Tampa Bay Noir

Tall, Dark, and Handsome by Ace Atkins

Westshore

Except for being really, really old, he was exactly what she’d wanted.

He was well dressed, navy suit with pressed white shirt, good teeth (that she hoped were real), and seemingly most of his own hair. They met, as had been arranged over e-mail, at the Hyatt on the Courtney Campbell Causeway. The restaurant was called Armani’s, and she knew it was nice because they expressly stated that they didn’t allow cutoff shorts and flip-flops. He ordered oysters Rockefeller. She ordered butternut squash soup. Her mother always told her not to eat too much on the first date or men might think you owe them something.

The view was amazing. Top floor of the hotel looking out at Tampa Bay, the sun going down across the water, streaks of black and gray against the orange sky. Real postcard stuff. The very reason she’d left Detroit, her third husband Frank, and a worthless job as a teller at Citizen’s Bank in Bloomfield Village. Only yesterday, she’d mailed a postcard to her friend Judy reading: You throw snowballs for me while I pick oranges for you. With love and kisses from Debbie Lyn.

“Really something, isn’t it?” he said. “Takes your breath away.”

“When I lived in Michigan, my tootsies would get so cold,” she responded. “I had to wear snow boots to work and then slip into my high heels. Every time I left the office, I had to change out my footwear. Ankle-deep in slush. That’s really no way to live.”

He smiled at her, all dark tan and silver hair, holding the gaze. “My God. You are simply the loveliest creature I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Oh, quit it.”

“No,” he said. “I mean it, Debbie Lyn. I think I mentioned to you that I used to work in the film business, and you have what they call a perfect face. Completely symmetrical. Wonderful blue eyes and the most interesting nose. They used to measure that stuff with rulers. Measure how far apart your eyes were. That’s why the old stars looked so grand.”

“I think my nose is too big.”

“Hogwash,” he said. “That’s what they said about Barbra Streisand and she’s done pretty well for herself with the Yentl and the Oscars and all that. I knew her in my other life.”

“You kind of look like her husband,” Debbie Lyn said. “James Brolin? The one who used to be on Hotel. And his son is that purple bad guy in those comic-book movies. My son just loves that stuff. All he does, reads comics and plays online games with his friends. Star Wars: Battlefront. Call of Duty.”

“How old is your son?”

“Twenty-five,” she said. “I really wish he’d meet a nice girl.”

“You never know when you’ll meet the right girl.”

“Stop it,” she said. “You are a charmer, aren’t you? Tell me what films you worked on.”

“Oh,” he replied with a flick of his wrist. “I was just a producer. Major League. Tremors 2. A little film called Tango & Cash. Remember Stallone and Kurt Russell driving that big monster truck? Spent most of my time arguing with the studio about the budget. You’ll never imagine what it costs to have a rat wrangler on set. One little nibble on Jack Palance’s pinky and you’re shut down for two whole days. For a tough guy, he could be so precious.”

He lifted his Rob Roy in a toast and she met him with her glass of rosé just as the sun hit the water, turning the darkness all gold and electric. Outside the windows, as he smiled at her, a slight wind kicked off the bay and rattled the palm trees. Debbie Lyn felt a little shiver at the base of her spine. This was it. This was actually happening. Tall, dark, handsome. Rich. All of it.

The waiter returned to bring another round. For the main course, she ordered the mushroom risotto, thinking, My God, what a wonder to be on an actual date. He had the bone-in veal chop with the cauliflower hash. The sun was gone now, and it had grown dark and calm across the water, a few pleasure boats heading back to the marina. Small white lights flickering across the countless piers. He kept on staring at her with a twinkle in his eye. She couldn’t help but notice the thick gold chain around his neck and some kind of old coin hanging from it. He fingered at it.

“A good luck charm,” he said.

“For what?”

“Finding the rest one day,” he said. “We were so incredibly close before the storm.”

She tilted her head, playing with the stemware. “What exactly is it that you do? I mean, now.”

“Oh,” he said, looking away, grinning. “A little of this. A little of that. I’m mainly retired. But certain interests and passions can draw me out. That’s what happened to my last relationship. I was told that I didn’t know how to relax, when to quit. Who wants to get old? Who wants to stop chasing their passions?”

Debbie Lyn beamed, wondering what scent he wore — sandalwood, bourbon, citrus, old suede. Over Christmas, she’d taken a job at the Art of Shaving at the International Plaza. She taught men how to apply the perfect mix of scent, rubbing it on their necks, chests, and even a dab behind their knees. Never overpowering. Find your signature scent, she’d told them. She looked across the white linen table as he continued to stare and smile, enjoying being with her, in her presence.

“Would it be too much, before our main courses have even arrived, to say I think I’m falling in love?”

He was playing with her. He had to be. Thirty minutes in and he was already in love? Either he was completely nuts or a hopeless romantic.

“Let’s see how you feel after the veal.”

“I’m even more in love on a full stomach.”

They’d just met and already she could see how that new life might work out. Out of that crummy apartment on Gandy Boulevard and away from living out of boxes, eating Jenny Craig frozen dinners while watching taped episodes of Days of Our Lives, telling her empty living room that dumb Eric better get his life together and realize that Jennifer was the best thing that ever walked into his young life. Her ex-husband calling over and over. Debbie Lyn, where the fuck did you put my chain saw and safety helmet? Talking to those teenage boys at the shave shop about making the proper strokes, them laughing as she walked away.

He reached for her hand and squeezed her fingers. “This is only the beginning. Today starts our adventure.”

Looking back at it, at that very moment, that man across from her looking so sharp and contrasted, white on navy linen, silver hair and gold coin, smelling of goddamn sandalwood, yep, in that moment, he would’ve been the very last person in the world she thought she’d shoot right dead center in the head.

But damn, thinking back on it now on her bunk at the Orient Road Jail, she was still sure of it. The son of a bitch had it coming.

“Why me?” Debbie Lyn had asked, lying there as uninhibited as a twenty-year-old and as naked as a newborn, except for a gold ankle bracelet, playing with his thick gray chest hair. “What was it about me? Surely you had plenty of women who responded to your profile?”

“Well, I have to admit it was your sense of humor.”

“My sense of humor? That’s funny. My last husband said I couldn’t be funny. That I’d never been funny a day in my life. He called me Debbie Downer all the time. Debbie Lyn Downer.”

“He was wrong. What was it you said to me? About being a sucker for a man and his boat, setting off on the seven seas?”

“I said I’ve always had a crush on Popeye,” she answered. “Which is true. Those big forearm muscles, the way he always looked out for Olive Oyl and Sweet Pea. It was cute. Real cute.”

“I can’t wait to show you my boat,” he said. “You will love it. Don’t bring a thing except for a bottle of champagne and your skimpiest bikini.”

“Bikini? How old do you think I am?”

“How old do you think I am?” he responded, setting his feet on the floor of his home on Bayshore Boulevard. Big Mediterranean Revival number, all stucco and barrel-tile roof. He said they’d used it as a set for some TV show back in the eighties about a nice family running a zoo. “Age is but a number.”

“I would never say.”

He winked at her, pulling a prescription bottle from his suit jacket and shaking loose a little blue pill. “Hold that thought. Let me grab a cool glass of water.”

He wandered off in the dark, tall, nearly six foot five, wiry and skinny with not much of an ass to speak of, sloped shoulders and randy as a sixteen-year-old. Debbie Lyn leaned back and stared at the ceiling and then all around the room.

There was only the bed and a folding chair, the kind you’d find in the basement of a church. Come to think about it, she didn’t recall seeing much at all as they’d gone inside last night, all kissing and hugging and dirty promises. There was a Jacuzzi, that much she was sure of, and a lot of laughter about the wild parrots in the trees and how one might come down to roost when he stood up — naked again — to refill their champagne. He’d played an old CD from her car in his little boom box — she had not seen one of those for a long, long time. “Red Red Wine.” UB40 from nearly forty years ago.

He walked back in, clapping his hands together, erect as a starter pistol. “Ready, freddy.”

“I can see that.”

“Let’s change up positions a bit,” he said. “We’ve already done one and two. But I sure like four and five. Maybe work our way up to a six if my back holds out.”

She looked up at him as she pulled open the sheet and again exposed herself, all the wrinkles, freckles, and sun damage, three children and twenty hard winters in Detroit. An ill-conceived rainbow tattoo on her hip bone from a girl’s weekend in Vegas. She was exposed. “I hate to ask,” she said. “Just what book are you following?”

“Does it matter?” he said, getting on his bony knees. “Just follow my lead.”

In the daylight, sun streaming into the big master bedroom, she started to wonder how a man so successful could’ve lost his wallet. The meal cost her $382 without tip. If this didn’t work out, she’d have to be dipping into her savings account.

“Ever watch a Western?” he asked. “Roy Rogers. Gene Autry. It’s just like that.”

“Who’s the cowboy and who’s the horse?”

“Giddyap,” he said, falling onto his back and reaching his long skinny arms up to her.

So it was now a week — or was it ten days? Either way they’d been together day and night, every damn day, since that first meal on the causeway. By now, the not-paying thing was starting to niggle at her. Now, she was looking down at the check at a Ruby Tuesdays on Dale Mabry Highway, not too far from the Best Buy and Home Depot. He’d had two margaritas and a fruit salad, talking about a meeting he had later in the day with investors for the sunken-treasure deal that he just knew was about to come in. He said he already had a house on standby in Key West, two boats and a helicopter. Just like that, talking about old days in the Keys with Tom McGuane and Jimmy Buffet, some kind of wife-swapping action with the woman who played Lois Lane.

“Isn’t she dead?” Debbie Lyn asked.

“Is she? I don’t know. We quit speaking some time ago.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

“And no word on the wallet?”

“Ah,” he said. “It won’t be long. I’m having new credit cards issued that should arrive today. This whole thing has been a misunderstanding. So embarrassing.”

“You knew Lois Lane?”

“We called her Marjie. She was a Libra. God. So much coke back then. Are you going to finish that?” He pointed to her half-eaten portion of blackened tilapia and wild rice. Her second day of calling in sick to work, nearly broke, and waiting for this mysterious cash to come in. It was so stupid. But still... maybe something.

“Tell me about this boat,” she said.

“It’s more than just a boat. It’s a galleon. Sunk off the coast of Islamorada. Have you ever heard of Mel Fisher?”

“No.”

“Really?” He stabbed the rest of the tilapia, looking less dapper than on their first meeting. Bright blue polo shirt with elastic-waist khaki shorts and blue Crocs! When she saw the Crocs she about died. Maybe he’s eccentric. Most rich people don’t care. They dress and live as they want to, her mother had always said. But he’s old. So damn old. Maybe his feet hurt. Fallen arches. Arthritic toes. Is there such a thing? But he’d held out in bed, making a go of it ten, twelve times with the help of his magic blue pill. Making that off-to-the-races horn sound in his clenched fist.

“Interesting,” he said, chewing. “This is so much better than Applebee’s.”

