Lucky You

by Carl Hiassen

  "The answer is no."

  "I need somebody to drill 'em."

  "Then talk to your wife."

  "Please," said Dominick. "I got the shop all set up."

  Demencio laid six dollars on the counter and slid off the stool. "Drill your own feet," he told Dominick. "I ain't in the mood."

  JoLayne Lucks knew what Dr. Crawford thought:

  Finally the girl gets a boyfriend, and the boyfriend beats her to a pulp.

  "Please don't stare. I know I'm a sight," JoLayne said.

  "You want to tell me about it?"

  "Truly? No." That would clinch it with Doc Crawford, the fact that she wouldn't talk. So she added: "It's not what you think."

  Dr. Crawford said: "Hold still, you little shit."

  He was addressing Mickey, the Welsh corgi on the examining table.

  JoLayne was doing her best to control the dog but it was squirming like a worm on a griddle. The little ones always were the hardest to handle – cockers, poodles, Pomeranians – and the nastiest, too. Biters, every damn one. Give me a 125-pound Dobie any day, JoLayne thought.

  To Mickey the corgi, she muttered: "Be good, baby." Whereupon Mickey sank his yellow fangs into her thumb and did not let go. As painful as it was, the attachment enabled JoLayne Lucks to control the dog's head, giving Dr. Crawford a clear shot at the vaccination site. The instant Mickey felt the needle, he released his grip on JoLayne. Dr. Crawford commended her for not losing her temper.

  JoLayne said, "Why take it personally. You'd bite, too, if you had a dog's brain. I've seen men with no such excuse do worse things."

  Dr. Crawford buttered her thumb with Betadine. JoLayne observed that it looked like steak sauce.

  "You want some on that lip?" the doctor asked.

  She shook her head, bracing for the next question. How did that happen?But all he said was: "A couple sutures wouldn't be a bad idea, either."

  "Oh, that's not necessary."

  "You don't trust me."

  "Nope." With her free hand she patted the bald spot on Doc Crawford's head. "I'll be OK," she told him.

  The remainder of JoLayne's workday: cat (Daisy), three kittens (unnamed), German shepherd (Kaiser), parrot (Polly), cat (Spike), beagle (Bilko), Labrador retriever (Contessa), four Labrador puppies (unnamed), and one rhinoceros iguana (Keith). JoLayne received no more bites or scratches, although the iguana relieved itself copiously on her lab coat.

  Arriving home, she recognized Tom Krome's blue Honda parked in the driveway. He was sitting in the swing on the porch. JoLayne sat down next to him and pushed off. With a squeak the swing started to move.

  JoLayne said, "I guess we've got a deal."

  "Yep."

  "What'd your boss say?"

  "He said, 'Great story, Tom! Go to it!' "

  "Really."

  "His exact words. Hey, what happened to your coat?"

  "Iguana pee. Now ask about my thumb."

  "Lemme see."

  JoLayne extended her hand. Krome studied the bite mark with mock seriousness.

  "Grizzly!" he said.

  She smiled. Boy, did it feel good, his touch. Strong and gentle and all that stuff. Which was how it always started, with a warm dumb tingle.

  JoLayne hopped out of the swing and said: "We've got an hour before sunset. I want to show you something."

  When they got to Simmons Wood, she pointed out the for sale sign. "That's why I can't wait six months for these jerkoffs to get caught. Any day, somebody's going to come along and buy this place."

  Tom Krome followed her over the fence, through the pine and palmettos. She stopped to point out bobcat scat, deer tracks and a red-shouldered hawk in the treetops.

  "Forty-four acres," JoLayne said.

  She was whispering, so Krome whispered back. "How much do they want for it?"

  "Three million and change," she said.

  Krome asked about the zoning.

  "Retail," JoLayne answered, with a grimace.

  They stopped on the sandy bluff overlooking the creek. JoLayne sat down and crossed her legs. "A shopping mall and a parking lot," she said, "just like in the Joni Mitchell song."

  Tom Krome felt he should be writing down everything she said. His notebook nagged at him from the back pocket of his jeans. As if he still had a newspaper job.

