A short distance away, Augustine stood with his arms folded. “Pathetic,” he said.
Skink agreed. “Check the glaze in his eyes. There’s nothing worse than a Republican on Halcion.”
As soon as Bonnie Lamb returned, they left for Turtle Meadow.
EIGHTEEN
Skink had gotten the address from the police report, courtesy of Jim Tile. The mailboxes and street signs were down, so it took some searching to find the house. Because of his respectable and clean-cut appearance, Augustine was chosen to make the inquiry. Skink waited in the back of the pickup truck, singing the chorus from “Ventilator Blues.” Bonnie Lamb wasn’t familiar with the song, but she enjoyed Skink’s bluesy bass voice. She stood by the truck, keeping an eye on him.
Augustine was met at the door by a tired-looking woman in a pink housedress. She said, “The trooper mentioned you’d be by.” Her tone was as lifeless as her stare; she’d been whipped by the hurricane.
“It’s been, like, three days since I called the cops.”
“We’re stretched pretty thin,” Augustine said.
The woman’s entire family-husband, four children, two cats-was bivouacked in the master bedroom, beneath the only swatch of roof that the hurricane hadn’t blown away. The husband wore a lime mesh tank top, baggy shorts, sandals and a Cleveland Indians cap. He had a stubble of gray-flecked beard. He tended a small Sterno stove on the dresser; six cans of pork and beans were lined up, the lids removed. The kids were preoccupied with battery-operated Game Boys, beeping like miniature radars.
“We still got no electric,” the woman said to Augustine. She told her husband it was the man the Highway Patrol sent about the stolen license plate. The husband asked Augustine why he wasn’t wearing a police uniform.
“Because I’m a detective,” Augustine said. “Plainclothes.” “Oh.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“These four kids pulled up and took the tag off my Camaro. I was out’n the yard, burying the fish-see, when the power went off it took care of the aquarium, so we had dead guppies-”
“Sailfin mollies!” interjected one of the kids. “Anyway, I had to bury the damn things before they stunk up the place. That’s when this Jeep comes up, four colored guys, stereo cranked full blast. They take a screwdriver and set to work on the Camaro. Me standin’ right there!”
The woman said, “I knew something was wrong. I brought the children inside the bedroom.”
Her husband dumped two cans of pork and beans into a small pot, which he held over the royal-blue flame of the Sterno. “So I run over with a shovel and say what do you think you’re up to, and one of the brothers flashes a gun and tells me to you-know-what. I didn’t argue, I backed right off. Getting shot over a damn license plate was not on my agenda, you understand.”
Augustine said, “Then what happened?”
“They slapped the tag on the Jeep and hauled ass.
You could hear that so-called music for about five miles.”
The wife added, “David’s got a pistol and he knows how to use it. But-”
“Not over a thirty-dollar license plate,” said her husband.
Augustine commended David for being so levelheaded. “Let me double-check the tag number.” He took out the folded piece of paper and read it aloud: “BZQ-42F.”
“Right,” said David, “but it’s not on that Jeep no more.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it the other day, goin’ down Calusa.”
“The same one?”
“Black Cherokee. Mags, tinted windows. I’d bet the farm it’s the same truck. I could tell by the mud flaps.”
The woman frowned. “Tell him about those.”
“Mud flaps like what you see on them eighteen-wheelers. You know, fancy, with naked ladies.”
“In chrome,” the woman said. “That’s how we knew it was the same one-”
Augustine said, “Where’s Calusa?”
“-only some white guy was driving it.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Not friendly,” said the husband.
The wife said, “Watch the beans, David. And tell him about the music.”
“That’s the other thing,” David said, stirring the pot. “He had that damn stereo all the way loud, same as the colored kids. Only it wasn’t rap music, it was Travis Tritt. I thought it was weird, this guy in a business suit and a niggered-up Jeep, listenin’ to Travis Tritt.”