Art couldn’t help but look around at the traffic, and Jethro joined him.
Cars full of suitcases and colorful rafts, with “Heart of Dixie” license plates, Florida Gators wheel covers and Fob James for Governor bumper stickers. There was a truckload of fruit pickers riding in back with a load of cantaloupe and marijuana; a retired couple from Newark muling stolen gems; a cold-call bauxite salesman with Michigan fraud warrants, driving a station wagon eaten up by harsh winters in Saginaw. Three runaway teens from Texarkana in a hot Taurus; the deposed president of Paraguay in a Chevy with bad transmission; and an ex-KGB agent stranded in Florida during the Soviet collapse who was now a freelance troubleshooter for the Broward County Democratic Committee.
“I pick that one,” said Jethro. He pointed at a van with a faded Molly Hatchet mural.
Inside the van were two sour-smelling men-a couple of open beers and loaded pistols on the greasy upholstery between them.
“I’ll bet the discussion in that van has just drifted into speculation about how much cash liquor stores keep on hand,” said Jethro.
“…About five hundred dollars just before the night drop,” the van’s passenger told the driver.
“I have seen it with alarming frequency,” Jethro told Art. “It is a well-worn path: The Downward Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same internal riffraff gyroscope and drag their traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the Florida state line for a final stand that only ends in crime tape and headlines…”
“…Maybe six hundred bucks on the weekend,” said the van’s driver.
Jethro grabbed a day-old newspaper off the floorboard and handed it to Art. Strong-arm robbery. Exploitation of the elderly. Church funds missing. Handicapped woman raped. Four-year-old bludgeoned to death by boyfriend while mother went to buy crack.
Art became troubled. He looked up from the paper and resumed examining the nature of the traffic around him. He realized he had spent far too much time in the small pond; he never knew the outside world was so upsetting. His small-town values and obligations to the community kicked in. The knowledge that he would soon die gave Art a chance to be selfless and do something positive for the world before he left.
“Have you considered my advice?” asked Jethro. “Have you thought about something that moves you? Something to focus your energies?”
Art had. He became obsessed with the number of bullies he saw.
He decided to kill one of them.
9
Zargoza waited ten minutes at the glass front door with the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign. He daydreamed and gazed at the drawbridge over the viridian sailboat channel. A gold Dodge Viper rolled into the gravel parking lot of B. F. Skinner Taxidermy.
“What are you doing here so early?” the driver asked Zargoza as he got out of the car.
“I need a repair job, B. F.” He pointed to the stuffed hammerhead shark sticking out the back of his pickup truck. The end of one of the shark’s eye pods was snapped and dangling.
“Damn college kids,” said Zargoza. “One shimmied up the thing last night and lost his balance and grabbed for something on the way down. Fucked up my shark. Kid landed on his neck, went to the emergency room. Guess who he’s gonna sue.”
“It just ain’t right,” said Skinner, unlocking the door. He hit switches near the entrance and fluorescent tubes flickered on in sequence and filled the large room with unnatural light. The taxidermy shop was an open studio with a high ceiling. The walls were white, and there was a row of generous transom windows just under the ceiling. Only a blond pine desk near the door and long, neat work shelves in the back. The minimalism set off the trophy fish. Finished jobs covered the walls. The fish still curing hung by their tails from a ceiling rack running down the center of the studio.
“Damn fine work,” said Zargoza, looking at a sailfish, king tarpon and hammerhead shark hanging in the middle of the room, almost completely dry. He admired the sail-the iridescent rainbowing in the ultramarine ridges-and the silver scaling of the tarpon. Zargoza walked up and touched the shark tentatively, but it was still tacky.
“That’s a great hammerhead,” said Zargoza. “I’ll double whatever you’re getting for it.”
Skinner rummaged through a mess of yellow papers and mail on his desk. He looked up. “I don’t know who that’s for. I’ll have to check with Jeff. He must have come in over the weekend and done them.”
“Jeff sure has improved since you took him on,” said Zargoza. “This is some of the best work I’ve ever seen… And these eyes-they’re so lifelike. It’s almost like the fish knew he was doomed.”
Zargoza walked around the tarpon. “I like what he did with bodies, too, full musculature. Lumpy, but in a menacing way, like a boa constrictor after it’s swallowed something.”
Zargoza squatted down and stuck his face under the hammerhead to admire further.
Skinner was opening a bank statement and almost impaled his hand with the letter opener when Zargoza screamed. He looked up and saw Zargoza on the ground, trembling and unable to speak, pointing up at the recessed mouth of the hammerhead. Inside the shark’s mouth was another mouth, a human mouth.
T he coconut telegraph running through the Gulf Coast ’s criminal subculture came alive.
Sidney Spittle was enjoying a morning beer at The Wharf Rat when word swept through the bar about the three regulars found taxidermied alive over at B. F. Skinner’s. His hands shook, and a sweat broke out at his temples. He got up and made it to the pay phone by the pool table, where he dropped his quarter and it rolled under a jukebox. He retrieved another from his pocket and used two shaking hands to get it into the slot, and he dialed.
“Baby, I’m at The Wharf Rat. Something bad’s happened. No, not now, not here. In an hour…” Sid stopped and looked around. He turned his back to the pool room and whispered.
“…I love you. Be careful,” and he hung up. He scanned the room again and left briskly through the screen door in the back of the bar.
A customer sitting at a table next to the screen door had his nose in a 1952 Life magazine. When Spittle went by, the customer stuck the magazine under his arm and followed Sid out the door.
As the screen slammed shut, Zargoza and his traveling goon squad skidded to a stop in the parking lot out front.
The bartender got his cocaine six steps below Zargoza and the Diaz Boys, and he wanted to score points. He also wanted to avoid the unspoken penalty of later being found to have withheld information. Upon hearing about the dead car thieves ten minutes earlier, he immediately phoned in a tip to Zargoza that the three had been bragging about five million dollars the night before and tipping everyone in sight like John Gotti. They had been hanging out with another regular, and the guy was back this morning, acting peculiar-he only knew his first name, Sid.
“Where is he?” Zargoza shouted as he crashed through the front door of The Wharf Rat.
The bartender pointed at the back door. “Just left.”
They ran out the back and saw Sidney Spittle and another driver pulling onto Gulf Boulevard. They sprinted around front to Zargoza’s German sedan.
It was a slow-motion O. J. chase down the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. Serge had retrieved the scorched Chrysler in Ybor City after dealing with the car thieves, and he drove under the speed limit in the right lane. Two cars back in the left lane was Team Zargoza. Neither was aware of the other and neither wanted to make a move on Spittle until they saw him with the briefcase.
They took a bridge to the mainland and drove across the Pinellas Peninsula. They caught the Gandy Bridge over the bay to Tampa and followed the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway downtown. Took nearly an hour, everyone stressed going so slow hanging back from Spittle.