Palm Beach Nasty (35 page)

Sonny nodded and walked back to his table.

“What’s the connection there?” Dominica asked.

“Oh, we had a . . . little disagreement once,” Crawford said, “all patched up now.”

Dominica had never been to the Hard Case before. She scanned the room, taking in the ripped felt on one of the pool tables, the blinking beer signs, her eyes stopping at the big, dirty glass jar containing pickled eggs.

“So, this is where you take your girls . . . to impress ’em, huh?”

He looked at her for a second, smiled and shook his head.

“I got news for you . . . you’re the first.”

She cocked her head.

“So . . . that would be a compliment?”

He nodded. “Oh, yeah, the highest.”

She reached out for his hand as they heard something behind them.

Crawford turned.

It was Do-rag with a Bud and a glass of wine.

“Truce,” he said, handing Crawford the Bud.

Crawford laughed and took the bottle.

“Truce,” Crawford said.

“I just wanted to say good job,” Do-rag said.

Crawford looked down, trying to conjure up his modest look.

“Thanks,” he said.

Do-rag snorted a laugh.

“Not you, numbnuts,” he said, handing Dominica the glass of wine, “your lady friend.”

EPILOGUE

A
lcie was on Interstate 95 just past Jacksonville. He had exchanged the plates on the Rolls with the ones from his Corolla. The Rolls was riding lower to the ground than usual because of all the gold bars and coins Alcie had just bought. Alcie didn’t trust the stock market, which had turned out to be exactly what he suspected all along: a scam perpetuated by rich, white guys who graduated from places like the University of Goldman Sachs.

After buying the gold bars and coins, he spent the afternoon going around to every pawnshop he could find. He had a big wad of cash, a Saturday night special—just in case—and went on a massive buying spree. He had read in the
Palm Beach Press
that local pawnshops were long on inventory because people who had lost fortunes on Wall Street were desperate for cash. Cash was king and Alcie had stacks of it. So he bought anything and everything made of gold. Rings, watches, earrings . . . even sprung for a huge gold filling.

Then with more than $2 million dollars in gold—along with his pride and joy, the big, beautiful Francis Bacon painting of the guy with the funny head—he was on his way back to his ancestral shack in the mountains of North Carolina. He still wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to tell his mother. Maybe he’d won the lottery?

Hell, did it really matter? It wasn’t like she’d be grilling him too hard.

A broad smile washed over his face as he thought about his time in Palm Beach. People went there for a lot of reasons. Sun. Golf. The ocean. Marry someone rich. Reinvent yourself. But Alcie, he had just gone there to earn enough to pay his mother back. For keeping him off the street . . . off the crack pipe.

Not to mention, all his life he had dreamed of motoring down the interstate in a big-ass Rolls, people nodding and thinking, dude did all right for himself.

Well, no question about it, he surely had.