“Hey, Serpico,” yelled Englewood. “How do you spell bougainvillea?”
“His name’s Gus,” said Walter.
“It’s okay,” said Gus. “B-o-u-g-…”
It had started as a proud nickname. And it had a nice snap. That was in the eighties, when Gus was a young stallion of a cop. Then his back went out, and he got fat. There was no exact moment in time — more of a gray transition — and the nickname gradually drifted into derision. After twenty years, it was a complete joke. Actually, it had been kind of a joke all along.
Nobody was talking in the substation, just the air conditioner and three chattering typewriters.
The front door opened. “I just heard the funniest story!” said Deputy Valrico. “This woman I stopped for speeding told me Serpico’s wife once—”
Englewood cleared his throat. Valrico turned. “Oh, hi, Serpico. Thought you were on a call.”
“Just got back.” Gus pulled a completed report from his typewriter and walked to a filing cabinet. The fax machine started up. Gus tore the APB off the spool and walked over to Walter’s desk.
“Remember those bodies up in Fort Pierce?”
Walter nodded and typed.
Gus set the fax on his desk. “Metallic green Trans Am spotted at a Key Largo gas station.”
“So it is headed this way.”
“There’s more,” said Gus. “See this list of victims? All named in the same indictment as the guy we found on the bat tower.”
9
THE PETITE WOMAN sitting in the rear of the No Name Pub didn’t take off her sunglasses. An untouched cup of coffee on the table. Her back to the wall.
After a few minutes, Anna’s eyes rose slightly. Someone she’d been watching at the bar was coming over. He pulled out the chair across from her. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Thanks for agreeing to meet.”
“Of course I’d meet you! Can’t tell you how worried I was when I saw the reports on TV. What the hell happened?”
Anna opened her mouth, then crumbled into silent crying. Her shoulders bobbed. The man turned around to see if anyone was looking. The people at the bar were laughing about something. The man reached across the table and put a hand on her arm. “You don’t have to say anything.”
Anna sniffled and gathered composure. “No, I have to tell someone….”
Two days earlier
ANNA SEBRING SCURRIED around the kitchen as the sun went down. She looked up over the sink. A big yellow daisy said six-thirty. She opened the oven and took a chicken out. She was wearing a waitress uniform.
It was a duplex, a plain white rectangle with no landscaping in a sub-blue-collar section of Fort Pierce, about two hours north of Miami. It had been another sparkling Florida development — “from the low forties” — when it first went up thirty years ago. Now the yards were dirt and weeds and disabled cars, the lawns orphaned in the mid-1980s, when the neighborhood collapsed all at once like the fall of Cambodia, and the Middle Class fled for the next new development farther inland.
Anna tensed when the front door opened. She hurried into the living room and searched Billy’s face for clues. She went to kiss him. He walked by.
“I made your favorite…”
He didn’t answer. Just sat at the dinner table. It was one of those days she knew to leave quickly. Anna grabbed the strap of her purse. “I’ll be home same time….”
She went out the door.
She came back in.
“My car’s gone.” Anna grabbed the phone. “Somebody stole it.”
When Billy didn’t react, she knew. She put the phone down.
“Repossessed again?”
Billy stared ahead.
“But we’re up on the payments this time. I deposited my check from the restaurant….”
Billy took a hard breath. Bad territory.
“You didn’t make the payment. You’re gambling….”
Crack. Right across the nose.
She stumbled, off-balance. Billy slowly pushed out his chair and stood.
Anna began backing up.
Billy didn’t have to knock her to the ground. She went down on her own, curling and covering everything important. Her legs took the kicks. She tried to keep quiet so the neighbors on the other side of the duplex wouldn’t know. Didn’t matter. Same story there, too.
Billy lost interest and went to the kitchen for a Coors. Anna stuffed contents back in her spilled purse and ran out the door.
But how to get to work? She’d be late again for sure, and she’d been warned. She looked at Billy’s metallic green Trans Am in the driveway. She had spare keys in her purse. It was the wrong decision, but there wasn’t a right one.
Ten minutes later, Anna raced into the parking lot of the Sunny Side Up Café. The sign had a fried egg with a smiling yolk.
“You’re late again!” yelled the owner, doubling as short-order cook after firing someone.
“Sorry…” Anna ran to the back of the restaurant and the employee rest room, actually a mop closet. She stuck toilet paper up her nose to draw blood. Checked her eyes in the mirror. Starting to puff.
Anna grabbed an order pad and rushed back out under the owner’s glare. The customers momentarily forgot their selections when Anna rushed up to the table looking like she’d just rolled down a hill. Clothes out of line, droplet of blood peeking from a nostril.
A taxi arrived. Billy. He could have just taken the Trans Am in the parking lot and driven away, but you had to know Billy. He ran in the restaurant and started shouting at Anna again like they were still alone in their living room. Billy so wanted to club her, but then saw the much-larger owner coming over. He left quickly.
Customers started getting up. Tires screeched in the parking lot and Billy took off. Across the street, a white Mercedes with tinted windows pulled away from the curb and headed in the same direction.
Anna was sitting and crying at an empty table. The owner walked over.
She wiped her eyes. “I’m so sorry….”
“So am I.”
She looked up. The owner was shaking his head. “This isn’t working.”
“I need this job.”
“I need this restaurant.”
He called for Val, one of the other waitresses, to give Anna a ride. There wasn’t any business now anyway.
They went to Val’s apartment. A relative was there, watching her kid.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna.
Val leaned against the kitchen counter and lit a cigarette. “I’d call the police.”
“I can’t.” Anna turned quickly. “And you don’t say anything either. Billy’s on probation. He’d go back to jail.”
“Good.”
“Then we really won’t have any money.”
Anna couldn’t believe how different Billy had been in the beginning.
“They always are,” said Val, looking over at her own child in the living room.
But Billy wasn’t like the others. And besides, he was in business with her brother, Rick. Anna adored Rick. He was married to her best friend, Janet, and Anna thought Janet was the luckiest woman in the world. If only she could find someone half as nice as her brother. And if Billy was good enough to be Rick’s business partner, that was plenty recommendation.
The two waitresses didn’t have answers. It got to be midnight.
“I need to go home,” said Anna.
“You should stay here.”
“Just take me home.”
They drove across town and turned the corner at the end of Anna’s street. Val leaned over the steering wheel. “Holy shit.”
Anna’s clothes and everything were all over the front lawn, the front dirt, that is. The Trans Am was in the driveway.
Val kept going past the house and drove to a nearby convenience store. They bought plastic trash bags and returned to the duplex. No sign of Billy. The blinds were drawn and all the lights off except one still burning in the back bathroom. They quietly stuffed belongings in the bags and tossed them in the backseat.