“There’s a safe in your office,” she said. “Jeff showed it to me. I’m not playing now, Ronnie. I want the cash. Tonight.”

  She heard the crunch of shells and saw a white sedan with a blue bubble on top cruise slowly past. The park ranger gave her a fingertip wave before cruising off to apprehend some heavily armed beer-drinking, dog-owning snook-catchers.

  “Right after sundown,” LeeAnn said, telling him where the drop was to be and how it was to go. “And leave that scuzzy Wormy dude at home, or the deal’s off.” She hung up the phone and allowed herself a little victory dance.

  “Scuzzy?” Wormy said. He popped open a beer and washed down a couple of the Malaysian mind benders. “Scuzzy?”

  Ronnie was still fiddling with the safe combination when the phone rang again, not five minutes later.

  He snatched up the receiver. “What now?”

  “Yo, Ronnie, my man,” Eddie said. “Got a slight problem on my end, dude. I’m on the way to get your Monte Carlo, but soon as I pick it up, I gotta drop it off, ‘cause I got a call on my beeper. From the bank. I gotta pick up a Jaguar and a Viper down in Sarasota. Now. Before the folks get back from the airport. Can’t come all the way north to you.”

  Ronnie felt a sheen of perspiration on his face. He didn’t need this.

  “I don’t need this shit, Eddie,” he said. “Bring the Monte Carlo here, to the lot, or you don’t get paid.”

  “No can do,” Eddie said cheerfully. “Bank’s a way better customer than you, Ronnie. You know where the old Belk’s store was? Over there in Central Plaza? Meet you there in twenty minutes. And if you’re not there, man, I’ll just drop the Monte Carlo, leave it with the keys in it.”

  They both knew that any vehicle left unattended in the bulldozed former shopping center would be stolen or stripped within five minutes.

  “I’m done with you, Eddie,” Ronnie warned. “And I got friends in the business. You’ll never snatch another car in this town again.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Eddie repeated. “See ya.”

  Ronnie took a packet of bills out of the safe, took his own pistol, and handed Wormy his. “Let’s go,” he said with disgust. “I’m gonna take the blue LTD, you can bring the Monte Carlo back here. Then I gotta go deal with that bitch LeeAnn.”

  “You’re paying her off?” Wormy asked. Were the pain pills making him hear things? Was Ronnie Bondurant getting soft?

  “Get real,” Ronnie said, showing Wormy the pistol he’d stuck in the waistband of his slacks. “Make sure your piece is loaded. After we get the keys from Eddie, get rid of him.”

  “What about the meet with Boone?” Wormy protested. “We can deal with that nigger repo man any time. Boone’s a forty-five-thousand-dollar proposition, Ron.”

  “Busy night,” Ronnie shrugged. “After this, people will start showing some respect. No more ‘minority’ partners, big-mouth whores, coked-up monkeys, or snotty repo men. Tonight, we clean house.”

  They heard a tapping on the glass in the showroom window. Ronnie looked out. It was Billy Tripp, peering through the window, the bandages on his face making him look like some white-masked orangutan.

  “Just in time,” Ronnie said.

  He unlocked the door, clapped Billy on the shoulder, and watched with satisfaction as the kid grimaced in pain. “Billy!” Ronnie said. “You’re early.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said, looking around behind him. He seemed jumpier than usual, probably been sniffing some air freshener or whatever it was they sniffed these days.

  “That’s good,” Ronnie said. “Got a little job for you and Wormy to do before we head out to Weedon Island. You go ahead with Wormy now, pick up that Monte Carlo and bring it back here. See you boys about nine, right?”

  Ollie ran his hand reverently over the hood of Eddie’s $40,000 customized repo truck. “Beautiful,” he told Eddie. “How’s it work?”

  Eddie looked at Truman, who nodded. “I’ll show you,” Eddie said. “Hop on in.”

  It was after seven, and the sky was streaked shrimp pink and cantaloupe orange with little grape-colored edges around the clouds. The temperature was still hovering at the ninety mark, the humidity at the bazillion level. Used to be, he and Nellie would take off for North Carolina at the tail end of a summer like this. Two weeks’ vacation. They liked places like Bryson City and Franklin and Hendersonville and Highlands; cool, green places with mountains and clear-running rivers and waterfalls tumbling down through sweet-scented forests. They didn’t stay in the fancy resorts, just mom-and-pop motels, the kind of places where the owners remembered you from year to year, and sometimes would sit outside with you, drink a beer and watch the sun sink into those mist- shrouded mountains.

