And then he’d calmly escorted Shiner back to the shore and helped him into the boat. JoLayne Lucks had been waiting with the shotgun, watching over Bodean Gazzer and Chub. The white guy had waded in, shoving the stern into deeper water so Shiner and Amber could lower the outboards without snagging bottom.
“Have a safe trip,” the black woman had sung out. “Watch out for manatees!”
An hour later Shiner finally heard what he’d been dreading—a helicopter. But it was blaze orange, not black. And it wasn’t NATO but the U.S. Coast Guard, thwock-thwocking back and forth in search of a woman overdue in a small rental boat; a woman who’d said she was going no farther than Cotton Key.
Shiner had no way of knowing this. He was convinced the chopper had been sent to strafe him. He dove to the deck, yanking Amber with him.
“Look out! Look out!” he hollered.
“Would you please get a grip.”
“But it’s them!”
The helicopter dipped low over the boat. The crew spotted the couple entwined on the deck and, accustomed to such amorous sightings, flew on. Clearly it wasn’t the vessel they’d been sent to find.
Once the chopper disappeared, Shiner sheepishly collected himself. Amber shoved the chart under his chin and told him to quit behaving like a wimp. An hour later, the Jewfish Creek drawbridge came into view. They nosed the Reel Luv into the slip farthest from the dockmaster (its owner would be puzzled but pleased to find it there, and the theft would be ascribed to joyriding teenagers). Mindful of his throbbing thumbs, Shiner struggled to tie off the bow rope. Amber scouted for the marine patrol, just in case. She was relieved to spot her car, undisturbed in the parking lot.
Shiner gave a glum wave and said, “See ya.”
“Where you going?”
“To the highway. Try to hitch a ride.”
Amber said, “I’ll drop you in Homestead.”
“Naw, that’s OK.” He was worried about her boyfriend, jealous Tony. Maybe she was setting him up for an ass-whupping.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
Shiner thought: God, she’s so pretty. To hell with it. He said, “Maybe I will bum along.”
“That’s a good way to describe it. You drive.”
They were halfway up Highway One to Florida City when Amber took Chub’s pistol out again, leading Shiner to believe he’d misjudged her intentions.
“You’re gone kill me, ain’t you?”
“Oh right,” Amber said. “I’m going to shoot you in broad daylight in all this traffic, when I had all morning to blow your head off in the middle of nowhere and dump your body in the drink. That’s what a dumb bimbo I am. Just drive, OK?”
The way Shiner was feeling, a hot slug in the belly couldn’t have hurt much worse than her sarcasm. He clamped his eyes on the road and tried to cook up a story for his Ma when he got back to Grange. The next time he glanced over at Amber, she’d gotten the Colt open. She was spinning the cylinder and peering, with one eye, into the chambers.
“Hey,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Stop the car.”
“OK, sure,” said Shiner. Carefully he guided the gargantuan Ford to the grassy shoulder, scattering a flock of egrets.
The gun lay open on Amber’s lap. She was unfolding a small piece of paper that had fallen from one of the bullet chambers.
Shiner said, “Lemme see.”
“Just listen: Twenty-four … nineteen … twenty-seven … twenty-two … thirty… seventeen.”
Shiner said, “God, don’t tell me it’s the damn Lotto!”
“Yup. Your dumb shitkicker buddies hid it inside the gun.”
“Oh man. Oh man. But—d-damn, what do we do now?”
Amber snapped the revolver shut and slipped the lottery coupon in a zippered pocket of her jumpsuit.
“You want me to keep drivin’?” Shiner asked.
“I think so, yes.”
They didn’t speak again until Florida City, where they stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru. They were fifth in the line of cars.
Amber said, “We’ve got a decision to make, don’t we?”
“I always get the Quarter Pounder.”
“I’m talking about the Lotto ticket.”
“Oh,” said Shiner.
“Fourteen million dollars.”
“God, I know.”
“Sometimes there’s a difference,” Amber said, “between what’s right and what’s common sense.”
“Good.”
“All I’m saying is, we need to think this out from all angles. It’s a big decision. Order me a salad, would you? And a Diet Coke.”
Shiner said, “You wanna split some fries?”
“Sure.”
Later, sitting at the traffic light near the turnpike ramp, Shiner heard Amber say: “What do you think they did to your buddies? Back on the island, I mean. What do you think happened after we left?”
Shiner said, “I don’t know, but I can guess.” Sadly he examined the mutilated militia tattoo on his arm.
“Light’s green,” Amber said. “We can go.”
26
Bodean Gazzer watched the Negro woman pick through his wallet until she found the condom packet. How could she have possibly known?
Another mystery, Bode thought despondently. Another mystery that won’t matter in the end.
As nonchalant as a nurse, the woman unrolled the rubber and plucked out the lottery ticket, which she placed in a pocket of her jeans.
“That ain’t yours,” Bode Gazzer blurted.
“Pardon?” The Negro woman wore a half smile. “What’d you say, bubba?”
“That one ain’t yours.”
“Really? Whose might it be?”
“Never mind.” Bode didn’t like the way her eyes kept cutting to the shotgun, which she’d handed to the white guy while she searched the wallet.
“Funny,” she said. “I checked the numbers on that ticket. And they were my numbers.”
“I said never mind.”
Chub began to moan and writhe. The white guy said, “He’s losing lots of blood.”
“Yes, he is,” said the Negro woman.
Bode asked, “Is he gone die?”
“He most certainly could.”
The white guy said to the woman: “It’s your call.”
“I suppose so.”
She walked briefly out of Bode’s view. She reappeared carrying a flat white box with a small red cross painted on the lid. She knelt beside Chub and opened it.
Bode heard her saying: “I wish I could stand here and let you die, but I can’t. My whole life, I’ve never been able to watch a living thing die. Not even a cockroach. Not even a despicable damn sonofabitch like you …”
The words lifted Bode’s hopes for reprieve. Covertly he began rubbing his wrists back and forth, to loosen the rope that held him to the tree.
The shotgun blast had excavated from Chub’s left shoulder a baseball-sized chunk of flesh, muscle and bone. He was not fortunate enough to pass out immediately from pain. The woman’s touch ignited splutter and profanity.
Firmly she told him to be still.
“Get away from me, nigger! Get the hell away!” Chub, wild-eyed and hoarse.
“You heard the man.” It was the white guy, holding the Remington. “He wants to bleed out. You heard him, JoLayne.”
Another agitated voice. Sounded like Bode Gazzer. “For God’s sake, Chub, shut up! She’s only trying to save your life, you stupid fuck!”
Yep. Definitely the colonel.
Chub shook himself like a dog, spitting blood and sandy grit. The bicycle patch had peeled, so now he had two open eyes with which to keep a bead on the nigger girl; more like one and a half, since the unhealed lid drooped like a ripped curtain.
“What’re you gone do to me, if I might ast?”
“Try to clean this messy gunshot and stop your bleeding.”
“How come?”
“Good question,” the woman said
.
Craning his head, Chub saw it was attached to a striped, sand-caked body that could not possibly be his. The cock, for example, was puckered to the size of a raspberry; definitely not a millionaire’s cock.
Had to be a nightmare is all, a freak-out from the boat glue. That must be how come the nigger girl looks ’zactly like the one they’d robbed upstate, the one clawed the shit outta us with those hellacious electric-looking fingernails.
“You ain’t no doctor,” Chub said to her.
“No, but I work in a doctor’s office. An animal doctor—”
“Jesus Willy Christ!”
“—and you’re about the dumbest, smelliest critter I ever saw,” the woman said matter-of-factly.
Chub was too weak to hit her. He wasn’t even a hundred percent sure he’d heard it right. Delirium slurred his senses.
“Whatcha gone do with all that lottery money, nigger?”
“Well, I thought I’d buy me a Cadillac or two,” JoLayne said, “and a giant-screen color TV.”
“Don’t you talk down to me.”
“And maybe a watermelon patch!”
“You gone kill me, girl?” Chub asked.
“Well, it’s tempting.”