  JoLayne, pointing at the tea-colored ribbon of water: "That's where the cooters come from. They're off the logs now, but you should be here when the sun's high."

  Still whispering, like she was in church. Which he supposed it was, in a way.

  "What do you make of my plan?"

  Krome said, "I think it's fantastic."

  "You're making fun."

  "Not at all – "

  "Oh yes. You think I'm nuts." She propped her chin in her hands. "OK, smart guy, what would youdo with the money?"

  Krome started to answer but JoLayne motioned for him to hush. A deer was at the creek; a doe, drinking. They watched it until darkness fell, then they quietly made their way back to the highway, Krome following the whiteness of JoLayne's lab coat weaving through the trees and scrub.

  Back at the house, she disappeared into the bedroom to change clothes and check her phone messages. When she came out, he was standing at the aquarium, watching the baby turtles.

  "Treasure this," she said. "Chase Bank called. The assholes have already charged a truckload of stuff on my Visa."

  Krome spun around. "You didn't tell me they got your credit card."

  JoLayne reached for the kitchen phone. "I've got to cancel that number."

  Krome grabbed her arm. "No, don't. This is wonderful news: They've got your Visa, plus they seem to be total morons."

  "Yeah, I couldn't be happier."

  "You wanted to find them, right? Now we've got a trail."

  JoLayne was intrigued. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a box of Goldfish crackers. The salt stung the cut on her lip, made her eyes water.

  Krome said: "Here's what you do. Call the bank and find out exactly where the card's been used. Tell them you loaned it to your brother, uncle, something like that. But don't cancel it, JoLayne. Not until we know where these guys are headed."

  She did what he told her. The Chase Bank people couldn't have been nicer. She took down the information and handed it to Krome, who said: "Wow."

  "No kidding, wow."

  "They spent twenty-three hundred dollars at a gun show?"

  "And two hundred sixty at a Hooters," JoLayne said. "I'm not sure which is scarier."

  The gun show was at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale, the Hooters was in Coconut Grove. The robbers seemed to be traveling south.

  "Get packed," Tom Krome said.

  "Lord, I forgot about the turtles. You know how hungry they get."

  "They're notcoming with us."

  "Course not," JoLayne said.

  They stopped at the ATM so she could get some cash. Back in the car, she popped a handful of Goldfish and said: "Drive like the wind, partner. My Visa maxes out at three thousand bucks."

  "Then let's pay it off. Put a check in the mail first thing tomorrow – I want these boys to go hog wild."

  Sportively JoLayne grabbed a handful of Krome's shirt. "Tom, I've got exactly four hundred and thirty-two dollars left in my checking."

  "Relax," he told her. Then, with a sideways glance: "It's time you started thinking like a millionaire."

  7

  Chub's real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus's father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie's womb had been as welcome as "a cockroach on a wedding cake."

  Nonetheless, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large ho
use with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a secondhand ski boat on a trailer in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Bookencyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus's siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there, too, had he not by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy.

  He moved out of his parents' home and took up with a bad crowd. He got a job in the photo department of a drugstore, where he earned extra money sorting through customers' negatives, swiping the racy ones and peddling the prints to horny kids at the high school. (Even after entering adulthood, Onus Gillespie remained amazed there were women in the world who'd allow their boyfriends or husbands to take pictures of them topless. He dreamed of meeting such a girl, but so far it hadn't happened.)

  When he was twenty-four, Onus accidentally landed a well-paying job at a home furnishings warehouse. Thanks to an aggressive union local, he managed to remain employed for six years despite a wretched attendance record, exhaustively documented incompetence and a perilous affinity for carpet glue. Stoned to the gills, Onus one day crashed a fork-lift into a Snapple machine, a low-speed mishap that he parlayed into an exorbitant claim for worker's compensation.

  His extended "convalescence" involved many drunken fishing and hunting excursions. One morning Onus was observed emerging from the woods with a prostitute on one arm and a dead bear cub slung over his shoulders. The man watching him was an investigator for an insurance company, which was able to argue convincingly that Mr. Onus Gillespie was not injured in the least. Only then was he fired from the warehouse. He chose not to appeal.

  Moira and Greve wrote one last check to their errant spawn, then disowned him. Onus needed no special encouragement to leave the state. In addition to the pending felony indictments for insurance fraud and game poaching, Onus had received a rather unfriendly letter from the Internal Revenue Service, inquiring why he'd never in his adult life bothered to file a tax return. To emphasize its concern, the IRS sent a flatbed and two disagreeable men to confiscate Onus's customized Ford Econoline van. It was easy to spot. An elaborate mural on the side of the vehicle depicted Kim Basinger as a nude mermaid, riding a narwhal. Onus had fallen for the beautiful Georgia actress in the movie 9½ Weeksand conceived the mural as a love tribute.

  It was the seizure of his beloved Econoline that turned Onus Gillespie bitterly against the U.S. government (although he was similarly resentful toward his parents, who not only had refused to pay his tax lien but had also tipped off the IRS agents about where to find the van). Before bolting, Onus burned his driver's license and renounced the family name. He began calling himself Chub (which is how his brothers and sisters had referred to him when he was younger and had something of a weight problem). He couldn't make up his mind on a new surname, so he decided to wait until something good popped into his head. He hitchhiked to Miami with only the clothes on his back, seventeen dollars in his wallet and, in a zippered pocket, his only tangible asset – the disabled-parking permit he'd scammed off the company doctor for the workmen's comp claim.

  Pure good fortune and a round of free beers led to a friendship with an amateur forger, who entrusted Chub with his printing equipment while he went off to state prison. In no time, Chub was cranking out fake handicapped stickers and selling them for cash to local motorists. His favorite hangout was Miami's federal courthouse, infamous for its dearth of parking spaces. Among Chub's satisfied customers were stenographers, bondsmen, drug lawyers and even a U.S. magistrate or two. Soon his reputation grew, and he became known throughout the county as a reliable supplier of bootleg wheelchair emblems.

  That's why he was sought out by Bodean Gazzer, who'd been having a terrible time trying to park downtown. Having recently purchased the Dodge Ram, Bode thought it was foolhardy to leave it three or four blocks away while he went to wrestle the bureaucracy of the corrections department. Those particular neighborhoods weren't such lovely places to go for a stroll; wall-to-wall Haitians and Cubans! He had nightmare visions of his gorgeous new truck stripped to its axles.

  Chub felt an instant kinship with Bode, whose global theories and braided explanations struck a comforting chord. For instance, Chub had been stung when his parents scorned him as a tax cheat, but Bode Gazzer made him feel better by enumerating the many sound reasons why no full-blooded white American male should give a nickel to the Infernal Revenue. Chub brightened to learn that what he'd initially regarded as ducking a debt was, in fact, an act of legitimate civil protest.

  "Like the Boston Tea Party," Bode had said, invoking his favorite historical reference. "Those boys were against taxation without representation, and that's what you're fightin', too. The white man has lost his voice in this government, so why should he foot the bill?"

  It sounded good to Chub. Damn good. And Bode Gazzer was full of such nimble rationalizations. (

  Some of Chub's acquaintances, especially the war veterans, disapproved of his handicapped-parking racket. Not Bode. "Think about it," he'd said to Chub. "How many wheelchair people you actually see? And look how many thousands of parkin' spaces they got. It don't add up, unless ... "

  " 'Less what?"

  "Unless those parkin' spots ain't really for the handicaps," Bode had surmised darkly. "What color's them wheelchair permits?"

  "Blue."

  "Hmmm-mmm. And what color is the helmets worn by United Nations troops?"

  "Fuck if I know. Blue?"

  "Yessir!" Bode Gazzer had shaken Chub by the arm. "Don't you see, boy? There's an invasion, who you think's gonna be parked in them blue wheelchair spaces? Soldiers, that's who. UN soldiers!"

  "Jesus Willy Christ."

  "So in my estimation you're doin' the country a tremendous goddamn service with those imitation handicap stickers. Every one you sell means one less parkin' spot for the enemy. That's how I think of it."

