Carl Hiaasen (19 page)

On two occasions Shiner fired the AR-15 at suspicious noises. The first turned out to be a clumsy opossum (not an enemy sapper) that knocked over Chub’s garbage can, just as the second turned out to be a mud hen (not a scuba-diving commando) splashing in the lily pads.

Better safe than sorry, Shiner thought.

After a while he drifted off, one cheek pressed against the cool stock of the rifle. He dreamed he was back in boot camp, trying to do push-ups while a brawny black sergeant stood over him, calling him a faggot, a pussy, a dickless wonder. In the dream, Shiner wasn’t much better at push-ups than he was in real life, so the sergeant’s yelling grew louder and louder. Suddenly he drew his sidearm and told Shiner he’d shoot him in the ass if his knees touched the ground once more, which of course happened on the very next push-up. In a rage, the sergeant simultaneously placed a heavy boot on Shiner’s back and the gun barrel against Shiner’s tremulous buttocks, and fired—

At the concussion, Shiner bolted awake, clutching the AR-15 to his chest. Then he heard it again—not a gunshot but more like a door slamming. He realized it wasn’t part of the dream; it was real. Somebody was out there, in the buzzing night. Maybe it was the NATO soldiers. Maybe what Shiner had heard slamming was the turret door of a Soviet tank.

As they stepped toward the trailer, Bodean Gazzer and Chub were startled by the raw, strung-out cry that came from the roof: “Who goes! Who goes there!”

They were about to answer when the darkness exploded in orange and blue sparks. The spray of automatic rifle fire sent them diving under the pickup truck, where they cursed and cowered and covered their ears until Shiner was done.

Then Chub called out: “It’s us, dickface!”

“Us who?” demanded the voice from the roof. “Who goes?”

“Us!
Us!”

“’Dentify you selves!”

Bode Gazzer spoke up: “The White Clarion Aryans. Your brothers.”

After a significant pause, they heard: “Aw, fuck. Come on out.”

Squirming from beneath the truck, Chub said: “What we got here’s one brain-dead skinhead.”

“Hush,” Bode said. “You hear that?”

“Jesus Willy Christ.”

Another car on the dirt road—driving away, fast.

Chub groped for his pistol. “What do we do?”

“We chase after the bastards,” Bode said, “soon as we get John Wayne Jr. off the roof.”

T
om Krome’s chest tightened when the headlights appeared in the rearview. JoLayne Lucks turned to see.

“Just like in the movies,” she said.

Krome told her to hang on. Without touching the brakes, he guided the car off the farm road, over a dirt berm. They jounced and shimmied to a halt in a stand of thin Australian pines.

“Unlock your door,” he said, “but don’t get out till I tell you.”

They ducked in the front seat, their faces inches apart. They heard the pickup truck coming, the rumble of the oversized tires on the packed dirt.

Out of nowhere, JoLayne said, “I wonder what Martha Stewart would do in a spot like this.”

Krome thought: OK, she’s delirious.

“Seriously,” said JoLayne. “There’s a woman who’d be completely useless right about now, unless you were in a hurry for a macramé or a flower box. Ever see ole Martha on TV? Plantin’ those bulbs and bakin’ them pies.”

Krome said, “Get a grip.” He lifted his head to peer out.

“Me, I’m all thumbs when it comes to crafts. A total klutz. However, I
can
use a gun—”

“Quiet,” Krome told her.

“—which we happen to have in our possession.”

“JoLayne, get ready!”

“A perfectly good shotgun.”

In the darkness Krome sensed her edging closer. Her cheek touched his, and he astonished himself by kissing her. No big deal; a light brotherly kiss meant only to calm. That’s what he told himself.

JoLayne turned her face but said nothing. The pickup truck was approaching rapidly. Krome felt her arm brush his shoulder, as if she were reaching out for him.

She wasn’t. She was going for his car keys, which she adroitly plucked from the ignition. In an instant she flung open her door and rolled out.

“No!” Krome shouted, but JoLayne was already at the trunk. By the time he got there, the Remington was in her hands.

