"Oh, that's not necessary."
"You don't trust me."
"Nope." With her free hand she patted the bald spot on Doc Crawford's head. "I'll be OK," she told him.
The remainder of JoLayne's workday: cat (Daisy), three kittens (unnamed), German shepherd (Kaiser), parrot (Polly), cat (Spike), beagle (Bilko), Labrador retriever (Contessa), four Labrador puppies (unnamed), and one rhinoceros iguana (Keith). JoLayne received no more bites or scratches, although the iguana relieved itself copiously on her lab coat.
Arriving home, she recognized Tom Krome's blue Honda parked in the driveway. He was sitting in the swing on the porch. JoLayne sat down next to him and pushed off. With a squeak the swing started to move.
JoLayne said, "I guess we've got a deal."
"Yep."
"What'd your boss say?"
"He said, 'Great story, Tom! Go to it!' "
"Really."
"His exact words. Hey, what happened to your coat?"
"Iguana pee. Now ask about my thumb."
"Lemme see."
JoLayne extended her hand. Krome studied the bite mark with mock seriousness.
"Grizzly!" he said.
She smiled. Boy, did it feel good, his touch. Strong and gentle and all that stuff. Which was how it always started, with a warm dumb tingle.
JoLayne hopped out of the swing and said: "We've got an hour before sunset. I want to show you something."
When they got to Simmons Wood, she pointed out the for sale sign. "That's why I can't wait six months for these jerkoffs to get caught. Any day, somebody's going to come along and buy this place."
Tom Krome followed her over the fence, through the pine and palmettos. She stopped to point out bobcat scat, deer tracks and a red-shouldered hawk in the treetops.
"Forty-four acres," JoLayne said.
She was whispering, so Krome whispered back. "How much do they want for it?"
"Three million and change," she said.
Krome asked about the zoning.
"Retail," JoLayne answered, with a grimace.
They stopped on the sandy bluff overlooking the creek. JoLayne sat down and crossed her legs. "A shopping mall and a parking lot," she said, "just like in the Joni Mitchell song."
Tom Krome felt he should be writing down everything she said. His notebook nagged at him from the back pocket of his jeans. As if he still had a newspaper job.
JoLayne, pointing at the tea-colored ribbon of water: "That's where the cooters come from. They're off the logs now, but you should be here when the sun's high."
Still whispering, like she was in church. Which he supposed it was, in a way.
"What do you make of my plan?"
Krome said, "I think it's fantastic."
"You're making fun."
"Not at all "
"Oh yes. You think I'm nuts." She propped her chin in her hands. "OK, smart guy, what would youdo with the money?"
Krome started to answer but JoLayne motioned for him to hush. A deer was at the creek; a doe, drinking. They watched it until darkness fell, then they quietly made their way back to the highway, Krome following the whiteness of JoLayne's lab coat weaving through the trees and scrub.
Back at the house, she disappeared into the bedroom to change clothes and check her phone messages. When she came out, he was standing at the aquarium, watching the baby turtles.
"Treasure this," she said. "Chase Bank called. The assholes have already charged a truckload of stuff on my Visa."
Krome spun around. "You didn't tell me they got your credit card."
JoLayne reached for the kitchen phone. "I've got to cancel that number."
Krome grabbed her arm. "No, don't. This is wonderful news: They've got your Visa, plus they seem to be total morons."
"Yeah, I couldn't be happier."
"You wanted to find them, right? Now we've got a trail."
JoLayne was intrigued. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a box of Goldfish crackers. The salt stung the cut on her lip, made her eyes water.
Krome said: "Here's what you do. Call the bank and find out exactly where the card's been used. Tell them you loaned it to your brother, uncle, something like that. But don't cancel it, JoLayne. Not until we know where these guys are headed."
She did what he told her. The Chase Bank people couldn't have been nicer. She took down the information and handed it to Krome, who said: "Wow."
"No kidding, wow."
"They spent twenty-three hundred dollars at a gun show?"
"And two hundred sixty at a Hooters," JoLayne said. "I'm not sure which is scarier."
The gun show was at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale, the Hooters was in Coconut Grove. The robbers seemed to be traveling south.
"Get packed," Tom Krome said.
"Lord, I forgot about the turtles. You know how hungry they get."
"They're notcoming with us."
"Course not," JoLayne said.
They stopped at the ATM so she could get some cash. Back in the car, she popped a handful of Goldfish and said: "Drive like the wind, partner. My Visa maxes out at three thousand bucks."
"Then let's pay it off. Put a check in the mail first thing tomorrow I want these boys to go hog wild."
Sportively JoLayne grabbed a handful of Krome's shirt. "Tom, I've got exactly four hundred and thirty-two dollars left in my checking."
"Relax," he told her. Then, with a sideways glance: "It's time you started thinking like a millionaire."
7
Chub's real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus's father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie's womb had been as welcome as "a cockroach on a wedding cake."
Nonetheless, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a secondhand ski boat on a trailer in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Bookencyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus's siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there, too, had he not by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy.
He moved out of his parents' home and took up with a bad crowd. He got a job in the photo department of a drugstore, where he earned extra money sorting through customers' negatives, swiping the racy ones and peddling the prints to horny kids at the high school. (Even after entering adulthood, Onus Gillespie remained amazed there were women in the world who'd allow their boyfriends or husbands to take pictures of them topless. He dreamed of meeting such a girl, but so far it hadn't happened.)
When he was twenty-four, Onus accidentally landed a well-paying job at a home furnishings warehouse. Thanks to an aggressive union local, he managed to remain employed for six years despite a wretched attendance record, exhaustively documented incompetence and a perilous affinity for carpet glue. Stoned to the gills, Onus one day crashed a fork-lift into a Snapple machine, a low-speed mishap that he parlayed into an exorbitant claim for worker's compensation.
His extended "convalescence" involved many drunken fishing and hunting excursions. One morning Onus was observed emerging from the woods with a prostitute on one arm and a dead bear cub slung over his shoulders. The man watching him was an investigator for an insurance company, which was able to argue convincingly that Mr. Onus Gillespie was not injured in the least. Only then was he fired from the warehouse. He chose not to appeal.
Moira and Greve wrote one last check to their errant spawn, then disowned him. Onus needed no special encouragement to leave the state. In addition to the pending felony indictments for insurance fraud and game poaching, Onus had received a rather unfriendly letter from the Internal Revenue Service, inquiring why he'd never in his adult life bothered to file a tax return. To emphasize its concern, the IRS sent a flatbed and two disagreeable men to confiscate Onus's customized Ford Econoline van. It was easy to spot. An elaborate mural on the side of the vehicle depicted Kim Basinger as a nude mermaid, riding a narwhal. Onus had fallen for the beautiful Georgia actress in the movie 9 Weeksand conceived the mural as a love tribute.