Most men didn’t give a second thought about shaving. They had their Barbasol, a disposable razor, and horrible hacking habits. Yes, she was supposed to say hacking at their face. Didn’t they know that shaving was a true art? That’s how she’d get them started, maybe a nice guy looking at a straight razor or fancy silver handle for a safety razor, wondering if he might like to upgrade. She was taught to talk to him about it, not sell him, only consult him on what he was doing now and if he might like to upgrade the process. What kind of facial hair do you keep? That being kind of a dumb question if the guy had a big brushy beard or a Tom Selleck mustache or something like that. But mainly she got younger dudes. Guys her age shaved like her dad did, to get clean, but these young guys had shitty little beards or constant scruff to make them look cool and edgy. What do you do to prepare your shave? You know, that’s the most important aspect of getting a close shave — clean your face, prepare your face. She might sell them on the less expensive products, see how interested they were in going all the way to a straight razor, brush, and shaving soap kit that retailed for nearly a hundred bucks.

Arranging a display of silver-tip brushes and mirrors, she turned right into the face of a husky dark woman. “He’s a fake,” the woman said, whispering to her. “A goddamn phony. You know this? Yes, you do. You are nothing but a meal thing to him. One of those things for a free meal.”

“A ticket?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “One of those.”

She was short and looked and sounded Latin American, with lots of frizzy hair and a wide backside, pointing her finger right at Debbie Lyn’s chest, speaking in a funny little accent that Debbie could never place — Cuban? Dominican? Guatemalan? The woman wore a flowing pink paisley shirt with a lot of silver rings and bracelets. She said her name was Delores. She was a good foot shorter than Debbie Lyn but weighed maybe twice as much. Not to judge...

“Delores,” Debbie Lyn said, “not here. I’ll meet you at the Starbucks in five minutes. Okay?”

“The Starbucks where I seen you with that rascal of a man, where he kiss your arms and your fingers?” she said. “He make me want to be sick. Make me want to shower myself.”

The Starbucks was nice, big, and open-air, a wide kiosk right by the Neiman Marcus, a marble staircase winding up to the second floor. A gaggle of teenage girls took selfies on the landing, wearing short-shorts and cropped tops, looking for a million views on wherever they posted pictures these days. Their clothes, their manners, all of it so silly and foreign. She would never, not in a million years.

“Okay,” Delores said, “don’t you tell me. I tell you.”

“About him?”

“Yes, about him. It’s all about him. It’s only ever about him. About him and the movies. All those big stars. Him and his big boats. His big cars. His cigars and money. Driving fast in the slow lane. All of it. He tell you about what he did with that man on television? That man from Australia with that knife? He say to me that he and that man were best friends. He say he come up with that line, about the knife. That no knife. This a knife. He say he the man who told that man and how that man go on to the Oscars. I should’ve known. I should’ve known.” The woman hit her own head with her hand. “Delores, what’d you do?”

“Then who is he?”

Delores shrugged and blew at her coffee, although it was mainly froth, nonfat, extra-foamy, vanilla cappuccino. That of course Debbie Lyn paid for, back two days and already an hour’s wage gone. But she was curious, so curious, with him lying on her couch when she left, forearm over his eyes from the seven-martini hangover. Ketel One, super dirty with extra olives. He called it a meal unto itself as if buying him seven goddamn martinis at Bar Louie would soften not having to buy dinner. Which she did anyway, drunk and stupid herself, opening up her safety Discover card for a Hawaiian hamburger and fries. He didn’t even offer her part of the burger, the man making friends with half the bar, most them calling him mister and sir, clapping him on the back and wishing him luck with the big treasure hunt. They were all pulling for him.

“I would like to know,” Delores said. “How about you?”

“What about me?”

“What he wants?”

“I have nothing.”

“Of course you do,” Delores said. “Or else he wouldn’t waste his time. Sniffing your behind. Who are you, Miss Debbie Lyn? What do you have that I don’t?”

“The house is being painted,” he said. “Tons of fumes, it will make you sick. I nearly passed out just leaving the place this morning.”

“Where’s your car?” Debbie Lyn asked.

“In the shop.”

“And what kind of car is it?”

“We’ve been through this,” he said, picking at his breakfast sandwich at Pass-a-Grille Beach, egg and cheese on a croissant with black coffee for $4.99. “I don’t want to brag. I’m driving the Aston Martin this week.”

“I thought it was a Rolls.” Debbie folded her arms over her chest, turning to watch a woman helping a small boy with a kite. It was February and warm, lots of blustery wind coming off the gulf.

He put down his breakfast sandwich on the Styrofoam plate and looked up. “I know what’s really going on here.”

Debbie Lyn turned back to face him, trying to gauge his expression, but his oversized Porsche sunglasses making it tough. He had on a Hawaiian shirt, sweatpants, and those goddamn Crocs.

“Delores found you.”

Debbie Lyn didn’t answer, turning back to the woman and the kid with the kite, the kid running like hell just as a blast of wind zipped that kite a hundred feet up in the air, the spool unwinding so fast, it burned his little hands. The woman picking it up as it skittered across the sand. This morning, she had seen on TV, Detroit got two feet of snow.

“I know you two have been communicating,” he said. “I saw it on your phone when I came over this morning.”

“That’s my own personal business.”

“It was on the counter. The message flashed on the screen. I can’t believe you’d listen to such trash.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be at your house?” she said. “Picking out window treatments?”

“The fumes are awful. Just terrible. I have the worst headache right now.”

“Sure,” Debbie Lyn. “Exactly. Perfect. Swell.”

He stood up and stretched, reaching down to touch his toes and then rotate back and forth with his lower back. She could hear his bones and cartilage pop, his smooth silver hair looking more white this morning, kicking up off his head like a rooster’s comb. “Did Delores tell you that she’s been institutionalized? Three times. Sad, really. The last time she believed she was José Martí, wanting to emancipate Cuba or some kind of nonsense. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry you’ve so quickly become tangled in my affairs. I wanted to help her. I really did. But she grew paranoid. Dangerous even. Cuban women are the worst.”

He began to unbutton his shirt, folding it neatly and placing it on the outdoor table near the beach café. A shapely young woman in her twenties wandered past them and began to shower the sand from her body. He watched her as she turned and lifted her feet, toweling off her little rump and heading off with a tote bag and straw hat in hand.

“Excuse me,” Debbie Lyn said.

“I’m sorry. She looks just like my first wife.”

“She could be your granddaughter.”

He smiled at her, making her feel like she was jealous, like she’d been out of line just asking him a few honest questions and then expecting him to listen instead of gawking at a twenty-year-old wearing dental floss.

“The thing I like about shelling,” he said, “is the exploration. The adventure. The discovery. You never know what you’ll find if you keep your eyes peeled. Some shells wash up completely intact. Others are nearly perfect but broken off at the edges.”

“That’s what you want to do?”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“Delores,” Debbie Lyn said. “She said you’re a fraud. That you’re broke.”

He reached out and offered his hand, the old gold coin swinging back and forth like a pendulum from his saggy neck. Debbie Lyn hadn’t moved from the seat, staring up at him and then the beach, the kid now in control of the kite, the woman pulling it in some, showing him how to walk backward to keep everything nice and balanced. Two steps. Two steps. Reel it in slow.

“How’s the shipwreck?” she said. Again, thinking of her mother. Nice girls don’t pry. They let men talk and they listen. Men like good listeners. They like to feel important.

“Just amazing,” he said. “Let’s walk and seek and I’ll tell you all about it. The story starts off at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The ship was heavy with gold, treasures from the New World, when it sailed from Havana. Dark skies on the horizon...”

Damn, she loved to hear him talk.

“According to him, it’s you who’s crazy,” Debbie Lyn said, not knowing who or what to believe now. After the beach, he’d taken her to another home he said he owned, this one in St. Pete along Sunset Drive. It had a long wrought-iron fence, lots of palm trees, and a lovely view of the water. He called it one of his properties. But like the one on Bayshore, this one seemed to be under construction too. Only letting her visit the kitchen, where he kept a small table, a few mismatched chairs. He reheated half of a Papa John’s pepperoni pizza with black olives and served her some white Zinfandel from a box.

“Me?” Delores said, standing by an aging Mercedes Coupe in a Bob Evans restaurant parking lot. “Me? Crazy? Sure, I’m the crazy one. Crazy for believing his bullshit all the time. Me who is crazy for buying this man clothes and dinner and the fancy cologne.”

Next door was some kind of sex shop, XTC Super Center, with a sign offering two-for-one on inflatables to Make the Bedroom Great Again. There were several cars parked outside but no one seemed to be coming or going from the front door.

“What kind?”

“I don’t know,” Delores said. “Some socks. Underwear. I can’t be so sure.”

“The cologne?”

“He call it sandalwood. He say he like it because it’s dry and manly. Like I think of him before he stole my money and my pride.”

“How did you know?” Debbie Lyn asked. “How did you know who he really was?”

Delores leaned against the trunk of her nifty little Mercedes, faded tan with a few rust blemishes. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her Chanel purse and lit one, blowing into the wind, nodding. “You sure you are ready?”

Debbie Lyn nodded.

“Come,” Delores said. “Get in the car with Delores and she show you where this old man come from. So much shame. It will only bring you shame. I’m so sorry for this. But you must know.”

The apartment was on the other side of the bay, in downtown Tampa, just off the Hillsborough River. A high-rise complex called Buena Vista Terrace, an institutional-looking building with small balconies overlooking the Crosstown Expressway and a parking lot. The place looked like it had been fancy-schmancy back in the day, with a dry fountain of a dolphin by the entrance and intricate terrazzo floor showing the settling of old Tampa.

“Third floor,” she said. “You will see. You will see who this man is all about. You meet his friend. The man he lived with. His name is Jack Russell, like the little dog. The man is older than dirt. But he remember things. His mind is sharp. He know. He know the kind of man we deal with here. This man. This man we think we love. Who we take to our beds. He stole this man’s microwave and the scrotum of a tiger.”

“Excuse me?”

“You will see,” Delores said, punching the button on the elevator. The elevator clanking and moving upward, Debbie Lyn having to hold onto its side. “Jack Russell collects such things. This man know it was valuable and he took them. The scrotum of the tiger was to keep tobacco. A pouch he got in the war. It was very special to him. It gave him strength, he say.”

Jack Russell was a chain-smoker in a wheelchair, oxygen tubes running up his nose, wearing a Vietnam veteran ball cap. He leaned sideways into his chair, scruffy and potbellied, as he looked Debbie Lyn up and down and said, “Yep, he’s a phony all right. Let me know if you find out what happened to my tobacco pouch. I carried that thing through the jungle. Brought me vigor and luck.”

“He lived here?” Debbie Lyn said. “With you?”

“We were roomies for two months,” Russell said, nodding over at Delores, who’d sunk into a La-Z-Boy, flipping through a Guns & Ammo. “Don’t be ashamed. He promised me all sorts of things too. Said that once that pirate ship, or whatever it is, paid out, he’d hire me to watch over all his vehicles. I could wax ’em from my chair. Said it would do him proud to put a disabled veteran to work. Saluted me and everything.”

