“Tom!”
“And this was in your mail?”
She said, “Unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
“That would be the word for it.”
“You and me, two of the most cynical people on God’s green earth… It’s almost like a revelation, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what the hell it is.”
He tried to throttle down and think like a reporter, beginning with a list of questions: Who in their right mind would give up a $14 million Lotto ticket? Why would they send it to him, of all people? And how’d they know where he was?
“It makes no damn sense.”
“None,” JoLayne agreed. That’s what was so wondrous. She’d been over it again and again—there were no sensible answers, because it was impossible. What had happened was absolutely impossible. She didn’t believe in miracles, but she was reconsidering the concept of divine mystery.
“The lottery agency said the other ticket was bought in Florida City. That’s three hundred miles away.”
“I know, Tom.”
“How in the world… ”
“Honey, put it away now. Someplace safe.”
“What should we do?” he asked.
” ‘We’? It’s your name on that envelope, buster. Come on, let’s get moving. Before it’s too dark.”
It was a few hours later, after they’d returned from their mission and JoLayne had drifted to sleep, when Tom Krome found the answer to one of the many, many questions.
The only answer he’d ever get.
He slipped out of bed to catch the late TV news, in case the men on Pearl Key had been found. He knew he shouldn’t have been concerned—dead or alive, the two robbers wouldn’t say much. They couldn’t, if they wished to stay out of prison.
Nonetheless, Krome was glued to the tube. As though he needed independent proof, a confirmation that the events of the past ten days were real and not a dream.
But the news had nothing. So he decided to surprise JoLayne (and demonstrate his domestic suitability) by washing the dinner dishes. He was scraping a tangle of noodles into the garbage when he spotted it in the bottom of the can:
A blue envelope made out to “Ms. Jo Lane Lucks.”
He retrieved it and placed it on the counter.
The envelope had been opened cleanly, possibly with a very long fingernail. Inside the envelope was a card, a bright Georgia O’Keeffe print.
And inside the card… nothing. Not a word.
And Tom Krome knew: That’s how the second lottery ticket had been delivered. It was sent to JoLayne, not him.
He could’ve cried, he was so happy. Or laughed, he was so mad.
Again she’d been one step ahead of him. It would always be that way. He’d have to get used to it.
She was too much.
Vultures starred in his nightmares, and Chub blamed the nigger woman.
Before boarding the skiff, she’d warned him in harrowing detail about black vultures. The sky over Pearl Key was full of them. “They’re gonna come for your friend,” she’d said, kneeling beside him on the shore, “and there’s nothing you can do.”
People think all buzzards hunt by smell, she’d said, but that’s not so. Turkey vultures use their noses; black vultures hunt purely by sight. Their eyeballs are twenty or thirty times more powerful than a human’s, she’d said. When they’re circling like that—the nigger woman pointing upward and, sure enough, there they were—it means they’re searching for carrion.
“What’s that?” Chub, fumbling to open his ragged eyelid, so he might see the birds better. Every part of him burned with fever; he felt infected from head to toe.
“Carrion,” the woman had replied, “is another word for dead meat.”
“Jesus Willy.”
“The trick is to keep moving, OK? Whatever you do, don’t lie down and doze off,” she’d said, “because they might think you’re dead. That’s when they’ll come for you. And once they get started, Lord… Just remember to do like I said. Don’t stop moving. Arms, legs, whatever. As long as they see movement, buzzards’ll usually keep away.”
“But I gotta sleep.”
“Only when it’s dark. They feed mainly in the daytime. At night you should be safe.”
That’s when she’d pressed the can of pepper spray into his crab-swollen fist and said, “Just in case.”