Definitely being polite, as the guy hurried to the lake’s edge, kicking off shoes, shirt, then tossing his wallet and cell phone onto the ground before he jumped into the water. A second later, another white guy appeared. He was a skinny scarecrow of a hippie who was doing the same thing, stripping to go in the water.
What the hell were these two white dudes doing at Red Citrus?
Squires yelled to the hippie, “Hey… you! What the hell you think you’re doing?” but the hippie was busy pulling off his shirt and talking into his cell phone at the same time, before he dropped the phone on the ground, next to his wallet, and then he went into the water, too, but on his belly.
Using his cell phone? The asshole had probably just called 911.
Shit! This was all Squires needed. Fifi was in the process of solving a serious problem, but now here were a couple of solid-looking white citizens messing in his business.
Squires spat, “Goddamn do-gooders!” as he headed after the flashlight Tula was holding, pushing people out of the way.
A moment later, speaking into the hippie’s cell phone, Squires was telling the 911 operator, “That’s right, cancel the emergency, ma’am. We made a mistake here on our end. I know, I know… it’s not the first time.”
He’d checked PREVIOUS CALLS. When he’d seen 911, he knew he had to do something to stop the cops from showing up.
But then Squires had to whisper “Damn it” as he covered the phone so the operator wouldn’t hear Carlson screaming across the water to the big white guy, yelling, “Help me! Take my hand!”
“Sir?” the operator said, raising her voice, “Who’s yelling in the background?”
“Ma’am,” Squires told her, being sweet, “I understand what you’re asking. And at first we thought someone was in trouble. But, turns out, it’s just a bunch of Mexican kids playing games. You know how girls squeal when they’re running round, playing games at night?”
The woman asked, “Did you place the call? Is your name Tomlinson?”
Squires hesitated, aware that it was sometimes a mistake to lie to the cops before thinking it over. “Yep, that’s my name,” he said finally.
The operator told him, “We’ve already dispatched units to that address. Dispatched it to… to a Red Citrus RV Park, Guava Street, just off San Carlos Boulevard. That’s near Fort Myers Beach, correct?”
Squires was getting nervous and impatient. He covered the phone and yanked the flashlight out of the weird little Bible freak’s hand because she kept turning the beam toward the water, where there was now a lot of splashing and swearing going on.
“Damn it,” he whispered to the girl, “pay attention!” as the operator asked him again, “Did you hear me? Is that the correct address, sir?”
Squires kept his voice pleasant and easy as he replied, “Well, if you reckon your people need to practice answering ambulance calls, ma’am, there’s nothing I can do to stop ’em. I just wanted you to know this one is a false alarm. Everything’s just fine here. Our folks are having lots of fun-it’s a sort of party going on. So I guess I’m gonna have to apologize to your people again when they show up here for no reason.”
The operator asked a couple more questions before Squires covered one ear, listening, until he suspected that the woman was convinced and had canceled the 911 call, no matter what she claimed. Then he hung up, as he swung the light toward the water, wanting to confirm the gator still had Carlson.
Fifi still had the guy, all right. But Squires could see the big white guy was swimming hard to catch up, which caused him to wonder, Who the hell is that crazy son of a bitch?
Well… there was an easy way to find out.
From the hippie’s billfold, Squires removed a wad of cash. It looked like a bunch of crisp twenties. He stuffed the money into his jeans, then retrieved the big guy’s billfold. There wasn’t nearly as much cash in it but enough. Yep, these two dudes were solid working citizens-plus, there were some other interesting things to see in this second billfold.
Squires’s eyes shifted from the pond to what he was holding. He used the flashlight to go through credit cards, business cards and IDs that showed a nerdy-looking guy with a jaw and glasses. Marion D. Ford, Ph. D.
Sanibel Biological Supply
Dinkin’s Bay Marina
Marion. What kind of name was that for a man?
The guy was a damn scientist or something, apparently. What the hell was a scientist doing at a trailer park full of chilies and wettails? Squires put one of the man’s business cards into his back pocket before he went through the other stuff, paying special attention to a couple of unusual IDs.
Yeah, the dude was a scientist, but there was some other stuff that worried Squires. Could be the asshole worked for the feds, too, because one of the IDs gave this guy, Marion Ford, unlimited access to something called the Special Operations Center at MacDill Air Base in Tampa.
What the hell was that about?
And there was another plastic ID for a military base in Cartagena, Colombia. But that one was mostly in Spanish, so there was no telling what it meant.
The dude, Ford, Squires guessed, must be some small-time scientist who worked for the feds. But he wasn’t really in the military-not according to what Squires was looking at in the billfold, anyway. Just maybe hired by the military, for some reason or another.
Could that mean the hippie and the nerd were actually with the Department of Immigration? Squires gave himself a few seconds to think about it. At first, that made some sense to him. Why else would they come snooping around a trailer park ass-deep in chilies and chulas?
But then Squires got a sinking feeling. What if the two dudes were actually with the DEA instead? What if they had come here trying to set up some kind of drug bust on the small steroid operation Squires was operating?
Squires whispered “Son of a bitch” as he glanced toward the pond, where he could see the gator rolling in a spray of water, and he thought, Eat that bastard, Fifi! Kill them both!
Squires was pretty sure he had seen the hippie, Tomlinson, before, cruising around the park in some shitty old Volkswagen that had to be twenty years old. Sometimes a girlish-looking electric bike, too. Which wasn’t that unusual. Dopers often cruised the parks because they knew that the chilies arrived from Mexico carrying baggies of weed or peyote buds in their pants instead of cash.
Hell, Squires had bought grass from them himself, although, more often, he just took the shit when he wanted it. Sometimes, he’d yank a guy up by the ankles and shake him, like shaking quarters out of an old pair of jeans. What the hell could a Mexican do about it? Call the cops?
That was one of the good things about managing a place like Red Citrus. No one on the whole goddamn property wanted the cops around, especially Squires and Frankie, so that made it a safe place to be. Which is why, in their newest double-wide trailer, Squires had set up a smaller version of the cookshack they had out there at the hunting camp. It wasn’t the sort of cookshack where he actually cooked food. What he cooked up was home-brewed steroid gear like testosterone enanthate, and equine-which was a horse steroid called EQ-plus winstrol and deca-durabolin.
“Gear” was bodybuilder slang for steroids, almost always purchased illegally.
Squires had become good at rendering high-grade veterinarian powders into injectable muscle juice. The kitchen was well supplied with Whatman sterile filters, 20-gauge needles, sesame oil, benzyl benzoate and everything else needed to produce a first-class product.
Squires had started small, producing just enough gear for himself and Frankie, who had, at one time, been one of the top female bodybuilders in the country. Then he began to sell to a few guys he trusted, and that’s how they got started.