Big Al Broadnax couldn’t believe his senses. His garden looked like Verdun—his own son, his heir, turning him in.
“Shut up! Don’t you speak! If you do, I might kill you myself!”
Snack started in on the various palms. Once he had ripped away the fronds, he jumped up and down on the fiberglass trunks until they were flat— “You’re a dead man anyway. Do you know that? Doom and them, they’re going to kill you! Hell, Longnecker’s ready to kill you right now!”
“What? You betrayed me! How do you know what they—? You betrayed me! Ahhhh! My only son—!”
“Just shut up! What am I going to do?…”
“You been with them all the time!”
“Yeah, that’s right. My kidnapping—it was all a fraud. I knew you were doing something crazy! I knew you were doing something to get yourself killed! Now you have! What am I going to do?…Where are they keeping her?”
“They didn’t even kidnap you, you slut?”
Snack collected himself. He had to. He had to think. How could he find out about Rosalind? He had to be smart. Wily, like Doom. You couldn’t ever tell what was going on inside Doom’s head. He was calm. Snack had to be calm. “Okay, Dad, you’re finished here. I mean, you can go on living in the house if Longnecker doesn’t kill you—but otherwise, you’re finished. You’re—what the fuck do they say?—you’re unfit to have affairs. I’m taking over right now.”
“Over my dead corpse!”
“Exactly…Wait! I got it!” Calm, calm…“Now I want that card Sikes gave you.”
“No!”
Snack advanced on his father, who started spinning his wheels to escape. There was no escape from Snack. He grabbed the handles behind his father’s head and shook him out of his chair onto the floor as if he were crumbs on the seat. There Snack searched his father’s person until he came up with Donny Sikes’s card. It said King Don and a phone number. Snack wheeled his father’s empty chair out of the ruined garden, leaving the man himself on the floor screaming obscene oaths.
After practicing several times until he got his voice under control, Snack called the number. “Hello, Mr. Sikes, this is Sennacherib Broadnax calling for my father.”
“Call me Donny. All my friends do.”
“Okay, Donny. Call me Snack.”
“Snack?”
“That’s what my friends call me. I’m calling to say that Dad changed his mind. He would like to see Rosalind. Like your man’s got her…Naked. I guess the old goat wants to gloat.” Snack was warming to it. He could hear Doom making a call like this. “Yeah, he’d love to see her tonight. Naked, huh?”
“Naked if I know my man.”
Snack and Donny giggled, both shooting for lasciviousness.
Donny Sikes couldn’t believe the old man was that stupid, to walk right in on the scene of a crime, but if he wanted to make it easy, why should Donny demur—“Well, I’ll just call my man and let him know you’re on the way.”
“Great, Donny. The old man’ll get a kick out of it. Where do you have her?”
“Seventeen fifty Shore Road, on Tequesta Key.”
“Uh, will you be there, Donny?”
“No, something’s come up.”
“Okay, I’ll be seeing you, Donny.”
“Right, Snack. Bye now.” Hanging up, Donny gave a little whoop of delight—it was almost too easy. He’d have Walter Freed kill both Rosalind and Big Al, make it look like a case of murder-suicide, beautiful to behold. Then he’d take out Doom Loomis, and Donny’s way would be clear.
Snack called Doom. “It’s Rosalind! Sikes kidnapped Rosalind!”
Doom sagged into the navigator’s seat. The Annes were asking what? what? but Doom shushed them. “Tell me, Snack.”
“Sikes hired a guy, a professional, to kidnap Rosalind so’s to draw you out. I don’t know who, but I know where.” Snack told him where.
“How do you know this, Snack?”
“…I heard Sikes say it.”
Obviously, he had said it to Big Al. Moreover, Doom thought, how did Sikes know about Rosalind without Big Al telling him?
“There’s another thing, Doom. I’m going over there. I set it up. I told Sikes that my father wanted to gloat over Rosalind.” Snack thought he best not mention the part about Rosalind being naked. “The professional guy is expecting me. He’s going to let me in!”
“That was brilliant.”
“…You really think so?”
“Yes! But don’t do anything until we get there, okay?”
“Okay.”
“What’s that sound I hear? Shouting?”
“Nothing. It’s a family matter,” said Snack.
“Where should we meet?”
“How about Rosalind’s dive shop? That’s only fifteen minutes from Shore Road.”
“We’re leaving now—Snack, thank you.”
Snack was flushed with pride. Before he left, he looked in on his father. Wing Li was hoisting Big Al onto the marble bench.
“Wing Li, that will be all for tonight. I want you to go home.”
“Great,” said Wing Li, who turned on his heel and left.
Snack propped his father up with pillows, comfy, then he tore the phones out of the wall. But after it was done, it seemed to have been unnecessary. Big Al wasn’t going to call anybody. He had fallen limp, spent. The life had gone out of his eyes.
SHOES
Rosalind had no idea how long she had lain limp with fear in the dirty trunk. The car moved all the time. Hyperventilating, sweating, at first she had thought she’d smother in there, but she managed to return her breathing to normal. That, however, was small comfort, bound naked in a killer’s trunk. By the end of the ride, she found herself hoping that he would shoot or strangle her, something quicker than the agonizing death that would result if he abandoned the car somewhere. She struggled against the tape, but that was hopeless and she knew it.
The car stopped, the engine died. Rosalind forgot her pain, waiting for whatever would happen next. The trunk lid popped open. Rosalind was blinded by the light. She sat up squinting as Walter Vale, grinning, loomed over her. She seemed to be inside a residential garage. Without saying a word, he pulled a black sack over her head and tied the drawstrings around her neck. Then he slit the tape around her knees and ankles and said, “Get out, dearie,” but she couldn’t, her legs wouldn’t work, so he hauled her out. Rosalind dropped to her knees but caught herself before she fell forward on her face.
Walter Vale pulled her upright by the arm and led her into the house. Rosalind could feel carpet beneath her feet, and for a moment she forgot she was naked, Walter Vale ogling her at will. Then the carpet gave way to a cool, hard surface, where she was left standing. She heard a chain clanking, but blind, she could do nothing except wait. He wrapped the end of the chain twice around her ankle and padlocked it there. She knew the other end would be locked to something implacable. He pulled the hood away. She was in a dark blue tile bathroom with fancy gold fixtures, chained to the base of the toilet with three feet of slack.
Walter Vale snapped open a knife right under her chin, but Rosalind figured he wasn’t going to stab her after going to the trouble of chaining her up. He used the knife to cut the tape from her mouth. She gasped and said, “Who are you, what do you want?”
He didn’t answer. He looked her up and down, grinning.
“Please untie my hands.”
Walter Vale paused and said, “Naw.” Then he walked out.
Rosalind looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was puffy, her eyes tear-stained slits. Her mouth and cheeks were raw where the tape had been removed, and blood had dried inside her lip on the left side. Silver tape still stuck to her knees and ankles. She sagged to the cool floor, leaned her back against the tub, and wept quietly.
Hours dragged.
Then something strange passed her Italian tile prison door. It was Walter Vale rolling himself along the hall in a wheelchair. Its tires left two distinct, dusty tracks behind. Walte
r Vale seemed amused by those tracks. He kept looking over his shoulder at them, giggling. On the way back he paused at the door, spun around in the chair to face Rosalind, who sat in a tight ball in the corner.
“This was my idea,” said Walter Vale.
“I don’t get it.”
“Who drives a wheelchair?”
“Big Al Broadnax.”
“Right. I never actually had the pleasure, but as soon as I hear he’s in a wheelchair, the idea occurs to me.”
“What idea?”
“What are the police going to think when they find wheelchair tracks all over the house?” Walter Vale loved to see their faces at the moment when truth dawned on them— “Then you’re going to kill me.”
“Of course, dearie.”
The phone rang.
“Excuse me,” said Walter Vale. He wheeled himself away.
Rosalind thought about her animals. She’d never see the animals again. And Dragoon’s Hammock and Lisa Up-the-Grove. And Doom. She wished that she and Doom had sailed away before it was too late. She hoped that after she’d gone, Doom would get this man, would kill him slowly.
Walter Vale returned to the bathroom, this time without benefit of the wheelchair, and said, “How about that? He’s coming over himself. Seems he wants to have a look at you. A man can’t get much more stupid than that.”
“Who! Big Al?”
“Yeah, it seems he wants to gloat over, uh, your present condition.”
“Oh please, no!”
