Florida Heatwave (10 page)

Anger rose like bile in Hawkins’s throat. “What makes you think I’m gonna be stupid enough to do this?”

“You love Jeanette, don’t ya?”

Instinctively, Hawkins tensed, preparing to jump Casano, but the sound of the gun’s hammer froze him.

Casano picked up the walkie-talkie. “You got that package all wrapped up for me?”

Static proceeded the answer. “The blonde package? Yeah, we got it right here.”

Casano’s lips barely moved as he replied. “Make the package talk so my boy can hear it.”

“Dan, help me …” was all that followed, but it was enough for Hawkins to recognize the woman’s voice. He stepped towards Casano.

“Move another inch, and both you and your lovely wife will die,” Casano warned. “Do what I’m tellin’ ya, and Jeanette lives. You’re gonna die either way, but mess it up, and you both die!”

“You stupid bastard. Life would have been easier if ya’d been honest,” Hawkins whispered.

Casano chuckled. “Why, so I could get a low-budget retirement, then drop dead with a heart attack? I like Mr. Santos’s retirement plan better.”

The music ceased, signaling the drumsmen to return to the muffled beats. The cheers from the crowd told Hawkins the president would be passing beneath the open window within seconds.

“Pick up the rifle now, or I blow your head off and my friend does the same to Jeanette!” Casano shouted above the roar pouring through the window.

Suddenly, Hawkins dropped and rolled, his right hand connecting with the rifle in a blur. The first shot’s crack was drowned out by the screams and music from the street. The second shot was muffled, plowing into tissue and bone.

Casano fell face up on the wooden floor, the blood from the fatal bullet wound to his brain mixing with his sweat.

Hawkins moved to the window just in time to see the back of Kennedy’s Lincoln, its bullet-proof top removed, moving south. The young president continued to wave to the crowd even as the car’s driver picked up speed.

“Unit Three, you there?” came frantically from Casano’s walkie-talkie. “Johnny, what happened? Come in!”

“You did good work, Dan, but we just can’t help you on this one.” The man in the trenchcoat clung to the shadows.

They stood at the same railing where they had met earlier. The man smiled, trying to ease the distaste of the message he was delivering. “I know you hoped this would get you a job with us, but the director says you aren’t ready yet. He swears if you do this last job for us, then you get what you want.”

Hawkins stared at the Sunshine Bridge that stretched across Tampa Bay. “My wife left me. You know that? Said she couldn’t live with the man who killed her brother-in-law, even if he was trash. Plus, she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t do what Casano wanted if I really believed they’d kill her.”

“I wondered about that myself, Danny.”

Hawkins sighed. “I woulda known my own wife’s voice no matter what. She ain’t got a New Orleans accent.” Hawkins turned to look at the man’s face. “Has Judith turned up anywhere yet?”

“Nothing yet, but we’ll keep looking,” he said. “Look, Danny, you caught a bad break on this one. You know the Bureau can’t let it out that someone came that close to killing the president of the United States. Besides, do you know how hard it was to convince the chief to go along on the accidental shooting story on Casano? Hell, he wanted to charge you with manslaughter!”

“Yeah, the chief’s a real straight shooter, ain’t he?” Hawkins prepared to leave. “What do you want me to do now? What’s the next carrot ya gonna dangle in front of my nose?”

“The director wants you in Dallas,” the man replied, pulling out a paper. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you arrive on November 21. It’s all hush-hush. But, Danny, Mr. Hoover himself insisted on nobody but you for this job. You gotta take it.”

BY JOHN DUFRESNE

You already know
the
what
pretty much. Now I’m going to tell you the true
why
and
how
of what I’ve done. It’s a compound of things that led to it. I murdered those seven or eight beautiful children. They had their whole brilliant lives ahead of them, and I mowed them down in cold blood. Everything that happened happened on a whim, and that’s what I liked about it. Wrong place, wrong time for the children. Right place, right time for me, you could say. It’s all a matter of your point of view as to how you see a thing. I had no hope, you understand. I had no future, no family, no job, and no friends. (I know people, but I don’t hang.) My pockets were empty; my heart was hollow. I had nothing to give. The only thing I have in this life now is to take. And that’s what I did. I took. It’s not fair that I did, but life isn’t fair, and that’s a lesson we all learned today. When a man loses everything, he is free to do anything.

