Lucky You (29 page)

Bode also knew that Chub, in his current frame of mind, was immune to such logic. All Bode could do was hold the Colt revolver and stand there, hoping it wouldn’t take long, hoping they wouldn’t make much noise. The shiver of arousal sparked by Amber’s nudity had already died of distraction at the heaving, pink-butted spectacle of Chub; grimy and grunting and drool-flecked. The arresting sights and smells graphically reminded Bode Gazzer of his partner’s many hygienic lapses and killed any spark of temptation to join in the fun.

“Hol’ still! Hol’ still!” Chub kept huffing.

But the agile Amber would not.

“Hurry up,” Bode said, checking over his shoulder. The skinhead Shiner would go ballistic if he saw what was happening.

“I can’t get it in! Goddamn, make her hoi’ still!” Chub used his weight to constrain her. Ribbons of brown turtle grass clung to his thighs.

“Use the damn gun!” he hollered at his partner.

“Shit.” Bode knelt and placed the barrel to Amber’s head. She stopped squirming. Behind a tangle of yellow-blond hair, her eyes narrowed with acceptance; not coldness and wild anger, like that crazy Negro woman up in Grange.

This is the way it’s supposed to be, Bode mused. You see the gun, you quit trying to fight. “Be still now,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Listen to the man.” Chub seized Amber’s wrists, pulling them away from her chest. “And do your lips … all pushed out and pouty … you know, like how Kim Basinger does.”

Amber said, “OK, on one condition. Tell me your name.”

“What for!”

“I can’t make love to a man,” she said, “unless I know his name. I just can’t do it, I’d rather die.”

Bode Gazzer told Chub: “Don’t be a idiot.”

Chub, pinning Amber’s arms over her head, catching his breath. “Gillespie,” he said. “Onus Gillespie.”

Bode was relieved—it was such a strange name, he thought his partner had made it up.

Coolly Amber said, “Pleased to meet you, Otis.”

“Naw, it’s
Onus.
O-n-u-s.”

“Oh. Mine’s Amber.” She blinked innocently. “Amber Bernstein. That’s B-e-r-n-s-t-e-i-n.”

It was as if Bodean Gazzer had been mule-kicked in the gut.

“Get off!” he shrieked at Chub.

“No sir!”

“But didn’t you hear? She’s … she’s a Jew!”

“I don’t care if she’s Vietcong, I’m gone stick my weenie in.”

“No! NO! Get off, and that’s an order!”

Chub closed his eyes and tried to block out Bode’s carping.
Hilton Head,
he told himself.
You and Blondie are at Hilton Head, doin it on the beach. Naw, even better—you’re doin’ it on the balcony of your brand-new condo!

But Amber’s obstinate wriggling was giving him fits; it was like trying to screw an eel. Plus, in his glue-dazed condition, Chub found himself wielding something less than a world-class, diamond-cutter erection.

“No white Christian man”—Bode, somber as a coroner, leaned over them—”no white Christian man shall give his seed to an infidel child of Satan!”

Amber interrupted her evasions to mention that her father was a rabbi. Bode Gazzer emitted a mournful groan. Chub glared up at him. “You worry about your own damn seed. Now back off so’s I kin plant mine.”

“Negative! As commanding officer of the White Clarion—”

Chub rose to his knees and, with his clawless hand, snatched the pistol from the colonel. He jammed it to Amber’s throat and told her to spread her legs.

Bode remembered the Colombian’s Beretta in his belt. He considered drawing the gun, not so much for Amber’s sake but to reinforce his superior rank. Without a steep improvement in discipline, Bode felt, the fledgling militia would soon go to pieces.

His consternation was heightened by the unexpected arrival of Shiner, the young blackmailer himself, stumbling through the trees. His cheeks were puffy and his pants were soiled and his twisted-looking fists were extended oddly at his sides, like a scarecrow’s. Upon seeing Major Chub naked atop Amber, Shiner roared into a headlong assault.

Bodean Gazzer was poised to tackle the hapless skinhead when something exploded from the shoreline behind him. Chub was lifted off Amber as if there were springs in his ass. Then Bode heard a frightfully heavy thump, which he later learned was the butt of a Remington shotgun impacting his own skull.

When he regained consciousness, Bode was aware of being constricted. A white man he didn’t know was tying him with a length of anchor rope to a buttonwood stump. Still flat on the ground was Chub, gurgling curses and drenched in his own blood. Shiner sat downcast in the bow of the stolen boat; his melancholy gaze was fixed on the bruised scabby mess of a tattoo. Amber stood back, wrapped in the oilskin tarpaulin. Irritably she plucked leaves and turtle grass from her hair.

