Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (31 page)

The bar at the Taste of Saigon doubled as its phone booth. The phone itself was balanced on top of a stack of phone books on the shiny, black-lacquered bar top.

Jackie edged her way between two shirt-sleeved businessmen and put her hand on the phone.

The bartender was in front of her immediately. “Fifties cent for call,” she informed Jackie.

“It’s a quarter at the gas station down the street,” Jackie said.

“You go down street,” she said. “This private phone.”

Jackie slid two quarters across the counter and dialed the number for Ed Weingarten at the FDLE with nervous fingers. It was nine-thirty. Ollie and Eddie had been gone a long time and there was no telling when Ronnie and Wormy would be back.

“You’ve reached the voice mail for Ed Weingarten,” an anonymous female voice told her. “Please leave a message, or dial zero to reach the operator for further directions.”

She dialed zero and got a recorded list of options, none of which included speaking to a human being.

Jackie clicked the disconnect button and started to dial again. There must be somebody at that office who could send help. The bartender held her hand over the dial pad. “Phone is for customer,” she said, looking meaningfully down the bar at the customers who sat there, laughing, talking, drinking, and smoking. There was a lot of smoke.

“I paid you fifty cents,” Jackie protested.

“For customer,” she said firmly.

Jackie ordered a Coke she didn’t want, put two dollar bills down on the bar, and dialed Weingarten again. “I’m calling for Truman Kicklighter,” she said. “It’s absolutely urgent that you meet him, right away, at Bondurant Motors. He’s found the body of Jeff Cantrell, and Ronnie Bondurant is due back any minute. Please hurry.” She ended by giving him the phone number at Taste of Saigon, which she read off the take-out menu posted on the wall. Then she sat down to wait.

The bartender zeroed in on her again. “You want food or drink? Bar is for customers.”

“Another Coke.”

The front side of the roof was dominated by the four-foot-high Bondurant Motors sign that ran the length of the building. From the back side of it, Truman could see the neon lighting coils outlining the letters, and the metal struts that held the sign upright. The sign was turned off. And the Cadillac was, too.

The flat tar roof radiated heat like a sizzling black-iron skillet. The tar was soft under his shoes and the sick, sweet rotting smell hanging in the thick, humid air told him he was in the right place. But this time he had to be sure.

Truman peered down over the edge of the sign. He saw the cars below, lined up neatly in the lot, and traffic whizzing past on U.S. 19. Across the street, the Taste of Saigon looked like a brick box on top of which somebody had placed a red plastic prefabricated pagoda. Right next door was the Candy Store, so brightly pink it seemed to throb and send off a weird rose-colored glow into the night. The nightclub’s parking lot was full, and the overflow crowd was pulling into the restaurant’s lot in search of empty spaces.

He hoped Jackie was safely inside the restaurant, telling Ed Weingarten the whole bizarre story. He wanted to get this over with. Up here on the roof like this, he was as vulnerable as a tin duck in a shooting gallery.

“Get on with it, Kicklighter,” he said out loud.

The Cadillac had been mounted on a thick set of iron girders bolted to a plate on the roof of the showroom. Obviously, the original owners had used a crane to lift the car into place.

From up here, he could see the coil and gearbox mounted on the underside of the car’s chassis, and the simple machinery that made the Caddie spin and dip six feet up in the air.

He’d noticed an aluminum extension ladder leaned up against the back side of the sign. He dragged it over to the base of the girder, and set it up.

Halfway up the ladder he wished for the flashlight he’d left with Jackie.

But the glow of the streetlights out on the highway would have to do. He climbed upward, forcing himself not to look down, willing himself not to think about what awaited him at the top of that ladder.

The first surprise was the Cadillac itself. When he pulled himself onto the top rung, he could stick his head inside the yawning hole where a window should have been. There was no glass in the windows or the windshield, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he saw that there was no dashboard, no seats, no steering wheel. He thumped the door. Instead of the ping of solid Detroit steel he was answered by a hollow, flat knocking. The car was just a shell, the original body covered in fiberglass to keep it from rusting out.

