"No," Avila admitted.
"The augers?"
"No, I swear."
"Never even checked?" Ira Jackson pounded ferociously with a hammer.
"I didn't see them," Avila said morosely, "because I never drove out there."
Ira Jackson's hammer halted in midair. Avila, who was lashed to a broken commode in a bathroom, lowered his eyes in a pantomime of shame. That's when he saw that the toilet bowl was alive with bright-green frogs and mottled brown snakes, splashing beneath him in fetid water.
With a shiver he said, "I never went to the trailer park. The guy sent me the money—"
"How much?"
"Fifty bucks a unit. He sent it to the office, so I figured what the hell, why waste gas? Instead of driving all the way down there, I..." Here Avila caught himself. It seemed unnecessary to reveal that he'd played golf on the afternoon he was supposed to inspect Suncoast Leisure Village.
"...I didn't go."
"You're shittin'me."
"No. I'm very, very sorry."
The expression on Ira Jackson's face caused Avila to reevaluate his decision to be candid. Evidently the doughnut man intended to torture him, no matter what. Ira Jackson bent over the crucifix and went back to work.
Raising his voice over the racket, Avila said, "Christ, if I knew what he was doing with those trailers, he never woulda got permits. You gotta believe me, there's no amount of money would make me take a pass on cut augers. No way!"
"Shut up." Ira Jackson carried the cross to the backyard and began nailing it to the trunk of a pine. It had been a tall lush tree until the hurricane sheared off the top thirty feet; now it was merely a bark-covered pole.
With each plonk of the hammer, Avila's spirits sank. He said a prayer to Change, then tried a "Hail Mary" in the wan hope that traditional Catholic entreaty would be more potent in staving off a crucifixion.
As the man from New York dragged him to the tree, Avila cried, "Please, I'll do anything you want!"
"OK," said Ira Jackson, "I want you to die."
He positioned Avila upright against the cross and wrapped duct tape around his ankles and wrists to minimize the squirming. Avila shut his eyes when he saw the doughnut man snatch up the hammer. The moment the cold point of the nail punctured his palm, Avila emitted a puppy yelp and fainted.
When he awoke, he saw that Chango had answered his prayers with a fury.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At nine sharp on the morning of August 31, an attractive brunette woman carrying two miniature dachshunds walked into a Hialeah branch of the Barnett Bank and opened an account under the name of "Neria G. Torres."
For identification, the woman provided an expired automobile registration and a handful of soggy mail. The bank officer politely requested a driver's license or passport, any document bearing a photograph. The woman said her most personal papers, including driver's license, were washed away by the hurricane. As the bank officer questioned her more closely, the woman became distraught. Soon her little dogs began to bark plangently; one of them squirted from her arms and dashed in circles around the lobby, nipping at other customers. To quiet the scene, the banker agreed to accept the woman's auto registration as identification. His own aunt had lost all her immigration papers in the storm, so Mrs. Torres's excuse seemed plausible. To open the account she gave him one hundred dollars cash, and said she'd be back in a few days to deposit a large insurance check.
"You're lucky they settled so fast," the banker remarked. "My aunt's having a terrible time with her company."
The woman said her homeowner policy was with Midwest Casualty. "I've got a great insurance man," she added.
Later, when Edie Marsh told the story to Fred Dove, he reacted with the weakest twitch of an ironic smile. Under the woeful circumstances, it was as good as a cartwheel.
Edie, Snapper and the two noisy wiener dogs had moved into his room at the Ramada. No other accommodations were available for a radius of sixty miles, because the hotels were jammed full of displaced families, relief volunteers, journalists, construction workers and insurance adjusters. Fred Dove felt trapped. His fear of getting arrested for fraud was now compounded by a fear that his wife would call the motel room, then Edie Marsh or Snapper would answer the phone and the wiener dogs would start howling, leaving Fred Dove to invent an explanation that no sensible woman in Omaha, Nebraska, would ever accept.
"Cheer up," Edie told him. "We're all set at the bank."
"Good," he said in a brittle tone.
The long tense weekend had abraded the insurance man's nerves-Snapper, gimping irritably around the small motel room, slugging down vodka, threatening to blast the yappy dachshunds with a massive black handgun he claimed to have stolen from a police officer.
No wonder I'm edgy, thought Fred Dove.
To deepen the gloom, sharing the cramped room with Snapper and the dogs left the insurance man no opportunity for intimacy with Edie Marsh. Not that he could have availed himself of a sexual invitation; the withering effect of Snapper's previous coital interruption endured, as Snapper continued to tease Fred Dove about the red condom.
Also looming large was the question of Edie's aptitude for violence-a disconcerting vision of the crowbar episode was scorched into Fred Dove's memory. He worried that she or Snapper might endeavor to murder each other at any moment.
Edie stretched out next to him on the bed. "You're miserable," she observed.
"Yes indeed," said the insurance man.
With his bum leg elevated, Snapper was stationed in an armchair three and one half feet from the television screen. Every so often he would take a futile swipe at Donald or Maria, and tell them to shut the holy fuck up.
"Sally Jessy," Edie whispered. Fred Dove sighed.
On the TV, a woman in a dreadful yellow wig was accusing her gap-toothed white-trash husband of screwing her younger sister. Instead of denying it, the husband said damn right, and it was the best nooky I ever had. Instantly the sister, also wearing a dreadful wig and lacking in teeth, piped up to say she couldn't get enough. Sally Jessy exhaled in weary dismay, the studio audience hooted, and Snapper let out a war whoop that set off the dogs once again.
"If the phone rings," Fred Dove said, "please don't answer."
Edie Marsh didn't need to ask why.
"You got any kids?" she asked.
The insurance man said he had two, a boy and a girl. He thought Edie might follow up and ask about their ages, what grades they were in, and so on. But she showed no interest.