Carl Hiaasen (39 page)

Bode was relieved—it was such a strange name, he thought his partner had made it up.

Coolly Amber said, “Pleased to meet you, Otis.”

“Naw, it’s
Onus
. O-n-u-s.”

“Oh. Mine’s Amber.” She blinked innocently. “Amber Bernstein. That’s B-e-r-n-s-t-e-i-n.”

It was as if Bodean Gazzer had been mule-kicked in the gut.

“Get off!” he shrieked at Chub.

“No sir!”

“But didn’t you hear? She’s … she’s a Jew!”

“I don’t care if she’s Vietcong, I’m gone stick my weenie in.”

“No! NO! Get off, and that’s an order!”

Chub closed his eyes and tried to block out Bode’s carping.
Hilton Head
, he told himself.
You and Blondie are at Hilton Head, doin’ it on the beach. Naw, even better—you’re doin’ it on the balcony of your brand-new condo!

But Amber’s obstinate wriggling was giving him fits; it was like trying to screw an eel. Plus, in his glue-dazed condition, Chub found himself wielding something less than a world-class, diamond-cutter erection.

“No white Christian man”—Bode, somber as a coroner, leaned over them—“no white Christian man shall give his seed to an infidel child of Satan!”

Amber interrupted her evasions to mention that her father was a rabbi. Bode Gazzer emitted a mournful groan. Chub glared up at him. “You worry about your own damn seed. Now back off so’s I kin plant mine.”

“Negative! As commanding officer of the White Clarion—”

Chub rose to his knees and, with his clawless hand, snatched the pistol from the colonel. He jammed it to Amber’s throat and told her to spread her legs.

Bode remembered the Colombian’s Beretta in his belt. He considered drawing the gun, not so much for Amber’s sake but to reinforce his superior rank. Without a steep improvement in discipline, Bode felt, the fledgling militia would soon go to pieces.

His consternation was heightened by the unexpected arrival of Shiner, the young blackmailer himself, stumbling through the trees. His cheeks were puffy and his pants were soiled and his twisted-looking fists were extended oddly at his sides, like a scarecrow’s. Upon seeing Major Chub naked atop Amber, Shiner roared into a headlong assault.

Bodean Gazzer was poised to tackle the hapless skinhead when something exploded from the shoreline behind him. Chub was lifted off Amber as if there were springs in her ass. Then Bode heard a frightfully heavy thump, which he later learned was the butt of a Remington shotgun impacting his own skull.

When he regained consciousness, Bode was aware of being
constricted. A white man he didn’t know was tying him with a length of anchor rope to a buttonwood stump. Still flat on the ground was Chub, gurgling curses and drenched in his own blood. Shiner sat downcast in the bow of the stolen boat; his melancholy gaze was fixed on the bruised scabby mess of a tattoo. Amber stood back, wrapped in the oilskin tarpaulin. Irritably she plucked leaves and turtle grass from her hair.

All the militia’s weapons had been piled on the ground. The captured arsenal was being inspected by a muscular young Negro woman with neon-green nails and a Remington shotgun. Bode Gazzer recognized her immediately.

“Not you!” was all he could say.

“That’s right, bubba. Say hi to the Black Tide.”

The sky and earth and universe began to spin madly for Bode Gazzer, as his fate appeared to him with sickening lucidity. The white man finished with the knots and stepped away from the tree. The Negro woman came forward, carrying the gun so casually as to cause a spasm in Bode’s fragile sphincter.

“What do you want?”

JoLayne Lucks slipped the shotgun between his lips.

“Let’s start with your wallet,” she said.

T
he case of
LaGort
v.
Save King Enterprises, Allied-Cagle Casualty, et al
. was settled in a courthouse hallway after a pretrial conference lasting less than two hours. The attorneys for the supermarket’s insurance carrier, having detected in Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. a frosty and inexplicable bias, chose to pay Emil LaGort the annoying but not unpalatable sum of $500,000. The purpose was to avoid a trial in which the defense clearly would get no help from the judge, who’d already vowed to prohibit any testimony attacking the past honesty of the plaintiff, including but not limited to his very long list of other negligence suits. Emil LaGort attended the conference in a noisy motorized wheelchair with maroon mica-fleck armrests, and wore around his neck a two-tone foam cervical brace. The brace was one of nine models available in Emil LaGort’s walk-in closet, where he saved all medical aids acquired during the phony recoveries from his many staged accidents.

