Lucky You (37 page)

Like a cosmic window shade snapping up, letting the sunlight streak in—”blazing lucidity” is how Bernard Squires would (while sampling the in-flight sherry) describe it. He would tell the pretty saleswoman about the surrealistic little town—the weeping Madonna, the dreamy Turtle Boy, the entrepreneurial carpenter with the raw holes in his hands, the eccentric black millionaire who worked at the animal clinic.

And afterwards he would tell the woman a few personal things: where he was born, where he was educated, his hobbies, his tastes in music and even (sketchily) his line of work. He would under no circumstances, however, tell her the contents of the eelskin briefcase in the overhead compartment.

EPIPHANY

Tom Krome carried the turtle tank up the porch and backed it slowly through the front door. The house was warm and fragrant with cooking; spaghetti and meatballs.

JoLayne was sampling the sauce when he came in. She was barefoot and blue-jeaned, in a baggy checked shirt with the tails knotted at her midriff.

“Where’ve you been?” she sang out. “I’m in my Martha Stewart mode! Hurry or you’ll miss it.” She breezed over to check on the cooters.

“We’re one shy,” Tom said. He told her about Demencio’s “apostles” and the weirdness with Sinclair. “I felt so sorry for the guy,” he said, “I gave him a slider. He thinks it’s Bartholomew.”

JoLayne, with consternation: “What exactly does he do with them? Please tell me he doesn’t … “

“He just sort of touches them. And chants like a banshee, of course.”

She said, “You’ve gotta love this town.”

The remaining forty-four seemed perky and fit, although the aquarium needed a hosing. To the turtles JoLayne crooned, “Don’t worry, troops. It won’t be long now.”

She felt Tom’s arms around her waist. He said, “Let’s hear the big news—are you a baroness, or still a wench?”

JoLayne knighted him grandly with the sauce spoon. He snatched her up and twirled with her around the floor. “Watch the babies! Watch out!” she said, giggling.

“It’s fantastic, Jo! You beat the bastards. You got Simmons Wood.”

They sat down, breathless. She pressed closer. “Mostly it was Moffitt,” she said.

Tom raised an eyebrow.

“He told the guy you were writing a big expose on the shopping-mall deal,” JoLayne said. “Told him it was bound to make the front pages—Mafia invades Grange!”

“Priceless.”

“Well, it worked. Squires bolted. But, Tom, what if they believe it? What if they come after you? Moffitt said they won’t dare, but—”

“He’s right. The mob doesn’t kill reporters anymore. Waste of ammo, and very bad for business.” Krome had to admire the agent’s guile. “It was a great bluff. Too bad … “

“What?”

“Too bad I didn’t think of it myself.”

JoLayne gave him a marinara kiss and headed for the kitchen. “Come along, Woodward, help me get the food on the table.”

Over dinner she went through the terms of the land sale. Tom worked the math and said: “You realize that even after taxes and interest payments, you’ll still have quite a comfortable income. Not that you care.”

“How comfortable?”

“About three hundred grand a year.”

“Well. That’ll be something new.”

OK, JoLayne thought, here’s the test. Here’s when we find out if Mr. Krome is truly different from Rick the mechanic or Lawrence the lawyer, or any of the other winners I’ve picked in this life.

Tom said, “You could actually afford a car.”

“Yeah? What else?” JoLayne, spearing a meatball,

“You could get that old piano fixed. And tuned.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Decent speakers for your stereo,” he said. “That should be a priority. And maybe a CD player, too, if you’re really feeling wild and reckless.”

“OK.”

“And don’t forget a new shotgun, to replace the one we tossed overboard.”

“OK, what else?”

“That’s about it. I’m out of ideas,” Tom said.

“You sure?”

JoLayne, hoping with all her heart he wouldn’t get a cagey glint in his eye and say something one of the others might’ve said. Colavito the stockbroker, for instance, would’ve offered to invest her windfall in red-hot would’ve advised her to deposit it all in the police credit union, so he could withdraw large sums secretly to spend on his girlfriends.

