Carl Hiaasen (15 page)

JoLayne Lucks demanded that Tom Krome teach her the thumb-popping trick. “That thing you did with the he-she back at Shiloh’s.”

When they got to a stoplight, Krome took her left hand to demonstrate.

“Not too hard!” she piped.

Gently he showed her how to disable a person by bending and twisting his thumb in a single motion. JoLayne asked where he’d learned about it.

“One time the newspaper sent me to take a class on self-defense,” Krome said, “for a feature story. The instructor was a ninja guy, weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds. But he knew all sorts of naughty little numbers.”

“Yeah?”

“Fingers in the eye sockets is another good one,” said Krome. “The scrotal squeeze is a crowd pleaser, too.”

“These come in handy in the newspaper biz?”

“Today was the first time.”

JoLayne was pleased he didn’t let go of her hand until the light turned green and it was time to steer the car. They stopped at a Burger King on Northwest Seventh Avenue and ate in the parking lot with the windows down. The breeze was cool and pleasant, even with the din from the interstate. After lunch they went on a tour of JoLayne’s childhood: kindergarten, elementary school, high school. The pet shop where she’d worked in the summers. The appliance store her father once owned. The auto garage where she’d met her first boyfriend.

“He took care of Daddy’s Grand Prix,” she said. “Good at lube jobs, bad at relationships. Rick was his name.”

“Where is he now?”

“Lord, I can’t imagine.”

While Krome drove, JoLayne found herself spinning through
the stories of the significant men in her life. “Aren’t you sorry,” she said, “you left your notebook at the motel?”

He smiled but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I got a helluva memory.” Then, swerving around a county bus: “What about Moffitt—he’s not on the List of Six?”

“Friends only.” JoLayne wondered if Krome’s interest was strictly professional, caught herself hoping it wasn’t. “He dated both my sisters, my best friend, a cousin and also my nursing supervisor at Jackson. But not me.”

“How come?”

“Mutual agreement.”

“Ah,” Krome said. He didn’t believe it was mutual. He believed Moffitt would go to his grave asking himself why JoLayne Lucks hadn’t wanted him.

“We’d been buddies so long,” she was saying, “we knew too much about each other. One of those deals.”

“Right,” Krome said. He pulled to the curb while two police cars and an ambulance sped past. When the wail of sirens faded, JoLayne said, “Plus Moffitt’s too serious for me. You saw for yourself. Why I’m telling you this stuff, Lord, I don’t know.”

“I’m interested.”

“But it’s not part of the story.”

“How do you know?” Krome said.

“Because I’m telling you so. It’s
not
part of the story.”

He shrugged.

“What in the world was I thinking,” JoLayne said, “bringing you in on this. First off, you’re a man, and I’ve got rotten instincts when it comes to men. Second, you’re a
reporter
, for heaven’s sake. Only a crazy fool would believe a reporter, am I right? And last but not least—”

“I’m awfully white,” Krome said.

“Bingo.”

“But you trust me anyway.”

“Truly it’s a mystery.” JoLayne removed her floppy hat and flipped it in the back seat. “Can we stop at a pay phone? I need to call Clara before it gets too late.”

Clara Markham was the real estate broker who had the listing for Simmons Wood. Clara knew JoLayne wanted to buy the property, because JoLayne had phoned the night she’d won the lottery. But then, two days later, JoLayne had called back to say something had happened and it might be awhile before she could make a down payment. Clara had promised not to accept any other offers until she spoke to JoLayne again. She was a friend, after all.

Krome spotted a pay phone outside a sub shop on 125th Street. JoLayne got Clara Markham at the realty office.

JoLayne said, “Whatcha up to, working so late.”

“Busy, girl.”

“How’s my pal Kenny?”

Kenny was Clara’s obese Persian. Because of its impeccably lush whiskers, Clara had named it after Kenny Rogers, the country singer.

“Much improved,” Clara reported. “The hair ball crisis is over, you can tell Dr. Crawford. But I’m afraid I’ve got some other news.”

JoLayne sucked in a deep breath. “Damn. Who is it?”

“A union pension fund out of Chicago.”

“And they build malls?”

“Girl, they build everything.”

“What’s the offer?” JoLayne asked gloomily.

“Three even. Twenty percent down.”

“Damn.
Goddamn.”

