Skinny Dip - Страница 17

"But I told you, he's not getting a dime if I'm dead."

Stranahan fiddled with the radio dials. "Most murders come down to lust, anger or greed," he said. "From what you've told me about your husband, I'm betting on greed. If this isn't about your money then it's about somebody else's."

Joey said that, in a way, she hoped he was right. "I'd hate to think he threw me off that ship just so he could be with her." She shot a glare toward the house.

"Not likely," said Stranahan.

"I wish you could've met Benny, my first husband. He was a sweetheart," she said fondly. "Not exactly a firecracker in certain departments, but a good honest guy."

Stranahan aimed the binoculars at the bay window of the Perrone residence. The lights had come on, though the curtains remained closed. It had been an hour since the dark-haired woman had arrived, parking a blue Ford compact next to Chaz's Humvee.

"You don't know who she is?"

"No idea. It's pitiful," Joey said. "He's got so many bimbos, you'd need radio collars to track them all."

Stranahan secretly was pleased that Chaz Perrone was entertaining female company only three tender days into widowhood. Such a boggling lack of self-restraint could open a world of squalid opportunities for someone seeking to mess with Chaz's head.

"Let's call it a night," Stranahan suggested.

"Honestly, did she look that smokin' hot to you?"

"The longer we stay, the riskier it gets."

"This is what the Secret Service drives. Chevy Suburbans."

"Joey, we're not the Secret Service. I'm supposed to be retired and you're supposed to be deceased."

"Hey, we should copy the license off her car!"

"Done." Too tired to trust his memory, Stranahan had jotted the tag number on the inside of his wrist.

"Fifteen more minutes," she said. "Then we can go."

"Thank you."

Earlier, after leaving the car-rental agency, they had, over Strana-han's objections, stopped at an outlet mall. Joey had decided that she couldn't continue wearing the clothes of his ex-wives and girlfriends, and noted as an example that their bras were all too large. Grimly, Stranahan had trailed after her as she accumulated $2,400 worth of slacks, tops, skirts, shoes, cosmetics and other personal items. She was the most ruthless and efficient shopper that he'd ever seen, but the experience had exhausted him so thoroughly that his senses now seemed cauterized.

Or perhaps that's how everyone came to feel in West Boca Dunes Phase II.

"You didn't even ask about the black dress," Joey was saying. "There's quite a naughty history there."

"I was letting my imagination run wild."

"Whatever he's doing with her tonight, he's thinking about me. That I can guarantee. And wait'll he finds the lipstick!"

Stranahan leaned his head against the window and shut his eyes.

"Don't you dare go to sleep," Joey said.

"I miss my dog. I want to go back to the island."

She poked him in the shoulder. "There they are!"

Two figures emerged from the Perrone house, a man and a woman, hurrying down the walkway. In the darkness Stranahan couldn't make out their faces but undoubtedly it was Joey's husband and his guest. As they got into the blue Ford, their expressions were briefly illuminated by the dome light. Both of them appeared soberly preoccupied, and not exactly radiating the afterglow of love.

Joey said, "He's driving. You know what that means."

"No, what?"

"He's been doing her," she said. "Guys never ask to drive your car until after they've slept with you at least twice. That's what Rose says, and she's been with, like, forty-nine men."

"Sounds like it's time for an oil change."

"Hey, let's follow 'em," Joey said.

"Let's not. Let's assume he screwed her and he's taking her to dinner and then he's sending her on her way."

"I'm going back inside my house."

"Bad idea," Stranahan said. "You've creeped him out enough for one night."

"Give me ten minutes. I've got to use the bathroom."

Joey hopped out of the Suburban and jogged down the street. When she returned, "Move It on Over" was blasting from the speakers.

She frowned at Stranahan. "That's cold."

"It's not the CD. It's the radio." He twisted the volume down. "I lucked into classic rock."

"What's so funny?"

"At my age I'm a sucker for ironies. Buckle up."

Joey didn't speak again until they were southbound on the interstate. "Chaz definitely noticed the dress in the closet, because it was gone when I went back."

"Excellent."

"But I found something really weird in the sink."

"What?" Stranahan was thinking maybe Jell-O or whipped cream.

"Pubic hair," Joey reported indignantly. "Kelly-green pubic hair. That nasty woman shaved herself all over my vanity."

Mick Stranahan reached over and squeezed her hand. "Nobody said this was going to be easy."

