Carl Hiaasen – Lucky You

“Get packed,” Tom Krome said.

“Lord, I forgot about the turtles. You know how hungry they get.”

“They’re not coming with us.”

“Course not,” JoLayne said.

They stopped at the ATM so she could get some cash. Back in the car, she popped a handful of Goldfish and said: “Drive like the wind, partner. My Visa maxes out at three thousand bucks.”

“Then let’s pay it off. Put a check in the mail first thing tomorrow—I want these boys to go hog wild.”

Sportively JoLayne grabbed a handful of Krome’s shirt. “Tom, I’ve got exactly four hundred and thirty-two dollars left in my checking.”

“Relax,” he told her. Then, with a sideways glance: “It’s time you started thinking like a millionaire.”

7

Chub’s real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus’s father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie’s womb had been as welcome as “a cockroach on a wedding cake.”

Nonetheless, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a secondhand ski boat on a trailer in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Book encyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus’s siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there, too, had he not by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy.

He moved out of his parents’ home and took up with a bad crowd. He got a job in the photo department of a drugstore, where he earned extra money sorting through customers’ negatives, swiping the racy ones and peddling the prints to horny kids at the high school. (Even after entering adulthood, Onus Gillespie remained amazed there were women in the world who’d allow their boyfriends or husbands to take pictures of them topless. He dreamed of meeting such a girl, but so far it hadn’t happened.)

When he was twenty-four, Onus accidentally landed a well-paying job at a home furnishings warehouse. Thanks to an aggressive union local, he managed to remain employed for six years despite a wretched attendance record, exhaustively documented incompetence and a perilous affinity for carpet glue. Stoned to the gills, Onus one day crashed a fork-lift into a Snapple machine, a low-speed mishap that he parlayed into an exorbitant claim for worker’s compensation.

His extended “convalescence” involved many drunken fishing and hunting excursions. One morning Onus was observed emerging from the woods with a prostitute on one arm and a dead bear cub slung over his shoulders. The man watching him was an investigator for an insurance company, which was able to argue convincingly that Mr. Onus Gillespie was not injured in the least. Only then was he fired from the warehouse. He chose not to appeal.

Moira and Greve wrote one last check to their errant spawn, then disowned him. Onus needed no special encouragement to leave the state. In addition to the pending felony indictments for insurance fraud and game poaching, Onus had received a rather unfriendly letter from the Internal Revenue Service, inquiring why he’d never in his adult life bothered to file a tax return. To emphasize its concern, the IRS sent a flatbed and two disagreeable men to confiscate Onus’s customized Ford Econoline van. It was easy to spot. An elaborate mural on the side of the vehicle depicted Kim Basinger as a nude mermaid, riding a narwhal. Onus had fallen for the beautiful Georgia actress in the movie 9½ Weeks and conceived the mural as a love tribute.

It was the seizure of his beloved Econoline that turned Onus Gillespie bitterly against the U.S. government (although he was similarly resentful toward his parents, who not only had refused to pay his tax lien but had also tipped off the IRS agents about where to find the van). Before bolting, Onus burned his driver’s license and renounced the family name. He began calling himself Chub (which is how his brothers and sisters had referred to him when he was younger and had something of a weight problem). He couldn’t make up his mind on a new surname, so he decided to wait until something good popped into his head. He hitchhiked to Miami with only the clothes on his back, seventeen dollars in his wallet and, in a zippered pocket, his only tangible asset—the disabled-parking permit he’d scammed off the company doctor for the workmen’s comp claim.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *