Skink wouldn’t have approved the mission. He would’ve said my job was to get my cousin home as fast as possible. Yet what if he needed help down the river? What if he’d been hurt so badly that he couldn’t get himself to a hospital?
I owed the man. He’d risked everything for Malley and me.
“If you’re not up for it,” I told her, “I totally understand. I can drop you at the police station.”
“You try that and I’ll kick your ass, Richard Sloan. This T.C. disaster is totally my fault.” Malley reached for the telephone and slapped it in my hand. “So come up with a story that’ll buy us some time to find your weird old senator.”
“Governor.”
“Whatever. Use your famous imagination.”
But my imagination stalled. The best excuse I could think of was car trouble, which Malley said was incredibly weak. When the operator placed the call to my house, I lucked out and got the answering machine.
“Hey, Mom, it’s me! We found Malley and she’s okay and we’re coming home. It’s a long story, I can’t wait to tell you what happened, but I lost my phone and now the car’s overheating. Don’t worry, though. Skink says he’ll have us home tomorrow night. And please don’t—”
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?” It was the operator.
“Yes?”
“You’ll have to try again later. Nobody was there to accept the charges.”
“But what about my message—”
“I had to disconnect as soon as the recording came on. There has to be a person on the other end to take the call.”
“Hang on,” I said, and handed the phone to my cousin. She gave the operator her home phone number.
Uncle Dan picked up on the first ring and practically shouted, “My God, of course we’ll accept the charges!” Even standing several feet away I could hear the sobs on the other end, he was so excited to hear his daughter’s voice. Aunt Sandy picked up on another line, and it was more of the same.
And Malley—cynical, selfish, tough-as-nails Malley—began crying, too.
I ducked around the corner to give her some privacy. She found me sitting on a curb near the Dumpster.
“We’re good to go,” she announced with a leftover sniffle.
“What story did you go with?
“Never mind, Richard.”
“Car trouble, I bet.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Ha!”
“Who did you tell them was driving us?”
“I said we found a cab driver in Panama City who’d do the trip for five hundred bucks plus gas. I said they can write him a check when we get home.”
“Not bad,” I admitted.
“I said the radiator in his taxi blew up, but it’ll be fixed by tomorrow. They still have radiators, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Excellent,” said Malley. “My mom’s calling your mom right now.”
“But no police yet, right?”
“Definitely. I told her all I want to do is come home and go to sleep in my own bed.”
“Which happens to be true, right? You can say it, Mal.”
“Give me some money.”
* * *
At the Tom Thumb we bought a road map, a Styrofoam picnic cooler, five pounds of ice, twelve bottles bottles of water, a six-pack of Coke, chocolate-chip cookies, a bag of Doritos, two prepackaged subs layered with anonymous gray meat, a box of granola bars and four random candy bars (excluding Butterfingers, because that’s what my father was eating when he had his stupid accident).
I handed the tattooed store clerk a couple of damp fifty-dollar bills that I’d gotten from the shoe box. If he was suspicious, it didn’t show. He gave me back twenty-two dollars and change, and said there was a restroom in the back, if we wanted to clean up.
Hint, hint.
Malley and I packed the cooler to the brim, hoisted it into the backseat of the Malibu and took off. I know you’re supposed to drive with both hands, but I kept one off the wheel so I could stuff my face with snacks and guzzle a cold bottle of water. It was either that or pass out from hunger.
The map was spread open on Malley’s lap, sprinkled with granola crumbs from the bar she was gnawing like a starved chipmunk.
“Go straight,” she advised.
“Straight is good.”
“Till you get to a place called Freeport, then hang a left. From there it’s like four miles to the bay.”
Choctawhatchee Bay, where the river empties.
I glanced at the speedometer and nearly choked. Sixty-six miles an hour! That’s what happens when you’re in a super hurry—your foot gets heavy on the pedal and you don’t even realize it. I tapped the brake until the needle dropped to fifty, which Skink had told me was the ideal pace for blending with traffic. Driving too slowly, he’d said, attracts just as much attention as driving too fast.
“Beth really likes you,” my cousin said, out of nowhere. That’s how I knew she was anxious with me behind the wheel—she was trying to make small talk, act casual.
“No way,” I said. “Beth’s going with Taylor.”
“He’s a loser. You should call her. She’s hot, right?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” Malley frogged me in the arm. “Don’t be such a geek.”
“Seriously, I’m supposed to take dating advice from you?”
“Good point,” she said.
“I’ve gotta ask again. Did Tommy do anything else to you? I mean besides the kissing and the handcuffs.”
“God, Richard, why don’t you believe me when I say I’m fine?”
“The police are going to ask the same question.”
“Then they’ll get the same damn answer,” Malley snapped, turning her face to the window.
“There’s a chance Skink’ll kill him, if he hasn’t already. You know that, right? He might die himself in the fight, but there’s no way Tommy can take him.”
“T.C. is strong.”
“The old man’s stronger. You have no idea.”
“Well, good.” Malley had flame in her eyes. “Tommy is a monster. Whatever it takes, I don’t want him hurting anybody else. Some other girl, she might not be as tough as me.”
