Flush - Carl Hiaasen [26]
As I fumbled to put on the seat belt, she peeled out of the driveway and raced toward Highway One. It was a while before I got up the nerve to ask where we were going.
“Why? You got a hot date or somethin’?” she said.
I decided not to mention the silver-barreled gun that lay on the console between us.
“Shelly, is something wrong?”
She laughed sourly. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
Even though she was wearing black sunglasses, I could tell she’d been crying. She was still sniffling and her voice sounded scratchy.
“‘Member what I told you about Lice runnin’ away?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, turns out I had it wrong,” she said.
“Did he come home?” I asked.
Shelly shook her head. “They finally towed the Jeep back from Cutler Ridge. Two hundred bucks—I had to pawn my promise ring to pay for it,” she said. “Know how I spent my morning, Noah?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Scrubbing bloodstains off the upholstery!”
I had thought it felt damp on the seat. “Blood? You sure?”
“See, I missed a spot.” Shelly pointed to a dark reddish smudge on the dashboard. “I don’t think Lice ran away,” she confided. “I think he got snatched. And”—here she made a hard left turn, nearly spilling the gun onto my lap—“I think whoever snatched him killed him.”
“What!”
“That’s right, Noah.” She buried her nose in a tissue. “And I think it’s all ‘cause of your daddy and that gamblin’ boat.”
I’d never been so close to a woman with a tattoo—or, I should say, a tattoo I could see for myself. Rado claimed that his older sister had gone off to college and gotten a tiny zebra butterfly tattooed on her butt. Thom and I had to take his word for this, since neither of us had ever seen enough of Rado’s sister to confirm the story.
Strange as it sounds, the more I stared at the tattoo on Shelly’s arm, the more natural it looked. The barbed wire definitely suited her personality.
“Relax. The pistol ain’t real,” she said. “It’s a lighter.”
When she pulled the trigger, a bright blue flame flared from the barrel.
“It looks pretty bad, though, huh? Bad enough to scare anybody tries to give me trouble,” Shelly said.
For more than an hour we’d been heading down the highway, obviously to nowhere in particular. Shelly kept saying she had more to tell me, but then she’d get worked up about Lice Peeking and what a “total zero” he was, and how she must be a fool to care about him. Afterward she’d cry and sniffle for a while, but just when I thought she had a grip on herself it would start all over again.
We were all the way to Sugarloaf Key before she turned the Jeep around and grumbled, “Where the heck was I goin’?” On the way back she pulled into the parking lot on the Marathon end of the old Seven Mile Bridge. The place was full of tourists who were tinkering with their cameras, getting ready to shoot pictures of the sunset. It was too cloudy for a green flash, and besides, I was too distracted to stand there and look for it.
“What makes you think Lice is … you know …”
“Dead? Number one, he hasn’t called up beggin’ to come home,” Shelly said, “which is totally not like him. Number two, none of his local party pals have heard from him, not a peep. Number three was that ugly bald gorilla who came to the trailer that night, and number four was the blood in my car.”
Again she pointed at the stain on the dashboard. I tried not to stare at it. Shelly being so worried made me worried, too.
“But who would kill him? And what’s it got to do with my dad?” I asked.
She sighed impatiently. “Noah, you got any idea how much money Dusty Muleman makes off the Coral Queen?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Between fifteen and twenty grand just from the casino tables,” she said. “Subtract the food for the customers, the pay for the crew, and he’s still clearin’ ten thousand, minimum, every night.”
“Dollars?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Gambling is a mega-huge business, kid, because the world is crawlin’ with suckers,” Shelly said. “Don’t forget that Lice had a big mouth. Suppose he blabbed to somebody that he was gonna help your daddy, and suppose Dusty