“Tony?” squeaked the voice on the telephone.
Edie took it from Snapper’s hand and said, “I’m very sorry. You’ve got the wrong number.” Then she hung up.
At first all Snapper could say was, “Goddamn.”
“The wife?”
“Yeah. Goddamn.”
Edie Marsh helped him pogo to the chair. The ice crunched as he sat down. “Where’s your Santy Claus boyfriend live?”
“SomeRamada.”
“Goddamn. We don’t got much time.”
Edie said, “Where’s Mrs Torres? Is she here in Miami?”
“Hell if I know. Get me to the car.”
“I’ve got some more bad news. The dogs came back this morning.”
“The wiener dogs?”
“We can’t just leave them here. They need to be fed.”
With both hands Snapper choked his throbbing leg and said, “Never again. I swear to Christ.”
“Oh yeah,” Edie Marsh said, “like this is some fun picnic for me. Here, give me your arm.”
Avila’s new customer took the Turnpike south. Before long the Cadillac was pinned in traffic-construction trucks, eighteen-wheelers, Army convoys, ambulances, sightseers, National Guardsmen, and hundreds of queasy insurance adjusters, all heading into the hurricane zone. Ground Zero.
“Looks like a bombing range,” said the man calling himself Rick Reynolds.
“Sure does. Where’s your house?”
“We got a ways yet.” As the car inched along, the man turned up the radio: Rush Limbaugh, making wisecracks about the wife of some candidate. Avila didn’t think the jokes were all that funny, but the man chuckled loyally. After the program ended, a news report announced that the President of the United States was flying to Miami to see the storm damage firsthand.
“Great,” said Avila. “You think traffic sucks now, just wait.”
The man said, “Yeah, one time I got stuck behind Reagan’s motorcade in the Holland Tunnel. Talk about a fuck story-two hours we’re breathing fumes.”
Avila inquired how long the man had been in Dade County. Couple months, he answered. Moved down from New York.
“And I never saw nuthin’ like this.”
Avila said, “Me, neither.”
“I don’t get it. Some houses go down like dominoes, some don’t lose a shingle. How’s that happen?”
Avila checked his wristwatch. He wondered if the guy had the fifteen grand on him, or maybe in the trunk of the car. He glanced in the back seat: a crumpled road map and two empty Mister Donut boxes.
The man said, “My guess is somebody got paid off. There’s no other way to make sense of it.”
Avila kept his eyes ahead. “This ain’t New York,” he said. Finally the traffic started to move.
The customer said a trailer park not far from his neighborhood got blown to smithereens. “Old lady was killed,” he said.
“Man, that’s rough.”
“Wonderful old lady. But every single trailer got destroyed, every damn one.”
Avila said, “Storm of the century.”
“No, but here’s the thing. The tie-downs on those mobile homes was rotted out. The augers was sawed off. Anchor disks missing. Now you tell me some inspector didn’t get greased.”.
Avila shifted uncomfortably. “Straps rot fast in this heat. How much farther?”
“Not long.”
The customer picked up Krome Avenue to 168th Street. There he turned back east and drove for a mile to a subdivision called Fox Hollow, which had eroded to more or less bare foundations in the hurricane. The man parked in front of the skeletal remains of a small tract home.
Avila got out of the Cadillac and said, “God, you weren’t kidding.”
The roof of the house was totally blown away; gables, beams, trusses, everything. Avila was stunned that Mr Reynolds was allowing his family to remain in such an unprotected structure. Avila followed him inside, stepping over the wind-flattened doors. The place looked abandoned except for the kitchen, where a pack of stray dogs fought over rancid hamburger in the overturned refrigerator. Avila’s customer grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and chased the mongrels off.
Peeking into the flooded bedrooms, Avila saw no sign of the customer’s family. Immediately he felt the whole day go sour. Just to be sure, he said, “So where’s your ninety-year-old grandmother?”
“Dead and buried,” Ira Jackson replied, slapping the bat in the palm of one hand, “on beautiful Staten Island.”
As the man from New York prepared to nail him to a pine tree, Avila concluded that Snapper was responsible for hiring the attacker.