None of that mattered just south of Ocala. What did was that he had to piss like a racehorse, whoever he was. Hed gone two beers over his usual limit at the Pot o Gold (maybe three) and had set the Jags cruise control at sixty-five, not wanting to see any strobing red lights in his rearview mirror tonight. He might have paid for the Jag with books written under the Hardin name, but it was as John Andrew Dykstra that he lived the majority of his life, and that was the name the flashlight would shine on if he was asked for his operators license. And Hardin might have drunk the beers in the Pot o Gold, but if a Florida state trooper produced the dreaded Breathalyzer kit in its little blue plastic case, it was Dykstras intoxicated molecules that would wind up inside the gadgets educated guts. And on a Thursday night in June, he would be easy pickings no matter who he was, because all the snowbirds had gone back to Michigan and he had I-75 pretty much to himself.
Yet there was a fundamental problem with beer any undergraduate understood: You couldnt buy it, only rent it. Luckily, there was a rest stop just six or seven miles south of Ocala, and there he would make a little room.
Meanwhile, though, who was he?
Certainly he had come to Sarasota sixteen years before as John Dykstra, and it was under that name that he had taught English at the Sarasota branch of FSU since 1990. Then, in 1994, hed decided to skip teaching summer classes and have a fling at writing a suspense novel instead. This had not been his idea. He had an agent in New York, not one of the superstuds, but an honest enough guy with a reasonable track record, who had been able to sell four of his new clients short stories (under the Dykstra name) to various literary magazines that paid in the low hundreds. The agents name was Jack Golden, and while he had nothing but praise for the stories, he dismissed the resulting checks as grocery money. It had been Jack whod pointed out that all John Dykstras published stories had a high narrative line (which was agentese for a plot, as far as Johnny could tell) and suggested his new client might be able to make $40,000 or $50,000 a whack writing suspense novels of a hundred thousand words.
You could do that in a summer if you found a hook to hang your hat on and then stuck to it, hed told Dykstra in a letter. (They hadnt progressed to using the phone and the fax at that point.) And it would be twice as much as youd make teaching classes in the June and August sessions down there at Mangrove U. If youre going to try it, my friend, now is the timebefore you find yourself with a wife and two-point-five children.
There had been no potential wife on the horizon (nor was there now), but Dykstra had taken Jacks point; rolling the dice did not get easier as one grew older. And a wife and kids werent the only responsibilities one took on as time slipped quietly by. There was always the lure of the credit cards, for instance. Credit cards put barnacles on your hull and slowed you down. Credit cards were agents of the norm and worked in favor of the sure thing.
When the summer-teaching contract came in January of 94, he had returned it unsigned to the department head with a brief explanatory note: I thought this summer Id try to write a novel instead.
Eddie Wassermans reply had been friendly but firm: Thats fine, Johnny, but I cant guarantee the position will be there next summer. The man in the chair always gets right of first refusal.
Dykstra had considered this, but only briefly; by then he had an idea. Better still, he had a character: The Dog, literary father of Jaguars and houses on Macintosh Road, was waiting to be born, and God bless the Dogs homicidal heart.
Ahead of him was the white arrow on the blue sign twinkling in his headlights, and the ramp curving off to the left, and the high-intensity arc-sodium lights illuminating the pavement so brightly that the ramp looked like part of a stage set. He put on his blinker, slowed to forty, and left the interstate.
Halfway up, the ramp branched: trucks and Winnebagos to the right, folks in Jaguars straight ahead. Fifty yards beyond the split was the rest stop, a low building of beige cinder block that also looked like a stage set under the brilliant lights. What would it be in a movie? A missile-command center, maybe? Sure, why not. A missile-command center way out in the boonies, and the guy in charge is suffering from some sort of carefully concealed (but progressive) mental illness. Hes seeing Russians everywhere, Russians coming out of the damn woodwork or make it Al Qaeda terrorists, that was probably more au courant. The Russians were sort of out as potential villains these days unless they were pushing dope or teenage hookers. And the villain doesnt matter anyway, its all a fantasy, but the guys finger is nevertheless itching to push the red button, and
And he needed to pee, so put the imagination on the back burner for a while, please and thank you. Besides, there was no place for the Dog in a story like that. The Dog was more of an urban warrior, as hed said at the Pot o Gold earlier tonight. (Nice phrase, too.) Still, the idea of that crazy missile-silo commander had some power, didnt it? A handsome guy the men love him looks perfectly normal on the outside
There was only one other car in the sprawling parking area at this hour, one of those PT Cruisers that never failed to amuse himthey looked like toy gangster cars out of the 1930s.
He parked four or five slots down from it, turned off the engine, then paused to give the deserted parking lot a quick scan before getting out. This wasnt the first time hed stopped at this particular rest area on his way back from the Pot, and once hed been both amused and horrified to see an alligator lumbering across the deserted pavement toward the sugar pines beyond the rest area, looking somehow like an elderly, overweight businessman on his way to a meeting. There was no gator tonight, and he got out, cocking his key-pak over his shoulder and pushing the padlock icon. Tonight there was only him and Mr. PT Cruiser. The Jag gave an obedient twitter, and for a moment he saw his shadow in the brief flash of its headlights only whose shadow was it? Dykstras or Hardins?
Johnny Dykstras, he decided. Hardin was gone now, left behind thirty or forty miles back. But this had been his night to give the brief (and mostly humorous) after-dinner presentation to the rest of the Florida Thieves, and he thought Mr. Hardin had done a fairly good job, ending with a promise to send the Dog after anyone who didnt contribute generously to this years charity, which happened to be Sunshine Readers, a non-profit that provided audiotape texts and articles for blind scholars.
He walked across the parking lot to the building, the heels of his cowboy boots clocking. John Dykstra never would have worn faded jeans and cowboy boots to a public function, especially one where he was the featured speaker, but Hardin was a different breed of hot rod. Unlike Dykstra (who could be fussy), Hardin didnt care much what people thought of his appearance.
The rest-area building was divided into three parts: the womens room on the left, the mens room on the right, and a big porchlike portico in the middle where you could pick up pamphlets on various central-and south-Florida attractions. There were also snack machines, two soft-drink machines, and a coin-op map dispenser that took a ridiculous number of quarters. Both sides of the short cinder-block entryway were papered with missing-child posters that always gave Dykstra a chill. How many of the kids in the photos, he always wondered, were buried in the damp, sandy soil or feeding the gators in the Glades? How many of them were growing up in the belief that the drifters who had snatched them (and from time to time sexually molested them or rented them out) were their mothers or fathers? Dykstra did not like to look at their open, innocent faces or consider the desperation underlying the absurd reward numbers$10,000, $20,000, $50,000, in one case $100,000 (that last one for a smiling towheaded girl from Fort Myers who had disappeared in 1980 and would now be a woman in young middle age, if she was still alive at all which she almost certainly was not). There was also a sign informing the public that barrel-picking was prohibited, and another stating that loitering longer than an hour in this rest area was prohibitedPOLICE TAKE NOTICE.