“Fuck him,” Wormy said, standing up. “Leave him where he is. Let the cops deal with it.”

  “What about my Mercedes, man?” Boone cried. “We can’t just leave it here like this. What am I gonna tell the insurance man?”

  “Tell him your car was stolen earlier tonight,” Ronnie said. “The thieves must have wrecked it out here, then run off. Come on,” he urged. “You wanted it totaled, it’s totaled.”

  Truman heard footsteps again, then the sound of four car doors being opened, then closed. The Lincoln’s engine purred to life, and he heard tires on gravel.

  From somewhere at the other end of the latrine, Truman heard a familiar crackling noise.

  “Joker to Batman. Come in, Batman. What the hell was that noise?”

  Chapter TWENTY-ONE

  Jackie yanked open the door of the Porta-Potty and gave Truman a hand so he could crawl out.

  He sat on the ground, dazed and shaken, feeling every inch his age. Mosquitoes swarmed around him in a buzzing cloud. He was too tired to slap them away.

  “You’re bleeding,” Jackie said, gently touching the back of his head. “And, excuse me, but you smell like a shithouse. Pee-yeeww!”

  “I’ve got to get to a shower,” Truman said, struggling to his feet.

  “I saw a sign on the way in here tonight, for a Boy Scout camp,” Jackie said. “I’ll bet they got showers. We could drive over there. I never knew Weedon Island had anything out here but the Florida Power Plant.”

  Tired as he was, Truman wouldn’t hear of trying to drive to the camp in the Nova. “The way I smell? We’d never get rid of the stink. Besides, I saw that road, too. There’s a big metal cattle gate pulled across it. The only way we’re getting in there is on foot.”

  The walk seemed endless in the heat and the damp. Truman trudged along in the dark while Jackie stayed a few yards ahead—and upwind—keeping the flashlight trained on the crushed oyster-shell path.

  Jackie was thin enough to be able to squeeze through the bars of the cattle gate. Truman sighed and put one leg up on the middle rung, somehow summoning the energy to haul himself up and over the top bar.

  A wooden sign nailed to the trunk of a pine tree notified them that it was .6 of a mile to the Boy Scout camp. Truman groaned, despite his resolve not to let on how bad he felt. His head wound was throbbing and his knees were cut and swollen from the pounding they’d taken when the Porta-Potty toppled over.

  “You okay?” Jackie asked, turning around to check on him. They’d been through a lot together, and it wasn’t like Mr. K to complain.

  “I’ll be better when I get this muck washed off,” he told her.

  Somewhere along the way, Jackie started whistling softly to herself.

  “Where’d you learn that?” Truman asked, stopping in his tracks.

  “Ollie and I watched The Bridge Over the River Kwai a few weeks ago. I’d heard the song before, but I never knew where it came from.”

  “You know the real name of that song?” It was the kind of trivia Truman loved.

  “Nope.”

  “‘The Colonel Bogey March,’” Truman informed her.

  They passed a clearing in the woods that revealed a patch of water thickly ringed with mangroves. As they got closer to the path, the mangrove branches rustled loudly and they heard the furious flapping of wings and startled calls. Jackie shined the flashlight up into the treetops. “Lookit,” she said, awed. “Flamingoes. This must be where they nest. I never saw so many flamingoes except on TV.”

  “You still haven’t,” Truman told her, watching a bird flap off to a nearby treetop. “Those are roseate spoonbills. Same color as flamingoes, but the bill is different, like a flattened spoon.”

  “Here’s some kind of building,” Jackie said after they’d walked another five minutes. She played the flashlight over the building. Large cedar poles had been sunk into the ground around a raised concrete platform, and more cedar logs formed a high-pitched roof. There were concrete picnic tables and benches and a large, open-stacked rock fire pit.

  “This is it?” Jackie asked. “This is their idea of a camp? What about bathrooms, cabins, all that kind of thing? What’s with the Boy Scouts?”

  “Boy Scouts are supposed to rough it,” Truman said. “They sleep in tents. Dig latrines. This must be their dining hall. Come on, let’s look and see if there’s at least a spigot.”

