The explosion caught Snapper furrowed in concentration, as he labored to steer around the parked Highway Patrol car, lit up like a Mardi Gras float.
Snapper ducked, peering up at the rearview. He saw the black trooper lying in a puddle, his arm waving but not aiming the smoking gun. Then the trooper went limp, and Snapper cackled.
The Cherokee fishtailed on the rain-slicked asphalt as it entered the highway. Edie Marsh hunched like an aged nun, sobbing into her hands. Skink had pulled Bonnie Lamb into his lap, out of the gunfire's path. Huddled in the cargo hatch, Augustine silently plucked nuggets of safety glass from his clothes.
Snapper was loopy on Midols, Johnnie Walker and pure criminal adrenaline. "You see that big nigger go down?" he yammered at the top of his lungs. "You see him go down!"
Christophe Michel spent the night of the hurricane in the safe and convivial atmosphere of Key West. At noon the next morning he put on the television and recognized, with cramps of dread, the bombed-out remains of a luxury housing development called Gables-on-the-Bay. The subdivision had been built by a company called Zenith Custom Homes, which not only employed Christophe Michel as a senior structural engineer but advertised his ecumenical credentials in its sales brochures. Michel had been recruited from one of France's oldest engineering firms, which had not energetically protested his departure. Among the fields in which Michel sorely lacked experience was that of girding single-family structures to withstand the force of tropical cyclones. His new employer assured him there was nothing to it, and FedExed him a copy of the South Florida Building Code, which weighed several pounds. Christophe Michel skimmed it on the flight from Orly to Miami.
He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as "South Florida's first hurricane-proof community." Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the Titanic was promoted as unsinkable.
All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-w-the-Bay-a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.
With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently planned his departure from the United States. He closed his bank accounts, shuttered the condo in Key West, packed the Seville and set out for the mainland.
The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.
When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.
"Give us your goddamn car," the man said. "Certainly."
"Don't stare at me like that!"
"Sorry." The engineer's trained eye calculated the skew of the man's jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.
"I got one bullet left!"
"I believe you," said Christophe Michel. The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly. Michel asked, "May I keep my suitcase?"
"Fuck, no!"
"I understand."
He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.
"My life savings just drove away," he said. "May I borrow the telephone?"
Bonnie Lamb expected Skink to erupt in homicidal fury upon seeing his best friend shot down. He didn't. Bonnie worried about the listless sag to his shoulders, the near feebleness of his movements. He wore the numb, unfocused glaze of the heavily sedated. Bonnie was sorry to see the governor's high spirits extinguished.
Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he'd gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they'd ditched it behind the convenience store.
Bonnie squeezed Skink's arm and asked if he was all right. He shifted his feet, and something rattled metallically on the floorboard. He picked it up and asked, "What's this?"
It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.
Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. "The Club!"
"The what?"
Bonnie Lamb said, "You know. That thing they advertise all the time on TV."
"I watch no television," Skink said.
Snapper hooted. "The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you lock it across't here"-he patted the steering wheel"so your car don't get stolen."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K." Snapper's laughter had a ring of triumph.
Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bonnie could see fresh tears shining in her eyelashes.
"I had this boyfriend," Edie sniffled, "he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer."
Snapper said, "No shit? Froze it?"
"Yeah." Edie couldn't come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They'd never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?
Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.
"See, that way you can't turn the wheel," Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, "so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. 'Less they put a fuckin' gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!"
Skink set the device down.
"Accept no imitations!" Snapper crowed again, waving the .357.
The governor's gaze turned out the window, drifting again. Teasingly, Bonnie said: "I can't believe you've never seen one of those."
This time the smile was sad. "I lead a sheltered life."
Edie Marsh wondered if Snapper could have picked a dumber location to shoot a cop-a county of slender, connected islands, with only one way out. She kept checking for blue police lights behind them.
Snapper told her to knock it off, she was making everyone a nervous wreck. "Another half hour we're home free," he said, "back on the mainland. Then we find another car."
"One with a CD player, I bet."
"Damn right."
The Seville got boxed in behind a slow beer truck. They wound up stopped at the traffic light in Key Largo. Again Edie snuck a peek behind them. Snapper heard a gasp.
"What!" He spun his head. "Is it cops?"
"No. The Jeep!"
"You're crazy, that ain't possible"
"Right behind us," Edie said.
Bonnie Lamb began to turn around, but Skink held her shoulder. The light turned green. Snapper floored the Seville, zipped smartly between the beer truck and a meandering Toyota. He said: "You crazy twat, there's only about a million goddamn black Jeeps on the road."