All the militia’s weapons had been piled on the ground. The captured arsenal was being inspected by a muscular young Negro woman with neon-green nails and a Remington shotgun. Bode Gazzer recognized her immediately.

“Not you!” was all he could say.

“That’s right, bubba. Say hi to the Black Tide.”

The sky and earth and universe began to spin madly for Bode Gazzer, as his fate appeared to him with sickening lucidity. The white man finished with the knots and stepped away from the tree. The Negro woman came forward, carrying the gun so casually as to cause a spasm in Bode’s fragile sphincter.

“What do you want?” he asked.

JoLayne Lucks slipped the shotgun between his lips.

“Let’s start with your wallet,” she said.

25

The case of
LaGort v. Save King Enterprises, Allied-Eagle Casualty, et al.
was settled in a courthouse hallway after a pretrial conference lasting less than two hours. The attorneys for the supermarket’s insurance carrier, having detected in Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. a frosty and inexplicable bias, chose to pay Emil LaGort the annoying but not unpalatable sum of $500,000. The purpose was to avoid a trial in which the defense clearly would get no help from the judge, who’d already vowed to prohibit any testimony attacking the past honesty of the plaintiff, including but not limited to his very long list of other negligence suits. Emil LaGort attended the conference in a noisy motorized wheelchair with maroon mica-fleck armrests, and wore around his neck a two-tone foam cervical brace. The brace was one of nine models available in Emil LaGort’s walk-in closet, where he saved all medical aids acquired during the phony recoveries from his many staged accidents.

After the settlement papers were signed and the sourpuss insurance lawyers filed into the elevator and Emil LaGort rolled himself across James Street to a topless luncheonette, his lawyer discreetly obtained from Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. the number of a newly opened Nassau bank account, into which $250,000 would be wired secretly within four weeks.

Not exactly a king’s ransom, Arthur Battenkill knew, but enough for a fast start on a new life.

The judge’s wife, however, wasn’t packing for the tropics. While Arthur Battenkill was tidying up the details of the Save King payoff, Katie was on her knees in church. She was praying for divine guidance, or at least improved clarity of thought. That morning she’d read in
The Register
that Tom Krome’s estranged wife had come to town to receive a journalism award on her “late” husband’s behalf. Regardless of Tommy’s ill feelings toward the elusive Mary Andrea Finley, it seemed possible to Katie Battenkill that the woman might be mourning an imagined loss; that she still might love Tom Krome in some significant way.

Shouldn’t somebody tell her he’s not really dead? If it were me, Katie thought, I’d sure want to know.

But Katie had assured Tommy she wouldn’t say a word. Breaking her promise would be a lie, and lying was a sin, and Katie was trying to give up sinning. On the other hand, she couldn’t bear the thought of Mrs. Krome (whatever her faults) needlessly suffering even a sliver of widow’s pain.

Knowing Tom was alive became a leaden weight upon Katie’s overtaxed conscience. There was a second secret, too; equally troubling. She was reminded of it by another item in
The Register,
which reported that the human remains believed to be those of Tom Krome were being shipped to an FBI laboratory “for more sophisticated analysis.” This meant DNA tests, which meant it wouldn’t be long before the dead man was correctly identified as Champ Powell, law clerk to Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.

The devious shitheel with whom Katie was about to flee the country forever.

“What do I do?” she whispered urgently. Head bowed, she knelt alone in the first pew. She prayed and waited, then prayed some more.

God’s answer, when it eventually came, was typically strong on instruction but weak on details. Katie Battenkill didn’t push it; she was grateful for anything.

As she walked out of church, she removed her diamond solitaire and deposited it in the slot of the oak collection box, where it landed with no more fanfare than a nickel. Lightning didn’t flash, thunder didn’t clap. No angels sang from the rafters.

Maybe that’ll come later, Katie thought.

After the last of the pilgrims were gone, Shiner’s mother approached the besheeted Sinclair, who was sloshing playfully with the cooters in the moat. She said, “Help me, turtle boy. I need a spiritual rudder.” Sinclair’s unshaven chin tilted toward the heavens: “
kiiiikkkeeeeaayy kaa-koooo kaattttkin
.”

His visitor failed to decipher the outcry
(kicking back with ultra-cool kathleen
—from a feature profile of the actress Kathleen Turner).

“How ‘bout giving that a shot in English?” Shiner’s mother grumped.

Sinclair beckoned her into the moat. She kicked off her scuffed bridal heels and stepped in. Sinclair motioned her to sit. With cupped hands he gathered several baby turtles and placed them on the billowing white folds of her gown.

