When he returned to the pickup truck, he saw that Bodean Gazzer had settled down. Shiner was earnestly inquiring about the pending NATO attack on the United States, wondering if there was something particular he should be watching for; a clear signal it was all right to go for the guns.
“Like helicopters. I heard about them secret black helicopters,” he was saying, “from the Internet.”
Bode said, “I wouldn’t go by the helicopters no more. Hell, they might switch to blimps. All depends.”
“Damn,” said Shiner.
“Tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened the dead of night, real quiet. You wake up one morning and the fuckin’ mailman’s wearing a blue helmet.”
Shiner recoiled. “Then what—they kill all us white people, right?” Chub said, “Not the women. Them they rape. The men is who they’ll kill.”
“No,” Bode Gazzer said. “First thing they do is make us all so dirt poor we can’t afford food or medicine or clothes on our back.”
“How in the world?” Shiner asked.
“Easy. Suppose they decided all our money’s illegal. Everything you saved up, worthless as toilet paper. Meanwhile they print up all new dollars, which they give out by the millions to Negroes and Cubans and such.”
Chub sat on the bumper of the truck and tried to massage the hangover from his forehead. He’d already heard Bode’s conspiracy theory about U.S. currency replacement. The subject had come up the night before, at Hooters, when Chub again recommended that they get rid of the nigger woman’s credit card before it could be traced. Bode had said they ought to hang on to it, in case the New World Tribunal took over all the banks and issued new money. Then everybody’s hard-earned American cash would be no good.
What cash? Chub had wondered. They were dead fucking broke.
“And the new money,” Bode was telling Shiner, “instead of George Washington and U. S. Grant, it’ll have pitchers of Jesse Jackson and Fy-del Castro.”
“No shit! Then what do we do?”
“Plastic,” Bode replied. “We use plastic. Ain’t that right, Chub?”
“For sure.” Chub got up, scratching at his crotch. It had been so long since he’d seen a fifty-dollar bill, he couldn’t remember whose face was on it. Might as well be James Brown, for all it mattered to Chub.
“Let’s get some goddamn food,” he said.
On the drive to Florida City, Shiner fell asleep with his teeth bared, like a mutt. Bode and Chub used the quiet time to discuss the events of the night before. Were they really followed, or was the car they’d heard simply lost in the farmlands?
Bode Gazzer voted for lost. He insisted he would have noticed somebody tailing them from the restaurant.
“Maybe if you was sober,” Chub said.
“It was nobody after us, I guarantee. We was just jumpy from all the boy’s shootin’.”
Chub said, “I ain’t so sure.”
He had a strong feeling that their luck was going rotten. He became certain after breakfast, at the diner, when the waitress failed to return promptly with the credit card. Chub spotted her consulting with the restaurant manager at the cash register. In one hand the manager was holding the stolen Visa. In his other hand was the telephone.
Chub whispered across the table, “Jig’s up.”
Bodean Gazzer went rigid. Working his toes back into his cowboy boots, he accidentally kicked Chub in the knee. Irritably Chub glanced under the table and said, “Watch it.”
Shiner, bug-eyed, twisting his paper napkin into a knot: “What the hell do we do now!”
“Run, boy. What else?” Chub playfully rapped his knuckles on Shiner’s bare marbled scalp. “Run like the fuckin’ wind.”
13
Bode Gazzer’s fondness for stolen credit cards was evident from the double-digit entry on his rap sheet, which also included nine convictions for check kiting, five for welfare fraud, four for stealing electricity, three for looting lobster traps and two for willful destruction of private property (a parking meter and an ATM machine).
All this was revealed to Moffitt soon after JoLayne Lucks called to report the license tag of the red pickup truck carrying the men who’d attacked her. The tag number was fed into one computer, which produced the name and birth date of Bodean James Gazzer, and that was fed into another computer, which produced Mr. Gazzer’s arrest record. Moffitt was surprised by nothing he found, least of all the fact that despite his many crimes, Bode Gazzer had cumulatively spent less than twenty-three months of his whole worthless life behind bars.