Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course (21 page)

The monkey’s face was pale and still. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Wormy?”

Wormy put the gun away reluctantly. “I’ll catch up with you later, pissant.”

Billy scuttled out of Wormy’s line of vision.

“Let’s do it,” Ronnie decided.

“Boone, I’d fasten that seat belt if I were you. Put it in neutral and wait. Billy, back up some so you’ll have some momentum. Not too fast, now. That Fury’s a big hunk of steel. Hit him too hard and our friend Hernando will be having a concrete sandwich for a midnight snack.”

Weems’s brays of laughter echoed in the deserted construction site. It was a nice thought—Boone with a couple tons of concrete shoved down his throat.

Hernando buckled himself into the Mercedes. His mind was made up. Wormy’s disposal would be a priority item on his schedule.

The monkey backed the yellow Fury up past the first set of barricades. He stuck his head out the window. “Ready?”

“Stomp it,” Ronnie shouted.

The Fury’s motor roared to life as it accelerated across the asphalt, hurtling straight toward the rear of the Mercedes. Billy Tripp’s face was a blur as he shot by.

“Get him,” Wormy said under his breath. “Flatten the nigger.”

The kid hit the brakes moments before impact, and the Fury skidded fast and hard. The sound of squealing rubber, metal on metal, metal on concrete, concrete on glass, was deafening.

“Too hard,” Ronnie said, shaking his head. “The kid’s got a lead foot.” They stood, gazing at the Fury with its whole front end embedded in the back of the crumpled-up Mercedes.

“Shit. I think he busted a fuel line,” Ronnie said, alarmed.

The smell of gasoline filled the air. There was a boom then, and flames shot out of the hood of the Plymouth.

“Shit,” Ronnie screamed, running toward the Fury. “Billy! Get out.”

Hernando Boone threw open the door of the Mercedes and stumbled out. His face was cut and bleeding. He stumbled, fell, got up, then stood there, dazed, watching the flames leap up in the air.

Ronnie Bondurant wrenched the door of the Fury open. Billy Tripp half fell, half jumped out.

“Help me get him up,” Ronnie called. “Come on. The car is gonna blow.”

Boone hesitated, then stepped forward, grabbing Billy under one arm, while Ronnie grabbed the other. Haltingly, they dragged the unconscious monkey across the pavement, off the shoulder, toward the construction trailer.

When the explosion came, Boone and Bondurant dropped to the ground, covering their heads with their arms. The life they had saved was suddenly irrelevant. Billy Tripp was forgotten.

Greasy, black smoke poured out of the gutted Fury, and the hood and front doors blew out, sailing off into the no longer quiet night.

Crouched under cover of the gray Lincoln, Wormy Weems could see nothing. But he heard chunks of the car raining down around him. “Two birds with one stone,” he mused with satisfaction.

Something big hit the side of the Porta-Potty. It rocked crazily for a moment, knocking Truman off the commode and into the sink. He felt the latrine wobbling, felt it toppling over. He tried to brace himself against the impact. In his panic, he forgot to breathe through his mouth, and nearly swooned from the stench.

When the Porta-Potty hit the ground, Truman’s head banged against the steel sink pipe so hard he thought he heard his skull bones splintering. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he bit his lip to keep from crying out from the pain.

He listened to his own breathing for a while, then wiggled his fingers and toes to make sure that he could. His ears were still ringing. Gingerly, he felt his head. A lump was already rising on the back of his head, and he could feel a small cut oozing blood.

Get your bearings, he told himself sternly. Sit still and wait for equilibrium to return. Finally, on his hands and knees, he inched out from under the sink, crawling forward until he bumped his head on what had been the roof of the Porta-Potty. With his hands, he felt the air vents. His hiding place had pitched over backward, landing the vents against the ground, and its inhabitant in total darkness. At least it hadn’t landed on the door. For this, Truman silently thanked his maker.

There were voices close by.

“Wormy!” It was Ronnie’s voice.

“Back here, behind your car,” Wormy called back. “You okay, Ronnie?”

“We’re both okay, asshole,” Boone shouted. “Thanks for asking. Your driver’s breathing, but I think he broke something. You need to help us get him to the car.”

Ronnie’s voice was closer still. “Come on, Wormy,” he said. “Somebody will have heard that explosion. We’ve got to get out of here before the cops show up. Help us get Billy to the car.”

“Fuck him,” Wormy said, standing up. “Leave him where he is. Let the cops deal with it.”

“What about my Mercedes, man?” Boone cried. “We can’t just leave it here like this. What am I gonna tell the insurance man?”

“Tell him your car was stolen earlier tonight,” Ronnie said. “The thieves must have wrecked it out here, then run off. Come on,” he urged. “You wanted it totaled, it’s totaled.”

Truman heard footsteps again, then the sound of four car doors being opened, then closed. The Lincoln’s engine purred to life, and he heard tires on gravel.

From somewhere at the other end of the latrine, Truman heard a familiar crackling noise.

“Joker to Batman. Come in, Batman. What the hell was that noise?”

Jackie yanked open the door of the Porta-Potty and gave Truman a hand so he could crawl out.

He sat on the ground, dazed and shaken, feeling every inch his age. Mosquitoes swarmed around him in a buzzing cloud. He was too tired to slap them away.

“You’re bleeding,” Jackie said, gently touching the back of his head. “And, excuse me, but you smell like a shithouse. Pee-yeeww!”

“I’ve got to get to a shower,” Truman said, struggling to his feet.

“I saw a sign on the way in here tonight, for a Boy Scout camp,” Jackie said. “I’ll bet they got showers. We could drive over there. I never knew Weedon Island had anything out here but the Florida Power Plant.”

Tired as he was, Truman wouldn’t hear of trying to drive to the camp in the Nova. “The way I smell? We’d never get rid of the stink. Besides, I saw that road, too. There’s a big metal cattle gate pulled across it. The only way we’re getting in there is on foot.”

The walk seemed endless in the heat and the damp. Truman trudged along in the dark while Jackie stayed a few yards ahead—and upwind—keeping the flashlight trained on the crushed oyster-shell path.

Jackie was thin enough to be able to squeeze through the bars of the cattle gate. Truman sighed and put one leg up on the middle rung, somehow summoning the energy to haul himself up and over the top bar.

A wooden sign nailed to the trunk of a pine tree notified them that it was .6 of a mile to the Boy Scout camp. Truman groaned, despite his resolve not to let on how bad he felt. His head wound was throbbing and his knees were cut and swollen from the pounding they’d taken when the Porta-Potty toppled over.

“You okay?” Jackie asked, turning around to check on him. They’d been through a lot together, and it wasn’t like Mr. K to complain.

“I’ll be better when I get this muck washed off,” he told her.

Somewhere along the way, Jackie started whistling softly to herself.

“Where’d you learn that?” Truman asked, stopping in his tracks.

“Ollie and I watched The Bridge Over the River Kwai a few weeks ago. I’d heard the song before, but I never knew where it came from.”

“You know the real name of that song?” It was the kind of trivia Truman loved.

“Nope.”

“‘The Colonel Bogey March,’” Truman informed her.

They passed a clearing in the woods that revealed a patch of water thickly ringed with mangroves. As they got closer to the path, the mangrove branches rustled loudly and they heard the furious flapping of wings and startled calls. Jackie shined the flashlight up into the treetops. “Lookit,” she said, awed. “Flamingoes. This must be where they nest. I never saw so many flamingoes except on TV.”

“You still haven’t,” Truman told her, watching a bird flap off to a nearby treetop. “Those are roseate spoonbills. Same color as flamingoes, but the bill is different, like a flattened spoon.”

“Here’s some kind of building,” Jackie said after they’d walked another five minutes. She played the flashlight over the building. Large cedar poles had been sunk into the ground around a raised concrete platform, and more cedar logs formed a high-pitched roof. There were concrete picnic tables and benches and a large, open-stacked rock fire pit.

