Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (30 page)

“Set the hook, hon,” the steelworker shouted. He’d put his pole down and was bent all the way over the bridge rail, watching the line unspool into the blue-black water.

There was a loud splash down there, and a huge silver streak, slicing up through the air, gaping mouth, flared gills, like a prehistoric thing. “It’s a tarpon,” the man shrieked. “Hey, this gal’s got a tarpon on. Reel it in some, get that slack out of your line.” People were running toward her now. A tarpon? Out here?

LeeAnn thrust the rod at the steelworker. “You reel it in,” she said, and she started jogging toward the light pole and her cooler of money. The red baseball cap was nowhere in sight.

She was thirty yards away when she heard a long, low blast of a horn that seemed to be coming from the underside of the bridge. Cars were slowing and stopping on both sides. Now a yellow-and-black-striped bar with flashing lights across it dropped down across the roadway.

“Oh, no,” LeeAnn said to herself, speeding up to a run. She was so close.

The concrete roadway started to move and rumble beneath her feet Now she was maybe five yards away, with the cooler just on the other side of that set of barricades. The roadway was inching upward, and the sidewalk beneath her feet was moving, too, and then she was sprinting, the heavy construction boots slowing her down. From under the bridge she heard the clanking of the gears winching the span up and open.

She jumped, landed and rolled, landing hard on her knees. But the cooler was there, right there. She crawled forward and clutched it to her chest, struggling to her feet, to get away from the moving bridge.

She was right in front of the bridge tender’s booth when Ronnie stepped over the railing separating the sidewalk from the booth.

“Hi, sugar,” he said, gripping her arm so tightly she screamed as loud as she could, in pain and in fright.

Behind him, in the tiny lit-up booth, she saw a slender, red-haired woman who seemed to be napping across the control switches. There was blood on her uniform blouse.

“You go ahead and carry the money,” Ronnie said, poking the .38 in the small of her back.

The Publix truck was pulled way off on the shoulder of the road at the place where the state planned to build the impressive new roadway into the county’s untouched wilderness area.

Hernando Boone drove alongside the cab of the eighteen-wheeler, waved at the driver, and parked nearby.

The driver was short and dark and spoke Cuban- accented English. “You Orlando’s brother?” he asked. “I am Ignacio.”

“Orlando’s my half-brother,” Boone said testily. “You can call me Mr. Boone. Let’s see those ribs.”

It was ten to nine, and there was no sign of Billy Tripp, who was supposed to be his new assistant, but was probably huddled up with Bondurant somewhere figuring out new ways to rip off Hernando Boone.

Now he saw headlights, and soon, a black-and- tan Cadillac Brougham came jouncing down the road. And now, there were more headlights, more cars. Damn. These sisters must think he was running an early-bird special. He and the Cuban would have to run the store all by themselves.

Ignacio jumped up on the rear bumper of the trailer, which was humming from all that juice needed to keep all those BTUs chilling the $2.98-a-pound baby-back ribs. He threw back the locking bar on the trailer and slid the doors outward, disappearing momentarily in the blast of arctic air that came shooting out into the hot, fetid evening.

Cars were streaming down the road now, dozens of them, parking even in the middle of the road. People were spilling out, happy, excited, chattering, a real carnival atmosphere. Women sipped wine coolers and grasped their counterfeit Louis Vuitton and Yves St. Laurent handbags close to their sides, full of cash for those bargain ribs. Plenty of men, too, and they were opening up the trunks of their cars, making room, opening coolers and stacking bags of ice; regular customers, familiar faces.

Ignacio looked at the lines of people surrounding the tractor-trailer, then back at the mountain of waxed cardboard cases stacked inside the truck, all the way to the ceiling.

“Shit,” he said in authentic English.

Hernando Boone pulled on a pair of thick, insulated gloves, hopped up onto the trailer, and let down the steel loading ramp.

