Skinny Dip - Страница 65

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Wouldn't it be a treat, Chaz thought, to have just one goddamn day when nobody fucked with my head?

Outside, a car horn honked three times. Ricca smiled.

"What now?" Chaz groused to himself.

"Listen, I wasn't serious about the Thunderbird," she confessed, "or the two hundred and fifty grand."

"Then I don't understand…"

"Of course you don't," she said.

The door burst open and there loomed Earl Edward O'Toole, his broad chest crosshatched with white tape.

In a voice as dry as ashes, Charles Perrone said, "You have got to be shitting me."

First Joey, then Ricca, now the goon. How can it be so hard to kill somebody? Chaz wondered.

With an incensed squawk he leveled the gun, his bruised and misshapen index finger picking impotently at the trigger. Tool casually clocked him with a left hook to the jaw.

Twelve hours later, the Humvee rumbled down the L-39 levee, Faith Hill singing sweetly on the radio, Red Hammernut mouthing an ivory toothpick while meticulously unspooling the videocassette he had removed from Chaz's VCR.

"Here's what I don't get," Red was saying to Tool. "How come that Ricca girl knew to call met I'm damn glad she did and all, but it's strange how she come to have my name and phone number."

Tool, who was driving, said he had no earthly idea. "You ask her?"

"She said some fella wrote it on a prayer card and gave it to her at Joey Perrone's church service. Whether that's true or not, I guess it don't matter now." Red Hammernut pocketed the toothpick and hawked out the window. "This whole deal has been a royal goat fuck from start to finish. I damn near lost track of which way's up and which way's down."

Tool could have enlightened Red about the doctor's botched attempt to murder not only Ricca Spillman but Mrs. Perrone, but he didn't feel much like chatting. Every rut in the levee reminded him of the fresh slug in his armpit. The discomfort was amplified by his sobriety, Tool having given his last fentanyl patch to Maureen.

From the corner of his eye he saw the tangled remains of the Sun Duchess videotape fly out of the Hummer, Red saying he couldn't afford to have that nosy damn detective get hold of it. Earlier, at the office, Red had destroyed his own copy.

He said, "I still can't believe that yuppie cocksucker shot you point-blank. We had such a good plan, too."

Not entirely, thought Tool.

Red had ordered him to kill Chaz Perrone before they got to Stiltsville, but Tool had privately scotched the idea. He'd been doing a lot of heavy thinking over what Maureen had said about making changes-that you were never too old to pick a positive new direction for your life. Tool knew that if he whacked the doctor he'd end up blabbing to Maureen, and he couldn't bear the thought of upsetting her when she was feeling so poorly. So he'd decided that instead of murdering Perrone he would simply heave him off the boat and make him swim to shore. Warn him to never again show his skeeter-bitten puss in Florida.

But the fucker shot him first.

As for the blackmail meeting, it had been Tool's intention-and Red's firm instruction-to deliver the money peaceably. When Tool had expressed surprise that Red was willing to kiss off five hundred grand, Red laughed so hard that a string of snot had shot out of his nose. He told Tool about a James Bond-type gizmo that he'd found at "a Cuban spy shop" in Miami; a transmitter, Red had explained, no bigger'n a pack of Winstons. Tool had tucked it into the Samsonite when he was loading the cash. Meantime, Red was lining up some heavyweight shitkickers to track the suitcase back on the mainland, and to take care of the blackmailer, the mystery girlfriend, whoever else was in on the scam.

But Charles Perrone stole the money first.

Afterward, when Chaz ditched the boat and waded to shore, the Samsonite must have sprung a leak and the transmitter shorted out. Tool had listened to Red pitch a conniption about the money going missing but then the phone rang, the woman named Ricca on the other end saying: "Chaz Perrone's back in Boca, if you're interested."

Red, telling her to wait for him to get there, slamming down the phone and saying to Tool: "Let's get a move on. The dumbass went straight home."

Now the suitcase was stowed safely in the back of the Humvee, along with Charles Perrone, who was headed to the Everglades for the very last time.

"See, it's all workin' out," Red Hammernut said.

Except that Tool still didn't have much appetite for killing Perrone, even though the man had shot him and left him for dead in Stiltsville. It was the strangest sensation. All day long Tool had worried about how to get out of the chore, since Red was coming along to make sure it got done right.

"I sure like this Faith Hill gal," Red was saying. "Know who else? That Shania Twain."