“This is it?” Jackie asked. “This is their idea of a camp? What about bathrooms, cabins, all that kind of thing? What’s with the Boy Scouts?”

“Boy Scouts are supposed to rough it,” Truman said. “They sleep in tents. Dig latrines. This must be their dining hall. Come on, let’s look and see if there’s at least a spigot.”

At the back of the fire pit they found a wall- mounted shower head with a rusty stream of water dribbling from it.

“Take a walk,” Truman told Jackie, “unless you want to see another rare bird. The white-tailed stinkpot.”

“Hurry up,” she said, slapping at her arms, “these skeeters are eating me alive.”

Truman turned the nozzle on full force and got a half-hearted spray of sulphur-scented water. He stood under the spray and stepped out of his excrement- spattered clothes. When he’d soaked every part of himself and the smell of sulphur finally overpowered the latrine smell, he picked the clothes up, held them under the water for a long time, and then wrung each piece out separately.

He pulled the light-blue boxer shorts on. They were waterlogged and hung loosely on his hips, but he was decent. He buttoned the navy-blue sport shirt, but the stink clung to his pants like a sandspur on a dog. He could not bear to put them on again. He rolled them up and dropped them in a wire trash bin at the edge of the encampment.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jackie asked as he met her on the path back to the main road.

“Boxers. They’re all the rage now,” he explained. “Chip even wears them to school.”

“Look like men’s underwear to me,” Jackie said. “Droopy underwear.”

Truman’s waterlogged sneakers made a squishing noise with each step he took. But the wet clothes and the shower had cooled him off, and he had more energy than he knew he still possessed.

“Did you hear what they were saying to each other before the crash?” Truman asked her. “I couldn’t quite make it out.”

“The black guy was asking how they were going to be able to file for the insurance without a witness or a police report. And then Wormy, the mean one? He just laughed and said they didn’t need the cops. Said that’s what made Florida great. Insurance companies don’t require a police report or witnesses—just one party who admits the accident was his fault.”

“That tells us for certain what the racket is,”

Truman said. “Fake car wrecks. But why Corvettes? And why steal back yours?”

“They didn’t talk about that,” Jackie said. “But Ronnie told the black guy, Boone, that getting the insurance company to total out a Mercedes was going to be a pain in the ass. Over ten thousand dollars, he said, you can’t go to no drive-through claims window.”

“Why Corvettes?” Truman wondered again.

They were coming out of the path now, and into the area of the construction site. The air was filled with the acrid smell of burning rubber, and flashing red-and-blue lights throbbed on and off near the wrecked cars. A fireman stood at the edge of the clearing, aiming a hose at the now steaming cars. There was a uniformed police officer, too, shining a large black flashlight at the rubber skid marks that led up to the crash. Another man, not in uniform, sat in the police cruiser, and they could hear the low chatter of radio traffic.

“Shouldn’t we talk to them?” Jackie asked. “Let them know what we saw and heard? That young guy they called Billy, when I peeked out, I saw them dragging him to the Lincoln. He was hurt bad, Mr. K, maybe even dead.”

“They’d never believe us,” Truman said, gesturing down at the waterlogged undershorts that threatened to fall off unless he kept them hitched up with one hand. “They’d probably arrest me for indecent exposure. Or worse, try to pin that wreck on us. No, let’s go get in the car and wait them out. The fire’s died down, there can’t be too much to see in the dark. I’ll call that FDLE agent in the morning. Let him know what went on.”

The next morning, Ollie slid into the chair across from Truman, who was watching the butter pat melt in his bowl of grits.

“Where you been?” Ollie asked breathlessly. “It’s third seating already. I was getting ready to go up to your room to see if there was any sign of life. Finally, Jackie stopped long enough to tell me about what all happened last night. Wish I’d have been there.”

“No you don’t,” Truman said. “You know women. They dramatize things.” He tasted his grits, then added a fine layer of salt and pepper and tried again. Much better. He finished them off while Ollie waited expectantly to hear more details of the previous night’s escapade.