“Could he be telling the truth?” Debbie Lyn said. “About some of it?”

“That man swore up and down he was a fighter pilot in the war. A goddamn Air Force colonel. But you ask him a few questions. About planes and such, and the son of a bitch didn’t know an F-4 from F Troop. Delores, you told her, right? About all those other women? The ones before you and after you? I don’t know how he does it. Is it the silver hair or is it the tan? If it’s the tan, someone please push me on out to the parking lot to get some sun.”

“It’s true,” Delores said, licking her thumb and flicking the page. Hand cannons, Smith & Wesson M19s, new Combat Magnums. “So many. He probably have that VD. He use his ding-dong like old men use metal detector on the beach. You know, beep-beep-beep. Sweep it left to right to look for silver?”

“Oh God,” Debbie Lyn said, laughing. “Oh God.”

“Say,” Russell looked her up and down again, “you got protection, right?”

She thought he was asking about prophylactics, but he wheeled over to his bed and pulled out a little black gun, so small it looked almost like a toy. He kept feeling under the bed until he got a magazine and slid it in place, grinning.

“You got to protect yourself, ma’am,” he said. “None of us know who this man is. What he does. One night, he said he was some kind of CIA assassin. Here, put this in your purse. Just promise me to get me that tiger pouch back. Bastard had no right.”

“I feel like a million bucks,” he said nearly a month later. A whole entire month of Debbie Lyn being quiet and polite, a good girl who didn’t ask questions and let the man do the deciding. She wanted to say something or do something, but she’d been having such a lovely time. They’d just gone to dinner, a nice little Vietnamese place off Treasure Island, and he’d spoken back and forth to the woman in French. Debbie Lyn was amazed, being reminded in some way of Miracle on 34th Street, Natalie Wood seeing that little Dutch girl singing “Sinterklaas,” feeling happy for the first time since losing her family in World War II. He’d been back to himself, clean shaven, non-Croc’d in knit shirt, khakis, and broken-in moccasins, smelling nice. He’d worn a Rolex. He’d opened the door for her. He’d even paid.

Holding her hand as they brought over the fried green-tea ice cream, he leaned in and kissed her cheek. She knew. She knew. But every night had been fun. Every night different. An adventure, as he had promised. She quit her job and moved into the old estate on Sunset Drive, sending her friend Judy more silly postcards from the beach. A bummy-looking man poking up from an ice hole near a sign that read, Thin Ice, beside a picture of a good-looking woman swimming at the beach, palm trees on shore. Her sign read: Pretty Nice... He still didn’t have a car. But she quit asking questions. He was on the phone constantly with the Keys. They had found something nearly a mile offshore. A candlestick. A gold bar. He said they had a big vacuum sucking up all that mucky sand until they hit pay dirt.

“How do you know French?”

“I lived in France some time ago,” he said. “Back then, I was in marketing. We handled business for Kellogg’s International. We did a lot of promotion for Frosted Flakes. I knew Tony the Tiger. The real Tony the Tiger. The original, Thurl Ravenscroft. Nobody could do a They’re great! like old Thurl. Wonderful, wonderful deep voice. He’s also the voice of Fritz at the Tiki Room at Disney. Did you know he was very religious? His lifelong dream was to record the entire Bible on tape. I’m talking the whole thing. Old and New Testament.”

They were back at the mansion on Sunset Drive, sitting in the Jacuzzi with the doors open. She’d bought some Korbel champagne at Walgreens and they drank it from a couple of plastic cups he kept in the empty cabinets.

“Who really owns this place?”

“Who do you think?” he said. “I know. I know. Delores filling your head with all that nonsense. I know it’s hard to believe, but I have had a pretty amazing life. I’ve worked in Hollywood and on Wall Street. I have been a millionaire but I also know what it’s like to be broke. I have traveled across this world and hope to again. And yes, Debbie Lyn, I am a risk-taker. A rascal. A rogue. A treasure hunter. Someone who looks tough and weathered on the outside, but inside I’m just a marshmallow. I’m not asking a thing from you but to trust me. Just like you see people do sometimes, those trust-fall thingies, where you close your eyes and fall backward. Why don’t we try and do that? Yes, let’s do that.”

“Fall backward in love?”

He laughed and laughed and reached for the champagne, filling it nearly to the top of his plastic cup with a University of Florida Gators logo. Chomp. Chomp. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. I guess I’m just like this old house. A real fixer-upper.”

The house was big and empty, with a few broken windows, but so many bedrooms and bathrooms, seeming like the kind of place an old movie star could live. She could make that work. The palm trees and the beach made the old stucco, the empty swimming pool, and all that just fine. She could be happy to sit up here on the second floor and drink cheap champagne and watch the fishing boats come and go, feel the wind on her face, smell the salt air. This was at least something. This was something to work with. Eating Suki Hana alone at the International Plaza was a torture she’d rather not endure.

He smiled at her and reached for his pill bottle. Downed a little blue one. “Tallyho.”

When the police came, the first time, she didn’t even know he was gone. She was asleep in the master bedroom, a brand-new Sealy Posturepedic king they bought on sale on the floor, a swirl of blankets and sheets. Two bottles of Korbel and an empty prescription container scattered nearby. The policewoman shined a flashlight into her eyes and asked her for some identification.

“Excuse me,” Debbie Lyn said, pushing herself up and covering her bare chest. “You can’t just come in here. Bust in the door and hassle people. Just what in the hell’s going on?”

The cop looked at her partner, a burly man, and didn’t say a word, just clicked off the flashlight, the room filled with early morning glow right before sunrise.

“The neighbors called about squatters,” she said. “You do know you can’t just break into any home in Florida and set up shop. Come on, lady. Get some clothes on. Get your stuff. Let’s go.”

“It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s his. This place is his home. He bought it at auction. We’re fixing it up.”

“And who exactly is he?” the cop asked.

Debbie Lyn looked up as the cop tapped the flashlight against her leg, the room filled with that bluish-gray predawn glow. Her head throbbing from the night before, more Hawaiian martinis at a tiki bar on Treasure Island. Him doing a silly little dance, forming a conga line with some bikers down from Mississippi. Debbie Lyn touched a Tiffany bracelet he’d given her and twirled it on her wrist. “I don’t really know,” she said. “My God. How stupid does that sound? I really have no idea.”

“I knew you would come to your sense,” Delores said, speeding across Tampa Bay on the Howard Frankland Bridge in her battered little coupe, Harry Connick Jr. coming through the speakers. “The Way You Look Tonight.” Rain pinging her windshield, her wipers tick-tocking.

“He left me there,” Debbie Lyn said. “I was arrested but they let me go. I told them everything I knew about him. I’m not sure they believed me. I think they thought I was nuts.”

“And he take your things?”

“Yes, he took my stuff. Boxes of my things. Some of my clothes. My television. He took my brand-new television. And my stereo and my CDs. My UB40. Meet Me in Margaritaville.”

“No one cares about CDs no more,” Delores said. “I play this man on my iPhone. This man, Harry Connick Jr., sing from his heart. He’s a real man. He know what it is like to love and feel. I see him on TV and he says such things.”

She pounded at her chest as she drove with her left hand, right wrist covered in an assortment of bracelets. Debbie Lyn felt at her wrist for the gift he’d given her. She pulled off the silver bracelet and held it up. “Do you recognize this?”

“Yes, yes,” Delores said, taking the exit downtown. “That’s mine. You keep it. It’s yours. You earn it. I tell you what we do. First we find him. And then we kill him. You okay with that? He take your TV, your music, personal soundtrack to your life, and my bracelet. That man, Jack Russell. He take his tobacco pouch made from the tiger’s privates. That’s what we do. We kill him and take his pouch. I make a coin purse out of it. Not for big change, no. But for nickels and dimes. Small things to buy Chiclets and gumballs. He small time. He nothing to me.”

“I couldn’t kill a man,” she said. “I couldn’t kill him.”

Delores shrugged, laughing but not with much humor, following Armenia toward Bayshore, past an old cigar factory and lots of restored bungalows and new trendy restaurants. She let down her window and lit up a cigarette. “You know where he go? He go where he always go. He go to that house where they make that TV show about a zoo. You see that zoo house where he feel safe and comfortable? Like an animal behind glass. That zoo house where he woo a woman, take her to bed for the first time. That man liking to do it in the Jacuzzi like a lizard, like a reptile at the Busch Garden.”

Debbie Lyn found him in back, skimming the pool naked, a hefty blond woman in a cheetah-print swimsuit sprawled out in a lounge chair. He had his little stereo with him, playing her CDs. “Red Red Wine,” just like from before. The woman passed out or asleep, gently snoring, not even lifting her head as Debbie Lyn came around back of the mansion. She had noticed a For Sale sign staked in the front lawn that she’d never seen before.

He stopped skimming and looked up. Son of a bitch. From the looks of it, he’d just taken the pill.

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, dropping the skimmer and raising his hands. Debbie Lyn marched right up to him, tearing off the bracelet and tossing it toward him. “So many leaves at this time of year. And I hate tan lines. It’s so much healthier for the skin, getting all that vitamin D.”

“And her?” Debbie Lyn jacked her thumb at the hefty blonde. “Who is she? Did you fall in love with her too? Did you ask that she join in your adventure? Is she going to help you roam the beach for surprises and dive for pirates’ treasure?”

“Where is Delores?” he said. “She put you up to all this. She filled your head with lies. Made you crazy. I told you that she’s not well.”

“She’s calling the police,” Debbie Lyn said. “They woke me up this morning. You asshole. You stole my fucking TV. And my music. It’s my personal soundtrack. Not yours.”

He stretched his hands out wide, looking in the harsh afternoon light like a tribal elder from a National Geographic film, all those folds and wrinkles like a hand-crafted wallet or a tobacco pouch.

“I was moving us,” he said. “Over here. It’s so much better over here. On this side of the bay. We can take long walks on Bayshore, gaze into God’s sunset. I just didn’t want to wake you this morning.”

The blond woman, about Debbie Lyn’s age or perhaps older, stirred, flipping over on her back and showing off the plunging neckline of the cheetah suit, a pair of ginormous breasts. “Honey?”

“And who is she? Or did she come with the property?”

“Nobody,” he said. “She was just helping me with a few items of business. Don’t let the nudity fool you. It’s all very European. Don’t let those Midwest morals your mother taught you cloud your mind.”

And at that very moment, Debbie Lyn did think about her mom, up in a nursing home in Hamtramck watching reruns of The Newlywed Game and Frank futzing around their old house, cursing her for stowing away his tools. And she thought about those high school boys laughing at her at International Plaza when they got her to talk about stroking it. She looked at him, standing there on the diving board, and thought, Gee, that old bastard could really use a shave. The white whiskers made him look crummy as hell. She fumbled around in the purse slung over her shoulder and found Jack Russell’s gun, closing one eye and aiming it right toward the right side of his face. You always started with the right, pulling your skin taut with the left hand, then started into a downward stroke. She would stroke that smile right off his face.