“Why can’t you jes answer me straight.”
The white guy’s face appeared over the woman’s shoulder. He whistled and said, “Hey, sport, what happened to your eye?”
Chub exerted himself to make a sneer. “You muss be some kind a nigger-lover.”
“Just a beginner,” the white man said.
The last thing Chub heard before blacking out was Bodean Gazzer bellowing: “Hey, I changed my mind! You kin let him die! Go ’head and let the asshole die!”
JoLayne Lucks couldn’t do it.
Couldn’t, although the stench of the robber had brought everything rushing back, the bile to her throat and the stinging to her eyes. All that had happened that night inside her own house—the horrible words they’d used, the casual way they’d punched her, the places on her body where they’d put their hands.
She still could taste the barrel of the man’s revolver, oily and cool on her tongue, yet she couldn’t let him die.
Even though he deserved it.
JoLayne willed herself to think of Chub as an animal—a sick confused animal, not unlike the raccoon she’d patched up the night before. It was the only way she could suppress her rage and concentrate on the seeping crater in the man’s shoulder; cleaning the wound as best she could, squeezing out the whole tube of antibiotic and dressing the pulp with wads of thin gauze.
The bastard finally passed out, which made it easier. Not having to listen to him call her nigger: that sure helped.
At one point, maneuvering to get the tape on, JoLayne wound up with his head in her lap. Instead of feeling repulsed, she was overwhelmed by an anthropological curiosity. Studying Chub’s slack unconscious face, she searched for clues to the toxic wellspring. Was the hatred discernible in his deep-set eyes? The angry-looking creases in his sunburned brow? The dull unhappy set of his stubbled jaw? If there was a telltale mark, a unique congenital feature identifying the man as a cruel sociopath, JoLayne Lucks couldn’t find it. His face was no different from that of a thousand other white guys she’d seen, playing out hard fumbling lives. Not all of them were impossible racists.
“Are you all right?” Tom Krome, stooping beside her.
“Fine. Brings back memories of my trauma-unit days.”
“How’s Gomer?”
“Bleeding’s stopped for now. That’s about all I can do.”
“You want to talk with the other one?”
“Most definitely,” JoLayne said.
As Krome approached the buttonwood stump, he sensed something was different. He should’ve stopped right away to figure it out, but he didn’t. Instead he picked up the pace, hurrying toward Bodean Gazzer.
By the time Krome saw the limp rope and noticed the prisoner’s legs were tucked under his butt—boot heels braced against the tree trunk—it was too late. With a martial cry the stubby thief vaulted from the ground, spearing Krome in the chest. He toppled backward, sucking air yet clinging madly with both fists to the shotgun. From a bed of damp sand he raised his head to see Bode Gazzer running away, into the mangroves.
Running toward the other end of Pearl Key, where Tom and JoLayne had hidden the other boat.
Which was, now, the only transportation off the island.
Krome hadn’t slugged anybody for years. The last time it happened was in the Meadowlands stadium, where he and Mary Andrea were watching the Giants play the Cowboys. The temperature was thirty-eight degrees and the New Jersey sky looked like churned mud. Sitting directly behind Tom Krome and his wife were two enormous noisy men from somewhere in Queens. Longshoremen, Mary Andrea speculated with a scowl, although they would later be revealed as commodities brokers. The men were alternating vodka screwdrivers and beer, and had celebrated a Giants field goal by shedding their coats and jerseys and pinching each other’s bare nipples until their eyes watered. By the second quarter Krome was scouting the stands for other seats, while Mary Andrea was packing to go home. One of the New Yorkers produced a pneumatic boat horn, which he deployed in sustained bursts six to ten inches from the base of Krome’s skull. Irately Mary Andrea wheeled and snapped at the two men, impelling one of them—he sported a beer-flecked walrus mustache, Krome recalled—to comment loudly upon the modest dimensions of Mary Andreas breasts, a subject about which she was known to be sensitive.
