Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (29 page)

“Don’t know,” Truman said. “Wormy and Billy probably went to get the Monte Carlo. Maybe Ronnie went along to deal with Eddie.”

With all the unlit floodlights, red and yellow Christmas lights, and the flashing, rotating pink Cadillac on the roof switched off, Bondurant Motors looked forlorn, like a carnival after all the rubes had gone home. The coast was clear, yet neither of them made a move to get out of the station wagon.

“They’ll kill Eddie,” Jackie said suddenly. “Ollie, too. We should never have let them try this. It’s idiotic.”

“Eddie has the element of surprise on his side,” Truman said, wanting to convince himself. “He’s tough. A real street type. He’s got a gun, he knows they’re coming, they don’t know he knows what they’re up to. We talked it all over, Jackie. Everybody knows the risks.”

“Let’s call the cops now,” Jackie said, her voice shaky. “We can tell them where Eddie’s meeting Wormy. They’ll stop anything bad from happening.”

“And arrest them for what?” Truman asked. “It’ll be the same thing as before. Our word against Bondurant’s. And nobody will ever find out what happened to Jeff Cantrell. Or your Corvette, or any of it We’ll call the cops the minute we find something inside. No heroics this time,” he added. “No surprises.”

They were winding their way briskly through the rows of parked junkers and rust buckets. “You never did say how you plan to get us inside,” Jackie reminded him.

“I’m a trusted employee,” Truman said. “Ronnie showed me where the key was hidden this morning.”

Once inside, they hurried into the garage. Truman headed straight for the drum of solvents. The lid popped off easily after one gentle prying motion of a screwdriver. Jackie held the flashlight.

Truman had a mop handle, which he thrust down into the oily green muck. “Step back,” he warned Jackie, not feeling the need to explain why.

She held her hand up to cover her mouth and nose, and looked away. “Jeff wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I mean, at first, I thought he was real cute.”

The solvent was thicker than he’d expected, and some of it slopped over the sides of the drum as he stirred the mop handle in a series of agonizingly slow figure eights. Jackie was still holding her breath when he pulled the mop handle out. “Nothing here but toxic wastes,” he said, relieved.

“Thank the Lord,” she said.

She played the light around the walls and ceilings of the garage, and walked over to the lift, looking not upward, at Ronnie Bondurant’s stacked-up storage shed in the sky, but down, at the rectangular oil- spattered concrete and steel grating beneath the rack. The grate was, to her eyes, disturbingly coffin shaped. She kicked the edge of it with her sneaker.

“What’s this? What’s it for?”

Truman kneeled down and ran the screwdriver around the edge of the grate. “It’s the grease trap. When they put a car on the lift there, they let the oil drain out into there. When the trap’s full, a truck comes along, sucks it out through a hose, and takes it to an oil reclamation place. I didn’t notice it before.”

“You think?”

He tapped the metal with the screwdriver. “There’s an outlet here, where they insert the hose, but I’m not sure the grate part ever gets removed.”

“Unless you have a body to hide,” Jackie said.

They got crowbars off the tool bench, and tugged and heaved and pried until their hands were blistered. But the grate didn’t move. Then they got a handful of bolts and washers and worked them through the holes in the grate. But they only heard the hollow sound of metal pinging on concrete.

“Empty,” Truman said. “Nobody’s worked on cars in here for a real long time.”

“This thing hasn’t been moved either,” Jackie agreed. “You want to try some of the cars out back?”

“Later,” Truman said, looking upward at the lube rack. “Shine that light up there, will you?”

“I’d like to do what you do,” Ollie said wistfully. “Out there, riding around in the middle of the night, just you and the outlaws, right and wrong, justice and evil. Kind of like the wild, wild west.”

“You crazy?” Eddie lifted one eyebrow that said Ollie was. “It’s just a job, man. Just a service I provide for people who can pay. I gotta mingle with the wrong element, get all nasty dirty, lot of heavy lifting. It ain’t all that exciting.”

“Better than sitting in a crummy newsstand all day,” Ollie said. “Selling TV Guides and making change for bus fare.”

