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29

That morning, watching from his condo window as Augie and Oswald pulled away in the Viking, Bern Heller experimented with the idea of using the boat to escape to some foreign country that had islands with palm trees, and straw huts and women who poured coconut milk over their hair and bodies to keep themselves feeling smooth…

Were there islands like that anymore? Were there ever?

Didn’t matter. He could still think about it.

…escape to an island that belonged to a country not interested in a few mistakes a man might make while living in Florida. Not if the man had money, and a yacht as classy looking as the Viking, where he could take the women with their coconut-smelling hair. Keep the air conditioner in the master suite going; make drinks for them while they took care of his laundry, his cooking…his other needs, while they were at it.

Bern pictured himself alone on the flybridge, all his belongings packed below, a trunkload of cash and certified checks hidden somewhere safe after cleaning out the corporation’s accounts. Pictured himself heading out across the Gulf of Mexico…

No, not the Gulf of Mexico. The water had to be calm. It had to stay calm.

…he pictured himself alone on the flybridge, keeping the boat close to the beach where there wasn’t any wind. Ride along nice and smooth, no more worries. He could follow the shoreline around to Mexico, or even Colombia—a favorite hangout of his grandfather’s judging from the passports that were still scattered on the nearby desk along with the leather-bound journal, the photo of the glamorous woman who was now probably an old hag, and documents mostly written in German.

Something new was on the desk, too. A registered letter from the old man’s personal assistant, Jason Goddard. And a package. They’d been sent overnight mail, but they couldn’t have anything to do with the message he’d left on Goddard’s machine: “I was wondering about the woman in the black-and-white picture…”

Or could they? Goddard was prompt. Known for being a step ahead. His grandfather referred to him as “my point man,” as if they were in a war. Or: “My personal son of a bitch,” because Goddard’s the one who did the old man’s dirty work.

But send an overnight package in reply to Bern’s phone message? Nobody responded that fast, not even Goddard. Besides, the envelope had a thick feel—there was a lot more than information about a woman inside.

Nothing good ever came in a thick envelope, that was Bern’s experience. Which is why he still hadn’t opened it. The way his luck was going? The damn thing could wait until tonight. Or tomorrow. He didn’t care.

Bern just wasn’t up to dealing with another shock. There’d been too many, way too fast. Last night was yet another example: The redneck dumping a barrel that contained the body of a woman who’d been quietly buried…nine months?

Yes, about that long. The girl Bern had spotted in a Gainesville parking lot, drop-dead gorgeous, with eyes that were way too good to waste time on him, so he had followed her. Got a little carried away when he dragged her out of the trunk, into a field, because the little bitch was a fighter—a mistake on her part, but his mistake, too, which he could admit to himself.

How long, though, was he going to have to pay for one or two stupid mistakes? Fair was fair, but he’d suffered enough.

The thing that tumbled out of the barrel probably was the girl from Gainesville, though he couldn’t swear to it. Hard to recognize what it was after being packed in a petroleum product for that long—dirty two-cycle motor oil in this instance. Which is what saved Moe’s Hoosier ass.

Very calm and cool, Moe had looked at Bern and said, “Girl? I don’t see any girl.” This, with the girl’s body only a few feet away, all folded up like a paper angel, oil streaming off it. And just after hearing Bern say that the girl looked so tiny, she almost had to be the sort of person no one would care about, or come looking for.

“A crack whore, most likely,” Bern had said.

And Moe had replied, “Girl,” like: What are you talking about? That thing’s not human. Which was a big relief that got better when Moe suggested it was probably an animal of some sort that fell into the barrel then couldn’t get out. And added, still very cool, “Do you want me to bury that mess where I found it, boss? Or do you want to take care of it yourself?”

At the time, Bern had his hands full. Full, because of the Cuban he’d spotted watching them from the twin-engine boat that was green in daylight but looked bluish in the yellow sodium lights.