“Come on,” he said.

“No, no, no!” Delores called out behind her. “I was kidding! I kid. Come on. He no worth it.”

But he was so very worth it. He was worth every damn penny she’d spent on hamburgers and martinis and self-respect. Just a nick, just a quick shave. That would scare the living daylights right out of him. No more Debbie Lyn to woo and cajole and lie to, his penis erect and mocking like an angry finger pointed right at her.

Blam. Blam. One shot to the right cheek and another to the left.

And damn. She knew she’d screwed up when he toppled off the diving board, a dark-red period showing right between his eyes, his bony old body landing with a hard splash. Delores was screaming. The hefty blond woman was screaming. Debbie Lyn lowered the gun. She placed it in her purse.

She took a long, easy breath and smiled. Good. That was done. She’d done good, right?

Walking around to the other side of the pool, Debbie Lyn stopped the music and pulled out the CD. She placed it in the purse right next to the gun.

After all, it was hers.

The Midnight Preacher by Sarah Gerard

34th Street

The Victory Motors building was squat and run-down, some of the windows partially covered with thick Styrofoam panels painted electric blue, molding and crumbling. Others were covered in plywood or a crosshatched layer of plastic. A low overhang provided shade. Two long, narrow signs taped near the top of the windows read, IN HIS NAME, in a seventies color palette and retro computer font.

A sign on the door read, No Trespassing: Violators Will Be Shot, Survivors Will Be Shot Again. Another, illustrated with a human target, read, We Don’t Call 911.

I was looking for the Live Crusade, particularly for Buck Hill, who used to have his studio in the back office of Victory Motors. The televangelist had disappeared from the airwaves and Internet without a trace two days after the election of Donald Trump, a week prior. I’m a freelance writer, and had convinced the Tampa Bay Times to let me look into his disappearance.

A stack of printed-out articles and e-mails sat just inside the front window, with a Post-it on it that read, Trump stuff, file. The article on top was dated 2013, and attributed to “Capitalist Evangelist” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who had variously aligned himself with the Republican, Libertarian, and Tea Parties, and endorsed Trump in the 2016 presidential race. The front door was ajar.

At the sound of the bell, a tiny, frail-looking old man emerged from the back office. I assumed this was Clive Waters, owner of the car lot, whom I had read about in an old issue of the Times. Waters had donated the office space to Hill, explaining, “I like what he’s doing. One-third of the population is up at that hour anyway. Better they find Buck than temptation.”

There appeared to be no one else at Victory Motors that day, save for a longhaired cat, asleep on a rolling chair. I asked Waters if Buck was there. It took a moment for him to understand that I was talking about Hill.

“He hasn’t lived in St. Petersburg or had his office here in several years,” Waters said.

Indeed, there was no remnant of a production studio in sight. I informed him that Victory Motors was still listed as the Live Crusade headquarters.

“We collect Buck’s mail for him and send it down to Naples,” he said.

He looked at me suspiciously. I smiled to reassure him that, as an attractive young woman, I was no one to fear. Usually, a smile was enough to convince people to give me information. “Do you know why he stopped broadcasting?” I asked. I decided to follow this with, “Is he okay?”

Clive relaxed. “Maybe he’s getting ready to do something big.”

I looked around the Victory Motors office again. The state of disrepair suggested no one was doing business there anymore. I thanked Clive for his time and left, heat waves warping the asphalt back to my car, crosshairs at my back.

More interesting than where Buck Hill had disappeared to was why I wanted to know in the first place. I suppose I wanted to come face-to-face with hate.

In the days after Trump’s election, like many, I spiraled. I started drinking again after two years sober. I broke up with my boyfriend, whom I suspected of voting for the wrong side. I locked myself inside a room at the Gateway Motel, which advertised Jacuzzis and free adult movies. I refused to answer the phone. I called in sick to my part-time barista job, claiming I had the flu.

Whenever I made eye contact with someone on the street, I wondered whether they were responsible for the rise of evil. I ate pickled pigs feet from the gas station, figuring, If they want me to die, then I will. I derived a sick pleasure from imagining someone discovering my body. It rained for days. Thankfully, the Gateway had wireless Internet. I couldn’t tear myself away from the bad news.

I had never heard of Buck Hill until I saw his name on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. I had gone there trawling for hate groups I could infiltrate and explode from the inside; this delusion had become my lifeline. Live Crusade was listed among the sixty-three active hate groups in Florida. There was the Supreme White Alliance, the Daily Stormer, the Nation of Islam, and the New Black Panther Party. Then there was the Live Crusade, just a mile away from me, listed under “General Hate.” Buck’s anti-Muslim vitriol, racism, and homophobia had earned him the designation.

“It’s sad, it’s always sad when these things happen, whenever people have to die,” he said. I was meditating on my encounter with Clive by combing Buck’s old videos, which I had discovered on YouTube, looking for clues about his move down to Naples. He was a bloated white man broadcasting alone from a darkened room, his thinning, dyed-blond hair gelled into spikes, the camera tilted up at his face, illuminated blue as if from a laptop screen.

“But then you have to think, four thousand babies die every day in this country and nobody’s upset about that. Nobody is pro-choice. Don’t ever let anyone tell you they’re pro-choice. You’re either pro-life or you’re pro-death,” he said.

He leaned toward the camera and away from it, eyes darting wildly around the room. I wondered if he might be drunk, like I was.

“Don’t let them confuse you with this weasel language — call it what it is,” he said. “They’re baby killers.”

I’d had an abortion the year before. My boyfriend and I were stupid; I was stupid, taking my hormonal birth control pills when I happened to remember. I smirked at Buck and left him ranting in the background while I dove into the black hole of his web history. He had risen to prominence in the early days of the Internet with “the world’s first full-service Christian website.” At its height, he sent free Worship War newsletters out to more than two million readers each day. The newsletters, called “Battles,” were part Live Crusade news and part sermon. Some of the most popular of them were addressed to Osama Bin Laden, Ann Romney, and Oprah. Buck had called Oprah a “new-age witch” and “the most dangerous woman on the planet.” I appreciated his flair.

In 2012, he told his followers to write in Jesus on the presidential ticket. He equated a vote for Mitt Romney with a vote for Satan. I found this funny. It seemed no one was immune to his wrath. In 2010, he opened a “9/11 Christian Center” at Ground Zero in response to the construction of an Islamic community center nearby.

I was amazed that I had never heard of this asshole. He had been on the Howard Stern Show three times. He preferred to appear on secular media, he said — as an evangelist, he had been called to reach non-Christians with the Truth of God’s Word. It occurred to me that I was now a part of this secular audience. I opened another Magic Hat and looked at the clock. It was four in the morning.

At first, my interest in Buck was perverse: I enjoyed hating him. I scrolled through old news stories with a sense of awe — that someone who harbored such hatred could call himself Christian; that he had accrued such a following; that he had amassed such wealth as to now live in what I assumed was a shiny mansion down in Naples. Maybe I was jealous.

I lived alone in a motel on 34th Street, a segment of US-19, a large highway that ran the length of the state north to south. My neighbors were drug addicts and homeless families paying with vouchers. It was the most I could afford for now, living by myself as a newly single freelancer, if I wanted to have both car insurance and health insurance. There was no Medicaid extension in Florida and I couldn’t find a full-time job, despite having a master’s degree and plenty of student debt.

I was divorced and had sex outside of marriage. I fell somewhere between spiritual and atheist in terms of faith claim, and I voted Democratic and drank alcohol, so I was everything Buck Hill preached against, and he was everything I preached against.

And yet, even as I hated him, Buck was familiar. He was a midnight preacher of the kind selling plastic pouches of holy water on late-night television. I’d seen his like while channel surfing through my teenage insomnia. I would land on a broadcast that commanded me to surrender my immortal soul along with my allowance, and the rise and fall of the huckster’s voice would soothe me to sleep on the sofa. It reminded me of my childhood when the only thing to do on a Wednesday night was tag along to a friend’s Bible study. Buck was every pastor who had ever pulled me aside for asking questions, and the sound of the Christian radio station playing in my friend’s mom’s car on the way to school. Most preachers at least tried to disguise their hatred, though. Buck washed himself in it like the blood of the lamb.

He had been simulcasting daily on his website, YouTube, and the Walk TV until two days after Trump’s election. Now his only signs of life were the Battles he continued to post on his website each day, which I quickly figured out were reproductions of previous Battles. He posted links to the Battles on his Facebook page, which only had a few hundred followers, most of them over sixty; the response was quiet. The posts received a handful of likes. He implored his readers, whoever they were, to “give generously” and “cover the ministry’s past two months of shortfalls,” at $65,000 each. He begged for one “ram in the bush” to cough up the $35,000 he claimed to need immediately, before month’s end.

Given that he wasn’t broadcasting anywhere, I knew that whatever pennies he was collecting on Facebook weren’t covering operating expenses. I searched the open records of Pinellas and Collier counties and discovered that he was being evicted from his Naples mansion. The eviction notice was dated two days after the election — the day he’d stopped broadcasting. His rent had been $8,000 per month. He owed his landlord $64,000, the equivalent of eight months.

A notorious televangelist’s fall from grace. His pitiful attempt at scamming people. Whether anyone was falling for the lie at this point was unclear. If no one were falling for it — if he wasn’t bringing in any money from the Battles — there would be no reason for him to continue publishing them, unless it was for existential reasons.

“Our spiritual free fall would be less if God allowed Trump to become president over Clinton,” he said in his last broadcast. I was eating my dinner from the gas station, watching the recording on my laptop. My dinner included beef jerky and a single-serving Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. I made a tiny Ritz cracker — and — yellow cheese sandwich, and ate it with a mealy apple slice. Despite my greasy appearance, I was feeling gleeful. I had found someone worse off than I was, and more evil, and I was going to publicly shame him. “And that’s what happened,” Buck said. “The wrath and judgment is still coming, but I do believe it gives us a little bit of a reprieve.”

His eyes cast wildly about the small room. Behind him, cheap-looking gold curtains hung pleated from a tall window. He talked in circles and sniffled, rocking back and forth. I simply needed to uncover the reasons for his downfall. He wore a plaid shirt open at the collar. He strained to fit the election results into the tiny framework of his limited belief system, grasping for any justification he could find.

He based his “final conclusion” on Trump’s clean slate of a voting record and his recent reversals on the topics of gay marriage and abortion. He acknowledged that many believers considered Trump to be morally bankrupt, but explained that because Trump was in the entertainment industry, like God, we shouldn’t seek to understand why he does what he does.

In the end, neither candidate could alter the “spiritual course” of this nation, he concluded — and though in the end, “Trump might be just as bad” as Hillary, “at least he might not be.”

I called the number hovering at the bottom of the screen. Someone answered, then immediately hung up. I called back and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on a folding chair chained to a dead planter. The rain had finally stopped and the air was now thick with foggy exhaust. The sky was a flaming sunset. Next door, a skinny girl leaned against a doorframe. The call went straight to voice mail. I left a message: “Hi... Buck? My name is Andrea Noble, I write for the Tampa Bay Times...”

