Predator (15 page)

    
“That’s mine!” Marino slams his fist down on the table.

Chapter 20

    
The Seminole belongs to a beat-up white pickup truck filled with ears of corn, parked some distance from the gas pumps. Hog has been watching him for a while.

    
“Some motherfucker took my fucking wallet, my cell phone, I think maybe when I was in the fucking shower,” the man is saying on the pay phone, standing with his back to the CITGO station and all the eighteen-wheelers rumbling in and out.

    
Hog doesn’t show his amusement as he listens to the man rant and rave about overnighting again, complaining and cursing because he’ll have to sleep in the cab of his truck, has no phone, no money for a motel. He doesn’t even have money for a shower, and anyway, a shower has gone up to five bucks, and that’s a lot to pay for a shower when nothing comes with it, not even soap. Some of the men double up and get a discount, disappearing behind an unpainted privacy fence on the west side of the CITGO food mart, piling their clothes and shoes on a bench inside the fence before stepping into a tiny concrete space dimly lit with a single shower head and a big, rusty drain in the middle of the floor.

    
It is always wet inside the shower. The shower head always drips, and the water handles screech. The men carry in their own soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, usually in plastic bags. They bring their own towels. Hog has never showered in there, but he’s looked at the men’s clothes, figuring out what might be in the pockets. Money. Cell phones. Sometimes drugs. Women shower in a similar arrangement on the east side of the food mart. They never go in two at a time, no matter the discount, and are in a nervous hurry when they shower, shamed by their nakedness and terrified that someone will walk in on them, that a man will, a big, powerful man who can do what he wants.

    
Hog dials the 800 number on the green card he keeps folded in his back pocket, a rectangular card maybe eight inches long with a large hole and a slit in one end so it can be attached to a door handle. Printed on the card is information and a cartoon of an animated citrus fruit wearing a tropical shirt and sunglasses. He is doing God’s will. He is the Hand of God doing God’s work. God has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

    
“Thank you for calling the Citrus Canker Eradication Program,” the familiar recording says. “Your call may be monitored for quality.”

    
The canned female voice goes on to say that if he is calling to report damage in Palm Beach, Dade or Broward Counties or Monroe to please dial the following number. He watches the Seminole climb into his pickup truck, and his red-plaid shirt reminds him of a lumberjack, the carved one by the front door of The Christmas Shop. He dials the number the recorded voice gave him.

    
“Department of Agriculture,” a woman answers.

    
“I need to speak to a citrus inspector, please,” he says as he stares at the Seminole and thinks about alligator wrestling.

    
“What may I help you with?”

    
“Are you an inspector?” he asks as he thinks of the alligator he saw about an hour ago on the bank of the narrow canal that runs along South 27.

    
He took it as a good sign. The gator was at least five feet long and very dark and dry, and not interested in the big lumber trucks rumbling by. He would have pulled over if there had been any place to do it. He would have watched the gator, studied the way it fearlessly handles life, quiet and calm but poised to flash into the water or grab its unsuspecting prey and drag it down to the bottom of the canal, where it would drown and rot and be eaten. He would have watched the gator for a long time, but he couldn’t safely get off the highway, and he is on a mission.

    
“Do you have something to report?” the woman’s voice is asking over the line.

    
“I work for a lawn service and happened to notice citrus canker in a yard about a block from where I was cutting the grass yesterday.”

    
“Can you give me the address?”

    
He gives her an address in the West Lake Park area.

    
“May I have your name?”

    
“I’d rather report this anonymously. I could get in trouble with my boss.”

    
“All right. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Did you actually enter this yard where you think you spotted the canker?”

    
“It’s an open yard, so I walked in because there are a lot of really nice trees and hedges and a lot of grass, and I was thinking maybe I could do some work there if they needed anyone. Then I noticed the suspicious-looking leaves. Several of the trees have tiny lesions on their leaves.”

    
“Did you notice a watery-looking margin around any of these lesions?”

    
“It’s my impression these trees were recently infected, which is probably why your routine inspections have missed them. What worries me is the yards on either side. They have citrus that in my estimation are less than nineteen hundred feet from the infected ones, meaning they’re probably infected, too, and the citrus in other yards beyond that in my estimation are also less than nineteen hundred feet away. And on and on throughout the neighborhood. So you can understand my concern.”

    
“What makes you think our routine inspections have missed the properties you’re mentioning?”

    
“Nothing to indicate you’ve been there. I’ve been working with citrus trees down here for a long time, working with professional lawn services most of my life. I’ve seen the worst of the worst, entire orchards that had to be burned. People wiped out.”

    
“Did you notice any lesions on any of the fruit?”

