Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (28 page)

“I want twenty thousand dollars, Ronnie, or I go to the cops. Or Hernando Boone. Both, maybe. Yeah, I like that idea. Boone will pay me for tipping him off, and if he doesn’t kill you first, I’ll go to the cops, maybe collect one of those big rewards they’re always giving away for crime tips.” LeeAnn laughed from a new place, down in her gut. “Although, to tell the truth, I will turn you in for free if it comes to that.”

Ronnie waved for Wormy to pick up the extension in the outer office.

“I don’t have twenty thousand, baby,” he said. “I’m in the used-car business, remember? Besides, the bank is closed.”

Wormy put his hand over the receiver and held up ten fingers. “Offer her ten,” he mimed.

LeeAnn had heard the click of the extension, knew Wormy Weems was listening in.

“There’s a safe in your office,” she said. “Jeff showed it to me. I’m not playing now, Ronnie. I want the cash. Tonight.”

She heard the crunch of shells and saw a white sedan with a blue bubble on top cruise slowly past. The park ranger gave her a fingertip wave before cruising off to apprehend some heavily armed beer-drinking, dog-owning snook-catchers.

“Right after sundown,” LeeAnn said, telling him where the drop was to be and how it was to go. “And leave that scuzzy Wormy dude at home, or the deal’s off.” She hung up the phone and allowed herself a little victory dance.

“Scuzzy?” Wormy said. He popped open a beer and washed down a couple of the Malaysian mind benders. “Scuzzy?”

Ronnie was still fiddling with the safe combination when the phone rang again, not five minutes later.

He snatched up the receiver. “What now?”

“Yo, Ronnie, my man,” Eddie said. “Got a slight problem on my end, dude. I’m on the way to get your Monte Carlo, but soon as I pick it up, I gotta drop it off, ‘cause I got a call on my beeper. From the bank. I gotta pick up a Jaguar and a Viper down in Sarasota. Now. Before the folks get back from the airport. Can’t come all the way north to you.”

Ronnie felt a sheen of perspiration on his face. He didn’t need this.

“I don’t need this shit, Eddie,” he said. “Bring the Monte Carlo here, to the lot, or you don’t get paid.”

“No can do,” Eddie said cheerfully. “Bank’s a way better customer than you, Ronnie. You know where the old Belk’s store was? Over there in Central Plaza? Meet you there in twenty minutes. And if you’re not there, man, I’ll just drop the Monte Carlo, leave it with the keys in it.”

They both knew that any vehicle left unattended in the bulldozed former shopping center would be stolen or stripped within five minutes.

“I’m done with you, Eddie,” Ronnie warned. “And I got friends in the business. You’ll never snatch another car in this town again.”

“Twenty minutes,” Eddie repeated. “See ya.”

Ronnie took a packet of bills out of the safe, took his own pistol, and handed Wormy his. “Let’s go,” he said with disgust. “I’m gonna take the blue LTD, you can bring the Monte Carlo back here. Then I gotta go deal with that bitch LeeAnn.”

“You’re paying her off?” Wormy asked. Were the pain pills making him hear things? Was Ronnie Bondurant getting soft?

“Get real,” Ronnie said, showing Wormy the pistol he’d stuck in the waistband of his slacks. “Make sure your piece is loaded. After we get the keys from Eddie, get rid of him.”

“What about the meet with Boone?” Wormy protested. “We can deal with that nigger repo man any time. Boone’s a forty-five-thousand-dollar proposition, Ron.”

“Busy night,” Ronnie shrugged. “After this, people will start showing some respect. No more ‘minority’ partners, big-mouth whores, coked-up monkeys, or snotty repo men. Tonight, we clean house.”

They heard a tapping on the glass in the showroom window. Ronnie looked out. It was Billy Tripp, peering through the window, the bandages on his face making him look like some white-masked orangutan.

“Just in time,” Ronnie said.

He unlocked the door, clapped Billy on the shoulder, and watched with satisfaction as the kid grimaced in pain. “Billy!” Ronnie said. “You’re early.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, looking around behind him. He seemed jumpier than usual, probably been sniffing some air freshener or whatever it was they sniffed these days.

