Текст книги "Lost"

Автор книги: Chris Jordan

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Fern shakes her head, exhales sharply. “Okay, okay, I get it. Jane isn’t here, try her cell. Other than that I’m like Colonel Schultz—I know nothing.”

“Perfect,” says Shane.

“Cell will be off for a couple of hours while we’re en route, but I’ll get any messages. And I’ll call you as soon as I can. Love you, Fern,” I say, hugging her. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“Go,” she insists, waving me away. “Find her.”

We’re heading for the door.

“I mean it about the bling hotel!” she reminds us.

Thanks to small miracles, our flight departs on time. An added bonus, it’s only three-quarters full, so the middle seat is empty. Shane has a real problem with his long legs, so he takes the aisle and I snuggle up against the window, hoping the hum of the engines will be calming. Trying not to obsess on what might be happening to Kelly at this very minute, or what might already have happened to her, or if she’s suffering or terrified or just plain lost.

Too much to think about. I have to find a way to put it aside, concentrate on the here and now, and whatever the next step may be. Get to Miami, then worry about Kel. Once we’re airborne and at altitude, Shane opens his laptop. No Internet connection, but he’s downloaded what he describes as scads of data, and he starts sorting through the files. Catching up on paperwork, he calls it.

“Mostly I’m treading water until I can get back on the Net,” he admits. “My advice, put your head back, close your eyes, get some rest. You’re going to need it when we get there.”

“But you never sleep,” I say reprovingly.

“Not on a job.”

“How is that possible?”

He makes a rueful face. “Never got a satisfactory answer. I’ve been brain scanned, studied by sleep deprivation specialists, checked into insomnia clinics, examined by neurologists, shrinks, fortune-tellers, you name it.”

“Fortune-tellers? Really?”

“No,” he admits, “but the rest, yes. They never found any organic brain disorders, nothing they can point to.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“It can be,” he admits. “The brain requires sleep—being deprived of it can actually kill you—so when my brain doesn’t sleep for too long it compensates by sending me into a fugue state for short intervals.”

“Fugue state? How does that work? Do you mind my asking?”

“No, it’s fine,” he says. “Basically I sleep with my eyes open, but don’t know I’m asleep. I can be up, moving around, unaware of my condition. Sort of like sleepwalking. When it gets really bad I tend to hallucinate. They call it wakeful dreaming or sleep state misperception.”

“And that’s why you left the FBI?”

“Pretty much, yes,” he says, sounding evasive.

“You had this all your life?”

“No,” he says, glancing away. “It’s a result of trauma.”

“You got shot? And that caused it?”

Shane turns to face me in his narrow seat. Not easy because his long legs are jammed. His eyes are as deep and as blue as the sky around us and they’re searching mine, as if looking for a clue. “No, I wasn’t shot,” he says. “You want to know exactly what happened?”

I nod, but there’s something in his manner that tells me I’ll regret asking.

“I propose a fair trade,” he begins. “I’ll tell you what happened to me if you’ll tell me about Kelly’s father. Who he is, where he is, and why you don’t want to talk about him.”

I turn to the window, gaze at the cotton clouds, the wave-laced sea below.

“Mrs. Garner? Jane?”

“Can’t,” I say.

“Does it have to do with what’s happened to your daughter? Is her father part of this? I have to know if I’m going to help.”

He waits for an answer, patient but insistent.

“I really can’t tell you about her father,” I say in a small voice, “because I have no idea who he is.”

And that’s the truth, almost.

Part II

Screams In The Night

1. Let Him Sizzle

There’s nothing like a dry martini at thirty thousand feet to set the mood. Edwin Manning, normally not much of a drinker, sips the icy vodka and decides that he has, finally, taken charge of himself, if not the whole nightmare situation. His twenty-four-hour emotional meltdown has left him deeply ashamed. The way he showed weakness in front of the former FBI agent and the girl’s mother was despicable. For the first time in his adult life he’d been unable to cope, immobilized by fear of what might happen if he makes the wrong decision. He didn’t snap out of it until the package arrived. At that moment it became obvious that if he failed to get it together and act like a man his son would surely die.

Demands have been made, outrageous demands. As a father he has to find a way to fulfill those demands, impossible as they may be.

It all starts with Edwin getting his ass in gear, transporting himself and a few burly associates to the scene of the crime, as it were. The associates, those with him on the chartered Gulfstream, include Mr. Salvatore J. Popkin, borrowed from the Wunderbar staff, where he is not-so-affectionately known as Sally Popeye or Sally Pop. Whatever juvenile, wannabe-wise-guy name he uses, at this moment he’s staring longingly at Edwin’s perfectly chilled martini with his egg-like eyes.

