Sucker bet - James Swain [30]
“Zoe!”
“Tony hates cruises. I heard him tell Donny that once. So before we left, I did a little snooping.” Reaching into her pocket, her daughter removed a square of paper and unfolded it. “I found this next to the phone in Tony’s study. It’s a phone number where he’s staying. See for yourself.”
Kat snatched the paper out of her daughter’s hand. Tony’s name was written on it, and the name of the Fontainebleau hotel, and a phone number.
“Your face is doing that funny thing,” her daughter warned.
Kat stared at herself in the mirror. She had thin bluish skin that flushed salmon pink whenever her blood pressure rose. Traffic inched forward, and she threw the car into drive.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” she told her daughter.
Zoe stared resolutely ahead.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Say thank you, Mom.”
“Excuse me?”
“Say thank you.”
“Now you listen to me, young lady—”
“You wanted to find Tony, right? I mean, it’s why we drove all the way over here, isn’t it? Well, I found Tony. So, say thank you.”
They had come to the roundabout on Clearwater Beach. It was not for the timid, and Kat punched the accelerator and merged into the maddening swirl of vehicles. To drive around it, she needed to change lanes, only none of the cars were willing to let her in. Zoe hit the horn, and a space appeared. Moments later, they were finally going in the right direction on 60.
“Thank you, Zoe,” she said.
Valentine did not like talking about suicide while standing on a hotel balcony, so he took Bill Higgins out for coffee. One block south of the Loews, they got sucked into the South Beach parade of freaks and model types, and ducked into an eatery where people were sitting on futons and the servers were guys with boa constrictors wrapped around their necks. They beat a hasty retreat and found a restaurant where the chairs had four legs and you were allowed to sit in them.
“Black,” Valentine told the waitress taking their order.
She Rollerbladed away, leaving them in their quiet corner. Bill lit up a cigarette and offered him one.
“I’ve been clean for two months,” Valentine said.
“Want me to put this out?”
“I can take it. So tell me why you want to blow your brains out. I mean, you’ve got a couple of more good years left.”
Bill cracked the thinnest of smiles. “You think so?” Plumes of purple smoke escaped each nostril. The waitress Rollerbladed back with two steaming cups, then sprinted away. “Look, Tony, this is going to ruin me, and not just in terms of my job. Once this comes out, Running Bear will know I set him up, and he’ll let every tribe in the country know. I’ll be an outcast among my own people.”
“He’s got that much clout?”
“Yes. You know anything about him?”
“I know he wrestles alligators pretty well.”
Bill blew the steam off his cup. “Running Bear is a half-breed, only one in his tribe. His daddy was a white marine who ran off after he got Running Bear’s mother pregnant. The day Running Bear was born, his mother took him down to the creek to be drowned—”
“She did what?”
“You heard me. That’s the Micanopy tradition, been going on for centuries.”
“Why?”
“It keeps them pure. The Micanopys are the last pure tribe of Indians in North America. No outsiders have ever been let in. A true sovereign nation. If any tribe rightfully deserves to have a casino, it’s them. So where was I?”
“Running Bear’s mother was about to drown him.”
“Right. So she’s dunking him in the water, and one of the tribe’s elders holds up his hand. He takes the baby from her and looks at him. And says, ‘This one was meant to help us.’ So Running Bear was spared. A few years later, his mother dies. Running Bear gets passed around the tribe. He becomes a delinquent. The police start chasing him, and he hides in the swamps, living with the alligators.
“Eventually, he grows up. He enlists in the army. He becomes a ranger and ends up going to South Vietnam as the head of a long-range reconnaissance unit. He goes back and forth