Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course, page 19
part #2 of Truman Kicklighter Series
“Wow,” Ollie said when she put the dishes on the table with a little flourish. “Thanks!”
“That’ll be twenty dollars,” Jackie said. “Cash.”
Ollie nearly fell off the chair. “What?” he yelped. “Since when does a ham sandwich cost that much?”
“Since I came up twenty dollars short for my car payment,” Jackie said. She whipped the plates back onto her tray. “If you don’t want this, I’ll just take it back in the kitchen. Lunch is over, you know.”
“There’s a name for this,” Ollie told her. “It’s called extortion. What if Mr. Wiggins finds out you extort money from the guests?”
“You let me worry about Mr. Wiggins,” Jackie said. She hoisted the trayful of food to her shoulder. “Well?”
He reached for his hip pocket. “All you had to do was ask. I would have loaned you the money since you need it that bad.”
“Right,” Jackie said sarcastically. She knew, as did all of his friends, that Ollie was a hoarder. It wasn’t that he was selfish, or even miserly, it was just that he had been tucking away bits of money for years, “in case of a rainy day.”
Ollie took out his moth-eaten black change purse and turned away so that Jackie would not see his stash. He counted out twenty ones, then turned back around and put the faded bills into her outstretched hand.
“I thought you weren’t going to pay those crooks any more money,” he said, just a hint of maliciousness in his voice. After all, they had left him out of all the fun the night before. “Thought you were going to get Truman to prove they stole your car and make them give it back. What happened to that idea?”
She put the money in the pocket of the apron with the rest of her savings and gave it a pat to reassure herself. “We’re still working on it,” she said. “But I need to make that payment. Just in case.”
Ronnie and Wormy were world-class pissed off. Two hours they’d spent trying to find LeeAnn Pilker. Her apartment was empty, and nobody was around to say whether or not they’d seen her lately. Her boss at the club, a guy named Ike, claimed he hadn’t seen her, even after Ronnie flicked a $100 bill his way.
“Anywhere else she’d go?” Wormy asked. “Like, if she was hiding?”
“Why would she be hiding?” Ike asked coolly. He pushed the $100 bill back at Ronnie. He remembered these two from earlier in the week. Big spenders, but they’d scared away half his regular clientele. And he knew LeeAnn had gone home with the guy in the golf shirt. Bondurant—who ran the car lot across the street.
“Like, if she stole some money or something,” Wormy said, heavy-lidded.
“Let me talk to your other girls,” Ronnie said, cutting Wormy short. “All these girls tell stuff to each other. One of them probably knows something. I’ll pay for their time,” he added.
“No dice,” Ike said. “The girls work for me, not you. And they mind their own business. If LeeAnn shows up, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”
Ronnie cussed him out good, until the hulking blond dyke from the front door heard him shouting and showed up at the manager’s door brandishing a bad-looking length of iron pipe wrapped in black tape.
“Anything wrong, Ike?” she asked.
“Naw,” Ike said. “You wanna show these guys the back door? They got a business appointment to get to.”
Ronnie cussed all the way across the street. “Fucking pimp,” he fumed as they dodged between cars. “He’s probably got the bitch hidden somewhere right inside that club.”
His mood didn’t lighten any when they walked in the front door of the showroom. Nobody was there. The place was deserted, the front door unlocked so that any asshole could just walk in off the street and rip them off.
“Where’s the old man?” Ronnie asked, looking around the showroom. “I told that old bastard to mind the store. Where the hell is he?”
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Wormy said.
“Shut the fuck up and find him,” Ronnie said.
Just then, the door from the garage opened, and Truman strolled inside, still working on the cellophane wrapper of a beef jerky stick. Right behind him was Eddie Nevins, both of them chatting away like long-lost chums.
“You’re supposed to be out here answering the phones,” Ronnie said. His voice was almost a whisper. A dull pink flush was creeping up his neck. All day long, he’d been getting no respect, now even the hired help was treating him like he was nothing.
“What if somebody came in here, wanting to make their payment?” Ronnie demanded. “What if somebody walked on the lot, wanted to talk to a salesman about a car? You just put out a sign, ‘Gone Fishin’? Screw that, Kicklighter! You’re here working for me, you better be working, not wandering around feeding your face, snooping someplace you got no business.”
Truman felt his face burn. He counted silently. “I’ve been here since noon, Ronnie,” he said, sounding cooler than he felt. “No lunch. Nothing. I just went in back to get a snack. Eddie was here, too, waiting to talk to you. We were gone maybe two minutes. I could hear the phone ring from the garage, and the doorbell, too. You want to fire me, go ahead. I’m not a young man, you know. I’ve got to keep my blood sugar up.”
“Who called you?” Ronnie asked, looking at Eddie.
“I called me,” Eddie said, crossing his arms across his chest to show off the rippling biceps below the cutoff sweatshirt sleeves. “You want to know where Wesley Coombs’s Monte Carlo is at?”
“It’d better be right here,” Ronnie said. “You been paid. I want that car.”
“Ask Wormy here what happened when I went to get the Monte Carlo,” Eddie suggested. “Ask him if he deliberately set me up to get hauled off to jail. Ask him if he notified the cops about the pick up.”
Wormy’s expression did not change. “Tough luck, Nevins. I forgot. Guess I must have been busy with something … important.”
Eddie cracked his knuckles, one at a time. “I had to pay five hundred dollars to get out of jail and get my truck out of the impound lot. And as far as I know, Wesley Coombs is laughing his ass off, ‘cause he’s still driving that Monte Carlo and he ain’t paid a dime on it for three months.”
“Goddamn,” Ronnie said, slamming his fist down on the desk. “Can’t I trust anybody around here? I’m surrounded by morons and incompetents.”
“Hey!” Wormy protested. “It slipped my mind. Honest.”
Ronnie stomped off to his office and slammed the door behind him. He opened the safe, reached past the pistols, and retrieved a stack of bills. Peeling off the needed amount, he closed the safe and twirled the lock around.
After this whole mess was over with, with LeeAnn, Boone, everybody, Ronnie promised himself, he was gonna have to rethink his personnel situation. Even Wormy. Especially Wormy. His daddy had warned him time and time again about putting trust in others. Lawton Bondurant had always been a friendless type, suspicious of everybody, including his own flesh and blood.
Not Ronnie. He believed in getting along and going along. He liked to party, liked to wheel and deal. A people person, that was Ronnie Bondurant. Him and Wormy, they’d been a team for a lot of years. Going way back to Dixie Highway Motors when Wormy came in to buy a ‘68 Cougar and stayed to work for Ronnie’s old man.
Wormy had his quirks. His moods. His hang-ups. He hated blacks, Cubans, Mexicans, women, and fags. But up until now, he’d been invaluable. Lately though, Wormy had let him down. Those pills he was popping kept him blitzed out of his mind. And the thing with Cantrell. Wormy had fired first, Ronnie was sure. He’d screwed up the red Corvette grab, too. He couldn’t get along with people. Take LeeAnn. She was afraid of him. Wormy had said or done something to make her suspicious of him. And now she was gone, his one shot at perfection.
Now Eddie. The best repo man around. Cheapest, too. If only Wormy didn’t know so much about the business, Ronnie thought. Too late now. Wormy knew, literally, where all the bodies were buried. Old Dad was right again.
He took the money out into the showroom. Wormy sat, Buddhalike, in his chair, staring straight ahead at the wall, like there was something fascinating on that wall he looked at all day, every day. Eddie held his hand out. Ronnie counted out eleven twenties and a ten and ignored Wormy’s pout.
“That’s half,” Ronnie said. “When you grab the Monte Carlo and bring it back here, I’ll pay the rest.”
Storm clouds gathered on Eddie’s face. Truman gave him the slightest signal: appeasement, at any cost.
“That sucks,” Eddie said. “And I ain’t goin’ back down there to Crackertown till I hear you, Ronnie, call the cops and give them the info.”
“Wormy can call,” Ronnie said.
“No way,” Eddie said. “We do this my way, or I call my lawyer and get him after y’all for wrongful imprisonment. I already talked to him when he got me outta jail.”
“Lawyer,” Wormy said and laughed.
“Shut up,” Ronnie said. He picked up the phone and got through to the warrants division and gave them the title number and pick-up authorization for the Monte Carlo to be repossessed from Wesley Coombs.
Ronnie put the receiver down. “Everybody happy? Now get the hell off my lot.”
Truman straightened the papers on his desktop and walked out of the showroom and over to his station wagon.
Eddie pulled alongside him in the truck. “Jeff’s in there, man,” he said, his face ashen. “In that drum. Just like I told you. How we gonna prove it?”
“I don’t know,” Truman admitted. He could see Wormy and Ronnie inside, watching their curbside conference. “Meet me down the block, at that Texaco station,” Truman said. “We’d better talk.”
By the time Truman got down the block, Eddie had already gone inside the station and gotten them two cold bottles of beer, brown paper bags twisted expertly around their necks.
Eddie handed Truman a beer as he climbed into the truck.
“We don’t know for sure Jeff is in that drum. Or even on the car lot,” Truman said. “But Ronnie’s gotten mighty paranoid all of a sudden. Did you hear the way he talked to Wormy?”
“Maybe the love bug’s bitin’ at Ronnie,” Eddie said. “I forgot to tell you, I dropped by the Candy Store. One of the girls was saying LeeAnn moved in with Ronnie. Big house on the south side. Right on the bay.”
“She’ll never talk to us now,” Truman said. “Even if she does know what happened to Cantrell. You know,” he said, taking a sip of the beer, “I talked to the FDLE agent who’s working this big investigation of Bondurant and Hernando Boone. He says Cantrell might not be dead at all. Weingarten says they’ve traced phone calls to LeeAnn’s phone that they think were from Jeff, and that somebody’s been using his credit card and ATM card.”
“How could that be?” Eddie asked.
“Two possibilities,” Truman theorized. “Jeff Cantrell is alive, and he’s hiding out for some reason, maybe because he crossed Bondurant. Which means he maybe faked his own death. Maybe Jackie didn’t see what she thought she saw that night. Or, we were right in the first place. Ronnie or somebody killed Jeff. The body’s hidden someplace close by. And the phone calls and credit card transactions are part of Ronnie’s plot to keep anybody from wondering what-ever happened to Jeff Cantrell.”
Eddie drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of the truck.
“We’ve gotta get back in that garage. And we gotta get LeeAnn to level with us.”
“Maybe we need some help,” Truman suggested.
Ollie was adamant. “I’m not setting foot on that car lot again. Those guys know us. They’ve got alarms and everything. They caught us last time. And it’s not just me. I don’t think it’s right to drag a girl into this.”
Jackie threw a pizza crust at Ollie. “I’m not afraid of going in there again. Only way I’m ever going to get this Corvette thing settled is to prove that those guys stole my car. And that Jeff Cantrell got killed, maybe because of it. And he was, too, dead. I know dead when I see dead.”
Eddie sat back on the small chair they had dragged into Truman’s room at the Fountain of Youth Hotel for this meeting. He’d greeted everybody after Truman made the introductions, and now he intended to let the others do the talking. Besides, he liked watching this cute Jackie Canaday. She wasn’t about to let two old birds get away with treating her like a sissy girl.
“We need both of you,” Truman said. “With the four of us working this thing, it should go smoothly. No car alarms or unexpected police this time.”
Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
Hernando Boone’s neck hurt like a sonofabitch. He couldn’t move it to the right but maybe two inches, couldn’t move it to the left at all. No time to do anything about it now.
His brother had called earlier in the day. A whole eighteen-wheeler full of beef baby-back ribs was on its way from Lakeland to St. Pete.
“Grade A,” Orlando had babbled. “And you know what’s coming up—right?”
“A migraine,” Hernando had said. “I’ve got spots in front of my eyes. I need to lay down.”
“No, bro,” Orlando had said. “Labor Day weekend. Everybody barbecues on Labor Day weekend. You should see the meat on these ribs. I saved back a case for myself. They’re marked three ninety-nine a pound. Blue Light Special—right?”
Hernando had squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He’d looked at the calendar on his desk and had felt the vein throbbing in his forehead.
“Labor Day is two weeks away. What am I gonna do with an eighteen-wheeler full of meat until then?”
“Shit. Throw it in the walk-in cooler like always,” his brother had said carelessly. “Ribs freeze good.”
“I got no more room,” Hernando had shouted. “I still got twenty cases of the boneless breaded chicken breasts you sent me for Fourth of July. You know what those tasted like, bro? Breaded chickenshit! My ladies can’t repeat sell to the sisters after they gone and bought chickenshit for a Fourth of July cookout.”
“How I’m supposed to know they’re bogus?” Orlando had asked. “I just steal the shit. I don’t run no taste tests.”
“Never mind,” Hernando had said. “Even if the walk-in was empty—even if I gave away all that chicken—I couldn’t store that much ribs. And the girls ain’t never sold a whole tractor-trailerful before.”
“Warehouse sale,” Orlando had prompted him. “Have the ladies call up and tell folks it’s a tractor-trailer sale. Three dollars a pound. Tell them they gotta show up at a certain time and place. Bring their own coolers. Park the trailer someplace nice and quiet. We sell ‘em right off the back, like we used to do with the Guccis and the Ray-Bans.”
“Might work,” Hernando had said reluctantly. “When did you say the truck will be here?”
“Better get your ladies jamming on those phones,” Orlando had said and chuckled. “I mapped out a back way since I had to borrow the truck to get the meat. Say nine o’clock. My driver’s calling me in a little bit and he’ll need an address. Where you want to set up?”
Nine o’clock. Hernando would have to work fast. And find the right place. That was crucial. His neck had throbbed. A reminder. “You know a place called Weedon Island?”
He called his cousin Alma, who ran the phone room. “Truckload of beef baby-back ribs coming in tonight,” he told her. “Tell the ladies, whoever sells the most is gonna win a prize. Let’s see. How about a—”
“Diamond tennis bracelet,” Alma suggested. “We got two left from that last shipment of stuff Orlando sent over.”
“All right,” he agreed. He told her the details. “Tell everybody the sale only lasts for an hour. Nine till ten. We gotta be out of there before anybody notices the traffic. And tell the girls we’re doing ten-pound minimums. For every twenty-pound order we throw in a case of breaded chicken breasts.”
“Huh,” Alma said. “Ought to throw that chicken in the trash. I’ll tell ‘em. That meat better be right this time.”
“Weedon Island. Ronnie ain’t gonna like that,” Billy Tripp said. The gauze around his jaw muffled the words and Boone had to listen hard to make out what he was saying. Billy Tripp wasn’t a treat for sore eyes today. The small patches of his face that weren’t swathed in bandages were red and shiny, like fresh- ground chuck. He had a high cervical collar that kept his neck immobile, and his left wrist was in a cast. Where he wasn’t burned, he was bruised, and one of his ferret-like front teeth had been knocked out, giving him an unfortunate cartoon-character appearance.
“I ain’t running no opinion polls,” Boone told Billy. “Anyway, after this load, I’m clearing out inventory. Getting out of home-delivery meat sales.”
“Hot meat, you mean,” Billy wheezed, his chest heaving a little, his blistered lips too swollen to smile.
“Never mind that,” Boone said. “What’s this deal you talkin’ about?”
“Bondurant fucked me over,” Billy said. “Wouldn’t pay my hospital bill. I had to sneak out of there when the nurses weren’t looking. Now Ronnie’s trying to stiff me on account of what happened to your Mercedes. And he’s the one who told me to punch it. Know what I think? I think he hoped we’d both get killed.”
“You totaled my Mercedes,” Boone said. “Who’s gonna pay for that?”
“I’m telling you, Ronnie’s going to fuck you over, too,” Tripp said. “I heard him tell Wormy. After they dropped you at that phone booth. They thought I was unconscious. Near dead. I thought so, too. And Ronnie said he’d put in the claim for the insurance, collect, and then tell you the insurance wouldn’t pay the whole amount. Keep all the money himself.”
