Larry nodded. “Yep…it’s always the lawyers.”
Not a word from Virginia.
“Thanks for the Coke, Larry.”
“Any time, Clyde.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Virginia watched Clyde go out through the glass doors and head to the pickup. But just as she opened her mouth to commend Larry on his detective work, Clyde stopped in mid-stride.
Now what?
They watched through the glass storefront as he threw his throat back and took a deep gulp of the ice-cold Coke.
“Good Lord,” Virginia muttered, shaking her head.
Neither Larry nor Virginia moved a hair sitting there on the bar stools behind the counter, watching as Clyde finally got into the truck, cranked up, and headed out of the parking lot.
Only when he’d eased out onto the highway and screeched off did Larry turn to Virginia.
“Man, V.G., you make me nervous! I gotta calm down. This whole morning’s giving me an aneurysm. I guess you wanna drive over there right now to check out the cameras.”
“I can go by myself. It’s okay.”
“Hell, no, you are not going by yourself. Anyway, I want to get a look at those cameras stuck up on a pine tree. Go wait in the El Camino while I close up. We’ll take my car. She’s unlocked. Better let the windows down. Might be hot.”
Virginia smiled. Larry always did the driving.
Virginia went ahead, sat in the El Camino’s passenger’s seat, and watched Larry lock up.
He climbed into the driver’s seat, flicked on the El Camino’s AC, and they headed out of the lot toward the Palmetto Dunes development site.
It was nearly 10 a.m. when they reached the area. The sun was just starting to heat up, burning the cool out of the air and off the road. Minute by minute, the damp, frosty feel in the air was giving way to another hot Island morning. In another half hour, heat waves would begin to snake up off the dark gray asphalt on the Georgia back roads.
Virginia and Larry traveled along several miles of bumpy access road. Keeping it casual, they eased past the entrance of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living at about fifteen mph. He kept it in the road while Virginia surveyed the area.
“See anybody around?”
“No, but keep going straight a little bit. Just in case.”
He nodded and continued on toward the south beaches for about a mile, then U-turned and doubled back to the construction site.
“Wanna go in?”
“No other way to find out where the cameras are. Plus, you have tinted windows. They can’t see us, but we can see them.”
Larry turned in, inching down the private drive toward the plum spot picked for the high-rises.
“It’s the sweet spot, that’s for sure.” He was right. There at the cusp, where grassy, firm ground turned to pink-white sand under your feet, was the exact spot Palmetto Dunes planned to erect two grayish-red high-rises, twenty-four stories each.
The two of them leaned forward in the El Camino, looking up to the tops of a cluster of tall pines.
And there they were, two black security cameras perched high above Palmetto’s entrance, glinting down toward the guardhouse like computerized metal birds of prey, waiting to catch their victims on videotape
“Clyde was right,” she told Larry as they both still squinted upward. “No one would ever spot those cameras unless they knew just where to look.”
“Okay, so, now that we’ve seen ’em…” He pointed toward the guardhouse. “Let’s get out of here before Deputy Dog burps his coffee and turns around.”
The rest of the site looked exactly as it had before. From what they could see from inside Larry’s El Camino, not much more had changed since Virginia had led the second foray against Palmetto to destroy the construction ground work.
The guardhouse stood just as it had for weeks. Virginia could even make out the back of a head, resting against the glass…the same head as before. It was the former security guard from the Brunswick Wal-Mart. He hadn’t been fired after all.
The window AC roared away right beside his head and, true to form, the guard sat oblivious to two spies thirty feet behind him. He was absorbed in his TV, same as before, but this time he was engrossed in The View.
Larry gently eased the El Camino into reverse and they backed out undetected.
When they were back on the main road, he glanced over at Virginia. “Well, what’d ya think?”
“We’ll just let them lay out the foundation again and then, the night before they’re ready to pour the concrete, we’ll tear it all up again.”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t know nothin’ about nothing! I’m just working reconnaissance here.”
“Right…you’re just a spy. So how can we get in without using the trail by the guardhouse?”
“Don’t know…lemme percolate.”
They headed back toward the 7-Eleven.
Virginia’s mind was spinning over the game of cat-and-mouse she was playing with some of the most high-powered financiers in the South. Could they possibly be outwitted a third time?
When she got back, she’d round up the guerrillas from their various daytime callings…the Radio Shack, the local high school, the Wal-Mart, and the Shrimp Boat Restaurant. Construction was under way again, and they had to be ready for action forty-eight hours from now.
Once the concrete was poured and set, destruction of the foundation would be almost impossible without the use of explosives. Time was of the essence. Millions of dollars were riding on the Palmetto Dunes high-rises. She learned a lot from the County Records Office. She wondered how long Eugene had been buying up the land…
Larry broke the silence with three words.
“Amphibious sneak attack.”
Virginia pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose, just barely keeping them on, and looked at him over the rims. The look posed the obvious question.
“Clyde’s damn cameras cut you off from the main entrance.” He turned down the radio. “The only other path in is off the highway…too dangerous. Might get spotted. They’re on to us now… They’ll be waiting up front for somebody to sneak in. So we got to go from another angle.”
“Another angle?” Virginia didn’t get it.
“V.G., didn’t you ever see Caddyshack? My God, it’s a classic.”
“Of course I saw Caddyshack, I haven’t been living in a cave, for Pete’s sake. But what does Caddyshack have to do with Palmetto Dunes?”
“V.G., you saw it, true. But I’ve seen it twelve times…minimum. If I only learned one thing from the movie…just one thing…it’s this. If you want to beat a varmint…you got to think like a varmint. These varmints are using the beach. So’ll we. We come in after dark by dinghy, shore at the south beach, and walk in. They’ll never suspect a rear attack.”
Brilliant.
“‘We’? So you’re in the foxhole with me?”
“I got to stand for something, V.G. I’ve let the Seven-Eleven take over my life. Running a convenience store takes on a life of its own…it’s sucking me dry, V.G. The deliveries, the gas pumps, the customers, the damn Slurpee machine. They’ve become my raison d’être.”
She didn’t want to interrupt, so she just nodded her head and kept looking straight ahead, watching the yellow line in the middle of the road as it flew under the front grille of the car, disappearing then popping up again behind them.
“It takes a toll, V.G. The grind of business. It’s robbed me of my purpose in life. The D reminded me of that. So, yeah. I’m in, V.G. I’m in the foxhole with you.”