  At the back of the fire pit they found a wall- mounted shower head with a rusty stream of water dribbling from it.

  “Take a walk,” Truman told Jackie, “unless you want to see another rare bird. The white-tailed stinkpot.”

  “Hurry up,” she said, slapping at her arms, “these skeeters are eating me alive.”

  Truman turned the nozzle on full force and got a half-hearted spray of sulphur-scented water. He stood under the spray and stepped out of his excrement- spattered clothes. When he’d soaked every part of himself and the smell of sulphur finally overpowered the latrine smell, he picked the clothes up, held them under the water for a long time, and then wrung each piece out separately.

  He pulled the light-blue boxer shorts on. They were waterlogged and hung loosely on his hips, but he was decent. He buttoned the navy-blue sport shirt, but the stink clung to his pants like a sandspur on a dog. He could not bear to put them on again. He rolled them up and dropped them in a wire trash bin at the edge of the encampment.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jackie asked as he met her on the path back to the main road.

  “Boxers. They’re all the rage now,” he explained. “Chip even wears them to school.”

  “Look like men’s underwear to me,” Jackie said. “Droopy underwear.”

  Truman’s waterlogged sneakers made a squishing noise with each step he took. But the wet clothes and the shower had cooled him off, and he had more energy than he knew he still possessed.

  “Did you hear what they were saying to each other before the crash?” Truman asked her. “I couldn’t quite make it out.”

  “The black guy was asking how they were going to be able to file for the insurance without a witness or a police report. And then Wormy, the mean one? He just laughed and said they didn’t need the cops. Said that’s what made Florida great. Insurance companies don’t require a police report or witnesses—just one party who admits the accident was his fault.”

  “That tells us for certain what the racket is,”

  Truman said. “Fake car wrecks. But why Corvettes? And why steal back yours?”

  “They didn’t talk about that,” Jackie said. “But Ronnie told the black guy, Boone, that getting the insurance company to total out a Mercedes was going to be a pain in the ass. Over ten thousand dollars, he said, you can’t go to no drive-through claims window.”

  “Why Corvettes?” Truman wondered again.

  They were coming out of the path now, and into the area of the construction site. The air was filled with the acrid smell of burning rubber, and flashing red-and-blue lights throbbed on and off near the wrecked cars. A fireman stood at the edge of the clearing, aiming a hose at the now steaming cars. There was a uniformed police officer, too, shining a large black flashlight at the rubber skid marks that led up to the crash. Another man, not in uniform, sat in the police cruiser, and they could hear the low chatter of radio traffic.

  “Shouldn’t we talk to them?” Jackie asked. “Let them know what we saw and heard? That young guy they called Billy, when I peeked out, I saw them dragging him to the Lincoln. He was hurt bad, Mr. K, maybe even dead.”

  “They’d never believe us,” Truman said, gesturing down at the waterlogged undershorts that threatened to fall off unless he kept them hitched up with one hand. “They’d probably arrest me for indecent exposure. Or worse, try to pin that wreck on us. No, let’s go get in the car and wait them out. The fire’s died down, there can’t be too much to see in the dark. I’ll call that FDLE agent in the morning. Let him know what went on.”

  The next morning, Ollie slid into the chair across from Truman, who was watching the butter pat melt in his bowl of grits.

  “Where you been?” Ollie asked breathlessly. “It’s third seating already. I was getting ready to go up to your room to see if there was any sign of life. Finally, Jackie stopped long enough to tell me about what all happened last night. Wish I’d have been there.”

  “No you don’t,” Truman said. “You know women. They dramatize things.” He tasted his grits, then added a fine layer of salt and pepper and tried again. Much better. He finished them off while Ollie waited expectantly to hear more details of the previous night’s escapade.

  There was a stir across the room. “Very funny,” Jackie said angrily. Ollie and Truman turned around to see what the commotion was about.

  Jackie was standing over two of the youth hostel kids, both boys of maybe eighteen, with long, unkempt hair. They sniggered wildly as Jackie dumped the contents of a hunter-green knapsack out on the table. Foil-wrapped packages came tumbling out in a heap. She tore one open.