The killings today got started back in ‘04 when my wife Patti left me and took the kids to her parents’ home over in Lakeland. And just like that I lost my babies and my in-laws, who treated me like a son, and who I cared about more than I ever cared about her, to be honest with you. I married her out of necessity. It didn’t take Patti long to get the divorce and the new life and the kids and the house and the car and the everything else, and I got the bills and the loneliness. And then when I found myself alone in a dingy studio apartment above Bartow Dry Cleaners, I went shopping and bought a big-ass flat-screen TV and a recliner and a dog, and I bought them all with bad checks. And it didn’t take the sheriff’s department long to find me. I lost my job at the phosphate mine after the arrest. I wasn’t paying child support. Fitzy, the little pit bull, wouldn’t stop crapping and pissing on the rug, so I borrowed my uncle Ray’s shitbox and drove Fitzy out to a sinkhole by Combee Settlement and dropped him in. No, I didn’t. I sure thought about it, but I had cooled off by the time I reached the pit, and so I just set him loose over by Gibsonia. He chased the car for a half mile, I bet, before he tuckered out. When I got the court summons, I left Polk County and lost myself here in Broward. I sold the
Sun-Sentinel
at Sheridan and Federal, got a weekly room at the Dixiewood Motel. And I entered into what I think of as my Golden Age.

Before I could prosper, however, I had to become someone the cops were not looking for. That happened when, one sunny morning, I found a black leather wallet behind a bus-stop bench on Dania Beach Boulevard. Inside was a driver’s license, a social security card, and a laminated funeral card with a cut rose on the front and the deceased’s name, Alice Rose Engdahl, on the back with a poem that began “Do not stand at my grave and weep” and ended with “I am not there, I did not die.” The guy was about my height, weight, and age—close enough, anyway, for government work. I was able to distress the driver’s license photo sufficiently so I could present myself at the DMV and get myself a replacement with my own mug shot, and that’s the day I became Elvis Engdahl.

I went by my benefactor’s house on Halloween and watched him greet and treat the neighborhood children. I never got to see his actual face because he was made up as Dracula and his wife as an angel. I loitered across the street trying to be as inconspicuous as the little gray sedan in Dracula’s driveway, but when you’re alone, you stand out. He spotted me. The Engdahls had hung an inflatable zombie, which wasn’t scaring anybody, from the scrawny black olive tree in their front yard and played spooky music from a boom box on their porch. Elvis Engdahl had a modest house, an angel of a wife, and a sweetness toward the children that I envied.

When Dracula straightened up, looked over at me again, and held my gaze, I thought it best to move along. I never took a thing from Elvis Engdahl except his name and his address. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I was wide awake in bed and staring at the ceiling, I’d imagine myself in the Engdahls’ house, sitting on the sofa, sipping a beer, watching the TV with Angel, and maybe she falls asleep on my lap during the Marlins game, and I get a call on my cell phone, and it’s one of my buddies from work who wants to know if I’d like to go airboating on Sunday. It’s all pretty pathetic, I suppose, the fantasy, but if you have no life, you have to imagine one. Otherwise you can’t sleep.

And so I became a new man with this heartbreaking new history—orphan, widow, drifter, something the ladies might find appealing—and a brand new confident attitude. Call me El. Or Double-E. Or Mr. Engdahl, if you must. When the late-night clerk at the Hess station on Federal was shot in the throat and killed during a robbery, I applied for his job. The old me would not have seized that opportunity. There weren’t a lot of eager beavers lined up to apply for the vacancy. I was hired on the spot. I bought a refurbished Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special and a pre-owned Kel-Tec Sub 2000 with my first paycheck at the Knife and Gun Show in Lauderdale. I was not about to become late-night victim number two. I carried the Special to work and slipped it onto the shelf below the register. “Yes, sir,” I’d say. “Please don’t shoot! Let me get that money out of the register for you pronto.” And I’d pull out the .45 and blast the motherfucker between the eyes. On slow nights I’d make a pistol of my hand and rehearse the scene in slow motion over and over again, try to imagine every possible scenario. The way I see it, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Friday was my night off. I’d stop into work, pick up my check from Stavros, cash it across the street at Pay-Day Loans, then go to Los Incas de Oro for dinner. I’d have anticucho de pollo, papas fritas, and a Cusqueña. I’d wind up on a barstool at the Wayside Inn. Friday is Naughty Night at the Wayside, meaning these models in nighties parade around serving guys crackers and cheese. The lie is that you’ll be so impressed you’ll buy the silky merchandise for your old lady. The truth is that guys like to look at gals in their underwear, and the place is packed. One of the models one night caught my eye. She had shoulder-length licorice black hair that she wore in bangs, Egyptian eyes, and bone white skin. I called her Cleopatra; her real name was Justine, but she went by Tina. She told me I should buy her the negligee she was wearing, and I did. And I bought her two vodka tonics. We hit it off like they do in the movies. We put on the juke box and slow-danced to a song by one of those bruised divas who’s so devoted to her abusive boyfriend. Later we stopped by Discount Liquors for a bottle of ginger brandy and walked to her place—the Mr. Lucky Motel by the Circle. In the morning she told me that she believed God had sent me to rescue her.