Eddie got his .38 out of the glove box and checked to see that it was loaded. He pulled another Slim Jim out from under his seat and laid it right beside the pistol. “You’re a pretty cool little dude,” he said. “You can ride shotgun for me any time you like.”

They were parked in a rubble-strewn parking lot on the back side of Central Plaza. It had been a branch of a big downtown St. Petersburg bank not that long ago. Then the bank got gobbled by another bank, and that bank got gobbled by a bank in Atlanta, and then everybody got gobbled by an institution in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Now all that was left was this pockmarked patch of asphalt, chained off from the street, well lit to keep out felons who might steal a parking lot.

Ollie used the bolt cutters to take care of the chain and then Eddie walked around the perimeter of the lot, shooting out the streetlights one by one. Cars drove past on Central Avenue a block away, but nobody cared what happened on this bleak little spot.

When the lot was good and dark, Eddie showed Ollie how to use the controls to unload the Monte Carlo.

“Not as easy as it looks,” Ollie remarked.

“Took me two weeks to get used to the controls,” Eddie said.

Ollie looked at the clock on the truck’s dashboard. “They’re late.”

“Dissin’ me,” Eddie said. “You ready now, Ollie? Could get ugly. Ronnie Bondurant jokes around, but he don’t play.”

“I’m all set,” Ollie said, clasping a Slim Jim in each hand. “You just give me the signal.”

“Here they come,” Eddie said. Ollie gulped and slid down onto the floor. He was so small that he could hide there, up under the truck’s capacious dashboard.

Wormy pulled his pickup truck alongside Eddie’s. It wasn’t until Wormy pushed a button and let the electric window roll down less than an inch that Eddie realized it was not Ronnie Bondurant, but some other man who sat in the front seat alongside Wormy. The other man was younger, wrapped in bandages. Maybe, Eddie thought, this was the monkey who was supposedly still in the hospital.

“Where’s Ronnie at?” Eddie said, immediately suspicious. He moved his right hand onto his thigh, the .38 under it.

Wormy kept the window rolled up. “He’s got better things to do than screw around with you,” he sneered. “Where’s the keys to the Monte Carlo?”

“Where’s my money?” Eddie asked.

Billy Tripp held up a handful of bills. “Come and get it, bro.”

“I ain’t any bro to you,” Eddie said levelly. He held up the keys to the Monte Carlo so Wormy could see them. And as he opened the door of his truck to get out, he slid the Slim Jim into the waist of his jeans. The .38 disappeared into his palm, no bigger, comparatively, than a peanut.

Wormy and Ronnie watched Eddie’s approach warily. They did not notice when the other door of the truck opened just a bit, or see the small man who seemed to slither out of the truck and along the pavement, through the bits of broken streetlights and gravel, until he was alongside Billy Tripp’s door.

Eddie tossed the keys through the opening in the window, aiming for Wormy’s face. The window slid shut again, and then it was rolling down, and Wormy leaned out a little, smiled and extended his right hand, not with Eddie’s money, but with his loaded .38.

“Repo this,” he said.

Everything happened so fast that afterward, even Ollie had to admit he wasn’t positive about the sequence of events.

“Now,” Eddie shouted.

Two shots rang out, and glass and blood spattered everywhere.

Ollie popped up, terrified, Slim Jim in hand, ready to jam the truck door locked to keep the outlaws from escaping. But nobody in that car was going anywhere. Wormy was slumped over to the right, pitched across Billy Tripp’s lap, a gaping wound in his left shoulder. Blood trickled down his limp forearm. Tripp’s bandaged and battered face lolled, with his chin resting against his chest.

“I think he’s dead,” Ollie said finally. “I think they’re both dead.”

Eddie stripped off his T-shirt and held it against his left forearm. The white shirt turned red. “It was a setup,” he said. “We gotta call the lot, get Truman and Jackie out of there. Bondurant’s still out there, maybe headed their way.”

“You’re shot,” Ollie said. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“In the truck,” Eddie said weakly. “Duct tape. I’ll fix it. You drive.”

