drive-in,’ Murphy told the men who had been checking what came out of the toilets and bathrooms in the Starfighter.
‘You think we can get a hundred thousand gallons from a pool into this thing? You’ve got to be crazy. You should have taken a sample right at the start.’
‘Oh sure, first thing you do is test for illegal substances in swimming-pools. That’s genius. Like dope carriers always dump the stuff there. What they do then? Wait till the water evaporates? Jesus, we’ve got some real geniuses round here.’
They reported back to the office in Atlanta.
‘We’ve been given the run-around. Either Sol was sucker bait and someone else was running the stuff or those Poles were selling foot powder. What’s Washington say?’
‘Says you’ve screwed up.’
‘That fucker Campito was a fucking decoy,’ said Palowski as they left the office. ‘Had to be. Just let me get my hands on the bastard I’ll castrate the swine.’
‘Too late,’ said Murphy. ‘They’ve found his body in the Everglades–or the bits of it the alligators left.’
As the DEA team pulled out of Wilma, Wally Immelmann lay in the Coronary Unit staring bleakly at the ceiling and cursing the day he’d ever got married to that fat bitch Joanie or allowed her to bring her goddam niece over with those terrible girls. They had ruined his marriage and his reputation with that damned recording and he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Wilma again. Not that he cared too much about his marriage–at times he was grateful to the little bitches for wrecking it. Infinitely more infuriating were the business consequences of their obscene emails. Immelmann Enterprises had lost virtually every customer he had cultivated over the past fifteen years and several of them were threatening him with lawsuits. He had tried to contact his lawyers only to be told that they no longer wished to represent a man who was mad enough to send messages calling them ‘cocksuckers’ and ‘motherfuckers’, not to mention announcing to the world in the crudest terms and at one thousand decibels that he made a habit of sodomising his wife. Even Congressman Herb Reich had been a recipient of one of the more abusive emails. To cap it all Maybelle’s statement to Sheriff Stallard hadn’t helped either. The news that the most prominent businessman in Wilma regularly had sex with black employees had spread all over the county and almost certainly was known right across the State. In short, he was a ruined man. He’d have to leave town and change his name and hole up somewhere he wasn’t known. And it was all that fucking Joanie’s fault. He should never have married the bitch.
In her cell in yet another police station in yet another town Ruth Rottecombe felt the same way about her marriage to the late Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. She should have known he was just the sort of idiot to get himself murdered at a time when she needed his support and influence most desperately. After all, that was what she had married him for, and she had cultivated that drunken swine Battleby to ensure that Harold’s seat in Parliament remained absolutely secure. She tried frantically to make sense out of the chaotic series of events that had led up to his disappearance, but the noises coming from a drunk who alternated whining pleas to be let out of the cell next to hers with vomiting, and on the other side what sounded like a foul-mouthed psychotic on some extremely powerful hallucinogenic drug, made anything approaching rational thought impossible. So was getting any sleep. Every half-hour the cell door was opened, the light turned on and a sinister female detective asked her insistently if she was all right.
‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she had squawked at her time and time again. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do than turn the light on and come in and ask that damn-fool