We walked to the Coral Rose Café for breakfast. We held hands the whole way like we were teenagers or senior citizens. And we couldn’t stop talking about ourselves. Of course, everything I told her was made up—the parents, Di and Eddie, killed in a tragic automobile accident when I was seventeen, the military service, the combat medal, the stillborn child, the darling wife who died of cancer, my own struggle with grief and depression. I was learning about Elvis Engdahl at the same time Tina was, and I admired what I heard about me. I felt taller all of a sudden, and wiser. I stopped using the f-word so much. Tina told me that she’d grown up on Long Island with an alcoholic father, an obsessive-compulsive mother, a brother who’s now a registered sex offender, and an older sister who married a CPA, sold her soul for a summer house on Nantucket. Everyone in her family was a disappointment to everyone else. Tina, herself, dropped out of Siena College to follow her boyfriend to Florida. The less said about that parasite the better, she told me.

We ate like wolves, and we couldn’t take our eyes off each other. She poured ketchup on her scrambled eggs, sprinkled salt on her grapefruit, and dripped Tabasco on her grits. She ate her toast with a knife and fork. I had seconds on the corned beef hash. She told me that modeling negligees was her hobby. She actually made her living as a prostitute. I told her those days were over now, and she squeezed my hand. She smiled, bit her lip, and wiped away a tear. We stopped by the Hess so I could show her off to Stavros and to Dawn, the morning clerk, who had had her chances with me. Later Tina and I went house-hunting and found a one-bedroom duplex on Harding Street. We moved in. New curtains, new welcome mat, a set of dishes, and a set of towels. We bought a microwave and started staying in on Friday nights. We’d watch a movie, split a six-pack, and eat Lean Cuisines, just like any happily married couple. We read newspapers and talked about where we’d like to be in five years. Me, I said I’d like to be working on a boat in the Bahamas. Anywhere but here, she said.

I opened a checking account at the Wachovia bank because I thought you said the name like “Watch over ya,” like the bank was a guardian angel, but it turns out you pronounce it like “Walk over ya,” like the bank’s your ex-wife’s attorney. Anyway, the account was my little secret. When I had enough money saved, I planned to surprise Tina with a decent car. With a car we could go places. I worked extra shifts whenever I could, and when I wasn’t working, I was with Tina. On Saturdays we took a cab to the Winn-Dixie to do our food shopping for the week. On Sundays we took a bus to the beach or to the track.

Tina’s little secret was she hadn’t stopped turning tricks. For a while I pretended I didn’t know what was going on. I ignored the evidence she hadn’t the wit or the will to conceal—the foil condom wrappers in the waste basket, the twenty-dollar bills on the nightstand, the unfamiliar body odor on the sheets. When I finally said something, Tina told me she was bored sitting around all day. I told her to walk to the park, why don’t you, or get a hobby. Learn how to cook, for chrissakes. Well, that set her off. She tossed an ashtray at the TV and broke the screen. She started packing her suitcase. I apologized, rocked her in my arms and scratched her back. She cried, hugged me, and said how she needed to feel useful, needed to pull her own weight, needed to contribute to the household. She agreed to look for honorable work, and it wasn’t long before she landed a waitressing job at IHOP. I switched to days so we could be together at night, and everything was once again hunky-dory.

We spent many of our evenings at the Lamp Post Lounge. The Post didn’t attract the dirtbags who hung out at the Wayside. We had our favorite table by the window; Bobby G., the bartender, knew just how we liked our drinks. Our home away from home. One night, the owner, Herbie Dyson, who I’d never seen before, came in and walked to our table and said to Tina, “What did I tell you about bringing your business in here?” I was thinking I’m going to have to smash my cocktail glass into his face, but Tina held my arm and said, “This isn’t business, Dyson. Elvis here is my fiancé.”