Double Whammy (27 page)

They found the apartment on Washington Drive easily; Jim Tile's black-and-tan Ford police cruiser was out front.

Culver parked his mother's truck. He got a pistol from under the front seat and tucked it into the back of his dungarees.

“What's that for?” Ozzie asked worriedly.

“It's a bad neighborhood, Oz.”

“I ain't going in there with a gun,” Ozzie said in a brittle voice. “I ain't,”

“Fine,” Culver said. “You sit out here in the parking lot with all these jigaboos. I'm sure they'll love the prospect of a fat little cracker boy like you.”

Ozzie looked around and knew that his brother was right. The streets were full of black faces, including some frightfully muscular teenagers slam-dunking basketballs through a rusty hoop nailed to a telephone pole. Ozzie decided he didn't want to stay in the truck after all. He followed Culver up to Jim Tile's apartment.

The trooper was finishing dinner, and getting ready to go out on the night shift. He came to the door wearing the gray, sharply pressed trousers of his uniform, but no shirt. The Rundell brothers were awestruck by the dimensions of his chest and arms.

After stammering for a second, Culver finally said, “We need to talk about the guy lives up on the lake.”

“Our boat got sunk,” Ozzie warbled, without explanation.

Jim Tile let them in, motioned toward two chairs at the dinette. The Rundell brothers sat down.

“Skink is his name, right?” Culver said.

“What's the connection,” Jim Tile asked mildly, “between the man on the lake and your boat?”

Ozzie started to say something, got lost, and looked to his brother for help. Culver said, “We heard Mr. Skink is the one who sunked it.”

Jim Tile said, “Well, Mr. Skink is out of town.”

“It happened out of town,” Culver said. “At a tournament up in Louisiana.”

“Did you go to the police?” Jim Tile asked.

“Not yet,” Culver said. He had wanted to, but Thomas Curl had said it was a bad idea. He said the police would be busy with Dickie's murder, and it wouldn't be right to bother them over a bass boat. Besides, the boat
had
been recovered out of the water, and it was Thomas Curl's opinion that it could be repaired. Ozzie said great, but Culver didn't like the idea. Culver wanted a brand-new boat, and he wanted the man named Skink to buy it for him.

“Well, if you haven't talked to the police in Louisiana, then I suggest you do,” Jim Tile said. “Once there's a warrant, one of Sheriff Lockhart's deputies can go out to Lake Jesup and arrest his.”

Culver Rundell doubted if Sheriff Earley Lockhart was much interested in a boat theft, not with his famous nephew turning up murdered in Louisiana. Earley had caught a flight to New Orleans two days after the killing, and had not yet returned. Before leaving, the sheriff dramatically informed the Harney
Sentinel
that his presence had been requested to assist in the homicide investigation, but in reality the Louisiana authorities merely wanted somebody to accompany Dickie's autopsied body back to Florida.

“It's a jurisdictional problem,” Trooper Jim Tile said to the Rundell brothers. “I really can't help.”

“You can take us to see Mr. Skink,” Culver said.

“Why? You know where he lives—drive out there yourself.”

To Ozzie's ear, Jim Tile's response sounded as close to a definite no as you could get. But Culver wasn't giving up.

“No way,” Culver said. “I heard he's got a big gun, shoots at people just for the fun of it. He doesn't know me or my brother, and he might just open fire if we was to drive up unannounced. You, he knows. Even if he's crazy as they say, he won't shoot a damn police car.”

The low, even tone of Jim Tile's voice did not change. “I told you, he's out of town.”

“Well, let's go see.”

“No,” said Jim Tile, rising. “I have to go to work.”

“Momma's truck,” Ozzie blurted. “Maybe we oughta go, Culver.”

Annoyed, Culver glanced at his brother. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm worried about Momma's truck out there. Maybe we should go.”

“The truck'll be fine,” Culver said.

“I don't know,” Jim Tile said, parting the venetian blinds. “It's a pretty rough neighborhood.”

Ozzie looked stricken.

“Oh, settle down,” Culver said angrily. Then, to Jim Tile: “You, why won't you help us? I lost a twenty-thousand-dollar rig because of that bastard!”

