"But Ski Cat, that's a cheap dinner," Dopey protested.
"Won't be cheap once they get you in there an' start you buyin' watered down drinks for them girls, Dopey," Ski Cat explained. He thought Dopey might be dumb enough to be a tourist, if he could just pay attention long enough.
Ski Cat was thirsty, and they settled themselves in the bar with cold beers. They were just in time for the local news on the television behind the bar. The lead story featured a bedside interview with Connie, her foot held up in the air with ropes and pulleys. Ski Cat couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. They had her now and she couldn’t get away.
Donald was just cleaning up after himself and thinking that he had done a good job on Kathy’s kitchen when she and Dave came in.
"Looks good, Donald," Kathy said, surveying the gleaming walls of the freshly painted kitchen. "You’re a careful painter. I get paint all over everything."
"Me, too," Dave chipped in. "You've got a real skill here. You could go into the business if you wanted to."
Donald explained again about working for his father's handyman business. "I'm hopin’ Billy let me use the truck for handyman work, after I check the traps every day. Then when I get the hospital paid, I can help my Mama. Maybe I can get my Mama a better place to live, where she ain't next door to people like Ski Cat," he mused.
Kathy fixed ham sandwiches and iced tea for the three of them. "That reminds me," she said. "Joe's in the hospital. He was watching Ski Cat's place late last night and somebody knocked him out and dumped him in Wright Square."
"Bet it was Ski Cat hit him. Ski Cat mean, scary. That's how he do," Donald said. "Joe come to see me in the hospital. Reckon it be alright if I go see him?"
"He'd like that, I'm sure," Kathy encouraged him. "He'll probably get to go home sometime tomorrow, so maybe you should stop by this evening."
Donald excused himself and drove away in the old truck.
Day 10, Afternoon
The throbbing in Joe’s head finally subsided sometime during the afternoon. He had slept for a while after lunch. When he woke up, he realized everything seemed back to normal. He recollected that Kathy and Dave had brought his mother by sometime before his nap, but his sense of timing was screwed up by the hospital schedule, so he wasn’t quite sure when it had been. Anna had been happy that he was on the mend, and mad as hell that they had conspired to hide his injury from her until he was almost well. He chuckled to himself. She would always be his mother, no matter how old he was or how feeble she got.
Charlie Thompson had been by to tell him they had a surveillance team in place to watch Ski Cat’s address. "Trying to be a hero, weren't you," Charlie gently needled.
Joe wasn’t quick enough to take the bait, so Charlie went on to tell him, "Fat Tony Cicero was seen leaving Ski Cat’s place this afternoon. Nobody knows quite what to make of it."
They knew Fat Tony as part of the Alfano family’s organization, but they had never connected him with drugs before. He was known to be responsible for the family’s gambling and prostitution activities. Although the Alfanos had originally made their money smuggling, they were thought of as benign, local criminals with nothing to connect them to the sleazy world of drugs until Tony appeared at Ski Cat’s. There was no sign of Ski Cat himself, although lots of his known associates were hanging around.
Joe was mulling this over when Kathy and Dave came back. He was thinking they seemed natural together all of a sudden, as if they had always been a couple. That was fine with Joe. He liked Dave as much as ever, even though his adolescent hero worship was long past. His sister deserved a first-class guy, especially after that jerk, Ken Owens. He still couldn’t fathom that one. He certainly was no expert on romantic relationships, he thought to himself. Here he was flying solo through his 40’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t want a wife; he just didn’t have time for courtship. He was too busy being a good cop.
A few minutes after Dave and Kathy got settled, Donald peered tentatively around the half-opened door. Joe didn’t quite recognize him, although he knew they had met recently.
"Sergeant Denardo?" Donald inquired softly.
Before Joe could respond, Dave was out of his chair, bringing Donald into the room. Seeing them together brought it into focus for Joe. This was the Black Caesar guy, who was sort of a witness to the hit and run. His head no longer looked as if it had been tarred and feathered, at least the part Joe could see under the painter’s cap. It was still hairless and coated with a greasy looking ointment, though. Joe thought it looked a lot like a roasted chicken.