  “See!” she exclaimed. “Bacon. Sausage. Fried ham. I knew it. What else have you two been squirreling away?” The foil from another package fell to the floor. Half a dozen biscuits and as many jelly packets were added to the heap of breakfast meats. Now she had her hand in the bag, digging around to see what else she’d find. A set of silverware clattered onto the table, followed by two of the restaurant’s small service plates, salt and pepper shakers, and a jumbo-sized McDonald’s drink cup. Orange juice slopped over the side as Jackie held it triumphantly in the air.

  “There’s enough food in this bag to feed six people,” she said accusingly. “I told Mr. Wiggins somebody was stealing food. Y’all ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

  The young men looked anything but ashamed. “Lighten up, babe,” one of them said, snatching the backpack out of her hands. “It’s not like we broke into Fort Knox or something. Just a little snack for the guys back in the room.”

  Both of them got up from the table, threw a handful of pennies on top of the mess, than swaggered out of the restaurant.

  Jackie stood for a moment, speechless. Then she scooped up the change and followed the boys out into the hotel lobby, where they were unlocking their bikes from the wrought-iron planter they had chained them to the night before. “Here!” she shouted, flinging the pennies in their faces. “Buy some bubblegum for the dudes back in the room. And get those bikes out of this lobby before one of our regular guests trips over them.”

  The boys glared at her and mumbled something under their breaths, but they wheeled the bikes quickly out of the lobby, while Jackie stood there, hands on her hips, daring them to give her any more lip.

  “Good for her,” Truman said. He scraped up the last bit of scrambled eggs with the crust of his toast, then pushed away from the table.

  “Time to get busy. I’ve got a lot of research to get done before I go in to work,” Truman said.

  “Yeah,” Ollie said reluctantly. “Me, too. You got anything you need me to research? I got all those magazines at the newsstand, you know.”

  “Not today,” Truman said. “Let me get my feet wet at Bondurant Motors. Then maybe I’ll have a better idea of how you can help. Things are starting to heat up though, I can tell you that.”

  “Gonna be a big story,” Ollie said. “Blow this town apart.”

  Jackie stomped back into the dining room and began cleaning up the mess the hostel kids had made at their table. Truman watched in sympathy. “I’d be satisfied just to help her get her car or her money back,” he said.

  “And solve a murder,” Ollie added.

  Truman didn’t correct him.

  Ed Weingarten, the FDLE agent, was visiting a sick friend, his secretary said. Truman left a message telling him it was urgent that they talk.

  Then he called Clarice Umbach, his insurance agent. Actually, Clarice was his old agent’s daughter-in-law. When Jack retired, Clarice took over all his clients. She’d been helpful and sympathetic during Nellie’s hospitalization, and later … And over the years, he’d referred a lot of business to Jack and Clarice.

  She greeted him enthusiastically. “My favorite client! Want to hear about our new annuity program for that grandson of yours?”

  He felt a pang of guilt. Someday, he’d put some more money in that college fund he’d started for Chipper. Someday.

  “Actually, Clarice, I need information for a big story I’m working on for the St. Pete Times. A car insurance scam.”

  Clarice groaned. “That’s all we need around here. A new way to cheat insurance companies. Pretty soon there won’t be an insurer in the country willing to write a policy down here. So tell me how this one works.”

  “They stage car accidents,” Truman started.

  “Nothing new in that,” Clarice said.

  “This guy owns a used-car lot. From what I’ve gathered, they buy a collision policy on a junky car, put it in the name of one of their flunkies, then stage an accident with a much more expensive car. Corvettes, usually, for some reason I can’t figure out. And they said something about wanting to be able to make the claim at a drive-through.”

  “I can help you with that,” Clarice said. “A Corvette’s body is made almost entirely of fiberglass. No metal on it. You hit a Corvette and it crumples like a paper doll. That’s why their rates are so high, higher even than your average sports-car. On the upside though, a good body man—one who knows fiberglass—can put one back together pretty quickly. Unless the frame is bent. If that happens, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can make it right.”