Ignacio climbed the stack of cases, hefted one onto his shoulder, and, grimacing, handed it down to Hernando, who nearly fell from the weight of it. But then the steroids, better business through chemistry, proved their worth, and Boone held the case aloft, over his head, like an ancient warrior showing the rest of the tribe a prized beaver pelt. With his block-shaped head, beaded ponytail, and massive torso, he was a god of meat, standing shoulders above the rest of the throng.

“Who’s first?” Hernado called out loudly. He was putting the case of meat down when he felt a searing pain in his shoulders, the trapezoids, maybe, and the pain ran down his back. He had to see a doctor for real. The case fell off the back of the truck and landed on the road with a dull thud. The fitted top fell off and greasy pink-and-white slabs of meat spilled out onto the roadside.

“Oooh,” several women cried.

Hernando slid down the ramp and in a moment was beside the ruined box. A hand reached out to snatch up a nice, meaty, five-pound slab. Five-finger discount. Hernando grabbed the hand and twisted until the discount shopper, a white-haired, stoop- shouldered granny, screamed “Have Mercy, Jesus,” and passed out from the pain.

There was a respectful silence for a moment.

“That meat ain’t cut,” somebody pointed out.

“I know that’s right,” a high-pitched woman’s voice joined in. “Ain’t cut, ain’t wrapped. Ain’t weighed. Look like half a side of beef he selling.”

Hernando got back up on the back of the trailer. The voices grew louder, and people were drifting away, starting their cars to drive off.

Ignacio had seen how things were working. And he’d already dealt with one Boone brother before. He slipped away and faded into the throng of departing meat buyers.

“Just a minute,” Boone called out loudly. He looked around, realized the Cuban was gone, and knew that he was alone with a crowd gone badder than week-old poultry.

“Hey!” he thundered. The griping and moaning subsided.

“This is a warehouse sale,” he called out. “We told y’all that. Cutting and weighing and wrapping costs extra. That’s how we cut out the middleman.”

“Alma didn’t say nothing on the phone about having to buy no whole cow,” a frizzle-haired white woman up front shouted.

Hernando could see his $45,000 profit sitting in that truck behind him, thawing, disappearing like an ice cube in July. When he got done with this fiasco, he resolved he would kill his brother. Orlando was only a half-brother, anyway.

“Split the slabs with your neighbors or friends,” Hernando said in frustration. “Sell them their half for four ninety-nine a pound. Make you a little profit off this thing.”

The shoppers conferred among themselves, and many concluded that this would, after all, be a decent transaction.

Ignacio saw the crowds moving forward with their fistfuls of money and decided to make his final break for freedom, snaking out from behind the construction trailer. The last thing he remembered was a hand, closing off his windpipe, and a voice, very quiet, whispering in English and Spanish that he was under arrest.

“You think Jeff’s body is hidden up there, in all that junk? Where? How do we get up there?”

Jackie played the flashlight over the makeshift platform atop the lube rack and shook her head doubtfully.

“Seven feet up, probably,” Truman estimated. “Didn’t you ever climb trees when you were a little girl?”

“Trees, yeah,” Jackie said. “Not greased poles. I’m no lumberjack, Mr. K.”

Truman pulled open the door to the garage bay. Two cars were parked inside the fenced-in area. The purple Colt he ruled out immediately, but the silver Blazer, despite its battered body, would work, he thought.

With Jackie at the steering wheel and Truman pushing behind the bumper, it was slow rolling.

Inside the showroom, the phone rang three rimes and then stopped, abruptly.

Whoever had decided a Blazer was a light-utility truck, Truman thought, grunting and panting, his whole body pitted against the thing, had never had to push one.

When the Blazer was lopsidedly angled as close to the lube rack as they had the energy to maneuver it, Jackie clambered up on the roof and reached for the platform. Truman climbed up, too.

“You hold the light,” he said. “I’ll go up, see if the footing’s solid.”

“I’m lighter,” Jackie protested, but he was already swinging one leg up and onto the platform.

