Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

“Hey, what’s with the snark?”

“Sorry,” Angie said. “Somebody blew up my pickup tonight. I’ll call you in the morning.”

After hanging up, she realized she was no longer interested in having sex with Spalding; he’d never made a move, and now the window had closed. It was nothing he’d said or done; possibly the allure of his accent had worn off. Maybe it was that simple.

Jerry Crosby had given Angie his private cell number, so she texted him saying that Pruitt had torched her truck. Because of the late hour she didn’t expect a reply, yet the phone rang almost immediately.

“What the hell happened?” Crosby asked.

“I got a call from a fake number with a fake mouse emergency. Pruitt must’ve been waiting when I got there. He threw a Molotov cocktail in the back of my pickup. The worst part was my stepson was with me.”

“Are you guys okay?”

“We jumped out and ran like hell,” Angie said. “Joel sprained his ankle. The truck’s fried.”

“When did this happen?”

“Couple hours ago.”

The chief said she was lucky to be alive. “Did you get a look at his face?”

“No, he had one of those freaky Halloween masks. The county’s got deputies waiting at his place right now.”

Crosby said, “Waste of time. They won’t find him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s already in jail.”

“What? Hold on. Since when?”

“Nine-thirty this morning,” said Crosby. “I had him picked up for threatening a law enforcement officer. That phone call at the restaurant yesterday—it pissed me off, Pruitt’s shitty attitude. And you were right, he was easy to find. Same address as his driver’s license.”

Angie was stunned. “So it wasn’t him who burned my truck.”

“Nope. He’s been locked up all day.”

“Then what the fuck, Jerry?”

“Do you have any enemies that are into firebombs?”

“At least one, obviously. But I’ve got no idea who it is.”

“Call me if you get a name,” the chief said.

Before lying down in bed, Angie groped under the mattress and took out the Taser. It looked like a Hasbro toy. She placed it on the nightstand, turned off the light and lay on her side with a pillow tucked between her knees, like when she was a little girl.

She slept poorly, awakened by a nightmare in which she was wearing a gossamer ball gown and climbing a snarled old banyan tree. Perched in the topmost bough was a one-eyed roaring bear, and the bear’s eye was a rosy pearl.

Angie sat up panting in the darkness, and told herself again that dreams don’t mean a damn thing.

THIRTEEN

Strangling Prince Paladin was by far the worst crime Uric Burns had ever committed, and he was pleased with himself for not feeling bad afterward. Strictly business, as Michael Corleone would say. The second Godfather was Uric’s favorite movie. Next on the list was Scarface, even though Pacino’s accent was fucked up. Uric knew plenty of tough Cubans, and none of them talked that way.

Prince Paladin was the tallest partner Uric had ever had, but he was otherwise dull and forgettable. He’d never mentioned that his real name was Keever Bracco, and Uric wouldn’t have remembered it, anyway. They had only been working together a few weeks before the fateful python job.

The men had first met at Giardia’s shop, where Uric was unloading a stolen scuba tank and the Prince was pawning a stolen Blu-ray with Avatar stuck in the disc feed. They began chatting, and Uric said he had a break-in planned that night in Gun Club Estates.

“Need a driver?” Prince Paladin asked.

“Can you lay off the weed?”

“Yeah, for three hundred bucks.”

“Two-fifty,” said Uric. “And if you show up stoned or drunk, I’ll pulp your balls with a claw hammer. Hit the shower, bro. You smell like a fuckin’ grow house.”

The Prince stayed sober behind the wheel, and Uric emerged from the burgled house carrying four AKs, a half-dozen loaded handguns and an antique crossbow that brought a rare smile to Giardia’s blighted face. Uric ended up paying the Prince the full three hundred he wanted, which predictably he blew on chronic. He was an okay driver, a semi-diligent lookout, and strong enough to move jumbo household appliances. The break-in at Angela Armstrong’s apartment had been the pair’s fifth job together, which in the realm of petty street crime practically made them an old married couple. For Prince Paladin, the divorce was harsh. He never saw it coming.

Uric Burns’s path to a life of crime had been untraditional. He grew up in an unbroken home with hardworking, affectionate parents, and an older brother who seldom picked on him. In high school, Uric made Bs and Cs, played intramural soccer, and worked on the yearbook. He had plenty of friends and dated three nice girls, one of whom favored him with a surprisingly skilled hand job after the senior prom. There was nothing in Uric’s past—no abuse, abandonment, family alcoholism, trauma, or tragedy—that would have caused anyone to predict he would one day quit his Furniture/Bedding sales job at BrandsMart to become a break-in artist, car thief, shoplifter, freelance shitbird and, ultimately, a killer.

In reality, Uric’s transition from working-class citizen to career felon was nothing more mysterious than unbound laziness, and the appeal of setting his own casual hours. He thought of himself as canny and cautious, for he’d never been shot, knifed or even diddled in the county jail. The unusual cleft in his forehead was of mundane origin; it came from the corner of a hurricane shutter that a previous cohort, wrecked on meth, had heedlessly tossed from a third-story landing. Uric knew he could have been killed, and the dent in his skull was a daily reminder of the risks posed by choosing unreliable partners. As soon as the Prince had revealed himself to be weak of resolve, a potential snitch, Uric saw him as a ticking time bomb. End of story.

Such was Uric’s pride in his own survival instincts that he was embarrassed to have walked into Tripp Teabull’s trap at Lipid House. Fright would have been a more useful reaction, but Uric acted super cool. He was confident he could talk his way out of the situation, though he’d barely gotten started when Teabull told him to shut the fuck up. The two muscle-shirted dudes who hauled him downstairs were even less interested in conversation.

During the long, uncomfortable ride, Uric began to comprehend he was in deeper-than-usual shit. The feeling would grow stronger with each passing hour. It wasn’t the first time he’d pissed off the person who had hired him, or been stiffed after a job. It wasn’t even the first time he’d been locked in a car trunk for a night.

It was, however, the first time anyone had strung a rope around his neck and led him like a lame horse across a bridge. The nervousness changed to relief when he saw his own white van parked on the other side. That meant the goons weren’t going to kill him; they were just going to kick his ass and let him go.

Tripp Teabull hated the sight of Uric’s filthy Dodge on the property, and he probably didn’t want Uric coming back to get it. That would explain why he’d ordered the van brought to the bridge.

Sweet, Uric said to himself. Least I won’t have to hitchhike home .

Which was the second-to-last thought to enter his mind.

The last was: Aw fuck.

—

Teabull had been awaiting a call from Angela Armstrong ever since Mauricio had told him about her unannounced visit. With Uric and the Prince now gone, Teabull believed that the young wildlife wrangler was the only person out of his sphere of control who knew the true circumstances of Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons’s death at Lipid House. When Angela failed to make contact after a few days, Teabull decided to send a preemptive message. He hired a reputable Hialeah arsonist to drive to Palm Beach County and firebomb Angela’s pickup truck. The explosion was to be ignited in her presence, maximizing the psychological impact.