“Bring your gun. I’m serious.” Her eyes flashed. “We can kidnap Max from the kidnapper. Why not!”
“Settle down, please. When’s the meeting?”
“Midnight tomorrow.”
“Where?”
When she told him, he looked discouraged. “They’ll never show. Not there.”
“You’re wrong,” Bonnie Lamb said. “Where’s that gun of yours?”
Augustine went to the living room and switched on the television. He channel-surfed until he found a Monty Python rerun; a classic, John Cleese buying a dead parrot. It never failed to make Augustine laugh.
Bonnie sat beside him on the sofa. When the Monty Python sketch ended, he turned to her and said, “You don’t know a damn thing about guns.”
ELEVEN
Max Lamb awoke to these words: “You need a legacy.”
He and Skink had bummed a ride in the back of a U-Haul truck. They were bucking down U.S. Highway One among two thousand cans of Campbell’s broccoli cheese soup, which was being donated to hurricane victims by a Baptist church in Pascagoula, Mississippi. What the shipment lacked in variety it made up for in Christian goodwill.
“This,” said the kidnapper, waving at the soup boxes, “is what people do for each other in times of catastrophe. They give help. You, on the other hand-”
“I said I was sorry.”
“-you, Max, arrive with a video camera.”
Max Lamb lit a cigaret. The governor had been in a rotten mood all day. First his favorite Stones tape broke, then the batteries crapped out in his Walkman.
Skink said, “The people who gave this soup, they went through Camille. Please assure me you know about Camille.”
“Another hurricane?”
“A magnificent shitkicker of a hurricane. Max, I believe you’re making progress.”
The advertising man sucked apprehensively on the Bronco. He said, “You were talking about getting a boat.”
Skink said, “Everyone ought to have a legacy. Something to be remembered for. Let’s hear some of your slogans.”
“Not right now.”
“I never see TV anymore, but some commercials I remember.” The kidnapper pointed at the canyon of red-and-white soup cans. “‘M’m, m’m good!’ That was a classic, no?”
Unabashedly Max Lamb said, “You ever hear of Plum Crunchies? It was a breakfast cereal.”
“A cereal,” said Skink.
” ‘You’ll go plum loco for Plum Crunchies!'”
The kidnapper frowned. From his camo trousers he produced a small felt box of the type used by jewelry stores. He opened it and removed a scorpion, which he placed on his bare brown wrist. The scorpion raised its fat claws, pinching the air in confusion. Max stared incredulously. The skin on his neck heated beneath the shock collar. He drew up his legs, preparing to spring from the truck if Skink tossed the awful creature at him.
“This little sucker,” Skink said, “is from Southeast Asia. Recognized him right away.” With a pinkie finger, he stroked the scorpion until it arched its venomous stinger.
Max Lamb asked how a Vietnamese scorpion got all the way to Florida. Skink said it was probably smuggled by importers. “Then, when the hurricane struck, Mortimer here made a dash for it. I found him in the horse barn. Remember Larks? ‘Show us your Larks!'”
“Barely.” Max was a kid when the Lark campaign hit TV.
Skink said: “That’s what I mean by legacy. Does anyone remember who thought up Larks? But the Marl-boro man, Christ, that’s the most successful ad campaign in history.”
It was a fact. Max Lamb wondered how Skink knew. He noticed that the scorpion had become tangled in the gray-blond hair on the captain’s arm.
“What are you going to do with it?” Max asked.
No answer. He tried another strategy. “Bonnie is deathly afraid of insects.”
Skink scooped the scorpion into the palm of one hand. “This ain’t no insect, Max. It’s an arachnid.”
“Bugs is what I meant, captain. She’s terrified of all bugs.” Max was speaking for himself. Icy needles of anxiety pricked at his arms and legs. He struggled to connect the kidnapper’s scorpion sympathies with his views of the Marlboro man. What was the psychopath trying to say?
“Can she swim, your Bonnie? Then she’ll be fine.” The governor popped the scorpion in his cheek and swallowed with an audible gulp.