  Nellie used to talk longingly about buying a little place “to summer up there in those mountains after we retire.”

  Now he was summering the same place he wintered and he couldn’t remember the last time he had watched a sunset on purpose. It wasn’t so awful, now that he was used to it. It just wasn’t what he’d expected.

  “Do you think Ronnie and Wormy are still at the car lot?” Jackie asked as she and Truman drove away from the Fountain of Youth in the Nova. She’d talked a lot of brave talk in front of Ollie, but she still remembered her last confrontation with Ronnie Bondurant and Wormy Weems, and it still made her shudder.

  “They’re not gonna let that Monte Carlo get away. It’s a matter of pride with Ronnie. And Eddie swears he can snatch a car in fifteen seconds,” Truman reassured her. “Nothing can stop him. Eddie and Ollie can keep Bondurant and Wormy out of our way for at least an hour. That’s probably all we’ll need.”

  “Isn’t this pretty dangerous?” Ollie asked anxiously. The neighborhood they drove through was one he had never seen before. Rusted-out mobile homes hunched shoulder to shoulder on lots with waist-high weeds. Junked cars were parked everywhere, and wild-eyed feral dogs barked viciously from every other yard.

  “Well, yeah,” Eddie said off-handedly. “It ain’t Snell Isle.” He pointed at a faded turquoise mobile home half a block ahead, on the right. A two-tone urine-and-iodine-colored sedan was parked directly in front of the front door, right in the middle of the yard, which looked to be mostly sand and scrub palms.

  “Wesley Coombs ain’t taking no chances now,” Eddie said. He slowed and pulled the truck to the curb. It was growing darker, and crickets and cicadas hummed busily in the dusky recesses of the occasional oleander tree.

  “What now?” Ollie asked. He dug in his pocket and brought out the snub-nosed .22 he kept in the cash drawer at the newsstand. “Want me to cover you?”

  “Let’s watch a few minutes,” Eddie said, “make sure all the folks are inside watching TV, minding their own business.”

  So the cicadas hummed, and Ollie fidgeted, and Eddie sat with his forearms draped over the steering wheel. “You know those oleander bushes?” he asked Ollie. “They’re poison. Flowers, leaves, branches, all of it poison. Like, if you was to stick somebody with a oleander branch, in the eye, something like that? Boom. Dead. And nobody’d know what happened.”

  “Is that so?” Ollie asked. “Pretty flowers, though.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “I had me a house, I’d have me a oleander hedge.”

  Lights flickered on along the street, and at least one faint blue aura projected out the window of every home on the street. Even Wesley Coombs’s home.

  “Let’s go,” Eddie said, starting up the truck. “Look under the seat there,” he told Ollie.

  Ollie brought out a flat, inch-wide strip of metal with a hook at the bottom. “What’s this?”

  “Slim Jim,” Eddie said. “Coombs will probably have the Monte Carlo locked, with the parking brake on, thinking that’ll stop me. You just stick that flat against the glass on the driver’s side, fish it down in there into the door, hook it on the locking mechanism, and yank it up. Opens anything.”

  “Me?” Ollie said, panicky. “Uh, isn’t that something you should do? I mean, I don’t have any, uh, experience. And it’s dark. How can I see?”

  “Check in the glove box,” Eddie said. “You’re looking for a thing looks like a black snake, with a little old glass eye on the end of it.”

  Ollie got the snakelike thing out and held it up to show Eddie.

  “Fiber-optic flashlight,” Eddie said proudly “Drop it right down in there with the edge of the Slim Jim, you can see perfect. Of course,” he added, “mostly I do it by feel. But that’s for professionals.”

  Eddie steered straight for the turquoise trailer. He made a sharp turn, cut the headlights, and started backing the truck into the yard, his tires spitting sand

  and weeds in all directions. He had work lights mounted on the roof and rear fender of the truck, and these he switched on.

