“That’s not a circus person you’re describing. That’s Jesus. Or maybe Jerry Garcia.”
“Whatever,” Joe Winder said. “Did you see anybody on the road? That’s all I’m asking.”
“Nope,” Carrie said. “I really ought to be on my way. What’d you decide about calling the cops?”
“Not a good idea,” said Winder. “Especially with Dr. Koocher still missing. Maybe the bad guys’ll call back.”
“The creeps who did this to you?” Carrie sounded incredulous. “I don’t think so, Joe.”
She didn’t say anything for several moments. Joe Winder tried to read her expression but she had turned away.
“How much does she make, your girlfriend, talking sexy on the phone?”
“Not much. Two hundred a week, sometimes two fifty. They get a bonus for selling videos. And panties, too. Twenty bucks a pair. They buy ’em wholesale from Zayre’s.”
“Two fifty, that stinks,” said Carrie Lanier. “But, hey, I’ve been there. You do what you have to.”
“Nina’s got no complaints,” said Joe Winder. “She says there’s a creative component to every job; the trick is finding it.”
Carrie turned around, glowing. “She’s absolutely right, your girlfriend is. You know what I did before I got my SAG card? I worked in a cough-drop factory. Wrapping the lozenges in foil, one at a time. The only way I kept from going crazy—each cough drop, I’d make a point to wrap it differently from the others. One I’d do in squares, the next I’d do in a triangle, the one after that I’d fold into a rhombus or something. Believe me, it got to be a challenge, especially at thirty lozenges per minute. That was our quota, or else we got docked.”
Joe Winder said the first dumb thing that popped into his brain. “I wonder if Nina has a quota.”
“She sounds like she’s doing just fine,” Carrie said. “Listen, Joe, I think you ought to know. There’s a rumor going around about the rat doctor. Supposedly they found a note.”
“Yeah?”
“You know what kind of note I mean. The bad kind. Good-bye, cruel world, and all that. Supposedly they found it in his desk at the lab.”
Joe Winder said, “What exactly did it say, this supposed note?”
“I don’t know all the details.” Carrie Lanier stood up to go. “Get some rest. It’s just a rumor.”
“Give me another pill, and sit down for a second.”
“Nope, I can’t.”
“Get me another goddamn pill!”
“Go to sleep, Joe.”
By eight the next morning, a crowd had gathered beneath the Card Sound Bridge to see the dead man hanging from the center span. From a distance it looked like a wax dummy with an elongated neck. Up close it looked much different.
The crowd was made up mostly of tourist families on their way down to the Florida Keys. They parked haphazardly on the shoulder of the road and clambered down to where the police cars and marine patrols were positioned, blue lights flashing in that insistent syncopation of emergency. A few of the tourist husbands took out portable video cameras to record the excitement, but the best vantage was from the decks of the yachts and sleek sailboats that had Cropped anchor in the channel near the bridge. The mast of one of the sloops had snagged on the hanging dead man and torn off his trousers as the vessel had passed through the bridge at dawn. By now everyone had noticed that the corpse wore no underwear.
A man from the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office stood on the jetty and looked up at the dead body swinging in the breeze, forty feet over the water. Standing next to the man from the medical examiner’s was FBI Agent Billy Hawkins, who was asking lots of questions that the man from the medical examiner’s didn’t answer. He was keenly aware that the FBI held absolutely no authority in this matter.
“I was on my way to the park,” Agent Hawkins was saying, “and I couldn’t help but notice.”
With cool politeness, the man from the medical examiner’s office said: “Not much we can tell you at the moment. Except he’s definitely dead, that much is obvious.” The coroner knew that most FBI agents went their whole careers without ever setting eyes on an actual corpse. The way Billy Hawkins was staring, he hadn’t seen many.