"How long'll you be gone?"
"Truly I don't know," JoLayne said, "but here's what I propose: one thousand dollars to take care of my darlings. Whether it's a day or a month."
Tom Krome looked shocked. Demencio whistled at the number.
JoLayne said, "I'm quite serious."
And quite nuts, thought Demencio. A grand to baby-sit a load of turtles?
"It's more than fair," he remarked, trying to avoid Krome's eye.
"I think so, too," JoLayne said. "Now ... Trish mentioned you had a cat."
"Screw the cat," said Demencio. "Pardon my French."
"Has it had its shots? I don't remember seeing you folks at Doc Craw-ford's."
"Just some dumb stray. Trish leaves scraps on the porch."
"All right," JoLayne told him, "but the deal's off if it kills even one of my babies."
"Don't you worry."
"There's forty-five even. I counted."
"Forty-five," Demencio repeated. "I'll keep track."
JoLayne handed him a hundred dollars as an advance, plus twenty for a lettuce fund. She said he'd receive the balance when she returned from the trip.
"What about Trish?" she asked. "How does she get on with reptiles?"
"Oh, she's crazy for 'em. Turtles especially." Demencio could barely keep a straight face.
Krome took out a camera, one of those cardboard disposables. Demencio asked what it was for.
"Your Virgin Mary can I get a picture? It's for a friend."
Demencio said, "I guess. Just give me a second to put her back together."
"That'll be terrific. Put her back together and make her cry."
"Christ, you want tears, too?"
"Please," said Tom Krome, "if it's not too much trouble."
8
It was past midnight when Tom Krome and JoLayne Lucks stopped at a Comfort Inn in South Miami, near the university. Fearing her nasty cuts and bruises would draw stares, JoLayne remained in the car while Krome registered them at the motel. They got separate rooms, adjoining.
Krome fell asleep easily a wonder, considering he had no job, thirteen hundred dollars in the bank, and an estranged wife who was pretending to be a drug addict while refusing to grant him a divorce. If that wasn't enough to cause brain fever, he'd also been marked for grievous harm by a jealous judge whose wife he'd been screwing for not even a month. All these weighty problems Krome had put aside in order to recklessly endanger himself pursuing two armed psychopaths who'd robbed and assaulted a woman Krome barely knew.
Yet he slept like a puppy. That according to JoLayne Lucks, who was sitting in the room when he awoke in bright daylight.
"Not a worry in the world," he heard her say. "That's one of the best things about my job watching puppies and kittens sleep."
Krome rose up on both elbows. JoLayne was wearing a sports halter and bicycle shorts. Her legs and arms were slender but tautly muscled; he wondered why he hadn't noticed before.
"Babies sleep the same way," she was saying, "but watching babies makes me sad. I'm not sure why."
"Because you know what's in store for them." Krome started to roll out of bed, then remembered he was wearing only underwear.
JoLayne lobbed him a towel. "You are quite the shy one. Want me to turn around?"
"Not necessary." After the bathtub episode, there was nothing to hide.
"Go take a shower," she told him. "I promise not to peek."
When Krome came out, she was asleep on his bed. For several moments he stood there listening to the sibilant rhythms of her breathing. It was alarming how comfortable he felt, considering the lunatic risks that lay ahead. This unfamiliar sense of mission was energizing, and he resolved not to overanalyze it. A woman had been hurt, the men who did it deserved to pay and Krome had nothing better to do than help. Anyway, chasing gun nuts through South Florida was better than writing brainless newspaper features about Bachelorhood in the Nineties.
He slipped next door to JoLayne's room, so he wouldn't wake her by talking on the telephone. Two hours later she came in, puffy-eyed, to report: "I had quite a dream."
"Bad or good?"
"You were in it."
"Say no more."
"In a hot-air balloon."
"Is that right."
"Canary yellow with an orange stripe."
Krome said, "I'd have preferred to be on a handsome steed."
"White or black?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Yeah, right." JoLayne rolled her eyes.
"As long as it runs," Krome said.
"Maybe next time." She yawned and sat down on the floor, folding her long legs under her bottom. "You've been a busy bee, no?"
He told her he'd lined up some money to finance the chase. Of course she wanted to know where he'd gotten it, but Krome fudged. The newspaper's credit union, unaware of his resignation the day before, had been pleased to make the loan. JoLayne Lucks would've raised hell if he'd told her the truth.
"I already wired three thousand toward your Visa bill," he said, "to keep the bastards going."
"Your own money!"
"Not mine, the newspaper's," he said.
"Get outta here."
"Ever heard of an expense account? I get reimbursed for hotels and gas, too."
Krome, sounding like quite the big shot. He wasn't sure if JoLayne Lucks was buying the lie. Her toes were wiggling, which could mean just about anything.
She said, "They must really want this story."
"Hey, that's the business we're in."
"The news biz, huh? Tell me more."
"The men who beat you up," Krome said, "they haven't cashed your Lotto ticket yet. I checked with Tallahassee. They haven't even left their names."
"They're waiting to make sure I don't go to the police. Just like you predicted."
"They'll hold out a week, maybe ten days, before that ticket burns a crater in their pocket."
"That isn't much time."
"I know. We'll need some breaks to find them."
"And then ... ?"
She'd asked the same thing earlier, and Krome had no answer. Everything depended on who the creeps were, where they lived, what they'd bought at that gun show. That the men had remembered to steal the night videotape from the Grab N'Go showed they weren't as stupid as Krome had first thought.
JoLayne reminded him that her Remington was in the trunk. "The nice thing about shotguns," she said, "is the margin of error."
"Oh, so you've shot people before."
"No, Tom, but I do know the gun. Daddy made sure of that."
Krome handed her the phone. "Call the nice folks at Visa. Let's see what our party boys are up to."
Sinclair had told no one at The Registerthat Tom Krome had resigned, in the hope it was a cheap bluff. Good reporters were temperamental and impulsive; this Sinclair remembered from newspaper management school.
Then the woman who covered the police beat came to Sinclair's office with a xeroxed report he found highly disturbing. The windows of Krome's house had been shot out by persons unknown, and there was no sign of the owner. In the absence of fresh blood or corpses, the cops were treating the incident as a random act of vandalism. Sinclair thought it sounded more serious than that.
He was pondering his options when his sister Joan phoned from Grange. Excitedly she told Sinclair the latest rumor: The Lotto woman, JoLayne Lucks, left town the night before with a white man, supposedly a newspaper writer.
"Is that your guy?" Joan asked.
Sinclair felt clammy as he fumbled for a pen and paper. Having never worked as a reporter, he had no experience taking notes.
"Start again," he implored his sister, "and go slowly."
But Joan was chattering on with more gossip: The clerk at the Grab N'Go had skipped out, too the one who'd originally said he sold the winning lottery ticket to JoLayne Lucks and then later changed his mind.
"Whoa," said Sinclair, scribbling spastically. "Run that by me again."
The shaky store clerk was a new twist to the story. Joan briefed her brother on what was known locally about Shiner. Sinclair cut her off when she got to the business about the young man's mother and the Road-Stain Jesus.
"Back up," he said to Joan. "They're traveling together the clerk, this writer and the Lucks woman? Is that the word?"