  Now he was steering with his left hand, the right hand on a small metal box with various buttons and levers and a kind of joystick that sat beside him on the seat of the truck. There was a huge rearview mirror mounted at eye level, and he stared intently into it, only occasionally turning around to check his progress.

  Ollie sat up on his knees and turned completely around to see what was happening. There was a hum, and a steel arm unfolded itself from the truck bed. Eddie’s fingers worked the switches, and the arm dropped until it was maybe a foot off the ground. Now he had his thumb and forefinger working the joystick, and a pair of hinged jaws slid out from the arm and silently slipped under the front axle of the Monte Carlo, each set of jaws poised with a tire between it. Another switch, and Ollie heard, rather than saw, the jaws clamp down.

  “Okay, Ollie,” Eddie said. “Let’s unlock her.”

  For Ollie, the distance from the truck to the ground looked suicidal. He clutched the Slim Jim in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and leapt into the darkness. He landed on his butt in the soft sand, scrambled to his feet, and was beside the Monte Carlo in an instant. His hands trembled as he twisted the On switch of the flashlight.

  He glanced inside the locked car and groaned. Eddie stood just behind him, his eyes on the door of the trailer, which, so far, had not opened. “It’s no good,” Ollie whispered. “Look what’s on the steering wheel. It’s the club.” He recited the slogan he’d heard so often on the radio. “‘Your car won’t budge if you’ve got the club.’”

  “No problem,” Eddie said, moving alongside him now. “You mind?”

  Ollie handed over his burglary tools and stepped aside. Eddie stuck the flashlight in the back pocket of his jeans. The pro-am was over. In a second he’d majicked the lock, in a half second he was squirting the hinges with a shot of WD-40, then he was sitting in the front seat, one big, be-ringed mitt grasping either side of the red rubber-coated device locked onto the steering wheel. He wiggled first one end, then the other.

  Behind them, a screen door opened, and a porch light snapped on, leaving Ollie half blinded in its yellow glare. “What the hell?” The voice was a man’s.

  Now a dog was barking from inside the house, jumping up against the door, and other dogs in other yards joined in. Ollie crouched down behind the open car door, grasping the edge of it to keep himself from giving in to the terror and running away. “Eddie, we gotta get out of here,” Ollie said. “Leave the car.”

  “Ju-uuu-ust a second now,” Eddie said. “See, like most people, this asshole leaves just enough slack in it, if you know how, you can pop it right off. Okay, it’s done.” He wrenched the emergency brake downward, popped the car into neutral, and slammed the door shut, just in time for both of them to hear the man shout at someone inside. “Bring the shotgun, Suzie, they’re stealing my damn car!”

  “Go,” Eddie urged.

  They dashed for the truck. Before both doors were closed, Eddie had doused the work lights, his thumb was on the joystick, and the hinged arm was moving upward, until the front end of the Monte Carlo lifted primly above and out of the grubby ground of Wesley Coombs’s yard.

  Ollie saw the man come running out of the trailer with a horse-sized brindle hound baying at his heels. Coombs slid three shells into a shotgun, racked it, and swung the shotgun to his shoulder.

  “Go!” Ollie screamed, sliding down onto the floor of the truck. “Go. Go. Go!”

  Jackie and Truman watched while Wormy and Billy Tripp sped out of the Bondurant Motors lot together in the liver-colored Pinto Billy had arrived in. Fifteen minutes later, Ronnie walked out quickly, locked the door, and left, not in his own gray Lincoln, but in the powder-blue LTD.

  “What’s up?” Jackie asked nervously.

  The Nova was half hidden behind the Dumpster in the parking lot of the Vietnamese restaurant next door to Bondurant Motors.

  “Don’t know,” Truman said. “Wormy and Billy probably went to get the Monte Carlo. Maybe Ronnie went along to deal with Eddie.”

  With all the unlit floodlights, red and yellow Christmas lights, and the flashing, rotating pink Cadillac on the roof switched off, Bondurant Motors looked forlorn, like a carnival after all the rubes had gone home. The coast was clear, yet neither of them made a move to get out of the station wagon.

  “They’ll kill Eddie,” Jackie said suddenly. “Ollie, too. We should never have let them try this. It’s idiotic.”

