West Palm: The Complete Novel (22 page)

I
t was dark when Dottie arrived, breathless from running up the stairs toward the blaring music. Smoker was overcome with happiness to see her in her crisp white uniform with
Cakes by Dottie
stitched across her tits.

“Are you okay?” she shouted above the screeching radio.

“Am I okay?” he shouted. “I'm handcuffed to the fucking desk.”

She switched the radio off and knelt beside him. “How do I get these things off?”

“First, get Tara on my cell phone.”

Without a word she went to his desk and picked up the cell.

“Top of the list,” he said. “Amazon.”

She brought up
amazon,
pressed send, and knelt back down beside him, holding the phone to his ear. He listened to it ring.
Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone please record your message
. He spoke calmly into the phone. “The maniac knows your address. Get Matthew to take you to a hotel.
Now
.”

Dottie asked, “Should I call the cops?”

Smoker shook his head. “If he's with her and she's still breathing, the last thing we want to do is freak him out with lights and sirens and loudspeakers.”

“Did he take the handcuff keys?”

“There are backups in the key drawer in the pantry.”

He heard her hurrying down the stairs and through the garage into the pantry.

She returned with the entire drawer of keys.

He pointed with his nose.

“You mean these dungeon keys?” She fumbled with the locks.

“Your poor skin,” she moaned when she'd got him free and saw the abraded welts he'd made around his wrists.

He attempted to get up, but had to hold on to the desk because his legs refused to work.

A moment later he was thumping numbly down the stairs in the direction of the pantry. She was close behind, listening to his explanation of what had happened. He didn't mention that he'd almost been eaten by a dog.

She lifted the lid from the pickle crock, and he took out his gun and holster.

As he started up his car she yelled, “If I don't hear from you in half an hour, I'm calling the cops.”

She watched his taillights disappear.

A rustling in the bushes made her jump.

A chartreuse ball was dropped at her feet.

You throw it, I'll catch it, then you'll throw it again, I'll catch it again, then you'll throw . . .

W
hen the protection of darkness had fallen, Matthew backed the van up to the house and they loaded in the corpse.

“All right, Mother, get in front.”

There were only two seats in the van, the back ones having been removed for transporting antiques, so Tara had to lie beside the dead body, on the quilted blankets Matthew used for wrapping furniture.

Even with this cushioning, the back of her head was sore where it met the floor. She hoped she didn't have a concussion. The bump felt as big as a baseball, though she'd treated it repeatedly with bags of frozen peas, twenty minutes on and twenty off. The van pulled out into the street, and the bouncing made her head hurt more.

Her cell phone rang. She saw the name and number, and ignored it.

“Who was that?” asked Matthew.

“Smoker.”

Despite the painful jolting caused by the van's motion, as they left the city lights behind them she began growing sleepy. She had showered in scalding water and repeatedly rinsed out her eyes. She was as clean as an accessory to murder can be. As for him, they'd stripped his body and stuck his bloodstained clothes in the washer, even throwing in his jogging shoes, enclosed in a pillowcase. His bracelets, the only items the cops knew about, were scrubbed and buried in Faith's junk jewelry boxes. Blown-off fragments of his head had been flushed down the toilet and were traveling through the municipal sewage system.

Matthew said forensic tests for blood and human remains also detected chlorine, and the presence of one overrode the evidence of the other. So they'd flooded the tiles around the pool with chlorine, and cleaned the grouting out with Q-tips.

Grisly as it all was, the most horrifying thing was the photos on Zachariah Whitman's laptop.

Matthew had crushed the laptop underneath the tires of his van, but its files were permanently stored in her brain. All the women were in their twenties or thirties, and all their throats had been cut. Only the decorations of the bodies varied, and each macabre scene was electronically surrounded by a frame from a photo-handling program. The final frame was the most elaborately carved and gilded; inside was a picture of her standing on the deck of
King Rat;
the features weren't clear because it was shot from a distance and at night. “Live models just weren't his forte,” said Matthew.

There was a second file, larger and more startling than the first. These were taken in a morgue or mortuary, where Zachariah Whitman had plainly enjoyed plenty of unsupervised time, enough to decorate hundreds of cadavers. “Quite a little scrapbook,” Matthew had said. “What shall we call it?
What I Did on My Vacation?
”

Faith's voice returned Tara to the present. “Watch out for lions.”