  Truman was taking notes almost as fast as Clarice was talking.

  “Could you take the same car, take it apart, and put it back together again and again? Without most people being able to tell?”

  She paused. “I don’t know. You need to talk to a body shop about that. Want me to see who’s on our approved list?”

  “Yeah,” Truman said. “But what about the insurance claims? Wouldn’t somebody notice the same guy getting hit over and over again?”

  Clarice laughed. “Theoretically, yes. There are two or three huge companies, Globalfax is the-biggie, that keep computer databases on every policy bought, every claim filed, everything. They sell that data to insurance companies so they can check up on people before they write a policy. See if they’re a good risk.”

  Truman was appalled. “They can do that?”

  “And more,” Clarice said. “But if you’re worried about somebody checking up on you, Truman, you can relax. I happen to know that your insurer, Gulfshores, isn’t a subscriber.”

  “I should have known,” Truman said. “They don’t even send out a calendar at Christmas.”

  “Don’t knock it. Their rates are the cheapest in town,” Clarice reminded him.

  “I’d sure like to think of a way to find out whether these crooks have a history of this thing,” Truman said.

  “I’ve got a friend at Allstate,” Clarice said thoughtfully. “They do subscribe to Globalfax. We trade favors sometimes. Do you have the names of these scam artists?”

  “Just three,” Truman said. “Ronnie Bondurant. Wormy, uh, William D. Weems. Hernando Boone. Oh, yeah, and there’s a fourth. Billy Tripp. Two ‘P’s, I think.”

  He could hear her pencil scribbling away. “Got it,” she said finally. “What kind of currency can I use for the trade?”

  He had to think. In the old days, at the wire, he had access to all kinds of riches: passes to the latest concerts, movies, the circus, Broadway plays, free records, books, booze, hotel rooms, fancy restaurant meals. Everybody wanted to show off their wares to the Associated Press. Later, the bosses had started to frown on freebies. Backlash from Watergate. So you took the freebies under the table.

  Now he was retired. He had a Nova station wagon with a busted window, a half share in an aluminum boat with no motor, and an AARP discount card.

  What about Ollie though? He griped all the time about all the magazines and paperback books he had to destroy so Chet could get credit for unsold merchandise. Truman had access to every cheesy paper-back novel and magazine he could ever want.

  “Does your friend like to read?” he asked Clarice.

  “She likes to eat,” Clarice said. “I bet she weighs three hundred pounds. It’s a cinch she’s not spending her spare time working out at the gym. Let me give it a try. Anything else while I’m at it?”

  “No, but thanks,” Truman said. “Wait. Yes. One more name. Just in case. Jeff Cantrell.”

  When Ed Weingarten called back, he was not in a chatty mood.

  “You’re not still sniffing around Ronnie Bondurant and his bunch, are you?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Truman said, getting defensive. “In fact, that’s why I’m calling. Last night we saw them in action. Bondurant, Weems, Boone, and a kid named Tripp. Out on Weedon Island, where all the construction is going on. We saw them total Boone’s Mercedes. On purpose. This kid named Tripp was nearly killed. And I know about the Corvettes, too—why they use them, probably even why they killed Jeff Cantrell.”

  “We already know most of that stuff,” Weingarten snapped. “Mr. Kicklighter, I asked you not to get involved in this matter. You’re endangering yourself as well as our agents.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Truman said. “In the meantime, you people can’t tell me a single thing about this young man they killed, can you? While I’ve tracked down his girlfriend, staked out his apartment, what have you people been doing? Tell me that, Mr. FDLE.”

  It had been years since he’d told off a cop like that. Felt good, too.

  “It’s against agency policy for me to tell you this, Mr. Kicklighter. But I’m going to do it anyway, just to get you off my back. We have reason to believe that Jeff Cantrell is not dead. We think he’s very much alive. Probably still mixed up with Bondurant.”

  “No,” Truman said. “Jackie saw him. With a bullet in the side of his head. You can’t fake that. And nobody’s seen or heard from him since that day.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26