Racing the Rain (33 page)

“Jesus damn Christ on a crutch,” Lucky said, turning off the key and sitting back in the seat.

He pushed the yachting cap back off his perspiring forehead and looked at Bobby through the top of his eyeballs.

“Cranked right up when the guy showed it to me. Then it started doing this shit after I paid him and it set awhile. Dollars to donuts he had it all warmed up before I got there so it would crank up pretty for me.
Sumbitch!
”

“Well, you flooded now. May's well give it a minute, let it dry out some,” said Bobby.

“I know what to do,” Lucky said irritably.

“How much ya pay for it anyway?”

“Hunnert and twenty-five.”

“He seen you comin', all right.”

“Great mind to take a baseball bat to his skull, little Jew bastard,” said Lucky.

“Easy,” said Bobby.

“Yeah, well, few more minutes drifting and we'll be right in the lights from the Crab Pot, goddammit.”

“Tha's all right if it did.”

“You want every sumbitch in Riviera Beach seeing us heading out into the intracoastal in the middle of the night?”

“We got diving stuff. Just doin' a little night dive.”

“With no tanks and no lights?”

“Can't nobody see that. You got to relax, man. You gone bust a gasket,” Bobby said, standing up to relieve himself over the side. Then he retrieved a dirty hand towel from under the console and used it to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

Lucky heaved a big sigh, sat up to the wheel, and tried the engine again. It caught and sputtered as Lucky goosed the throttle several times, then allowed it to idle raggedly. Blue smoke poured out of the exhaust and floated out across the surface of the warm water.

“Okay, hand me over that bottle and set yourself down,” Lucky said.

Bobby picked up the brown bag and pulled the fifth out, holding it up to admire the label in the light from the bridge.

“My oh my, Cockspur,” he said, unscrewing the cap and upending the rum bottle, bubbling it several times before hauling it down and holding it up to study it again, smacking his lips with approval.

“Hand it here, goddammit,” said Lucky, flicking the running lights on. He eased the throttle forward until the little boat got up on plane, then eased it back until they were making fifteen knots down the middle of the intracoastal.

“Shore, boss, here you go. You don't mind drinking after no Negro, do you, boss?”

“Just don't want no goddamn backwash, black or white,” said Lucky. But there was a tinge of humor in his voice, which Bobby took as a sign he was relaxing a little now that the engine was running. Lucky seemed good-natured on the surface, but that belied a vicious streak that had earned him a reputation up and down the coast as far as Titusville in one direction and Miami in the other. It had also earned him some stretches of county time and once almost a bus ride to Raiford, had it not been for a last-minute witness defection. He had been a juvenile delinquent in Indiana before going to war as a paratrooper. He had been decorated for bravery and had seen and done things that he struggled to keep out of his thoughts at night.

Bobby was just as much of a bad boy, but without the surface charm. He owned a taxi company, but his real vocation involved moonshining, bolita, and freelance skullduggery. He was reputed to have killed three black men with a machete one night in Belle Glade, though no bodies were ever found—Lake Okeechobee is a large body of water and more or less full of alligators. If anyone ever had the temerity to ask him about it, Bobby would say that he didn't do it, and if he did, it was in self-defense. But when he said it, it wasn't like he was trying to be funny.

Lucky took a long pull from the bottle and held it out in front of him admiringly while he made little
geck-geck-geck
noises, lips stretched tightly over his teeth in a macabre grimace of a smile. He took a small follow-up sip, then handed it back, wiping his mouth with the back of his forearm.

Bobby stood easily beside the console, his knees absorbing the occasional jolt when they hit a small wave. They could see a few lights from buildings and cars on both sides of the intracoastal but heard no noise at all above the little outboard. Though it was a typical humid May evening, the bright moon and passing breeze made it almost pleasant.

“Where'd you get that?” Bobby pointed the bottle at Lucky's new-looking yachtsman's hat, the only clean article of clothing he had on.

“Part of the plan, me hearty. Lemmee hold that bottle a secont and don't worry about nothin'. White man got everything under control tonight.”

“Tha's what I
do
worry about.”

* * *

Judge Curtis Chillingworth walked barefoot into the small kitchen of his Manalapan beach house, noticing that the linoleum was still sandy from the last renters. He made a mental note to mention it to his wife as he poured two glasses of Johnnie Walker from the new bottle on the counter, one finger for Marge, two for himself. He fetched ice from the small rusty fridge, added a splash of water from the tap to her drink, none for his, and padded back to the bedroom, where she sat up in bed reading a paperback. She looked up and smiled when he handed her the drink, which she placed on a crocheted doily on the bedside table.

The sound of ocean drifted through the curtains along with the pleasant sea breeze. They were just a few scant feet from the ocean at high tide.

“Thank you, Jeeves,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am. May I get you anything else?”

Their little joke was to play upper-crust Palm Beachers, though it was hardly the case. Manalapan wasn't Palm Beach, though with his circuit judge's salary and some careful real estate investments, they had raised their three daughters comfortably and were secure in their middle years. Their little beach place made a steady income during the winter months when well-heeled but price-conscious snowbirds wanted a place on the ocean but did not want to pay Palm Beach prices just to be ignored by the Kennedys. It was rented most of the winter and spring, so it was always a treat in the summer when they were able to take a break from their stuffy home in West Palm Beach and steal away for a few nights of ocean breezes. They always brought a bottle of scotch and a couple of steaks for the grill, and treated it as a minivacation, though he had to drive downtown to the courthouse the next day, just like always.

“What is that you're reading?” he asked, putting his drink on his bedside table and pulling back the bedspread and sheet.

“Oh, it's this sort of trashy thing for my book club,
God's Little Acre.
I don't think it's really your cup of tea, dear.”

“Isn't that the pornographic one they banned everywhere?” He sniffed.

She giggled. He pulled his own book from the lower shelf of the nightstand, a hardcover biography of Winston Churchill, which he was just starting.

“Well, I'm back to old Winnie myself,” he said. “He's got the black dog again and this time I'm afraid it might do him in before he can regain power and deal with the Hun once and for all.”

She closed the book on her index finger and regarded him fondly.

“I don't really see the attraction of reliving all that again,” she said. “It was bad enough getting through it the first time. Everything you went through over there, and all the rationing and hardship back here, families losing fathers and sons, getting those awful telegrams. I'd think you'd just want to forget it.”

“However bad it was for Americans, here or there, it was a hundred times—a thousand times—worse for those poor people over there. I don't know why, but I just find it interesting, getting a historical perspective on it. When we were there, we were much too close to things, too concerned with details. Not just the details of war, but the details of trying to live with all of that going on around you. Sometimes it was a big accomplishment just to get a shower or find a hot meal.”

“I suppose. But I'm afraid not even Mr. Caldwell can hold my attention much longer. I was down at the Junior League sorting used clothes first thing this morning, and I haven't stopped all day. I thank you for the drink and I'll leave you and Mr. Churchill to work everything out,” she said, kissing him on the cheek and turning her lamp off.

“Not for long, I expect. I had pretrial motions all afternoon and I'm pooped, too,” he said.

“I love you. Good night.”

“I love you, too, Margie.”

Half an hour later when he got up to see who could possibly be calling in the middle of the night, he opened the door to his porch to find a disheveled, nervous man in a captain's cap, saying his yacht had broken down and wondering if he could use the phone to call the Coast Guard. Then he halted his tale of nautical woe and smiled.

“Say, aren't you Judge Chillingworth?” asked Lucky Holzapfel.

T
he Citrus City main library had once been the home of an early Florida cattle baron, whose grandfather made a living cracking a long bullwhip behind the ears of feral cows. The ancestors of the bedraggled cattle had been abandoned in the swamps by the conquistadors. Cracking those whips was the way they drove the rangy cows out of the swamps and across the grassy wastes of central Florida to Punta Gorda, where they were loaded onto wooden ships and taken north to feed starving Confederate troops. Thus, the term “cracker” came to be applied in a general and mostly complimentary way to early residents of the Sunshine State. It was later appropriated by black people looking for a term derisive enough to apply to white people for all the things black people had been called by
them
over the years.