After the settlement papers were signed and the sourpuss insurance lawyers filed into the elevator and Emil LaGort rolled
himself across James Street to a topless luncheonette, his lawyer discreetly obtained from Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. the number of a newly opened Nassau bank account, into which $250,000 would be wired secretly within four weeks.

Not exactly a king’s ransom, Arthur Battenkill knew, but enough for a fast start on a new life.

The judge’s wife, however, wasn’t packing for the tropics. While Arthur Battenkill was tidying up the details of the Save King payoff, Katie was on her knees in church. She was praying for divine guidance, or at least improved clarity of thought. That morning she’d read in
The Register
that Tom Krome’s estranged wife had come to town to receive a journalism award on her “late” husband’s behalf. Regardless of Tommy’s ill feelings toward the elusive Mary Andrea Finley, it seemed possible to Katie Battenkill that the woman might be mourning an imagined loss; that she still might love Tom Krome in some significant way.

Shouldn’t somebody tell her he’s not really dead? If it were me, Katie thought, I’d sure want to know.

But Katie had assured Tommy she wouldn’t say a word. Breaking her promise would be a lie, and lying was a sin, and Katie was trying to give up sinning. On the other hand, she couldn’t bear the thought of Mrs. Krome (whatever her faults) needlessly suffering even a sliver of widow’s pain.

Knowing Tom was alive became a leaden weight upon Katie’s overtaxed conscience. There was a second secret, too; equally troubling. She was reminded of it by another item in
The Register
, which reported that the human remains believed to be those of Tom Krome were being shipped to an FBI laboratory “for more sophisticated analysis.” This meant DNA tests, which meant it wouldn’t be long before the dead man was correctly identified as Champ Powell, law clerk to Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.

The devious shitheel with whom Katie was about to flee the country forever.

“What do I do?” she whispered urgently. Head bowed, she knelt alone in the first pew. She prayed and waited, then prayed some more.

God’s answer, when it eventually came, was typically strong on instruction but weak on details. Katie Battenkill didn’t push it; she was grateful for anything.

As she walked out of church, she removed her diamond solitaire and deposited it in the slot of the oak collection box, where it landed with no more fanfare than a nickel. Lightning didn’t flash, thunder didn’t clap. No angels sang from the rafters.

Maybe that’ll come later, Katie thought.

After the last of the pilgrims were gone, Shiner’s mother approached the besheeted Sinclair, who was sloshing playfully with the cooters in the moat. She said, “Help me, turtle boy. I need a spiritual rudder.”

Sinclair’s unshaven chin tilted toward the heavens: “
Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo kattttkin.”

His visitor failed to decipher the outcry
(KICKING BACK WITH ULTRA-COOL KATHLEEN
—from a feature profile of the actress Kathleen Turner).

“How ’bout giving that a shot in English?” Shiner’s mother grumped.

Sinclair beckoned her into the moat. She kicked off her scuffed bridal heels and stepped in. Sinclair motioned her to sit. With cupped hands he gathered several baby turtles and placed them on the billowing white folds of her gown.

Shiner’s mother picked one up to examine it. “You paint these suckers yourself?”

Sinclair laughed patiently. “They’re not painted. That’s the Lord’s imprint.”

“No joke? Is this little guy ’posed to be Luke or Matthew or who?”

“Lay back with me.”

“They paved my Jesus this morning, did you hear? The road department did.”

“Lay back,” Sinclair told her.

He sloshed closer, taking her shoulders and lowering her baptismally. Shiner’s mother closed her eyes and felt the coolness of the funky water on her neck, the tickle of tiny cooter claws across her skin.

“They won’t bite?”

“Nope,” said Sinclair, supporting her.

Soon Shiner’s mother was enfolded by a preternatural sense of inner peace and trust, and possibly something more. The last man who’d touched her so sensitively was her periodontist, for whom she’d fallen head over heels.

“Oh, turtle boy, I lost my son and my shrine. I don’t know what to do.”

“Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo,” Sinclair murmured.

“OK,” said Shiner’s mother. “Kiki-kakeee-kooo. Is that the Bible in, like, Japanese?”

Unseen by the meditators in the moat was Demencio, who stood with knuckles on hips at a window. To Trish he said: “You believe this shit—she’s in with the turtles!”

“Honey, she’s had a rough day. The D.O.T. paved her road stain.”

