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a company worth several hundred million dollars…

Now this.

Bern balled his fist and hit himself on the side of the head. Really fucking dumb, that’s how dumb he could be. He’d been suspicious of his grandfather’s generosity from the first. The grandfather who Bern, at the age of thirteen, had tried to kill by sneaking up from behind with a ball-peen hammer. The grandfather who, more than once, referred to him as “a failed experiment,” and “an embarrassment to the race.” But he’d gone ahead and accepted the deal anyway.

Bern was thinking: I am fucked. I am an embarrassment to the race.

He’d probably been adopted from some half-wit floozy, courtesy of a little town in southern Indiana where he was related to a whole population of village idiots, including his long-lost retard brother, Moe.

Bern turned his face to the ceiling and screamed, “Why are you doing this to me?!”

He stood, knocking over the chair, lifted the beer mug and shattered it against the wall. Marlissa Dorn stared at him from the table. He was about to lose everything because of this woman’s relative, some lawsuit-happy bitch named Mildred Engle. Bern grabbed the photo, balled it into a wad—You whore!—and hurled it at the window.

His hands were sweating.

He felt a roaring pain in his head. Bern paced for a few minutes, and got another beer, before he took the letter and finished reading.

Jason wanted him to contact the lawsuit-happy bitch and attempt to negotiate a settlement. “Treat her with respect, charm her if you can,” the twerp suggested. Bern had until the family’s Appleton Christmas reunion. That would give the board time to agree on the best method of dissolving the company.

We must have the original promissory notes. Without them, Ms. Engle has no claim. She lives on Sanibel Island, Gulf Drive, at an estate named Southwind…

Bern crumpled the letter and punted it like a football—and damn near fell on his ass, he was so furious.

Perfect.

Oh, he’d charm the bitch, all right. She was threatening to ruin his life with some damn old pieces of paper? An introduction to a game named Caveman, that’s what the woman needed. Have an oil drum open and ready, the Viking packed, waiting to cruise to his own private island. Get the woman naked, all worked up, then jam her in the barrel while she was still alive…

Bern stopped, head cocked, then looked out the condo’s front window. A small boat was coming down the canal, no lights. Looked like a mullet boat.

The mood he was in, he hoped it was somebody coming to rob the place. He got his Luger, checked to see if it was loaded, and rushed outside ready to shoot the shit out of whoever it was. Say the wrong word, give him any lip at all, and bang.

Turned out to be Arlis what’s his name, the old man they’d just fired, bringing Augie and his worthless butt- buddy, Oswald, home from Dinkin’s Bay.

The Viking must have broken down or run out of fuel.

Why else would the little shit need a ride from Sanibel?

A rlis Futch was a perfect example of someone who got his rocks off being negative. The old man sat by the seawall in his shitty-looking mullet boat, laughing like a loon, while Augie told Bern that the nerd biologist, Ford, and his Dinkin’s Bay buddies had stolen the Viking from them.

“Did you call the cops?” Bern asked.

Augie was in a smart-ass mood after a long day on the water, almost drowning, and also aware he was being laughed at. Old man Futch had been riding his ass relentlessly for the last hour. “Call the cops and tell them what?” he asked Bern. “Tell them that they salvaged the same boat legally that we salvaged illegally? Fuck ’em. They stole the Viking from us, I’ll steal it back. I’ve got a spare set of keys in my condo.”

Bern didn’t grab the snotty little brat, or slap him as he had before. He stepped and raised his left hand, causing Augie to flinch, then hit him in the face with his fist, a crushing overhand right that busted the kid’s nose flat, opening flesh cheek to eye.

“You oversized bully. You son of a bitch, you hurt him!” Trippe Oswald, the bubble-butted twerp, showed some spunk for once, kneeling beside Augie, who hadn’t moved except for a muscle spasm that was causing his right foot to twitch.

Bern was still furious, having just learned that everything he owned was about to go down the shitter because of promissory notes in the possession of some old lady. Now Augie was telling him his last hope of escape, the Viking, was gone?

“Where’s the key to Augie’s condo? Don’t lie to me, you little fairy, where’s he keep it?”

Oswald didn’t answer, he was so scared.

“Goddamn you, I am about at the end of my rope. Where?”

Bern grabbed Oswald by the T-shirt, the German Luger in his hand now, the gun he’d grabbed thinking the boat with no lights coming down the canal was a robber, wanting to shoot somebody. Anybody.

Oswald formed words. “All our shit’s on the Viking, man. Keys, wallets, everything. It wasn’t our fault!” Bern drew back the Luger as if to pistol-whip him. “But there’s another key! At Augie’s condo, the key to the door’s hidden under a flowerpot! The boat key is somewhere in his room.”

Bern wanted to shoot the disgusting little snitch. But old man Arlis Futch was there, still watching and laughing. Probably for the best, too. Knocking Augie unconscious would be tough enough to explain at the Christmas reunion in Appleton. But then killing his boyfriend?

That kind of talk, an ex–professional football player didn’t need.

Instead, Bern smacked Oswald aside the head with the pistol. Not hard, but the snitch went down like he’d been poleaxed, looking like he was unconscious but was faking it.

The old man thought that was hilarious.

Bern swung the pistol at Futch and held it there, taking aim. The old man saw it but continued to laugh. Forced himself to laugh for a while longer so Bern could see that if he stopped, it was only because he wanted to.

Arlis Futch stopped laughing a moment later, and said in a low voice, “Go ahead and shoot, you fat fuck. Being old’s a lot scarier than dying. You’d be doing me a favor.” And meant it. Sounding like he had been a serious hard-ass in his younger years.

Then said, looking at the marina docks, all the boats sitting near the collapsed barn, “You shot and murdered Javier? I heard about it on the VHF. Did you, you fat asshole?”

Bern was thinking: I squeeze the trigger, then tell the cops the old bastard was attacking me.

But two corpses in one day?

That would only produce more trouble, more bad luck, which was typical of all the negative crap he’d been dealing with lately.

The old man wouldn’t shut up. “If it turns out you murdered a fisherman, what you better do, boy, is pack your shit and run back to whatever hole you crawled out of. Don’t be surprised if someone torches this place in the next few days. The way I picture it, you’ll be tied up inside one of the buildings when we light the match. All that fat you got, I bet you sputter!”

A very negative guy, this Cracker fisherman. Scary, too, for an old man.

B ern left Arlis Futch in the boat, and Oswald to tend to Augie, while he drove his Beamer to Augie’s condo. The place was a mess: crushed beer cans, ashtrays, porno DVDs. Bern found the keys to the Viking in Augie’s room. He looked around: a king-sized water bed, half the closet filled with Oswald’s clothes, some weird-looking stuff in a jar by the nightstand.

He also found several FedEx envelopes, addressed to Augie from Jason Goddard. It appeared that Augie received a package every time Bern did—but different stuff inside, cover letters included.

An example:

…confidentially, your great-grandfather asked me to send his personal effects, along with his reassurance that your inheritance will be substantially increased once your uncle, Bernard Heller, is proven incompetent.