Ollie used the bolt cutters to take care of the chain and then Eddie walked around the perimeter of the lot, shooting out the streetlights one by one. Cars drove past on Central Avenue a block away, but nobody cared what happened on this bleak little spot.

  When the lot was good and dark, Eddie showed Ollie how to use the controls to unload the Monte Carlo.

  “Not as easy as it looks,” Ollie remarked.

  “Took me two weeks to get used to the controls,” Eddie said.

  Ollie looked at the clock on the truck’s dashboard. “They’re late.”

  “Dissin’ me,” Eddie said. “You ready now, Ollie? Could get ugly. Ronnie Bondurant jokes around, but he don’t play.”

  “I’m all set,” Ollie said, clasping a Slim Jim in each hand. “You just give me the signal.”

  “Here they come,” Eddie said. Ollie gulped and slid down onto the floor. He was so small that he could hide there, up under the truck’s capacious dashboard.

  Wormy pulled his pickup truck alongside Eddie’s. It wasn’t until Wormy pushed a button and let the electric window roll down less than an inch that Eddie realized it was not Ronnie Bondurant, but some other man who sat in the front seat alongside Wormy. The other man was younger, wrapped in bandages. Maybe, Eddie thought, this was the monkey who was supposedly still in the hospital.

  “Where’s Ronnie at?” Eddie said, immediately suspicious. He moved his right hand onto his thigh, the .38 under it.

  Wormy kept the window rolled up. “He’s got better things to do than screw around with you,” he sneered. “Where’s the keys to the Monte Carlo?”

  “Where’s my money?” Eddie asked.

  Billy Tripp held up a handful of bills. “Come and get it, bro.”

  “I ain’t any bro to you,” Eddie said levelly. He held up the keys to the Monte Carlo so Wormy could see them. And as he opened the door of his truck to get out, he slid the Slim Jim into the waist of his jeans. The .38 disappeared into his palm, no bigger, comparatively, than a peanut.

  Wormy and Ronnie watched Eddie’s approach warily. They did not notice when the other door of the truck opened just a bit, or see the small man who seemed to slither out of the truck and along the pavement, through the bits of broken streetlights and gravel, until he was alongside Billy Tripp’s door.

  Eddie tossed the keys through the opening in the window, aiming for Wormy’s face. The window slid shut again, and then it was rolling down, and Wormy leaned out a little, smiled and extended his right hand, not with Eddie’s money, but with his loaded .38.

  “Repo this,” he said.

  Everything happened so fast that afterward, even Ollie had to admit he wasn’t positive about the sequence of events.

  “Now,” Eddie shouted.

  Two shots rang out, and glass and blood spattered everywhere.

  Ollie popped up, terrified, Slim Jim in hand, ready to jam the truck door locked to keep the outlaws from escaping. But nobody in that car was going anywhere. Wormy was slumped over to the right, pitched across Billy Tripp’s lap, a gaping wound in his left shoulder. Blood trickled down his limp forearm. Tripp’s bandaged and battered face lolled, with his chin resting against his chest.

  “I think he’s dead,” Ollie said finally. “I think they’re both dead.”

  Eddie stripped off his T-shirt and held it against his left forearm. The white shirt turned red. “It was a setup,” he said. “We gotta call the lot, get Truman and Jackie out of there. Bondurant’s still out there, maybe headed their way.”

  “You’re shot,” Ollie said. “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  “In the truck,” Eddie said weakly. “Duct tape. I’ll fix it. You drive.”

  Ronnie buckled the seat belt around the Styrofoam cooler full of bills. He always liked to keep his money safe.

  He was on the Bayway, headed out for the Gulf beaches. Just a quiet little ride. Ronnie and $20,000. He threw two quarters in the basket at the tollbooth at Eckerd College, had the car nosed forward even before the green light was flashing.

  The bridge was lined with losers. People with no money and no hope, nothing better to do with a hot summer night than spend it standing around sweating, waiting for a stinking fish to bite another piece of stinking fish. If Ronnie Bondurant wanted fish, he went into an air-conditioned restaurant, had it brought to him with a slice of lemon and a baked potato, and put it on his American Express Gold Card. That was Ronnie’s idea of fishing.

