Gerry Mackenzie had been young Leslie Simons’s first attempt to break out of the third-rate life she’d been dealt, growing up poor in West Palm, right next door to the ultra-rich, but never being quite poor enough to just throw in the towel. No; all the time she was growing up, her mother’s favorite word had been “appearances.” They had to keep up appearances, God knows why. They had to spend money for show, not for necessities. With a divorced mom who worked as a supermarket cashier and a slightly retarded older sister who was never going to be useful for anything and was never going to marry and become somebody else’s burden, this meant for the young Leslie Simons an endless life of dreary pretense.
Gerry Mackenzie, a wholesale salesman for a big computer company, a glad-handing upbeat guy full of talk about the latest advances in the “industry,” full of expertise and inside dirt, as though he himself were just on the verge of becoming the next software billionaire, had seemed just precisely the right prince to rescue Leslie Simons from the dungeon of her life. Only after she’d married him had she discovered that her mother had been an amateur when it came to keeping up appearances; Gerry was the pro. It was all sparkle and flash with him, all salesman’s hype, all toothy grins and pay-you-back-next-week. It all came clear to her, one day in the second year of the marriage, when she’d heard two of Gerry’s fellow salesmen talking about him, and one said, “He comes on so great, but you know? He just can’t close.”
She understood there were salesmen like that, failed salesmen. (Not her, though; in real estate, she was a shark for closing.) As a talker, Gerry Mackenzie was a winner; as an earner, he was a flop. She got her real estate agent’s license during the marriage because somebody had to put food on the table, and after a while she realized all she was getting out of this deal was the opportunity to listen to Gerry gasbag all the time. Home wasn’t that great an alternative, but, until something else came along, it was better than Gerry. At least, she got to keep more of her earnings.
Was Daniel Parmitt the something else? Not to marry, God knows, or even to sleep with, but to make it possible for her to get out of here. On her own, this time. Far away from Palm Beach, far away from Florida entirely. Maybe the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she could kick back in her own little place and let the world go screw itself. On her own, strictly on her own.
Which had been the other thing she’d learned from marriage to Gerry Mackenzie: she didn’t much like sex. She never had, in the few times she’d tried it with other people before Gerry, but then she’d always assumed it was because she and the guy didn’t know each other well enough or weren’t compatible or whatever. With Gerry, they got to know each other very well, and Gerry certainly knew how to turn his salesman’s charm to the question of sex, so that was one area in which she couldn’t find him at fault.
No, it was her. She didn’t think she was a lesbian, she’d never had any interest in that direction, either. She thought it was just that she didn’t particularly need sex, so why go through with it? Messy, disorganized, and frequently embarrassing; the hell with it.
That was one of the good things about Daniel Parmitt; he didn’t mistake her interest for a sexual one, and he was too focused on his own plans to have time for irrelevancies like sex with his local girl guide. There were moments when she thought it might be interesting to go to bed with him just once, just to see what it was like, but then she’d remember how cold his eyes had been the time he’d made her strip so he could be sure she wasn’t tape-recording their conversation, and she knew that wasn’t the look of somebody interested in her body. Even today, Gerry Mackenzie would give her a better time than that, if that’s what she wanted.
It still surprised her that she’d been bold enough to go after Parmitt, before she’d known enough about him to know it was the right thing to do. Desperation, maybe, an antenna out frantically in search of a sign. Whatever it was, some instinct had grabbed her, that’s all, and said, This guy will get you out of here. He’ll get you out of here, and then he’ll get out of your life. Grab him.
Would he? Would the people he was mad at really steal Mrs. Clendon’s jewels and get away with it? Would Daniel Parmitt really take the jewels away from them? And would he really share some of the profit with her?
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Did she have anything else going? Nothing. The commission on the Bromwich condo sale was very nice, but not what she needed. She’d known for a long time, you don’t change your life on commissions. You need a score. Somewhere, somehow, a score.
Keep healthy, Daniel Parmitt, she thought. I’ve bet the farm on you.
3
Elvis Clagg saw the whole thing, from the beginning, right there in front of him. It was incredible. It was like a movie.
At twenty-three, Elvis Clagg wasn’t the youngest member of the Christian Renewal Defense Force (CRDF), but he was the most recent recruit, having joined up only four months ago, bringing the CRDF’s strength up to twenty-nine, its highest enlistment in more than fifteen years. Still, not one of those guys had ever themselves seen anything as amazing, and they were the first to admit it. Even Captain Bob, in his years in Nam, had never seen the like, and Captain Bob was over fifty years of age.
Captain Bob Hardawl himself had founded the CRDF not long after he’d come back to Florida from Nam and had seen that the niggers and kikes were about to take over everywhere from the forces of God, and that the forces of God could use some help from a fella equipped with infantryman training.
Armageddon hadn’t struck yet, thank God, but you just knew that sooner or later it would. You could read all about it on the Internet, you could hear it in the songs of Aryan rock, you could see it in the news all around you, you could read it in all the books and magazines that Captain Bob insisted every member of the CRDF subscribe to and read.
That was an odd thing, too. Reading had always been tough for Elvis Clagg. It had been one of the reasons he’d dropped out of school at the very first opportunity and got that job at the sugar mill that paid shit and immediately gave him a bad cough like an old car. But now that he had stuff he wanted to read, stuff he liked to read, why, turned out, he was a natural at it.
They oughta figure that out in the schools. Quit giving the kids all that Moby-Dick shit and give them The Protocols of Zion, and you’re gonna have you some heavy-duty readers.
But the point is, with all the reading everybody’d done, and all the sights that everybody’d seen — and three of the CRDF troopers had done time up at Raiford, so you know they’re not exactly pansies — still and all, nobody had ever seen anything like this.
The entire troop of twenty-nine, Captain Bob Hardawl commanding, was deep in the Everglades on maneuvers, keeping up their tracking skills, learning jungle infiltration, when they heard the car. There was a road over there, of course, they’d just marched out on it, but you never heard a car on that road, it didn’t go anywhere. Just to some fallen-down shacks used to belong to alligator hunters or maybe even older, egret hunters, from when the fancy ladies up north liked to wear egret feathers in their hats. So why was a car coming this way?
Billy Joe, one of the more excitable members of the group, called, “Captain Bob, interlopers! Suppose they’re Feds?”