“Have a beer if you like,” Edwin suggests, “But I want you sober when we arrive, understood?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Manning.”

“Really?” says Edwin, feeling a slight buzz. “You look like shit.”

“Ha-ha. You should see the other guy,” Sally responds, wincing as he readjusts his arm sling.

With his thick bulk and his shaved head and the weird eyes, Sally has the look of a guy who can’t be stopped, but Edwin figures he got in trouble with the other big man, the former special agent, himself no slouch in the art of intimidation. It doesn’t matter how it really went down, Edwin finally has a plan, of sorts, and Sally Pop still figures into the mix.

“At most we’ve got forty-eight hours before the FBI steps on my neck,” Edwin reminds him. “So we need to roll as soon as we land. Thirty minutes to the condo, pick up a few things, another forty-five to the destination.”

“No problem,” says Sally.

“No problem?” Edwin responds, voice rising. “You think this is no problem?” His eyes well with tears as he indicates the red plastic cooler nestled under his seat.

“I mean, ah, no problem with transportation,” Sally says uneasily, trying not to glance at the cooler. “That other thing, Mr. Manning, I don’t know what to say.”

Edwin finishes his martini, good to the last drop. He’s not even slightly ashamed of the tears. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a good cry. He’s aware that the other associates, the new guys Sally Pop brought on board, already have a nickname for him. Weepy. Nice, but Edwin doesn’t care. They’re so far down the food chain he’s barely aware that they live, breathe or think. Nothing like thinking or higher reasoning, but they do have functioning nervous systems, brain stems and so on. Temporary employees. Disposable, if it comes to that. Their thoughts and opinions are of no import. At the moment his sole concern is his beautiful son, a young man worth ten thousand of the bent-nose rope-a-dopes who will be acting as Edwin’s personal security detail until he gets this all sorted out.

It’s a new thing, the need to surround himself with hired muscle. But he knows the mad bastard on the phone, the one who threatens to shake his world to pieces. Knows the man to be intelligent, unpredictable and highly dangerous. Capable, as he has demonstrated, of the most unimaginable acts, not the least of which sloshes in the red plastic cooler beneath his seat, in a solution of saline and chipped ice.

Flesh of his flesh.

Seth’s little finger, still wearing the ring Edwin gave him when he graduated from flight school. FedExed to him as promised in a cheery little ice pack. A well-known replantation surgeon has already examined the severed finger, pronounced it too damaged to reattach, even if Seth is located in the next few hours, but Edwin isn’t ready to give up on that. He’ll find a more daring surgeon. He’ll get Seth back, make him whole again, no matter what it takes. And then he will make sure that the man who damaged Seth will cease to exist.

Edwin Manning, a slightly built, intensely driven man who has never deliberately caused physical harm to another human being, now dreams of slowly immersing his adversary in a vat of bubbling acid.

Let the bastard suffer as I have suffered, he’s thinking, tears in his eyes. Let him sizzle.

2. The Twenty-four Hour Rule

When Kelly was eight years old, my mother got it in her head that we needed a vacation. Partly it was to celebrate Kelly having finished a successful course of chemo, partly because Mom thought we ought to do something as a family that didn’t involve hospitals. It was a two-part holiday extravaganza, financed entirely out of her personal savings. The first part was a four-day package tour of Disney World. Included, a perfectly nice motel in Orlando with shuttle service to the park, where Kelly, frankly, went totally bonkers. Loved it to pieces. The rides, the actors in the goofy costumes, the food—she even claimed to love waiting in line. It makes Space Mountain so much better, Mommy, having to wait! She was so happy to be alive and healthy, so glad to be doing things other kids did, that nothing could temper her joy, not even ninety minutes in a line of squirming brats. My own mother was so pleased that I’d catch her smiling and humming songs to herself. It was a rare event for Mom, to have everything work out as planned. So as far as the Garner clan is concerned, Disney World was the greatest family vacation of all time, a glorious childhood memory for Kelly, for all of us. And then it got even better, at least for me.

The second part of the trip, which Mom kept a big secret, was a three-night stay in South Beach, coinciding with Fashion Week. How she managed it I’ll never know, but she got us a room at a great little boutique hotel right there on Ocean Drive, in the heart of the Art Deco District, and tickets to one of the runway shows. On the short flight from Orlando to Miami she kept looking at me sideways, to see if I was loving the idea, and I kept bursting into tears and hugging her, and Kelly kept wanting to know why grown-ups cried when they were happy.

