Lennox hears a roar and looks up, sees a plane coming in to land. Wonders how many men Lance Dearing, with or without his badge, has shot.
10 The Best Shake in Florida
ALL THOSE TIMES she’d sat practising denunciations, honing them to intensify their devastating impact.
The sleeping man next to her. Breathing lightly, not quite a snore; harmonised with the almost silent air con. He’d gotten up in the night to dispose of the condom. Like he had the first two. As if it would be unseemly for her to set eyes on it. But she had noticed the blood on the last one, when he’d discreetly pulled it off his exhausted dick. Trudi had taken that as her cue to get up, use the bidet and insert the spare tampon she kept in her bag. A corrosive-looking patch of her blood on his sheets; she’d felt its wetness as she’d climbed back in, perceiving herself as soiled.
Mentally ill. In a way that transcends the habitual stupidity, selfishness and weakness of men. Submitting to a rising panic, she slips from this stranger’s bed, struggles silently into her abandoned clothes, and sneaks from the apartment. Emerges into a sumptuously furnished and planted common area of the housing development. An understanding concierge, a small, nimble man, who looks and moves like an ex-flyweight boxer, calls her a cab to take her back to the hotel. They chat for a while, and when the taxi arrives he links arms and escorts her – like a father with his daughter on her wedding day, she fancies – up a staircase to a split-level exit that emerges into a palm-tree-lined street on the other side from the bay. Strangely, it doesn’t feel weird or intrusive, the man moving with a controlled grace and no sense of sleaze. The cab is waiting and she climbs in with gratitude.
Her guilt fades as she thinks of Lennox. Anxious but determined, she will trade him night for night, event for event.
She needs to be there, to suck down some more pain if that’s what it takes. The wild infidelity she’d enjoyed much of the night excites and repels her. Reaching the hotel room she feels a relief mingled with a horrible sadness and anger that he’s still not in,
Trudi sits up. The room still Rayless.
A lurid sun whites out a section of the pallid blue sky. One eye closed for the glow that hits his profile, his unaligned nose points the other across the street to a row of brightly painted homes with their broken, uneven yards. A fuzzy-haired man, wearing a filthy yellow shirt, pushes a shopping cart at a slow, uniform pace, his head bowed into its contents, only occasionally looking up as traffic zips, roars and grinds along to the intersection. A series of concrete planters filled with eucalyptus trees have been positioned in front of a cinder-block office building, to prevent people parking there. Tianna sits on one of them, legs crossed, reading the magazine on her lap. Lennox tracks the bum with the cart, following the man’s line of vision to a sign:
BARCLAY AND WEISMAN
WE WILL GET YOU COMPENSATION
FOR YOUR INJURIES
Close by the office entrance, a discarded old tyre with a dead pigeon inside its black circle makes Lennox feel somehow cheered, as if it shows local wildlife’s determination to resist the incursion of the ubiquitous temperate bird. He stretches and yawns, pulls his shirt from his skin. Feels his upper body draw breath.
Inside the office: T.W. Pye feels the padded chair creak under his corpulent frame as he collapses into it. He sucks on the super-sized Coke and chomps into the Big Mac as grease runs through his sweaty fingers, down three wobbling liver-spotted chins that sprout like truffles from under his mouth to the top of his chest. Now forty years old, Pye has been chronically overweight since his teens, due largely to an addiction to franchised fast food and cola. He has recently come to see that this has robbed him of health, vigour and sexuality. He’s never enjoyed congress with a woman he hasn’t paid for.
Now his sassy defiance is crumbling in the face of this compulsion, the resulting breathlessness, chest and arm pains, and the soul-crushing depression and anxiety attacks that plague him in the night. Most of all, it is undermined by the relentless flood of information. Coming at him from all angles, telling him in unequivocal voices: the stuff he was reared on is killing him. He can’t switch on a TV without some smug liberal nutritionist notifying him that he’s the draughtsman of his own ruination.
The world, or the part of it that comes into contact with him, will pay for this. The Qwik Car Rental franchise’s reputation as a less stringent operator than the bigger players ensures that Pye’s customers are often desperate people in a hurry. He gets at least one police inquiry per week. But T.W. Pye loves to ask questions; enjoys his sense of power over his more hapless patrons. The phone on his desk rings out shrilly just as Ray Lennox walks into his empty office. An incongruous nightclub-red velvet rope herds the non-existent customers into a utilitarian line. Pye sets down his burger, picks up the phone, cursorily regarding Lennox in petulant disapproval. — Hey! Gus! How’s it hanging?
Lennox regards the obese man, shifting his stare to the image of a busty girl, obviously silicone-enhanced, who bursts out of the yellow two-piece swimsuit from the calendar on the wall behind him.
— Strange, Gustave, mighty strange. Sure thing, buddy. Bring em by tonight. I’ll be home.
Impatience blazes in Lennox as he meets Pye’s gaze. In the instant that follows a reciprocal abhorrence is conceived.
— Till tonight. See ya, Gus. Pye lets the receiver slide from his hand on to its cradle. Thickset eyes regard Lennox in cheery malice. — Now, he says, breaking into an obsequious grin.
— Need a car. Going to Bologna.
— Nice, smiles Pye, as Lennox hands over his licence. He regards it for a few seconds, holding it up to the light like it was a high-denomination banknote. — Ain’t plannin on crossin the state line, are you?
— No. Bologna, Florida. Just need it for two days.
T.W. Pye dips his head, feels his smile slowly extending out towards the limits of its treachery. — Only we can’t give you no car if you’re planning on crossin the state line, not with you bein a foreigner n’all. New rules: war gainst terror. The big boys, Hertz, Avis, they’ll be able to help you out there.
— No state line. Bologna, Florida, Lennox repeats, uneasy in the role of supplicant. — Two days max.
— Well, I got me this Volkswagen Polo. Pye’s smile holds up, even as a trickle of sweat rolls from temple across cheek, like the slow slash of the psychopath’s razor. — European. Economical. Ought to appeal. Where you from?
— How much? Lennox pulls out his platinum Visa.
Pye sits back, scowls, coughing out rates, terms and conditions. Lennox motions in stony accord, as the door swings open. Tianna breezes in, her jacket hooked round her finger and draped casually behind her. She beats the magazine on her leg in imitation of him. Pye takes in the indigo shorts and mustard tank top with its sparkling slogan. Sees the rangy, bony limbs coming out from them. He responds with a predator’s leer; eyes narrowing, face tightening and draining of blood. Lennox catches that stink of torpid lust, causing his teeth to grind together again.