Clara said, “They want an answer in a week.”

“I can do better than three million. You wait.”

“Jo, I’ll stall as long as I can.”

“I’d sure appreciate it.”

“And be sure and tell Doc Crawford thanks for the ointment. Tell him Kenny says thanks, too.”

JoLayne Lucks hung up and sat on the curb. A group of teenagers spilled from the sub shop, nearly tripping over her.

Tom Krome got out of the car. “I take it there’s another buyer.”

JoLayne nodded disconsolately. “I’ve got a week, Tom. Seven lousy days to get my Lotto ticket back.”

“Then let’s go to it.” He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

The place known as Simmons Wood had been owned since 1959 by Lighthorse Simmons, whose father had been an early settler of Grange. Lighthorse maintained the rolling green tract as a private hunting reserve and visited regularly until he’d personally shot nearly every living creature on the property. Then he took up fishing. And although a fly rod could never provide the same hot blood rush as a rifle, Lighthorse Simmons grew to enjoy yanking feisty little bluegills and largemouth bass from the creek. Eventually, as he got older, he even stopped killing them.

Ironically, it was a hunter’s bullet that led to the end of Lighthorse’s long custodianship of Simmons Wood. The mishap occurred at dusk one evening—Lighthorse was on the creek bank, bending over to cough up a wad of Red Man he’d accidentally swallowed. In the twilight, the old fellow’s broad straw hat, tawny suede jacket and downward pose apparently called to mind—at least for one myopic trespasser—the image of a six-point buck, drinking.

The bullet clipped Lighthorse’s right kneecap, and after three surgeries he remained unable to hike through Simmons
Wood without constant, grating pain. An electric cart was given to him as part of the insurance settlement, but it proved unsuitable for the bumpy terrain. One rainy morning Lighthorse hit a pine stump and the cart overturned. He was pinned for nearly four hours, during which time he was prodigiously befouled by an excitable feral boar—a breed of pig originally introduced to Grange, for sporting purposes, by Lighthorse’s own father.

After that incident, Lighthorse never again set foot in Simmons Wood. He went through the legal technicalities of rezoning it from agricultural to commercial, but ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to sell. The land remained untrammeled (and the dawn unbroken by gunfire) for such a long time that wild animals finally began to reappear. But when Lighthorse passed away, at age seventy-five, the administrators of his estate put Simmons Wood on the market. The place held no sentimental attachment for the old man’s son and daughter, who viewed the potentially immense proceeds from the land sale as several new oil derricks in Venezuela and a winter ski cottage in New Hampshire, respectively.

On the other end of the deal was Bernard Squires, investment manager for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. To Bernard Squires fell the sensitive task of dispensing the union’s pension fund in such a way as to conceal the millions of dollars being skimmed annually by organized crime: specifically, the Richard Tarbone family of Chicago.

Bernard Squires’ livelihood, and in all probability his very life, depended on his talent for assembling investment portfolios in which vast sums could plausibly disappear. Naturally he had a fondness for real estate developments. Not for a moment did Bernard envision for Simmons Wood a thriving, profitable retail shopping center. Grange was a perfectly ridiculous location
for a major mall—one of the only municipalities in Florida to have shrunk (according to incredulous census takers) during the boom years of the eighties and nineties. And while its puny population was augmented by a modest flow of highway tourists, the demographics of the average Grange visitor could most diplomatically be typed, from a retailer’s perspective, as
“low
low end.” No major anchor stores or national chains would dream of locating there, as Bernard Squires well knew.

His plan, from the beginning, was to create a very expensive failure. Acting as a bank, the pension fund would finance the purchase of Simmons Wood and enter into a series of contracts with construction companies secretly controlled by Richard Tarbone and his associates. Simmons Wood would be bulldozed and cleared, a foundation would be poured, and perhaps even a wall or two would go up.

Then: a run of bad luck. Shortages of labor and materials. Weather delays. Missed payments on construction loans. Contractors unexpectedly filing for bankruptcy. And as if that weren’t enough, the leasing agent would dejectedly report that hardly anyone wanted space in the soon-to-be-completed Simmons Wood Mall. The project would sputter and die, and the site would become a ruin. Florida was full of them.