My phone vibrated against my ear. I glanced at the screen. What is it that u need? it said. The sender had signed the text, BH.

I hung up the phone. Thanks for responding, I typed. I’m wondering when Live Crusade will be back on the air.

Hopefully back on tv in Sept... thnx, he responded.

Did you stop broadcasting because you’re working on a new project? Clive said you had outgrown Victory Motors.

Who is this?

The skinny girl greeted a ragged biker in a leather vest. The vest had a Confederate flag on it. He asked her something and she shook her head and looked away.

Andrea Noble. I’m a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, I said. I’m wondering if you can tell me what motivated your move down to Naples.

Email me so I have ur info, he said. Will get back to u later in the week.

The biker walked across the parking lot to the milky check-in window. The office didn’t have a door on it, just the window, and someone saw you there or they didn’t, and if they didn’t, then you waited. There was no bell. The bell would ring all night if there were one. The illuminated Gateway Motel sign flickered like a moth against a lightbulb.

I asked Buck if he would be open to talking on the phone. It may be faster, save you some time.

Email me so I can work it into my daily schedule, he said. He added, Thnx.

I knew this would be the last I heard from him. I’d e-mail him and he’d never respond — he was ghosting me; it had happened to me dozens of times. He was hiding something.

So I said, God bless.

Buck had given his life to Christ while he was in prison, serving thirty months for insider trading. He’d been raised Methodist, and had planned to be a minister. Then in college, he had answered an ad seeking PC salesmen, and soon after got into selling fax machines, then got into investment banking. He spent eleven years running from God.

“Lying on my prison cot, I thought about my wife, Mi-Seon,” he told Bay News 9. I was making my way through the videos posted on his YouTube channel. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d stepped outside the Gateway and every flat surface in my room was now populated with beer bottles stuffed with cigarette butts. Bags had appeared beneath my eyes, but it didn’t matter since no one was looking at me, and I also wasn’t looking at myself.

“We’d been married seven years and I hadn’t been a good husband,” Buck said. “She had every reason to leave me, and yet, that morning, she had vowed to stand by me. If my wife of flesh and blood could love another person to that degree, how much more must God love me?”

I had e-mailed my editor that morning with an update. My hypothesis is that Buck’s recent troubles stem from an illness brought on by his daily consumption of wrath, I said. I think I can have this story to you by the end of November. There are questions I still need to answer.

Send when you can, he responded.

I knew he didn’t care. I was not a priority — the paper was buried under postelection news. No doubt he’d forgotten about this quirky editorial. I couldn’t even imagine which section he would put it in. Metro?

I was a shitty journalist, and this couldn’t be argued. The drinking didn’t help. I hoped there was a story in Buck, but I hadn’t yet found it, and I couldn’t be trusted with anything breaking.

After leaving prison, he’d earned his ministerial degree and had hit the road as an itinerant preacher, then accepted an invitation to produce Christian television in Florida. Neither was satisfying. Everyone he ministered to was already saved, and as an evangelist, he needed to reach souls in jeopardy.

In 1999, he launched LiveCrusade.com, the first place where people could go seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day for prayer. He answered prayer requests live on the air, broadcasting from midnight until two a.m. Within a year, seven hundred volunteer pastors around the country were responding to forty thousand LiveCrusade.com prayer-request e-mails daily. Within three years, Buck had secured a time slot on secular television. Though Live Crusade with Buck Hill reached national and international audiences for limited periods, his greatest impact was in regional networks throughout Florida.

He appeared on air in a suit and tie. His hair was cut and styled, bleached blond. He was charismatic, seated before a serious-looking bookcase, preaching on everything from divorce to gluttony.

Even back then, his sermons skewed political. He took particular aim at “baby killing” and “the radical homosexual agenda.” After five years, networks pulled Hill’s show under pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Among other things, he had called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of Hell,” and called the Prophet Mohammed a “murdering pedophile.” The Koran was a “book of fables and a book of lies.”

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State petitioned to have Live Crusade’s tax-exempt status revoked. “I have every right to educate people on spiritual matters and deal with the pressing spiritual issues of our day, even those that transcend into the political arena,” Hill told the New York Times, which broke the story. “Unlike many Christian leaders, I have never and never will endorse any candidate for public office. I have never told people who to vote for or who not to vote for.”

The IRS launched an investigation into the Live Crusade ministry that lasted for nine years. This past March, Buck and his lawyer finally reached a settlement. I spent a day at the courthouse, wading through the filings. He owed $10 million in unpaid taxes. He owed $100,000 to American Express.

“He was very theatrical,” said Shelly Zeno, his former publicist. I had found her on Facebook, living in Sarasota. To my amazement, she posted her phone number on her profile. It sounded like she answered the phone in her car. She invited me to come down to the lot where she was now selling Aston Martins. We borrowed a Vanquish Volante and followed the bay. She rolled the top down. Chrome clouds gathered over the water. She was a fast talker, peroxide blond, with oversized lips and enormous knockers. She had represented some of the biggest names in Christian media, including Buck’s archnemesis, “prosperity pimp” Joel Osteen. I hoped she would give me some dirt on Buck’s spending habits.

“I worked pro bono for him,” she told me. “He never had the money to pay me. He wrote his own copy, and I just sent it to editors. I didn’t always agree with what he had to say, but he was good at attracting attention. I liked his spirit. There was a time when he felt everything he was saying and doing was coming from a very deep conviction.”

“You believe that?”

“Absolutely.”

We pulled up to a streetlight and she smiled at the car next to us. Two men leered back. I could tell my plastic Walgreens sunglasses next to her Ferragamo’s didn’t make sense to them, much like her story about Buck’s finances didn’t make sense. Did she think I hadn’t done my research? That I didn’t know about his Naples mansion or his trouble with the IRS?

“If he didn’t have the money to pay you, what happened to his donations?” I said.

“What donations?” she laughed.

“You’re saying he never got any?”

“Not that I know of.”

I’d read somewhere that he refused to sell trinkets on the air. “The Bible says the Gospel should be free,” he’d said. But then, he also ran a “Souls of Gold” mail-in jewelry campaign offering only receipts and prayers in return for your family heirlooms. And the Ezekiel Project: a paid membership that offered prayers in return for the membership fee. Members of the Ezekiel Project were expected to sign up other members who were “committed to the Truth,” like a holy pyramid scheme. Where did that money go?

“I looked him up about a year ago,” Shelly said. “It made me sad. I could tell he wasn’t doing well, that something had happened to him.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I couldn’t tell you. His website was rolling out old information. His appearance concerned me. It looked like he was in a dark, tattered room with the drapes pulled. It was just so not Buck.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“I considered it, but I was afraid he would ask me for help.” She wasn’t doing Christian PR anymore — she refused. “You can’t pay me to walk into a church now. By the time I left PR, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything except making rich Christians richer.”

I was driving on the Tamiami Trail when Buck called me back. I had been persistent in trying to get him on the phone since leaving St. Petersburg, wanting to make a plan to meet him in person. In my voice mails, I had expressed my concern for the future of Live Crusade given his recent troubles with the IRS. I was careful not to give him further reason to avoid me. I pulled out my recorder and steered with my elbows, praying that my car wouldn’t veer off the road, since I didn’t have the money to get it serviced, and hadn’t in over a year.

“We’ve been jammed with so much, trying to get our TV show back on the air,” Buck apologized. “I’ve just been so slammed with so many things.”

I said it was no problem. The sun streaked past my passenger window. “What do you have to do to get your show back on the air?” I said. I figured entertaining his fantasy was the best way to ingratiate myself.

“Oh, just... when you’re working with twenty-five syndicators, it’s a daily grind to get everything set up,” he said.

“That’s a lot of syndicators. Can you name some of them?”

“We’re going into eighty-some-odd markets,” he said. “But I’ll, uh, fill you in on everything. Just let me get through December and I’ll talk to you, okay?”

“You know, I talked to Jim West from the Walk TV,” I lied. “He said he would be happy to have you back on the network, but that you owe them money, and would have to negotiate a new contract.”

“We’re dealing with another syndicator,” said Buck. “One of the major networks.”

“I thought there were twenty-five syndicators? Is there only one? Which one are you working with?”

“I’ll talk to you about it in January, hon. Everything will be up and running by then.”

“You know, I talked to your landlord, Carol, too. I know that you’re in the middle of eviction proceedings, so I’m wondering what’s going on with that.”

“I’ll talk to you in January.”

“You owe her about the same amount that you’re asking for in the Battles — $64,000. You’re asking for $65,000 in the Battles. Is that related?”

He hung up.

I knew from Google Maps that his mansion sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a double-gated golf course community. I parked across the street from the entrance and leaned on the hood of my car. There was no way I could drive up to it; I would have to sneak in. Given that Buck was dodging me again, showing up at his door now could seem like escalation, a threat. I decided to get a room and regroup. I expected him to e-mail me that night, anyway, since I had baited him. The truth was, his landlord had refused to speak with me. I wasn’t surprised; I knew from social media that she was a Trump supporter. When I’d asked her whether she believed in Hill’s work, whether she and Buck had a “personal friendship,” she’d said it was none of my business.

No official motion had been made on his eviction in several days. This led me to believe that she didn’t really want him out; she just wanted her money. Maybe she believed his lies about syndication. Maybe she agreed with his views on Muslims, Oprah, abortion, and salvation.

Some part of me was beginning to sympathize with Buck. I could almost ignore his hateful messaging and see him for who he was: an insolvent, weak, lonely has-been. I related to his moral certitude, but tendency to violate his own moral code. I related to his failure, but determination to keep trying against all odds. I almost, in spite of myself, felt like reaching out to him and saying, Here, let me help you be less of a fuck-up. Then again, he might not have wanted my help. Maybe he believed himself a martyr.

I checked into the Sunrise Motel, advertising fifty cable channels, a mini fridge, and low rates. A wreath of dead leaves hung above the bulletproof glass of the check-in window, beside an American flag. Next door was a liquor store that I planned to hit up as soon as I changed out of my dirty clothes. My car was one of two in the lot. The other was missing a back window. I needed a nap.

The walls of the room were concrete blocks, painted white and unadorned. The bedspread was the color of red tide. I was checking the mattress for bedbugs when Buck’s first e-mail came in. I scrolled until I reached it — he had not waited for me to respond before sending others, each spiraling deeper. Who are you? he demanded. First... I am NOT being evicted. Second... why would you be calling my landlord? Wht is your real goal? Issue?.. If we are to move forward??

His messages were riddled with snark and jabs at my intelligence, and sarcastic turns of phrase: FYI, LOL, Obviously you are very ingenious.

Outside, the sun was setting fast over a blighted intersection crawling with souls of little faith. I decided to hold off reading any more of Buck’s e-mails until he was done being mad at me, but my phone kept vibrating in my pocket, and each time I felt it, my pulse quickened. I hated when people were mad at me, even people I hated. I asked the liquor store clerk where the Scotch was, and opened my phone in the back corner. Interesting, Buck said. Spoke to Mi-Seon?.. Spoke to Shelly?.. Mike? Key $ man David?

