception of Vatican City, the worst place in the world to expedite a divorce. Further complicating the procedure was the fact that the estranged Mrs. Krome was an accomplished stage actress who was capable, as she demonstrated time and again, of convincing the most hardbitten judge of her fragile mental condition. She also had a habit of disappearing for months at a time with obscure road shows—most recently it was a musical adaptation of
The Silence of the Lambs
—which made it difficult to serve her with court summonses.

Tom Krome said, “Dick, I can’t take much more.”

“The competency hearing is set two weeks from tomorrow.”

“How long can she drag this out?”

“You mean, what’s the record?”

Krome sat up in bed. He caught the phone before it hit his lap. He put the receiver flush to his lips and said loudly:
“Does she even have a goddamn lawyer yet?”

“I doubt it,” said Dick Turnquist. “Get some rest, Tom.”

“Where is she?”

“Mary Andrea?”

“Where’s this rehab center?” Krome said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, let me guess. Switzerland?”

“Maui.”

“Fuck.”

Dick Turnquist said things could be worse. Tom Krome said he didn’t think so. He gave the lawyer permission to round up a couple of expert witnesses on Prozac for the upcoming hearing.

“Shouldn’t be hard,” Krome added. “Who wouldn’t love a free trip to Hawaii?”

Two hours later, he was startled awake by the light graze of fingernails on his cheek.

Katie
. Krome realized he’d fallen asleep without locking his door. Moron! He sprung upright.

The room was black. He smelled perfumed soap.

“Katherine?” Christ, she must’ve run out on her husband!

“No, it’s me. Please don’t turn on the light.”

He felt the mattress shift as JoLayne Lucks sat beside him. In the darkness she found one of his hands and brought it to her face.

“Oh no,” said Krome.

“There were two of them.” Her voice was thick.

“Let me see.”

“Keep it dark. Please, Tom.”

He traced along her forehead, down her cheeks. One of her eyes was swollen shut—a raw knot, hot to the touch. Her top lip was split open, bloody and crusting.

“Jesus,” Krome sighed. He made her lie down. “I’m calling a doctor.”

“No,” JoLayne said.

“And the cops.”

“Don’t!”

Krome felt like his chest would explode. Gently JoLayne pulled him down, so they were lying side by side.

“They got the ticket,” she whispered.

It took a moment for him to understand: The lottery ticket, of course.

“They made me give it to them,” she said.

“Who?”

“I never saw them before. There were two of them.”

Krome heard her swallow, fighting the tears. His head was thundering—he had to do something. Get the woman to a hospital. Notify the police. Interview the neighbors in case somebody saw something, heard something …

But Tom Krome couldn’t move. JoLayne Lucks hung on to his arms as if she were drowning. He turned on his side and carefully embraced her.

She shivered and said, “They
made
me give it to them.”

“It’s OK.”

“No—”

“You’re going to be all right. That’s the important thing.”

“No,” she cried, “you don’t understand.”

A few minutes later, after her breathing settled, Krome reached over to the bedstand and turned on the lamp. JoLayne closed her eyes while he studied the cuts and bruises.

“What else did they do?” he asked.

“Punched me in the stomach. And other places.”

JoLayne saw his eyes flash, his jaw tighten. He told her: “It’s time to get up. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“Damn right,” she said. “That’s why I came to you.”

T
hey took turns examining themselves in the rearview mirror, Chub swearing extravagantly: “Goddamn nigger bitch, goddamn we shoulda kilt her.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Bodean Gazzer.

They both hurt like hell and looked worse. Chub had deep scratches down his cheeks, and his left eyelid was sliced in half—one ragged flap blinked, the other didn’t. He was soiled with blood, mostly his own.

He said, “I never seen such fuckin’ fingernails. You?”

Bode muttered in assent. His face and throat bore numerous purple-welted bite marks. The crazy cunt had also chewed off a substantial segment of one eyebrow, and Bode was having a time plugging the hole.

