He was therefore flabbergasted to feel the gun barrel at the base of his neck. Shiner (who’d detected Chub’s arm slipping behind the seat and figured he was just stretching) jerked at a sharp noise near his left ear—the click of the hammer being cocked. He turned only enough to see the Colt Python pointed at the colonel. “Pull over,” Chub said.
“What for?” Bode asked.
“Yer own good.”
As soon as his partner stopped the truck, Chub eased down the hammer of the gun. “Son,” he said to Shiner, “I got another mission for you. Provided you wanna stay in the brotherhood.”
Shiner flinched like a spanked puppy; he’d thought his place in the White Clarion Aryans was solid.
“It’s no sweat,” Chub was saying. “You’ll dig it.” He stepped out of the pickup and motioned with the gun for Shiner to do the same.
Being half drunk and exhausted did not affect Bodean Gazzer’s low threshold of annoyance. Chain of command obviously meant nothing to Chub; the goon operated on blood impulse and reckless emotion. If it continued, they’d all end up in maximum security at Raiford—not the ideal venue for a white-supremacy crusade.
When Chub reentered the truck, Bode said, “This shit’s gotta stop. Where’s the boy?”
“I sent him back up the road.”
“For what?”
“To finish some bidness. Let’s go.” Chub, laying the revolver on the front seat between them; Shiner’s spot.
“Well, goddamn.” Bode could hear the kid’s golf spikes clacking on the pavement.
“Jest drive,” Chub said.
“Anywheres in particular?”
“Wherever you was goin’ is fine. Long as it ain’t too fur from Jewfish Creek.” Chub launched a brown stream of spit out the window. “Go ‘head and ast.”
Bode Gazzer said, “OK. How come Jewfish Creek?”
“On account of I like the name.”
“Ah.” On account of you’re a certified moron, Bode thought.
By daybreak they were at a marina in Key Largo, picking out a boat to steal.
Tom Krome’s death was announced with an end-of-the-world headline in The Register, but the news failed to shake American journalism to its foundations. The New York Times didn’t carry the story, while the Associated Press condensed The Register’s melodramatic front-page spread to eleven sober inches. The AP’s rewrite desk circumspectly noted that, while the medical examiner was confident of his preliminary findings, the body found in Tom Krome’s burned house had yet to be positively identified. The Register’s managing editor seemed certain of the worst—he was quoted as saying Krome was “quite possibly” murdered as the result of a sensitive newspaper assignment. Pressed for details, the managing editor replied he was not at liberty to discuss the investigation.
Many papers across the United States picked up the Associated Press story and reduced it to four or five paragraphs. A slightly longer version appeared in The Missoulian, the daily that serves Missoula and other communities in the greater Bitterroot valley of Montana. Fortuitously, it was here Mary Andrea Finley Krome had hooked up with a little-theater production of The Glass Menagerie. Although she was not a great fan of Tennessee Williams (and, in any case, preferred musicals over dramas), she needed the work. The prospect of performing in small-town obscurity depressed Mary Andrea, but her mood brightened after she made friends with another actress, a dance major at the state university. Her name was Lorie, or possibly Loretta—Mary Andrea reminded herself to check in the playbill. On Mary Andrea’s second morning in town, Lorie or Loretta introduced her to a cozy coffee shop where students and local artists gathered, not far from the new city carousel. The coffee shop featured old stuffed sofas upon which Mary Andrea and her new pal contentedly settled with their cappuccinos and croissants. They spread the newspaper between them.
It was Mary Andrea’s habit to begin each morning with an update of entertainment and celebrity happenings, of which several were capsulized in The Missoulian. Tom Cruise was being paid $22 million to star in a movie about a narcoleptic heart surgeon who must attempt a six-hour transplant operation on his girlfriend (Mary Andrea wondered which of Hollywood’s anorexic blow-job artists had won the part). Also, it was reported that one of Mary Andrea’s least-favorite television programs, Sag Harbor Saga, was being canceled after a three-year run. (Mary Andrea feared it wasn’t the last America would see of Siobhan Davies, the insufferable Irish witch who’d beaten her out for the role of Darien, the predatory textile heiress.) And, finally, a drug-loving actor with whom Mary Andrea once had done Shakespeare in the Park was under arrest in New York after disrobing in the lobby of Trump Tower and, during his flight to escape, head-butting the beefeater at the Fifth Avenue entrance. (Mary Andrea took no joy from the actor’s plight, for he had shown her nothing but kindness during The Merchant of Venice, when a disoriented June bug had flown into Mary Andrea’s right ear and interrupted for several awkward moments Portia’s famous peroration on the quality of mercy.)