Tara got to her knees and peered through the van's side window. They were out in the country now, and on the right their headlights illuminated a large sign,
LION COUNTY SAFARI
.

“Tell me we're not going to feed him to the lions.”

Matthew drove on through the darkness until they reached a fork, then turned left down a side road and onto a small bridge. Their headlights shone on a sign—
SHERIFF'S TRAINING RANGE.

“You picked a great place to bury a body,” she said.

“We're not going to bury it.”

Beyond the deserted training range, they turned at a pumping station, and their headlights caught a brown-and-white sign for the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

“Entrance fee required,”
she read.

“Mother has a senior citizen pass.”

A body of water gleamed on their left, and their headlights lit a sign that said it was unlawful to feed, entice, or disturb the alligators. Another sign showed the outline of an alligator with a slashed red circle inside its swollen stomach. In case this didn't make the point, the warnings were in three languages:
ATTENTION! ATENCIÓN! ACHTUNG!

Matthew slowed the van.

Up ahead she could make out a boat ramp, but he stopped well before the ramp, parking on a grassy slope.

He and Faith climbed out.

“Why,” declared Faith, looking around, “this is where we dumped Donny.”

Her words filled the moist stillness.

In the back of the van Tara told herself, I must not have heard her right.

Matthew unlocked the back doors.

She stared out at him. “What did Faith just say?”

It was too dark to read his expression, but his silence was her answer.

He was sliding out his collapsible dolly and opening it to its full length.

She said, “You've done this before.”

“Push him toward me,” he commanded.

Don't think, she told herself, just do what you have to. She helped him slide Zachariah Whitman's naked body to the edge of the van, and watched him stand it upright on the dolly. Then she too climbed out. The night was cloudy, with just a sliver of moon.

“Alligators are fussy eaters,” he said, fastening a cement block around the corpse's ankles with the rope he used for wrapping furniture. “It has to be alive and kicking, or nice and rotten. A fresh corpse doesn't interest them.” He tied a second block around the corpse's neck. “Once it begins to decay, they'll devour it with pleasure. But before that happens we don't want it floating to the surface.” She understood now why he'd pierced the body's abdomen, to keep the stomach and intestines from inflating with gas.

Faith was staring at the man she'd killed.

“Mother, what I want you to do is lie down in the van and have a nice nap. I'm going to lock the doors to make sure you'll be safe from lions. You saw the sign, this is lion country.”

They helped her into the back of the van, made sure she was lying flat on the padded blankets, and locked the doors.

He handed Tara the crushed laptop and a flashlight. “Thataway,” he pointed.

She guided him down the grassy slope to a small dock just wide enough for a couple of fishermen to stand there with poles.

He wheeled his dolly onto the dock, and pushed. The weighted corpse fell and hit the water with a loud splash; the drop from the dock was obviously a long one.

A second heavy splash came from across the inlet.

“Alligators,” he said. “They cruise around here like destroyers.”

He pointed over the rippling darkness toward a chain of buoys. She understood. Boats not permitted here.

“This area was dredged,” he said. “The water's deep, and the bottom's invisible.”

He took the laptop from her and heaved it into the drink.

He was closing up the dolly when they heard the sound of dogs and tires crunching on the gravel road.

“Good-bye, Dolly,” he muttered, and flung it off the platform.

As the vehicle and its barking cargo grew louder, he grabbed her hand and hurried her from the dock down into the field. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“I know you have a headache, darling, but this has to look authentic. Just remember, the death penalty is alive and well in Florida.”

They were fumbling out of their clothes when a peculiar truck came noisily into view—rumbling on large tractor tires, with a frenzied dog in a cage on top of the hood, more caged dogs in back, and a bunch of drunken hog hunters whooping it up and pointing rifles through the open windows.

He drew her to the ground and rolled on top of her. “Sorry there's no time for romantic dialogue.”

The headlights caught them, and drunken laughter erupted from the truck. One of the yahoos called out through the window, “Ride that flagpole, sugar.”

Hours before, she'd had a murderer on top of her; now it was Matthew. The truck lights blinked in rhythm with his dry humping and the barking of the dogs grew more intense. As the drunken hunters shouted their encouragement, Matthew hummed their high school anthem in her ear.

The catcalls and barking seemed to last forever. The longer he went at it, the more the hunters cheered. Were they going to stay until he stopped? And afterward what would they do?

He let out a loud groan, celebrated by applause and whistles from the truck.

