Stormy Weather

He got along fine at Zenith, once he understood that cost containment was higher on the list of corporate priorities than ensuring structural integrity. To justify its preposterously inflated prices, the company had hyped Gables-on-the-Bay as "South Florida's first hurricane-proof community." Much in the same way, Michel later reflected, that the Titanic was promoted as unsinkable.

All week the news from Dade County worsened. The newspaper hired its own construction engineers to inspect the storm rubble, uncovering so many design flaws that an unabridged listing was possible only in the tiniest of agate type. One of the engineers sarcastically remarked that Gables-on-the-Bay should have been called Gables-w-the-Bay-a quote so colorful that it merited enlargement, in boldface, on the front page.

With home owners picketing Zenith headquarters and demanding a grand jury, Christophe Michel prudently pla

The rain did nothing for his fragile confidence in American traffic. Every bend and rise in the overseas highway was a trial of reflexes and composure. Michel finished his last cigaret while crossing the Bahia Honda Bridge, and by Islamorada had gnawed his forty-dollar manicure to slaw. At the first break in the weather, he stopped at a Circle K for a carton of Broncos, an American brand to which he unaccountably had become devoted.

When he returned to the Seville, four strangers emerged from the shadows. One of them put a gun to his belly.

"Give us your goddamn car," the man said. "Certainly."

"Don't stare at me like that!"

"Sorry." The engineer's trained eye calculated the skew of the man's jawbone at thirty-five degrees off center.

"I got one bullet left!"

"I believe you," said Christophe Michel. The disfigured gunman told him to go back in the store and count backward from one hundred, slowly. Michel asked, "May I keep my suitcase?"

"Fuck, no!"

"I understand."

He was counting aloud as he walked for the second time into the Circle K. The clerk at the register asked if something was wrong. Michel, fumbling to light a Bronco, nodded explicitly.

"My life savings just drove away," he said. "May I borrow the telephone?"

Bo

Meanwhile Snapper ranted and swore because the Seville had no CD player, only a tape deck, and here he'd gone to all the goddamn trouble of removing his compact discs from the Jeep before they'd ditched it behind the convenience store.

Bo

It was a red pronged instrument, with a black plastic grip and a chrome key lock.

Snapper looked over his shoulder and sniggered. "The Club!"

"The what?"

Bo

"I watch no television," Skink said.

Snapper hooted. "The Club, for Chrissakes. The Club! See, you lock it across't here"-he patted the steering wheel—"so your car don't get stolen."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Lotta good it did that dickhead back at the Circle K." Snapper's laughter had a ring of triumph.

Edie Marsh was struggling to collect herself after the shooting. Even in the darkness, Bo

"I had this boyfriend," Edie sniffled, "he put one of those on his new Firebird. They got it anyway. Right out of the driveway, broad daylight. What they did, they iced the lock and cracked it with a hammer."

Snapper said, "No shit? Froze it?"

"Yeah." Edie couldn't come to terms with what had happened at the Paradise Palms, the wrongness and maddening stupidity of it. They'd never get away now. Never. Killing a cop! How had a harmless insurance scam come so unhinged?

Skink was impressed with the ingenious simplicity of The Club. He took special interest in the notched slide mechanism, which allowed the pronged ends to be fitted snugly into almost any large aperture.

"See, that way you can't turn the wheel," Snapper was explaining, still enjoying the irony, "so nobody can drive off with your fancy new Cadillac Seville. 'Less they put a fuckin' gun in your ribs. Ha! Accept no imitations!"

Skink set the device down.

"Accept no imitations!" Snapper crowed again, waving the .357.

The governor's gaze turned out the window, drifting again. Teasingly, Bo

This time the smile was sad. "I lead a sheltered life."

Edie Marsh wondered if Snapper could have picked a dumber location to shoot a cop-a county of slender, co

Snapper told her to knock it off, she was making everyone a nervous wreck. "Another half hour we're home free," he said, "back on the mainland. Then we find another car."

"One with a CD player, I bet."

"Damn right."

The Seville got boxed in behind a slow beer truck. They wound up stopped at the traffic light in Key Largo. Again Edie snuck a peek behind them. Snapper heard a gasp.

"What!" He spun his head. "Is it cops?"

"No. The Jeep!"

"You're crazy, that ain't possible—"

"Right behind us," Edie said.

Bo

"Yeah?" Edie said. "With bullet holes in the roof?" She could see a bud of mushroomed steel above the passenger side.

"Jesus." Snapper used the barrel of the .357 to adjust the rearview mirror. "Jesus, you sure?"

The Cherokee was still on their bumper. Bo