All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-w-the-Bay-a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.
With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently planned his departure from the United States. He closed his bank accounts, shuttered the condo in Key West, packed the Seville and set out for the mainland.
The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in
American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.
When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.
“Give us your goddamn car,” the man said. “Certainly.”
“Don’t stare at me like that!”
“Sorry.” The engineer’s trained eye calculated the skew of the man’s jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.
“I got one bullet left!” “I believe you,” said Christophe Michel. The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly. Michel asked, “May I keep my suitcase?” “Fuck, no!” “I understand.”
He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.
“My life savings just drove away,” he said. “May I borrow the telephone?”
Bonnie Lamb expected Skink to erupt in homicidal fury upon seeing his best friend shot down. He didn’t. Bonnie worried about the listless sag to his shoulders, the near feebleness of his movements. He wore the numb, unfocused glaze of the heavily sedated. Bonnie was sorry to see the governor’s high spirits extinguished.
Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he’d gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they’d ditched it behind the convenience store.
Bonnie squeezed Skink’s arm and asked if he was all right. He shifted his feet, and something rattled metallically on the floorboard. He picked it up and asked, “What’s this?”
It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.
Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. “The Club!”
“The what?”
Bonnie Lamb said, “You know. That thing they advertise all the time on TV.”
“I watch no television,” Skink said.
Snapper hooted. “The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you lock it across’t here”-he patted the steering wheel-“so your car don’t get stolen.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K.” Snapper’s laughter had a ring of triumph.
Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bonnie could see fresh tears shining in her eyelashes.
“I had this boyfriend,” Edie sniffled, “he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer.”
Snapper said, “No shit? Froze it?”
“Yeah.” Edie couldn’t come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They’d never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?
Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.
“See, that way you can’t turn the wheel,” Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, “so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. ‘Less they put a fuckin’ gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!”