Shiner’s mother picked one up to examine it. “You paint these suckers yourself?”

Sinclair laughed patiently. “They’re not painted. That’s the Lord’s imprint.”

“No joke? Is this little guy ‘posed to be Luke or Matthew or who?”

“Lay back with me.”

“They paved my Jesus this morning, did you hear? The road department did.”

“Lay back,” Sinclair told her.

He sloshed closer, taking her shoulders and lowering her baptismally. Shiner’s mother closed her eyes and felt the coolness of the funky water on her neck, the tickle of tiny cooter claws across her skin.

“They won’t bite?”

“Nope,” said Sinclair, supporting her.

Soon Shiner’s mother was enfolded by a preternatural sense of inner peace and trust, and possibly something more. The last man who’d touched her so sensitively was her periodontist, for whom she’d fallen head over heels.

“Oh, turtle boy, I lost my son and my shrine. I don’t know what to do.”

”
‘Kiiikkkeeeaay ka-kooo,”
Sinclair murmured.

“OK,” said Shiner’s mother.
“Kiki-kakeee-kooo.
Is that the Bible in, like, Japanese?”

Unseen by the meditators in the moat was Demencio, who stood with knuckles on hips at a window. To Trish he said: “You believe this shit—she’s in with the turtles!”

“Honey, she’s had a rough day. The D.O.T. paved her road stain.”

“I want her off my property.”

“Oh, what’s the harm? It’s almost dark.”

Trish was in the kitchen, roasting a chicken for supper. Demencio had been mixing a batch of perfumed water, refilling the tear well in the weeping Madonna.

“If that crazy broad’s not gone after dinner,” he said, “you go chase her off. And he sure and count them cooters, make sure she don’t swipe any.”

Trish said, “Have a heart.”

“I don’t trust that woman.”

“You don’t trust anybody.”

“I can’t help it. It’s the nature of the business,” said Demencio. “We got any red food coloring?”

“For what?”

“I was thinking … what if she started crying blood? The Virgin Mary.”

“Perfumed blood?” said his wife.

“Don’t gimme that face. It’s just an idea is all,” Demencio said, “just an idea I’m playing with. For when we don’t have the turtles no more.”

“Let me check.” Trish, bustling toward the spice cabinet.

Under less stressful circumstances Bernard Squires might have enjoyed the farmhouse quaintness of Mrs. Hendricks’ bed-and-breakfast, but even the caress of a handmade quilt could not dissolve his anxiety. So he took an evening walk—alone, in his sleek pin-striped suit—through the little town of Grange.

Bernard Squires had spent a tense chunk of the afternoon on the telephone with associates of Richard “The Icepick” Tarbone and, briefly, with Mr. Tarbone himself. Squires considered himself a clear-spoken person, but he’d had great difficulty making The Icepick understand why Simmons Wood couldn’t be purchased until the competing offer was submitted and rejected.

“And it
will
be rejected,” Bernard Squires had said, “because we’re going to outbid the bastards.”

But Mr. Tarbone had become angrier than Squires had ever heard him, and made it plain that closing the deal was requisite not only for Squires’ future employment but for his continued good health. Squires had assured the old man that the delay was temporary and that by week’s end Simmons Wood would be secured for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. Squires was instructed not to return to Chicago without a signed contract.

As he strolled in the cool breezy dusk, Bernard Squires tried to guess why the Tarbones were so hot to get the land. The likeliest explanation was a dire shortfall of untraceable cash, necessitating another elaborately disguised raid on the union pension fund. Perhaps the family intended to use the Simmons Wood property as collateral on a construction loan and wanted to lock in before interest rates shot up.

Or perhaps they really
did
mean to build a Mediterranean-style shopping mall in Grange, Florida. As laughable as that was, Bernard Squires couldn’t eliminate the possibility. Maybe The Icepick had tired of the mob life. Maybe he was trying to go legit.

In any case, it truly didn’t matter why Richard Tarbone was in such a hurry. What mattered was that Bernard Squires acquire the forty-four acres as soon as possible. In tight negotiations Squires was unaccustomed to losing and had at his disposal numerous extralegal methods of persuasion. If there were (as Clara Markham asserted) rival buyers for Simmons Wood, Squires felt certain he could outspend them, outflank them, or simply intimidate them into withdrawing.

Squires was so confident that he probably would’ve drifted contentedly into a long afternoon nap, had old man Tarbone not uttered what sounded over the phone like a serious threat:

“You get this done, goddammit! You don’t wanna end up like Millstep, you’ll fucking get this done.”