Hell of a thing to do to a great old car like a ‘57 Cadillac, Truman thought, although to his mind, the ‘57 Chevy Bel Air was the sportier of the two cars.

He boosted one leg up on the doorsill, then swung the other leg through, too, and wiggled the rest of himself right inside the car.

Almost before he’d landed on the floor of the car, someone was screaming. “EEEE-AHHHH. EEEE AHHHH.” Over and over again. Then something sharp was clawing at his face, digging into the flesh. He flailed at the thing, one-armed, trying to protect his face and eyes with the other arm. Then, as suddenly as the attack had started, it was over.

Truman crouched on his hands and knees and raised his head cautiously, opened his eyes and saw that the air around him was full of slowly sifting, downy white-and-gray feathers. The last seagull flapped out through the Cadillac’s open windshield. Truman reared up his head and sneezed. Three times, rapidly.

Then he set out, crawling, to find Jeff Cantrell’s body so he could get himself out of this Hitchcockian hell.

Except for an inch-thick layer of leaves, feathers, eggshells, and seagull dung, there was nothing to find. All that was left, he realized, was the trunk.

LeeAnn couldn’t seem to concentrate on her driving. Other than that, she was amazingly calm. It was like somebody else was in this LTD, driving down the road with Ronnie Bondurant sitting right beside her, sticking a nickel-plated revolver into her rib cage. Like LeeAnn herself was somewhere else, on a cool, green mountain in Montana, looking down, seeing some other girl having a really shitty life.

The jabbing was real, though.

“Don’t even try it,” Ronnie said. “Face it, LeeAnn, your ticket to the circus was that body of yours, not your pathetic pea brain. The only reason I didn’t shoot you back there at the bridge and throw you down to those sharks is I got some business to take care of. Work now, play later, right, sugar?”

“What are you going to do to me?” LeeAnn asked, trying to make herself concentrate on the road and the other cars. For once, she thought, why couldn’t a cop be on her tail for speeding or running a red light?

“Right now?” Ronnie said. “We’re going back to the lot and pick up Wormy. He had to run another little errand.” He ruffled his fingers through her short hair. “Say, that’s right. I almost forgot. Eddie was a friend of yours, wasn’t he? The repo man? Wormy had to go show the guy what happens when people try to jerk Ronnie Bondurant around.”

“You kill them,” she said automatically.

“Sometimes.”

“Like Jeff.”

“And you’re next,” he said, avoiding the question. “Too bad. You’re a real waste of talent, LeeAnn.”

It was what all her teachers had said, all through school, that what-a-waste crap. LeeAnn had learned to tune them out, and now she tuned Ronnie out, too. Until she saw the pink glow up ahead. She knew that glow. The club. And across the street was Bondurant Motors. Last stop.

Jackie was almost out of money. She’d spent eight dollars trying to reach Ed Weingarten, four phone calls, three Cokes. In between calls, she ran outside and checked across the street.

She saw the LTD slow down, then pull into Bondurant Motors. Ronnie Bondurant got out and pulled a slender, short-haired girl out of the driver’s side. His hand was extended, like he was pointing a gun at her.

Seeing the place unlit like that, Ronnie made up his mind. Wormy was history. Tonight. In fact, it would be a nice touch for Wormy and Hernando Boone to shoot each other.

He went to unlock the showroom door, but it was already open.

“Friggin’ pillhead,” he said, shoving LeeAnn inside. “Get in there,” he said, pointing toward his office. He pushed her toward the office and she stumbled on the doorsill. He pushed her again, knocking her to the floor. “Don’t move,” he said. He locked the showroom door behind him.

