"She gonna be okay?" he asked the Jamaican nurse.
"Oh, she'll feel better after breakfast."
Maureen said, "Earl, this is Evie. She's one of the good ones."
The nurse laughed. "I'll come back in an hour for your bath."
As soon as they were alone again, Maureen said: "She's a sharp girl. You should let her take a look at that problem with your you-know-what."
"No thanks." Tool wasn't spreading his ass crack to any female stranger, black, white, or purple polka-dotted.
"For heaven's sake, Earl, she's a professional health-care provider."
"How about some TV?"
"Hmmm-hmmm," said Maureen.
Tool noticed that her breathing had slowed and her eyelids were droopy. The drugs that Nurse Evie had brought, combined with the secondhand fentanyl patch, were taking effect. Maybe now Maureen could grab a decent sleep.
He said, "I better go."
"Thank you for the company, Earl."
"Anytime."
"I didn't even think to ask about your bodyguarding," she said drowsily. "How's it going with that big-shot doctor?"
"Same old crap."
When Tool stood to leave, Maureen turned her face to the wall and curled herself into a shape that reminded him of a question mark.
"Don't you dare give up," he said anxiously.
"Not me."
"I'm dead serious now."
"Earl?"
He could barely hear her speak, so he leaned over the bed rail and balanced his huge head close to hers.
"Yes, ma'am. What is it?"
"Earl, I need a favor."
"Anything."
"It's a whopper," Maureen said.
"Just name it."
"Can you get me out of here?"
Tool smiled. "I thought you'd never ask."
Chaz Perrone awoke nude in his yellow Humvee on the shoulder of Interstate 95, somewhere in Palm Beach County.
Friday morning.
Rush hour.
His bladder was the size of Lake Okeechobee and his skull was splitting open like a rotten melon. He opened the passenger door and tried to take a leak, but it felt as if he were pissing broken glass. Crawling behind the steering wheel, he was relieved to spy the keys in the ignition.
He headed home with careful regard for the speed limits, not wishing to be stopped by the cops and forced to explain his appearance. He was grateful for the absurd height of the Hummer, which concealed his chafed and sallow nakedness from other motorists, save for a few coarse truck drivers.
What the hell happened last night? Chaz wondered, squinting into the cruel morning sun.
The last thing he remembered with clarity was Rose, in those incredible short jeans, leading him to her bedroom. That's when he must have flipped out, because somehow Rose had morphed into Joey and right away she'd started unloading an unholy ration of shit.
Joey, in the same skirt and blouse that she'd been wearing on the night he threw her overboard!
By the time Chaz reached the exit for West Boca Dunes Phase II, he had it all figured out. What had triggered his freak-out was watching the video of Joey's murder over and over; that, combined with too much booze. And hadn't Rose been wearing the same perfume as Joey?
Chaz didn't recall running from the bedroom, but apparently that's what he'd done. Dashed out the front door, dove into the Hummer and took off. Rose must have thought he was totally whacked.
He glanced down at his pecker, which he scarcely recognized in its dolorous, chastened droop. He wondered if he'd ever again be able to initiate a sex act without being taunted by the ambrosial ghost of his dead wife.
He wheeled into his driveway and parked next to Tool's Grand Marquis, checking both ways down the street before loping into the house. The door to the big goon's room was shut, so Chaz furtively padded to the kitchen, where he gulped four aspirins with a chaser of Mountain Dew. Then he stepped into the shower and propped himself against the tiles, massaging his hangover until the hot water ran out.
When he emerged from the bathroom, the phone was ringing.
"Where you been, son?" It was Red Hammernut. "I left, like, a dozen goddamn messages on your answer machine."
"I spent the night at a friend's," Chaz said.
"Without Mr. O'Toole?"
"It was an emergency, Red."
"You wanna talk about emergencies? Tell you what, I got a major-league motherfucker of an emergency arrived just yesterday by Federal Express. It's a videocassette."
"Oh shit."
"Up to your eyeballs, son. You know about this damn thing?"
"Yessir. I got one, too."
"Is that so?" Red Hammernut sounded like he was working up to a spit. "I thought I seen plenty in my day, Chaz, but never nuthin' like this. I'd be lyin' if I said I wasn't shook up."
Red's slurred delivery suggested that he'd gotten an early start on his cocktails.
"Let's not do this on the phone," he said to Chaz.
"You want me to drive over to the office?"
"Hell no. I'm parked right'n front of your goddamn house."
Chaz went to the window and saw the gray Cadillac idling in the swale. He stepped into a wrinkled pair of trousers and hurried outside. The passenger door of the big car swung open and Chaz climbed into the chill. Red Hammernut was dressed like he'd just stepped off a niar-lin boat, a sunburned gnome in Eddie Bauer khakis. He had a plug of tobacco in one cheek and smear of zinc oxide on his radish-shaped nose. From his thick ruddy neck hung a pair of polarized sunglasses. A bottle of Jack Daniel's stood open on the seat-back tray; no glass.
Chaz said, "I didn't know the guy had a video camera. When I saw the tape, I was blown away."
"Son, it's bad, bad news."
"The worst," Chaz agreed.
"I gotta say, it was a tur'ble thing to watch. I always liked Joey, I really did," Red said. "I won't ask why you done it, because it ain't none of my business."
Chaz was mildly irritated. "But we talked about it, remember? How worried I was? I thought she'd figured out our whole deal."
He was disappointed that Red hadn't commented on the efficiency of the crime itself; the steel balls it took to go through with it.
"We've got to pay the blackmail, Red. Now there's no choice."
"I 'gree."
"The whole five hundred, right?"
"Yup," Red Hammernut said. "The full load."
Chaz Perrone's relief almost instantly gave way to suspicion. He'd been expecting resistance or, at the least, some loony alternate plan. He knew how much Red cherished his money; dropping half a million bucks was enough to send him on a six-month bender.
"The drop is set for tonight," Chaz said, "on a house somewhere in the middle of Biscayne Bay. The guy wrote down a GPS heading."
"Yeah, Tool told me."
"You talked to Tool?"
"That's right. I already gave him the cash to hold." Red Hammer-nut took a pull from the bottle of bourbon. "Why you look so surprised, son? The man works for me."
"Yeah. So do I," Chaz reminded him.
"And you're in charge of buyin' the suitcase." Red said this with no trace of sarcasm. "I got you guys a boat for the night, a twenty-three-footer, at Bayside Marina. That's downtown Miami, acrosst from the basketball arena. Tool's good with outboards, you let him drive."
"Whatever," said Chaz.
He was thinking about the scene toward the end of GoodFellas, when everything's falling apart for the gangsters and the Ray Liotta character meets the Robert De Niro character at a diner. The two of them are sitting there, calmly talking about all the problems and all the heat-just like Red and I are talking, Chaz thought-when the De Niro character nonchalantly asks the Ray Liotta character to go down to Florida and do a job.
And right then, at that instant, the Ray Liotta character knows he's being set up for a hit.
"Son, I don't want no funny business out there on the water," Red Hammernut was saying. "I told Tool the same thing-pay the sumbitch and get the hell outta Dodge, you hear?"