  He was in the outside lane and he could see the boats out on the bay. Big cabin cruisers and ski boats zipped back and forth, leaving luminous white trails of froth in their wake. When all this was over, Ronnie promised himself, he’d spend a day out on the Hydrasport, cruise Pass-A-Grill Beach, find some new talent who liked fast boats and a guy with money to spend.

  In the meantime, he passed the Point Brittany condo tower and made the left to head toward Tierra Verde. Nice out here, he thought. More happening out at the beaches than at sleepy old Pinellas Point. Lots of babes out here. With the money he took off Hernando Boone tonight, maybe he’d buy a place out here.

  First he needed to deal with a certain bitch who thought she was smarter than Ronnie Bondurant. She was out here, somewhere, on this second bridge. He slowed down and his eyes swept first one side, then the other, looking for the familiar curves of LeeAnn Pilker. Plenty of lights out here, plenty of people. People were strung along the sidewalks lining each side; retirees with leather-like skin, family groups with little kids running up and down, and teenagers with their blaring radios and tackle heavy enough to catch Moby Dick, should he ever find a way to swim up the west coast of Florida.

  Women? Yeah, there were some old black ladies, squatted on yard chairs, touristy types with sun visors and DisneyWorld T-shirts, all of them too old or too young or too ugly to be LeeAnn Pilker.

  The LTD nosed over the bridge’s hump, past the bridge tender’s booth, and on down, maybe half a mile, before Ronnie turned around at the Fort DeSoto exit, and came back over the bridge to get another look at the setup.

  LeeAnn’s arms were getting pretty tired, holding that heavy bait-casting rod. She’d been bent over this damned concrete railing for an hour now. At first she’d just let the line drift in the water, then, out of boredom, she’d accepted the offer of a big, live pinfish from a retired steelworker from McKeesport who was set up four or five feet away.

  The pinfish was out there now, swimming against the tide, when she saw the big, blue LTD on its first pass by. It didn’t surprise her to see Ronnie was here early in a different car, checking it out, trying to catch her up. Wasn’t she a woman? Didn’t she have shit for brains, not to mention a saggy ass and a bump on her nose?

  She didn’t turn around after she saw Ronnie pass by the second time, either, knowing he’d have to go clear back through the tollbooth to turn around again. Montana, she decided. They had mountains in Montana, and snow, and trees. And moose. She’d always wanted to see a moose.

  Ten minutes later, Ronnie swept by again. When he reached the sandy embankment up ahead, he pulled off and parked, like LeeAnn had told him. Told him. The bitch. He lifted the lid of the cooler, took a look at his cash. Not good-bye. No way. He got the cooler out and locked the car. He had to dodge between cars to get to the other side, the cooler heavier than he would have thought. When he was across, he pulled the red baseball cap out of his back pocket, set it on his head, and started lugging the cooler up toward the crest of the bridge. Goddamn, he thought. Twenty thousand was heavy money, literally.

  When she saw the red cap come bobbing up toward her, she allowed herself a tiny, private smile. She could see Ronnie gasping for breath. It was a hike, in this heat, up an incline, weighed down with all that money. Her money.

  “Something’s got your line,” the steelworker said, tugging at her sleeve. “Big one. Better pay attention, hon.”

  LeeAnn heard the monofilament line whirling out through the reel. Ronnie was five feet away from the light pole where she’d told him to set down the cooler. What was he doing? Now he was walking away rapidly, his back to her.

  “Set the hook, hon,” the steelworker shouted. He’d put his pole down and was bent all the way over the bridge rail, watching the line unspool into the blue-black water.

  There was a loud splash down there, and a huge silver streak, slicing up through the air, gaping mouth, flared gills, like a prehistoric thing. “It’s a tarpon,” the man shrieked. “Hey, this gal’s got a tarpon on. Reel it in some, get that slack out of your line.” People were running toward her now. A tarpon? Out here?

  LeeAnn thrust the rod at the steelworker. “You reel it in,” she said, and she started jogging toward the light pole and her cooler of money. The red baseball cap was nowhere in sight.