Jim Tile was still looking out the window. “So that's your mother's pickup?”

“Ours is in the impound, up New Orleans,” Ozzie said.

“The red one,” Jim Tile said.

“Yeah,” Culver grunted, secretly impressed that the trooper would remember the color.

Then Jim Tile said to Ozzie: “What about the green one?”

The color washed out of Ozzie's cheeks. His eyelids fluttered, as if he were about to faint.

“What green one?” Culver said, slow to put it together.

“The one your brother was driving week before last,” Jim Tile said, “out on the Gilchrist. About dawn, one morning.”

“When?” Ozzie hiccuped. “Wasn't me. Our truck is red.”

“You and two other guys,” Jim Tile said, “and the truck was green. Out-of-state tags.”

Finally Culver was picking up on the train of conversation. He tried to help Ozzie as best he could, even though he felt like strangling him.

“I remember that day,” Culver improvised, watching his brother's eyes grow big. “You and some boys went fishing up at the slough. I remember 'cause you took a couple Shakespeare plug rods out of the shop, along with some Johnson spoons and purple skirts.”

Ozzie's lips were like chalk. His bottom jaw went up and down until finally he said, “Oh, yeah.”

Culver said, “I remember 'cause you didn't want to try live shiners, even though I told you to. You said there was too much heavy cover, so you'd prefer dragging those damn weedless spoons.”

Jim Tile was buttoning his shirt. “So, Ozzie,” he said, “you guys catch anything?”

“Sure,” Ozzie said, glancing at the door, as if he were about to run.

“What'd you catch?”

“Our truck is red,” Ozzie Rundell said, licking his lips. His shoulders twitched and his eyes rolled up and fixed on the ceiling. His cheeks puffed out, like he was trying to fart.

“Pardon me?” Jim Tile said, bending over to tie his shoes.

“That's Momma's pickup outside,” Ozzie said in a very high voice. He was gone, unglued, lost in a pathetic blubbering panic. Culver shook his head disgustedly.

“I asked what you caught,” Jim Tile said, “out at Morgan Slough.”

Ozzie smiled and smacked his lips. “One time Dickie gave me a tacklebox,” he said.

“All right, that's enough,” Culver broke in.

“Ozzie?” said Jim Tile.

“The day in the truck?”

“The green truck, yes.”

“I was driving, that's all. I didn't drown nobody.”

“Of course not,” Jim Tile said.

“That's it,” said Culver Rundell. “Shut the fuck up, Oz.”

Culver had the gun out. He was holding it with two hands, pointing it at Jim Tile's heart. Jim Tile glanced down once, but seemed to pay no more attention to the gun than if it were just Culver's fly unzipped.

“Let's go,” Culver said in a husky whisper.

But Jim Tile merely walked into the bedroom, stood at the dresser, and adjusted his trooper's Stetson.

“Now!” Culver shouted. Ozzie stared at the handgun and covered his ears.

Jim Tile reached for a bottle of cologne.

Culver exploded. “Nigger, I'm talking to you!”

Only then did Jim Tile turn to give Ozzie Rundell's brother his complete and undivided attention.

The boat was an eighteen-foot Aquasport with a two-hundred-horse Evinrude outboard; smooth trim, dry ride, very fast. Skink liked it quite a bit. He liked it so much he decided not to ditch it at Haulover docks after all, but to drive it up the Intracoastal Waterway all the way to Pier 66, in Fort Lauderdale. The morning was biting cold, and R. J. Decker would have preferred to travel by car, but there was no point to raising the issue. Skink was having a ball, his silvery ponytail strung out behind him like a rope in the breeze. At the Dania Beach bridge he cut the throttle down to idle speed and the Aquasport coasted into a slow crawl.

“What's up?” Decker asked.

Skink said, “Manatee zone.”