The man called Tool lived in a trailer outside of LaBelle, not far from Lake Okeechobee. The trailer had come with a half-acre parcel upon which the previous owner had cultivated tomatoes, a crop despised by Tool since his days as a crew boss. The day he moved in, he hitched an old Pontiac engine block to his truck and dragged it back and forth across the tomato patch until all that remained was churned dirt.

In place of vegetables Tool began planting highway-fatality markers that he collected on his travels throughout southwest Florida. The small homemade crosses often displayed colorful floral arrangements, which Tool found pleasing to the eye. Whenever he spied one of the markers along a road, he would yank it from the ground and place it in the back of his truck. Often this act was witnessed by other motorists, though nobody ever attempted to interfere.

Tool stood six three and weighed 280 pounds and owned a head like a cinder block. His upper body was matted so heavily with hair that he perspired copiously, even in cold weather, and found it uncomfortable to wear a shirt. Nearly a year had passed since Tool had been shot in broad daylight by a poacher who had mistaken him for a bear. No entry wound had been visible, as the slug had uncannily tunneled into the seam of Tool's formidable buttocks. Because bleeding was minimal, he elected to forgo medical treatment-a decision that would come back to haunt him.

Soon the pain became so unbearable that he gave up his job as a crew boss, no longer physically able to harass and abuse migrant farmworkers for twelve hours at a stretch. Such was his misery that a concerned dope-addict friend recommended fentanyl, a high-octane painkiller used during surgery but also available in a convenient skin patch.

Tool had no prescription for the medicine, but he did have a lock-pick. Once a week he'd drive to Fort Myers, break into a nursing home and meticulously peel the fentanyl patches from torsos of sedated cancer patients. In no time Tool was hopelessly hooked, his dosage escalating to levels that would have euthanized a more highly evolved organism. The only serious obstacle to his drug habit was his excess of body hair, so dense and oily as to defy conventional adhesives. Daily cropping was required, often in checkerboard patterns to accommodate multiple stolen patches.

That was how Red Hammernut found him, buck naked in a rusty washtub behind the house trailer, scraping brutally at his shoulder blades with a disposable razor.

"Hey," Tool said. "Long time no see."

"I been to Africa after them tarpon." With a groggy sigh Red Hammernut lowered himself into a tattered lawn chair. "Just got back to Tampa this morning and I'm jet-lagged outta my skull. May I ask what in the name of Jesus P. Christ you're doin'?"

"You got a job for me?"

That was one thing Red Hammernut admired about Tool-the sumbitch got right to the point.

"Go on and finish your bath. We'll talk after," Red said. "Meantime, where's my ole friend Mr. Daniel?"

"They's a bottle in the bedroom somewheres."

Tool's bedroom was the last place that Red Hammernut yearned to explore, so he took a beer from the refrigerator instead. When he came back outside, Tool was hosing himself off.

Red pointed at the field of white fatality markers behind the trailer. "How many you got now?"

"Sixty odd. Mebbe seventy." Tool shook himself like a drenched buffalo. "Say, Red, throw me that damn towel."

It was a wadded scrap stained with what appeared to be transmission fluid. Red Hammernut tossed it to Tool, who fashioned a do-rag crookedly around his head.

"I still can't understand why you save those damn things. It's pretty fuckin' depressing, you ask me," Red said.

Tool turned to contemplate the orderly rows of crosses. He didn't give a shit about the car-crash victims, but he liked the visual symmetry of his design. "It's sorta like that famous soldier graveyard up in Washington-what's it called?"

"Arlington?"

"Yeah. Sorta like a mini Arlington!"

"Christ, I'm sure."

"Well, it's better'n goddamn tomatoes."

"You're right about that." Red Hammernut laughed.

The two men had met four years earlier when Red Hammernut's company purchased the vegetable farm where Tool was running crews of pickers and packers. After observing Tool's specialized management techniques, Red had recruited him for side jobs that required muscle and a lack of conscience. Red had found him to be reliable and focused in the way of a natural predator, though not as ruthlessly gung ho as his precedessor, Crow Beacham. It was Crow who had eagerly volunteered to dispose of that foolish young Mexican, the one griping about the curdled toilets and brown-running water at the migrant camps. Barely nineteen, the boy had marched his complaint to the faggot Communist lawyers at Rural Legal Services, who were preparing to share it with a federal judge, when their star witness vanished. It was almost two years before they'd found the Mexican kid's skeleton, in a phosphate pit a hundred miles away, but by then Crow Beacham was dead from syphilis and tapeworms. Tool took better care of himself, Red Hammernut noted, though not much.