Ronnie buckled the seat belt around the Styrofoam cooler full of bills. He always liked to keep his money safe.

He was on the Bayway, headed out for the Gulf beaches. Just a quiet little ride. Ronnie and $20,000. He threw two quarters in the basket at the tollbooth at Eckerd College, had the car nosed forward even before the green light was flashing.

The bridge was lined with losers. People with no money and no hope, nothing better to do with a hot summer night than spend it standing around sweating, waiting for a stinking fish to bite another piece of stinking fish. If Ronnie Bondurant wanted fish, he went into an air-conditioned restaurant, had it brought to him with a slice of lemon and a baked potato, and put it on his American Express Gold Card. That was Ronnie’s idea of fishing.

He was in the outside lane and he could see the boats out on the bay. Big cabin cruisers and ski boats zipped back and forth, leaving luminous white trails of froth in their wake. When all this was over, Ronnie promised himself, he’d spend a day out on the Hydrasport, cruise Pass-A-Grill Beach, find some new talent who liked fast boats and a guy with money to spend.

In the meantime, he passed the Point Brittany condo tower and made the left to head toward Tierra Verde. Nice out here, he thought. More happening out at the beaches than at sleepy old Pinellas Point. Lots of babes out here. With the money he took off Hernando Boone tonight, maybe he’d buy a place out here.

First he needed to deal with a certain bitch who thought she was smarter than Ronnie Bondurant. She was out here, somewhere, on this second bridge. He slowed down and his eyes swept first one side, then the other, looking for the familiar curves of LeeAnn Pilker. Plenty of lights out here, plenty of people. People were strung along the sidewalks lining each side; retirees with leather-like skin, family groups with little kids running up and down, and teenagers with their blaring radios and tackle heavy enough to catch Moby Dick, should he ever find a way to swim up the west coast of Florida.

Women? Yeah, there were some old black ladies, squatted on yard chairs, touristy types with sun visors and DisneyWorld T-shirts, all of them too old or too young or too ugly to be LeeAnn Pilker.

The LTD nosed over the bridge’s hump, past the bridge tender’s booth, and on down, maybe half a mile, before Ronnie turned around at the Fort DeSoto exit, and came back over the bridge to get another look at the setup.

LeeAnn’s arms were getting pretty tired, holding that heavy bait-casting rod. She’d been bent over this damned concrete railing for an hour now. At first she’d just let the line drift in the water, then, out of boredom, she’d accepted the offer of a big, live pinfish from a retired steelworker from McKeesport who was set up four or five feet away.

The pinfish was out there now, swimming against the tide, when she saw the big, blue LTD on its first pass by. It didn’t surprise her to see Ronnie was here early in a different car, checking it out, trying to catch her up. Wasn’t she a woman? Didn’t she have shit for brains, not to mention a saggy ass and a bump on her nose?

She didn’t turn around after she saw Ronnie pass by the second time, either, knowing he’d have to go clear back through the tollbooth to turn around again. Montana, she decided. They had mountains in Montana, and snow, and trees. And moose. She’d always wanted to see a moose.

Ten minutes later, Ronnie swept by again. When he reached the sandy embankment up ahead, he pulled off and parked, like LeeAnn had told him. Told him. The bitch. He lifted the lid of the cooler, took a look at his cash. Not good-bye. No way. He got the cooler out and locked the car. He had to dodge between cars to get to the other side, the cooler heavier than he would have thought. When he was across, he pulled the red baseball cap out of his back pocket, set it on his head, and started lugging the cooler up toward the crest of the bridge. Goddamn, he thought. Twenty thousand was heavy money, literally.

When she saw the red cap come bobbing up toward her, she allowed herself a tiny, private smile. She could see Ronnie gasping for breath. It was a hike, in this heat, up an incline, weighed down with all that money. Her money.

“Something’s got your line,” the steelworker said, tugging at her sleeve. “Big one. Better pay attention, hon.”

LeeAnn heard the monofilament line whirling out through the reel. Ronnie was five feet away from the light pole where she’d told him to set down the cooler. What was he doing? Now he was walking away rapidly, his back to her.