The Cuban had tried to run. Jumped out of the boat and scampered, Bern on his heels, the Hoosier lagging far behind. When Bern caught the Cuban, he’d looked as surprised as some of the wide receivers Bern had played against, a white guy his size dragging them down from behind.

He had the Cuban’s arm levered up, and his knee on the guy’s throat so he couldn’t cry out, which is when Moe revisited the subject: “Girl? I don’t know why you keep saying that, boss, I’d swear it was some kind of animal. We can use the bulldozer and bury it where it belongs.”

Which saved him.

It didn’t save the Cuban, who was listening.

T he phone on the desk of his condo was ringing. Bern didn’t notice right away because his ears were also ringing. They’d been ringing since about 1 A.M. that morning, when Moe’s unexpected gunshot had temporarily deafened him.

Bern looked at the caller ID, seeing: PRIVATE NUMBER.

There was a trick his wife back in Madison had learned, how to program her phone in a way so her own number was shielded from the person she was calling. She didn’t do it often though. More likely, it was Jason Goddard, who was also an attorney and did tricky stuff all the time.

Bern answered.

Damn. His wife.

Even though impaired, he had no trouble hearing: “Bernard, you said you’d call me last night. I tried three times and you never answered—the last time was ten minutes after midnight!”

At ten minutes after midnight, he and the Hoosier were trying to decide what to do with the Cuban. Call the cops and let them deal with him? Or take care of the situation themselves.

“…which is thoughtlessness, plain and simple. I swear, you haven’t been the same since you took that Florida job. What’s got into you? The money’s nice, I’m not saying I want you to quit, but try and be a little more thoughtful. It’s like Florida has taken all the sweetness out of you, Bernie…”

Sweetness? The woman was still loud and clueless, something that might change about a month after they sealed her coffin and got a few feet of dirt on it.

“…so I’m just gonna come right out and tell you what’s got me so upset. It’s that Augie. I was talking to your sister-in-law yesterday, and Augie told her that you got yourself into another brawl. But this time with some hippie who nearly killed you. Is that true, Bernard? Did he hurt you? You never said a doggone word…”

Augie, the little fucking snitch. If he’d told his motor-mouthed mother, half of Wisconsin would know by next week. A really shitty thing to do to a former pro lineman in a state where fans worshipped their football players. Spread a rumor about him getting his ass kicked by some pansy doper.

Bern interrupted his wife long enough to say, “A hippie choked me? Geez, honey, that’s so crazy it’s funny. The guys at the Cadillac dealership are gonna laugh their tails off when they hear it. No…of course it didn’t happen. Augie wants my job, honey. The whole family knows…”

Bern held the phone away after that, preferring to listen to the ringing inside his own head as he slid the photo of the glamorous woman in front of him. After last night, he no longer had an interest in tracking down some old lady, no matter how good she looked umpteen years ago. He had more important things to do now. The most pressing: Figure out how to escape this nightmare if things began to unravel.

They were unraveling fast.

The photo, at least, gave him something to look at while Shirley yammered on and on. Stare at the beautiful woman’s picture too long, though, and something weird happened: the faces of the two dead girls were superimposed, one and then the other, beneath the glamorous, glossy hair and atop that pear-ripe body. Which got worse when the gorgeous woman’s face became his wife’s face…

Bern blinked and shook himself, then pushed the photo away. But the image lingered: his wife, Shirley, with her pudgy white cheeks, her mouth always moving, hair smelling of the beauty parlor where all her friends went—their church group, and her book club—always lots to gossip.

Which is why it had been heaven for him, moving to Florida and away from her—for the first few months, anyway. Whole different world than what he was used to.

His grandfather had entrusted him with a completely different sort of job.

Bern was suspicious then. Still was.

