Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split Read online

  “Cool,” Curtis said. He went over to the workbench, got a can of air freshener, and spritzed the spray around the interior of the Escort.

  The fragrance of lilacs wafted through the garage.

  Butch sniffed appreciatively. “You know, that stuff smells like the crap Cookie used to take a bath in. Not bad.”

  “Now, like I was saying,” he continued, “Wade was telling me maybe he’d meet us at the track tonight, tell us which dogs to bet on in a couple of races.”

  “And then we’ll be even,” Curtis said.

  “I was thinking, though,” Butch said, “maybe he should give us this computer thingy. So we could bet all the races. Win big.”

  Curtis looked doubtful. Frown lines crossed his grease- stained forehead.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” he said. “That Cutlass has got about two hundred thousand miles on it and the transmission’s shot. I don’t think he’s gonna think that’s a fair trade.”

  “Maybe he won’t,” Butch agreed. “That’s why I was thinking you could go with me tonight. You, me, and that .38 of yours.”

  “Ah-he-e-em.”

  It was an exaggerated throat-clearing. Both men looked in the direction it was coming from, from the doorway of the bay.

  Tammi Stargell’s body was outlined by the sunlight streaming into the dim garage. She was tall and skinny, with long, stringy arms and legs. She’d cut her dishwater-colored hair short, bleached it blond, and she had these little strands hanging down over her eyes, like some kind of anorexic sheepdog. She wore dark brown eye shadow and pale pink lipstick. Butch thought she looked like something out of the late-night creature feature. Curtis thought she looked awesome.

  “Somebody wants the Escort,” she said. “You about done, Curtis?”

  “Let me just gas it up and pull it around to the front and it’ll be ready to roll,” Curtis said, sliding in behind the wheel.

  “About time,” Tammi muttered.

  After Curtis had backed the car out of the bay, she walked over to Butch, who was pretending to read the paper again.

  “I heard that part about the gun,” she said. “What kind of trouble are you getting him into now?”

  “No kind of trouble at all,” Butch said, not looking up.

  “Then why the .38? He’s still on probation from that last no-kinda-trouble-at-all you talked him into.”

  “We was set up,” Butch protested. “How was I supposed to know there’d be a Doberman sleeping in that liquor store all night?”

  “Why the gun?” she repeated.

  Butch sighed. He might as well go on and tell her. If he didn’t, Curtis would. He was so pussy-whipped by this skinny piece of tail it was pathetic.

  As he filled her in, Tammi’s close-set blue eyes narrowed to slits. “You’re sure this guy really works at DataTrack?”

  Butch held up a folded rental agreement. “Oh, yeah. When he was late coming back with the money, I called up the work number he gave. He works there all right.”

  She still wasn’t convinced.

  “There must be five, six hundred people working out there. How do you know he really works on computers like he says? How do you know he’s not a janitor or something?”

  Butch let his chair tilt back a little, propping his black lace-up workshoes on the metal desktop. He picked up the sports page again.

  “He’s no janitor,” he said. “You ever hear of Wade Hardeson Jr.?”

  “That the guy with the Cutlass?”

  “His old man,” Butch said. “That’s Wade Hardeson Jr. as in chairman of the board of Orange State Savings and Loan. As in the big white house on the water on Snell Isle with the forty-foot Bertram tied up at the dock. As in rear friggin’ commodore of the Yacht Club.”

  “If his old man’s rich and such a big hotshot, why is the kid renting that piece of shit from us? And why’s he owe us money?”

  “Unfortunately,” Butch said sadly, “in many cases the chip off the old block is in reality full of termites. Our friend Wade has got him a bad drinking problem and a spic girlfriend. His daddy’s cut off Wade the Third’s allowance. Now Wade’s got this computer program. It could make him rich enough to tell his daddy to go jump in Tampa Bay. But Wade don’t have hardly enough money to get in the pay toilet at the track, let alone into the clubhouse. He let on when I visited him last week that he was gonna try to sell the computer thingy to some high roller. What Wade told me was, soon as he gets the money from this guy, he’ll pay us what he owes us, plus give us tips on a couple races.”

