Dark and Bloody Ground (27 page)

Roger and Donnie left the water before Carol returned. Drying himself off, Roger bent down to check inside his shoes. He shook one and then the other and began yelling at Bartley, accusing him of stealing and threatening to twist his head off. Sherry told him to leave Donnie alone.

“Dragon Lady kyped your roll. She went to buy a drink, is all.”

“Is that right? She did that? Well, that is going to be one sorry bitch.”

When Carol came back with her margarita, she handed Roger the change. He told her through clenched teeth to put down her drink, they were going in the water. She did not want to go in, Carol said. It was late and getting cool. They were the only people left on the beach.

“Put that shit down. We’re going in the water.”

Carol obeyed. Roger took her by the hand and led her roughly into the surf. The slope of the sand was gradual. He pulled her out farther until the waves were breaking against her breasts and into her face and she had to keep hopping not to drink in saltwater. The others watched her trying to get free of him, flailing with one arm, thrashing like a gaffed fish. Roger’s shoulders were still above the water.

He let go of her hand suddenly and grabbed her with both hands around her throat. His screaming—"Bitch! Fucking lying bitch!"—drifted in to the beach over the noise of the surf. He shoved her under and yanked her up by the throat above his head, screaming into her face, and pushed her under, again and again, jerking her up and plunging her down as if she were no more than a kitten.

By the time Sherry and Donnie and Benny could struggle through the waves to reach them and pry Roger loose and carry Carol to the beach, she was turning blue and passing out. Sherry rolled her onto her stomach and pounded on her back. Seawater trickled from her mouth. She began to breathe, cough, at last to cry.

“She’ll never do that again,” Roger said. “Nobody takes my money.”

By morning the marks of Roger’s fingers were visible on her throat. He advised her to get some sun.

It took them a few days to locate a suitable apartment. One night the others talked Sherry into accompanying them to a nightclub a few blocks from the Sands. She put aside her aversion to clubs and bars, lured by the promise of live country music. She had never heard of the band or the singer, but maybe they would cheer her up. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she had aged ten years in the past month.

It was called Castaways: bamboo and wicker tables and chairs on different levels around the dance floor and stage, red and green running lights, the walls and ceiling draped with fishing nets, waitresses in coconut-shell bras. The band was adequate, the singer a pert brunette from Nashville, or so she claimed, doing okay versions of classic Patsy Cline. The only thing that bugged Sherry was their waitress, a blonde flirt who rang a cowbell hung around her neck every time Benny gave her a tip and bent way over scooping up the money so Benny could gawk at her coconuts. Every waitress had to wear a cowbell, and they were clanging all over the room. It drove Sherry nuts. She broke training to order a double strawberry daquiri, then another and another.

At tables pushed together behind them sat a large party, four or five couples, including a mother and two daughters and a man who looked like Willie Nelson, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, a red bandana around his head, an earring, and braids. Donnie, always a menace on his own, started chatting up one of the daughters, even asking her to dance, right in front of her date, who told him to bug off. Trying to head off trouble, Sherry led Donnie onto the dance floor and did her best to wear him out, but he was so coked up he could have done the Cotton-eyed Joe to Miami.

When they returned to the table Roger and Carol—she had been
mixing cocaine and Valium all day—had managed to get into an argument with the party behind them. It was at the shouting stage. One of the women called Roger a hick and a bum and a big slob. He smashed the neck of his beer bottle against the edge of the table and jabbed the jagged thing through the air, snarling and demanding who was ready to get cut first. Carol told the woman not to talk to Roger like that. The woman sprang forward and dumped Carol over in her chair and started stomping on her with high heels. Another woman fell on Carol and tore at her blouse.

“You take Chop on one at a time or forget it!” Sherry shouted.

She grabbed both women by the hair and yanked them up. One of them called Sherry a bitch. Sherry shoved her back and Benny slapped the woman’s face.

It was a free-for-all after that, glasses and bottles flying, women clawing at each other, men wrestling and tumbling on the floor, tables overturned. The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” to no effect. In the middle of it all Sherry heard the waitress screaming that someone had stolen her cowbell. “You did it! You’ve got my cowbell! Give it back!” She came at Sherry.