  She was thirty yards away when she heard a long, low blast of a horn that seemed to be coming from the underside of the bridge. Cars were slowing and stopping on both sides. Now a yellow-and-black-striped bar with flashing lights across it dropped down across the roadway.

  “Oh, no,” LeeAnn said to herself, speeding up to a run. She was so close.

  The concrete roadway started to move and rumble beneath her feet Now she was maybe five yards away, with the cooler just on the other side of that set of barricades. The roadway was inching upward, and the sidewalk beneath her feet was moving, too, and then she was sprinting, the heavy construction boots slowing her down. From under the bridge she heard the clanking of the gears winching the span up and open.

  She jumped, landed and rolled, landing hard on her knees. But the cooler was there, right there. She crawled forward and clutched it to her chest, struggling to her feet, to get away from the moving bridge.

  She was right in front of the bridge tender’s booth when Ronnie stepped over the railing separating the sidewalk from the booth.

  “Hi, sugar,” he said, gripping her arm so tightly she screamed as loud as she could, in pain and in fright.

  Behind him, in the tiny lit-up booth, she saw a slender, red-haired woman who seemed to be napping across the control switches. There was blood on her uniform blouse.

  “You go ahead and carry the money,” Ronnie said, poking the .38 in the small of her back.

  The Publix truck was pulled way off on the shoulder of the road at the place where the state planned to build the impressive new roadway into the county’s untouched wilderness area.

  Hernando Boone drove alongside the cab of the eighteen-wheeler, waved at the driver, and parked nearby.

  The driver was short and dark and spoke Cuban- accented English. “You Orlando’s brother?” he asked. “I am Ignacio.”

  “Orlando’s my half-brother,” Boone said testily. “You can call me Mr. Boone. Let’s see those ribs.”

  It was ten to nine, and there was no sign of Billy Tripp, who was supposed to be his new assistant, but was probably huddled up with Bondurant somewhere figuring out new ways to rip off Hernando Boone.

  Now he saw headlights, and soon, a black-and- tan Cadillac Brougham came jouncing down the road. And now, there were more headlights, more cars. Damn. These sisters must think he was running an early-bird special. He and the Cuban would have to run the store all by themselves.

  Ignacio jumped up on the rear bumper of the trailer, which was humming from all that juice needed to keep all those BTUs chilling the $2.98-a-pound baby-back ribs. He threw back the locking bar on the trailer and slid the doors outward, disappearing momentarily in the blast of arctic air that came shooting out into the hot, fetid evening.

  Cars were streaming down the road now, dozens of them, parking even in the middle of the road. People were spilling out, happy, excited, chattering, a real carnival atmosphere. Women sipped wine coolers and grasped their counterfeit Louis Vuitton and Yves St. Laurent handbags close to their sides, full of cash for those bargain ribs. Plenty of men, too, and they were opening up the trunks of their cars, making room, opening coolers and stacking bags of ice; regular customers, familiar faces.

  Ignacio looked at the lines of people surrounding the tractor-trailer, then back at the mountain of waxed cardboard cases stacked inside the truck, all the way to the ceiling.

  “Shit,” he said in authentic English.

  Hernando Boone pulled on a pair of thick, insulated gloves, hopped up onto the trailer, and let down the steel loading ramp.

  Ignacio climbed the stack of cases, hefted one onto his shoulder, and, grimacing, handed it down to Hernando, who nearly fell from the weight of it. But then the steroids, better business through chemistry, proved their worth, and Boone held the case aloft, over his head, like an ancient warrior showing the rest of the tribe a prized beaver pelt. With his block-shaped head, beaded ponytail, and massive torso, he was a god of meat, standing shoulders above the rest of the throng.

  “Who’s first?” Hernado called out loudly. He was putting the case of meat down when he felt a searing pain in his shoulders, the trapezoids, maybe, and the pain ran down his back. He had to see a doctor for real. The case fell off the back of the truck and landed on the road with a dull thud. The fitted top fell off and greasy pink-and-white slabs of meat spilled out onto the roadside.

  “Oooh,” several women cried.

  Hernando slid down the ramp and in a moment was beside the ruined box. A hand reached out to snatch up a nice, meaty, five-pound slab. Five-finger discount. Hernando grabbed the hand and twisted until the discount shopper, a white-haired, stoop- shouldered granny, screamed “Have Mercy, Jesus,” and passed out from the pain.