B ern had spent eleven years at Gimpel Cadillac, Madison, selling new and pre-owned vehicles, enjoying the long micro-brewery lunches, and shaking hands with adoring Packers fan buyers, saying things like, “No finer man ever lived than Mr. Vince Lombardi.” Or: “The quarterback position, which is probably the toughest job in all sports, I can sum up the definition in two words: Bart and Brett.” Or, if it was a guy buyer, his wife not around: “When they blocked that little Polack’s kick and I saw him pick up the ball? I thought, geez, he won’t even know which way to run. I was tempted to stick the guy under my arm and run her in myself!”

It was a fun job. Easy; something he was used to. But he didn’t enjoy going home to Shirley, with her perfume and sprayed hair, and a mouth that never stopped moving. His only escape was the occasional sales meeting in Green Bay, or Chicago, or Milwaukee, which was his favorite city because of the nice nudie bars where the girls were so normal acting, especially the one in the strip mall with the store that pretended to be a museum but actually sold retail. He’d bought the German Luger there, which worked like a real one but was made in Taiwan.

Bern had considered using the Luger last night to shoot the Cuban. Instead, Moe didn’t bat an eye when he’d asked, “Hey, Moe, do I remember you saying something about carrying a gun in your truck? If I keep my knee on this guy’s neck much longer, he’s not gonna be able to try and run again.”

Moe answered, “You betcha I got a gun. I know how to use it, too.” Then returned with a chrome .357 revolver in a fancy holster, which the Hoosier didn’t strap on but wanted to, Bern could tell by the way he kept straightening his cowboy hat.

The Cuban’s eyes got very wide when Moe pulled the revolver out to show what an expert he was with the thing. Cocking it and releasing the hammer, popping the cylinder to count the six pinky-sized hollow-point bullets inside. Acting like a gunfighter until the damn gun went off accidentally, the bullet passing so close to Bern’s ear that his legs buckled, certain he’d been shot through the head because of the ringing pain.

Fucking Moe. Who kept apologizing over and over, repeating the exact same thing because he was too stupid to realize that Bern was deaf, temporarily, and why he was squinting at the cowboy’s ugly, moving mouth, asking, “What?…What?…What?”

What a night.

Nightmare, more like it…

Wisconsin wasn’t so bad, all things considered. The boats up home were mostly aluminum, and the weather could be bad eight or nine months of the year. But he still got out. He’d had some fun on the road. Sometimes the girls wanted to, sometimes they didn’t—quite a few had done a little kicking and scratching, but nothing that had caused him to get carried away.

Not like Florida. Jesus. He regretted ever coming here.

Why had he?

It still didn’t make any sense what his grandfather did. Not to anyone. Grandy had shocked the whole family when he telephoned Bern out of the blue and offered him the CEO job, Indian Harbor, and two similar developments, one near Bradenton, the other near Marco. They hadn’t exchanged a word in years, even at the family reunion in Appleton. Everyone knew that Grandy and Bern hated each other. They still whispered about the unfortunate incident when Bern, age thirteen, got so angry at Grandy that he snuck up behind the old man and brained him with a hammer. Those two had been back and forth at each other’s throats ever since.

“It’s ’cause they’re two peas in a pod,” relatives would say.

Maybe so, but it still didn’t explain why the old man offered him the job at a salary three times what he was making at Gimpel’s, and a contractual guarantee that Bern would inherit fifty-one percent of all the Florida landholding company’s property and assets.

There were only two stipulations: Bern had to sign over all his personal assets to the company so that he had a vested interest.

“You’re going to inherit it all back, anyway,” his wife had told him after reading the contract. “That’s not a gamble, it’s a guarantee.”

The other stipulation was that he had to fulfill the obligations of his current position for at least two years after the old man’s death.

“That means showing up on time,” his wife said, her tone asking: How easy can it get? “Your developments don’t even have to make a profit. As long as the company remains solvent, we own half. It’s too good to pass up!

Exactly. Which was maybe what Grandy had in mind: luring Bern down here to a job that had come to seem more like the old bastard’s way of getting even.

No, it was worse than that. Coming to Florida was more like a curse.