Nearby, the roadbed brightened; insects swirled in the white beams of the truck’s lights. Hurriedly Krome pulled JoLayne Lucks behind a pine tree. He wrapped his arms around her, pinning the shotgun awkwardly between them.

“Lemme go,” she said.

“You got the safety on?”

“Don’t be a jerk, Tom.”

“Sshhh.”

As the pickup passed, they heard the sound of men’s voices raised in excitement. Tom Krome didn’t relax his hold on JoLayne until the truck was gone and the night was utterly still.

He said, “That was close.”

JoLayne laid the shotgun in the trunk, and not gently. “Macramé, my ass,” she said.

Demencio was still basking in the praise of the Reverend Joshua Moody, who before departing had turned to his curious flock and proclaimed:

“In thirty-three years of touring miracles, this is one of the most astounding things I’ve ever seen!”

He was speaking of the apostolic cooters.

Later, after the Christian pilgrims from West Virginia had keened and swooned and ultimately placed in Trish’s wicker collection basket the sum of $211 (not including what was spent on soft drinks, T-shirts, angel food snacks and sunblock), Reverend Moody had pulled Demencio aside: “You gotta tell me exactly where this came from.”

“It’s like I said.”

“Hey, I been doin’ this since before you were born.” The preacher, arching one of his snowy-white eyebrows. “Come on, son, I won’t give it away.”

Demencio had coolly stuck to his spiel. “One day the turtles are normal. The next day I look in the aquarium and there’s the apostles. All twelve of ’em.”

“Sure, sure.” With an impatient sigh, Reverend Moody had turned Demencio loose. “Of all the places for a holy apparition—on a cooter’s shell, I swear to God, boy.”

“Not an apparition,” Demencio had said coyly, “just a likeness.”

The concept of using turtles is what had intrigued Reverend Moody—how had a mere layman such as Demencio dreamed up something so original? The man simply wouldn’t say. So, out of professional courtesy, the preacher had backed off. Amiably he’d pumped Demencio’s hand and told him: “You are one brilliant bastard.” Then he’d shepherded the pilgrims back onto the bus.

Demencio had stood waving on the sidewalk until they were
out of sight. With a self-congratulatory smirk he’d turned toward his wife, who was sorting the tear-dampened clumps of cash.

“We did it!” she said elatedly.

“Un-fucking-believable.”

“You were right, honey. They’ll go for anything.”

As a kid, Demencio had seen painted turtles for sale at an outdoor flea market in Hialeah. Some of them had roses or sunflowers lacquered on their shells; others had flags or hearts or Disney characters. Demencio had figured it would be no less absurd to decorate JoLayne’s cooters with the faces of religious figures. It had seemed Demencio’s only hope for salvaging a profit from Reverend Moody’s visitation, since the weeping Madonna was temporarily out of service.

After Trish had brought home the art supplies, Demencio had selected a dozen of the liveliest specimens from JoLayne’s big aquarium. The delicate process of painting had been preceded by a brief discussion about how the apostles could be most respectfully portrayed on the carapace of a mud-dwelling reptile. Neither Demencio nor his wife could name even half of the original disciples, so they’d consulted a Bible (which, unfortunately, had not provided a complete set of portraits). Trish then had fished through a box of her late father’s belongings and found a Time-Life volume about the world’s greatest masterpieces. In it was a photograph of Leonardo’s
The Last Supper
, which Trish had torn out and placed on the workbench in front of her husband.

“This is peachy,” he’d said, “but who’s who?”

Trish, pointing: “I believe that’s Judas. Or maybe Andrew.”

“Christ.”

“Right there,” Trish had said helpfully, “in the middle.”

Whereupon Demencio had expelled her and settled down
with the cooters to paint. There was no sense getting fancy, because the animals’ corrugated shells were difficult to work with—as small as silver dollars. Beards was the way to go, he’d told himself. All the big shots in the Bible wore beards.

Soon Demencio had found a rhythm—restraining each baby turtle with his left hand, wielding the brush with his right. He’d been steady and precise, finishing the job in less than three hours. Although every apostle was given lush facial hair, Demencio had tried to make each one distinct.