  There was a respectful silence for a moment.

  “That meat ain’t cut,” somebody pointed out.

  “I know that’s right,” a high-pitched woman’s voice joined in. “Ain’t cut, ain’t wrapped. Ain’t weighed. Look like half a side of beef he selling.”

  Hernando got back up on the back of the trailer. The voices grew louder, and people were drifting away, starting their cars to drive off.

  Ignacio had seen how things were working. And he’d already dealt with one Boone brother before. He slipped away and faded into the throng of departing meat buyers.

  “Just a minute,” Boone called out loudly. He looked around, realized the Cuban was gone, and knew that he was alone with a crowd gone badder than week-old poultry.

  “Hey!” he thundered. The griping and moaning subsided.

  “This is a warehouse sale,” he called out. “We told y’all that. Cutting and weighing and wrapping costs extra. That’s how we cut out the middleman.”

  “Alma didn’t say nothing on the phone about having to buy no whole cow,” a frizzle-haired white woman up front shouted.

  Hernando could see his $45,000 profit sitting in that truck behind him, thawing, disappearing like an ice cube in July. When he got done with this fiasco, he resolved he would kill his brother. Orlando was only a half-brother, anyway.

  “Split the slabs with your neighbors or friends,” Hernando said in frustration. “Sell them their half for four ninety-nine a pound. Make you a little profit off this thing.”

  The shoppers conferred among themselves, and many concluded that this would, after all, be a decent transaction.

  Ignacio saw the crowds moving forward with their fistfuls of money and decided to make his final break for freedom, snaking out from behind the construction trailer. The last thing he remembered was a hand, closing off his windpipe, and a voice, very quiet, whispering in English and Spanish that he was under arrest.

  “You think Jeff’s body is hidden up there, in all that junk? Where? How do we get up there?”

  Jackie played the flashlight over the makeshift platform atop the lube rack and shook her head doubtfully.

  “Seven feet up, probably,” Truman estimated. “Didn’t you ever climb trees when you were a little girl?”

  “Trees, yeah,” Jackie said. “Not greased poles. I’m no lumberjack, Mr. K.”

  Truman pulled open the door to the garage bay. Two cars were parked inside the fenced-in area. The purple Colt he ruled out immediately, but the silver Blazer, despite its battered body, would work, he thought.

  With Jackie at the steering wheel and Truman pushing behind the bumper, it was slow rolling.

  Inside the showroom, the phone rang three rimes and then stopped, abruptly.

  Whoever had decided a Blazer was a light-utility truck, Truman thought, grunting and panting, his whole body pitted against the thing, had never had to push one.

  When the Blazer was lopsidedly angled as close to the lube rack as they had the energy to maneuver it, Jackie clambered up on the roof and reached for the platform. Truman climbed up, too.

  “You hold the light,” he said. “I’ll go up, see if the footing’s solid.”

  “I’m lighter,” Jackie protested, but he was already swinging one leg up and onto the platform.

  She held the light with both hands, pointed low so it wouldn’t shine in his eyes up there.

  The platform was so cluttered with junk there was only a four-foot-square clearing that remained unobstructed. The planking creaked underfoot as he stepped gingerly to one side. It was dark despite the flashlight’s puny beam. He felt the cold porcelain of the toilet, bumped a knee against something sharp.

  “I’m coming up,” Jackie declared.

  “This is hopeless,” she said when she was crowded right beside him. “If we try to climb around on here, it’ll all fall down. Us with it. Maybe they moved the body,” she said faintly. “Maybe it was never here.” The dark was closing in on her, and she coughed from the dust they’d stirred up. Something skittered across her right arm and she slapped at it and felt it fell lightly on her foot. Just a roach. Just a roach, she told herself.

  “Maybe they faked the whole thing,” she said. “Maybe Jeff is still alive, in on it with Bondurant and them.”

  “Shine the flash back over there,” Truman said. “To your right there, over by that Pepsi machine.”

  “It’s too small,” she said, running the beam of light over it. The Pepsi machine wasn’t even five feet tall.

 

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