Stormy Weather (41 page)

That’s when the rear window of the Jeep vaporized.

The explosion caught Snapper furrowed in concentration, as he labored to steer around the parked Highway Patrol car, lit up like a Mardi Gras float.

Snapper ducked, peering up at the rearview. He saw the black trooper lying in a puddle, his arm waving but not aiming the smoking gun. Then the trooper went limp, and Snapper cackled.

The Cherokee fishtailed on the rain-slicked asphalt as it entered the highway. Edie Marsh hunched like an aged nun, sobbing into her hands. Skink had pulled Bonnie Lamb into his lap, out of the gunfire’s path. Huddled in the cargo hatch, Augustine silently plucked nuggets of safety glass from his clothes.

Snapper was loopy on Midols, Johnnie Walker and pure criminal adrenaline. “You see that big nigger go down?” he yammered at the top of his lungs. “You see him go down!”

Christophe Michel spent the night of the hurricane in the safe and convivial atmosphere of Key West. At noon the next morning he put on the television and recognized, with cramps of dread, the
bombed-out remains of a luxury housing development called Gables-on-the-Bay. The subdivision had been built by a company called Zenith Custom Homes, which not only employed Christophe Michel as a senior structural engineer but advertised his ecumenical credentials in its sales brochures. Michel had been recruited from one of France’s oldest engineering firms, which had not energetically protested his departure. Among the fields in which Michel sorely lacked experience was that of girding single-family structures to withstand the force of tropical cyclones. His new employer assured him there was nothing to it, and FedExed him a copy of the South Florida Building Code, which weighed several pounds. Christophe Michel skimmed it on the flight from Orly to Miami.

He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as “South Florida’s first hurricane-proof community.” Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the
Titanic
was promoted as unsinkable.

All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-
in-
the Bay—a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.

With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently planned his departure from the United States. He closed his bank accounts, shuttered the condo in Key West, packed the Seville and set out for the mainland.

The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.

When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.

“Give us your goddamn car,” the man said.

“Certainly.”

“Don’t stare at me like that!”

“Sorry.” The engineer’s trained eye calculated the skew of the man’s jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.

“I got one bullet left!”

“I believe you,” said Christophe Michel.

The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly.

Michel asked, “May I keep my suitcase?”

“Fuck, no!”

“I understand.”

He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.

“My life savings just drove away,” he said. “May I borrow the telephone?”

Bonnie Lamb expected Skink to erupt in homicidal fury upon seeing his best friend shot down. He didn’t. Bonnie worried about the listless sag to his shoulders, the near feebleness of his movements. He wore the numb, unfocused glaze of the heavily sedated. Bonnie was sorry to see the governor’s high spirits extinguished.

Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he’d gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they’d ditched it behind the convenience store.

Bonnie squeezed Skink’s arm and asked if he was all right. He shifted his feet, and something rattled metallically on the floorboard. He picked it up and asked, “What’s this?”

It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.

Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. “The Club!”

“The what?”

Bonnie Lamb said, “You know. That thing they advertise all the time on TV.”

“I watch no television,” Skink said.

Snapper hooted. “The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you
lock it across’t here”—he patted the steering wheel—“so your car don’t get stolen.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K.” Snapper’s laughter had a ring of triumph.

Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bonnie could see fresh tears shining in her eyelashes.

“I had this boyfriend,” Edie sniffled, “he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer.”

Snapper said, “No shit? Froze it?”

“Yeah.” Edie couldn’t come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They’d never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?

Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.

“See, that way you can’t turn the wheel,” Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, “so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. ’Less they put a fuckin’ gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!”

Skink set the device down.

“Accept no imitations!” Snapper crowed again, waving the .357.

The governor’s gaze turned out the window, drifting again. Teasingly, Bonnie said: “I can’t believe you’ve never seen one of those.”

This time the smile was sad. “I lead a sheltered life.”

Edie Marsh wondered if Snapper could have picked a dumber location to shoot a cop—a county of slender, connected islands, with only one way out. She kept checking for blue police lights behind them.

Snapper told her to knock it off, she was making everyone a nervous wreck. “Another half hour we’re home free,” he said, “back on the mainland. Then we find another car.”

“One with a CD player, I bet.”

“Damn right.”

The Seville got boxed in behind a slow beer truck. They wound
up stopped at the traffic light in Key Largo. Again Edie snuck a peek behind them. Snapper heard a gasp.

“What!” He spun his head. “Is it cops?”

“No. The Jeep!”

“You’re crazy, that ain’t possible—”

“Right behind us,” Edie said.

Bonnie Lamb began to turn around, but Skink held her shoulder. The light turned green. Snapper floored the Seville, zipped smartly between the beer truck and a meandering Toyota. He said: “You crazy twat, there’s only about a million goddamn black Jeeps on the road.”

“Yeah?” Edie said. “With bullet holes in the roof?” She could see a bud of mushroomed steel above the passenger side.

“Jesus.” Snapper used the barrel of the .357 to adjust the rearview mirror. “Jesus, you sure?”

The Cherokee was still on their bumper. Bonnie noticed the governor wore a faint smile. Edie picked up on it, too. She said, “What’s going on? Who’s that behind us?”

Skink shrugged. Snapper said: “How ’bout this? I don’t care who’s back there, because he’s already one dead cocksucker. That’s ’zackly how many shots I got left.”

