that would feel, to be a millionaire?
“Cops will protect
King smiled, his expression asking,
Perry liked that, no matter how many times he heard the story, but then he had to go and spoil it by looking around the truck stop, beyond the eighteen-wheelers parked in rows, and saying, “Snow’s sticking on the damn palm trees! You believe this shit? The leaves are silver, like ice.”
King told him, “Dude, that’s not snow. It’s neon light that does that, the way the wind hits the trees. An optical illusion.”
King, the know-it-all, an expert on everything.
Perry had lit a cigarette, his expression saying,
“When you talked Florida, you never mentioned snow. I’m starting to wonder if you’ve really been here before.”
King, who had never been south of St. Louis in his life, said, “Believe what you want. Backstage at a Buffett concert, maybe Jimmy will help me convince you. Besides, Macon’s not Florida. Orlando, that’s
Perry was twenty-three, King, thirty-one or thirty-two, he wasn’t sure. Both men skinny with Adam’s apples showing, combs in their pockets, King carrying his belongings in a Army duffel, Perry with his in a backpack stolen from a playground. The men had been cell mates at Statesville Correctional, near Joliet, which worked out okay because neither of them was into the butt-buddy thing. At Statesville, sleeping on your belly could be interpreted as an invitation, so having a cell mate who dug only girls was worth a hell of a lot more than friendship. They had both worn their pants low, kept their mouths shut, and done their time kicking around ways to get rich when they finally made parole.
It was at Statesville that they met Julie, a black dude, who told them about a man he’d worked for in Winter Haven, which was near Orlando, doing lawn maintenance, picking oranges—an old man, he said, who had a coin collection worth a fortune and paid his help in cash, usually twenty-dollar bills. Older bills, Julie told them, the picture of Jackson small on the front, which suggested to King, the thinker, that the old man didn’t use banks.
“How’d he make his money?” King had asked.
“Family owned a thousand acres of citrus,” Julie had told them. “Then Disney came along. The old man still owns a hundred acres—six years ago, he still owned it, anyway. You’d need a calculator to count that much money.”
Julie was doing life but wasn’t a typical con, because the man he’d killed was a one-time thing, and he had it coming, from the way Julie told it.
“I wasn’t drunk, never used a damn drug in my life, but when I heard what the son-bitch did to my wife, I sort of went nuts. I used a shotgun, four rounds of bird shot. It took a while. I wanted to give the son-bitch time to review the rules.”
When King had asked, “Why didn’t you go for the old man’s money while you were at it?,” the look of contempt on Julie’s face said more than any parole board would ever know.
“I worked for that man. The man paid me on time and he treated my family fair. What kinda punk-ass question is that?”
After that, Julie wouldn’t give King or Perry the time of day, but they’d learned enough by then. They knew the old man’s name, and that what was left of the citrus farm was set back off Green Pond Road and Route 27 on property north of Winter Haven, most of it probably golf courses and trailer parks by now, but the big white house still there, Julie guessed, hidden by trees.
It took a few weeks thinking about it before King really latched on to the idea of Florida, heading south, scoring big, then buying their way out of the United States and into foreign lives. It wasn’t until then that King mentioned he’d once lived in Florida. He claimed he’d worked as a lifeguard in Palm Beach, hustling rich old women, wearing custom-sewn jackets—he’d even done some scuba diving, he said, when he wasn’t sitting on the beach, eating mangoes and drinking orange juice, every morning.
Six months they’d been cell mates, and it was all news to Perry.
“You ever had fresh squeezed? Not the crap that comes out of a can, the real thing. Sun’s hot, tan all year round, but with a nice cool breeze off the ocean—try to picture it. And the girls, they’ve got no reason to wear clothes. Before you even say hello, Jock-a-mo, you’re halfway home.”
King, a tropical expert all of a sudden, particularly on Florida. He’d been reading about Mexico and Central America, too.
Perry suspected King was full of shit, but the man had ideas, he was ten years older, always thinking, so maybe it was okay. Perry wasn’t a thinker. Perry was a doer.
King processed out three months before Perry, but he was there in the visitors’ parking lot, waiting, carrying a magazine,
It was a story about the old man, whose name was Hostetler, refusing to sell the last fifty acres of his property, even though the county was pissed off because they were losing taxes that Disney or Comfort Suites were eager to pay. The picture showed a sour-looking old man with bitter, superior eyes, sitting next to a dog, some kind of pointer that looked more crippled up than the old man.
Damn, the guy was real. Just like Julie had said.
King had flipped to a page that showed another photo, the man inside his house, pointing at a painting. The magazine said it was the old man’s grandfather, the property’s original owner. There was something else, in the background, that was of more interest to King, who’d brought along a magnifying glass.
“A mint set of American gold eagles,” he had told Perry, an authority on coins now, too.
“How you know they’re mint? The picture’s blurry.”
Patiently, King had explained, “Because they’re framed, for chrissake. The photographer was focusing on the painting of the dude in the old Army uniform, not the coins. A set like this is worth twenty grand, easy. How many more you guess he’s got stashed away in that big old house?”
Twenty grand was more money than Perry had ever had in his life, but it was a figure he could get his mind around. Two hundred grand, or two million, those numbers came into his brain as blank pages. But if King said it was possible, maybe it was . . .
Perry, the doer, had said to King, “The dog looks too old to cause trouble. But we can’t just bust in there and expect Hostetler to fill a bag.”
King had already thought of that, too. “I got my hands on a little Hi-Point three-eighty,” he said.
When Perry asked, “You ever shoot a gun?,” King snapped, “I was in the Army for a year, wasn’t I?,” but he wasn’t convincing.
The men had taken a bus back to where King was rooming because Perry, who read gun magazines, wanted to see the little palm-sized pistol—black on silver; five rounds in the clip, one in the chamber—for himself.
The gun was a cheapie, it couldn’t be very accurate, but it would do the job. Same with the two plastic- handled switchblade knives, all in a box.
“One old man, one old dog,” King had said. “House-sitting out there all alone, full of gold coins and twenty- dollar bills. Hell, like the article said, we’d be doing Florida’s taxpayers a favor to free up that shitty excuse for a farm. It’s such an easy setup, I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried it before.”
On the thirteen-hundred-mile trip, Bloomington to Orlando, Perry wondered about that. Three times they switched buses—Evansville, Nashville and Atlanta—and, at each stop, because there was still an opportunity to buy a ticket home, he’d brought up the subject with King, saying “Why you think that is?”
King and Perry arrived at the Orlando Greyhound terminal, North Magruder Avenue, an hour before midnight on Saturday, only a few hours ahead of the Arctic low. They stepped off the bus into a balmy, orange-scented night that caused Perry to say, “Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.”
By Sunday morning, though, at first light, the Arctic wind was silver in the palms. By midnight, it was so cold
