Randy White - Everglades

What would he make? Sixty, seventy grand easy. Maybe a lot more if word caught on. Because that’s how porno sold-word of mouth.

He tried to imagine how she’d react when she found out. Sally Minster, the lady saint. Or maybe a male member of her church, being naughty, playing around in cyberspace, would find her. How would her preacher handle that?

That made Izzy chuckle.

His water-into-wine theory again. All religion was bullshit and fakery. Same with the holy goofs who pretended to practice it.

Hypocrites.

Izzy walked downstairs to the pool door, leaving the Minster home the same way he’d entered.

Hurrying.

Maybe hurrying too much because he had so much do tomorrow, Saturday. He had to spend the day making final preparations for the Bhagwan’s big magic trick on Palm Sunday. No simple task, which Jerry Singh was too self-obsessed to realize.

Because the Ashram owned interests in many theme communities, and because each community had its own eighteen-hole golf course, collecting several tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer had not caused Izzy the legal problems it would’ve most people.

The Feds had been nervous about the stuff ever since a U-Haul truck full of ammonium nitrate nearly brought down Oklahoma City. No way anyone could buy it in large quantities now without filling out forms and lots of background checks.

So what Izzy did, over a period of eighteen months, he regularly borrowed fertilizer from the maintenance barns of every golf course in the organization, saying they needed it at Sawgrass. Then he went to the Ashram’s master computer and adjusted the inventory numbers.

Easy.

But now came the shitty part. Tomorrow, he had to dump forty bags of the crap into a cement mixer by hand, then add diesel fuel and mix it until it was the consistency of mayonnaise. Dirty work.

He already had the blasting caps, two dozen six-volt batteries and timers wired, so the only thing left to do after that was transfer the gook to a Sawgrass maintenance truck. He’d had the truck rigged with a four-hundred-gallon skid-mounted tank and a pump that was powered by a Honda generator.

Tomorrow was a full day. So he was hurrying. He wanted to get out and make it to Sawgrass tonight before the bar closed.

Izzy keyed in the security password he’d found in Sally’s on-line computer files. He opened the door and stepped out into the night.

Then he froze.

Shit.

He was standing face-to-face with a seventy-year-old man in a brown security guard’s uniform. The man had a silver badge on his shirt pocket. He was holding a flashlight, not a gun.

“Can I help you, sir?”

A ridiculous question for the guard to ask. The old man, Izzy realized, was as startled as he was. Scared, too.

Izzy relaxed a little. “Just going out for a walk. See you!” He waved as if saying good-bye, but was really using his open palm to mask his face.

“Are you a friend of Mrs. Minster?” The old man was following him. Then the old man said, “Hey, hold it right there, buddy,” and he shined the flashlight directly on Izzy’s face.

Mistake.

Izzy stopped, turned slowly to face the man, and said, “Do you know how fucking dumb that was, mister?”

Izzy got to the guard before he could get the handheld walkie-talkie to his mouth. He held the old man, choking him with his forearm, squeezing harder and harder until the man suddenly quit struggling. Went from being a frightened old man to a rag doll.

Just like that. He quit. Or maybe he’d had a heart attack. It was so unexpected.

It was funny how that went. Some people fought like hell when they knew they were dying. Others just gave up, surrendered, as if to get it over with faster.

Izzy was now doubly glad that the woman’s dog was gone. The animal would follow him around, lick his hands, bring him a slipper or a towel or something like he wanted to play. Which completely ruined the mood.

Right now, for instance, the dog would have been in the pool enclosure, yapping its head off.

So Izzy was glad he’d gotten rid of the dog-though the damn thing tried to bite him the first time he shoved its head under water.

The dog wasn’t like the old man.

The church lady’s dog had fought back. chapter thirteen

Riding in the Freon capsule that was Frank DeAntoni’s Lincoln, looking through glass at sawgrass touching April sky, I listened to Tomlinson say from the backseat, “If an infinite number of drunken rednecks pull shotguns from the rack and shoot an infinite number of road signs, I hate to say it, but, one day those bastards are bound to produce a very good haiku in Braille. What’re the odds, Doc? It’s gotta happen, man.”

DeAntoni didn’t much like Tomlinson. He made it obvious, ignoring him when he could, shaking his head in reply to questions, rolling his eyes when Tomlinson made one of his eccentric observations.

DeAntoni rolled his eyes now, saying, “As if some blind dude is gonna roam around down here feeling for road signs, searching for something to read.” Then after a few more seconds, thinking about it: “Like they could even find the fucking signs way out here in this godforsaken swamp. How stupid can you get, Mac? They’d need a ladder to even reach ’em.”

DeAntoni was not a man whose life was complicated by an overactive imagination.

At a Mobil station, intersection of 951 and Rattlesnake Hammock Road, east of Naples, DeAntoni pulled me aside and whispered, “Jesus Christ, next time that weirdo takes off those John Lennon shades of his, check out the pupils. I think he might have been smoking marijuana. ”

“Really?” I replied. “Using drugs this early in the morning. Hum-m-m-m. I guess it’s possible. ”

“And wearing that crazy Hawaiian dress. I practically had to threaten him to make him change into shorts.”

Actually, Tomlinson had been wearing his black-and-orange sarong, swami-style, like a pair of baggy pants. He knew a couple of dozen ways to tie the things, depending on the occasion. I’d had to issue a threat or two myself. Nothing to do with his sarongs, which I’ve become used to. If he didn’t get rid of Karlita, though, he wasn’t going anywhere with me.

Which is why he informed Karlita that she couldn’t accompany us.

DeAntoni said, “What I don’t understand is, you two guys are pals. But you’re like exact opposites.”

I said, “I know, I know. It’s been worrying me for years.”

I think DeAntoni decided that the best way to keep Tomlinson quiet was to fill the silence by asking me lots of questions.

Speeding east on the Tamiami Trail, the remote two-lane that crosses Florida’s interior, all cypress swamp and grass savanna, I explained to Frank that the sawgrass growing out there, ten feet high, got its name from its three-edged, serrated blades.

“Sawgrass is deceptive,” Tomlinson added. “Looks like Kansas wheat, but it’ll cut you like a razor.”

Referring to the thatched huts along the road, and state road signs that read INDIAN VILLAGE AHEAD, I had to think back to the Florida history I’d learned in high school.

Trouble was, I wasn’t certain the information was still accurate.

I told DeAntoni that ’Glades Indians were derived from mixed bands of Creek and Muskogees, on the run in the late 1700s, who’d sought safe haven in Florida. The earliest group, Mikasuki-speaking Creeks, became known as the Miccosukee, then Trail Miccosukee, as in Tamiami Trail.

Another group, mostly farmers, were called the Cimar rons, which is Spanish slang for runaway or wild people-possibly because of the runaway slaves who sometimes lived among them. Cimarron became Simaloni in the Miccosukee language, then Seminole.

I told him, “I’m not sure if that information’s up to date. Tomlinson’s an expert on indigenous cultures, Native American history. He’s like an encyclopedia-literally. You should be asking him.”