Eventually, it was the immodest giggling of young Celeste that galvanized Neria Torres. She sprang from the bed, turned on all the lights, snatched up the velvet satchel containing Dr. Gabler’s special healing crystals and began whaling deliriously on the writhing mound of bedsheets. The satchel was heavy and the stones were sharp, taking a toll on the professor’s unfirm flesh. With an effeminate cry, he scuttled to the bathroom and chained the door. Meanwhile the graduate student cowered nude and tearful on the mattress. The stubble on Dr. Gabler’s chin had left a telltale path of abraded, roseate blotches from her neck to her quivering belly. Neria Torres noticed, with fierce satisfaction, a faint comma of a scar beneath each of young Celeste’s perfect breasts; an Earth Mother with implants!
Repeatedly she gasped, “I’m sorry, Neria, please don’t kill me! Please don’t…”
Neria threw the satchel of crystals to the floor. “Celeste, you know what I hope for you? I hope that asshole hiding in the john is the highlight of your entire goddamn life. Now where’s the keys to the van?”
Hours later, at a busy truck stop in Gainesville, Neria tried another call to Mr. Varga, her former neighbor in Miami. This time his phone was working; Varga answered on the third ring. He insisted he knew nothing about Neria’s husband and a young blond hussy loading up a rental truck.
“Fact, I haven’t seen Tony since maybe two days after the hurricane.”
“Are there still strangers at the house?” Neria asked.
“All the time, people come and go. But no blondes.”
“Who are they, Leon?”
“I don’t know. Friends and cousins of Tony, I heard. They got two dogs bark half the night. I figured Tony’s letting ’em watch the place.”
Varga shared his theory: Neria’s husband was lying low, due to adverse publicity about the mobile-home industry. “Every damn one blew to smithereens in the storm,” Varga related. “The papers and TV are making a big stink. Supposedly there’s going to be an investigation. The FBI is what they say.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“That’s the rumor,” Varga said. “Your Tony, he’s no fool. I think he’s making himself invisible till all this cools down, these people come to their senses. I mean, it’s not his fault those trailers fell apart. God’s will is what it was. He’s testing us, same as He did with Noah.”
“Except Noah wasn’t insured,” said Neria Torres.
Mr. Varga was right about one thing: Tony wouldn’t stick around if there was heat. His style was to take a nice hotel room and ride things out. In the meantime, he’d have some of his deadbeat relatives or white-trash salesmen pals stay with their bimbos in the house on Calusa. Tony wouldn’t be far away; never would he skip town without getting his paws on the Midwest Casualty money.
Neria was buoyed. The story about the young blonde and Brooklyn obviously was bullshit, a ruse cooked up by her husband. Wishful thinking, too, Neria mused. Talking to Mr. Varga validated her decision to return to Miami.
“Are you really heading home?” he asked. “You and the mister give it one more try?”
“Stranger things have happened,” said Neria Torres. She made Mr. Varga swear on a stack of Holy Bibles not to breathe a word. She said it would ruin everything if Tony found out she was coming.
CHAPTER
23
Snapper instructed Edie Marsh to take the Turnpike, and watch the damn speedometer. He was pressed against the passenger-side door, keeping the stolen .357 pointed at the freak in the army greens. The young woman was no immediate threat.
The stranger blinked like a craggy tortoise. He said: “How much you get for her ring?”
Snapper frowned. The fucker knew—but how?
Edie Marsh didn’t take her eyes off the road. “What’s he talking about? Whose ring?”
Snapper spied, in the lower margin of his vision, the wandering prow of his jawbone. He said, “Everybody shut the fuck up!”
Leaning forward, the longhair said to Edie: “Your rough-tough boyfriend beat up a policewoman. Ripped off her gun and her mother’s wedding band—he didn’t tell you?”
Edie shivered. Maybe it was his breath on the nape of her neck, or the slow rumble of his voice, or what he was saying. Meanwhile Snapper waved the police pistol and hollered for the whole world to shut up or fucking die!
He jammed a CD into the dashboard stereo: ninety-five decibels of country heartache. Within minutes his fury passed, soothed by Reba’s crooning or possibly the five white pills Edie had given him back at the house.
OK, boy, now think.