  And that's how Chub intended to think of it, too. He wasn't a crook, he was a patriot! Life was getting better and better.

  And now here he was, on the road with his best buddy.

  Soon to be multimillionaires.

  Spending a long leisurely afternoon at Hooters, eating barbecue chicken wings and slugging down Coronas.

  Flirting with the waitresses in them shiny orange shorts, sweet God Almighty, sporting the finest young legs Chub had ever seen. And asses shaped just like Golden Delicious apples.

  And outside: a pickup truck full of guns.

  "A toast," said Bode Gazzer, lifting his mug. "To America."

  "Amen!" Chub burped.

  "This here is what it's all about."

  "For sure."

  Said Bode: "No such thing as too much pussy or too much firepower. That's a fact."

  They were shitfaced by the time the check came. With a foamy grin, Bode slapped the stolen credit card on the table. Chub vaguely recalled they were supposed to ditch the nigger woman's Visa after the gun show, where they'd used it to purchase a TEC-g, a Cobray M-ii, a used AR-I5, a canister of pepper spray and several boxes of ammo.

  Chub preferred gun shows over gun stores because, thanks to the National Rifle Association, gun shows remained exempt from practically every state and federal firearms regulation. It had been Chub's idea to browse at the one in Fort Lauderdale. However, he'd had strong reservations about paying for such flashy weapons with a stolen credit card, which he thought was risky to the point of stupid.

  Again Bode Gazzer had put his friend's mind at ease. He'd explained to Chub that many gun-show dealers were actually undercover ATF agents, and that the use of a phony bank card would send the bully lawmen on a frantic futile search for "J. L. Lucks" and his newly purchased arsenal.

  "So they're off on a goose chase," Bode had said, "instead of hassling law-abiding Americans all day long."

  His second reason for using a stolen Visa was more pragmatic than political: They had no cash. But Bode had agreed with Chub that they ought to throw away the credit card after the gun show, in case the Chase Bank started checking up.
<
br />   Chub was about to remind his partner of that plan when an exceptionally long-legged waitress appeared and whisked the Visa card off the table.

  Bode rubbed his hands together, reverently. "Thatis what we're fightin' for, my friend. Anytime you start to doubt our cause, think a that young sweet thing and the 'Merica she deserves."

  "A-fucking-men," Chub said with a bleary snort.

  The waitress reminded him strikingly of his beloved Kim Basinger: fair skin, sinful lips, yellow hair. Chub was electrified. He wondered if the waitress had a boyfriend, and if she let him take topless photos. Chub considered inviting her to sit and have a beer, but then Bode Gazzer loomed into focus, reminding Chub what they both must look like: Bode, in his camo and cowboy boots, his face welted and bitch-bitten; Chub, gouged and puffy, his mangled left eyelid concealed behind a homemade patch.

  The girl'd have to be blind or crazy to show an interest. When she returned to the table, Chub boldly asked her name. She said it was Amber.

  "OK, Amber, if I might ast – you ever heard a the White Rebel Brotherhood?"

  "Sure," the waitress said. "They opened for the Geto Boys last summer."

  Bode, who was signing the Visa receipt, glanced up and said: "You are seriously mistaken, sugar."

  "I don't think so, sir. I got a T-shirt at the concert."

  Bode frowned. Chub twirled his ponytail and whooped. "Ain't that a kick in the nuts!"

  Amber picked up the credit-card slip, which included a hundred-dollar tip, and rewarded them with a blush and her very warmest smile, at which time Chub dropped to one knee and begged permission to purchase her orange shorts as a keepsake of the afternoon. Two Hispanic bouncers materialized to escort the militiamen out of the restaurant.

  Later, sitting in the truck among their new guns, Chub was chuckling. "So much for your White Rebel Brotherhood."

  "Shut up," Bode Gazzer slurred, " 'fore I puke on your shoes."

  "Go right ahead, brother. I'm in love."

  "Like hell."

  "I'm in love, and I got a mission."

  "Don't you start!"

  "No," Chub said, "don't youtry and stop me."