“I was hoping you and me’d have some time to get to know each other, but things don’t always work out. Too bad.”
“You’re going to kill us both?”
“Yeah, only it’s going to look like the old man did you. Making it look like murder-suicide. That’s kinda my speciality. Then it’s this guy Doom Loomis’s turn. But I don’t give discounts for the family plan.”
“Was it you? Did you kill Doom’s father?”
“Yep. Also that stupid embezzler, what was his name? Ozzie. Stupid name, stupid guy. His girlfriend too. Don’t remember her name. A man can’t be expected to remember the names of everybody he did. You know, you look real beautiful sitting there like that. How about begging me to let you go? How about telling me you’ll do anything if I let you go?”
“How about I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” grinned Walter.
“Where’d you get those alligator shoes? Nobody but asshole geeks wear alligator shoes.”
The smile vanished. He kicked her in the side with his shoes, knocked her against the tub. That’s where he left her.
ROGER RUNS
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND. This was an emergency if Roger Vespucci ever saw one. So he bolted through the door at full tilt, and the alarm did indeed sound, a whooping Klaxon noise like that in submarine movies. Gown streaming in his own apparent wind, his parts flopping painfully, he sprinted through the parking lot, over a landscaped knoll with stunted cabbage palms, where he tripped over his hem and skidded in the mulch. There he crouched for a while to reconnoiter and to determine the extent of his injuries. They were slight, but he still had two problems—clothes and transport. Well, three, if you counted the gun.
Broadnax County Hospital, like many things in south Florida, was situated next to a shopping center, this one called the Pink Flamingo Plaza. The alarm still whooped. Soon security goons would show up with flashlights and conduct a general search. Roger needed to be elsewhere. He ran around to the rear of the stores and hid behind a rancid yellow dumpster. PEDRO’S CHICKEN EAT-IN OR CARRY-OUT said big white letters on the receptacle’s side. So far so good. He sat down for a rest, but when his bare ass touched the still-warm blacktop, he decided to keep moving—
Just then a delivery truck pulled to a stop, its headlights lashing Roger, crouching. He ducked around to the dark side of the dumpster. The truck bore Pedro’s emblem—a tap-dancing chicken in a red sombrero. The teenage driver propped his can of Bud Lite on the dash, climbed down with a tray of dead chickens, and kicked open the screen door to Pedro’s kitchen…Like wheels from heaven. The kid had left the engine running.
He couldn’t go after Donny Sikes in a dancing chicken truck, but he might get far enough to steal something less conspicuous. He leapt aboard, located first gear, and lurched away, a couple hundred fryers behind his head.
But where was he going to go? Full of indecision, Roger drove Pedro’s chicken truck along a six-lane boulevard lined with retail establishments, eat-it-and-beat-it joints, their gaudy neon come-ons flickering and flashing, drive-up banks, and gas stations bathed in the halogen yellow of mortal illness beneath two-ton signs sixty feet up in the night sky. He’d have to ditch this chicken truck soon.
He ducked blindly off the boulevard into a gridded subdivision of single-story, pastel-painted cinder-block residences. A person could spit, often did, from his kitchen window into his neighbor’s carport, which, like every other carport in the subdivision, overflowed with rusting recreation gear, hibachis, bicycles, deep-sea fishing rods, snow tires, boats. Whimsical sculptures walked on the chinch-bug-infested lawns. Each street was named after an indigenous water bird. Up Sanderling Drive, down Tern Terrace, Roger Vespucci patrolled.
On Bittern Boulevard, he spotted a fat guy working under his 427 turbo-charged four-wheel-drive Dodge pickup truck with enormous knobby, reptilian tires and objects hanging from the rearview mirror. A woman held the light for him. He had an eight ball tattooed on his upper arm; something was behind the eight ball, but Roger couldn’t make it out.
Roger pulled right into their driveway. A Doberman staked out in the patchy lawn barked, snapped and snarled, and leapt against its chain. The fat guy slid out from under his truck and, with his woman, peered coldly at this tap-dancing chicken truck from out of the wild blue yonder. Roger didn’t want to alight with his pale ass hanging out of his garment in such a way as to alienate strangers, so he waited until they came to him.