I took note of these names.

He insisted that the Live Crusade’s monthly operating budget for the last nine years had been $65,000, that the bulk was balled bandwidth — though it was obvious to me, and anyone taking even a cursory look, that he was using no bandwidth.

I paid for my Dewar’s and carried it out in a paper bag. Back in the room, I brought it to the bathtub, where the squawk of Trump’s voice penetrated the wall from the next unit. A murderous fantasy overtook me and I thought about my ex-boyfriend, how proud of himself he must be now, seeing that horny toad’s face every day. I hadn’t even told him about my abortion. I’d paid for it with my own credit card and had lied about leaving town for two days to report on a story. “I’m a feminist,” he had told me. “I just think that a man should have some say, if he’s the father.”

I smiled imagining telling him now, imagining stabbing Trump in the face and, as he died, holding up a picture of the thirteen-year-old he’d raped, tossing money at him for an abortion as I was leaving.

Buck was still e-mailing me.

...btw... throw Hinn... Jakes... and the rest of the prosperity pimps on Christian TV with Osteen, he said. I would never worry about money again if I took their path to preaching/fleecing the choir...

Poor baby.

I actually live and believe all I teach... and one day... like each one... will stand before God..

Then, to my surprise, he said, Chat with you in Jan...

I went back to Buck’s Facebook. The sun had set and the Sunrise was filling up, all of the windows coming alive. Next door, someone was getting fucked or murdered. I turned up the TV. Buck and I had a friend in common: the mother of a person I’d dated briefly in high school. The family identified as Messianic Jews, or “Jews for Jesus”: ethnically Jewish, but evangelically Christian. This manifested in curious ways. One day, my boyfriend built a didgeridoo out of some old PVC pipe. He was playing it in the kitchen and his mom came to listen.

“After a while, it kind of puts you into a trance,” said my boyfriend.

“Then you have to stop,” said his mother. Her expression was fearful. “That’s how the devil gets in.”

Two years after we broke up, when my ex was seventeen, he married a fifteen-year-old girl from the next street over. Twelve years later, they were divorced with five children. His social media was now a scrolling advertisement for misogyny. Ladies, this is how you take care of your man! Another woman coming at me!

I often wondered why I was still virtually connected with him. Maybe I recognized his rage as suffering. I suspected the problem was an undiagnosed illness, though that seemed insulting to people with illnesses, and could be letting him off too easily. I knew via rumor that his ex had taken out an injunction for protection against him after he’d tried to strangle her in the shower. Afterward, he got another girl pregnant and beat her into having a miscarriage.

Now he lived with his mother. I unfriended him and messaged her to ask about Buck. I wondered whether she knew him personally or just followed his ministry.

I used to call his program for prayer in the late nineties, she responded. She asked me why I wanted to know, and I explained that I was thinking of writing a story about him. I asked her if she’d noticed that he was no longer broadcasting. She hadn’t thought about him in years, she admitted.

But listen, Andrea, I hope you’re doing an exposé that’s compassionate, trying to find the answers, she said. What could have contributed to this great man’s fall? What were the factors? And you know what? He may tell you. If you say, “Listen, I really want to paint a vivid portrait of what can happen, and the pressures, and what led you to these decisions,” he might tell you.

The mansion was peaches-and-cream, bordering a golf course. In September, Hurricane Hermine had knocked the pool enclosure down, and it had yet to be repaired, so it sat crumpled in a heap on the deck furniture. A cluster of potted plants waited at the edge of the driveway beside bags of potting soil and an ash-gray Toyota Camry. The front door was open. I knocked on the screen. Mi-Seon appeared in a nightgown. She was a petite Korean woman with a kind, open face. She made no move to open the screen while we talked, so we spoke through it. She was convinced at first that someone had put me up to writing the story, and demanded to know who had tipped me off. I assured her that I was writing it as a matter of personal interest. She told me she didn’t want to talk about Buck. “If I talk about Buck, I have to talk about myself,” she told me. “And I don’t want people to call me up and ask me about it.” She told me they’d divorced. He was no longer living there. She’d been living on Buck’s alimony payments, which he’d stopped sending. She didn’t know where he was. “Nothing good can come of this,” she said. “I know it’s public record, but it’s personal.”

“Buck is a public figure,” I said.

“He’s been through enough.” She smiled at me. I saw she was crying. I wondered about his new wife, if he had one — I suspected she would be the blonde I’d seen in the Souls of Gold infomercial. In it, she was dropping her old jewelry with French-tipped nails into a padded envelope, and walking it out to the mailbox behind me, at the end of the driveway.

“Do you think Buck has been persecuted unfairly for his beliefs?” I said.

“Well, he would say things, and people would get offended, but it’s just his opinion.” Mi-Seon told me again that she didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’re not Christian, you’re against Christians.” She began to shut the door.

“Wait, Mi-Seon...” I’d been attempting to make contact with her for days. She wasn’t listed publicly and wasn’t on social media. She no longer used e-mail. I told her that I had recently been attending church. “First Methodist, in Largo.” This was a lie but it worked.

She cracked the door. She told me that life with Buck had led her to want to “cocoon.” Pressure in the televangelism industry to maintain a facade had become exhausting. “People say they’re your friends and then they turn around and they’re not your friends,” she said. She was a private person. The screen door didn’t have a knob on it, I now noticed. I asked her if she found it hard to live in the public eye, given how opinionated Buck is.

“No, it’s not that. I don’t trust secular media. Buck paid a lot of money to the secular media and then they kicked him off. And you journalists pad the story, make it more dramatic, fictitious.”

I reminded her that she didn’t know what I would be writing.

“You print lies.”

“The Tampa Bay Times has fact-checkers.”

“I don’t like the Tampa Bay Times,” she said.

“Buck used secular media to reach nonbelievers.”

“That’s what got him into trouble. He made mistakes.”

“What mistakes?”

“With money. And in his personal life,” she said. They had separated a year into his investigation by the IRS. They’d been married twenty-six years. “He wasn’t praying about it.”

“How did you meet?” I asked, knowing my time was running short.

Mi-Seon smiled. She opened the door wider and stepped toward the screen. “He saw me at the mall. He approached me and spoke to me in Korean. Then he wrote my name.”

“How did he know it?”

“He’d followed me.”

I can’t say I was surprised to see an Aston Martin parked at the Gateway Motel when I got home. The clouds had lifted, revealing a silver sun, and Buck sat in the folding chair outside my room with his hands in his coat pockets. I wondered which hand had the gun in it.

His red-ringed eyes were drunk and crying. I walked to the check-in window, though it was abandoned, pretending I didn’t see him. I dropped my night’s pay into the rusting mailbox. The skinny girl came around the corner, her face bruised. I asked her how long Buck had been there.

“All day,” she said. “He rented the room next to yours.”

“Did he say what he wants?”

“He asked me if I was a hooker.”

I took out my recorder and turned it on, then tucked it into my pocket and thanked her. If he shot me, at least there would be a record of who had done it. He followed me with his eyes as I crossed the lot back toward him. He sat forward on the chair, a mordant smile on his face, then he rose and came into my room behind me without saying a word. I closed the door.

We sat at the particleboard table across from each other. I placed an ashtray between us. He reached into his coat pocket and my heart lit up, expecting to see a gun, but he pulled out a flask and offered it to me.

“No thanks,” I said, “I’m working.”

He shrugged. “The IRS will never see a dime due to the fact that I have nothing,” he told me. He pulled at the flask. “The investigation into Live Crusade was started by Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit. Heard of her? In 2013, she was investigated for unfair probing of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The IRS knew they would never see a dime. They knew the settlement would never be collected. They just wanted to ruin me. They pick and choose targets based on their own biases.”

His face became red. I thought he would cry, but he didn’t. He closed his eyes, as if praying. I looked away, embarrassed.

“Are you asking me to feel bad for you?” I said. “Because I don’t.”

“No, I’m asking you to leave me with some dignity.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I have a gun.”

He opened his eyes. My gut turned to liquid. I reached up and pulled back the curtains next to us. The window looked out on the parking lot. I made eye contact with the skinny girl. She nodded.

“You also have a luxury car,” I said.

“Don’t be an idiot. I’ve had that car for six years.”

“And?” I lit a cigarette. I ashed in the tray, blowing my smoke in his face. I didn’t believe he had a gun. I chose not to, or was unable.

He cocked it beneath the table. I felt it pointed at my uterus. His forehead was wet with sweat. He got off on his power. “The Times isn’t paying you enough to risk your life,” he said.

He was right about that. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils. The crack rang in my ears. The wall’s plaster crumbled into my lap, and I laughed, but the laughter was my overwhelming sadness and fear.

“You’re living in it now, aren’t you?” I said, meaning the car.

But he was already gone, leaving the door open.

Jackknife by Danny López

Gibsonton

I finished packing my overnight bag and was about to head to the shelter when my phone buzzed.

“Wes?”

I hadn’t heard Lisa Moon’s perilous voice in over a year. Now she breathed deep into the speaker. “I need your help.”

“Really, my help?”

“Please...”

I tightened my grip on the phone and fought the impulse to throw it against the wall, smash it to pieces like she’d done with our relationship, or whatever you call what we once had. But I was soft — a sucker. She had me wrapped around her finger. She knew it. I knew it.

“I’m sorry,” she went on real slow. “I... I didn’t know who else to call.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need a ride,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Jack’s place in Gibsonton.”

Gibsonton. It wasn’t even a real town, just a few blocks of old houses and single-wide trailers that had seen better days. A depressing Florida suburb once favored by circus folk and carnies.

I held the phone away from my face, paced around the living room of my run-down Seminole Heights apartment. I could still hear the sound of the door slamming as she walked out of my life, the chain of the lock swinging, clacking against the dead bolt like a clock.

“Wesley?”

“There’s a hurricane—”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry... but I need help.”

“What about Jack?”

“That’s what I need help with.”

“Jesus, Lisa.”

“Wes...”

“This isn’t a good time.”

“Just say no, then. You can do that, you know?”

No. She knew I couldn’t. So I took down the address. Just before I shut off the TV and walked out the door, the weatherman pointed to the image of the perfect round eye of the storm. Hurricane Lloyd was now a category four with sustained winds of 135 miles an hour. The shiny, well-groomed weatherman warned everyone to evacuate the barrier islands from Longboat Key to Cedar Key and seek shelter immediately from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs.

Gibsonton was right smack in the center of the cone.

I met Lisa Moon at the Mons Venus during one of my first gigs as a PI after I’d been forced into retirement from the Tampa Police Department. The Internal Affairs investigation into the shooting death of a well-known drug dealer destroyed my law enforcement career. I was canned for doing my job. About half a dozen of us responded to a call of suspicious activity that was soon upgraded to shots fired in Ybor City. Two suspects were dead. Turned out neither one of the victims had a weapon. The investigation found we followed proper protocol, but three of us got terminated because heads had to roll.