In a worn voice, he said: “Important thing is we got the ticket.”

“Which I’ll hang on to,” Chub said, “just to be safe.” And to make things even, he thought. No way was he about to let Bode Gazzer hold
both
Lotto tickets.

“Fine with me,” Bode said, though it wasn’t. He was in too much pain to argue. He’d never seen a woman fight so ferociously. Christ, she’d left them looking like gator puke!

Chub said, “They’re animals. Total goddamn animals.”

Bode agreed. “White girl’d never fuss like that. Not even for fourteen million bucks.”

“I’m serious, we shoulda kilt her.”

“Right. Wasn’t you the one had no interest in jail time?”

“Bode, go fuck yourself.”

Chub pressed a sodden bandanna to his tattered eyelid. He remembered how relieved he’d been to learn that the woman who’d hit the lottery numbers was black. What a weight off his shoulders! If she’d been white—especially a white Christian woman, elderly, like his granny—Chub knew he wouldn’t have had the guts to go through with the robbery. Much less slug her in the face and the privates, as was necessary with that wild JoLayne bitch.

And a white girl, you shove a pistol in her lips and she’ll do whatever she’s told. Not this one.

Where’s the ticket?

Not a word.

Where’s the goddamn ticket?

And Bode Gazzer saying, “Hey, genius, she can’t talk with a gun in her mouth.”

And Chub removing it, only to have the woman spit all over the barrel. Then she’d spit on him, too.

Leaving Chub and Bode to conclude there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to this person, in the way of rape or torture, to make her give up that ticket.

It had been Bode’s idea to shoot one of the turtles.

Give him credit, Chub thought, for figuring out the woman’s weakness.

Grabbing a baby turtle from the tank, setting it at JoLayne’s
feet, chuckling in anticipation as it started marching toward her bare toes.

And Chub, firing a round into the center of the turtle’s shell, sending it skidding like a tiny green hockey puck across the floor, bouncing off walls and corners.

That’s when the woman broke down and told them where she’d hidden the Lotto stub. Inside the piano, of all places! What a racket they’d made, getting it out of there.

But they’d done it. Now here they were, parked in the amber glow of a streetlight; taking turns with the rearview, checking how badly the nigger girl had messed them up.

Chub’s multiple lacerations gave a striped effect to his long sunken face. The softest breeze stung like hot acid. He said, “I reckon I need stitches.”

Bode Gazzer, shaking his head: “No doctors till we git home.” Then he got a good look at Chub’s seeping cuts and, recognizing a threat to his new truck’s gorgeous upholstery, announced, “Band-Aids. That’s what we’ll get.”

He made a U-turn on the highway and drove back to town at high speed. His destination was the Grab N’Go, where they would purchase first-aid supplies and also settle a piece of militia business.

Shiner’s teenage years had been tolerable until his mother had gotten religion. Before then, she’d allowed him to play football without a helmet, shoot his .22 inside the city limits, go bass fishing with cherry bombs, smoke cigarets, bother the girls and skip school at least twice a week.

One night Shiner had returned home late from a Whitesnake concert in Tampa to find his mother waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing plastic thong sandals, a shortie nightgown and her ex-husband’s mustard blazer, left over from his days at Century
21—for Shiner, a jarring apparition. Wordlessly his mother had taken his hand and led him out the front door. In the moonlight they’d traipsed half a mile to the intersection where Sebring Street meets the highway. There Shiner’s mother had dropped to her knees and begun to pray. Not polite praying, either; moans and wails that fractured the peacefulness of the night.

Shiner had been further dumbfounded and embarrassed to watch his mother crawl into the road and nuzzle her cheek to the grimy pavement.

“Ma,” he’d said. “Cut it out.”

“Don’t you see Him?”

“See who? You’re gonna get runned over.”

