“But—”
“Leave the goddamn truck! Jesus Willy, we got twenty-eight million bucks. Buy a whole Dodge dealership, you want.”
Sullenly Bode Gazzer joined Chub in loading the stolen boat. The last thing to come out of the pickup was the rolled-up chamois.
“The hell’s in there?” Chub said. “Or shouldn’t I ast. Sounds like a bag a Budweiser cans.”
Bode said, “The AR-15. I took it apart to clean.”
“God help us. Let’s go.”
Bode knew better than to ask for the wheel; he could see there’d been problems on the boat. Chub’s clothing was soaked, and his ponytail was garnished with a strand of cinnamon-colored seaweed. The deck and vinyl bucket seats were littered with small broken pieces of what appeared to be bluish ceramic, as if Chub had smashed a plate.
As they idled away from the ramp, Bode turned for one last look at his red Ram truck, which he fully expected to be stripped or stolen outright by dusk. He noticed a man standing a short distance up the shore, at the fringe of some mangroves. It was a white man, so Bode Gazzer wasn’t alarmed; probably just a fisherman.
As the boat labored to gain speed, Bode shouted: “How’s she run?”
“Like a one-legged whore.”
“What’s all the mud and shit in here?”
“I can’t hear you,” Chub yelled back.
Given the slop on deck and the halting performance of the outboards, it was pointless for Chub to deny that he’d run the thing aground. He saw no reason, however, to tell Bodean Gazzer how close he’d come to losing half the lottery jackpot.
Bravely kicking back to the shallows.
Flailing and groping in the marl and grasses until he’d found it in eighteen inches of water: the Lotto ticket, waving in the current like a small miracle.
Naturally it was in the claws of a blue crab. The nasty fucker had staked a claim to the moldy Band-Aid on which the ticket was stuck. The delirious Chub hadn’t hesitated to leap upon the feisty scavenger, which gouged him mercilessly with one claw while clinging with the other to its sodden prize. With the crab fastened intractably to his right hand, Chub had clambered over the transom and thrashed the little bastard to pieces against the gunwale. In this manner he had reclaimed the Lotto ticket, but victory came with a price. The only intact segment of the defunct crab was the cream-blue pincers that hung from the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger; a macabre broach.
Bodean Gazzer noticed it immediately, but decided not to say a word. Thinking: I shoulda kept drivin’ straight to Tall’hassee. I shoulda never turnt around.
“I got a map,” he shouted over the hack of the mud-choked Mercurys.
No audible response from Chub.
“I picked out a island, too.”
Chub seemed to nod.
“Pearl Key!” Bode shouted. “We’ll be safe there.”
Chub launched a gooey hawker over the windshield. “First we gotta make a stop.”
“I know, I know.” Bode Gazzer let the engines drown his words. “Jewfish goddamn Creek.”
19
Demencio spent all day painting the rest of JoLayne’s cooters. Without a reliable biblical archive, it was difficult to find thirty-three separate portraits for duplication on turtle shells. In the interest of time Demencio chose a generic saintly countenance, varying the details only slightly from cooter to cooter.
While the reptiles were drying, Trish burst into the house and exclaimed: “Four hundred and twenty bucks!”
Demencio’s eyebrows danced—it was a gangbuster of a visitation.
“They flat-out love this guy,” said his wife.
“Sinclair? My theory, it’s more the apostles.”
“Honey, it’s the whole package. Him, the weeping Mary, the cooters… There’s a little something for everybody.”
It was true; Demencio had never seen a group of pilgrims so enthralled.
Trish said, “Just think what we could clear, Christmas week. When did JoLayne say she’ll be back?”
“Any day.” Demencio began capping the paint bottles.
“I bet she’d loan us the cooters over the holidays!”
One thing about Trish, she had a ton of faith in human nature. “Loan or rent?” said Demencio. “And even if she did, what about him?”
“Sinclair?”
“He ain’t wrapped for the long haul. By tomorrow he’s liable to be flashin’ his weenie at old ladies.”