In what seemed to Bonnie as a single fluid motion, the governor reached across the seat, wrenched the .357 from Snapper’s hand and fired it point-blank into the Cadillac’s dashboard.

Then he dropped it on Snapper’s lap and said: “Now you’ve got jackshit.”

Snapper labored not to pile the car into a utility pole. Edie Marsh’s ears rang from the gun blast, although she wasn’t surprised by what had happened. It had only been a matter of time. The smiler had been humoring them.

One thought reverberated in Bonnie Lamb’s head: What now? What in the world will he do next?

Snapper, straining not to appear frightened, hollering at Skink over his shoulder: “Try anything,
anything
, I fuckin’ swear we’re all going off a bridge. You unnerstand? We’ll all be dead.”

“Eyes on the road, chief.”

“Don’t touch me, goddammit!”

Skink placed his chin next to the headrest, inches from Snapper’s right ear. He said, “That cop you shot, he was a friend of mine.”

Edie Marsh’s chin dropped. “Tell me it wasn’t ‘Jim.’”

“It was.”

“Naturally.” She sighed disconsolately.

“So what?” Snapper said. His shoulders bunched. “Like I’m supposed to know. Fucking cop’s a cop.”

To Bonnie, the social dynamics inside the carjacked Seville were surreal. Logically the abduction should have ended once Snapper’s gun was out of bullets. Yet here they were, riding along as if nothing had changed. They might as well be on a double date. Stop for pizza and milk shakes.

She said: “Can I ask something: Where are we going? Is somebody in charge now?”

Snapper said, “
I
am, goddammit. Long as I’m drivin’—”

He felt Edie jab him in the side. “The Jeep,” she said, pointing. “Check it out.”

The black truck was in the left lane, keeping speed with the Cadillac. Snapper pressed the accelerator, but the Jeep stayed even.

“Well, shit,” he grumbled. Edie was right. It was the same truck they’d abandoned ten minutes earlier. Snapper was totally baffled. Who could it be?

They watched the Cherokee’s front passenger window roll down. The ghost driver steered with his left hand. His eyes were locked on the highway. In the oncoming headlights Snapper caught sight of the man’s face, which he didn’t recognize. He did, however, note that the stranger definitely wasn’t wearing a Highway Patrol uniform. The observation gave Snapper an utterly misplaced sense of relief.

Bonnie Lamb recognized the other driver immediately. She gave a clandestine wave. So did the governor.

“What’s going on!” Edie Marsh was on her knees, pointing and shouting. “What’s going on! Who is
that
sonofabitch!”

She was more dejected than startled when the Jeep’s driver one-handedly raised a rifle. By the time Snapper saw it, he’d already heard the shot.

Pfffttt
. Like a kid’s airgun.

Then a painful sting under one ear; liquid heat flooding down through his arms, his chest, his legs. He went slack and listed starboard, mumbling, “What the fuh, what the fuh—”

Skink said it was a superb time for Edie to assist at the wheel. “Take it steady,” he added. “We’re coasting.”

Reaching across Snapper’s body, she anxiously guided the Seville
to the gravel shoulder of the highway. The black Jeep smoothly swung in ahead of them.

Edie bit her lip. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t.”

“Me, neither,” said Bonnie Lamb. She was out the door, running toward Augustine, before the car stopped rolling.

Jim Tile once played tight end for the University of Florida. In his junior year, during the final home game of the season, a scrawny Alabama cornerback speared his crimson helmet full tilt into Jim Tile’s sternum. Jim Tile held on to the football but completely forgot how to breathe.

That’s how he felt now, lying in clammy rainwater, staring up at the worried face of a platinum-haired hooker. The impact of the shot had deflated Jim Tile’s lungs, which were screaming silently for air. The emergency lights of the patrol car blinked blue-white-blue in the reflection in the prostitute’s eyes.

Jim Tile understood that he couldn’t be dying—it only felt that way. The asshole’s bullet wasn’t lodged in vital bronchial tissue; it was stuck in a layer of blessedly impenetrable Du Pont Kevlar. Like most police officers, Jim Tile detested the vest, particularly in the summer—it was hot, bulky, itchy. But he wore it because he’d promised his mother, his nieces, his uncle and of course Brenda, who wore one of her own. Working for the Highway Patrol was statistically the most dangerous job in law enforcement. Naturally it also paid the worst. Only after numerous officers had been gunned down were bulletproof vests requisitioned for the state patrol, whose budget was so threadbare that the purchase was made possible only by soliciting outside donations.

Long before that, Jim Tile’s loved ones had decided he shouldn’t wait for the state legislature to demonstrate its heartfelt concern for police officers. The Kevlar vest was a family Christmas present. Jim Tile didn’t always wear it while patrolling rural parts of the Panhandle, but in Miami he wouldn’t go to church without it. He was glad he had strapped it on today.

If only he could remember how to breathe.

“Take it easy, baby,” the hooker kept saying. “Take it easy. We called 911.”

As Jim Tile sat upright, he emitted a sucking sound that reminded the prostitute of a broken garbage disposal. When she smacked him between the shoulders, a mashed chunk of lead fell from a dime-sized hole in Jim Tile’s shirt and plopped into the puddle. He picked it up: the slug from a .357.

Jim Tile asked, “Where’d they go?” His voice was a frail rattle. With difficulty he holstered his service revolver.