At the end of the number, everyone on the floor cheered and clapped for themselves. City and Country pecked the men on the cheeks and excused themselves for the ladies’ room, giggling along the way like schoolgirls.

Inside, they examined themselves in the mirror to see how hammered they looked. Everything was checking out fine when they heard a weird noise coming from one of the stalls.

City and Country looked at each other puzzled and then back at the stall. Some kind of chaos inside, bumping around, then cursing. A leather bag hit the floor and the contents of a woman’s purse scattered under the stall door and onto the tiles of the restroom: lipstick, hairbrush, dispenser of contraceptive foam, car keys, cocaine vial.

More cursing.

The stall door opened and Billie Joe started to reach down for her belongings. When she saw City and Country, she stopped and stood up straight. She held a small lacquer tray and a steak knife she had gotten from the short-order kitchen, to chop at a Peruvian pebble. Her jeans were around her ankles and panties at her knees. Powder all over her nose and smeared on her left cheek. She was wreckage.

City and Country were stunned silent, but Billie Joe looked at them and yelled, “Youuuuu!”-accusation, verdict and sentence all in one syllable. She pointed the steak knife at them and charged, except her clothes were still around her legs and she was only able to manage a ridiculous waddle. City and Country had to hold each other up they were laughing so hard. Then Billie Joe ran out of steam and toppled forward on her face.

City and Country fell into hysterics. They resisted looking back at Billie Joe because it would only bust them up again; their sides were aching and they were having trouble getting air.

City finally looked back and her face changed. “Wait! What the hell is this!” A deep purple pool was spreading out from under Billie Joe. Country leaned forward and saw the tip of the steak knife sticking out the back of Billie Joe’s neck.

“Jesus!”

She flipped Billie Joe over, pulled the bloody knife out of her throat and flung it aside. When the blade came out, the severed jugular squirted all over Country, and she grabbed the woman’s neck trying to stop the bleeding. The more life leaked out of Billie Joe, the harder Country squeezed.

It was no use; blood was still getting out, and it was over in seconds.

Country stood and saw blood on her hands and wiped them on her jeans.

City was jumping up and down. “Oh my God! We’re dead!”

“What are you talking about?” shouted Country.

The pair did a quick once-around the restroom. Knife with bloody fingerprints under a toilet, more bloody fingerprints on the bruises on Billie Joe’s neck, and blood all over Country.

She began to shake. “We didn’t do anything!”

“Listen to me!” said City. “This is Alabama -I know about separate justice. She’s some rich bitch and we’re poor trash.”

“We didn’t do anything!”

City looked at the door and pointed. “Lock it!”

Country ran for the dead bolt and turned it fast, and City started scooping the contents back into Billie Joe’s purse.

“What are you doing?” asked Country.

“We gotta get outta the state. There’s some money here.”

“Neither of us has a car.”

“She does,” said City, holding up the set of keys with an Alfa Romeo fob. “There can’t be more than one Spider outside in the lot. Let’s just hope the guys didn’t drive.”

There was a pounding on the door, a woman’s voice. “I gotta pee!”

City opened the door fast and both of them knocked over the waiting woman as they ran out. They turned down a side hallway, away from the dance floor, and burst out the plywood back door and into the parking lot.

29

The mood at Hammerhead Ranch had gone sour.

The heat wave continued. The excitement of just arriving at the island motel had turned to the bitter drudgery of washing clothes at the island Laundromat.

There was a stifling funk that hung heavy like ozone. The place was getting listless yet jumpy. There was the feeling of the end game.

The wind had almost completely stopped. People languished in The Florida Room, drinking more, talking less. There was little movement except the tapping of fingers on tables. The bartender was getting divorced and stopped wiping glasses. People held their drinks up to the light, looking at water spots. Serge was at a table with a jeweler’s magnifying glass stuck in his eye, trying to sell a plain rock for ten thousand dollars to two members of the Olympic Committee.

C. C. Flag staggered into the bar with half his clothes torn off, welts up and down his torso, and a shredded gold sash hanging off his shoulder.

“What the hell happened to you?!” asked Zargoza.

“ Tampa Bay is a primitive place,” Flag said and wobbled to the bar.

A hesitant private investigator from Alabama named Paul checked into the motel and started snooping around, showing a picture of Art to people in the bar. Everyone dummied up. They grabbed his private eye badge and threw it on the roof.

Five Navy SEALs paddled ashore in a black raft and sprinted silently between the beach blankets and sand castles up to room four, hoping to surprise a band of arms dealers. The SEALs lobbed concussion grenades through the window, knocked down the door with a fiberglass truncheon, ran inside and neutralized the occupants in three point two seconds with the Vulcan nerve pinch. Except the arms dealers were in the next room, and the SEALs had subdued a vacationing family from Akron. A TV camera crew from Florida Cable News’s Cops and Robbers-Live! charged into the room after the SEALs to incriminate the Ohio residents in their underwear before millions of viewers.

Nobody in the bar gave a damn.

Vacation had turned into a grind. The sexual tension was gone. Exciting, mysterious strangers became tired, irritable neighbors with uninteresting secrets. Even City and Country were starting to look rough. They had taken to sitting at their regular corner table and openly smoking dope the whole day. They stared puzzled and angry at their joints. “What’s wrong with this shit? It doesn’t work anymore!”

Lenny wandered into the bar.

“Hey, asshole,” the bartender yelled at him. “You wanna get your two friends out of my bar and into some kind of twelve-step program?”

“What’s the matter?” asked Lenny.

“What’s the matter?! You’ve turned them into pot gnats!”

“Marijuana is nature’s medicine.”

“You got to get ’em out of here. They keep bugging me to hook ’em up with a better connection. They say your stuff’s no good. Quote: ‘It’s a bunch of shitty brown Mexican shake that doesn’t even get you high-and there’s too much lumber.’ Where did they learn to talk like that?”

“I don’t know why it doesn’t get them high.”

“Because they smoke it round the clock! They’re burnt out! It’s like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers over there!”

“Have you asked them to cool it out?”

“They’re your monsters-you drive ’em back into the sea!”

The Florida Cable News weather report came on the television over the bar.

“Hey, that’s not Toto!” said someone at the bar.

He was right. There was a new dog on the set. Looked a lot like Toto, but the audience was too familiar with the real thing to be duped. The new weather dog was called Toto II, with no mention of what happened to Roman numeral one.

Toto II danced on a large storm-tracking map on the floor of the studio. Hurricane Rolando-berto had crossed the Caribbean Sea. It was supposed to hit the Yucatán but unexpectedly curved up into the Gulf of Mexico. Revised projections had it heading north and passing Tampa Bay in twenty-four hours, missing it by a hundred miles to the left and making landfall somewhere between Pensacola and New Orleans.