Sucker bet - James Swain [22]
Valentine nearly said yes, then realized he’d have to return the videotape of Jack Lightfoot, something he had no intention of doing.
“No, I am,” he said.
Running Bear looked at him. “You still want to work for us?”
“I need the money,” he said.
He got into his car. The seat was covered in reptilian slime. Running Bear stuck his face in the open window.
“I’ll deal with Smooth Stone,” the chief said.
Valentine understood. Running Bear didn’t want him calling the Broward police, who would come onto the reservation if he filed a complaint.
“You do that,” he said.
Valentine decided to stay on Miami Beach, the architecture a real time warp for someone of his generation, and was halfway there when he realized he didn’t like the way he was feeling. His heart was beating a hundred miles an hour and the opposing traffic was passing by faster than normal. With his cell phone he found the nearest hospital, and walked into its emergency room and was sitting on a doctor’s table fifteen minutes later. The doctor was a woman, her manner cool and detached.
“Not a heart attack or a stroke,” she informed him when she was done.
He felt himself relax. “Great.”
She wrote something on her clipboard. “Everything is fine except your heart rate. Do you mind telling me what you were doing that got you so worked up?”
“Wrestling alligators.”
“Seriously,” she said.
He showed her the palms of his hands. He’d lost a lot of skin.
“Did you get lost in the swamps?” she asked.
“The gator was in my car,” he said.
The doctor excused herself. Valentine went to the door and peeked outside. At the hallway’s end, she stood talking to another doctor. Florida had a law called the Baker Act, where people acting strangely could be locked up even if they hadn’t broken any laws. Tossing his clothes on, he got out of the emergency room as fast as he could.
Checking into the Fontainebleau hotel, he got a room facing the ocean.
Growing up, he’d known guys who’d bussed tables in Atlantic City in the summer, then went south in the winter to work the Fontainebleau. It had been the only real hotel on Miami Beach, the others simply there to handle the overflow.
He got pretzels from the minibar and went onto the balcony. The beach looked wider than he last remembered, and clusters of mature palm trees surrounded the octopus-shaped swimming pool. Otherwise, the place was still the same.
He was sitting on the bed tugging off his shoes when he remembered Mabel. He’d been talking to her on his cell phone when the gator had nearly taken his arm off, and he’d forgotten to call her back. He picked up the phone on the night table and dialed her number.
“Oh, Tony,” she exclaimed. “I was so worried.”
“A thousand apologies,” he said. Then he told her everything that had happened.
“Thank goodness you’re all right,” she said when he was done.
He felt like a heel. Mabel had done more good things for him in the past year than anyone on the planet. So why didn’t he treat her with more respect? Losing his wife had hardened his heart; he knew that for a fact. But had it also hardened his soul?
9
Candy Hart had never known love.
It was true. There had been a football player in high school who’d broken her heart, but they’d spent most of their time in the backseat of his car, humping like bunnies. Only fifteen, and already a member of what her Bible-thumping mother called the Itchy Ovary Club. Brad, or was it Burt? She’d known quite a few after him. There was no doubt about it. Candy liked boys.
But none that she’d ever loved with her heart. She’d gone looking plenty of times—in bars, gyms, even in church—and always come back with the bucket half full. It was another of her mother’s cockamamie expressions.
At twenty, she had married a carpet salesman named Claude, then run off to Las Vegas when he started beating her. Needing a place to stay, she’d let a slick casino boss talk her into sleeping with a high roller for five hundred bucks. It hadn’t seemed like work, and when the casino boss had called