She held the light with both hands, pointed low so it wouldn’t shine in his eyes up there.

The platform was so cluttered with junk there was only a four-foot-square clearing that remained unobstructed. The planking creaked underfoot as he stepped gingerly to one side. It was dark despite the flashlight’s puny beam. He felt the cold porcelain of the toilet, bumped a knee against something sharp.

“I’m coming up,” Jackie declared.

“This is hopeless,” she said when she was crowded right beside him. “If we try to climb around on here, it’ll all fall down. Us with it. Maybe they moved the body,” she said faintly. “Maybe it was never here.” The dark was closing in on her, and she coughed from the dust they’d stirred up. Something skittered across her right arm and she slapped at it and felt it fell lightly on her foot. Just a roach. Just a roach, she told herself.

“Maybe they faked the whole thing,” she said. “Maybe Jeff is still alive, in on it with Bondurant and them.”

“Shine the flash back over there,” Truman said. “To your right there, over by that Pepsi machine.”

“It’s too small,” she said, running the beam of light over it. The Pepsi machine wasn’t even five feet tall.

“Back to the right,” Truman said, squinting to see better.

“Right.”

“There.”

A metal handrail was bolted to the wall. Painted the same dull gray as the garage walls. Six rungs led upward, but to where?

“Shine it on the ceiling,” Truman said.

She traced a rectangle with it and they both saw the barely discernible outline of a door.

“An attic?” Jackie didn’t get it. “Nobody has attics in Florida. Besides, I’ve seen the outside. The roofs flat.”

Truman was already inching his way toward the far wall, knocking aside a stack of folding metal chairs. They fell and banged loudly against the hood of the Blazer below, followed by a cardboard carton full of old files, the backseat of a ‘72 Pontiac Firebird, and a stack of aluminum window screens.

“Keep that light steady,” Truman told her, reaching for the first rung of the ladder. “As soon as I’m up there, climb down and go across the street and call Weingarten at the FDLE. Tell him what’s been going on, and ask him to get his people here now. Don’t come back until you see police cars. I mean it, Jackie.”

The top rung stopped about three feet below the ceiling. He had to coil his head and neck down to keep from knocking his head against what felt like solid wood. With one foot resting on the rung, he pushed the weight of his shoulders upward.

When he straightened up, he found himself looking out across the flat tar and gravel roof of Bondurant Motors. At the pink 1957 Cadillac. A flock of seagulls swooped and whirled in the air above it, crying out at the disturbance.

Ollie drove. The big black truck lurched forward in fits and starts, veering from side to side, at times jouncing up over the curb, then sharply back over into the left lane. Eddie winced at every jolt, but with his good hand, he kept dialing the number at Bondurant Motors.

“That’s four times,” he said finally. “Hope they’re out of there.”

Ollie was trying to concentrate on driving, but he couldn’t miss the blood seeping out from the duct tape strapped around Eddie’s forearm.

“I should take you to the hospital.”

“I’m okay,” Eddie insisted. “The bullet’s just up there in the fatty part, near my underarm. It ain’t nothing, Ollie. I had girlfriends cut me worse than this.”

The truck bounced up on the sidewalk again, and this time Eddie reached over with his right arm and jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a concrete bus-stop bench.

“You can’t see nothin, can you?” Eddie asked. “Your head don’t even clear the top of that steering wheel.”

“I can see a lot,” Ollie retorted. “If it’s, you know, big.”

Eddie took the steering wheel with his right hand. “I’ll look out for the big stuff,” he offered. “You take care of the brakes and the gas pedal. This bad boy will do one-twenty, you know.”

“Right,” Ollie said. He stomped down on the accelerator as hard as he could with the tip of his toes, and the speedometer jumped up to seventy, then eighty miles per hour.

“Say. You got a driver’s license?” Eddie asked.

“This is frontier justice,” Ollie said, keeping one hand on the steering wheel, just in case. “A driver’s license is the least of our worries.”