Hours later, at a busy truck stop in Gainesville, Neria tried another call to Mr Varga, her former neighbor in Miami. This time his phone was working; Varga answered on the third ring. He insisted he knew nothing about Neria’s husband and a young blond hussy loading up a rental truck.
“Fact, I haven’t seen Tony since maybe two days after the hurricane.”
“Are there still strangers at the house?” Neria asked.
“All the time, people come and go. But no blondes.”
“Who are they, Leon?”
“I don’t know. Friends and cousins of Tony, I heard. They got two dogs bark half the night. I figured Tony’s letting ’em watch the place.”
Varga shared his theory: Neria’s husband was lying low, due to adverse publicity about the mobile-home industry. “Every damn one blew to smithereens in the storm,” Varga related. “The papers and TV are making a big stink. Supposedly there’s going to be an investigation. The FBI is what they say.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“That’s the rumor,” Varga said. “Your Tony, he’s no fool. I think he’s making himself invisible till all this cools down, these people come to their senses. I mean, it’s not his fault those trailers fell apart. God’s will is what it was. He’s testing us, same as He did with Noah.”
“Except Noah wasn’t insured,” said Neria Torres.
Mr Varga was right about one thing: Tony wouldn’t stick around if there was heat. His style was to take a nice hotel room and ride things out. In the meantime, he’d have some of his deadbeat relatives or white-trash salesmen pals stay with their bimbos in the house on Calusa. Tony wouldn’t be far away; never would he skip town without getting his paws on the Midwest Casualty money.
Neria was buoyed. The story about the young blonde and Brooklyn obviously was bullshit, a ruse cooked up by her husband. Wishful thinking, too, Neria mused. Talking to Mr Varga validated her decision to return to Miami.
“Are you really heading home?” he asked. “You and the mister give it one more try?”
“Stranger things have happened,” said Neria Torres. She made Mr Varga swear on a stack of Holy Bibles not to breathe a word. She said it would ruin everything if Tony found out she was coming.
TWENTY-THREE
Snapper instructed Edie Marsh to take the Turnpike, and watch the damn speedometer. He was pressed against the passenger-side door, keeping the stolen .357 pointed at the freak in the army greens. The -young woman was no immediate threat.
The stranger blinked like a craggy tortoise. He said: “How much you get for her ring?”
Snapper frowned. The fucker knew-but how? Edie Marsh didn’t take her eyes off the road. “What’s he talking about? Whose ring?”
Snapper spied, in the lower margin of his vision, the wandering prow of his jawbone. He said, “Everybody shut the fuck up!”
Leaning forward, the longhair said to Edie: “Your rough-tough boyfriend beat up a policewoman. Ripped off her gun and her mother’s wedding band-he didn’t -tell you?”
Edie shivered. Maybe it was his breath on the nape of her neck, or the slow rumble of his voice, or what he was saying. Meanwhile Snapper waved the police pistol and hollered for the whole world to shut up or fucking die!
He jammed a CD into the dashboard stereo: ninety-five decibels of country heartache. Within minutes his
fury passed, soothed by Reba’s crooning or possibly the five white pills Edie had given him back at the house. OK, boy, now think.
The original plan was to waylay the nutty old man with the hookers. No problem there. A guy Snapper knew from his Lauderdale days, Johnny Horn, had a small motel down in the Keys. Ideal spot for Levon Stichler to take a short vacation. Snapper’s idea was to get one a them cheap disposable cameras, so the hookers could take some pictures, the kind a respectable man wouldn’t want his grandkiddies to see. Two or three days tied naked to a motel bed, the old fart wouldn’t care to recall he’d ever set foot at 15600 Calusa Drive. If he promised to behave, then possibly the disposable camera would get disposed of. The old man could make his way back to Miami with nothing but a bed rash and a sore cock to show for the experience.