The motor revved, the headlights veered away from them, and she relaxed. The drunken hunters weren't criminals, just good ol' boys. She and Matthew were the criminals.

The last wisecrack she heard was directed to the dog on the hood. “You sniffed out the wrong hogs.”

“Was it good for you?” Matthew asked.

“I could've done without the gnats.” She swatted them away as she got to her feet. Hurrying into her clothes, she said, “When we were kids I used to dream of doing it with you.”

“My own sitcom fantasy was we'd marry a pair of brothers and live next door to each other.” He held out his hand, and they climbed up the slope to the van.

She slid into the front seat beside him. They heard Faith snoring in back.

When the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge was behind them and they were across the bridge, he explained the demise of Donny. “He came home crazed on bath salts, claiming I was using mind control on him through a device I implanted in his nose when he was asleep. Then he broke twenty thousand dollars' worth of antique glass, and came after me with a jagged hunk of Italian green opaline. Mother shot him. A gay lovers' quarrel leading to a bullet in the heart isn't the ambience my clients expect with their Lalique crystal. So his body had to disappear.”

They picked up speed on the main road. The Lion Country Safari flashed by on their left. Tara wondered how many days it would take for the alligators to be tempted by the rotting corpse.

“You may question my decision,” he said, “but I never have.”

“I'm not questioning your decision.”

“Donny's dreadful family missed the checks he occasionally sent them. Drawn on my account, of course. They got in touch with the West Palm Beach police, who were all over me. That's why we couldn't report what went down today. If the cops found a dead body on my patio, they would've reopened Donny's case.”

Gazing out at the lights of Southern Boulevard, she wondered how many more crimes were being covered up tonight.

They arrived home to find a Jetta parked in front of the house.

“It's Smoker,” she said.

“I wonder what I'll be selling him this evening.”

“Try a cast-iron alibi.”

“Now that's a thought.”

Smoker was out of his car before they'd parked, striding toward the van.

He was so relieved to see his amazon alive in the passenger seat, it barely registered in his mind that for the first time she wasn't equally glad to see him.

Then she stepped from the van, and he saw the expression on her face. It was an expression he'd seen many times in his career, and he thought of it as the abyss. It was treacherous and deep, but you were given just a glimpse, and then like a broken window it was quickly covered with plywood so you couldn't see in.

Something monumental had happened. And he wasn't going to offer her any information until he heard what she had to say.

“Here for a little late night shopping?” asked Matthew.

They're covering up, thought Smoker, but exactly what?

“Tara,” said Matthew, “why don't you take our private investigator inside and give him a drink while I unload?”

Smoker followed her into the house. She faced him across the mahogany bar. Her eyes were bloodshot; she'd been crying. “Have you been waiting outside very long?” she asked politely, like a hostess to a guest she barely knew.

“A couple of hours.”

“What would you like to drink?”

“Anything.”

Her gaze moved toward the door, and Smoker turned to see Matthew entering with his mother.

All three of them looked wrong.

Not that the old woman ever looked right. But tonight she didn't ask if he liked rutabaga.

Tara reached for the ice. Smoker saw her hands were shaking, and he knew it wasn't Zach she was afraid of anymore. Zach was no longer a threat to her. Which could only mean one thing.

Now I'm the threat.

“Why don't I mix the drinks?” suggested Matthew. He dropped ice cubes into four highball glasses, added gin and tonic to three, and plain quinine water to the fourth, which he gave to his mother.

He's on edge, thought Smoker. He forgot the citrus slices.

They're all in on it.

As they clinked their glasses, he recalled how well the amazon had defended herself the last time Zach attacked her.

This time, she'd been waiting with a semiautomatic. And she'd had help.

He didn't blame them. They'd wanted it to be over.

He contemplated the antique dealer with new respect. Not only did he sell me a bar and a half, he blew away a serial killer.

He noticed dried streaks of mud on the amazon's clothes. They've just come home from burying the body. Let's hope they buried it deep.

Above her highball glass, her bloodshot eyes were fixed on Matthew, and Smoker sensed that she and the antique dealer were closer than ever.

And I'm totally excluded.

That was the hard part. He and the amazon were finished.

Matthew broke the oppressive silence. “I know it's terribly late,” he said to Smoker, “but since you're here, I'd love to show you a Tiffany hip flask I just got in.”

I've got to hand it to the guy, thought Smoker, he's got balls of steel.

But I don't have to buy his Tiffany hip flask.