After a while they did, keeping their distance. The man wore greasy cut-off jeans and a Weeki Wachee Springs T-shirt under which his hairy pink belly peeked. It was “Mom” behind the eight ball. The woman, who still held the light, was built like a fire hydrant with pendulous breasts, their spread barely repressed beneath a lime-green stretch halter.
“Shuddup, Nestor!” bellowed the man. The Doberman flopped on its side and panted. “You lost, man?”
“Look,” said Roger from behind the wheel, “I got at least fifty chickens in this truck. I’ll trade you fifty chickens for a shirt, pants, and a pair of shoes.”
The man’s expression, blank, didn’t change. He wiped his hands on a rag and stuck it into his back pocket. Her expression didn’t change either, but she turned off the light. “What, you ain’t got clothes of yer own?” the man queried.
“No, I don’t. I’m talking top-drawer fryers here.”
“Cooked or what?” the woman asked.
“Raw. You can do them up any way you like. Have the folks over, freeze the rest.”
“Make it sixty chickens,” the man said, “you got yourself a deal.”
“Sure, sure, sixty. Throw in a jacket and a hat, you can have every chicken in the truck. Wait—what’s that there? In the carport.”
“That’s a Dodge Ram.”
“No, that two-wheeled thing—like a motor scooter—”
“That there’s a moped.”
“Does it run?” Roger wondered.
“Everything I got runs. I’m a master mechanic. I used to be on the Alaska pipeline.”
The woman hiked up her halter as affirmation of that.
“Great, great. Is that where you got that swell tattoo?”
“Yeah. I got others.”
“Swell, swell. Look, I’ll give you this whole truck and everything in it for the clothes and that moped.”
The man and the woman slowly circled the truck in opposite directions. When they returned to the driver’s window, the man said, “You stole this truck,
ditn’t you?”
“Of course I stole it,” said Roger Vespucci.
KILLER
Longnecker arrived on Rosalind’s boat. The night was calm, enabling Bert to nudge the bow right up to the high-tide line, and Longnecker hopped ashore without even getting his combat boots wet. As Bert backed away, Longnecker crept up the short beach in the dark. He crawled through the tangle of buttonwood and sea grape to the edge of the road. From there he could see the house and could hit anybody in front of it. He hosed himself down with bug spray and assumed the traditional prone position beneath the trees.
Bahamian-style, pastel pink with a white roof and white wooden hurricane shutters, the house was low and overhung with dark vegetation. Across the street was the Atlantic Ocean, making this modest house worth about two million. The living room was lighted, but the porch was not.
Occasionally headlights passed, but no one slowed down in front of the house. Longnecker flipped the leather cover off his watch face. It was about that time. He cocked his rifle and put the safety on. Something slithered in the bushes. Snakes? He froze. Crawling up his pant leg? He rolled over onto his back and sprayed bug juice all around his position until the can emptied with a hiss. Maybe vipers, as well as insects, hated Off. It was worth a try. Another set of lights came slowly from the north. The brights flashed on and off. Right on the money.
Snack parked his father’s van in the driveway, alighted, and activated the machinery that lowered the wheelchair to ground level. But it was Doom, not Big Al, who sat in the chair. His legs—and his sawed-off shotgun, which Longnecker had called an alley sweeper—were covered with a crocheted quilt. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat slung low over his brows, and on that part of his face still showing, the Annes had done an admirable age makeup job.
Doom had never intentionally injured another person in his life, but now he was filled with resolve to change that. His heart pounded. If this man had hurt Rosalind, so much as a contusion where he gripped her arm too hard, then Doom meant to point his alley sweeper at him and pull the trigger. If that didn’t have the desired effect immediately, then he’d pull it again. After that he would do the same thing to Donald Sikes and to Big Al Broadnax, then to anyone else who seemed in need of a good sweeping. Point-blank murder wasn’t what he had had in mind when he came down here, and for a moment, as Snack wheeled him up the walk, Doom wondered if there had been another way, or was this simply the natural outcome of events, as Professor Goode had predicted. Perhaps he’d work that out in recollected tranquillity, if there was ever to be such a thing. Sheriff Plotner crouched in the back of the van, ready to make an arrest. He and Rosalind had had their differences, but if this man had hurt her, he’d never make it to jail alive. He would tell Ted Koppel that he had died trying to escape.
Apparent Wind Page 24