“I want her off my property.”

“Oh, what’s the harm? It’s almost dark.”

Trish was in the kitchen, roasting a chicken for supper. Demencio had been mixing a batch of perfumed water, refilling the tear well in the weeping Madonna.

“If that crazy broad’s not gone after dinner,” he said, “you go chase her off. And be sure and count them cooters, make sure she don’t swipe any.”

Trish said, “Have a heart.”

“I don’t trust that woman.”

“You don’t trust anybody.”

“I can’t help it. It’s the nature of the business,” said Demencio. “We got any red food coloring?”

“For what?”

“I was thinking … what if she started crying blood? The Virgin Mary.”

“Perfumed blood?” said his wife.

“Don’t gimme that face. It’s just an idea is all,” Demencio said, “just an idea I’m playing with. For when we don’t have the turtles no more.”

“Let me check.” Trish, bustling toward the spice cabinet.

Under less stressful circumstances Bernard Squires might have enjoyed the farmhouse quaintness of Mrs. Hendricks’ bed-and-breakfast, but even the caress of a handmade quilt could not dissolve his anxiety. So he took an evening walk—alone, in his sleek pin-striped suit—through the little town of Grange.

Bernard Squires had spent a tense chunk of the afternoon on the telephone with associates of Richard “The Icepick” Tarbone and, briefly, with Mr. Tarbone himself. Squires considered himself a clear-spoken person, but he’d had great difficulty making The Icepick understand why Simmons Wood couldn’t be purchased until the competing offer was submitted and rejected.

“And it
will
be rejected,” Bernard Squires had said, “because we’re going to outbid the bastards.”

But Mr. Tarbone had become angrier than Squires had ever heard him, and made it plain that closing the deal was requisite
not only for Squires’ future employment but for his continued good health. Squires had assured the old man that the delay was temporary and that by week’s end Simmons Wood would be secured for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. Squires was instructed not to return to Chicago without a signed contract.

As he strolled in the cool breezy dusk, Bernard Squires tried to guess why the Tarbones were so hot to get the land. The likeliest explanation was a dire shortfall of untraceable cash, necessitating another elaborately disguised raid on the union pension fund. Perhaps the family intended to use the Simmons Wood property as collateral on a construction loan and wanted to lock in before interest rates shot up.

Or perhaps they really
did
mean to build a Mediterranean-style shopping mall in Grange, Florida. As laughable as that was, Bernard Squires couldn’t eliminate the possibility. Maybe The Icepick had tired of the mob life. Maybe he was trying to go legit.

In any case, it truly didn’t matter why Richard Tarbone was in such a hurry. What mattered was that Bernard Squires acquire the forty-four acres as soon as possible. In tight negotiations Squires was unaccustomed to losing and had at his disposal numerous extralegal methods of persuasion. If there were (as Clara Markham asserted) rival buyers for Simmons Wood, Squires felt certain he could outspend them, outflank them, or simply intimidate them into withdrawing.

Squires was so confident that he probably would’ve drifted contentedly into a long afternoon nap, had old man Tarbone not uttered what sounded over the phone like a serious threat:

“You get this done, goddammit! You don’t wanna end up like Millstep, you’ll fucking get this done.”

At the mention of Jimmy Millstep, Bernard Squires had felt his silk undershirt dampen. Millstep had been a lawyer for the
Tarbone family until the Friday he showed up twenty minutes late at a bond hearing for Richard Tarbone’s homophobic nephew Gene, who consequently had to spend an entire weekend in a ten-by-ten cell with a well-behaved but flamboyant he-she. Attorney Millstep blamed a needful mistress and an inept cabbie for his tardiness to court, but he got no sympathy from Richard Tarbone, who not only fired him but ordered him murdered. A week later, Jimmy Millstep’s bullet-riddled body was dumped at the office of the Illinois Bar Association. A note pinned to his lapel said: “Is this one of yours?”

So it was no wonder Bernard Squires was jumpy, a condition exacerbated by the abrupt appearance of a rumpled stranger with bloody punctures in the palms of his hands.

“Halt, sinner!” said the man, advancing with a limp. Bernard Squires warily sidestepped him.

“Halt, pilgrim,” the man implored, waving a sheaf of rose-colored advertising flyers.

Squires snatched one and backed out of reach. The stranger muttered a blessing as he shuffled off into the twilight. Squires stopped beneath a streetlamp to look at the paper: