Tripp swallowed hard. Talking was painful. “Wormy said they should get rid of you. Like they did Jeff Cantrell. The guy who used to work at the lot. Ronnie told everybody Jeff left town. I think he killed him.”

  “Well, he’s dead,” Boone said carelessly. “That part’s the truth. I was there. So they think they can cut me out, huh?”

  “That’s why I came over here,” Billy said. “I know how they run things. I can help you. Could use me a job. And a place to crash.”

  Boone’s lips stretched into a wide smile, his high cheekbones revealing his Indian blood. “Crash. You like to crash, don’t you?”

  LeeAnn Pilker squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Just do it. And fast, before I change my mind.”

  Danielle picked up a hank of the long, shimmering hair and sawed away at it with the big shears. LeeAnn felt it fall on her back. She allowed herself one tear. One tiny tear. “Keep going,” she told Danielle.

  She breathed again. Ever since she’d left Ronnie’s house this morning, LeeAnn had to remind herself to breathe. She was wound as tight as a three-dollar wristwatch. She had to keep moving.

  Her first stop had been at Jeff’s apartment. She’d parked two blocks away and jogged to the apartment. Mrs. Borgshultz’s car was there, but LeeAnn was desperate. She used her key and slipped into the apartment.

  The phone was still hooked up. Ronnie must have forgotten to have it cut off. Or Wormy, most likely.

  She called Danielle, her old room-mate. There was nobody else.

  “What do you want?” Danielle had asked, not bothering to hide her annoyance. Danielle was married, had two little kids. Her husband didn’t know anything about his wife’s old life and Danielle intended to keep it like that.

  “I need help,” LeeAnn said. “I need to disappear for a while.”

  Danielle didn’t bother to ask why. The old life was gone, but not forgotten. And LeeAnn always had terrible taste in men. “I can’t give you any money,” she said “Dave’s been laid off.”

  “I’ve got money. Some,” LeeAnn said. “But I can’t go to a motel. He’ll find me. And the police will probably be looking for me too. It’s his money.”

  The trade wasn’t great, as trades went. Danielle’s Isuzu was eleven years old, needed new tires, and the clutch was nearly shot. To get in the front seat you had to get in on the passenger side, because one of the kids had shoved a popsicle stick in the door lock. The Coleman camper was hitched onto the back.

  They took the license plate off LeeAnn’s Honda, and Danielle replaced it with one from her grandma’s Plymouth. “She’s in a nursing home. She’ll never know the difference,” Danielle said.

  LeeAnn had to promise to bring the Isuzu and the Coleman camper and the other stuff back within a week. “Dave thinks I rented it to some friends,” Danielle explained, counting the twenties LeeAnn gave her, then tucking them in the pocket of her shorts.

  After Danielle helped crank up the tent part and showed LeeAnn how to use the little butane stove and the lantern, she glanced anxiously around the Fort DeSoto Park campsite. The crickets were starting up, and the baby was stirring in her car seat. Dave would be expecting dinner on the table real soon.

  LeeAnn shook the hair off her shoulders one last time, and tried not to look at the ground. Her neck felt naked.

  “How do I look?” she asked anxiously.

  Danielle gave her a critical going-over. “Well, it’s kind of raggedy, but actually, with your bone structure, people will probably think it’s the latest style.”

  LeeAnn looked stunning, but there was still some lingering jealousy over a man Danielle had brought home one time, and LeeAnn had taken over. They’d sworn all that was behind them, but maybe it wasn’t.

  “How are you gonna hide those?” Danielle asked, nodding at LeeAnn’s chest.

  “Did you bring a couple of Dave’s shirts?”

  Danielle handed over two of Dave’s biggest, baggiest short-sleeved blue work shirts, and LeeAnn buttoned them over the tight T-shirt she’d been wearing.

  “You look like shit,” Danielle said encouragingly. “I gotta go now. But by Sunday night, you can probably move to a better spot. Ft. DeSoto’s usually full on weekends. You were lucky somebody canceled out at the last minute. Think you can take the camper down and move it by yourself?”

  “I don’t plan to still be here on Monday,” LeeAnn told her. “Soon as I find out what I need to know, get enough money to get clear of here, I’m going as far away as I can get. Some place where they have leaves that fall in the autumn, and no bugs. And no men.”

  “Antarctica?” Danielle asked.

  “Maybe,” LeeAnn shot back. “I’ll call you Monday. Tell you where to pick up your car. Somewhere at the airport.”

  When Danielle was gone, LeeAnne went inside the camper and sat on the foam pad that was supposed to be a bed. She looked at Ronnie’s big gold Rolex, double-wrapped around her wrist. She could hear bugs outside, thudding softly against the sides of the canvas tent. The tent top smelled of pee, and hot dogs and baked beans.

  Right about now, she thought, Ronnie would be tearing up the town, looking for her. And his money.

  And his watch. And wondering how much she knew about Jeff Cantrell. And everything else.

  She took the bottle of bug spray Danielle had left and sprayed it all over her arms and legs and neck. Then she set out in the direction of the ranger’s station, where there was supposed to be a pay phone.

  Wormy was getting ready to lock the front door when he saw Billy Tripp get out of a yellow cab.

  “Sonofabitch,” he yelled to Ronnie, who was in the office, getting some cash to replace what LeeAnn had stolen. Ronnie believed in carrying at least a few thousand in walking-around money at all times. “Look what the cat just dragged in.”

  Tripp was limping badly. “Heya, Wormy,” he said uneasily, looking around the darkened showroom. “Is Ronnie around?”

  “Come on back here,” Ronnie said, recognizing the voice.

  Billy followed Wormy into the private office, and Wormy closed it behind them.

  “Thought you disappeared,” Ronnie said. “Wormy here says you been calling up, making all kind of demands. My employees don’t make demands, Billy. Not if they want to stay alive.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Ronnie,” Billy said. “A misunderstanding. Don’t you wanna know why I’m here now?”

  Wormy crossed his legs and leaned carefully back in his chair. He had to do everything carefully now, even with the pain pills. The back reminded him of who’d caused his pain, and he thought longingly of the safe, where Ronnie made him lock up his pistol.

  “Boone wants me to help him set you up,” Billy said. “He came to the hospital, paid my bill, took me over to his office. You know, in that old store over there in colored town?”

  “I know where Boone’s at,” Ronnie said. “What makes him think he can set me up, with or without your help?”

  “Boone knows you keep a lot of cash around here, especially on Fridays, when people come in and make their payments. He’s got one of those gangs, robbing crews he calls them, he just wants me to give him the inside story. You know, where you keep the money and all.”

  “Let him try it,” Wormy put in.

  “I ain’t working for Boone,” Billy said, shaking his head vigorously. “He’s a crazy man. But what I wanted to tell you was, while I was at his place a while ago, I heard him setting up a deal. For tonight. Back out on Weedon Island. He’s got a load of meat coming in. Ribs. I thought maybe we rip him off before he gets you.”

  “Meat?” Wormy hooted. “Do we look like Oscar Meyer to you?”

  Ronnie sat back in his chair and gave Billy Tripp an indulgent smile. “Wormy’s right. I’m in the used-car business here, Billy. What would I do with a load of ribs? Buy a car, get a rack of ribs?”

  “It ain’t the meat you want,” Billy said. “Boone only sells cash and carry. The ribs are two ninety-nine a pound. Ten-pound minimum. That’s thirty dollars a person, at least. And it’s a whole tractor-trailer. You know how those people love their ribs.”

  “Wonder what one of those rigs carries?” Ronnie mused.

  “No, Ronnie,” Wormy protested. “Don’t even start. You said we were done with Boone. We take his insurance money and get rid of him, first chance we get.”

  “A holdup,” Ronnie said. “Like we used to do back in the good old days when my daddy was getting started. Stick ‘em up. Hand over the loot. Oops. Bang. Adios, amigo.”

  “I heard Boone talking on the phone,” Billy continued. “He figures that truck can carry five hundred cases of ribs. Thirty pounds of ribs in a case. That’s fifteen thousand pounds.”

  “Forty-five thousand dollars,” Ronnie said. “I’m liking this more and more.” He got up and sat on the edge of the desk, inches from where Billy Tripp perched like a wounded bird.

  “Why would Boone cut you in on something like this, Billy? He’s got his own crew he works with, he told you himself.”

  Billy’s right eye flickered in an attempt at a wink. “I told him you double-crossed me. And you were gonna double-cross him, too. I think he had that part figured already. So I said we should work together. Get you before you get him.”

  Ronnie put his hand on Billy’s shoulder. The kid flinched. “I did double-cross you, Billy. So why come to me? Why not go to work for Boone?”

  Tripp looked down at his dust-covered tennis shoes. You could still see some blood drops on the laces and the toes. “You know.”

  “What?” Ronnie said.

  “He talks about being an Indian,” Tripp said. “Mostly he’s a nigger. My mama wouldn’t stand for me taking orders from no nigger. That’s not how I was raised.”

  Wormy shrugged. It made sense. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Jackie put the phone down and looked at the others in the room.

  “LeeAnn’s not at the Candy Store. Her boss said she didn’t show up for work today. And two other guys already came looking for her, in a really bad mood. The boss said that if I was a friend of LeeAnn’s, I should tell her this guy was talking about calling the cops. Because she stole a lot of money from him.”

  Truman was puttering around his room, cleaning up the empty soda cans and paper plates and pizza crusts. His place was so small, that if you left any messes at all, it became unbearable. “She’s on the run from Bondurant,” he said. “If we could find her, maybe she’d help us.”

  “If we don’t find her, and Ronnie does, she won’t be helping anybody,” Eddie said. “He’ll kill her, too.”

  All this talk of people killing each other was becoming increasingly alarming to Ollie. “Not to be a killjoy or anything,” he started, stopping to chew on a piece of pizza crust he managed to snatch up before Truman disposed of the box, “but I thought all we were supposed to be doing was finding Jackie’s car. Now we’re chasing runaway strippers and dealing with murderers and everything.”

  He hadn’t forgotten about Jackie’s holding him up for twenty dollars. “How are we going to find a stripper on the run? She probably took the first bus out of town if she knows what’s good for her.”

  Jackie gave Ollie a withering look.

  Ollie didn’t care. “Am I the only one in this room with any common sense? Truman, you talk to her. I mean, we don’t even have a plan.”

  But Truman and Eddie were quietly conferring at the desk, with Eddie drawing diagrams on a paper napkin, and Truman’s finger hovering over a city map.

  “Truman?” Ollie repeated.

  “Oh. A plan,” Truman said. “Eddie has some suggestions, and some rather handy expertise. And he insists that he wants to help out.”

  Three sets of eyes turned toward Eddie. He felt surprisingly bashful.

  “See, we need to get Wormy and Ronnie out of the way for a while, so you guys can look for Jeff’s body. On the car lot anyway. Me and Truman figure that’s where the body’s hidden. So I’ll go do what I’m supposed to do. Pick up Wesley Coombs’s Monte Carlo. Then, once I snatch the car, I call Bondurant and Weems and tell them they gotta meet me halfway to pick up the car. ‘Cause I gotta go out right away on another pickup. Or else I leave the Monte Carlo right where it’s at.”

  “How do you know Ronnie will bring Wormy with him?” Jackie wanted to know.

  “Because somebody has to drive the Monte Carlo back to the lot, and somebody has to drive their car,” Eddie explained.

  “And why wouldn’t they just pick up the car and go right back to the lot? Or hire one of those drivers of theirs to go pick up the Monte Carlo?” Ollie said, wanting to pick holes in Eddie’s plan.

  “Their favorite driver, Billy, is in the hospital,” Truman said. “We’re just going to assume it’ll be Ronnie and Wormy. But Eddie’s got a phone in his truck. If anything goes wrong, he’ll call the lot to warn us. Give the signal. Three rings and a hang-up. That’ll give us time to get out.”

  “And how are you going to keep Ronnie and Wormy occupied long enough to give us time to search the car lot?” Jackie asked. “It’s a big place. I’ve been there, remember?”

  “I’m gonna snatch that car of theirs,” Eddie said. “With them in it. That’ll give y’all plenty of time.”

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  The ranger’s station was closed, and the campground was quiet. Anybody who would voluntarily camp in August in Florida, LeeAnn had decided, was probably already institutionalized. On the clamshell road in front of the station, four kids rode their bikes around in dazed circles.

  A middle-aged man was standing right in front of the only pay phone she’d seen in the whole place. His face and neck and arms were burnt lobster red and his pale blue eyes stared intently at the camp bulletin board.

  LeeAnn stood beside him, pretending to be just as engrossed in all the institutional postings. There were fishing regulations: “No speckled trout to be taken under twelve inches long, no redfish to be taken due to a statewide fishing ban, no snook to be taken with any method except hook and line, only one snook per person per day to be kept, no snook under twenty-four inches to be kept, and no gill-netting, trotlines, or spearguns of any kind to be used in a Pinellas County Park.”

  Also prohibited were firearms, explosives, loud radios or televisions, unleashed animals, and alcoholic beverages or controlled substances of any kind.

  The rules baffled LeeAnn, whose family considered all those forbidden commodities as essential to any worthwhile outdoor activity.

  “What’s a snook?” The sunburnt man’s broad, blistered forehead was wrinkled in puzzlement. “I never heard of a snook. We don’t have them up home,” he said apologetically. The accent was flat, midwestern.

  Up home must be Illinois, she decided. They got a lot of guys from Illinois in the club. Apparently they got their rocks off looking at skin that wasn’t the same hue as milk.

  “It’s a fish,” LeeAnn said. Growing up, her brothers would point a lantern down into the bay, and when a snook came swirling up out of the depths to take a friendly peek at the light, they’d blast it with their BB guns. Big sportsmen, her brothers.

  “I think they only have them in Florida,” she added. “And it’s illegal to sell them. They’re like, holy or something.”

  “Interesting,” he said. He picked up his little toy tacklebox and Zebco fishing reel and wandered away.

  She dialed the number at Bondurant Motors and turned around, so she could keep an eye out for more bulletin board readers.

  LeeAnn glanced idly down at herself and was pleased with what she saw. She was wearing a pair of muddy construction boots she’d found in the trunk of Danielle’s Isuzu, along with a moldy pack of cigarettes, which she’d stuck in her shirt pocket. She’d chewed off the acrylic nails, stuffed all her jewelry in the pocket of the baggy, oversized jeans, and had also appropriated Dave’s baseball cap, which she wore backward over her new haircut.

  The phone rang a long time. “Pick up,” she muttered. She hadn’t stopped to think about getting Ronnie’s home number.

  “Bondurant Motors.” It was him.

  She almost lost her nerve. And then she thought again of his intentions to have her cut apart and glued back together like some Frankenstein Barbie doll.

  “LeeAnn?” he said softly. “Is that you, baby?”

  “It’s me all right,” she said.

  “Why, LeeAnn?” he crooned. “Why’d you leave, baby? If you wanted money, you know I’d give you anything in the world.”

  Especially if it involved rhinoplasty or liposuction. “Cut the crap, Ronnie,” she said. “I know Jeff’s dead. You guys killed him. Wormy hid the body, only he’s got to move it pretty soon, before buzzards start circling Bondurant Motors. And let’s not forget this whole scam you’re working on Hernando Boone. Pretty scary guy to mess with, Ronnie.”

  “No, baby,” Ronnie said. “You got it all wrong. See, your mama was right. People shouldn’t eavesdrop. Because they get things misconstrued. Come on back to the house, LeeAnn, and I’ll explain everything.”

  “Like hell.” Her voice had taken on a new coarseness, a bravado that she’d never heard before. Yeah, bravado. You cut your hair and dress butch, and you could say anything to anybody. It was like you’d suddenly grown balls.

  “I want twenty thousand dollars, Ronnie, or I go to the cops. Or Hernando Boone. Both, maybe. Yeah, I like that idea. Boone will pay me for tipping him off, and if he doesn’t kill you first, I’ll go to the cops, maybe collect one of those big rewards they’re always giving away for crime tips.” LeeAnn laughed from a new place, down in her gut. “Although, to tell the truth, I will turn you in for free if it comes to that.”

  Ronnie waved for Wormy to pick up the extension in the outer office.

  “I don’t have twenty thousand, baby,” he said. “I’m in the used-car business, remember? Besides, the bank is closed.”

  Wormy put his hand over the receiver and held up ten fingers. “Offer her ten,” he mimed.

  LeeAnn had heard the click of the extension, knew Wormy Weems was listening in.

 

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