Stormy Weather

by Carl Hiassen

  "Not till you promise me and Bridget won't get in trouble."

  "Jesus, I already told you."

  She said, "Here's the deal, so listen. You gotta wait till we get our money from your friend Snapper. Then you gotta promise not to shoot anybody in front of us, OK?"

  Avila said, "On my wife's future grave."

  "Also, you gotta promise to pay us what you said– five hundred each."

  "Yep."

  "Plus two stone crab dinners. That's Bridget's idea."

  "No problem," Avila said. Informing the prostitutes that stone crabs were out of season would only have muddled the negotiation.

  "The name," Avila pressed.

  "Paradise Palms. I've never been there before. Bridget, neither, but Snapper promised it's really nice."

  "Compared to prison, I'm sure it's the fucking Ritz. What's the room number?"

  Jasmine asked Bridget. Bridget didn't know.

  "Doesn't matter," Avila said. "I'll track you down."

  "Remember what you promised!"

  "Yeah, I'll try. It's already been at least seven seconds."

  "Well, sweetheart, we better cruise."

  Avila was about to set the receiver on the cradle when he remembered something. "Hey! Jasmine, wait!"

  "Yeah, what."

  "Did you tell her about me?"

  "Bridget? I didn't tell her nuthin'." Jasmine sounded puzzled. "What's to tell?"

  "Nuthin'."

  "Oh ... you mean about—"

  "Don't say it!"

  Jasmine said, "Honey, I would never. That was between you and me. Honest to God."

  "'Cause the other night you said I was better." How valiantly Avila had labored to stifle his vocalizing during the lovemaking! What few sounds he'd made were not, by any stretch of the imagination, squeaks.

  "The other night you were just great," said Jasmine. "Fantastic, even. Better than I remembered." Avila said, "Same goes for you, too." Later, driving to Sweetwater for the chickens, he couldn't stop thinking about the call girl's sultry compliment. Whether she meant a word of it or not wasn't worth speculating on; the concept of sincerity was so foreign to Avila's own life that he felt unqualified to pass judgment on Jasmine. He was just glad she'd quit calling herself Morganna-what a clunker of a name to remember in the heat of passion!

  The combined effect of marijuana and methaqualone on Dr Charles Gabler's judgment was not salutary. Never was it more evident than late on the night of September 1, at a roadside motel off Interstate 10 near Bonifay, Florida. Overtaken with desire, the professor slipped out of the twin bed he shared with the sleeping Neria Torres, and slipped into the twin bed occupied by the wakeful young graduate student, Celeste. As he ardently attached himself to one of Celeste's creamy breasts, Dr Gabler was becalmed by a warm, harmonious confluence of physical and metaphysical currents. His timing couldn't have been worse.

  Neria Torres had been reevaluating the parameters of her relationship with the professor ever since they'd pulled off a highway outside Jackson, Mississippi, so he could take a leak. Sitting in the driver's seat, watching Dr Gabler try to tinkle in some azaleas, Neria had thought: I don't find this cute anymore.

  As the professor had tottered back toward the van, the beams of the headlights dramatically illuminated the ruby-colored crystals dangling from the lanyard around his neck.

  "Oh wow," young Celeste had exclaimed, suffused with mystic awe and Humboldt County's finest.

  That was the moment when Neria Torres had looked into her future and decided that the professor should share no large part of it; specifically, the insurance settlement from the hurricane. Neria envisioned a scenario in which Dr Gabler might endeavor to sweet-talk her out of a portion of the money-he would probably call it a friendly loan-and then flee in the dead of night with his nubile protegee. After all, that's pretty much what he'd done to his previous lover, a vendor of fine macrames, when Neria Torres entered his life.

  Even if the professor harbored no selfish designs on the hurricane booty, Neria had a pragmatic reason to dump him: His appearance in Miami would complicate the duel with her estranged husband over the insurance settlement. Considering the tainted circumstance of her departure from the household, Neria doubted that Tony would be in a mood to forgive and forget. Her inability to make contact in the days following the storm was foreboding-the vindictive bastard obviously intended to pocket her half of the windfall. If the battle went to court, Dr Gabler's bleary presence during the proceedings would not, Neria Torres knew, work in her favor.

  These were the thoughts she carried into sleep at the motel in Bonifay. Had it been a deeper sleep, or had the room's Eisenhower-vintage cooling unit been a few decibels louder, Neria Torres might not have been awakened by the muffled suckling and amorous hmmm-hmmms from the nearby bed. But awakened she was.

  Except for cracking her eyelids, Neria didn't move a muscle at first. Instead she lay listening in disgusted fascination, struggling to arrange her emotions. On the one hand, she was vastly relieved to have found a solid excuse for jettisoning the professor. On the other hand, she was furious that the sneaky little shit would be so crude and thoughtless. Over the years, Tony Torres undoubtedly had cheated on her now and again-but never while she was sleeping in the same room!

  Eventually, it was the immodest giggling of young Celeste that galvanized Neria Torres. She sprang from the bed, turned on all the lights, snatched up the velvet satchel containing Dr Gabler's special healing crystals and began whaling deliriously on the writhing mound of bedsheets. The satchel was heavy and the stones were sharp, taking a toll on the professor's unfirm flesh. With an effeminate cry, he scuttled to the bathroom and chained the door. Meanwhile the graduate student cowered nude and tearful on the mattress. The stubble on Dr Gabler's chin had left a telltale path of abraded, roseate blotches from her neck to her quivering belly. Neria Torres noticed, with fierce satisfaction, a faint comma of a scar beneath each of young Celeste's perfect breasts; an Earth Mother with implants!

  Repeatedly she gasped, "I'm sorry, Neria, please don't kill me! Please don't..."

  Neria threw the satchel of crystals to the floor. "Celeste, you know what I hope for you? I hope that asshole hiding in the John is the highlight of your entire goddamn life. Now where's the keys to the van?"

  Hours later, at a busy truck stop in Gainesville, Neria tried another call to Mr. Varga, her former neighbor in Miami. This time his phone was working; Varga answered on the third ring. He insisted he knew nothing about Neria's husband and a young blond hussy loading up a rental truck.

  "Fact, I haven't seen Tony since maybe two days after the hurricane."

  "Are there still strangers at the house?" Neria asked.

  "All the time, people come and go. But no blondes."

  "Who are they, Leon?"

  "I don't know. Friends and cousins of Tony, I heard. They got two dogs bark half the night. I figured Tony's letting 'em watch the place."

  Varga shared his theory: Neria's husband was lying low, due to adverse publicity about the mobile-home industry. "Every damn one blew to smithereens in the storm," Varga related. "The papers and TV are making a big stink. Supposedly there's going to be an investigation. The FBI is what they say."

  "Oh, come off it."

  "That's the rumor," Varga said. "Your Tony, he's no fool. I think he's making himself invisible till all this cools down, these people come to their senses. I mean, it's not his fault those trailers fell apart. God's will is what it was. He's testing us, same as He did with Noah."

  "Except Noah wasn't insured," said Neria Torres.

  Mr. Varga was right about one thing: Tony wouldn't stick around if there was heat. His style was to take a nice hotel room and ride things out. In the meantime, he'd have some of his deadbeat relatives or white-trash salesmen pals stay with their bimbos in the house on Calusa. Tony wouldn't be far away; never would he skip town without getting his paws on the Midwest Casualty money.

  Neria was buoyed. The story about
the young blonde and Brooklyn obviously was bullshit, a ruse cooked up by her husband. Wishful thinking, too, Neria mused. Talking to Mr. Varga validated her decision to return to Miami.

  "Are you really heading home?" he asked. "You and the mister give it one more try?"

