by Carl Hiassen
"How much?" said Kingsbury. He leaned forward and put his hands on his bare knees. "Don't make it, like...a game."
Bud Schwartz detected visceral fear in the man's voice; it gave him an unfamiliar feeling of power. On the other side of the bathroom door, Francis Kingsbury's wife shouted something about wanting to get out. Kingsbury ignored her.
"The banks that made the loans on Falcon Trace, do they know who you are?" Bud Schwartz affected a curious tone. "Do they know you're a government witness? A mob guy?"
Kingsbury didn't bother to reply.
"I imagine they gave you shitloads a money, Bud Schwartz went on, "and I imagine they could call it back."
Francis Kingsbury went to the bathroom door and told Penny to shut up and sit her sweet ass on the can. He turned back to the burglars and said: "So what's the number, the grand total? For Gotti, I mean."
Danny Pogue resisted the urge to enter the negotiation; expectantly he looked at his partner. Bud Schwartz smoothed his hair, pursed his mouth. He wanted to hear what kind of bullshit offer Kingsbury would make on his own.
"I'm trying to think what's fair."
"Give me a fucking number," said Kingsbury, "and I'll goddamn tell you if it's fair."
What the hell, thought Bud Schwartz. "Fifty grand," he said calmly. "And we toss in Ramex and the rest for free."
Excitedly Danny Pogue began excavating a new pimple.
Kingsbury eyed the men suspiciously. "Fifty, you said? As in five-oh?"
"Right." Bud Schwartz gave half a grin. "That's fifty to give back the Gotti file..."
"And?"
"Two hundred more to forget what was in it."
Kingsbury chuckled bitterly. "So I was wrong," he said. "You're not such a putz."
Danny Pogue was so overjoyed that he could barely control himself on the ride back to Molly's condominium. "We're gonna be rich," he said, pounding both hands on the upholstery. "You're a genius, man, that's what you are."
"It went good," Bud Schwartz agreed. Better than he had ever imagined. As he drove, he did the arithmetic in his head. Five thousand for the American Express file, fifty for the Gotti stuff, another two hundred in hush money...rich was the word for it. "Early retirement," he said to Danny Pogue. "No more damn b-and-e's."
"You don't think he'll call the cops?"
"That's the last place he'd call. Guy's a scammer, Danny."
They stopped at a U-Tote-Em and bought two six-packs of Coors and a box of jelly doughnuts. In the parking lot they rolled down the windows and turned up the radio and stuffed themselves in jubilation. It was an hour until curfew; if they weren't back by midnight, Molly had said, she would call the FBI and say her memory had returned.
"I bet she'll cut us some slack," said Danny Pogue, "if we're a little late."
"Maybe." Bud Schwartz opened the door and rolled an empty beer can under the car. He said, "I'm sure getting' tired of being her pet burglar."
"Well, then, let's go to a tittie bar and celebrate." Danny Pogue said he knew of a place where the girls danced naked on the tables, and let you grab their ankles for five bucks.
Bud Schwartz said not tonight. There would be no celebration until they broke free from the old lady. Tonight he would make a pitch for the rest of the ten grand that she'd promised. Surely they were square by now; Molly had been so thrilled by the contents of the Ramex file that she'd given him a hug. Then she'd gone out and had eight copies made. What more could she want of them?
Back on the road, Bud Schwartz said: "Remember, don't say a damn thing about what we done tonight."
"You told me a hundred times."
"Well, it'll screw up everything. I mean it, don't tell her where we been."
"No reason," said Danny Pogue. "It's got nothin' to do with the butterflies, right?"
"No, it sure does not."
Danny Pogue said he was hungry again, so they stopped to pick up some chicken nuggets. Again they ate in the parking lot, listening to a country station. Bud Schwartz had never before driven an automobile with a working clock, so he was surprised to glance at the dashboard of the Cutlass and find that it was half past twelve, and counting.
"Better roll," Danny Pogue said, "just in case."
"I got a better idea – gimme a quarter." Bud Schwartz got out and walked to a pay telephone under a streetlight. He dialed the number of Molly McNamara's condominium and let it ring five minutes. He hung up, retrieved the quarter and dialed again. This time he let it ring twice as long.
In the car, speeding down U.S. 1, Danny Pogue said, "I can't believe she'd do it – maybe she went someplace else. Maybe she left us a note."
Bud Schwartz gripped the wheel with both hands; the bullet wound was numb because he had forgotten about it. Escape was on his mind – what if the old bitch had run to the feds? Worse, what if she'd found the Gotti file? What if she'd gone snooping through the bedroom and found it hidden between the mattress and the box spring, which in retrospect was probably not the cleverest place of concealment.
"Shit," he said, thinking of the bleak possibilities.
"Don't jump the gun," said Danny Pogue, for once the optimist.
They made it back to the condo in twenty-two minutes, parked the rental car and went upstairs. The door to Molly's apartment was unlocked. Bud Schwartz knocked twice anyway. "It's just us," he announced lightly, "Butch and Sundance."
When he went in, he saw that the place had been torn apart. "Oh Jesus," he said.
Danny Pogue pushed him with the crutch. "I can't fucking believe it," he said. "Somebody hit the place."
"No," said Bud Schwartz, "it's more than that."
The sofas had been slit, chairs broken, mirrors shattered. A ceramic Siamese cat had been smashed face-first through the big-screen television. While Danny Pogue hopscotched through the rubble, Bud Schwartz went directly to the bedroom, which also had been ransacked and vandalized. He reached under the mattress and found the Kingsbury files exactly where he had left them. Whoever did the place hadn't been looking very hard, if it all.
A hoarse shout came from the kitchen.
Bud Schwartz found Danny Pogue on his knees next to Molly McNamara. She lay on her back, with one leg folded crookedly under the other. Her housecoat, torn and stained with something dark, was bunched around her hips. Her face had been beaten to pulp; beads of blood glistened like holly berries in her snowy hair. Her eyes were closed and her lips were gray, but she was breathing – raspy, irregular gulps.
Danny Pogue took Molly's wrist. "God Almighty," he said, voice quavering. "What – who do we call?"
"Nobody." Bud Schwartz shook his head ruefully. "Don't you understand, we can't call nobody." He bent down and put his bandaged hand on Molly's forehead. "Who the hell would do this to an old lady?"
"I hope she don't die."
"Me, too," said Bud Schwartz. "Honest to God, this ain't right."
SEVENTEEN
Joe Winder's trousers were soaked from the thighs down. Nina took a long look and said: "You've been fishing."
"Yes."
"In the middle of the day."
"The fish are all gone," Winder said dismally. "Ever since they bulldozed the place."
Nina sat cross-legged on the floor. She wore blue-jean shorts and a pink cotton halter; the same outfit she'd been wearing the day he'd met her, calling out numbers at the Seminole bingo hall. Joe Winder had gone there to meet an Indian named Sammy Deer, who purportedly was selling an airboat, but Sammy Deer had hopped over to Freeport for the weekend, leaving Joe Winder stuck with three hundred chain-smoking white women in the bingo hall. Halfway out the door, he'd heard Nina's voice ("Q 34; Q, as in "quicksilver," 34!"), spun around and went back to see if she looked as lovely as she sounded, and she had. Nina informed him that she was part-timing as a bingo caller until the telephone gig came through, and he confided to her that he was buying an airboat so he could disappear into the Everglades at will. He changed his plans after their first date.
Now, analyzing
her body language, Joe Winder knew that he was in danger of losing Nina's affections. A yellow legal pad was propped on her lap. She tapped on a bare knee with her felt-tipped pen, which she held as a drummer would.
"What happened to your big meeting?" she said. "Why aren't you at the Kingdom?"
He pretended not to hear. He said, "They dumped a ton of fill in the cove. The bottom's mucky and full of cut trees." He removed his trousers and arranged them crookedly on a wire hanger. "All against the law, of course. Dumping in a marine sanctuary."
Nina said, "You got canned, is that it?"
"A mutual parting of the ways, and not a particularly amicable one." Joe Winder sat down beside her. He sensed a lecture coming on.
"Put on some pants," she said.
"What's the point?"