When I miss Mom the most, those are the days I want to experience all over again. The South Beach Caper, as she called it. How proud she was to have pulled it off! All her life she sacrificed for her child—me—and this was the payoff, those few precious hours when she could be mentor and mother and grandmother and confidante and best friend and tour guide. She especially loved the runway show, the exotic models strutting wild little dresses and fake furs that made them look like skinny éclairs on high heels. The designers orbiting the stage like nervous satellites, one of them literally tearing out tiny clumps of his bizarrely coiffed hair. Mom would have loved it if I was one of those designers—not the tearing-out-the-hair part, of course—and she’d done everything she could to give me the opportunity. Maybe I wanted it, too, at one time, in the excitement of first discovering I had some talent in that direction. But then Kelly had gotten sick and healing her became the center of my life, and when we came out the other side, all three of us, I was more than happy to earn a good living being my own boss, selling elaborate wedding gowns to people who have more money than sense.

Anyhow, that was my one and only visit to Miami until now, and stepping into the tropical sunlight without my mother and my daughter brings on a hollow pang of loneliness so overwhelming it hits my guts like a physical blow.

“You okay?” Shane wants to know.

“I’ll be fine. Let me sit for a minute.”

The big guy finds me a seat on the lower level, says he’ll keep me in sight while he arranges a car rental. Sure enough I can spot his head above the crowd, see him glancing back from the Hertz counter, signaling that it won’t take long.

Fern has left a number of messages on my cell, all of them variations on “hope you’re okay, call me soonest.” She answers on the first ring.

“Thank God!” she begins. “I was worried if the plane crashed.”

“The plane didn’t crash. I’m here, we made it, we’re renting a car. Any calls?”

“Any calls? Are you kidding? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing! Who is this Haley person? Seems kind of sweet but also seriously whacked. She actually started weeping when I said you were out of town for a few days. I’m telling people your great-aunt Hilda died. She was ninety-three, by the way, and a former Ziegfield girl. The one with the diamond-studded tiara and the peacock feathers. There are rumors she had a fling with Bugsy Siegel. Or was it Warren Beatty?”

“You made her up?”

“Background details are important, Jane. I have to believe in Aunt Hilda. Amazing woman. Too bad you were estranged for all these years.”

“Fern, I don’t know what to say.”

“Not to worry, I’m taking care of business. Mrs. Norbert was very nice, she said no problem, she’ll see you when you get back. Ditto the Spinellis. There was inquiry for an estimate, a ten-member wedding party in Bellport, they want you to coordinate the tuxedos with the gowns, whatever that means, but they’ll wait until next week. Let’s see, what else. Oh, Fred is filing the tax quarterlies, he said to let you know there were no surprises. And Alex McFairy suspects something is going on, but he didn’t push.”

“McQuarrie. His name is McQuarrie.”

“Whatever.”

Something I’ve never really understood, Fern not liking my friend Alex. It’s not that he’s gay—Fern has more gay male pals than Cher and Madonna combined. She thinks Alex is a terrible snob, and of course that’s true, but if I don’t find his snooty attitudes offensive, why should Fern? One of those unfortunate things about life—no matter how hard you try, not all your friends are friends.

“The detective called,” she’s saying. “Jay Berg? He sounds full of himself. Nothing to report from his end, just checking in—wanted to know if Kelly had made contact. I said no, was that okay?”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to start lying to the cops, not if we can help it.”

“Any news?”

“We just got here. How could there be any news?”

“You sound so stressed! Janey, listen to me, you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on his. Those are good shoulders.”

“Got to go. Thanks, Fern, you’re a saint.”

“Not if I can help it. Bye-bye. Love you, Janey poo.”

Janey poo. Fern is the only person in the world who can get away with calling me that. My playground name. I’m seven years old, fall on my bum in the mud. All the kids laughing, saying I pooed my pants, which seems so utterly unfair, since I haven’t even wet the bed in years and years—or months, at least. Fern, who loved being the playground hero, swooping in like the wonderful wicked witch, saying she’ll poo on them if they don’t shut their dirty mouths, and from then on it’s her secret sister name for me. A name that says we’re in this together, blood of my blood, best friends forever.

Thank God for Fern. Having her on my side makes an impossible situation just a little bit easier to take.