Beholding the miniature visages, Trish had asked: “Which is which?”

“Beats the hell outta me.”

And, as Demencio had expected, it hadn’t mattered. One pilgrim’s Matthew was another pilgrim’s John.

Avidly Reverend Moody’s followers had clustered around the cooter corral that Trish had fashioned out of plastic gardening fence. Demencio had called out the names of each apostle as he pointed with deliberate ambiguity among the scrabbling swarm. The pilgrims hadn’t merely been persuaded, they’d been overwhelmed. In the center of the small enclosure Demencio had stationed the fiberglass Virgin Mary, who (he’d announced) would not be crying on this special day. The pilgrims had understood completely—the Holy Mother obviously was cheered by the unexpected arrival of her Son’s inner circle.

The apostolic turtles proved such a smash that Demencio decided to use them again the next morning. By noon the yard was jammed. Demencio was fixing a sandwich in the kitchen when Trish urgently reported that the cooters were dehydrating in the sun and that the paint on their shells was beginning to flake. Demencio solved the problem by digging a small moat around the fiberglass Madonna and filling it with a garden hose. Later
a divinely inspired tourist from South Carolina asked if that was holy water in which the turtles were swimming. When Demencio assured him it was, the man asked to buy a cupful for four dollars. The other visitors rushed to queue up, and before long Demencio had to refill the moat.

He was aglow at his windfall. Turtle worship! Reverend Moody had been right—it was pure genius.

The visitation proceeded smoothly until midafternoon, when Dominick Amador showed up to hustle Demencio’s overflow, exhibiting his seeping stigmata in a most vulgar way. Trish chased him away with a rake. The altercation took place in full view of Mayor Jerry Wicks, who made no attempt to intervene on the shameless Dominick’s behalf.

Mayor Wicks had arrived at the shrine in the company of three persons who definitely weren’t pilgrims. Two of them Demencio recognized from around town; the third was a stranger. Demencio acknowledged the group with the air of a busy man on his way to the bank, which he was.

“Please,” the mayor said. “We won’t be long.”

“You caught me at a bad time.” Demencio, stuffing the last of three fat envelopes.

Jerry Wicks said, “It’s about JoLayne Lucks.”

“Yeah?” Demencio, thinking: Shit, I knew it was too good to be true. The damn turtles are probably stolen.

Trish popped her head in the front door: “More lettuce!”

Demencio locked the bank deposits in a drawer and headed for the refrigerator. “Have a seat,” he said indifferently to his visitors. “Be with you in a minute.”

Roddy and Joan were thrilled to assist Joan’s brother on such an important journalistic assignment; in fact, they’d have been ecstatic to help with the weekly crop report. Roddy worked for
the state, inspecting gasoline pumps, while Joan taught third grade at the county elementary school. They didn’t get much company in Grange so they were delighted when Sinclair asked if he could come over for a few days, to work on the lottery story. Because it had been their tip to the newspaper that had gotten the ball rolling, Roddy and Joan felt duty-bound to help Sinclair locate his star reporter, missing with JoLayne Lucks. The Lotto mystery was the most commotion to sweep Grange in ages, and Roddy and Joan were pleased to be in the thick of it. Sinclair hadn’t been in town twenty minutes before they introduced him to the mayor, who listened to Sinclair’s account of Tom Krome’s disappearance with puzzlement and a trace of dismay.

“Whatever’s happened,” Jerry Wicks said, “rest assured it wasn’t Grangians who are responsible. We are the most hospitable folks in Florida!”

Sinclair balanced the notebook on his knees while writing down every word. Sinclair assumed that’s how real reporters worked; like a supercharged stenographer, preserving each article and preposition. He didn’t know any better, and was too proud to ask around the newsroom for guidance before he’d left on his trip.

One drawback to Sinclair’s exact note-taking technique was the extended silence between the moment a sentence was spoken and the moment Sinclair finished transcribing it. He was an uncommonly slow writer; years at the computer keyboard had left him unaccustomed to the feel of a pen in his hand. To make matters worse, he was a neat freak. Copying every trivial comment wasn’t enough; Sinclair painstakingly put in the punctuation, too.