The original plan was to waylay the nutty old man with the hookers. No problem there. A guy Snapper knew from his Lauderdale days, Johnny Horn, had a small motel down in the Keys. Ideal spot for Levon Stichler to take a short vacation. Snapper’s idea was to get one a them cheap disposable cameras, so the hookers could take some pictures, the kind a respectable man wouldn’t want his grandkiddies to see. Two or three days tied naked to a motel bed, the old fart wouldn’t care to recall he’d ever set foot at 15600 Calusa Drive. If he promised to behave, then possibly the disposable camera would get disposed of. The old man could make his way back to Miami with nothing but a bed rash and a sore cock to show for the experience.
Best of all, Snapper wouldn’t have to pay for the motel room in the Keys, because Johnny Horn owed him a favor. Two years back, Snapper had more or less repossessed a Corvette convertible from the freeloading boyfriend of one of Johnny Horn’s ex-wives. Snapper had driven the Corvette straight to the Port of Miami and, in broad daylight, parked it on a container ship bound for Cartagena. It was a high-risk deal, and Johnny said for Snapper to call the Paradise Palms anytime he needed a place to crash or hide out or take some girl.
Snapper had dreamed up the plan for old man Stichler all by himself, without Edie’s input. He surely didn’t want to throw all that cleverness out the window, but he couldn’t conceive of how to fit the new intruders into his scheme, and he was too fogged from the pills to improvise. It seemed easier to kill the one-eyed freak and his woman companion—and as long as Snapper was being so bold, why not do loony old Levon as well? That way, Snapper reasoned, he wouldn’t have to pay the two whores anything, except for gas money and possibly a seafood dinner.
On the downside: How to get rid of three dead bodies? The logistics were daunting. Snapper suspected that his droopy brain wasn’t up to the challenge. Killing took energy, and Snapper all of a sudden felt like sleeping for three weeks solid.
He worked up a pep talk for himself, recalling what a wise guy once told him in prison: Dumping bodies is like buying real estate—location, location, location. Snapper thought: Look around, boy. You got your mangrove islands, your Everglades, your Atlantic-motherfucking-Ocean. What more you want? A fast shot to the head, then let the sharks or the gators or the crabs finish the job. What’s so damn difficult about that?
But Jesus, the stakes were high; one measly fuckup and it’s back to Raiford for the rest of my life. Probably locked in a ten-by-ten with some humongous horny black faggot weight lifter. Clean and jerk my skinny ass till I walk like Julia Roberts.
And shooting people is awful noisy. Edie Marsh wouldn’t go for it, Snapper knew for a fact. She’d make quite a stink. And killing Edie with the others was impractical because (a) he didn’t have enough bullets and (b) he couldn’t cash the insurance checks without her. Damn.
“What is it?” Edie shouted over Reba.
Snapper made a sarcastic zipper motion across his lips. He thought: I’m so goddamn tired. If only I could have a nap, it would come to me. A new plan.
The one-eyed stranger began to sing along with the stereo. Snapper scrutinized him coldly. How’d he know about the lady trooper? Snapper’s hands had a slight tremor. His lips were as dry as ash. What if the bitch had gone and died? What if first she’d gotten a good look at him, or maybe the Jeep? What if it was already on TV, and every cop in Florida was in the hunt?
Snapper told himself to knock
it off, think positive. For the first time in days, his busted-up knee didn’t hurt so much. That was something to be glad about.
The young woman in the back seat joined her flaky companion in song. She was winging it with the lyrics, but that was all right with Snapper; her voice was pretty.
Edie Marsh tapped the rim of the steering wheel and acted peeved at the amateur chorus. After about three minutes she reached out and poked the Off button on the CD player. Reba fell silent, and so did the chorus.
Snapper announced that the next selection was Travis Tritt.
“Spare us,” Edie said.
“Hell’s your problem?”
The woman in the back seat spoke up: “My name’s Bonnie. This is the governor. He prefers to be called ‘captain.’”
“Skink will be fine,” said the one-eyed man. “And I would kill for some Allman Brothers.”
Snapper demanded to know what they wanted, why they’d been snooping at the Torres house. The man who called himself Skink said: “We were looking for you.”
“How come?”