"You look like maybe you tryin' to cut in on my Black Caesar business, Sergeant Denardo," Donald accused Joe, "with your head all wrapped up."
"Call me Joe, will you? It all started when I fell asleep in Wright Square, just like with you, Donald," Joe replied.
Donald was struggling to pay attention to Joe. Something had kicked that wasp nest in his head, and he was seeing random pictures that didn’t fit this situation. With a snap that he thought must surely have been audible, he stopped the pictures. He had to remember to go back to the one of the big, black car. It had something to do with Joe and Wright Square.
"Okay, Joe," Donald acknowledged, "I sure made lots of nice friends since I started washin’ Lizzie’s van. She know just about everybody 'round here, I reckon."
Donald visited for a few minutes and then excused himself, wishing his new friend a speedy recovery. "I got to get up early and check my traps before I go to wash Miss Lizzie's van," he explained.
After he was gone, Kathy and Dave expanded on the details of Donald’s new career, for Joe’s benefit. Joe started laughing about Billy’s raccoon trapping scam. It was one of those things that just tickled him anew every time he thought of it. He had even sent Billy business, once. One of his colleagues in the county police department had been telling him about being called to The Marshe Landes one evening to investigate the theft of several hundred dollars' worth of steak and lobster, right off the grill.
"Damnedest thing you ever saw, Joe," the county cop had said. "These people so rich they don’t eat stuff from the grocery store like you and me. They order this stuff over the Internet and it comes by airfreight, or courier, or something, the next day. All packed in dry ice and ready to cook, from what they told me. And they don’t have no kitchen in that big fine house, I don’t reckon, because their kitchen’s outside by the swimming pool. Got its own little building out there, with a refrigerator and a stove, and the whole works. Only got two walls, though, so you can watch the pool while you cook. Flies must be terrible, I reckon. Anyhow, they got all this airmail food laid out in their outdoor kitchen, ready to cook for this big party. The lady goes to cook, and the food’s all gone, just in the blink of an eye, she said. So, I have me a look, and there, plain as day, we got ‘coon tracks across the counter, like he stepped in hot dog mustard. That’s what I tell ’em, but the lady says, ‘No, it’s Dee John.’ I thought she was a namin’ the perpetrator at first, but I finally got that it was the tracks. She said it weren’t hot dog mustard; it was ‘Dee John.’"
Joe had given the county cop Billy’s phone number to pass along. He had heard later that the people weren’t very happy, even though they did hire Billy. They felt like theft was a problem for the police, even if the thief was a raccoon.
Ski Cat was on another airplane, this time headed back to Savannah. He had called Fat Tony with the news that they had found Connie, and Tony had given him new orders. He was to leave Dopey in Miami Beach to keep an eye on Connie and get himself back home. Tony had another task for him. Of course, he couldn’t tell Ski Cat what it was over the phone. They always spoke in this sort of code, like in the gangster movies. Tony always thought his phone might be tapped. Ski Cat had argued against leaving Dopey unsupervised, with all the distractions of South Beach, but Fat Tony told him it didn’t take two tough guys to watch a one-legged broad who was confined to her bed. He needed Ski Cat to come back and take care of s
ome loose ends. It shouldn’t take him long by Tony’s reckoning. Tony was sure he would be back in Miami way before Connie was up and walking around. Meanwhile, all Dopey had to do was make sure he knew where Connie went, in the unlikely event that she got out of the hospital.
Ski Cat did his best to impress on Dopey the importance of his mission, but he wasn’t sure if he got through. Dopey had this dazed, excited look on his face, like a little kid when you tell him he’s had enough candy for the day, and he’s got a pocketful hidden that you don’t know about. After spending a couple of days in South Beach and reading the local papers, Ski Cat thought Dopey fit right in. He was likely to get into all sorts of mischief, left unsupervised, but probably none that would run him afoul of the law, if there was any down here. Ski Cat was just worried that Connie could get out of the hospital, ask Dopey for directions, hire him to carry her bags and put her on a plane to Mars, and he wouldn’t even notice, unless she happened to be naked. There was something wrong with that boy -- Ski Cat was sure of it.
