The supervisor got the entire staff in on the act, and they canvassed the bottom half of the state, pushing the title, then working their way north. The stores were receptive. They could always send the books back if they didn’t sell. “Sure, we’ll take a few cases.” The title started moving in several markets. Not like at the first store, but respectably, and multiplied by hundreds of outlets, it began adding up to real numbers.
An overcast summer morning in New York. A Friday. Midtown Manhattan, the nerve ganglion of the global publishing industry, and by noon everyone was consumed with the same crisis: how to beat weekend traffic heading out of town to the Hamptons after lunch.
On West Fifty-third Street, at a sidewalk restaurant of obscure nationality and no prices, a man and a woman sat across from each other in identical business suits. A waiter in a red turban set a plate in front of each of them. They had ordered the same, pan-seared sponge on a bed of pollen.
“Pepper?” asked the waiter.
They nodded. The waiter twisted a metal tube over their plates.
“Sir,” said the woman. “We have a sleeper on our hands. Just got the sales report yesterday. Red-hot — might even crack the Times bestseller list.”
“Whose book? Allister? Byron? Sir Dennis?”
She shook her head. “Ralph.”
“Ralph!”
The waiter held a pump bottle. “Moisture?”
They nodded.
“I didn’t know Ralph was even still alive.”
“We’re trying to confirm that.”
“When did we publish a new title?”
“We didn’t. This is his last one.”
The waiter put on safety goggles. “Blowtorch?”
They nodded.
“But his last book was ten years ago.”
“Eleven.”
The man shook his head. “This is a crazy business.”
“No crazier than any other.”
A troupe of midgets surrounded the table, Cossack dancing.
“I just can’t get over it. I mean, Ralph! How did this start?”
“A sales fluke out of Miami Beach. A bookstore called The Palm Reader, then it snowballed.”
“The Palm Reader?”
“One of those new crime and mystery specialty shops. A local wholesaler got wind of it and spread the word…”
The waiter clapped his hands twice, and the midgets dispersed. “Dessert?”
They nodded.
“Okay, throw some money at promotions,” said the man, jabbing his sponge with a fork. “And find Ralph. We need to get him back on tour. Talk to his agent.”
“He isn’t represented anymore, not that we know of.”
“Try the last one.”
The dessert hovercraft arrived.
5
The day Paul and Jethro found the five million dollars and took off across the state had started out pleasant enough. No rain in the forecast, the mercury hovering under eighty at the Lakeland airport, halfway between Tampa and Orlando. Two long lines of cars sat stationary in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 4, hundreds of traffic-jammed vehicles stretching endlessly over the gentle central Florida hills, all the way to the horizon.
In the middle of the right lane was a blue ’74 Malibu. Jethro was driving, Paul in the passenger seat with an open briefcase in his lap, counting wads.
“How much farther to the cruise ships?” asked Paul.
“Eighty miles,” said Jethro. “How much money?”
“Three million. A lot left. Hope there’s a ship leaving today.”
“We can always put up in a motel. Nobody’s going to find us that fast. It’ll be weeks before they even realize anyone has found the money, and longer, if ever, before they connect it to us.”
Five miles behind the Malibu, a pink Cadillac Eldorado was stuck in the same lane.
“What’s the global-positioning tracker say?” asked Lenny.
Serge looked down at the beeping box on the seat beside him. “The briefcase is stuck in traffic, too. About five miles ahead.”
The Cadillac held four people, two men in front, two women in back. Airbrushing down the side of the convertible: LENNY LIPPOWICZ — THE DON JOHNSON EXPERIENCE. One bumper sticker: REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS.
“What’s the delay?” said Serge, grabbing the top of the windshield and standing up on the driver’s seat to see as far as he could. He plopped back down and punched the steering wheel.
“Maybe a wreck?” said Lenny in the passenger seat, wearing a pastel T-shirt and white Versace jacket.
“Should have known better,” said Serge. “Never take I-4 when you have to get anywhere.”
A female voice from the backseat: “Can we have another joint?”
“No!” snapped Serge. “No more dope for you!”
Lenny passed a joint back.
Serge threw up his hands. “I just told them they couldn’t have any more.”
“Doper etiquette,” said Lenny. “Mellow out.”
“You know my personality type,” said Serge. “I can’t take boredom. And I especially can’t take some kind of huge holdup where you don’t know what’s going on!”
One of the women offered the lit joint over Serge’s shoulder. He pushed it away. “Just give me a ballpark of how long the wait is! I don’t care if it’s four hours — I need something I can mentally whittle on, compartmentalize, break down and digest. Or give the reason. Let me know what the hell’s going on! This out-of-the-loop, can’t-seethe-front-of-the-line shit is making me crazy!” He punched the steering wheel again.
“Look,” said Lenny. “I think they’re starting to move up there.”
They both leaned forward and watched closely. They sat back again.
“Sorry. Just an illusion,” said Lenny. “Heat waves from the road.”
The backseat: “Ahem…can we have, like, another joint? It’ll be the last one. Promise.”
“See what you started?” said Serge. “They’re hooked.”
“How was I to know?”
Serge turned around and put his arm over the back of the driver’s seat and stared at the women, City and Country, college-age babes from Alabama. “You say you never got high in your life until last week? Not a single time until Lenny turned you on back at Hammerhead Ranch?”
The women nodded, one hitting a roach clip, the other holding her smoke.
“At least try to be a little more discreet. We’re in a convertible.” Serge turned back around and hit the steering wheel again. “C’mon!”
“Must be a wreck,” said Lenny.
“It would have to be a ruptured tanker of liquid phosgene to take this long. Otherwise, they’d already be sweeping up glass.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s I-4. Take your pick,” said Serge. “I’ve seen sinkholes, armed assaults, forest fires that flushed wildlife into traffic. And then there was the cow.”
“The cow?”
“There was this one cow. She liked to stand alone all day up to her tits in the middle of this little lake off the side of the road.”
“That was a driving problem?”
“Everyone slowed down and watched. They thought she was in trouble. Hundreds called the highway patrol, wanting them to send a rescue helicopter with a canvas sling harness and a winch.”
“Did they?”
“No. There was nothing wrong. But the calls kept pouring in and tied up all the emergency lines. So the highway department put up a sign, one of those big mobile things on wheels, a bunch of flashing orange light bulbs that spell out stuff like RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD. Except this one said, THE COW IS OK. True story.”
“What happened?”
“Made everything worse. Everyone slowing down to watch.”
Lenny nodded, then pointed ahead at the stationary lines of cars. “Might as well turn the engine off and save gas.”
“And put The Club on.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Lenny. “How come you always put your Club on backward, with the lock facing the dash?”
“Fuckin’ kids — they stick machine screws in the lock and yank the mechanism out with dent-pullers. But they don’t have the necessary clearance if I reverse the bar. The things you have to do to survive in this state.”