“Here’s your cowbell,” Sherry said, and busted her right in the chops. She cratered.

“Benny!” Sherry shouted. “Donnie! This ain’t good sense! We got to get out of here!”

They made it through the door before the cops arrived and ran flat-out to the motel. In the room they laughed and broke out more beer and dope. Except for Carol, who was hurting all over, no one was injured.

“Me and Benny was the only ones throwed a punch,” Sherry said.

“The rest of you all never swung a lick. I tell you one dang thing, it’s a hell of a way to act when we’s on the run!”

In their room Sherry and Benny undressed each other and she told him how proud she was that he had slapped that dogfaced woman for calling her a bitch. He said he’d do anything for his Booger.

“Right smart, you will. Do it all night.”

They found the perfect accommodations for themselves in Ormond Beach, just north of Daytona. It was one of forty condos in a compound grandly named the Garden of New Britain, clustered around a
swimming pool and tennis courts, behind a high fence off Chipping-wood Lane. This was on the ocean side of the Intracoastal Waterway, a block and a half from Highway A1A and the beach. Theirs was Number 55. Like all the others, it was painted white with gray wood trim and a sloping red roof, semidetached, two stories, nestled amid attractive landscaping that included lawns and red and yellow hibiscus and palm trees. They could enjoy three bedrooms and a living room, all completely furnished, and a kitchen with built-in appliances and stocked with dishes and pots and pans. The downstairs bedroom, claimed by Benny and Sherry, had sliding glass doors that opened onto a small yard; the upstairs bedrooms came with balconies ideal for sunbathing in the nude.

Even with the Garden of New Britain’s reasonable rent, six hundred a month, it was time to replenish their supply of cash. They began by faking busts of high school students in the tried-and-true method of tracing local dealers; Roger pinpointed other scores through contacts made at two nearby bars, the Pelican Lounge in Daytona and The Barn. Sherry complained that the addicts among them drained off too much of the communal nest egg. Nearly every day, a man driving a taxi dropped by to deliver drugs. While the others got stoned, Benny and Sherry ran and worked out on the beach.

Donnie became hard to handle. His habit had become voracious, up to three and four grams of coke a day and nearly constant marijuana. The stuff would run low, they would have to do another job—and these were penny-ante scores, comparatively speaking. Donnie also spent plenty on women. He was hitting the bars four nights out of five, bringing a different girl home with him every time, bragging and jiving. Sherry considered him deranged, a sex fiend who apparently had to prove himself nightly, and she never knew what might be hanging around the kitchen in the morning, slurping coffee or throwing up in the sink. Going to the beach and swimming in the pool were great, but Sherry was getting her fill of the Sunshine State sooner than she would have thought.

When the boys left on an excursion to Knoxville to do some jobs the fence there had finally set up for them, a reunion with Pat Mason proved an enjoyable break. Sherry and Carol flew to Miami. Pat, tan and looking fit and on top of the world driving a new Mercedes—on loan from her boss—and accompanied by a stunning woman, drove everyone to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate the Fourth
of July. That evening they were on their way to the beach to watch the fireworks, cruising the Lauderdale strip in bumper-to-bumper traffic, feeling free and wild away from the men. A single guy pulled up beside them in a convertible and gave them the eye. Sherry, who had had a couple of beers and a joint, lowered the window and began talking to him, saying that there was one girl in their car that thought he was the cutest thing she’d ever seen, and that if he guessed which one of them she was, she’d jump into his car with him. The guy pointed to Carol.

“Go ahead, Chop,” Sherry said. “I dare you.”

Carol hesitated; Sherry double-dared her. Carol was out the door just as the traffic started to move. She ran to the convertible, which was barely creeping ahead, vaulted in beside the startled driver, gave him a kiss, and jumped out to hurry back. Horns honked up and down the line.

“You see?” Sherry teased her. “You might’ve could’ve run off with that boy. See what you’ll do when Straw Boss ain’t a-looking? He’d kill you if he knew. Poor Chop, you ain’t nothing but a slave to love, Lord help you.”

The boys returned on the sixth. Their trip to Tennessee had been only moderately successful, but by the middle of the next week there seemed to be plenty of money to go around again. Sherry was not asking any questions. When she telephoned a friend in Knoxville, however, just to pass the time, saying that she was on a Florida vacation without being more specific than that, she ended up with an earful.