Day 11, Morning
The part that Willy hated most about his chosen line of work, aside from all the geeks who came into the store, was checking the rental returns back in. Every morning when he opened up, there would be a pile of DVDs under the little trap door in the window beside the main entrance. He pictured the geeks creeping up under cover of darkness to return the instruments of their depravity. Sometimes he found other things in the pile. Mostly he found fast food wrappers, but, sometimes, much, much worse things -- disgusting stuff.
People probably figured if you worked in a place like this, you got off on kinky stuff -- not Willie, though. Willie fancied himself a family man, through and through. He just hadn’t found a family that would have him, yet. Once Willie got the air-conditioning on and got his coffee, he started in on the pile of returned DVDs. He liked to get them taken care of before the lunchtime customers started their furtive sallies into the Emporium.
Willie’s management information system was crude but it worked. He had a title card stuck in a little holder on each DVD case. When somebody rented a DVD, he pulled the card and put it into a "hold for check-in" box. There was a different slot in the box for each day of the week. The item number from the DVD was entered in the merchandise description on the cash register as Willie rang up the sale. The receipt was headed "South Chatham Newsstand." This kept the customers’ credit card records from revealing their perversion.
The problem was that it was complicated for Willie to figure out who had overdue DVDs. He had to go through the register tape for the day the DVD was rented and find the transaction. If it was a credit card transaction, his research was finished, because the renter's name was right there on the receipt. If it was a cash rental, though, he had to look up the customer based on the "member number" from the register tape. This happened seldom enough, and Willie’s brain was fried enough, that he had to figure out the technique from scratch every time, so he tended to put off dealing with past due DVDs until he had accumulated several. What pains he took to protect the privacy of these slime balls who liked to watch dirty movies.
The other problem was that the people put the wrong DVDs in the cases, sometimes, and the cases were plain, again with just an item number, so if the geek’s secretary or wife saw the DVD in his briefcase, they wouldn’t have immediate confirmation that he was the pervert they had always suspected him of being. All the perverts were of the male persuasion. Willie had never rented a single video to a woman, unless you counted transvestites, but Willie was a good Republican, so they were stuck with the gender they were born with, in his view. Willie had to check that each DVD was in its rightful case, or, God forbid, some poor customer might later get the wrong XXX video, like there was a big difference from one to another, Willie thought. Of course, he obviously wasn’t an aficionado.
Thus, it happened that Willie found the unlabeled DVD in the case marked "Item 1157." He thought the inner label on the DVD itself had just fallen off, but, being the conscientious businessman that he was, Willie thought he should check. He looked up Item 1157 in his catalog and made a note of the title. He cleaned the mystery DVD, popped it in the player in his workroom, and found himself looking at an attractive Hispanic woman in a business suit, talking to the camera. This didn’t look right to Willie. He had never watched "Spring Break Gone Bad," but he knew that all his DVDs started out with the FBI warning about making copies and some kind of title shot.
He turned up the sound and listened for a few minutes and realized that this was a DVD of some business presentation that dealt with expenses being higher than they should be -- boring. He put the DVD back in its case and set it aside to deal with later. Some idiot might really get his cover blown when he showed the other video by mistake. Willie spent a few minutes daydreaming about some of his least-liked customers accidentally queuing up "Spring Break Gone Bad" at their Baptist Church’s financial review meeting. It was at times like this that Willie found his work rewarding.
Donald had gotten up at daybreak. He had become an early riser since he went to work for Billy. Even though Billy had said he could check the traps after he finished Lizzie's van, Donald figured if he made his rounds early, he could be sure the raccoons didn't get stuck out in the hot sun of the late morning. He would take the traps to Lizzie’s and put them in the shade with some food and water for the raccoons while he cleaned her van. Then, when he was finished with the van, he would put the traps back in his truck and take them out to Billy's. Billy would then put the raccoons in a big cage with a bunch of other raccoons.
Donald was almost finished with the van. He tried to make it look a little better each day, finding a new little nook or cranny to scrub out, besides just giving it a routine wash. He wanted to do something extra for Lizzie, because she had been so good to him, fixing him up to work for all her friends. Donald suddenly had so much work to do that he didn’t have much time to think about free enterprise or Black Caesar any more.
He kept meaning to ask Billy about free enterprise, but the only time he saw Billy was when he caught a raccoon in one of the traps. When Donald asked what Billy did with the raccoons, Billy explained that recycling was the way to a better environment and it was nature’s way of dealing with a scarcity. Because there was only a limited amount of habitat for the raccoons, it was important to recycle them, so they all got a fair shot.
Donald wasn’t sure, but he thought habitat must be a technical term for rich folks’ backyards. He also was starting to think he had caught one raccoon twice already. It had almost seemed glad to see him when he picked up the trap. He didn’t know for sure, being a city boy, but it sure looked like the same raccoon he had caught yesterday. He didn’t know how fast raccoons traveled, but it did seem to him like a long way from Billy’s to The Marshe Landes -- too far, anyway, for a raccoon to travel in one night. He had to remember to ask Billy about that the next time he saw him.
Donald was peeling off the remnants of an outdated bumper sticker from the back bumper of the van when the picture of the black car clicked into his mind again. He remembered where he had seen it before. The black car he had seen in that doctor’s garage at The Marshe Landes was the same one he had seen downtown one night recently. Now he just had to remember why that would be important to his new friend, Joe. Maybe it had something to do with Black Caesar. He still had to work out that headscarf.
At the rate he was making money helping all Lizzie’s friends, it wouldn’t be long before he had the hospital paid. Then maybe he could get back to free enterprise, although this working wasn’t so bad. He was thinking since he didn’t have just one job that he worked at all day, every day, maybe this wouldn’t really count against him. He needed to talk to Luther or Billy about that. He was having fun doing all these different things for his new friends; he wondered if it changed from work to free enterprise if you were having fun. He sure did wish he could remember why he wanted to tell Joe about that car with the funny bumper sticker. It would come to him
, though. Part of it already had.
Sam had Jimmy and Tony sitting in his den. They were trying to make sense out of what they knew. Tony’s guy, Ski Cat, had run the Barrera broad to ground. It didn’t look like she was going anywhere too soon. Maybe the Miami Beach cops had bought them a little time by running over her foot. Sam reasoned that the clock was stopped while she was immobile. That gave them a better chance to figure out her fail-safe system and disarm it.
They had done some checking on Jonas Belk, too. The three of them had a fair number of contacts among the members of the legal profession in Savannah and they had made numerous inquiries under various pretexts. They learned that Belk had shown promise as a young lawyer, but he had started having problems with drink early on. His family connections and his mother’s money had gotten him out of several tight spots, and he had settled into an obscure niche where he couldn’t get in too much trouble. Mostly, he wrote wills and reviewed small time real estate contracts -- things he could do quickly in his sober moments and that wouldn’t cause trouble if they got lost on his desk while he was in an alcoholic stupor for a day or two.
All of their sources agreed that Belk probably didn’t break even in his solo law practice, and that his mother must subsidize him. His fellow lawyers ranked him somewhere between harmless and pitiful. While Sam knew this meant that other lawyers didn’t think much of Belk, to him it said that by most objective standards, Belk was probably a much more worthy human being than most of his colleagues at the Bar. A harmless lawyer was a rare enough creature to be an asset to society, in Sam’s opinion.
All of this made it seem unlikely to Sam that Belk would have any devious role in Barrera’s scheme. He was far too unreliable to have anything other than the most straightforward part to play. Still, that didn’t explain the obviously bogus file Jimmy had found in Belk’s office. Sam thought maybe Barrera had set this up as a red herring to get them off her trail. He was beginning to think she was cagey enough to do something like that; use a dupe like Belk to cover her tracks. It had just been too easy with the cell phone call as a pointer and the file, right there in his filing cabinet. The whole thing smelled like shrimp in the sun, to Sam.
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