“As a favor to a friend. You wouldn’t know him.”
Edie Marsh said, “You’re not making a damn bit of sense.”
Something shifted in the bed of the Jeep. The sound was followed by a faint quavering moan.
From the woman, Bonnie: “What are your names?”
Edie Marsh rolled her eyes. Bonnie caught it in the rearview.
Snapper said, “Fuckin’ idiots, the both of ’em.”
“All I meant,” said Bonnie Lamb, “is what should we call you?”
“I’m Farrah Fawcett,” Edie said. Nodding at Snapper: “He’s Ryan O’Neal.”
In discouragement, Bonnie turned toward the window. “Just forget it.”
A warm hand settled on Edie’s shoulder. “Whoever you are,” Skink said intimately, “you make a truly lovely couple.”
“Fuck you.”
Snapper lunged across the seat and stuck the barrel of the .357 in a crease of the stranger’s cheek. “You think I don’t got the balls to shoot?”
Skink nonchalantly pushed the gun away. He eased back in the seat and folded his arms. His fearless attitude distracted Edie Marsh. Snapper commanded her to pull off at the next exit. He needed to find a bathroom.
Having never been abducted at gunpoint, Bonnie Lamb wasn’t as scared as she thought she ought to be. She attributed the unexpected composure to her resolve for adventure and to the governor’s implausibly confident air. Based on nothing but blind faith, Bonnie was sure that Skink wouldn’t allow them to be harmed by a deformed auto thief. The guy’s erratic gun handling was nerve-racking, but somehow not so menacing with another woman in the Jeep. Bonnie Lamb could tell that she wasn’t some dull-eyed trailer-park tramp; she was a sharp cookie, and not especially afraid of the dolt with the pistol. Bonnie had a feeling there wouldn’t be any killing inside the truck.
She wondered what Max Lamb would think if he could see her now. Probably best that he couldn’t. She felt terrible about hurting her husband, but did she miss him? It didn’t feel like it. Perhaps she was doing Max the biggest favor of his life. Having waited all of one week to commit adultery with a near-total stranger, Bonnie surmised that she had, in the parlance of pop psychotherapy, “unresolved issues” to confront. Poor eager Max was a victim of misleading packaging. He thought he was getting one sort of woman when he was getting another. For that Bonnie felt guilty.
She vowed not to depress herself by overanalyzing her instant attraction to Augustine. She wished he were there, and wondered how he would ever find them on the road. Bonnie herself had no clue which way they were headed.
“South,” the governor reported. “And south is good.”
The man with the pistol snarled: “Quiet, asshole.”
Suddenly Bonnie got an eerie hologrammic vision of the gunman’s naked skull on the wall of Augustine’s guest room. The broken mandible caused the bony orb to rest with a sinister tilt on the shelf; a pirate’s crooked grin. Then Bonnie had a flash of Augustine, juggling the gunman’s skull with the others.
From a pocket Skink withdrew a squirming Bufo toad, which immediately peed on him. The man with the .357 sneered.
The woman who was driving glanced over her shoulder. “What now?” she grumbled.
“Smoke the sweat,” Skink said, cupping the toad and its amber piddle in his palm, “and then you see mastodons.”
“Get that stinking thing outta here,” said the gunman.
“Did you know mastodons once roamed Florida? Eons before your ancestors began their ruinous copulations. Mastodons as big as cement trucks!” Skink put the toad out the window. Then he wiped the toad pee on the sleeve of the gunman’s pinstriped suit.
“You fuck!” Snapper took aim at Skink’s good eye.
The woman at the wheel told him to cool it—other drivers were staring. She turned off at the next exit and pulled into an abandoned service station. The hurricane had blown down the gas pumps like dominoes. Looters had cleaned out the garage. On the roof lay the remains of a Mazda Miata, squashed upside down like a bright ladybug.
While the gunman left the Jeep to relieve himself behind the building, the woman reluctantly took charge of the .357. She looked so uncomfortable that Bonnie Lamb felt a little sorry for her; the poor girl could barely hoist the darn thing. Surely, Bonnie thought, now was the moment for Skink to make his move.
But he didn’t. Instead he smiled at the woman in the driver’s seat and said, “You’re truly pretty. And aware of it, of course. The guiding force for most of your life, I imagine—your good looks.”