That was a coincidence that Sherry was in Florida, the friend said. Was she anywhere near Palm Beach? Not that she knew of, Sherry said. She had never been near the place. Well, the friend said, the Knoxville paper had a story that morning about Moon Mullins. Did Sherry remember him? No, Sherry said, but she had heard of him, Carol’s old pal. What was up?

“He’s dead. They think he was murdered. It says right here, murdered in his house at West Palm Beach. Says he might’ve known the person, or else he left his door unlocked. ‘No signs of forced entry,’ the paper says.”

“Read me that,” Sherry said, her mind awhirl.

Paul “Moon” Mullins, a former Clinton and Knoxville businessman,
had been found dead, “an obvious homicide victim.” His house had been ransacked and several items of jewelry had been taken. His body had been discovered on Tuesday evening by a neighbor. Mullins had been tied to a chair and apparently strangled. Rumors were that one finger, on which Mullins was said to have worn a large diamond ring, had been severed, but the police refused to confirm this detail.

A Kentucky native who had also been involved in the coal business, Mullins had developed several shopping centers and had founded Mullins Carpet and Upholstery, a store now operated by his ex-wife. “He started out on a shoestring and made it,” Dimples Mullins was quoted as saying.

Shoestrings aside, Sherry knew that Moon Mullins had been a fairly big-time dope dealer. He had suffered from narcolepsy, a condition that caused him to fall asleep suddenly, and Carol had at one time been his caretaker, as someone had phrased it, driving him around and performing other services for him. Roger knew about that. Mullins’s name had cropped up several times in conversation since they had come to Florida—something about his Las Vegas connections. He was supposed to have been rolling in dough.

“I guess you never know when your time is up,” Sherry said. “I got to go now.”

Better not to speculate, Sherry decided. The important thing was that Benny would never strangle anyone, let alone cut off a finger to get at some damn ring. It would take a real sicko hombre to do something like that.

Whoever had killed Moon Mullins, it had not been Benny. That was what mattered, Sherry told herself. And as for Mullins, from what she understood, it would be a small funeral.

“We got to get that dude a full-time woman,” Sherry said to Benny one day. Donnie’s escapades had become intolerable. He was playing Don Juan twenty-four hours a day, whether he had to pay for it or not. When he wasn’t picking them up at night, he was after women on the beach during the day. He and Roger bought remote-control model cars, big ones that you could send out a hundred yards or more. Donnie would direct one over the sand to where some girl lay sunning herself, make it bump into her, and call it back. The girl would follow the machine with her eyes until she saw Donnie grinning
at her. What an introduction. Sometimes he’d attach a note: “Put your bra in this car and meet the man of your dreams,” or “Ride me on the highway to heaven.”

Sherry did not know which was more disgusting, Donnie or the inexhaustible number of dimwit women willing to play with him. To her, he had the sex appeal of a chimpanzee. A neighbor had complained about the late-night shoutings and carryings-on; the manager had been by to see them. And with all the dope he had been consuming, he could not be trusted not to shoot off his mouth. There wasn’t a better way to have a prostitution or a narcotics charge against you dropped than to tip off the cops to some thieving addict.

Sherry suggested to him that he import his ex-wife to Florida. But when Donnie telephoned the ex, he blabbed that they would soon set sail for Bimini and she, still pregnant, declined the offer, worried about whether there were doctors on the island. Sherry got on the line to try to convince her: “If they has babies, I reckon they has doctors. They ain’t cannibals out there.” But the woman would not be persuaded.

When Sherry overheard Donnie sweet-talking Rebecca Hannah on the phone one afternoon, she got another idea. Bartley was hooked on Rebecca; that had been obvious since Six Flags. Sherry did not think Becky was as pretty as Donnie thought she was, or as
she
thought she was—"beef to the heels like a Tennessee heifer,” was Sherry’s analysis—but she did have a pretty sort of a dishface and, in Sherry’s view, cared about a good time and a fast dollar. Sherry asked Benny to sound Donnie out about bringing Becky down. It might be the one way to calm his hormones, or to channel them.