  Tammi’s mind was racing along as Butch talked. “Why settle for a couple of races?” she asked. “Why not get him to tell us the races for the whole season?”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” Butch agreed.

  Wade Hardeson III popped the top of a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, took a long sip, and frowned. Five more cans littered the burnt-orange shag carpet around him. He poked one with the toe of his sneaker, just to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. He hadn’t.

  He belched. Made it into a long drawn-out anthem. Shiiiit.

  “What the hell,” he muttered, and emptied the last can, drinking the lukewarm beer down in an effortless series of gulps.

  A skinny orange kitten, only a little lighter in color than the carpet, crept into the living room where Wade was sprawled on the sofa. The cat sniffed daintily at the cans. “Get outta here, Asshole,” he said, tossing the last can at the cat’s head and missing.

  Wade called the cat Asshole. Rosie, whose cat it was— hell, whose apartment this was—called it Punkin.

  “Bummer.” He said it aloud. Looked at the three hundred-dollar bills he’d laid out on the milk-crate coffee table. Some high roller. Some fuckin’ stake. He said that aloud too. “Some fuckin’ stake.”

  And tonight was the night. Big night. Wade’s program was ready. He just needed the rest of the data Rosie was supposed to bring back from Sarasota.

  “Hurry up,” he’d told her. “This is important, babe.”

  She’d given him that look, in that way she had, those big black eyes unblinking. Telling him he’d gone too far.

  “Listen, Wade,” she said quickly. “This was my idea—right? You don’t know anything about dog racing. You got that computer at work, and you know how to punch the right buttons. Make it tell you stuff. But you ain’t nothing without me. I’m the one paying rent around here. And I’m the one knows the dogs. It’s all up here.” She pointed a red-painted fingernail at her head, the long black hair neatly parted down the middle, flowing down her back nearly to her waist.

  Then she’d pointed to the stack of racing forms from Tampa Downs, the ones she’d meticulously marked up after every race during the six-month greyhound season in Tampa.

  Six months. Her feet ached at the thought of it. Standing around outside the front gate, dressed in her halter top and cut-off jeans, and those ridiculous red spike heels. “Racetrack Rosie Picks the Winners,” she’d chant to the arriving crowd. “You’ll Smell Like a Rose with Rosie’s Picks.”

  On a good night in Tampa or St. Pete she’d sell sixty or seventy tout sheets at a buck a pop. Sarasota, where the rich people lived, she could make a couple hundred bucks a night sometimes.

  Sarasota was where she’d met Wade Hardeson III to begin with. The first night of the Sarasota season last June, she’d hitched a ride over from St. Pete with her little brother James.

  This surfer-lookin’ guy, shaggy sun-bleached hair, white low-slung jeans, big blue eyes, bought one of her sheets, went inside, and bet a couple of her picks. After he’d won a trifecta in the third race, he’d come outside, bringing her a beer to celebrate.

  She’d thought he was cute, and he was definitely interested in her. He’d hung around all night, asking a lot of questions about how a nice girl like her, blah, blah.

  “I worked in one of the kennels while I was in high school,” she’d told him. “You pick it up.”

  The stuff about the kennel was true, as far as
it went. She’d actually gone to her first dog race at the age of five, with her uncle Ernesto. Ernesto didn’t seem to have a real job, but he went to the dog races and the jai alai at home in Tampa, and the horse track in Oldsmar, and a lot of other places in Florida too.

  She and James lived with Uncle Ernesto and Aunt Silvia in a bright blue concrete-block house in a run-down part of Tampa. Aunt Silvia worked at a dry cleaners. And Uncle Ernesto hung out.

  “Jobs are for fools, Rosita mia,” he’d often told her.

  That night in Sarasota. Well, James had come out after the eighth race, flat busted. He never would try her picks. James had seen her laughing and flirting with the blond surfer guy, shrugged, and walked away. Rosie Figueroa could take care of herself.

  She could, too. Although why she fell for someone like Wade Hardeson III, she’d never know.

  Yes, she did too. He’d been to college. He had a job where he wore a sport coat and necktie. He drove a Porsche. That night, after they left the track, he’d taken her to a swanky restaurant. She ate two orders of steamed stone crabs, the butter dripping down her chin.