“Shiner, don’t you see Him?” She’d bounced to her feet. “Son, it’s Jesus. Look there! Our Lord and Savior! Don’t you see His face in the road?”

Shiner had walked to the spot and peered intently. “It’s just an oil stain, Ma. Or maybe brake fluid.”

“No! It’s the face of Jesus Christ.”

“OK, I’m outta here.”

“Shiner!”

He’d figured the Jesus thing would blow over once she’d sobered up, but he was wrong. His mother had spent the whole next day praying at the edge of the road, and the day after as well. Some vacationing Christians gave her a nice blue parasol and a Styrofoam cooler full of soda pop. The following Saturday, a reporter from a TV station in Orlando came to town with a camera crew. Soon the Road-Stain Jesus was regionally famous, as was Shiner’s mother. Nothing much went right for him after that.

One day he came home to find her burning his collection of heavy-metal CDs, which she had taken to calling “devil wafers.” She forbade him to drink beer or smoke cigarets, and threatened to withhold his five-dollar weekly allowance if he didn’t stay
home Friday nights and sing hymns. To get out of the house (and far away from the pilgrims who came regularly to snap his mother’s picture) Shiner joined the army. In less than a month he washed out of basic training, and returned to Grange twenty pounds lighter but infinitely more sullen than when he’d left. To a depressed job market Shiner brought neither an adequate education nor practical work skills, so he wound up working the graveyard shift at the Grab N’Go, doubles on Saturday. Nothing much happened except for the stickups, which occurred every second or third weekend. Some nights barely a half dozen customers came through the door, leaving Shiner loads of free time to paw through the latest
Hustler
or
Swank
. He was always careful to sneak the nudie magazines back to the frozen-food aisle, the only place in the store that was blocked from the fish-eye gaze of the security camera. Shiner would dissect the magazines and arrange his favorite snatch shots across the Plexiglas lid of the ice-cream freezer—it was colder than a frog’s balls back there, but he couldn’t risk getting caught at the front of the store. His mother would be ruined if her only son got fired for whacking off on the job, especially on videotape. Even though Shiner was mad at his Ma, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

At 2 a.m. on the morning of November 27, he was hunched feverishly over a
Best of Jugs
when he heard the jingle of the cat bell that was fastened to the store’s front door. He tucked himself in and hurried up toward the register. It took him a moment to recognize the two customers as the same men who’d stopped by earlier in the evening for jerky and Quick Picks. Clearly they’d been in an awesome bar fight.

“The hell happened to you boys?” Shiner asked.

The short one, dressed in camo, asked for Band-Aids. The one with the ponytail requested malt liquor. Shiner obliged—finally, some excitement! He helped the men clean and bind their multiple wounds. The camouflaged one introduced himself
as Bodean Gazzer, Bode for short. He said his friend was called Chub.

“Pleased to meetcha,” said Shiner.

“Son, we need your help.”

“OK.”

Bode said, “You believe in God and family?”

Shiner hesitated. Not this again—more pilgrims!

But then Chub said, “You believe in guns?”

“The right to bear arms,” Bode Gazzer clarified. “It’s in the Constitution.”

“Sure,” said Shiner.

“You got a gun?”

“Course,” Shiner answered.

“Excellent. And the white man—you believe in the white man?”

“Goddamn right!”

“Good,” Bode Gazzer said.

He told Shiner to take a hard look at himself. Look at where he’d ended up, behind the counter of a miserable motherfucking convenience store, waiting on Cubans and Negroes and Jews and probably even a few Indians.

Chub said, “How old are you, boy?”

“Nineteen.”

“And this is your grand plan for life?” Chub sneered as he waved a hand around the store. “This is your, whatchamacallit, your birthright?”

“Hell, no.” Shiner found it difficult to meet Chub’s gaze; the split eyelid was distracting and creepy. The closed portion hung pale and unblinking, a torn drape behind which the yolky bloodshot eyeball would intermittently disappear.