Whatever true sum was lost in the Simmons Wood venture would be doubled when it appeared as red ink on the books of the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. That is how Bernard Squires hid the Tarbone family’s skimming. If other union officials suspected skulduggery, they were wise enough not to make a peep. Besides, the pension fund made a profit, overall; Squires saw to that. Even the IRS auditors didn’t challenge his numbers. Investing in real estate was a crapshoot, as everybody knew. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost.

Once, the write-off had outlived its usefulness, Bernard Squires would contrive to unload Simmons Wood on an insurance conglomerate or maybe the Japanese—somebody with enough capital to finish the stupid mall, or raze it and start over. For now, though, Bernard Squires was eager to lock up the deal.

It was Richard “The Icepick” Tarbone’s desire to close on the Grange property as soon as possible. “And don’t call me,” he had told Squires, “until you got some good fucking news. Do whatever it takes, you understand?”

Bernard understood.

The visitation got off to a rocky start. Once again, Demencio’s fiberglass Madonna wasn’t weeping properly—this time due to a crimp in the plastic feeder lines between the reservoir bottle and the eyes. One tear duct was barren while the other gushed like an artery. A pilgrim from Guatemala, having been spritzed in the forehead, loudly challenged the legitimacy of the miracle. Luckily the tirade was in Spanish and therefore incomprehensible to the other visitors. Trish, who was manning the Madonna, relayed the details of the plumbing problem to Demencio at the breakfast table. He told her to lay off the pump, pronto; no more crying.

“But we got a bus coming,” Trish reminded him. “The mission bus from West Virginia.”

“Aw, shit.”

Every week Demencio changed the Madonna’s weeping schedule. It was important to have “dry” days as well as “wet” days; otherwise there was no sense of heavenly mystery. Moreover, Demencio had observed that some pilgrims actually were glad when the Virgin Mary didn’t cry on their first visit. It gave them a reason to come back to Grange on a future vacation, just
as tourists return to Yellowstone year after year in the hopes of spotting a moose.

So Demencio hadn’t been alarmed when his wife told him the Madonna was malfunctioning. Usually midweek was slow for business, a good time for an unscheduled dry day. But he’d forgotten about the damn mission bus: sixty-odd Christian pilgrims from Wheeling. The preacher’s name was Mooney or Moody, something like that, and every other year he roared through Florida with new recruits. Trish would bake a lime pie and Demencio would throw in a bottle of scotch, and in return the preacher would entreat his faithful followers to donate generously at Demencio’s shrine. For such a dependable throng, Demencio felt obliged to provide tears.

Thus the Madonna’s hydraulic failure was potentially a crisis. Demencio didn’t want to interrupt the morning visitation to haul the statue indoors for repairs—to do so would arouse suspicion, even among the most devout. Peering through the curtains, Demencio counted nine victims in the front yard, hovering attentively around the icon.

“Got any ideas?” Trish asked.

“Quiet,” said her husband. “Lemme think.”

But it wasn’t quiet. The sounds of crunching filled the room: JoLayne’s cooters, enjoying breakfast.

Demencio’s somber gaze settled on the aquarium. Instead of breaking the romaine into bite-sized pieces, he’d dropped the whole head of lettuce into the tank. The sight of it had pitched the baby turtles into a frenzy, and they were now chewing their way up the leafy slopes.

It was, Demencio had to admit, weirdly impressive. Forty-five marauding turtles. He got an idea. “You still got that Bible?” he asked his wife. “The illustrated one?”

“Somewhere, yeah.”

“And I’ll need some paint,” he said, “like they sell for model airplanes at the hobby store.”

“We only got two hours before the bus.”

“Don’t worry, this won’t take long.” Demencio walked over to the aquarium. He bent down and said: “OK, who wants to be a star?”

O
n the morning of November 28, with rain misting the mountains, Mary Andrea Finley Krome checked out of the Mona Pacifica Mineral Spa and Residential Treatment Center, on the island of Maui. She flew directly to Los Angeles, where the next day she auditioned for a network television commercial for a new home-pregnancy test. Later she flew on to Scottsdale to rejoin the road company for the
Silence of the Lambs
musical, in which she starred as Clarice, the intrepid young FBI agent. Mary Andrea’s itinerary was relayed by certain sources to Tom Krome’s divorce lawyer, Dick Turnquist, who arranged for a process server to be waiting backstage at the dinner theater in Arizona.