Randall Shane returns from the counter disappointed. No Lincoln Town Cars available. “I settled for a Crown Vic,” he says, handing me the paperwork. “You drive.”

On the short bus ride to the car lot he explains that he’s into his twenty-seventh hour without sleep and doesn’t trust himself behind the wheel.

“Are you sure you’re okay with the rest of it?” I want to know. “Can you do this?”

“I’m fine,” he insists. “Never felt better. The twenty-four-hour rule is my own personal thing. Like not driving if you have a glass of wine.”

“Lots of people drive with a glass of wine. I have, if it’s only one with dinner.”

“Not me. Never,” he says, very firmly.

End of discussion, obviously. Mr. Shane has his rules and sticks to ‘em, thank you, ma’am. What’s with him, anyhow? The so-called sleep disorder—did he have an accident, fall asleep at the wheel, is that what this is about? At some point I do want to know, but it’s not important enough to pursue, not at the moment. Certainly not worth surrendering my secrets.

Ancient history. There are bigger priorities.

Waiting in the Hertz lot is a big, dark green Ford sedan with tinted windows. To me it looks suspiciously like a cop car. Shane says that’s no surprise, lots of law enforcement agencies use the Crown Victoria, including the FBI.

“You’re thinking of the P71 Police Interceptor model. This is the rental version,” he says, sliding into the passenger seat. “Less power, smoother ride. Also shotgun, police radio, or on-board computer. Otherwise pretty much the same vehicle.”

“Feels like a boat,” I point out. “Drives like one, too,” he says. “Where are we headed, exactly?” Shane unfolds the Hertz map. “I want to find that cell tower,” he says. “We’ll go from there.”

3. Darkness My Old Friend

The mosquito is driving her insane.

Kelly knows she should conserve the battery in the lantern—her only source of light—but for the past twenty minutes a mosquito has been sucking her blood like a winged vampire. She’s decided she can take the confinement, the hunger, the worrying about what has happened to Seth, the toilet-in-a-bucket, but the goddamn mosquito makes her want to run into a wall, knock herself out.

Crazy thought. How can she find a way to escape if she’s unconscious?

Zzz-zzz-zzz, dive-bombing her ear. Stupid bug!

Kelly clicks on the feeble light. Catches a glimpse of something zipping around her face, then loses it. She crawls to a corner, hoping the bug will stay around the light, leave her alone.

The strategy works for less than a minute. Zzz-zzz-zzz. With her back braced to the corner, swatting air, she makes a terrible discovery: there’s way more than one mosquito. There are dozens, attacking in turn, and more are streaming in through the narrow air vent.

There will be no end to the biting, the buzzing, the swarming dots of madness. Sobbing frantically, she slaps at her ears, hair, neck.

Kelly remembers a kid in the hospital having a seizure, how scary it was to observe, and this is like that—uncontrollable, involuntary. Her limbs kicking out, her brain throwing sparks instead of thinking. And she hates it, not being in charge of her body.

As she continues to slap herself, the hate part gradually overcomes the fear. She concentrates on hating what’s been done to her. A hatred as white and hot as a knife to the brain. How dare they? Not that she has a clear idea of who they are. The mission was to deliver his father’s company plane to a location in Florida—a fabulous flight in a dream aircraft, with Kelly flying hands-on most of the way. Supposedly a favor to some business associate. Deliver the King Air, then return on a commercial flight, they’d both be home the same day, no big deal. But when she and Seth exited the aircraft, three men were waiting on the packed gravel runway. Dark, dangerous men—one of them darker and more dangerous than the others. Glossy black hair in a bowl cut—he’s the one who shot her, drugged her. Wait. Does she have that right, was she really drugged? Did he shoot her with some sort of dart or is that something from a bad dream, the nightmare of waking up in the dark?

Hard to sort out that jumble of images, decide what’s real, what’s imagined. Similar to how her memory got scrambled when they gave her anesthesia in the hospital. You come out of a black hole, can’t quite put it all together. Dazed and confused for sure.

Gradually Kelly settles. Takes control of her breathing, stops slapping at herself. Let the bastards bite, she’s got more important things to do.

Figure it out, Kel. Or, like her mom is always saying, use your noodle.

First thing, she turns off the lamp.

