Carl Hiaasen by Lucky You

intrigued. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a box of Goldfish crackers. The salt stung the cut on her lip, made her eyes water.
    Krome said: “Here’s what you do. Call the bank and find out exactly where the card’s been used. Tell them you loaned it to your brother, uncle, something like that. But don’t cancel it, JoLayne. Not until we know where these guys are headed.”
    She did what he told her. The Chase Bank people couldn’t have been nicer. She took down the information and handed it to Krome, who said: “Wow.”
    “No kidding, wow.”
    “They spent twenty-three hundred dollars at a
gun show?”
    “And two hundred sixty at a Hooters,” JoLayne said. “I’m not sure which is scarier.”
    The gun show was at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale, the Hooters was in Coconut Grove. The robbers seemed to be traveling south.
    “Get packed,” Tom Krome said.
    “Lord, I forgot about the turtles. You know how hungry they get.”
    “They’re
not
coming with us.”
    “Course not,” JoLayne said.
    They stopped at the ATM so she could get some cash. Back in the car, she popped a handful of Goldfish and said: “Drive like the wind, partner. My Visa maxes out at three thousand bucks.”
    “Then let’s pay it off. Put a check in the mail first thing tomorrow—I want these boys to go hog wild.”
    Sportively JoLayne grabbed a handful of Krome’s shirt. “Tom, I’ve got exactly four hundred and thirty-two dollars left in my checking.”
    “Relax,” he told her. Then, with a sideways glance: “It’s time you started thinking like a millionaire.”

7
    C hub’s real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus’s father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie’s womb had been as welcome as “a cockroach on a wedding cake.”
    Nonetheless, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a secondhand ski boat on a trailer in the garage, and a deluxe set of
World Book
encyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus’s siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there, too, had he not by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy.
    He moved out of his parents’ home and took up with a bad crowd. He got a job in the photo department of a drugstore,where he earned extra money sorting through customers’ negatives, swiping the racy ones and peddling the prints to horny kids at the high school. (Even after entering adulthood, Onus Gillespie remained amazed there were women in the world who’d allow their boyfriends or husbands to take pictures of them topless. He dreamed of meeting such a girl, but so far it hadn’t happened.)
    When he was twenty-four, Onus accidentally landed a well-paying job at a home furnishings warehouse. Thanks to an aggressive union local, he managed to remain employed for six years despite a wretched attendance record, exhaustively documented incompetence and a perilous affinity for carpet glue. Stoned to the gills, Onus one day crashed a forklift into a Snapple machine, a low-speed mishap that he parlayed into an exorbitant claim for worker’s compensation.
    His extended “convalescence” involved many drunken fishing and hunting excursions. One morning Onus was observed emerging from the woods with a prostitute on one arm and a dead bear cub slung over his shoulders. The man watching him was an investigator for an insurance company, which was able to argue convincingly that Mr. Onus Gillespie was not injured in the least. Only then was he fired from the warehouse. He chose not to appeal.
    Moira