  “If his job’s so great, how come he’s living with you and you’re paying all the bills?” James wanted to know. “What’s he do over at DataTrack? They pay him to get blasted every night?”

  “It’s computers,” she’d said quickly. “They do stuff for NASA, for the space program. We’re going over to Cape Kennedy, next launch. Wade can get us right in. At least he don’t walk around with Sheetrock dust in his hair and eyes and up his ass like some people.”

  What Wade actually did, she later found out, was sit at a computer all day and type in numbers—data, he called it.

  Weather stuff, to be exact. He’d punch in temperatures, humidity, precipitation, barometric readings. And somehow, the computer could suck it in, then spit out the best time for a rocket launch.

  “The computer decides what the weather’s gonna be ahead of time?” Rosie had asked. “And it’s right?”

  “Ninety percent accuracy rate,” Wade drawled, nibbling on her ear with those nice straight white teeth of his. “Of course, a lot of that’s because of the skill of the programmer.” He’d reached around to slip off her halter top, but she sat straight up in bed.

  “If I could pick winners ninety percent of the time, hell, fifty percent of the time, I’d be rich,” she said slowly. “Filthy, stinkin’ rich.”

  “We’d be rich,” Wade had said, drawing her back down toward him on the bed. “Now let me show you my money-maker.”

  After, when Wade was asleep, Rosie got up, pulled on a T-shirt and went out to the kitchen.

  She got a Fresca out of the refrigerator and sat at the dinette table with a pad of paper, a pencil, and some old racing programs.

  She wrote down all the variables in handicapping that Ernesto had taught her. Stuff like the dog’s dam and sire. Its weight, kennel, and trainer. Then there was the dog’s previous finishes, its favorite running position, track length, weather conditions, health, and performance against other dogs.

  Some of that stuff you got out of the programs, the rest of it you got by hanging around with trainers and lead-out boys and kennel hands. Rosie even knew a guy who worked for a veterinarian who took care of the dogs at some of the bigger kennels.

  She wrote it all down. All the categories, in her neat block print, while Wade snored away in the bedroom. The next morning she’d told him her plan.

  Tonight was definitely the night.

  Wade had worked really hard programming in all the data Rosie had gathered from the Tampa season, but she’d had to go back to Sarasota to look up the old race programs at the track office, since she’d only started keeping records after their season was over. He deserved a beer or two. After tonight they’d be in high cotton.

  He heard the chugging sound of her VW Beetle outside in the parking lot and hurriedly kicked the beer cans under the sofa. “Cheezit, Asshole,” he told the kitten. “It’s the cops.”

  Wade stood up, stretched, and scratched his belly, pausing to wonder at the paunch he’d developed since the summer.

  “Wade?” Rosie called, letting the wooden screen door bang shut.

  Her face was green.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I was at the top of the Skyway Bridge. Then some jerk ahead of me stops. He fuckin’ stops. And my bug starts to roll backward. I pop it into first and it stalls. And rolls backward some more. And right behind me is the biggest mother tractor-trailer I ever saw. I thought I was gonna pass out.”

  “But you didn’t,” Wade said. Rosie hated bridges. Especially suspension bridges like the Sunshine Skyway. He opened one of the battered wooden cabinets and got out a ceramic mug and a jar of instant Folgers, spooned some into the cup, and ran some hot water over it.

  “You want some coffee?” He put the cup in front of her. Then, casually, “You get the data?”

  She heaved her fringed leather shoulder bag onto the kitchen table and took out a green steno pad.

  “It’s all right here,” she said, patting the notebook. “What about the money? How much did your old man give you?”

  Wade opened a brown-paper sack and took out a package of Ann Page sugar doughnuts. Rosie’s favorite junk food. He set the doughnut box in front of her, got a plate, and put that there too. Then he bent down and kissed her neck.

  She looked up, instantly suspicious. She smelled the beer on his breath. He’d screwed up again.

  “How much?” she said sharply.

  Wade sighed deeply. “Three hundred. The old bastard’s still ticked off about the Porsche being repoed. But I can get—”

  Rosie did not let him finish. She hurled the box of doughnuts, the saucer, and her purse at him.

