from it.
“I like it,” Gil finally said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I like it. If this con works, Tommy will give us Joe. We get Joe, and I win.”
The two FBI men in the room didn’t understand his change of pronouns. Only Victoria knew he was talking about his chance to become New Jersey’s Lieutenant Governor. “Run the scam anyway?” she asked.
“Yeah. Only we’re your partners. You keep us informed. Once it goes down, we bust everybody.”
Victoria looked at him, not sure what to do. Finally she shook her head in disgust. “You constantly amaze me, Gil. You keep setting one new low after another.”
“I’m not the one sleeping with a felon,” he prodded her. Then he gave her a satellite vibrating beeper, and told her she had better call in every twelve hours or when they beeped her, whichever came first. If she failed to comply, they would fall on the scam, bust everyone, and all deals would be off.
Then Gil drove with her in the back of a government sedan to the Marina Motel. When they were a block away, he let her out of the car, but he stopped her before she could walk away. “Of course, you understand that regardless of how this goes, I’m going to see that you’re disbarred for this.”
“See you at the hearing,” she finally answered and walked away into the night.
TWENTY - NINE
INBRED INSURANCE
BEANO HAD LEFT VICTORIA AT THREE-THIRTY IN THE afternoon and had driven the yellow Caprice across town to pick up Paper Collar John at his hotel; then they headed toward the Red Boar Inn two blocks off Market Street down by the harbor. Beano could hear them even before he and Paper Collar John pulled into the large asphalt parking lot. The Inn was an arched, two-story, stucco, Spanish-style structure with a red tile roof. There were ten wide-tire trucks parked in the lot, all of them sporting Arkansas license plates, mud flaps, gun racks, and tuck-and-roll upholstery. For some unknown reason each radio antenna had a red feather taped to the tip. The trucks were pristine, and glistened with chrome wheel rims and lacquer paint. The sound of laughter and catcalls was pouring out into the early evening through the open door of room 15.
“Shit,” Beano said to Paper Collar John, “they’re gonna end up getting busted for noise pollution before we even get them in the lineup.”
“I already came down here twice yesterday and talked to the Manager of this place. Gave him an extra five hundred not to call the cops.”
“Who’s in charge a’these hillbillies now?” Beano asked as they got out of the Caprice and moved toward the room where a huge, three-hundred-pound albino man in overalls was tipped back in a creaking metal chair.
“Hard to tell,” John answered. “None a’these Hog Creek Bateses have IQs higher than the Arkansas speed limit. I think it’s either the skinny one, Cadillac Bates, or maybe it’s the fat guy, Ford.”
Beano remembered that more than half of the Hog Creek Bateses were named after their vehicles. The reason for that, he’d been told, was because most of them couldn’t read. They chose names they could copy off their trucks for hospital birth certificates.
As they got nearer, they could hear Travis Tritt singing on the full-volume radio, but still barely cutting through the wall of Hog Creek noise. The Albino in the chair, whose skin and buzzed hair were both snow-white, finished a beer and burped at them.
“Hi, cousin. I’m Beano. Cadillac Bates around?” Beano asked and smiled at his huge, inbred relative.
The Albino didn’t answer but turned and bellowed over his shoulder, “Yankees comin’!”
“Thanks for that kind assessment,” Beano said to the Albino, who blinked pale eyes at him, missing the sarcasm. “Which one are you?” he added.
“Bronco Bates,” the young man said, and burped again. End of conversation.
Beano nodded and moved past Bronco into a motel room that had been cleared of all furniture. The king-size bed had been dismantled and stacked up against the wall. The rest of the furniture was piled up in the hall. There were twenty Bateses and two roosters in the room. The men were in a circle cheering, while the game cocks in the center of the room were tearing the shit out of each other. Money was on the floor everywhere, and the men, who ranged in age from twenty to fifty, were yelling obscenities at the two warring roosters. The spectators looked like refugees from a monster truck tournament.
“Jesus,” Beano