Trooper says, “Must’ve been some cat to give you a bite like that.”
“Yeah, I ought to put the damn thing to sleep.”
“Sounds like a smart idea,” says the trooper, “before he bites you someplace else.”
And then the sonofabitch touches the brim of his Stetson and says so long. Like John Fucking Wayne.
And here comes Winder, cruising out of the apartment with an armful of clothes. Gets in the car—not his car, somebody else’s; somebody with an employee sticker from the Kingdom—and drives off with the radio blasting.
Pedro Luz lays back cool and sly, maybe half a mile, waiting until the cocky bastard reaches that long empty stretch on Card Sound Road, south of the Carysfort Marina. That’s where Pedro aims to make the big move.
Until the Saab dies. Grinds to a miserable wheezing halt. A Saab!
Pedro Luz is so pissed he yanks the steering wheel off its column and heaves it into a tamarind tree. Only afterwards does it dawn on him that Mr. X isn’t going to appreciate having a $35,000 automobile and no way to steer it.
An hour later, here comes Pascual’s Wrecker Service.
Guy lifts the hood, can’t find a thing. Slides underneath, zero. Then he says maybe Pedro ran out of gas, and Pedro says don’t be an asshole. Guy pulls off the gas cap, closes one eye and looks inside, like he can actually see something.
Then he sniffs real hard, rubs his nose, sniffs again. Then he starts laughing like a fruit.
“Your friends fucked you up real good,” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
“Come here and take a whiff.”
“No, thanks,” Pedro says.
Guy hoots. “Now I seen everything.”
Pedro’s trying to figure out when it happened. Figures somebody snuck up and did it while he was talking to that hardass trooper. Which means the trooper was in on it.
“Did a number on your engine,” says the tow-truck man, chuckling way too much.
Pedro Luz grabs him by the arm until his fingers lock on bone. He says, “So tell me. What exactly’s in the gas tank?”
“Jack Daniels,” the guy says. “I know that smell anywhere.”
So now Pedro’s watching him put the hook to Mr. Kingsbury’s Saab and wondering what else could go wrong. Thinking about the monkeys and shithead burglars and what happened to Churrito. Thinking about the black state trooper busting his balls for no reason, and how somebody managed to pour booze in the tank without Pedro even knowing it.
Pedro thinks he’d better shoot some horse juice in his arms as soon as possible, and get tight on Joe Winder’s ass.
In one of his pockets he finds the scrap of paper where he wrote the decal number off the car Winder was driving. It’s not much, but it’s the only thing he’s got to show for a long sorry morning.
So Pedro tells the tow-truck guy he’s going to ride in the busted Saab on the way to the shop. Use Kingsbury’s car phone to make a few calls.
Guy says no way, it’s against company policy. Gotta sit up front in the truck.
Which is not what Pedro wants to hear after such a shitty day. So he tackles the guy and yanks his arms out of the sockets one at a time, pop-pop. Leaves him thrashing in the grass by the side of the road.
Jumps in the tow truck and heads for the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills.
The Mothers of Wilderness listened solemnly as Molly McNamara recounted the brutal assault. They were gathered in the Florida room of Molly’s old house, where a potluck supper had been arranged on a calico tablecloth. Normally a hungry bunch, the Mothers scarcely touched the food; a huge bacon-cheese ball lay undisturbed on a sterling platter—a sure sign that the group was distracted.
And no wonder: Molly’s story was appalling. No one dreamed that the battle against Falcon Trace would ever come to violence. That Molly had been attacked by thugs in her own apartment was horrifying; equally unsettling was her lurid description of the finger-biting episode. In disbelief, several of the older members fiddled frenetically with the controls to their hearing aids.