    
“As I’ve been explaining, it looks like the canker’s in the early stages, very early stages. I’ve seen entire orchards burned because of the canker. People’s lives ruined.”

    
“When you walked into the yard where you think you saw citrus canker, did you disinfect after you left?” she asks, and he doesn’t like her tone.

    
He doesn’t like her. She’s stupid and tyrannical.

    
“Of course I deconned. I’ve been in the lawn-care business for a long time. I always spray myself and my tools with GX-1027, according to regulation. I know all about what happens. I’ve seen entire commercial orchards destroyed, burned up and abandoned. People ruined.”

    
“Excuse me…”

    
“Very bad things happen.”

    
“Excuse me…”

    
“People need to take the canker seriously,” Hog says.

    
“What’s the registration number for your vehicle, the one you use for your lawn service? I’m assuming you have a yellow-and-black regulatory sticker on the left side of the windshield? I need that number.”

    
“My number’s irrelevant,” he says to the inspector, who thinks she’s so much more important and powerful than he. “The vehicle belongs to my boss and I’ll get in trouble if he knows I made this call. If people find out his lawn service reported citrus canker that’s probably going to result in every citrus tree in the neighborhood being eradicated, what do you think will happen to our lawn-care business?”

    
“I understand, sir. But it’s important I have your decal number for our records. And I really would like a way to contact you, if necessary.”

    
“No,” he says. “I’ll get fired.”

Chapter 21

    
The CITGO station is getting busy with truckers who park their semis behind the food mart and off to the side of the Chickee Hut restaurant, line them up at the edge of the woods and sleep in them and probably have sex in them.

    
The truckers eat at the Chickee Hut, which is misspelled because the people who come here are too ignorant to know how to spell chikee and probably don’t even know what it is. Chikee is a Seminole word, and even the Seminoles can’t spell it.

    
The ignorant truckers live from mile to mile and pull over here to spend their money at the food mart, where there is plenty of diesel fuel, beer, hotdogs and cigars, and a selection of folding knives in a glass case. They can play pool in the Golden Tee game room and get their trucks repaired at the CB antenna or tire services. The CITGO is a full-service stop out in the middle of nothing, where people come and go and mind their own business. Nobody bothers Hog. They barely look at him, so many people in and out, hardly anybody to see him twice, except the guy who works in the Chickee Hut restaurant.

    
It is behind a chain-link fence at the edge of the parking lot. Signs posted on the fence announce that solicitors will be prosecuted and the only dogs allowed are K9s, and wildlife can enter at its own risk. There is plenty of wildlife at night, but Hog wouldn’t know about it firsthand because he doesn’t waste money in the game room, not on pool or the jukebox. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t want sex with any of the women at the CITGO.

    
They are disgusting in skimpy shorts and tight tops, their faces made harsh by too much cheap makeup and too much sun. They sit in the open-air restaurant or at the bar, which is nothing but a roof thatched with palmetto leaves and a scarred wooden counter lined with eight stools. They eat dinner specials like BBQ ribs and meat-loaf and country-fried steak, and they drink. The food is good and cooked right there on the premises. Hog likes the trucker burger, and it’s only three ninety-five. A grilled cheese is three dollars and a quarter. Cheap, disgusting women, bad things happen to women like that. They deserve it.

    
They want it.

    
They tell everyone.

    
“I’ll have a grilled cheese to go,” Hog says to the man behind the bar. “And a trucker burger for here.”

    
The man has a big belly and wears a soiled white apron. He is busy popping caps off dripping bottles of beer that he keeps on ice inside tubs. The man with the big belly has waited on him before but never seems to remember him.

    
“You want the grilled cheese the same time as your burger?” he asks, sliding two bottles of beer closer to a trucker and his lady who are already drunk.

    
“Just make sure the grilled cheese is wrapped to go.”

    
“I asked you if you wanted them at the same time.” He isn’t annoyed but rather indifferent about it.

    
“That would be fine.”

    
“What do you want to drink?” the man with the big belly asks as he opens another beer.

    
“Plain water.”

    
“Now what the hell is plain water?” the drunk trucker asks loudly as his lady giggles and presses her breast against his big, tattooed arm. “Water you get on an air-plane ?”

    
“Just plain water,” Hog says to the man behind the bar.

    
“I don’t like nothing plain, do I baby?” the drunk trucker’s drunk girlfriend slurs, gripping the stool with her plump legs in their tight shorts, her plump breasts bulging from her low-cut top.

    
“So where you heading?” the drunk girlfriend asks.

    
“North,” he says. “Eventually.”

    
“Well you be careful driving around down here all by your lonesome,” the woman slurs. “There’s a lot of crazies.”

Chapter 22