  “You idiot” she screamed. Punkin fled the room in one elegant leap.

  Next door, even across the weed-choked courtyard of the Bayside Tourist Court, the other residents could hear Rosie Figueroa screaming, first in English, then in Spanish. Moments later, Wade Hardeson III burst from the small, red-painted cabin, shirtless, covered in what looked like powdered sugar.

  “Get the money,” Rosie screamed, standing in the doorway of the cabin. “Get the rest of the money or don’t come back.”

  Chapter Four

  Butch Goolsby shot Curtis the look, but Curtis did not notice. The radio was playing and Curtis was humming along, nodding his head back and forth, using his fingers to drum the song’s bass line on the top of his thighs. “Ooga-chukka, ooga-chukka,” Curtis chanted.

  When he’d had enough, Butch reached over and snapped the radio off with such force that the plastic knob came off in his hand.

  Curtis looked hurt. “You broke the radio,” he said.

  “You gotta listen to that crap all day and all night? You look like one of them toy dogs setting in the back window of a car, head bobbing back and forth like some kinda moron. Can’t you sit still?”

  Curtis was humming now. Butch kept his hands tight on the steering wheel of the car, so he wouldn’t reach over and slap Curtis.

  Butch had been around. Done some time in the Pinellas County jail, and a short stint up at Starke for a misunderstanding concerning a concealed weapon and a clearly illegal traffic stop by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, so he knew it was not good policy to go around slapping somebody twenty years younger and sixty pounds heavier, even if that somebody is your only son.

  “Look here,” Butch said, “let’s go over the routine for when we see our buddy Wade. I’m gonna remind him about the money he owes us for the Cutlass. And you’re gonna sit in the truck. Don’t say nuthin’. If this jerk-off Wade looks at you, give him your tough look.”

  “Tough?” Curtis was puzzled.

  “Look mean,” Butch explained. “Kind of narrow your eyes, like Clint Eastwood in them Dirty Harry movies. Think you can do that?”

  Curtis squinched his eyes so that he looked like an idiot Chinaman. Butch sighed. “Here,” he said, pulling the Smith & Wesso
n .38 pistol from under the seat of the truck. “If I give you the nod, you just hold this up real quick. Only don’t shoot him. Not out in public.”

  “Okay,” Curtis said. He squinched his eyes again for practice and stroked the pistol, humming again, but softly.

  When they got to the Bayside Tourist Court, Butch pulled alongside the Cutlass, took a clean toothpick, and fitted it between his bottom teeth.

  He knocked on the door of unit seven, scraping his knuckles on the peeling paint. After a moment, Wade Hardeson III stuck his head out the door. His face paled a little when he saw his guest.

  “Who is it?” he heard a woman’s voice call.

  “Tell her somebody needs their battery jumped off,” Butch said in a low voice. “We don’t want nobody to get hurt.”

  “Be right back, Rosie,” Wade called.

  He closed the door quickly and stepped out onto the cracked concrete stoop. “What are you doing here? I told you I’d meet you at the track tonight. I’ll give you a couple tips, and we’ll be all square.”

  Butch shook his head. “Deal’s off. The boss man’s busting my chops about that Cutlass. You got the money?”

  Wade’s face fell. “No. I don’t have the money. I got a cash flow problem. I thought we had an understanding.”

  “Uh-uh,” Butch said. “No good.”

  He started walking away. Wade followed him out to the parking lot. Butch leaned over and looked in the open window of the Cutlass.

  “You got any personal shit in here, you better get it out. Me and my boy gotta take it back to the shop right now.”

  He reached in his pocket and took out a round brass ring loaded with keys, each with a small, round paper tag attached.

  “Curtis,” he said, looking over at his son, who was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck, “let’s go. I’ll drive the Cutlass, you follow.”

  When his father addressed him, Curtis stopped humming and quit tapping his feet. He squinched his eyes up. “All right,” he said, trying to sound tough. He jammed the pistol in the waistband of his jeans, got out of the truck and walked around to the driver’s side and got in. At the same time, Butch opened the door of the Cutlass and started throwing Wade’s belongings onto the pavement.