  "Stranger things have happened," said Neria Torres. She made Mr. Varga swear on a stack of Holy Bibles not to breathe a word. She said it would ruin everything if Tony found out she was coming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Snapper instructed Edie Marsh to take the Turnpike, and watch the damn speedometer. He was pressed against the passenger-side door, keeping the stolen .357 pointed at the freak in the army greens. The young woman was no immediate threat.

  The stranger blinked like a craggy tortoise. He said: "How much you get for her ring?"

  Snapper frowned. The fucker knew-but how? Edie Marsh didn't take her eyes off the road. "What's he talking about? Whose ring?"

  Snapper spied, in the lower margin of his vision, the wandering prow of his jawbone. He said, "Everybody shut the fuck up!"

  Leaning forward, the longhair said to Edie: "Your rough-tough boyfriend beat up a policewoman. Ripped off her gun and her mother's wedding band-he didn't tell you?"

  Edie shivered. Maybe it was his breath on the nape of her neck, or the slow rumble of his voice, or what he was saying. Meanwhile Snapper waved the police pistol and hollered for the whole world to shut up or fucking die!

  He jammed a CD into the dashboard stereo: ninety-five decibels of country heartache. Within minutes his fury passed, soothed by Reba's crooning or possibly the five white pills Edie had given him back at the house. OK, boy, now think.

  The original plan was to waylay the nutty old man with the hookers. No problem there. A guy Snapper knew from his Lauderdale days, Johnny Horn, had a small motel down in the Keys. Ideal spot for Levon Stichler to take a short vacation. Snapper's idea was to get one a them cheap disposable cameras, so the hookers could take some pictures, the kind a respectable man wouldn't want his grandkiddies to see. Two or three days tied naked to a motel bed, the old fart wouldn't care to recall he'd ever set foot at 15600 Calusa Drive. If he promised to behave, then possibly the disposable camera would get disposed of. The old man could make his way back to Miami with nothing but a bed rash and a sore cock to show for the experience.

  Best of all, Snapper wouldn't have to pay for the motel room in the Keys, because Johnny Horn owed him a favor. Two years back, Snapper had more or less repossessed a Corvette convertible from the freeloading boyfriend of one of Johnny Horn's ex-wives. Snapper had driven the Corvette straight to the Port of Miami and, in broad daylight, parked it on a container ship bound for Cartagena. It was a high-risk deal, and Johnny said for Snapper to call the Paradise Palms anytime he needed a place to crash or hide out or take some girl.

  Snapper had dreamed up the plan for old man Stichler all by himself, without Edie's input. He surely didn't want to throw all that cleverness out the window, but he couldn't conceive of how to fit the new intruders into his scheme, and he was too fogged from the pills to improvise. It seemed easier to kill the one-eyed freak and his woman companion-and as long as Snapper was being so bold, why not do loony old Levon as well? That way, Snapper reasoned, he wouldn't have to pay the two whores anything, except for gas money and possibly a seafood dinner.

  On the downside: How to get rid of three dead bodies? The logistics were daunting. Snapper suspected that his droopy brain wasn't up to the challenge. Killing took energy, and Snapper all of a sudden felt like sleeping for three weeks solid.

  He worked up a pep talk for himself, recalling what a wise guy once told him in prison: Dumping bodies is like buying real estate-location, location, location. Snapper thought: Look around, boy. You got your mangrove islands, your Everglades, your Atlantic-mother-fucking-Ocean. What more you want? A fast shot to the head, then let the sharks or the gators or the crabs finish the job. What's so damn difficult about that?

  But Jesus, the stakes were high; one measly fuckup and it's back to Raiford for the rest of my life. Probably locked in a ten-by-ten with some humongous horny black faggot weight lifter. Clean and jerk my skinny ass till I walk like Julia Roberts.

  And shooting people is awful noisy. Edie Marsh wouldn't go for it, Snapper knew for a fact. She'd make quite a stink. And killing Edie with the others was impractical because (a) he didn't have enough bullets and (b) he couldn't cash the insurance checks without her. Damn.

  "What is it?" Edie shouted over Reba.