In the wintertime giant manatees migrate with their young to congregate sluggishly in the warm sheltered waters of the Intracoastal. During manatee season boaters are required by law to go slow, but each year dozens of the gentle mammals are run down and sliced to ribbons by reckless tourists and teenagers. The fine for such a crime costs the offending boater no more than a new pair of Top-Siders, and is not much of a deterrent. During the last days of his governorship, Clinton Tyree had lobbied for a somewhat tougher law. His version would have required anyone who killed a manatee to immediately forfeit his boat (no matter how luxurious) and pay a ten-thousand-dollar fine or go to jail for forty-five days. The Tyree amendment would have also required the manatee killer to personally bury the dead animal himself, at a public ceremony.

Not surprisingly, the governor's proposal was quietly rejected.

R. J. Decker knew none of this, so he was somewhat perplexed when Skink took a hawklike interest in another boat, speeding south down the waterway in the predawn twilight. It was a gaily colored ski boat full of young men and women returning from a night of serious dockside partying. Skink waved furiously and shouted for them to slow down, watch out for the sea cows, but the kids just stared back with radish-colored eyes—except for the driver, who made the awful mistake of flipping Skink the magic digit. Later the girls from the ski boat would tell the marine patrol that their boyfriends had gravely underestimated the size and temperament of the old hippie, just as they had underestimated the speed of the Aquasport. Were it not for the other stranger dragging the old hippie off them, the girls said, their boyfriends might have been seriously killed. (At this point the girls were doing all the talking because the young men were still being X-rayed at Broward General Hospital for broken bones. The doctors marveled that they had been able to swim so far in such a traumatized condition.)

To convince Skink to quit pummeling the speeders, Decker had had to agree to let him sink their ski boat, which he did by shooting three holes in the hull. Then he scrupulously idled the Aquasport all the way to the Port Everglades inlet, and from there it was full throttle again to Pier 66. By now Decker was cold and wet and eternally grateful to be off the water. They caught a cab to the Harbor Beach Marriott, got a room, and fell asleep—Decker splayed on the king-size bed, Skink in a ball on the floor. At noon they woke up and started working the phones.

 

Jim Tile got off the road at nine in the morning. When he got back to the apartment, he fixed himself four poached eggs, three hunks of Canadian bacon, and a tumbler of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Then he took off his trousers, went to the bathroom, and changed the dressing on the bullet wound in his right thigh. Afterward he put on a gray sweatsuit, fixed himself some hot tea, and sat down with the newspaper. He did all this without saying a word to the Rundell brothers, who were still bound and gagged on the floor. In truth Culver didn't feel slighted (he had passed out from pain many hours before), but Ozzie was dying to talk. Ozzie was scared out of his mind.

“Thur?” he said.

Jim Tile lowered the newspaper, reached down, and yanked the towel from Ozzie's mouth.

“Sir, is my brother dead? Thank you. For taking the towel, I mean, thanks.”

Jim Tile said, “Your brother's not dead.”

“What's wrong with him? His face don't look right.”

“His jaw's broken,” Jim Tile said. “And all his fingers too.” It had happened when Jim Tile had wrenched the pistol away, after Culver had shot him and ruined a perfectly good uniform.

“He needs a doctor, bad,” Ozzie said plaintively.

“Yes, he does.” Jim Tile hadn't meant to break Culver's jaw in so many places, and he was annoyed at himself for punching the man too hard. Culver wouldn't be doing any chatting for a long time, so now the information would have to come from Ozzie, one of the most witless and jumble-headed crackers that Jim Tile had ever met.

Culver moaned and strained against the ropes. Ozzie said, “Oh Jesus, he's hurt bad.”

“Yes, he is,” Jim Tile said. “You can take him to the doctor after we have our talk.”

“Promise?”

“You've got my word.”

“Is Culver going to jail?”

“Well, I don't know. Attempted murder of a police officer, that's a life term here in Florida. Agg assault, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and so on. I just don't know.”

Ozzie said, “What about me?”

“Oh, same goes for you. You're his partner, right?”

Ozzie's eyes got wet. “Momma 'spects the truck back long time ago.”

“She'll be worried,” Jim Tile said.

“Can we go soon?”

Jim Tile folded up the newspaper and leaned forward. “First you answer some questions.”

“Okay, but go slow.”

“Did Dickie Lockhart get you boys to kill Bobby Clinch?”

“No, Jesus! Honest we didn't.” Ozzie's nose was running. “I liked Bobby, so'd Culver—”