  “Eddie has the element of surprise on his side,” Truman said, wanting to convince himself. “He’s tough. A real street type. He’s got a gun, he knows they’re coming, they don’t know he knows what they’re up to. We talked it all over, Jackie. Everybody knows the risks.”

  “Let’s call the cops now,” Jackie said, her voice shaky. “We can tell them where Eddie’s meeting Wormy. They’ll stop anything bad from happening.”

  “And arrest them for what?” Truman asked. “It’ll be the same thing as before. Our word against Bondurant’s. And nobody will ever find out what happened to Jeff Cantrell. Or your Corvette, or any of it We’ll call the cops the minute we find something inside. No heroics this time,” he added. “No surprises.”

  They were winding their way briskly through the rows of parked junkers and rust buckets. “You never did say how you plan to get us inside,” Jackie reminded him.

  “I’m a trusted employee,” Truman said. “Ronnie showed me where the key was hidden this morning.”

  Once inside, they hurried into the garage. Truman headed straight for the drum of solvents. The lid popped off easily after one gentle prying motion of a screwdriver. Jackie held the flashlight.

  Truman had a mop handle, which he thrust down into the oily green muck. “Step back,” he warned Jackie, not feeling the need to explain why.

  She held her hand up to cover her mouth and nose, and looked away. “Jeff wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I mean, at first, I thought he was real cute.”

  The solvent was thicker than he’d expected, and some of it slopped over the sides of the drum as he stirred the mop handle in a series of agonizingly slow figure eights. Jackie was still holding her breath when he pulled the mop handle out. “Nothing here but toxic wastes,” he said, relieved.

  “Thank the Lord,” she said.

  She played the light around the walls and ceilings of the garage, and walked over to the lift, looking not upward, at Ronnie Bondurant’s stacked-up storage shed in the sky, but down, at the rectangular oil- spattered concrete and steel grating beneath the rack. The grate was, to her eyes, disturbingly coffin shaped. She kicked the edge of it with her sneaker.

  “What’s this? What’s it for?”

  Truman kneeled down and ran the screwdriver around the edge of the grate. “It’s the grease trap. When they put a car on the lift there, they let the oil drain out into there. When the trap’s full, a truck comes along, sucks it out through a hose, and takes it to an oil reclamation place. I didn’t notice it before.”

  “You think?”

  He tapped the metal with the screwdriver. “There’s an outlet here, where they insert the hose, but I’m not sure the grate part ever gets removed.”

  “Unless you have a body to hide,” Jackie said.

  They got crowbars off the tool bench, and tugged and heaved and pried until their hands were blistered. But the grate didn’t move. Then they got a handful of bolts and washers and worked them through the holes in the grate. But they only heard the hollow sound of metal pinging on concrete.

  “Empty,” Truman said. “Nobody’s worked on cars in here for a real long time.”

  “This thing hasn’t been moved either,” Jackie agreed. “You want to try some of the cars out back?”

  “Later,” Truman said, looking upward at the lube rack. “Shine that light up there, will you?”

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I’d like to do what you do,” Ollie said wistfully. “Out there, riding around in the middle of the night, just you and the outlaws, right and wrong, justice and evil. Kind of like the wild, wild west.”

  “You crazy?” Eddie lifted one eyebrow that said Ollie was. “It’s just a job, man. Just a service I provide for people who can pay. I gotta mingle with the wrong element, get all nasty dirty, lot of heavy lifting. It ain’t all that exciting.”

  “Better than sitting in a crummy newsstand all day,” Ollie said. “Selling TV Guides and making change for bus fare.”

  Eddie got his .38 out of the glove box and checked to see that it was loaded. He pulled another Slim Jim out from under his seat and laid it right beside the pistol. “You’re a pretty cool little dude,” he said. “You can ride shotgun for me any time you like.”

  They were parked in a rubble-strewn parking lot on the back side of Central Plaza. It had been a branch of a big downtown St. Petersburg bank not that long ago. Then the bank got gobbled by another bank, and that bank got gobbled by a bank in Atlanta, and then everybody got gobbled by an institution in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  Now all that was left was this pockmarked patch of asphalt, chained off from the street, well lit to keep out felons who might steal a parking lot.

 

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