“Where are our boys?”
“Still in the truck.”
JoLayne said, “What d’you think—they meeting somebody?”
“I don’t know. They’ve been up and down, scoping out the boats.”
Squinting at the windshield’s glare, JoLayne groped for her sunglasses. She saw the red Dodge pickup at the opposite end of the marina, parked by the front door of the tackle shop.
“Again with the wheelchair zone?”
“Yep.”
“Assholes.”
They’d decided that the man driving the truck must be Bodean Gazzer, because that was the name on the registration, according to Tom’s source at the highway patrol. Bullet holes notwithstanding, the pristine condition of the vehicle suggested an owner who would not casually loan it to fleeing felons. Tom and JoLayne still had no name for Gazzer’s partner, the one with the ponytail and the bad eye.
And now a new mystery: a third man, who’d been abruptly put out along the road in the pitch dark of the night—JoLayne and Tom watching from the parking lot of a video store, where they’d pulled over to wait. Something in the bearing of the third man had looked familiar to JoLayne, but in the blue-gray darkness his facial features were indiscernible. The headlights of a passing car had revealed a chubby figure with a disconsolate trudge. Also: An Australian bush hat.
There was no sign of him in the morning, at the marina. Krome didn’t know what to make of it.
JoLayne asked if he’d phoned his folks.
“They didn’t even know I was dead. Now they’re really confused,” Krome said. “Whose turn on the radio?”
“Mine.” She reached for the dial.
During the long hours in the car, the two of them had encountered a potentially serious divergence of musical tastes. Tom believed that driving in South Florida required constant hard-rock accompaniment, while JoLayne favored songs that were breezy and soothing to the nerves. In the interest of fairness, they’d agreed to alternate control of the radio. If she lucked into a Sade, he got a Tom Petty. If he got the Kinks, she got an Annie Lennox. And so on. Occasionally they found common ground. Van Morrison. Dire Straits. “The Girl with the Faraway Eyes,” which they sang together as they rode through Florida City. There were even a few mutual abominations (a Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson duet, for instance) that propelled them to lunge simultaneously for the tuning button.
“Here’s what I noticed,” said JoLayne, adjusting the volume.
“Who’s that?” Krome demanded.
“Celine Dion.”
“Geez, it’s Saturday morning. Have some mercy.”
“You’ll get your turn.” JoLayne wore a shrewd, schoolteacher smile. “Now, Tom, here’s what I noticed: You don’t like many black musical artists.”
“Oh, bullshit.” He was truly stung.
“Name one.”
“Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix—”
“A live one.”
“B.B. King, Al Green, Billy Preston. The Hootie guy, what’s his name—”
“You’re pushing it,” JoLayne said.
“Prince!”
“Oh, come on.”
Krome said, “Damn right. ‘Little Red Corvette.’ ”
“I guess it’s possible.”
“Christ, what if I said something like that to you?”
“You’re right,” said JoLayne. “I take it all back.”
” ‘A live one.’ Gimme a break.”
She eyed him over the rims of her peach-tinted shades. “You’re pretty touchy about this stuff, aren’t you? I suppose that’s the white man’s burden. At least the liberal white man.”
“Who said I was liberal.”
“You’re cute when you’re on the defensive. Want the rest of my coffee? I gotta pee.”
“Not now,” Tom Krome said. “Take off your hat and duck.”
The red pickup was rolling toward them, in reverse. The driver backed up to a slip where a twenty-foot boat was tied. It had twin out-boards, a flecked blue-and-gray finish and a folding Bimini top. From the tackle shop you couldn’t have seen it, moored between a towering Hatteras and a boxy houseboat.
Peering over the dashboard, Krome watched a tall, unshaven passenger get out of the truck: the ponytailed man. He carried a bottle of beer and some tools—a screwdriver, a wire cutter, a socket wrench. The man climbed somewhat unsteadily into the boat and disappeared behind the steering console.
“What’s going on?” JoLayne, inching up in the seat.
Krome told her to stay down. He saw a puff of blue smoke, then heard the outboards start. The ponytailed man stood up and signaled laconically at the driver of the pickup truck. Then the ponytailed man untied the lines and with both hands pushed the boat away from the pilings.