At the mention of Jimmy Millstep, Bernard Squires had felt his silk undershirt dampen. Millstep had been a lawyer for the Tarbone family until the Friday he showed up twenty minutes late at a bond hearing for Richard Tarbone’s homophobic nephew Gene, who consequently had to spend an entire weekend in a ten-by-ten cell with a well-behaved but flamboyant he-she. Attorney Millstep blamed a needful mistress and an inept cabbie for his tardiness to court, but he got no sympathy from Richard Tarbone, who not only fired him but ordered him murdered. A week later, Jimmy Millstep’s bullet-riddled body was dumped at the office of the Illinois Bar Association. A note pinned to his lapel said: “Is this one of yours?”

So it was no wonder Bernard Squires was jumpy, a condition exacerbated by the abrupt appearance of a rumpled stranger with bloody punctures in the palms of his hands.

“Halt, sinner!” said the man, advancing with a limp. Bernard Squires warily sidestepped him.

“Halt, pilgrim,” the man implored, waving a sheaf of rose-colored advertising flyers.

Squires snatched one and backed out of reach. The stranger muttered a blessing as he shuffled off into the twilight. Squires stopped beneath a streetlamp to look at the paper:

ASTOUNDING STIGMATA OF CHRIST!!!!

Come see amazing Dominick Amador,

the humbel carpenter who woke up one day

with the exactly identical crucifiction wounds of

Jesus Christ himself, Son of God!

Bleeding 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.

Saturdays Noon to 3 p.m. (Palms only).

Visitations open to the publix. Offerings welcomed!

4834 Haydon Burns Lane (Look for The Cross in the front yard!)

And in small print at the bottom of the paper:

As feachered on Rev. Pat Robertson’s “Heavenly Signs” TV show!!!

Bernard Squires crumpled the flyer and tossed it. Sickos, he thought, no matter where you go on this planet. Sickos who never learned to spell. Squires stopped at the Grab N’Go, where his request for a
New York Times
drew the blankest of stares. He settled for a
USA Today
and a cup of decaf, and headed back toward the b-and-b. Somewhere he made a wrong turn and found himself on a street he didn’t recognize—the chanting tipped him off.

Squires heard it from a block away: a man and a woman, vocalizing disharmoniously in some exotic tongue. The tremulous sounds drew Squires to a floodlit house. It was a plain, one-story concrete-and-stucco, typical of Florida tract developments in the 1960s and ‘70s. Squires stood out of sight, behind an old oak, watching.

Three figures were visible—four, counting a statue of the Virgin Mary, which a dark-haired man in coveralls was positioning and repositioning on a small illuminated platform. Two other persons—the chanters, it turned out—sat with legs outstretched in a curved trench that had been dug in the lawn and filled with water. The man in the trench was cloaked in dingy bed linens, while the woman wore a formal white gown with lacy pointed shoulders. The pair was of indeterminate age, though both had pale skin and wet hair. Bernard Squires noticed V-shaped wakes pushing here and there in the water; animals of some kind, swimming …

Turtles?

Squires edged closer. Soon he realized he was witness to an eccentric religious rite. The couple in the trench continued to join arms and spout gibberish while scores of grape-sized reptile heads bobbed around them. (Squires recalled a cable-television documentary about a snake-handling cult in Kentucky—perhaps this was a breakaway sect of turtle worshipers!) Interestingly, the dark-haired man in coveralls took no part in the moat-wallowing ceremony. Rather, he intermittently turned from the Madonna statue to gaze upon the two chanters with what appeared to Bernard Squires as unmasked disapproval.

“Kiiikkkeeeaay kakkooo kattttkin!”
the couple bayed, sending such an icy jet down Squires’ spine that he crossed the street and hurried away. He was not a devout man and certainly didn’t believe in omens, but he was profoundly unsettled by the turtle handlers and the stranger with blood on his palms. Grange, which initially had impressed Squires as a prototypical tourist-grubbing southern truck stop, now seemed murky and mysterious. Weird vapors tainted the parochial climate of sturdy marriages, conservatively traditional faiths and blind veneration of progress—
any
progress—that allowed slick characters such as Bernard Squires to swoop in and have their way. He returned straightaway to the bed-and-breakfast, bid an early good night to Mrs. Hendricks (taking a pass on her pork roast, squash, snap beans and pecan pie), bolted the door to his room (quietly, so as not to offend his hostess), and slipped beneath the quilt to nurse a hollow, helpless, irrational feeling that Simmons Wood was lost.