And that, in the words of Forrest Gump, was all she had to say about that.
Southbound on U.S. 331, I went around a battered pickup loaded with bulbous watermelons. The old heap was only doing thirty and the road was clear on both sides, but the passing move freaked Malley out. I couldn’t help smiling when she covered her eyes.
“Oh, you think you’re so cool,” she said.
“It’s Driving 101. Be nice and I’ll give you a lesson.”
“I so can’t wait till you get your first ticket!”
The thought had crossed my mind, too. I didn’t want to do anything to attract police attention, because Malley and I definitely didn’t look like we were on our way to a church picnic—two scruffy teenagers cruising around in a car that didn’t belong to us, with thousands of dollars hidden in a shoe box.
Skink’s driving mix was playing, the music that had gotten him through Vietnam, he’d said. When a song called “Born to Be Wild” came on, Malley reached to turn it off. Then she changed her mind and turned up the volume. We passed a sign for Eden Gardens State Park, which she thought was funny because my booster-seat book was East of Eden.
The rippled shine of Choctawhatchee Bay came into view, and I pulled off at a picnic area on the north side of the causeway. I took some money from the trunk of the car and approached a dock where a heavyset man was hosing down his Pathfinder, a basic open eighteen-foot fishing boat. The engine was a big two-stroke Yamaha.
“Know where I could rent something like this?” I asked.
The man shook his head. “Most places you gotta be twenty-one.”
“Seriously?”
“On account of the insurance,” he said.
“Oh.”
“’Less you do a private deal.”
“I’ve got cash,” I said.
The man got thoughtful. I’d never met him before, but there was something familiar about that chubby, sunburned face and oversized balding head.
“You ever run a outboard this size?” he asked.
“All the time,” I lied. His engine had five times more horsepower than the one on my little skiff back home. Still, I was pretty sure I could handle it.
“Don’t b.s. me, buddy.”
“Want me to show you?”
The man licked his dingy teeth and thought some more. “You got any ID?”
I handed over the driver’s license that Mr. Tile had given me. The man glanced at my photo, nodded and gave it back.
“I’ll pay you two hundred bucks for a four-hour rental,” I said. “That’s good money.”
The man scratched the reddish stubble on his hedgehog chin. “Make it two-fifty—but first I need to see if you know the bow of the boat from the butt.”
My cousin got out of the car to find out what was going on.
“Hello, I’m Malley,” she said to the man.
“My name’s Dime.”
The wind shifted and I caught a toxic whiff of B.O. Instantly I made the connection. “You have a brother named Nickel?”
“Sure do,” said Dime, “and a sister named Penny.”
“Call Nickel, okay? He’ll vouch for me.”
“He’s on his way back from Bonifay, and anyhow he don’t carry a phone. And this ain’t his boat, it’s mine, so git on board. Let’s see if you’re full a b.s.”
Malley watched from a picnic table while I carefully motored Dime around a tongue of flat water that opened into the bay. The Pathfinder’s engine needed new spark plugs and the steering felt tight, yet I had no trouble maneuvering to Dime’s satisfaction.
One key difference between driving a boat and driving a car is that a boat has no brakes. That means you need to throttle down and coast to your stopping point, or if there’s an emergency, slam it straight through Neutral into Reverse, and hang on. All the gears on Dime’s engine seemed to be working fine. As the boat gained speed, the rush of fresh air dispersed his foul odor and I could breathe freely again.
I accelerated until the Pathfinder planed off, then I finished the tryout with a smooth 360. Dime took over the controls and steered back to the dock.
“O-right,” he said. “Four hours max. But I need a deposit, ’case you two decide to cruise off to Alabama.”
“How big a deposit?” Malley asked warily.
“I’d say seven hunnert bucks.”
“And I’d say you’re rippin’ us off.”
“Okay, be that way,” Dime said. “Good luck findin’ you selves a nuthuh boat.”
We had more than enough to pay the seven-hundred-dollar deposit, but I wasn’t sure that Dime would give it back when we returned. Malley and I had counted what remained in the shoe box: $9,970. It was huge amount of cash, don’t get me wrong, but I thought Skink might need every dollar for medical bills.
I put five fifties for the boat rental in Dime’s outstretched hand. “If we’re not back by sundown, the car is yours. That’s our deposit, okay?”
He snorted louder than the wild boar. “You must think I’m a damn fool,” he growled, yet he gave the Malibu a long look over his shoulder.
I tossed him the keys. “My word’s solid. You can ask Nickel.”
“He’s my brother, not my boss.”
“Didn’t he tell you about the shoe box?”
Dime’s brow crinkled warily. “That was yore C-note?”
So now I knew—a hundred bucks was all that Nickel had taken from the buried stash as a fee for ferrying me to the houseboat.
“He earned it,” I said to Dime.
“Yeah, well, he shoulda took more.”
Malley jerked her chin toward the boat. “How much gas is in the tank?”
“Enough. Y’all ain’t goin’ upriver, right?”
She eyed him narrowly. “What’s the difference where we go?”
“’Cause the river’s full a sunk stumps and snags you cain’t see,” Dime said. “Hit one them suckers and I’ll have to sell that car a yours to buy me a new boat.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll stay out in the bay, where it’s safe.”
One more lie from the lips of Richard Sloan, but who was counting?
Twenty-One
Malley didn’t want to wear a life vest. She said it made her look fat.
“And check out the mildew. Gross!”
“It floats, Mal. That’s all that matters.”
But the life jackets on Dime’s boat were so old and rotted that they tore apart when we tried to put them on. This happened about two miles up the river, after we ran into choppy water during a gusty squall.
The Pathfinder had a center console with a low windshield. To keep my head dry, I fitted on the governor’s shower cap, which had stayed crumpled in my back pocket throughout all our escapades.
Malley said, “Okay, now you’re creeping me out.”
“Don’t you believe in mojo?”
“No, but I believe in dweebs, and that’s what you look like. Please take off that nasty thing.”
“Nope.”
On board was the cooler holding our snacks and drinks. I’d also brought the shoe box, to spare Dime from temptation.
Malley pleaded for me to slow down, with good reason. The rain was so heavy that we could barely see ten yards beyond the bow. I eased back on the throttle, scanning the water for obstacles. My cousin unwrapped one of the brick-like subs from the convenience store and gave me half. We each took a bite and made the same sickly face.
“What’s your guess, Richard. Is this stuff ham or turkey?”
“Vinyl,” I said.
But we were hungry, so we forced ourselves to eat. The weather wasn’t fierce like the night before. There was no lightning in the dense veil of clouds that settled over the Choctawhatchee, blocking out the sun. We advanced through a strange murky twilight, the hard rain turning to a soupy mist. Every now and then we’d hear the plop of a turtle tumbling from a log, but to our eyes the banks were a haze. At one point my cousin yipped and pointed to a jagged tree limb floating dead ahead, but I’d already spotted it and steered clear.
Eventually we passed another boat, a flat-bottomed skiff drifting downstream. In it was a young couple bobber-fishing for bream and bass. Even in full rain suits the man and woman looked miserable, liked drenched rats. I’m sure Malley and I looked worse. She asked them if they’d seen a white houseboat with a possible hole in the hull, and they said no. The man was using a bait bucket to bail water, which reminded me to check our bilge pump. The wire connections were rusty, like most everything on Dime’s boat, yet the bilge was humming like a champ.
“Quick question,” said Malley as we motored onward. “Did my parents really put up a ten-thousand-dollar reward, or was that just hype for the billboards?”
“Are you kidding? It was totally legit—ten grand for any tip leading to your safe return. Why does that surprise you?”
“I don’t know. It’s a lot of money,” she said.
“Well, how much do you think you’re worth?”
She rolled her eyes. “To them, or me?”
“To everybody who cares about you,” I said. “Quit being such a pain in the ass.”
She acted startled. “What did you just say?”
“You heard me, Mal.”
I nudged the throttle forward and kept to the middle of the river—or where I guessed the middle to be. As we rounded a sharp bend, Malley pinched my elbow and shouted. I saw it, too, a bulky object bobbing in the
current off the starboard side. The boat was going too fast to stop in time, so I coasted past and circled back.
The thing in the water a gray hard-shell suitcase, just like the one I’d seen in the cabin of the houseboat.
“Definitely T.C.’s,” said my cousin. “See the Mega-Moonwalker sticker?”
The Mega-Moonwalker’s Ball was an electronic music festival in Denmark where Tommy Chalmers claimed to have performed as the star DJ. Malley said anyone could buy the concert decals online for four bucks.
I put the engine in Neutral, reached over the gunwale and hauled the suitcase aboard. “Not very heavy,” I remarked.
“Don’t ask me. He kept it locked.”
Fortunately, Dime had stowed a toolbox on the boat. I took out the screwdriver (rusty, of course) and pried at the latches of the suitcase until they popped open. Inside were the belongings of a professional criminal, not an aspiring musician.
Three license plates from three different counties.
A half-dozen credit cards and debit cards, none belonging to Thomas Chalmers.
Two disposable cell phones.
The blond wig he’d worn when he picked up Malley at the Orlando airport.
A fake mustache that looked like a diseased caterpillar.
A uniform shirt from a pest-control service that had the name “Bradley” stitched on the pocket, a shirt from a cable TV company that had “Chico” on it and a shirt from a septic-tank business that simply said “Supervisor.”
And, tucked inside a blue plastic binder, a manila file titled “Malley Spence.” The ink was smeared because river water had leaked into the suitcase. My cousin grabbed the binder from my hand and practically clawed it open.
The first page of the file was a printout of a photograph that she’d texted to the man she then knew as Talbo Chock. There was nothing bad about the picture—Malley in her emerald-green tracksuit, smiling at the camera. Her bony arms were folded and her cinnamon hair was tied in a ponytail, the way she always wore it when she trained.
Without a word, my cousin ripped up the photo, crumpled the shreds and threw them the water. The rest of the file was notes that Tommy Chalmers had carefully compiled, a profile of his target based on details that she herself had provided.
Skink--No Surrender Page 17