I started doing work for a bail bondsman I knew who did a little side investigation work for select clients. That’s how I ended up following this sleazeball who’d taken out a second mortgage on his nice home in Bayshore Gardens and was using the cash to live it up while his wife stayed home with the kids. Every few days he’d hit the Mons and throw money at the strippers. He got lap dances, and on a number of occasions took one of his favorite girls to the Seminole Hard Rock Casino for a night of gambling and debauchery.

I sat away from the action at the Mons and observed. I took notes, some photos, maybe a little video for evidence. And every time it was Lisa Moon in her skimpy waitress outfit who came to take my drink order.

“Just soda water.”

“For real?”

“Yeah,” I said, “you have soda water, don’t you?”

She shrugged and wrote the order down on her pad. “You on the wagon?”

“Does it matter?”

“You a cop?”

“What makes you think that?”

She gave me that little sideways smile. “I dunno. The Dockers, the shoes. You got the look.”

“The look, huh?”

“You come in here a couple times a week and sit in the back, drink soda water, and never get a dance. What gives?”

“Nothing gives,” I said. “You getting me my water or do I have to go to the bar and get it myself?”

I took my overnight bag. Hurricane Lloyd was less than a couple hours away. We were already getting occasional feeder bands. If rescuing Lisa Moon took too long, I’d have to find a shelter down in Gibsonton.

Traffic was hell. Every gas station had lines of cars that snaked out onto the street. I-75 was bumper-to-bumper heading north, but the southbound lane was deserted. I was the only crazy headed into the storm.

On my last visit to the Mons, my subject didn’t leave until closing. When I walked out, Lisa was standing outside smoking a cigarette. She tossed the butt in the air and it flew across my path like a falling star, stopped me in my tracks.

“So where to next?” she said.

I had to smile ’cause she was too cool, wearing a pair of black leggings, combat boots, and a gray tank top. She looked totally different than the waitress I’d come to know at the Mons.

“Sleep,” I said.

“What about the dude you’re shadowing?”

“What about him?”

“You gonna follow him or what?”

“Nope. But when that son of a bitch wakes up in the morning, he’s going to be looking at divorce papers.”

“So, mission accomplished?”

I nodded.

“Right on. We should celebrate.”

I looked behind me at the Mons. “Bar’s closed.”

She nodded to the side. “How about breakfast? My treat.”

We walked to the Denny’s down the block and took a booth at the very back. She had French toast and coffee. I had the All-American Slam. She talked. I listened. I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep or that the last few months of surveillance work had destroyed whatever little social life I had, but that morning, as dawn turned the windowpanes a sad gray, I was captured by her bright-blue eyes.

Lisa told me she grew up in a small town outside Augusta. She dropped out of high school and escaped to Miami, where she found a job booking cruises for some online discount outfit.

“It wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it was gonna be,” she said as she drowned her toast in syrup. “I wanted to travel, so I stuck with it for a couple years. The dude I was living with at the time managed a club on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach. One day he tells me he’s been offered a job running the London Victory in Tampa, so he splits. I followed only to find out his move had nothing to do with work. He was chasing some Cuban bitch with huge knockers.”

“What’d you do?”

“I kicked his ass,” she said all casual, “and moved to St. Pete and got a job at one of those trendy restaurants on Beach Drive. Three years and five jobs later, I ended up at the Mons Venus. I should’ve gone there from the start. Place is a gold mine.” She stopped talking and eyed my plate. “You gonna eat that last piece of bacon?”

As predicted, we went back to my place.

The address Lisa had given me led me to the Fairfax — a trailer park across Riverview Drive from the VFW. The place was like a junkyard of eight or nine single wides in various stages of disrepair. My first thought was that I was in the wrong place. I couldn’t see Lisa living in this filth. I couldn’t see anyone living here. But still, I parked between a rusted orange trailer with a Confederate flag on the window and a dirty single wide whose roof was half covered with a blue-vinyl tarp and old tires.

I barely knocked when the door flew open. It took me a moment to realize it was Lisa — my Lisa. She had her long dark hair up in a messy bun, wore cutoff jean shorts and a pink T-shirt. But it was her eyes that struck me. They were big and jittery. She was scared.

“Wes!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside, saw the scar on my thumb. I pulled my hand away quickly. She looked to the side and back at me like she was waiting for something — or someone. Still, it felt good to be close to her again, taking in the sweet flowery smell of her perfume. I could’ve stood there for hours, but there was a hurricane coming.

“We should get going,” I said.

“What?”

“The storm.”

“Wes...”

“What happened to you?” It escaped me like a prayer. This was her life, where she lived — the nasty yellow shag carpet and the warping dark-wood paneling, the stink like burned Spam and cigarette smoke.

The Lisa Moon I’d known was tough. She dressed like Joan Jett and lived in a nice studio apartment in Palma Ceia and drove a bloodred Miata. She had it together like no one I knew. She was always in control. That had been our problem. We were two headstrong lovers with trust issues. Protecting our own feelings came first.

Now here she was, living like trailer trash — and in Gibsonton, no less.

“I don’t know where Jack is,” she said, and took a short step back. “I need to know he’s safe.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.” But I really didn’t give a damn about her knife-throwing clown.

“No. I need to know. We need to find him. He’s been gone three days. He won’t answer his phone. And now this damn hurricane. He would never just go and leave me here like this.”

“You sure about that?”

She slapped me.

Within the first couple of months of dating, I asked Lisa to move in with me. She refused. She said she liked her independence. She said she loved her little apartment with the white walls and gold crown molding. She said that if we moved in together it would ruin the magic.

By magic she meant sex. It kept us together, like a drug we had to get a fix of every few days. We often fought, but somehow we always ended up in the sack either at her place or mine. Sometimes it was rough. Sometimes it was soft. But it was always good.

Our problem was that I wanted to take care of her and she didn’t need any taking care of. When I told her she should quit the Mons and get a respectable job, flatware flew across my apartment.

“What is it about men that you need to dominate us?” she cried. “I was fine before you showed up, and I’m fine now.”

“I hate you working late nights around all those creeps.”

“That wasn’t a problem when you were hanging out there every night.”

“I was working.”

“And what do you think I do there?”

I was jealous. I worried she’d meet someone else. And she did. Jack the fucking Knife. And now here she was.

She never let me get close. I wanted all of her, body and soul, but all she ever gave was body. All I could do was wonder if it was different with Jack. She’d been with him at least eight months, living in this tin can. She looked thin, dark circles under her eyes, haggard. Maybe she was on drugs.

I raised my hand to belt her one but stopped short. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I wasn’t going to be drawn into our usual game of love and pain. I was a new man.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, her lip trembling. “I love Jack. I’m not leaving without him, Wes.”

“For all we know, he might be sitting in a cozy suite at some hotel in Orlando or Atlanta.”

“He’s not like that,” she lamented, and pointed to the door. “He walked out that door three days ago and hasn’t come back. He won’t answer his phone.”

“You go to the cops?”

“No... I—”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes. “I was scared. I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”

“An affair?”

“No!” She gave me a poisonous look. “He said he was meeting a friend. I don’t know. Some of those guys he hangs out with are bad news.”

“Drugs?”

“No, not him, but his friends. They’re lowlifes. Carnies. You can’t trust them.”

“You think they did something to him?”

She turned away. Tears escaped her eyes. “I just thought it’d be better not to involve the police. Not yet.”

“Okay,” I said, and placed my hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy.”

She shrugged my hand off and wiped her tears with the back of her wrists. “Can you help me?”

A strong feeder band from Lloyd swept in, rattling the aluminum roof of the trailer and bringing a wave of hard rain.

“We need to leave,” I said.

“Not without Jack.”

“We’re not going to find him if we stay here.”

She didn’t move.

“Fine,” I said. “Did he take anything when he left?”

“His knives.”

“What?”

“He took his set of knives.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s a set of custom Laguiole knives. They’re worth a small fortune.”

“Why would he take them?”

“I don’t know!” she cried. “We were working on an act. He was in touch with a producer, someone who’d been in Hollywood and was looking for innovative acts. Things were looking really good for us. But then he started getting these phone calls. Last week he said someone was following him.”

The racket of the rain on the roof died down.

“The man’s a con, Lisa. I swear, you fall for these guys—”

“Don’t... don’t you talk down to me. I love Jack and he loves me. Get over it, Wes. You don’t wanna help me, fine.” She grabbed her purse and shoved past me to the front door. “You should’ve just said so before you came down here.” She ran out.

I went after her. “Hold up.”

She stood by my car with her back to me. The night was suddenly dead still.

“I came all the way down here... I’ll help you look for him. But the hurricane...” I pressed the unlock button on my key. The car beeped. Lisa lowered her head and ambled to the car.

Another feeder band swept across the Fairfax. The gust dragged a plastic trash can across the dirt road to the far end of the trailer. It came to rest next to a large round target, the kind you see at the circus with straps and a star and the outline of a woman painted on it. Part of Jack’s William Tell routine.

I turned away from the rain and made my way to the car. I drove to the entrance to the trailer park and stopped. I knew we were not going to find Jack. I had to get us out of here, back to Tampa. Or at least find shelter. I had a quarter tank of gas.

I took a right toward the interstate.

“Where we going?”

“75.”

“Can’t we drive around a bit?”

“You think he’ll be walking around in this weather?”

“Let’s just take a quick drive. Ten minutes. That’s all.”

I glanced at her. She knew I would do what she asked. I took a left and we crisscrossed Gibsonton in a grid pattern through the narrow streets of this sad run-down town. The roads were deserted, shitty little houses boarded up with plywood. The feeder band passed and the night was suddenly calm again.

I kept asking myself why I’d fallen for her of all people. But I knew better. There was never any logic to love, lust, infatuation — they were all a mystery. They drove people to do crazy things. I was no exception.

Maybe I’d been lonely.

But I was lonely now — had been since the day she left. There was something about her. And when I learned she’d hooked up with Jack the knife thrower, it hit me in the gut. Bad. I knew I would never see her again if I didn’t do something. And then she called. But what she wanted was him. She was willing to risk our lives in the storm to find Jack.

Just as my temper was about to snap, I saw the lights. Blue and red cut the darkness like a disco. Cops. They were camped at the intersection of Riverview Drive and 41. The railroad tracks. On the north side was a wooden shack like an old-time station, an abandoned depot covered in vines and graffiti. It was a circus: three police cruisers, an ambulance, the crime scene van, and two unmarked Grand Marquis.

“Must be the president,” I joked. But I knew better.

Lisa covered her mouth with her hand. “J-Jack...”

“You don’t know that.”

“Pull over.”

I did what she asked, eased the car to the side of the road where a uniformed officer stood directing the nonexistent traffic.

Lisa lowered her window. “What’s going on?”

“Gotta move on,” the officer said, and waved for us to pass.

“Is 41 clear to Tampa?” I asked.

He leaned in. “What do I look like, Bay News 9?”

I inched forward to the tracks and stole a quick glance at the abandoned depot. Detective Morano was standing to the side in a blue plastic poncho, hood pulled back.

I pulled over on the gravel.

