Bright lights started strobing everywhere. In the reflec- 1 tion of the puddles. On the coral-colored walls of the ; motel. In the fronds of the sabal palms. ;
Snapper shoved the Jeep into Neutral. “Fucking ; cops!” [
“No way,” Edie said. But she knew he was right.
A figure in gray was approaching the Cherokee. Snapper rolled down the window. It was a state trooper; big black sonofabitch, too. He’d parked his patrol car at an angle, to block the exit.
Snapper’s mind raced, half drunk, half wired: Christ Almighty, would Momma and Pappy pitch a fit they ever heard I got taken down by a nigger cop. Momma especially.
In a flash Snapper figured out what must’ve happened: The lady trooper either was alive, or had survived long enough after the beating to give a description of the Jeep, and maybe even of Snapper himself.
So this was the big black posse.
Snapper knew he should’ve ditched the Cherokee after it happened. Sure, park the fucker in the nearest canal and call it a deal. But, oh Jesus, how he loved that stereo system! Reba, Garth, Hank Jr., they’d never sounded so sweet. His whole life Snapper had wanted a car with decent speakers. So he’d stayed with the stolen Jeep because of its awesome stereo-and here was the price to be paid.
A big black motherfucker of a cop, coming across the parking lot, drawing his gun.
The one-eyed man tapped him on the shoulder. “Haul ass, chief.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what I’d do.”
“No,” murmured Edie Marsh. “We’ve had it.”
Snapper told her to shut up. He snatched the .357 off the seat, pointed it out the window and somehow managed to shoot the trooper in the center of the chest. The man fell backward, landing with a splash.
“Good night, nigger,” Snapper said.
Skink went rigid. Bonnie and Edie screamed. Snapper slammed the Jeep into gear and peeled rubber.
“You see thaa-aatt?” he whinnied. “One shot, one nigger cop! Whooheee! One shot!”
In the cargo well of the Cherokee, Augustine popped up on one knee. The stubby dart rifle was at his shoulder, the sights trained on the ragged hairline of Snapper’s neck. He was surprised when Skink turned and shoved him back to the floor.
That’s when the rear window of the Jeep vaporized.
The explosion caught Snapper furrowed in concentration, as he labored to steer around the parked Highway Patrol car, lit up like a Mardi Gras float.
Snapper ducked, peering up at the rearview. He saw the black trooper lying in a puddle, his arm waving but not aiming the smoking gun. Then the trooper went limp, and Snapper cackled.
The Cherokee fishtailed on the rain-slicked asphalt as it entered the highway. Edie Marsh hunched like an aged nun, sobbing into her hands. Skink had pulled Bonnie Lamb into his lap, out of the gunfire’s path. Huddled in the cargo hatch, Augustine silently plucked nuggets of safety glass from his clothes.
Snapper was loopy on Midols, Johnnie Walker and pure criminal adrenaline. “You see that big nigger go down?” he yammered at the top of his lungs. “You see him go down!”
Christophe Michel spent the night of the hurricane in the safe and convivial atmosphere of Key West. At noon the next morning he put on the television and recognized, with cramps of dread, the bombed-out remains of a luxury housing development called Gables-on-the-Bay. The subdivision had been built by a company called
Zenith Custom Homes, which not only employed Christophe Michel as a senior structural engineer but advertised his ecumenical credentials in its sales brochures. Michel had been recruited from one of France’s oldest engineering firms, which had not energetically protested his departure. Among the fields in which Michel sorely lacked experience was that of girding single-family structures to withstand the force of tropical cyclones. His new employer assured him there was nothing to it, and FedExed him a copy of the South Florida Building Code, which weighed several pounds. Christophe Michel skimmed it on the flight from Orly to Miami.
He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as “South Florida’s first hurricane-proof community.” Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the Titanic was promoted as unsinkable.