“That’s good,” Ronnie said. “Got a little job for you and Wormy to do before we head out to Weedon Island. You go ahead with Wormy now, pick up that Monte Carlo and bring it back here. See you boys about nine, right?”

Ollie ran his hand reverently over the hood of Eddie’s $40,000 customized repo truck. “Beautiful,” he told Eddie. “How’s it work?”

Eddie looked at Truman, who nodded. “I’ll show you,” Eddie said. “Hop on in.”

It was after seven, and the sky was streaked shrimp pink and cantaloupe orange with little grape-colored edges around the clouds. The temperature was still hovering at the ninety mark, the humidity at the bazillion level. Used to be, he and Nellie would take off for North Carolina at the tail end of a summer like this. Two weeks’ vacation. They liked places like Bryson City and Franklin and Hendersonville and Highlands; cool, green places with mountains and clear-running rivers and waterfalls tumbling down through sweet-scented forests. They didn’t stay in the fancy resorts, just mom-and-pop motels, the kind of places where the owners remembered you from year to year, and sometimes would sit outside with you, drink a beer and watch the sun sink into those mist- shrouded mountains.

Nellie used to talk longingly about buying a little place “to summer up there in those mountains after we retire.”

Now he was summering the same place he wintered and he couldn’t remember the last time he had watched a sunset on purpose. It wasn’t so awful, now that he was used to it. It just wasn’t what he’d expected.

“Do you think Ronnie and Wormy are still at the car lot?” Jackie asked as she and Truman drove away from the Fountain of Youth in the Nova. She’d talked a lot of brave talk in front of Ollie, but she still remembered her last confrontation with Ronnie Bondurant and Wormy Weems, and it still made her shudder.

“They’re not gonna let that Monte Carlo get away. It’s a matter of pride with Ronnie. And Eddie swears he can snatch a car in fifteen seconds,” Truman reassured her. “Nothing can stop him. Eddie and Ollie can keep Bondurant and Wormy out of our way for at least an hour. That’s probably all we’ll need.”

“Isn’t this pretty dangerous?” Ollie asked anxiously. The neighborhood they drove through was one he had never seen before. Rusted-out mobile homes hunched shoulder to shoulder on lots with waist-high weeds. Junked cars were parked everywhere, and wild-eyed feral dogs barked viciously from every other yard.

“Well, yeah,” Eddie said off-handedly. “It ain’t Snell Isle.” He pointed at a faded turquoise mobile home half a block ahead, on the right. A two-tone urine-and-iodine-colored sedan was parked directly in front of the front door, right in the middle of the yard, which looked to be mostly sand and scrub palms.

“Wesley Coombs ain’t taking no chances now,” Eddie said. He slowed and pulled the truck to the curb. It was growing darker, and crickets and cicadas hummed busily in the dusky recesses of the occasional oleander tree.

“What now?” Ollie asked. He dug in his pocket and brought out the snub-nosed .22 he kept in the cash drawer at the newsstand. “Want me to cover you?”

“Let’s watch a few minutes,” Eddie said, “make sure all the folks are inside watching TV, minding their own business.”

So the cicadas hummed, and Ollie fidgeted, and Eddie sat with his forearms draped over the steering wheel. “You know those oleander bushes?” he asked Ollie. “They’re poison. Flowers, leaves, branches, all of it poison. Like, if you was to stick somebody with a oleander branch, in the eye, something like that? Boom. Dead. And nobody’d know what happened.”

“Is that so?” Ollie asked. “Pretty flowers, though.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I had me a house, I’d have me a oleander hedge.”

Lights flickered on along the street, and at least one faint blue aura projected out the window of every home on the street. Even Wesley Coombs’s home.

“Let’s go,” Eddie said, starting up the truck. “Look under the seat there,” he told Ollie.

Ollie brought out a flat, inch-wide strip of metal with a hook at the bottom. “What’s this?”

“Slim Jim,” Eddie said. “Coombs will probably have the Monte Carlo locked, with the parking brake on, thinking that’ll stop me. You just stick that flat against the glass on the driver’s side, fish it down in there into the door, hook it on the locking mechanism, and yank it up. Opens anything.”

“Me?” Ollie said, panicky. “Uh, isn’t that something you should do? I mean, I don’t have any, uh, experience. And it’s dark. How can I see?”

