Son, I hope you are alive to read these words. I’m sorry the way things turned out. Dad should’ve signed off right there, but grace and decency were never his strong suits.
Everything I did was for you, he wrote. Every move I made, right or wrong.
Which was crap, an unnecessary lie. It mildly saddened Augustine but didn’t embitter him. He was beyond all that. The airplane accident had pruned his emotions down to the roots. Nothing affected him the way it had before, which was fine. He decided everyone could benefit from a short coma. Wipe the slate clean.
So what if it took him years to come up with a new agenda? Here it was. Here she was.
Dad would not approve. Fortunately, Dad was not a factor.
Augustine heard the closing of a door, footsteps slapping in the puddles, voices advancing across the motel parking lot. He took three deep breaths. Checked the safety on the dart rifle.
He was glad for the weather, which misted the Jeep’s windows and made him invisible from the outside. The voices grew sharper-two men arguing. Augustine didn’t recognize them. Perhaps Snapper and somebody else, but who?
Loud words broke through the whisper of the rain. Augustine decided not to give himself away unless Bonnie Lamb was in trouble. The argument moved closer. Then came a deep huff, the sounds of a clumsy struggle; a bottle shattering on the pavement.
One of the men blurted: “Hold the damn gun while I strangle this fucker.”
Snapper’s consternation about the two remaining bullets in the .357 was well founded. A crack marksman he was not.
A police report dated July 7, 1989, showed that one Lester Maddox Parsons was arrested for shooting Theodore “Sunny” Shea outside the Satellite Grille in Dania, Florida. The victim was not just a garden-variety crack dealer, as Snapper claimed after the incident. In truth, Sunny Shea was his longtime business partner. The scope of their enterprises extended beyond drugs to stolen guns, jewelry, clothing, patio furniture, stereos, even a shipment of baby food on one occasion. Eventually Sunny Shea came to suspect Snapper of cheating him on the proceeds, and confronted him with the accusation one humid summer night in the doorway of the Satellite Grille, before sixteen eyewitnesses.
Snapper’s indignant response was to display a 9mm Clock (swiped from the glove box of an unmarked Coral Springs police car) and attempt to empty said weapon into Sunny Shea. In all, Snapper fired eleven times from a distance of eight feet. Only six rounds struck Sunny Shea, and not one nicked a vital organ-quite a feat, considering that Sunny Shea weighed only one hundred thirty pounds and hadn’t an ounce of fat on his body. The hapless shooting exhibition was even more remarkable because Snapper was stone sober at the time.
Sunny Shea never lost consciousness, and was extremely cooperative when police inquired about the identity of his assailant. The two detectives who hauled Lester Maddox Parsons to the Broward County Jail ridiculed him mercilessly about his lousy aim.
The next morning, when they came to his cell to inform him that the charge of attempted first-degree murder had been upgraded, Snapper glowed with vindication. Then he learned it wasn’t one of his shots that had killed his scrawny, obnoxious partner-some bone-head in the emergency room had injected Theodore “Sunny” Shea with an antibiotic to which he was virulently, and fatally, allergic.
Snapper pleaded out to a chickenshit manslaughter and got easy time, but his confidence in the efficacy of handguns was ruined forever. Two bullets in a .357 was scarcely better than no bullets at all.
Which was why he didn’t want to waste them on Avila, the whiny spic. He was the last guy on earth that Snapper expected to see at Paradise Palms. He’d materialized like a drowned ghost out of the rainstorm, bitching about the roofing deposit that Snapper had ripped off from Mrs Whitmark.
“You know who she is? You know who she’s married to?” Avila was screeching. Skink and the two women retreated to a dry vantage, under the eaves of the motel, while Avila chased Snapper around the parking lot like a terrier. Their conversation was difficult to follow, but Edie Marsh got the substance of it: Snapper had made a seven-thousand-dollar score.