Nina asked why his tongue was blue, and he told her the story of the bogus mango voles. She said she didn't believe a word.
"Charlie practically admitted everything."
"I don't really care," Nina said. She stopped drumming on her kneecap and turned away.
"What is it?"
"Look, I can't afford to support you." When she looked back at him, her eyes were moist and angry. "Things were going so well," she said.
Winder was stunned. Was she seriously worried about the money? "Nina, there's a man dead. Don't you understand? I can't work for a murderer."
"Stop it!" She shook the legal pad in front of his nose. "You know what I've been working on? Extra scripts. The other girls like my stuff so much they offered to buy, like, two or three a week. Twenty-five bucks each, it could really add up."
"That's great." He was proud of her, that was the hell of it. She'd never believe that he could be proud of her.
Pen in mouth, Nina said: "I wrote about an out-of-body experience. Like when you're about to die and you can actually see yourself lying there – but then you get saved at the very last minute. Only my script was about making love, about floating out of yourself just as you're about to come. Suspended in air, I looked down at the bed and saw myself shudder violently, my fingernails raking across your broad tan shoulders. I gave it to the new girl, Addie, and she tried it Friday night. One guy, she said, he called back eleven times."
"Is that a new record?"
"It just so happens, yes. But the point is, I'm looking at a major opportunity. If I start selling enough scripts, maybe I can get off the phones. Just stay home and write – wouldn't that be better?"
"Sure would." Winder put his arm around her. "You can still do that, honey. It would be great."
"Not with you sitting here every day. Playing your damn Warren Zevon."
"I'll get another job."
"No, Joe, it'll be the same old shit." She pulled away and got up from the floor. "I can't write when my life is in turmoil. I need a stabilizer. Peacefulness. Quiet."
Winder felt wounded. "For God's sake, Nina, I know a little something about writing. This place is plenty quiet."
"There is tension," she said grimly, "and don't deny it."
"Writers thrive on domestic tension. Look at Poe, Hemingway – and Mailer in his younger days, you talk about tense." He hoped Nina would appreciate being included on such an eminent roster, but she didn't. Impatiently he said, "It isn't exactly epic literature, anyway. It's phone porn."
Her expression clouded. "Phone porn? Thanks, Joe."
"Well, Christ, that's what it is."
Coldly she folded her arms and leaned against one of the tall speakers. "It's still writing, and writing is hard work. If I'm going to make a go of it, I need some space. And some security."
"If you're talking about groceries, don't worry. I intend to pull my own weight."
Nina raised her hands in exasperation. "Where can you find another job that pays so much?"
Joe Winder couldn't believe what he was hearing. Why the sudden anxiety? The laying on of guilt? If he'd known he was in for a full-blown argument, he indeed would have put on some pants.
Nina said, "It's not just the money. I need someone reliable, someone who will be here for me."
"Have I ever let you down?"
"No, but you will."
Winder didn't say anything because she was absolutely correct; nothing in his immediate plans would please her.
"I know you," Nina added, in a sad voice. "You aren't going to let go of this thing."
"Probably not."
"Then I think we're definitely heading in different directions. I think you're going to end up in jail, or maybe dead."
"Have some faith," Joe Winder said.
"It's not that easy." Nina stalked to the closet, flung open the door and stared at the clutter. "Where"d you put my suitcase?"
In the mid-1970s, Florida elected a crusading young governor named Clinton Tyree, an ex-football star and Vietnam War veteran. At six feet six, he was the tallest chief executive in the history of the state. In all likelihood he was also the most honest. When a ravenous and politically connected land-development company attempted to bribe Clinton Tyree, he tape-recorded their offers, turned the evidence over to the FBI and volunteered to testify at the trial. By taking a public stand against such omnipotent forces, Clinton Tyree became something of a folk hero in the Sunshine State and beyond. The faint scent of integrity attracted the national media, which roared into Florida and anointed the young governor a star of the new political vanguard.