"Yeah, me, too."

"I read where she might be related to the writer fella Twain. The one wrote that famous huckleberry book."

"Is that right?"

" 'Bout this smarty-pants white kid and a big nigra feller and they's on a raft together down some river."

"Okay." Tool assumed that Red Hammernut had been drinking.

"Shania, see, she's like Mark Twain's great-great-great-grand-niece. That's what the article said anyhow."

"Maybe she could do her next video on a raft," said Tool, playing along. "Her and the band."

"Son, that girl could do a video in a Jiffy John and make it look like the Taj Mahal." Red turned to peer in the back of the Hummer. "Hey, our friend finally got quiet."

They'd hog-tied the biologist, hauled him back to LaBelle and stashed him in a refrigerator truck with seventeen hundred pounds of fresh-picked cabbage and celery. Tool had driven himself home to get some clean overalls and irrigate the grassy field where his highway crosses were planted, while Red Hammernut had spent the afternoon entertaining two state senators who'd come up with a promising scheme to subvert the NAFTA treaty and fuck over the tomato growers in Mexico.

Later, when everybody else was gone, Tool and Red had come back to remove Chaz Perrone, blue-lipped and shivering, from the frigid truck. Then, utilizing the latest vegetable-packing technology, they had shrink-wrapped him from head to toe. He was expected to expire from asphyxiation before they arrived at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. That was where Red had chosen to get rid of the body, a comfortable distance from Hammernut Farms.

"Guess I'll have to find me another so-called scientist who loves money more'n saw grass and mud fish," Red was saying. "Otherwise Uncle Sam's gonna make me dig some goddamn filtration pond to clean up my water. We're talkin' millions of dollars, not countin' the lawyers and politicians I gotta pay. And they wonder how come the American farmer is a dyin' breed!"

Looking at Red's buffed fingernails and bleached teeth, Tool wondered when was the last time he'd touched a shovel or a hoe. It was a known fact that Red's late daddy had made a killing off natural gas in Arkansas, and that Red had used his inheritance to buy up row-crop operations all over the Sun Belt.

"Hey, there's the truck," Red said.

Tool braked to a halt next to a dusty Dodge pickup. It had been parked on the levee an hour earlier by one of Red's trusted crew bosses, so that Red and Tool would have transportation out of the Loxahatchee preserve. They intended to abandon the Hummer at the edge of the rim canal, Chaz Perrone's suicide message attached to the dashboard. Red said the note was a bonus, though he wasn't sure what to make of the part about the swan getup.

Dragging their captive out of the Hummer, they were surprised to find that he wasn't dead. With the tenacity of a psychotic gopher, Chaz had gnawed a ragged hole in the shrink wrap, through which he now labored to breathe. It sounded like molasses being sucked down a drainpipe.

"Damnation," Red said. He snatched a Remington twelve-gauge off the backseat and ordered Tool to cut the sumbitch loose.

"You sure?"

"Hell yes."

Tool used a pocket knife to skin off the plastic cocoon. Chaz levered himself to a squat, his clothes sopping and his face flushed.

"Thank you," he wheezed.

Red Hammernut said, "What the hell for? We're still gonna wax your thieving ass."

"Red, I'm so truly sorry about the money."

"I don't doubt it."

"I'll do whatever you want. Just tell me."

The doctor cowered there, shrunken and hollow-eyed, a squalid portrait of guilt. While Tool had no sympathy, neither was he in the mood to watch a man's brains get splattered like oatmeal.

Red said, "It was a setup from day one, right? There wasn't no damn blackmail, just you and some greedy asshole pals."

"That's not true!" Chaz protested.

"I always figured you killed your wife. That much I put together from the get-go," Red said. "But for you to video the whole thing, that's some sick shit. Just to squeeze some cash outta me? Son, you are one evil little bastard."

"Listen, Red. I did not kill Joey. She's alive!"

Red glanced over at Tool, who shrugged blankly.

"Hey, then, what you're sayin'-she must be in on this, too."

"Exactly!" Chaz exclaimed. "She's the one behind the blackmail."

"Your dead wife."

"Yes! I found out last night."

Red nodded. "Well, son, you just answered my next question."

"What's that?"

"How low can you go?"

"Aw, Red, I'm telling the God's truth."

"Let's get Mr. O'Toole's opinion."

Tool was watching the sun go down, thinking about the hot, throbbing knot under his arm. "Gimme the shotgun," he said.