But Tom Krome had no schemes to troll, no gold mines to tout no partnerships to propose. “Really, I’m the wrong person to give advice,” he said. “People who work for newspaper wages don’t get much experience at saving money.”

That was it. He didn’t ask for a penny.

And JoLayne knew better than to offer, because then he’d suspect she was setting him up to be dumped. Which was, now, the farthest thing from her mind.

Bottom line: From day one, the man had been true to his word. The first I’ve ever picked who was, she thought. Maybe my luck
has
changed.

Tom said, “Come on—you must have your own wish list.”

“Doc Crawford needs a new X-ray machine for the animals.”

“Aw, go nuts, Jo. Get him an MRI.” He tugged on the knot of her shirttail. “You’re only going to win the lottery once.”

She hoped her smile didn’t give away the secret.

“Tom, who knows you’re staying here with me?”

“Am I?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Who else knows?”

“Nobody. Why?”

“Look on top of the piano,” she said. “There’s a white envelope. It was in the mail when I got home.”

He examined it closely. His name was hand-printed in nondescript block letters. Had to be one of the locals—Demencio, maybe. Or the daffy Sinclair’s sister, pleading for an intervention.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” JoLayne tried not to appear overeager.

“Sure.” Tom brought the envelope to the table and meticulously cut the flap with the tines of a salad fork. The Lotto ticket fell out, landing in a mound of parmesan.

“What the hell?” He picked it up by a corner, as if it were forensic evidence.

JoLayne, watching innocently.

“Your numbers. What were they?” Tom was embarrassed because his hand was shaking. “I can’t remember, Jo—the six numbers you won with.”

“I do,” she said, and began reciting. “Seventeen … “

Krome, thinking: This isn’t possible.

“Nineteen, twenty-two … ”

It’s a gag, he told himself. Must be.

“Twenty-four, twenty-seven … “

Moffitt, the sonofabitch! He’s one who could pull it off. Print up a fake ticket, as a joke.

“Thirty,” JoLayne said. “Those were my numbers.”

It looked too real to be a phony; water-stained and frayed, folded then unfolded. It looked as if someone had carried it a long way for a long time.

Then Krome remembered: There had been two winners that night.

“Tom?”

“I can’t … This is crazy.” He showed it to her. “Jo, I think it’s the real thing.”

“Tom!”

“And this was in your mail?”

She said, “Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.”

“That would be the word for it.”

“You and me, two of the most cynical people on God’s green earth … It’s almost like a revelation, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is.”

He tried to throttle down and think like a reporter, beginning with a list of questions: Who in their right mind would give up a $14 million Lotto ticket? Why would they send it to him, of all people? And how’d they know where he was?

“It makes no damn sense.”

“None,” JoLayne agreed. That’s what was so wondrous. She’d been over it again and again—there were no sensible answers, because it was impossible. What had happened was absolutely impossible. She didn’t believe in miracles, but she was reconsidering the concept of divine mystery.

“The lottery agency said the other ticket was bought in Florida City. That’s three hundred miles away.”

“I know, Tom.”

“How in the world … “

“Honey, put it away now. Someplace safe.”

“What should we do?” he asked.

” ‘We’? It’s your name on that envelope, buster. Come on, let’s get moving. Before it’s too dark.”

It was a few hours later, after they’d returned from their mission and JoLayne had drifted to sleep, when Tom Krome found the answer to one of the many, many questions.

The only answer he’d ever get.

He slipped out of bed to catch the late TV news, in case the men on Pearl Key had been found. He knew he shouldn’t have been concerned—dead or alive, the two robbers wouldn’t say much. They couldn’t, if they wished to stay out of prison.

Nonetheless, Krome was glued to the tube. As though he needed independent proof, a confirmation that the events of the past ten days were real and not a dream.

But the news had nothing. So he decided to surprise JoLayne (and demonstrate his domestic suitability) by washing the dinner dishes. He was scraping a tangle of noodles into the garbage when he spotted it in the bottom of the can:

A blue envelope made out to “Ms. Jo Lane Lucks.”

He retrieved it and placed it on the counter.

The envelope had been opened cleanly, possibly with a very long fingernail. Inside the envelope was a card, a bright Georgia O’Keeffe print.

