Bern held the phone away after that, preferring to listen to the ringing inside his own head as he slid the photo of the glamorous woman in front of him. After last night, he no longer had an interest in tracking down some old lady, no matter how good she looked umpteen years ago. He had more important things to do now. The most pressing: Figure out how to escape this nightmare if things began to unravel.
They were unraveling fast.
The photo, at least, gave him something to look at while Shirley yammered on and on. Stare at the beautiful woman’s picture too long, though, and something weird happened: the faces of the two dead girls were superimposed, one and then the other, beneath the glamorous, glossy hair and atop that pear-ripe body. Which got worse when the gorgeous woman’s face became his wife’s face…
Bern blinked and shook himself, then pushed the photo away. But the image lingered: his wife, Shirley, with her pudgy white cheeks, her mouth always moving, hair smelling of the beauty parlor where all her friends went— their church group, and her book club—always lots to gossip.
Which is why it had been heaven for him, moving to Florida and away from her—for the first few months, anyway. Whole different world than what he was used to.
His grandfather had entrusted him with a completely different sort of job.
Bern was suspicious then. Still was.
B ern had spent eleven years at Gimpel Cadillac, Madison, selling new and pre-owned vehicles, enjoying the long micro-brewery lunches, and shaking hands with adoring Packers fan buyers, saying things like, “No finer man ever lived than Mr. Vince Lombardi.” Or: “The quarterback position, which is
It was a fun job. Easy; something he was used to. But he didn’t enjoy going home to Shirley, with her perfume and sprayed hair, and a mouth that never stopped moving. His only escape was the occasional sales meeting in Green Bay, or Chicago, or Milwaukee, which was his favorite city because of the nice nudie bars where the girls were so normal acting, especially the one in the strip mall with the store that pretended to be a museum but actually sold retail. He’d bought the German Luger there, which worked like a real one but was made in Taiwan.
Bern had considered using the Luger last night to shoot the Cuban. Instead, Moe didn’t bat an eye when he’d asked, “Hey, Moe, do I remember you saying something about carrying a gun in your truck? If I keep my knee on this guy’s neck much longer, he’s not gonna be able to try and run again.”
Moe answered, “You betcha I got a gun. I know how to use it, too.” Then returned with a chrome .357 revolver in a fancy holster, which the Hoosier didn’t strap on but wanted to, Bern could tell by the way he kept straightening his cowboy hat.
The Cuban’s eyes got very wide when Moe pulled the revolver out to show what an expert he was with the thing. Cocking it and releasing the hammer, popping the cylinder to count the six pinky-sized hollow-point bullets inside. Acting like a gunfighter until the damn gun went off accidentally, the bullet passing so close to Bern’s ear that his legs buckled, certain he’d been shot through the head because of the ringing pain.
Fucking Moe. Who kept apologizing over and over, repeating the exact same thing because he was too stupid to realize that Bern was deaf, temporarily, and why he was squinting at the cowboy’s ugly, moving mouth, asking, “What?…What?…
What a night.
Nightmare, more like it…
Wisconsin wasn’t so bad, all things considered. The boats up home were mostly aluminum, and the weather could be bad eight or nine months of the year. But he still got out. He’d had some fun on the road. Sometimes the girls wanted to, sometimes they didn’t—quite a few had done a little kicking and scratching, but nothing that had caused him to get carried away.
Not like Florida. Jesus. He regretted ever coming here.
Why had he?
It still didn’t make any sense what his grandfather did. Not to anyone. Grandy had shocked the whole family when he telephoned Bern out of the blue and offered him the CEO job, Indian Harbor, and two similar developments, one near Bradenton, the other near Marco. They hadn’t exchanged a word in years, even at the family reunion in Appleton. Everyone knew that Grandy and Bern hated each other. They still whispered about the unfortunate incident when Bern, age thirteen, got so angry at Grandy that he snuck up behind the old man and brained him with a hammer. Those two had been back and forth at each other’s throats ever since.
“It’s ’cause they’re two peas in a pod,” relatives would say.
Maybe so, but it still didn’t explain why the old man offered him the job at a salary three times what he was making at Gimpel’s, and a contractual guarantee that Bern would inherit fifty-one percent of all the Florida landholding company’s property and assets.
There were only two stipulations: Bern had to sign over all his personal assets to the company so that he had a vested interest.
“You’re going to inherit it all back, anyway,” his wife had told him after reading the contract. “That’s not a gamble, it’s a guarantee.”
The other stipulation was that he had to fulfill the obligations of his current position for at least two years after the old man’s death.
“That means showing up on time,” his wife said, her tone asking:
Exactly. Which was maybe what Grandy had in mind: luring Bern down here to a job that had come to seem more like the old bastard’s way of getting even.
No, it was worse than that. Coming to Florida was more like a curse.
30
Moe’s Dodge Ram pickup, with the big tires and the gun rack, came skidding into the marina parking lot as Bern sat at the office computer having some quiet time on the Internet. It was late Saturday afternoon, around 6 P.M. Augie still hadn’t returned with the Viking, but Bern’s anxiety had calmed on this calm day with the salvage crew off, no employees around to upset him, and no recently discovered bodies to deal with that he knew of.
That was about to change.
When Bern saw the Hoosier’s vehicle, he felt a sickening tension in his stomach. His hearing was back to normal, but not his nerves.
His day was coming. Augie’s, too. Bern’s list was growing, and why not, if he had to disappear? Go out with a bang. Like the old man used to say: Forgiveness is for people who don’t have the balls for revenge.
Bern would have his balls with him if he had to run away to a foreign country. Might as well even some scores.
From the Internet, he’d printed information on remote islands off Mexico and Central America that were more or less connected to Florida by shoreline—if a boater was willing to follow the contour of the Gulf of Mexico, stay close to the beach along Louisiana and Texas. Which he was.
He’d also read and printed out an article titled “How to Change Your Identity and Disappear Forever.”
Interesting. Nearly twenty thousand Americans disappeared each year by choice, the story said, and many of them went on to live happy, anonymous lives. Fake passports, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards—all that stuff could be bought if you had the right connections. A better way to do it, though, was to steal the identity of a person who’d died recently. It was best if they were poor, or had only a small number of living relatives—fewer people to blow your cover, that way.
Of course, the article didn’t give the actual details—you had to buy the guy’s book to get the real scoop—but it had lifted Bern’s spirits to read that it was possible to vanish and leave your old life behind.
That day might be coming for him very soon. All because of the hick from French Lick.
