“What’s she look like, this black girl?”
“Hot. Jungle meat.”
“And the blonde?”
“Delicate features, hair to her shoulders.” He pauses. “Like you,” he says.
The blonde still doesn’t blink.
“What else?” she asks.
“That’s all they’ve got.”
“Why the phony story?” the man asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You wrote the fucking thing…”
“They told me what to write!”
“But not why, huh?”
“Only broad strokes.”
“Let’s hear the broad strokes.”
“Sloate wants… he’s the local cop on the case,” Garcia explains.
The man nods. He already knows this. But if they have nothing to do with the kidnapping, how…?
“He wants the black girl and her blonde accomplice to believe that Alice Glendenning followed their instructions and did not go to the police. The black girl warned her not to go to the police, you see. Told her if she wasn’t alone when she dropped off the ransom money, they’d kill the children. Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children. So my story was all about protecting those two kids. If the kids went to Disney World, there was no kidnapping, you see? In which case, it’s safe to return them, drop them off on a street corner someplace, anyplace, just get rid of them. Sloate wants those kids back safe and sound. That’s what he hopes the story will accomplish.”
“It just might,” the blonde agrees.
“Do the cops have any idea where these people are holding the kids?” the man asks.
“If they knew that—”
“Do they even have a fucking clue?”
“Not that I know of.”
There’s one thing Garcia hasn’t given them. He hasn’t told them that once the two dames let the kids loose, Sloate hopes they’ll go on a spending spree. Run out to spend all those marked hundred-dollar bills. Buy themselves some fur coats and diamond rings. Leave a trail a mile wide. That was one of the purposes of the story. But he hasn’t told them this.
“Okay to go now?” he asks.
“No, now we’re gonna shoot you,” the blonde says.
For an instant, Garcia’s heart stops.
But the blonde is laughing.
Garcia is still sweating when he steps out of the red Thunderbird into blistering heat.
As the pair drive off, he hears more laughter from inside the convertible.
His name is Joseph Ontano, and that is the name he goes by at work. But Angelet and Holmes know him as Joey Onions because in addition to being an insurance adjuster, Joey is also a gambler, and they are the men with whom he places his frequent bets. At the moment, and by their virtually infallible count, Joey Onions is into them for some fifty thousand bucks, give or take. Which is why he is always so happy to provide them with sometimes valuable information about the inside workings of Garland Insurance. The numbers racket, as Angelet and Holmes both know, is premised on the insurance business, which is why it is also sometimes known as the “policy game” — but that’s another story, and that’s not why they’re looking for Joey today.
Angelet and Holmes know exactly where to find him because that is their business, even on a Sunday. At ten minutes past noon, on this particularly sweaty hot Sunday in May, when the dogs aren’t running, they look for Joey at a cockfight in the black section of Cape October. Florida’s HB 1593 makes it a felony to breed, sell, or possess dogs or birds for the purpose of fighting. But hey, man, this is Colleytown.
Colleytown was, in fact, once a real town named Colley before it got incorporated as part of greater Cab’Octubre after the Civil War. Minuscule in comparison to some of the sprawling black ghettoes elsewhere in the South — there are maybe, what, two, three thousand people here? — Colleytown can hold its own with the worst of them. Because Cape October is a resort destination with sandy beaches and palm trees and fishing piers and little hidden lagoons, one tends to forget that it’s a part of the South, or that the entire state of Florida, in fact, is really the deepest part of the South. In the South, there are ghettos. And in ghettos, there are drugs and prostitution and gambling, and the gambling often includes illegal sports events like cock-fights. Then again, that holds true for almost every city in the United States. So who gives a shit about what happens in the rest of the world? Holmes thinks. Then again, Holmes is black. And he considers himself lucky that he’s here in Florida living off the fat of the land instead of getting shot at in some foreign hood like all his dumb fuckin brothers in Bush’s stupid fuckin crusade.
The cockfighting season in Cape October roughly coincides with the tourist season, though not too many tourists are attracted to what its devotees call “a blood sport.” The end of May will mark the official end of this season’s fights, but even now, in the middle of the month, there are fewer fights than there were last month or the month before then. Actually, the fights began tapering off shortly after Easter, which is when the tourist season unofficially ends. There have been only two or three fights a week since then, at different times and in different venues, depending on how much advance knowledge the police have managed to gather. This Sunday’s fights were supposed to take place last night at a venue in Bradenton. Instead, the local fuzz were alerted, and so the venue was changed to Colleytown, and the time was changed to Sunday afternoon, when most good people are home reading the comics.
This Sunday afternoon, there are plenty of good people about to watch the first of the fights, which is between a rooster named Ebony because he is as black as midnight, and a rooster named King Kock because he has been crossbred with a very large pheasant and is positively enormous. Nurtured on steroids to increase their muscle tissue, dosed with angel dust to numb any pain, both birds are equipped with fighting spurs before they enter the carpeted ring. In India, where the “sport” enjoys wide popularity, the birds fight bare-heeled using only their God-given claws to shred and destroy. In Puerto Rico, a long plastic apparatus that resembles a darning needle is attached to each of the bird’s heels. Here in this part of Florida, the chosen artificial device is called a slasher. It is a piece of steel honed to razor-sharp precision. These spurs are fastened to both claws. One of these birds will die a horrible death in the next few minutes.
King Kock is the favorite to win, the odds on him being five-to-six. This means that if Joey bets two grand on the bird’s nose — or his beak, to be more accurate — he will take home twenty-four hundred dollars, which is not a fortune but which is better than a kick in the face. He has been on a losing streak this past month, which is why he’s into Angelet and Holmes for such a large sum, and so he takes the favored bet, King Kock to win at five-to-six.
Ebony turns out to be a vicious little bastard.
The crowd roars, “Kill him, kill him! ” — this is such a genteel sport — as he tears King Kock apart, limb by limb, feather by feather.
Joey Onions has just lost a lot of money on this stupid fuckin King Kock, and he’s not happy. He is even less happy to see — entering the barn enclosing the ring — the two men to whom he still owes fifty large. Sometimes these people come around to collect at the most inopportune times. Like now, when he has just dropped two thousand dollars on a bird that couldn’t peck shit out of his own grandmother. If they are here for even part of the fifty, they haven’t got a prayer. But if they decide to get ugly about this, he may very well go home with a broken kneecap.