  Snapper made a sarcastic zipper motion across his lips. He thought: I'm so goddamn tired. If only I could have a nap, it would come to me. A new plan.

  The one-eyed stranger began to sing along with the stereo. Snapper scrutinized him coldly. How'd he know about the lady trooper? Snapper's hands had a slight tremor. His lips were as dry as ash. What if the bitch had gone and died? What if first she'd gotten a good look at him, or maybe the Jeep? What if it was already on TV, and every cop in Florida was in the hunt?

  Snapper told himself to knock it off, think positive. For the first time in days, his busted-up knee didn't hurt so much. That was something to be glad about.

  The young woman in the back seat joined her flaky companion in song. She was winging it with the lyrics, but that was all right with Snapper; her voice was pretty.

  Edie Marsh tapped the rim of the steering wheel and acted peeved at the amateur chorus. After about three minutes she reached out and poked the Off button on the CD player. Reba fell silent, and so did the chorus.

  Snapper announced that the next selection was Travis Tritt.

  "Spare us," Edie said. "Hell's your problem?"

  The woman in the back seat spoke up: "My name's Bonnie. This is the governor. He prefers to be called 'captain.' "

  "Skink will be fine," said the one-eyed man. "And I would kill for some Allman Brothers."

  Snapper demanded to know what they wanted, why they'd been snooping at the Torres house. The man who called himself Skink said: "We were looking for you."

  "How come?"

  "As a favor to a friend. You wouldn't know him."

  Edie Marsh said, "You're not making a damn bit of sense."

  Something shifted in the bed of the Jeep. The sound was followed by a faint quavering moan.

  From the woman, Bonnie: "What are your names?"

  Edie Marsh rolled her eyes. Bonnie caught it in the rearview.

  Snapper said, "Fuckin' idiots, the both of 'em."

  "All I meant," said Bonnie Lamb, "is what should we call you?"

  "I'm Farrah Fawcett," Edie said. Nodding at Snapper: "He's Ryan O'Neal."

  In discouragement, Bonnie turned toward the window. "Just forget it."

  A warm hand settled on Edie's shoulder. "Whoever you are," Skink said intimately, "you make a truly lovely couple."

  "Fuck you."

  Snapper lunged across the seat and stuck the barrel of the .357 in a crease of the stranger's cheek. "You think I don't got the balls to shoot?"

  Skink nonchalantly pushed the gun away. He eased back in the seat and folded his arms. His fearless attitude distracted Edie Marsh. Snapper commanded her to pull off at the next exit. He needed to find a bathroom.

  Having never been abducted at gunpoint, Bonnie Lamb wasn't as scared as she thought she ought to be. She attributed the unexpected composure to her resolve for adventure and to the governor's implausibly confident air. Based on nothing but blind faith, Bonnie was sure that Skink wouldn't allow them to be harmed by a deformed auto thief. The guy's erratic gun handling was nerve-racking, but somehow not so menacing with another woman in the Jeep. Bonnie Lamb could tell that she wasn't some dull-eyed trailer-park tramp; she was a sharp cookie, and not especially afraid of the dolt with the pistol. Bonnie had a feeling there wouldn't be any killing inside the truck.

  She wondered what Max Lamb would think if he could see her now. Probably best that he couldn't. She felt terrible about hurting her husband, but did she miss him? It didn'
t feel like it. Perhaps she was doing Max the biggest favor of his life. Having waited all of one week to commit adultery with a near-total stranger, Bonnie surmised that she had, in the parlance of pop psychotherapy, "unresolved issues" to confront. Poor eager Max was a victim of misleading packaging. He thought he was getting one sort of woman when he was getting another. For that Bonnie felt guilty.

  She vowed not to depress herself by overanalyzing her instant attraction to Augustine. She wished he were there, and wondered how he would ever find them on the road. Bonnie herself had no clue which way they were headed.

  "South," the governor reported. "And south is good."

  The man with the pistol snarled: "Quiet, asshole."