Lisa looked at me. “What’re you doing?”

“I know that cop,” I said. “I’ll ask him about Jack.”

“I’m coming with—”

“No!” I placed my hand on her thigh. “No. Let me go. He’ll be more at ease if I go alone.”

She looked down at my hand. I pulled it away and stepped out of the car, made my way around the back of the car and across the tracks to where Murano was standing, tapping the screen of his phone.

“You updating your Facebook status?”

He glanced up and smiled uneasily. “Yo, Riley. What the... Last I heard, you were putting in hours as a bouncer at some hipster bar in Ybor.”

“I’m a PI.”

He put his phone in his pocket and offered his hand. “The hell are you doing here anyway?”

I shook his hand with my left. “Came to give a friend a ride.” I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. “What’s the best way to Tampa?”

“You’re better off finding a shelter.” He nodded to the east. “Collins Elementary on Summerfield. You got maybe half an hour before it starts coming hard.”

“What happened here?”

“Body. Or what’s left of it. Guy was cut up into little pieces a couple days ago.”

A cop poked his head out of the depot. “Detective, we’re ready for you.”

“You got an ID on the stiff?”

Murano shook his head. “Gotta go to work.”

As I made my way back to the car, another feeder band swept in and almost blew me over. The rain pelted me like hail. When I finally got in the car, it was empty. Lisa Moon was gone.

Lisa had a tendency to disappear. She was, as they say, mercurial. We’d have a pleasant date, maybe drinks at a bar or a late-night dinner at the Mermaid Tavern or Esther’s Cafe. You’d think everything was roses. But when I drove her back to her place she wouldn’t invite me up, or she’d insist on taking an Uber home. I wouldn’t see her for weeks after that. Then she’d magically reappear acting as if we’d been hanging together the day before. Until she met Jack.

The wind and rain persisted. There was no sign of Lisa near the abandoned depot or up and down Riverview Drive. I worked my way toward the dense Brazilian pepper bushes and combed the area, but the ground was muddy from the rain and my feet sank deep in the muck. There was no trail or tracks anywhere. All I could think of was that she ran back toward the Fairfax.

I drove back east on Riverview Drive, told myself to forget Lisa Moon, head back to 75, find shelter. There was not a soul on the road. It was just the punishing rain and wind. As I drove past the Fairfax the weather turned like a switch — calm and dry. I stopped the car and backed up into the Fairfax, parked by the trailer. We’d left the door unlocked. But she wasn’t there.

I didn’t get it. She didn’t deserve to live like this, in this mess, in this moldy, dilapidated can. She was better than this. She was better than Jack. I offered her a good life, even risked my own to come here and save her, and she ran away from me. Again.

I turned to the door and threw a punch at the wall. My fist went through the paneling like it was made of paper. I looked at my hand. The thin fresh scar that ran down from the ball of my thumb bled a few drops. I stormed back outside. The air was dead. The night had a dark, translucent quality. Gibsonton didn’t look like Gibsonton. It looked fake, like a Hollywood set — a place made to look like Gibsonton.

I got in my car, started the engine, and tuned the radio to one of those all-news AM stations to get an update on the hurricane.

The monster storm was upon us. The cone was narrow and making landfall just north of Bradenton on a northeasterly direction. It was coming for Gibsonton.

I was out of time.

The wind picked up as I crisscrossed Gibsonton at random looking for Lisa. Road signs trembled, trees and bushes danced back and forth, debris dragged across the road, the rain fell in torrents, washing across the road in waves, then dying down, only to start again.

I passed the Fairfax for the fifth time and pulled up to the VFW building across the street. Certainly not a proper shelter, but it had to be better than staying in my car. I hurried to the front but the door was locked. I went around the back. Locked.

A transformer blew with a big fireball at the end of the block. Then everything went dark. That’s when I saw the kid running across the field and into a small warehouse in the back of the property.

I dashed after him, pulled at the steel door. Three midgets, small people — whatever you call them — an older woman with long gray hair, a man with long pork-chop sideburns, and a younger one, blond, who was busy drying his hair with a towel. They stood around a large wooden crate with a lantern in the center.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had nowhere else to go. I saw... I saw one of you run in here... and...” Behind them was a mountain of parts for a mechanical ride — flying elephants, cheap Dumbo imitations — and a trailer with a colorful sign for fried Twinkies. The walls were block and mortar, steel roof. “Seems like a safe place. I hope it’s okay.”

“It’ll hold,” the woman said. “You didn’t happen to see Ricky or Jacques out there, did ya?”

I shook my head. The small person with the sideburns rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I’m telling you, Gail, they must’ve gone with her.”

“The girl ain’t got no car, Kyle.” The woman moved a small plastic chair up to the crate and sat. “We best just hope they didn’t abscond and done left us here.”

The younger small person with the blond hair nodded. He tossed the towel on the crate and climbed into one of the fiberglass elephant rides.

Kyle fiddled with a small transistor radio. Static. Voices, static. A seventies song. Motown. Then a voice came across loud and clear, rattling off statistics and the cost of previous hurricanes — Harvey, Katrina, Andrew.

“Whatever the storm does,” Gail said, “bet you we don’t see a dime of relief money.”

“It’s all a shell game,” Kyle said.

“Look here.” The woman leaned forward on her chair and squinted at me. “How come I ain’t seen you around Gibsonton?”

“I’m from Tampa,” I said. “I came down to help a friend, but I guess she found another ride.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Welcome to the club.”

“They kept sayin’ the storm was headed to Sarasota,” Gail put in. “Then it shifted at the last moment.”

“But Gibsonton was always on the cone,” Kyle said. “We just thought we’d be spared ’cause we always are.”

“Not always,” the woman sighed.

Behind her a sign with a colorful illustration of a giant Twinkie on a stick separated her from the bulk of the machinery. The place smelled of oil or lubricant. Outside the wind was howling. The rattle of the steel roof and debris came and went with each gust. I took a step back, sat on the ground, and leaned against the wheel of a trailer. I didn’t want to think of Lisa Moon out there in this mess. It was my fault. It was a stupid idea. I shouldn’t have come.

The blond small person sitting in the elephant shrieked with laughter. The woman glanced back at him, then at me, and touched the side of her head. “Foley’s a little... you know...”

“Aren’t we all?”

She laughed. “You’re all right, Mister...”

“Riley. Wesley Riley.”

She nodded. “Funny how the storm brought us together.”

“You live down here full-time?”

“Born and raised,” she said. “Met my husband Ricky when he came down for the Lobster Boy trial. He’s a nephew of Harry Glenn Newman, world’s smallest man. I was testifyin’ against Christopher Wyant. I seen Mary talkin’ to him ’bout shootin’ Lobster Boy a couple weeks before he done it. Yeah, we’re showfolks to the bone, ran quite a business for a time. Nine rides, two concessions, and half a dozen full-time workers, ain’t that true, Kyle?”

Kyle stared at the ground and nodded, mumbled something about the financial crash of 2008.

“But we’re gettin’ back in the game. Tell’m, Kyle. Tell’m about the act.”

The wind grew loud and ominous like a train rushing overhead. We fell silent and looked up at the steel roof shaking and rattling under the pressure of the storm.

“Kyle!” Gail broke our trance. “Tell’m.”

Kyle’s eyes went wide. He swallowed hard. “We have this new act with Jacques Couteau. A real famous performer. Maybe you heard of him. Anyway, he’s one hell of a talented knife thrower, and—”

“We been practicing all year,” Gail interrupted. “Jacques and his gal Liz La Lune. She’s a real pretty gal. Got real talent for show.”

“It’s built like a play,” Kyle said. “We’ve got a whole drama. Foley here tries to steal Liz from Jacques and they start this back-and-forth dance, kind of like a jealous lover. So Jacques and Foley hate each other, but it’s Liz who’s playing them against each other. Jacques keeps throwing knifes—”

“No need to bore him with the details,” Gail cut in again. “Point is, Liz and Foley keep runnin’ round and Jacques keeps throwin’ knives but keeps missin’. It’s tragic and funny at the same time.”

“We just signed with an outfit out of Chico, California,” Kyle said.

“I’m gonna be in the circus!” Foley chirped from his perch on the elephant.

The freight-train sound shook my bones like a jackhammer. Then stopped. We looked at each other.

Foley hopped out of the elephant. “Is it over?”

“It’s the eye,” I said.

“It’s over!” Foley sang. “Over. Over. Over!”

“No. It’s just the eye,” I said.

“You don’t know that.” Kyle was already at the door. Gail and Foley followed him out. Then me. We walked together to the middle of the field. The VFW post was standing but the roof had blown away. The whole field was littered with debris, a fallen oak. The plastic VFW sign had flown off and gotten snagged on the barbed-wire fence. There was no rain or wind, just this deep pressure. I yawned to pop my ears.

“Look!” Kyle pointed. Someone was running toward us. “Ricky!”

Ricky was tall and thin with long gray hair in a ponytail. He swooped up Gail and kissed her on the mouth.

“Did you find Jacques?” Kyle asked.

Ricky put Gail down and shook his head, then nodded toward the warehouse. “We better get inside before the storm comes around again.”

We locked ourselves in the warehouse. Foley climbed back onto his ride and rocked back and forth in his perch while humming a song I didn’t recognize. Gail wouldn’t let go of Ricky’s hand. They sat together and watched Kyle fiddle with the radio, but all he got was a station playing Mexican music. Then the train sound started again, faster and louder and harder. Felt like it was going to pull the roof and the lot of us out into the night sky.

When the noise finally settled into a steady drone, Ricky stood. “I have bad news. Jacques Couteau’s dead.”

Kyle jumped to his feet. “What?”

“Someone did a number on him with his own knives. Chopped him up into little bits.”

“My God.” Gail lowered her head. “Who... who would—”

“Liz!” Kyle snapped. “It had to be Liz.”

“Cops found the body in the old train depot. Liz is with them. I think she’s the one who told them.”

“No...” I whispered. Jacques and Liz, Jack and Lisa. “He wasn’t French,” I said.

They looked at me.

“Well, he wasn’t,” I said. “And neither was Lisa.”

“What’re you talking about?” Ricky asked.

I looked down at the scar on my hand, the neat slice Jack’s fancy throwing knife made when it caught his rib and buckled. He begged for mercy in perfect English. He told me he would go away. He wouldn’t interfere. He swore again and again that he would leave. He would go to California and never look back, never contact Lisa — ever.

But that wasn’t the point. Lisa had to do it on her own. She had to call me. She had to need me. Otherwise she would always be looking past me for Jack. And it was working. She did call. She needed my help. But then...

I walked out of the warehouse. It was pouring rain and the wind was blowing hard. I made my way across the dark field to the Fairfax. The trailers were torn, mangled, and crushed against each other.

I turned. Ricky and the small people were standing across the street as two cop cars cruised slowly down Riverview Drive and pulled into the entrance of the Fairfax. In the front seat of the second car I could make out Lisa Moon. She was crying, her face slightly distorted from pain or anger, her hand raised, pointing at me.