The Hound of the Sanibel Sunset Detective (15 page)

“Your tough luck that you followed me in the first place. You should have let them kill me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time.”

Crimson chuckled as he opened the driver’s side door. “Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s going to be a next time, my friend.”

He was about to get into the car when he stopped and said, “Before I forget. Stay right where you are. I sort of want to shoot you, so one of those wrong moves you hear about, and I will put a bullet in you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Tree said.

“Here’s something for you,” Crimson said, almost as an afterthought. “That Mountie you were talking about.”

“What about her?”

“Her name is Melora Spark?”

“You know her?”

“Here’s a news flash, evidence that the truth always happens: she’s no Mountie.”

“What is she?”

“More truth, man. That dog?”

“What about the dog?”

“It’s not the dog everyone is after.”

He got into the car and a moment later, the Beetle sped away.

Leaving Tree standing on the side of the highway. With the rain falling.

________

Of course, there was no cellphone signal out here, tempting Tree to smash his phone to the pavement in a dramatic show of frustration. But then he thought better of it since such a gesture would be meaningless, anyway. Better to hold the drama and just figure out what to do next.

Let’s see, he thought to himself. He was alone on the side of a deserted highway in the middle of Alligator Alley, an area of Florida where they strongly advise you not to end up alone. Faced with those circumstances, someone like him, Sanibel Island’s private detective, albeit a supposedly retired private eye, should be able to come up with the next move.

Except he stood there and stood there and couldn’t think of anything.

Finally, more from frustration than anything, he stuck out his thumb.

Stupid, really. Who was going to pick up an old guy, soaking wet, slumped along the side of the road with his thumb out in the nowhere of Alligator Alley?

As if to answer the question, two cars flew past in quick succession throwing off sprays of water. Tree barely jumped out of the way in time. Frantic arm waving failed to persuade the cars to stop. His best hope, he decided, was that the state police would happen along, but given his luck so far, just when he needed a cop, none would appear. They showed up only when he didn’t want them. They were very good at that.

An eighteen-wheeler crashed past and this time Tree wasn’t fast enough and got his pants drenched. He swore loudly at the unfairness of it all, the madness, his stupidity for putting his life on the line for Crimson, a heartless, coke-snorting biker-scumbag who would as soon betray you as breathe. Tree stood helpless in the drizzle, the vast flatness of the landscape all but lost in the mist and the arriving darkness.

22

L
uckily, the rain stopped soon after Tree began walking. An hour or so later, he spotted a gas station on the right. A big sign leaning against the side of a slant-roofed, weather-beaten shack said he was approaching Carl’s. Live bait was available. Soaked to the skin, but relieved, he hobbled inside. Behind protective Plexiglas, a teenaged girl with henna-colored hair, her broad, bare shoulders tattooed, was busy with her smartphone.

“I’m looking for the restroom,” he said.

The girl looked irritated at being distracted. “It’s around the side,” she said through an opening in the Plexiglas. “You need a key.”

She slipped a key attached to a thick piece of wood through the opening. Tree took it, thanked her, and went out the door. He found the restroom and used the key to enter the darkened interior. Immediately, he was hit by a foul smell. He fumbled around until he discovered a light switch.

An overhead fluorescent light produced a curious humming sound before emitting a pale glow that revealed a backed-up toilet surrounded by discarded paper towels. Tree held his breath while he relieved himself. The toilet refused to flush. He swore in exasperation. He tried to wash his hands in the filthy sink, but no water came out of the tap. He swore again. Now he was going to contract some terrible airborne infection from this hellhole restroom and die a terrible death in a nowhere patch of South Florida.

He limped back into the gas station. The teenager with the henna-colored hair held her smartphone in front of her like a mirror—or maybe a pathway to the future.

“Excuse me.” Tree slipped the key back through the Plexiglas opening. The teenager continued to study the smartphone screen as though it contained the secrets of the universe. Maybe it did. “I’m kind of stranded out here, and my cellphone isn’t working. I’m wondering if you have a phone I could use so I could call for some help.”

The teenager regarded him with disinterested eyes. “The telephone is not for customer use,” she said by rote, as if she had had to repeat it a million times.

“I understand that,” Tree said. “But I’m in a bit of a jam here. I wonder if you could make an exception just this once.”

“Can’t help you,” the teenager said. She went back to her smartphone.

Tree forced himself to tamp down bubbling anger. He took a deep breath and then brought out his wallet. “I’ll pay you for the use of the phone.”

The teenager looked at him. He slid a twenty-dollar bill through the Plexiglas opening. She gave it a lazy look.

“You got another one of those?”

“No.”

She went back to her screen.

“Come on,” he said. “Give me a break, will you?”

She looked up from her phone and now there was a spark of anger in those dull eyes. “If you don’t quit bothering me, I’ll call the cops.”

“Yeah, do that, will you? Call the police.”

Her eyes looked even angrier. “What a jerk,” she said. But she snapped up the twenty, and then got up from her chair, an overweight teen moving slowly to where a phone sat on its cradle. She picked it up and then moved heavily back to the Plexiglas and shoved the phone through. “Make it quick,” she said. “I could get in a lot of trouble for this.”

Tree picked up the phone and dialed a number. A voice said, “Hello?”

“Kelly?” Not who Tree wanted.

“Hi, Tree,” she said. “If you’re looking for Rex, he’s not here.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No idea. He’s gone off to a meeting with someone on the Fort Myers city council.”

“Okay, listen. Do you have access to a car?”

“Rex left me his car.”

“I need a ride.”

“You want me to come and get you?” There was disbelief in Kelly’s voice.

“Can you do that?”

She paused and then said, “Where are you?”

23

T
ree bought a plastic bottle of Diet Coke. He hated Diet Coke in plastic bottles, but that was all that was available in the glass-fronted cooling unit. He also purchased Rice Krispies Treats from the teenage girl with the hennaed hair. Their fight over the telephone and the extortion of twenty dollars had not improved her disposition.

He didn’t want to stay inside with her alternately shooting glares at her smartphone screen and at him. He went out and stood beside the Live Bait sign. He sipped at the Diet Coke and munched on a Rice Krispies Treat. The sun had re-emerged, baking the flat landscape around the gas station, heating the asphalt surface of the highway, so that as the odd truck roared by, its tires sizzled. None of the trucks stopped. Maybe the word had spread about the miserable teenaged girl with the hennaed hair and smartphone fixation.

Tree finished his Coke and Rice Krispies Treats. He paced around outside for the better part of the next hour and a half. Eventually, he gathered the courage once again to face his teenage nemesis and went back inside. She was still engaged with her smartphone and barely glanced at him as he entered. He walked to the back where the glass-fronted refrigerator units contained bottles of water.

He grabbed a bottle and was headed back to the front when the entrance door opened and Kelly stepped inside. “Like old times,” she said when she saw him.

“Is it?”

“Me having to come and pick you up from the most unlikely places. The only difference is, now you’re sober. You are sober, aren’t you, Tree?”

“I am, although I’m considering returning to a life of drink.”

In her fetching short shorts and sheer white top, her makeup perfectly applied, Kelly was, as usual, ready for the photo shoot that would never occur out here on Alligator Alley.

She followed him to the counter where the teen monster with the hennaed hair lay in wait in her Plexiglas lair. The teenager glanced up from her smartphone. And then her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. She gasped: “Are you Kelly Fleming?”

Tree looked around at Kelly. She smiled brightly at the teenager. “I’m Kelly,” she said. “How are you?”

“Wow,” the teenager exclaimed. She was off her perch behind the Plexiglas. “We just moved here a year ago. But I grew up in Chicago watching you on the news. You’re, like,
famous
. What are you doing here?”

“Just picking up a friend,” Kelly said.

The teenager looked horrified. “You’re with
him
?” As though that was beyond the realm of possibility.

“I’m afraid so,” Kelly said.

The teenager looked as though she would forgive Kelly anything—even the ultimate transgression of being associated with Tree. She waddled out from her fortress behind the counter to where Kelly stood.

“Could I, like, get your autograph?” She handed Kelly a scrap of paper.

“It would be my pleasure.” Kelly took the paper over to the counter.

“If you could make it out to Charlene.”

As if by magic, Kelly produced a Sharpie. “Are you Charlene?”

Charlene’s ear-to-ear grin removed any traces of the teen monster. “It’s such an honor to meet you.”

“It’s great to meet you, Charlene, and thanks for putting up with my friend,” Kelly said. She made a deep, swirling masterpiece out of her signature. She presented it to Charlene. “How much do we owe you for the water?”

“Oh, no. It’s okay. Take the water. Please.”

“You’re very sweet,” Kelly said. She kissed the teenager’s cheek. “Thanks so much, Charlene.”

Charlene looked as though she had died and gone to heaven.

_________

“Can you believe this car?” Kelly looked pleased with herself as she gripped the sport steering wheel and swung the Dodge Charger Hellcat onto the highway.

“It’s not a car,” Tree said. “It’s a Hellcat.”

“Whatever made Rex buy this thing?”

“He still thinks of himself as a hellcat.”

“That kid back there, I’m amazed she recognized me.”

“What can I tell you, Kelly?” he said. “You still know how to dazzle, even in the middle of nowhere.”

“A lot of good it does me.” But her face was aglow.

The car roared down the highway, the sound of the V-8 engine a deep, authoritative rumble. The soul of a certain kind of American manhood called out from under that hood; the muscular assertion that you could still be a real man, if only from behind the wheel of a Hellcat.

Or a real woman—Kelly looked as though she was thoroughly enjoying herself controlling this powerful car. Of course, Tree mused, Kelly enjoyed herself whenever she was in control, whether it was cars or men.

She gave Tree a sideways glance. “Not that I want to pry into your personal life. But do you mind if I ask how you managed to end up out here without a car?”

“Someone stole my car,” Tree said.

“That battered old Volkswagen you drive around? Who would want to steal that?”

“A particularly low class of criminal in South Florida.”

“What made you call me?”

“I didn’t call you, I called Rex.”

“But why not Freddie?”

“Freddie is trying to run a business,” he said. “I didn’t want to drag her away because of my stupidity.”

“Is that what it is, your stupidity?”

“Let’s just say there are days when I do wonder about the state of my sanity,” he said.

“But you’re onto something, aren’t you, Tree?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Come on, something’s going down.”

“I was in Miami. My car was stolen when I stopped at that gas station. No more complicated than that.”

She threw him another glance. “Then why didn’t you call the police?”

“Who says I didn’t?”

“If you had, they would have been back there at the gas station, and you wouldn’t have needed me.”

Tree didn’t say anything. They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Kelly said, “You know when I was talking to you about getting back into television?”

“Yes,” he said, striking a tentative note because he was never quite sure what Kelly had in mind.