The gray control box was on the wall, next to Wormy’s desk. No telling how many folks had driven by his darkened business tonight, thinking Ronnie Bondurant couldn’t pay his light bill. Or worse, that Ronnie Bondurant was out of business. No telling how many potential impulse buyers he’d lost tonight.

He started flipping switches. Now the red and yellow lights strung around the sales lot were ablaze. Now the custom-made billboard was a beacon to those in need of cheap transportation and one-stop financing. Now, he thought with satisfaction, the pink Cadillac that was the Bondurant Motors trademark, not to mention a Tampa Bay area landmark, was up there on the roof, its high beams flashing on and off, doing its slow dips and spins.

At The Taste of Saigon, Jackie saw all the lights switching on across the street at Bondurant Motors. Uh-oh.

Things got very bright very quickly. There was a series of clicks, and the car shuddered a bit. He knew instantly what had happened.

He had one leg out the window of the Cadillac when he heard the clang of the aluminum ladder hitting the roof below. For a split second, he considered jumping. Then he lost his balance and fell back inside the car. At least it was a shorter fall.

The first few rotations, the machinery seemed to be warming up. By the fourth or fifth loop, he had to grip the window frame with both hands to keep from being flung from side to side.

On one of the car’s downward swoops he pulled himself to his knees and looked out the window, across the rooftop. Everything was a blur of light and color and motion. Just like the time he’d taken Cheryl up on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the State Fair when she was a little kid. Now he was the one who was dizzy and disoriented. His stomach churned violently. He hung his head out the window and threw up all over a Tampa Bay area landmark.

Ronnie rummaged around in his bottom desk drawer until he found what he was looking for. Only an eighteen- inch extension cord, but it would do. He stood over LeeAnn and pointed the pistol at her head. “Let’s go.”

LeeAnn stared up at him, wild-eyed. Last chance, girl. Ronnie was either going to tie her up and then shoot her, or strangle her with that cord. Either way, it would be a closed-coffin funeral. “Fuck you,” she told him.

When he went to slap her, she curled her legs up to her chest and kicked, knees together, construction boots aimed right at his crotch. He sidestepped and she missed, catching him on the kneecap, not the nuts.

Ronnie howled with pain, whirled around and punched her, square in the mouth, with his closed fist. She screamed, but the cry was clogged with blood and broken teeth and it came out more as a high-pitched gurgle.

Jackie remembered the keys as she was dodging the cars on U.S. 19. Truman had handed them to her after he’d unlocked the doors. She heard the howls and the faint cries from inside as she circled around toward the back of the lot, but she was too close to the building to be able to see the roof.

It was a tough call, but it didn’t take much for her to make up her mind. She ran, crouched low, toward where she’d seen Truman last, the garage and the lube rack. LeeAnn Pilker would have to wait.

Eddie and Ollie parked beside Truman’s station wagon at The Taste of Saigon. No sign of Truman or Jackie.

“That’s Ronnie’s car,” Eddie said, pointing across the street at the Lincoln. “And that ain’t good.”

“I’m calling 911,” Ollie said, reaching for the car phone.

“If my arm was okay, I’d say no, let’s go in there ourselves,” Eddie said grudgingly, “but I’m not a hundred percent right now.”

Ollie put the phone down when he saw the yellow two-tone Monte Carlo come chugging up and turn into Bondurant Motors.

“Can’t be,” Eddie said.

“You shot them,” Ollie said. “They were dead.”

“One of ‘em been resurrected,” Eddie said.

Billy Tripp looked remarkably undead as he got out of the Monte Carlo. He stood there, checking the place out, making up his mind about something.

Eddie got his .38 and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans, and Ollie did the same with his .22.

Ronnie hadn’t turned on the lights in the garage. Jackie could make out the outline of the Blazer, parked right where they’d left it in the garage, but where was the flashlight? Had she put it down somewhere? She’d never find anything up on that lube rack without a light.

There was light seeping out from under the door to the showroom. Maybe there was a better way, she thought.