“Check in the glove box,” Eddie said. “You’re looking for a thing looks like a black snake, with a little old glass eye on the end of it.”

Ollie got the snakelike thing out and held it up to show Eddie.

“Fiber-optic flashlight,” Eddie said proudly “Drop it right down in there with the edge of the Slim Jim, you can see perfect. Of course,” he added, “mostly I do it by feel. But that’s for professionals.”

Eddie steered straight for the turquoise trailer. He made a sharp turn, cut the headlights, and started backing the truck into the yard, his tires spitting sand

and weeds in all directions. He had work lights mounted on the roof and rear fender of the truck, and these he switched on.

Now he was steering with his left hand, the right hand on a small metal box with various buttons and levers and a kind of joystick that sat beside him on the seat of the truck. There was a huge rearview mirror mounted at eye level, and he stared intently into it, only occasionally turning around to check his progress.

Ollie sat up on his knees and turned completely around to see what was happening. There was a hum, and a steel arm unfolded itself from the truck bed. Eddie’s fingers worked the switches, and the arm dropped until it was maybe a foot off the ground. Now he had his thumb and forefinger working the joystick, and a pair of hinged jaws slid out from the arm and silently slipped under the front axle of the Monte Carlo, each set of jaws poised with a tire between it. Another switch, and Ollie heard, rather than saw, the jaws clamp down.

“Okay, Ollie,” Eddie said. “Let’s unlock her.”

For Ollie, the distance from the truck to the ground looked suicidal. He clutched the Slim Jim in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and leapt into the darkness. He landed on his butt in the soft sand, scrambled to his feet, and was beside the Monte Carlo in an instant. His hands trembled as he twisted the On switch of the flashlight.

He glanced inside the locked car and groaned. Eddie stood just behind him, his eyes on the door of the trailer, which, so far, had not opened. “It’s no good,” Ollie whispered. “Look what’s on the steering wheel. It’s the club.” He recited the slogan he’d heard so often on the radio. “‘Your car won’t budge if you’ve got the club.’”

“No problem,” Eddie said, moving alongside him now. “You mind?”

Ollie handed over his burglary tools and stepped aside. Eddie stuck the flashlight in the back pocket of his jeans. The pro-am was over. In a second he’d majicked the lock, in a half second he was squirting the hinges with a shot of WD-40, then he was sitting in the front seat, one big, be-ringed mitt grasping either side of the red rubber-coated device locked onto the steering wheel. He wiggled first one end, then the other.

Behind them, a screen door opened, and a porch light snapped on, leaving Ollie half blinded in its yellow glare. “What the hell?” The voice was a man’s.

Now a dog was barking from inside the house, jumping up against the door, and other dogs in other yards joined in. Ollie crouched down behind the open car door, grasping the edge of it to keep himself from giving in to the terror and running away. “Eddie, we gotta get out of here,” Ollie said. “Leave the car.”

“Ju-uuu-ust a second now,” Eddie said. “See, like most people, this asshole leaves just enough slack in it, if you know how, you can pop it right off. Okay, it’s done.” He wrenched the emergency brake downward, popped the car into neutral, and slammed the door shut, just in time for both of them to hear the man shout at someone inside. “Bring the shotgun, Suzie, they’re stealing my damn car!”

“Go,” Eddie urged.

They dashed for the truck. Before both doors were closed, Eddie had doused the work lights, his thumb was on the joystick, and the hinged arm was moving upward, until the front end of the Monte Carlo lifted primly above and out of the grubby ground of Wesley Coombs’s yard.

Ollie saw the man come running out of the trailer with a horse-sized brindle hound baying at his heels. Coombs slid three shells into a shotgun, racked it, and swung the shotgun to his shoulder.

“Go!” Ollie screamed, sliding down onto the floor of the truck. “Go. Go. Go!”

Jackie and Truman watched while Wormy and Billy Tripp sped out of the Bondurant Motors lot together in the liver-colored Pinto Billy had arrived in. Fifteen minutes later, Ronnie walked out quickly, locked the door, and left, not in his own gray Lincoln, but in the powder-blue LTD.

“What’s up?” Jackie asked nervously.

The Nova was half hidden behind the Dumpster in the parking lot of the Vietnamese restaurant next door to Bondurant Motors.