And inside the card … nothing. Not a word.

And Tom Krome knew: That’s how the second lottery ticket had been delivered. It was sent to JoLayne, not him.

He could’ve cried, he was so happy. Or laughed, he was so mad.

Again she’d been one step ahead of him. It would always be that way. He’d have to get used to it.

She was too much.

Vultures starred in his nightmares, and Chub blamed the nigger woman.

Before boarding the skiff, she’d warned him in harrowing detail about black vultures. The sky over Pearl Key was full of them. “They’re gonna come for your friend,” she’d said, kneeling beside him on the shore, “and there’s nothing you can do.”

People think all buzzards hunt by smell, she’d said, but that’s not so. Turkey vultures use their noses; black vultures hunt purely by sight. Their eyeballs are twenty or thirty times more powerful than a human’s, she’d said. When they’re circling like that—the nigger woman pointing upward and, sure enough, there they were—it means they’re searching for carrion.

“What’s that?” Chub, fumbling to open his ragged eyelid, so he might see the birds better. Every part of him burned with fever; he felt infected from head to toe.

“Carrion,” the woman had replied, “is another word
for
dead meat.”

“Jesus Willy.”

“The trick is to keep moving, OK? Whatever you do, don’t lie down and doze off,” she’d said, “because they might think you’re dead. That’s when they’ll come for you. And once they get started, Lord … Just remember to do like I said.
Don’t stop moving.
Arms, legs, whatever. As long as they see movement, buzzards’ll usually keep away.”

“But I gotta sleep.”

“Only when it’s dark. They feed mainly in the daytime. At night you should be safe.”

That’s when she’d pressed the can of pepper spray into his crab-swollen fist and said, “Just in case.”

“Will it stop ‘em?” Chub peered dubiously at the container. Bode Gazzer had purchased it at the Lauderdale gun show.

“It’s made to knock grizzly bears on their asses,” the woman had told him. “Ten percent concentration of oleoresin capsicum. That’s two million Scoville Heat Units.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

“It means big medicine, Gomer. Good luck.”

Moments later: the sound of an outboard engine revving. Sure as shit, they’d left him out here. She and the white guy—deserted him on this goddamn island with his dead friend, and the sky darkening with vultures.

They’d come down for Bode in the midafternoon, just as the woman predicted. At the time, Chub was squatting in the mangroves, huffing the last of the WD-4O. It didn’t give a fraction of the jolt that boat glue did, but it was better than nothing.

Teetering from the woods, he’d spotted the buzzards picking eagerly at his partner’s corpse—six, seven, maybe more. Some had held strings of flesh in their beaks, others nibbled shreds of camouflage fabric. On the ground the birds had seemed so large, especially with their bare, scalded-looking heads and vast white-tipped wings—Chub had been surprised. When he ran at them they’d hissed and spooked, although not far; into the treetops.

On the bright sand around him he’d noticed the ominous shrinking shadows of others dropping closer, flying tighter circles. That’s when Chub decided to run far away from Bode’s dead body, to a safer part of the island.
 
He grabbed the pepper spray and half lurched, half galloped through the mangroves. Finally he came to a secluded clearing and keeled in exhaustion, landing on his wounded shoulder.

Almost immediately the first nightmare began: invisible beaks, pecking and gouging at his face. He bolted upright, sopped in sweat. In his next dream, which followed quickly, the rancid scavengers encircled him and, by aligning wing to wing, formed a picket from which he couldn’t escape. Again he awakened with a shiver.

It was all her fault, the nigger girl from the Black Tide—she’d put the crazy buzzard talk in his head. They were only birds, for chrissake. Stupid, smelly birds.

Still, Chub kept his good eye trained on their glide pattern, the high thermals.

At dusk he made his way back to the abandoned campsite, in hopes of finding a dry tarp and some beer. When he spotted the paper grocery bag in the bushes, he got an idea about how to pass the long nerve-racking night. He dumped out the crinkled tube of marine adhesive and gave one last squeeze, to make sure he hadn’t missed any. Then he shook the can of pepper spray and shot a stream inside the empty bag.