The colloquy quickly degenerated (despite the distraction of a blocked Dallas punt) until one of the men aimed the boat horn at Mary Andreas flawless nose and let ’er rip. Krome saw no other option but to punch the fat fuck until he fell down. His bosom buddy of course took a wide sloppy swing at Krome’s noggin, but Tom had plenty of time to duck (Mary Andrea was way ahead of him) and unleash a solid uppercut to the scrotal region. The decking of the rude men drew flurries of cheers, the other football fans mistaking Krome’s outburst for an act of husbandly chivalry. In truth it was pure selfish anger, as Krome demonstrated by grabbing the boat horn, placing it flush against the right ear of fallen Walrus Face, and blasting away until the canister emptied, its plangent blare ebbing with a sequence of comical burps.
Cops arrived, jotted names, arrested no one. Krome himself fractured two knuckles in the fight but had no regrets. Mary Andrea scolded him for flying off the handle, but phoned every one of her friends to brag on him. A month later the Kromes heard from an attorney representing one of the commodities brokers, who claimed to be suffering from chronic headaches, deafness and myriad psychological problems resulting from the beating. A companion lawsuit was being hatched by the other fan, who was said to be in need of delicate surgery for cosmetic repair of a displaced left testicle. Tom Krome’s own lawyer strongly advised him to avoid a trial, which he did by agreeing to purchase Giant’s season tickets for each of the aggrieved brokers and also providing (thanks to the connections of a sportswriter pal) official-looking NFL footballs personally autographed by Lawrence Taylor.
Krome anticipated no such nuisance suits from Bodean Gazzer and would take all steps necessary to prevent the robber from escaping Pearl Key and stranding Tom and JoLayne without a boat. To prevent shooting off his own toes, Krome prudently set down the shotgun before he started running. The redneck had a fifty-yard head start but he wasn’t hard to track, crashing through branches like a crazed rhinoceros. Any concealment provided by Gazzer’s camouflage outfit was offset by his unstealthiness. The longer-legged Krome was able to gain ground and at no time mistook the fleeing felon for a mangrove tree.
He overtook Gazzer in a clearing and tackled him. The redneck extracted one chunky leg and slammed his boot smartly into Tom Krome’s cheekbone. Quickly Gazzer was up and running again. He got to the Boston Whaler, which he was laboring to drag into the water when Krome again overtook him. They went down in a splash, the camouflaged man windmilling his arms.
Krome felt a
lifetime of emotional detachment dissolve in a stream of bubbles and galvanizing, uncontrollable fury. It was the first purely murderous impulse of his life, and for a split second it gave a perverse clarity to all the murderous acts he’d written about for newspapers. Krome understood that he ought to be terrified, but he felt only a primitive rage. He wrapped Bodean Gazzer in a brutal headlock and held him underwater with the gravest intention. When a wildly flung elbow struck Krome in the throat, he realized that he was (at age thirty-five) engaged in his first life-or-death struggle.
He would have preferred it more neatly choreographed, like the altercation at Giants Stadium, but that was unusual. In his work Krome had attended enough crime scenes to know that violence was seldom cinematic. Usually it was clumsy, careless, chaotic: a damn mess.
Exactly like this, he thought. If I can’t get my head up even for half a second, I’m probably going to drown.
In four lousy feet of water, I’m going to drown.
They’d stirred up so much marl that Krome couldn’t see anything but a greenish haze in suspension. He released his hold on Gazzer’s neck but they remained tangled—he and the crook, no longer fighting each other but flailing for air.
As the mortal darkening began, words came unspooled in Tom Krome’s brain.
REPORTER FOUND DEAD …
REPORTER BELIEVED DEAD FOUND DEAD …
REPORTER BELIEVED DEAD FOUND DEAD ON MYSTERY ISLAND …
Krome thinking: Headlines!
He pictured them vividly as they would appear in the paper, below the fold of the front page. He beheld a vision of scissors flashing, the article about his drowning meticulously being clipped by a faceless someone—his father, Katie, JoLayne or even Mary Andrea (strictly for insurance purposes).
Tom Krome envisioned the span of his life condensed to one shitty, potentially ungrammatical newspaper caption. The prospect was more depressing than death itself.