The library was a grand old structure of two stories, handsome in its day before going to seed in the 1930s. Now it has been lovingly restored by civic-minded Citrus Cityites and put to use housing the town's meager collection of books and magazines. The library had no more reliable patron than “Vincent Natulkiewicz” (as his library card referred to Trapper Nelson), who, every Saturday, rain or shine, would bring in the five books he had checked out the previous week and then troll through the stacks to find five new ones. The head librarian, Marilyn Young, would also save the previous week's
Wall Street Journal
s for him to take back to the Loxahatchee to pore over. The Tarzan of the Loxahatchee was nothing if not well-read.

His weekly patterns were known to Quenton Cassidy, so when he needed to talk to Trapper and didn't feel like making the journey out to his camp, Cassidy knew exactly where to find him at ten o'clock on Saturday morning.

The dictates of the Dewey decimal system had placed the 900s—i.e., most of the books Trapper was interested in: history, geography, biography—in the cattle baron's former master bedroom in the second-floor back corner room of the house, far from Ms. Young at the front desk. That allowed them to talk in normal tones unless she wandered in to shelve books or to find something for a patron. She would then shush them despite there being not another soul in the building. It was the principle of the thing.

“What you got there?” said Cassidy.

“Biography of Churchill. Friend of mine recommended it,” said Trapper. He added it to the stack on the table behind them and continued down the shelf.

“Aren't you going to look for anything?” said Trapper.

“This isn't my kind of thing. I prefer novels, like
Catch-22
, or books about sports.”

“What are you reading now?”

“Book called
Floorburns.
About basketball,” said Cassidy.

“Can't leave the sport behind, huh?”

“I like ones about track, too, but there aren't many of them.”

“I'm surprised there are any. What have you read?”

“I liked Bannister's book. And there was a kids' novel called
Iron Duke
and another one,
Junior Miler,
that were both pretty good.”

Trapper was engrossed in a book about Africa, trying to divide his attention between that and his conversation.

“So where were you at practice day before yesterday? Kamrad was miffed,” he said.

“I know. Lenny was supposed to tell him. We had a forensics meet at another school. I was doing extemp. I told him about it yesterday,” said Cassidy.

“Forensics?”

“You know, debate, public speaking, that kind of thing.”

“What's ‘extemp'?”

“Extemporaneous. They give you a topic and you have to make something up on the spot and deliver it in front of someone, a judge.”

“I didn't know you did that kind of thing.”

“Well, I wanted to do debate, but they go on trips and stuff and it's pretty hard to do that and sports at the same time.”

“Hmmm.” Trapper had found a book on Antarctic expeditions.

“So anyway, I got home and took a nap, then went out for my run really late.”

“Oh, yeah, you did the seven miles after all?”

“Yeah, I ran across the bridge and along the beach and back. It was pretty amazing. Big bright moon, cool breeze, no traffic or anybody to bother you.”

“So you did your workout! I can tell Archie you didn't skip.”

“Oh, and I saw your friends again,” Cassidy said.

Trapper put the book back on the shelf and looked at Cassidy.

“What friends?”

“You know, that Lucky guy and his sidekick.”

“Floyd and Bobby? Where? Where'd you see them?”

“They were doing a night dive, I guess. They were taking off from the dock behind the Crab Pot, really late. It was pretty dark, but I recognized them.”

Trapper's eyes widened and he held his hand up to stop Cassidy from continuing. Without a word he gestured toward the door with his head.

“Hey, what's . . .”

Trapper made a shushing sound and led Cassidy out of the building and into a little courtyard under some frangipani trees in the cattle baron's backyard. They sat at a picnic table across from each other.