It was, unfortunately, a vanguard of one. Clinton Tyree spoke with a blistering candor that terrified his fellow politicians. While others reveled in Florida's boom times, Clinton Tyree warned that the state was on the brink of an environmental cataclysm. The Everglades were drying up, the coral reefs were dying, Lake Okeechobee was choking on man-made poisons and the bluegills were loaded with mercury. While other officeholders touted Florida as a tropical dreamland, the governor called it a toxic dump with palm trees. On a popular call-in radio show, he asked visitors to stay away for a couple of years. He spoke not of managing the state's breakneck growth, but of halting it altogether. This, he declared, was the only way to save the place.
The day Clinton Tyree got his picture on the cover of a national newsmagazine, some of the most powerful special interests in Florida – bankers, builders, highway contractors, sugar barons, phosphate-mining executives – congealed in an informal conspiracy to thwart the new governor's reforms by stepping around him, as if he were a small lump of dogshit on an otherwise luxuriant carpet.
Bypassing Clinton Tyree was relatively easy to do; all it took was money. In a matter of months, everyone who could be compromised, intimidated or bought off was. The governor found himself isolated from even his own political party, which had no stake in his radical bluster because it was alienating all the big campaign contributors. Save Florida? Why? And from what? The support that Clinton Tyree enjoyed among voters didn't help him one bit in the back rooms of Tallahassee; every bill he wanted passed got gutted, buried or rebuffed. The fact that he was popular with the media didn't deter his enemies; it merely softened their strategy. Rather than attack the governor's agenda, they did something worse – they ignored it. Only the most gentlemanly words were publicly spoken about young Clint, the handsome war hero, and about his idealism and courage to speak out. Any reporter who came to town could fill two or three notebooks with admiring quotes – so many (and so effusive) that someone new to the state might have assumed that Clinton Tyree had already died, which he had, in a way.
On the morning the Florida Cabinet decided to shut down a coastal wildlife preserve and sell it dirt cheap to a powerful land-sales firm, the lone dissenting vote trudged from the Capitol Building in disgust and vanished from the political landscape in the back of a limousine.
At first authorities presumed that the governor was the victim of a kidnapping or other foul play. A nationwide manhunt was suspended only after a notarized resignation letter was analyzed by the FBI and found to be authentic. It was true; the crazy bastard had up and quit.
Journalists, authors a
nd screenwriters flocked to Florida with hopes of securing exclusive rights to the renegade governor's story, but none could find him. Consequently, nothing was written that even bordered on the truth.
Which was this: Clinton Tyree now went by the name of Skink, and lived in those steamy clawing places where he was least likely to be bothered by human life-forms. For fifteen years the governor had been submerged in an expatriation that was deliberately remote and anonymous, if not entirely tranquil.
Joe Winder wanted to talk about what happened in Tallahassee. "I read all the stories," he said. "I went back and looked up the microfiche."
"Then you know all there is to know." Skink was on his haunches, poking the embers with a stick. Winder refused to look at what was frying in the pan.
He said, "All this time and they never found you."
"They quit searching," Skink said. A hot ash caught in a wisp of his beard. He snuffed it with two fingers. "I don't normally eat soft-shell turtle," he allowed.
"Me neither," said Joe Winder.
"The flavor makes up for the texture."
"I bet." Winder knelt on the other side of the fire.
Out of the blue Skink said, "Your old man wasn't a bad guy, but he was in a bad business."
Winder heard himself agree. "He never understood what was so wrong about it. Or why I was so goddamn mad. He died not having a clue."
Skink lifted the turtle by the tail and stuck a fork in it. "Ten more minutes," he said, "at least."
It wasn't easy trying to talk with him this way, but Winder wouldn't give up: "It's been an interesting day. In the space of two hours I lost my job and my girlfriend."
"Christ, you sound like Dobie Gillis."
"The job was shit, I admit. But I was hoping Nina would stay strong. She's one in a million."
"Love," said Skink, "it's just a kiss away."
Dejectedly, Winder thought: I'm wasting my time. The man couldn't care less. "I came to ask about a plan," Winder said. "I've been racking my brain."
"Come on, I want to show you something." Skink rose slowly and stretched, and the blaze-orange rainsuit made a crackling noise. He pulled the shower cap tight on his skull and, in high steps, marched off through the trees. To the west, the sky boiled with fierce purple thunderheads.