“Nothing, Mom. It’s all me.”
“Did you have a fight?” her mother asked.
“Listen, I’ve met two unusual men. I believe I’ve fallen in love with one of them.”
“On your honeymoon, Bonnie?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s not certain,” Bonnie said.
“These men, are they dangerous?”
“Not to me. Mom, they’re totally different from anyone I’ve ever known. It’s a very … primitive charisma.”
“Let’s not mention that last part to your father.”
Next Bonnie phoned the apartment in New York. When she got back to the Seville, she told Skink to go on without her.
“Max left a message on the machine.” She didn’t look at Augustine when she said it. Couldn’t look at him.
Bonnie repeated her husband’s message. “He says it’s over if I don’t meet with him.”
“It’s over regardless,” Skink said.
“Please.”
“Call back and leave your own message.” The governor gave her the details-the place, the time, who would be there.
After Bonnie finished with the phone, Skink made another call himself. When they got back in the car, Augustine punched the accelerator and peeled rubber. Bonnie put her hand on his arm. He gave a tight, rueful smile.
They made the 905 turnoff in the nick of time. Already the northbound traffic was stacked past Lake Surprise; Skink surmised that the police had raised the Jewfish Creek drawbridge for their roadblock. He predicted they’d set up another one at Card Sound, as soon as more patrol cars arrived from the mainland.
Edie Marsh said, “So where are we going?”
“Patience.”
The two of them sat together in the back seat. On the governor’s lap was a Bill Blass suitcase, removed from the Cadillac’s trunk to make space for the blacked out Snapper.
Skink said, “Driver, dome light! P’or favor.” Augustine began pushing dashboard buttons until the ceiling lights came on. Skink broke the locks off the suitcase and opened it.
“What have we here!” he said.
The troopers waited all night at Jewfish Creek. As Jim Tile predicted the black Jeep Cherokee never appeared, nor did the silver Cadillac stolen from a customer at a Key Largo convenience store. The French victim had dryly described the armed carjacker as “a poster boy for TMJ.”
At daybreak the cops gave up the roadblock and fanned through the Upper Keys. It would take three days to locate the Seville, abandoned on a disused smugglers’ trail off County Road 905, only a few miles from the exclusive Ocean Reef Club. The police would wait another forty-eight hours before announcing the discovery of the vehicle. They omitted mention of the bullet hole in its dashboard, as they didn’t wish to unduly alarm Ocean Reef’s residents and guests, which included some of the most socially prominent, politically influential and chronically impatient taxpayers in the eastern United States. Many were already in a cranky mood, due to the inconvenient damaging of their vacation homes by the hurricane. News that a murderous criminal might be lurking in the mangroves would touch off heated high-level communiques with Tallahassee and
Washington, D.C. The Ocean Reef crowd didn’t mess around.
As it turned out, there was no danger whatsoever.
Most newly married men, faced with unexpected desertion, would have been manic with grief, jealousy and anger. Max Lamb, however, was blessed by a hearty, blinding preoccupation with his career.
A nettlesome thought kept scrolling across his mind, and it had nothing to do with his runaway wife. It was something the nutty kidnapper had told him: You need a legacy.
They’d been riding in the back of a U-Haul truck, discussing unforgettable advertising slogans. Max hadn’t anything zippy to brag about except the short-lived Plum Crunchies ditty. Since the failure of the cereal campaign, the sixth floor had deployed him more often for billboard concepts and print graphics, and not as much on the verbally creative side.
Which stung, because Max considered himself a gen- \ uinely glib and talented wordsmith. He believed it was j well within his reach to write an advertising catchphrase [ that would embed itself in the national lexicon-one of those classics the kidnapper had mentioned. A legacy, if you will.
Now that Bronco cigarets were history, Max was left to review the potential of his other accounts. The hypercarbonated soda served on the plane to Miami put him in mind of Old Faithful Root Beer. Old Faithful’s popularity had peaked in the summer of 1962, and since then its share of the global soft-drink market had fizzled to a microscopic sliver. Rodale’s mission was to revive