Darkness my old friend. Something from a song her grandmother used to play. An actual turntable album, probably still there with the stuff in the attic Mom can’t bring herself to throw out, although the turntable itself is long gone. Kind of a spooky-pretty song, high boy voices, and when Kelly had to go back into the hospital, face it all over again, the words resonated. Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to speak to you again. Made sense to her then, and it makes sense now: the darkness really can be her friend, if she can find a way to use it. She can’t break through the steel walls or fit through the ventilation slot. She has no knife, no gun, no secret karate moves. There’s only one way to escape: she has to think herself out.

Her weapon is her brain. Her brain and the dark.

4. Small Alligators

The road runs straight and true, a sliver of hot black tar straight into the middle of nowhere. This is my first experience driving in South Florida—with my mom we took shuttles and courtesy vans—but I seem to be doing okay. With Shane navigating, I manage to connect with a street south of the airport and follow it west until the endless stoplights gradually diminish and the flat, urban sprawl gives way to a sea of grass that stretches all the way to the horizon. Nothing but sunburnt grass, and low mangroves, and silvery glints of water under a bleached-out sky.

We’ve gone from the twenty-first century to some ancient, empty wilderness in less than forty minutes.

“This is the Everglades?” I want to know.

“The edge of it,” he says, consulting the map. “Pull over at the next rest stop.”

It’s not so much a rest stop as a narrow strip of baked earth. When I shove open the heavy door and step out, the sudden blast of heat takes my breath away. Shane is already peering off into the great flat distance, using a rock-steady hand to shade his eyes.

“There,” he says, pointing.

Half a mile away, on a little man-made island in the grasslands, a sky-blue tower juts up like a rude finger.

“Got it,” I say, squinting into the brightness. “But what good does it do us?”

Can’t say I ever before actually noticed a cell tower. Why would I? Normally all I care is if the phone works, not the technical aspects. But here we are, in the middle of the soggy forever, staring up at this huge thing that bristles with what Shane says are microwave transponders.

“Cell phone transmission is basically line of sight,” he explains. “What you carry in your purse is a small radio transmitter with a range of only a few miles. The nearest tower picks up your transmission, beams it to a base station, where the call is shunted into the normal phone lines we all know and love. Think of it as a much bigger way of doing what your cordless phone at home does, providing radio connection between the bases. Pretty simple, really.”

Yeah, sure, pretty simple if you happen to be a techno-freak. Some of us have never figured out how electricity comes out of those little receptacles in the wall, let alone how cell phones, or TVs or radios work. Mostly because we don’t really care how stuff works, just so long as the toaster oven gets all hot when you push the button.

I’m thinking about heat and toasters and ovens because it feels like we’re being baked alive. When the big trucks roar by, the gusts of wind hit like a hot slap in the face. I’m going to need a hat or a visor, and most of all a pair of big, wraparound sunglasses—or maybe one of those welder’s masks, to shield me from the brutal sun.

Shane smiles, showing his teeth. Looks like a handsome shark, pleased to be out of water. “The most recent calls from your daughter’s cell phone were made in line of sight from here, via that tower. Figure the height of the tower, that means a radius of up to ten miles.”

“Yeah, I get it. But if someone else is using her phone, then she isn’t necessarily within the same area, right? Plus there’s nothing out here. Maybe the kidnappers were driving along this road when they made the call. Maybe they’re a hundred miles from here by now. Or a thousand, if they stole the flyboy’s airplane.”

Shane nods, still shielding his pale eyes. “Agreed, lots of maybes. But we have to start somewhere. I wanted to get a physical look at the area before I start working from maps and aerial photographs.”

The heat is curdling my brain, making me cranky. “Okay, you had a look,” I say. “What do you see but a whole lot of nowhere?”

He seems to take the question seriously, has another slow scan around the area. “I see hundreds of birds. Mostly cattle egret—those are the little guys—but some heron and ibis and at least one osprey. I see miles and miles of waterway that would be navigable in a flat-bottomed boat, or even better by an airboat. I see a man in a straw hat fishing with a cane pole. I see a small alligator.”

“What!” I do a little involuntary dance step, as if something is nipping at my heels.

“On the canal bank,” he says gently. “Over there.”

Blame it on the blinding light, but I really hadn’t noticed much of anything but the sky and the grass. Shane is right, of course. The little white splotches are birds, I can see that now. A lot of birds, some of them circling high overhead, which probably means the place is teeming with life, right? Nor had I noticed the canal that runs along the road, because it looks more like a wide irrigation ditch, and who pays attention to ditches? Most shocking, there really is a small alligator—maybe three feet long—on the opposite bank, as motionless as a moldy log. Never saw it. And the old man with the really long fishing pole, how did I miss him? Or the rusty old pickup that must have brought him here? If I didn’t notice a man and a truck and an alligator all out in the open, what else haven’t I noticed? Did I expect to find my missing daughter waving her arms, shouting “Over here, Mom!”?