The woman blushed, then toughened.
“Where’d you spend the storm?” Skink asked.
“In a motel. With Mel Gibson there,” the woman said, nodding toward Skink, “and a hooker.”
“I was tied to a bridge. You should try it sometime.”
“Right.”
Bonnie Lamb said, “He isn’t kidding.”
The woman shifted the .357 to her other hand. “What on earth are you people doing? Who sent you to the house—Tony’s wife?” She turned around on her knees, bracing her gun arm on the front seat. “Bonnie, dear,” she said sharply. “I’d really appreciate some answers.”
“Would you believe I’m on my honeymoon.”
“You’re joking.” The woman glanced doubtfully at Skink.
Bonnie said, “Oh, not him. My husband’s in Mexico.”
“Boy, are you ever lost,” said the woman.
Bonnie shook her head. “Not really.”
The storm had knocked down the traffic signal at Florida City, or what was left of Florida City. A tired policeman in a yellow rainsuit directed traffic at the intersection. Edie Marsh tensed behind the wheel of the Jeep. She told Snapper to make sure the gun was out of sight. As they passed the officer, Bonnie Lamb figured it would be a fine time to poke her head out the window and shout for help, but Skink offered no encouraging signal. His chin had drooped back to his chest.
Most of the street signs remained down from the hurricane, but Bonnie saw one indicating they were about to enter the Fabulous Florida Keys. Snapper was apprehensive about possible checkpoints along Highway One, so he instructed Edie Marsh to use Card Sound Road instead.
“There’s a toll,” she noted.
“So?”
“I left my purse at the house.”
Snapper said, “Jesus, I got money.”
“I bet you do.” Edie Marsh couldn’t stop thinking about what the one-eyed stranger had said: Snapper assaulting a woman cop and swiping her mother’s ring.
“How much did you get for it?” she asked.
“For what?”
“The ring.” Edie stared ahead at the flat strip of road, which stretched eastward as far as she could see.
Snapper muttered obscenely. He fished in his coat and came out with a plain gold wedding band. He held it three inches from Edie’s face.
“Happy?” he said.
The
sight of the stolen ring affected Edie in an unexpected way: She felt repulsed, then dejected. She tried to picture the policewoman, wondered if she was married or had children, wondered what dreadful things Snapper had done to her.
Lord, Edie thought. What a small, disappointing life I’ve made for myself. She wanted to believe it would’ve been different if only she’d talked that shy young Kennedy into the sack. But she was no longer sure.
“I couldn’t pawn it,” Snapper was saying. “Damn thing’s engraved, nobody’ll touch it.”
“What does it say?” Edie asked quietly. “On the ring.”
“Who cares.”
“Come on. What does it say?”
The woman in the back seat sat forward, also curious, as Snapper read the inscription aloud: “‘For My Cynthia. Always.’” He gave a scornful laugh and hung his bony arm out the window, preparing to toss the ring from the truck.
“Don’t do that,” Edie said, backing off the accelerator.
“The fuck not? If I can’t hock the goddamn thing, I’m gone dump it. Case we get pulled over.”
Edie Marsh said, “Just don’t, OK?”
“Oops. Too late.” He cocked his arm and threw the ring as far as he could. It plopped into a roadside canal, breaking the surface with concentric circles.
Edie saw everything from the corner of her eye. “You lousy prick.” Her voice was as hard as marble. The woman in the back seat felt the Jeep gain speed.
Defiantly Snapper waved the heavy black pistol. “Maybe you never heard of somethin’ called ‘possession of stolen property’—it’s a motherfuckin’ felony, case you didn’t know. Here’s another beauty: Vi-o-lay-shun o’ pro-bay-shun! Translated: My skinny white ass goes straight to Starke, I get caught. Do not pass Go, do not collect any hurricane money. So fuck the cop’s jewelry, unnerstand?”
Edie Marsh said nothing. She willed herself to concentrate on the slick two-lane blacktop, which intermittently was strewn with pine boughs, palmetto fronds and loose sheets of plywood. A regular obstacle course. Edie checked the speedometer: ninety-two miles per hour. Not bad for a city girl.