“This whole area, it was a major drug smuggling destination some years back,” Shane explains. “You can’t see it from the road, but within a few miles of here there are remote airfields, old storage buildings, trailers, bunkers, you name it. Lots of secret places to run a criminal enterprise, hide an abductee, whatever.”

Lots of places, I’m thinking, to bury a body.

“Those birds up there,” I say, pointing. “The ones way up high. Are those vultures?”

“Buzzards.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Not sure. Vultures are bigger.”

“But they both eat dead things, right? Dead things out in the swamp?”

Shane nods to himself. “I think we’re done here,” he says gently.

5. Pretty Little Thang

The only thing Roy Whittle likes about the Glade City Hunt Club is the stuffed wolverine perched atop the old wooden phone booth in the lobby. The nasty beast, big as a dog, is in full weasel snarl, teeth bared, glass eyes flat with a hatred of all creatures not itself. In the wild, a fifty-pound wolverine in a bad mood can take down a moose, fueled by sheer tenacity and scalpel-sharp claws. As a kid Roy used to imagine the stuffed wolverine coming to life, leaping on the fat neck of Buster Nyles, the Collier County sheriff who took bribes with both hands, and then betrayed low-level drug smugglers like Roy’s father. The good old boys who ran the show walked away, burying their millions in pickle jars and offshore investments while swamp-cracker chumps like Pappy shuffled into cells at Raiford. And yet the old man, dumb as a load of cinder blocks, always aspired to be one of the regulars who drank with Sheriff Nyles and his minions, impressing the hell out of the sunburned tourists and occasional movie stars who flocked to the fabled Hunt Club for a taste of Old Florida ambiance. The huge gator hide nailed to the red-cedar paneling, darkened by a century of cigar smoke. The lovingly framed photo of Hemingway standing at the famous veranda bar, his arm thrown over the shoulders of a very young Buster, then a lowly game warden who told lies outrageous enough to impress a famous novelist. The formal menus signed by Clark Gable and Harry Truman, the fat, exuberant tarpon mounted over the entrance to the immense screened-in porch where the movers and shakers, the elected and the anointed, had for generations gathered to gorge on blackened redfish caught by their guides.

In the glory days more bullshit flowed through the Glade City Hunt Club than in all the saloons of Texas. The days when local fishing guides moonlighted on the wrong side of the law, jacking protected gators, piloting airboats full of forbidden marijuana bales, and then bragging on it to Donny Nyles, the Hunt Club bartender, Buster’s little brother, and himself a coke-sniffing smuggler and dissembler of some note.

Buster and Donny are both dead now—cancer and self-administered gunshot respectively—but Roy still hates their rotting bones. Hates them for sneering at Pappy, then shining him on, setting him up. Wrecking his pathetic life because they could, and because it amused them. Roy’s is a prideful hatred, a blood hatred, the Whittle family having settled in these parts at about the same time as the Nyles clan, difference being the Whittles, barefoot and willfully ignorant—Pappy bragged he’d never dirtied his mind by reading a newspaper—the Whittles kept to their hidden whiskey stills and their secret gator holes and never ran for office, or secured employment with law enforcement agencies. Therefore never had the leverage to enrich themselves at the public trough, or avoid serving time because they controlled both the jails and the courts.

What Roy would really like to do is take out his uncircumcised member and urinate all over the precious lobby, add a little sheen to the hardwood floors. Instead he tucks in his shirt, straightens out his Caterpillar ball cap, and presents himself at the famous bar.

“Hey, um, Donny,” Roy says, addressing the barkeep by the name pinned to the lapel of his Tommy Bahama shirt.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Stick around?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Stick Davis. Supposed to meet him here.”

The barkeep eyes the otherwise empty bar, the message being, see for yourself, moron, nobody home.

“Gimme a Bud,” says Roy, taking a stool.

“Corona, Heineken, Harp, and Sapporo on tap,” he recites.

“Bottled beer listed on the board. No Budweiser today. No Budweiser tomorrow.”

“You ain’t from around here.”

The barkeep, a sly, surfer-blond dude about Roy’s age, volunteers that he’s from Orlando. Roy has never been to Orlando. Fact is he’s never been north of Bradenton, and then only once to visit his mother in the hospital.