Read Online JL04 - Mortal Sin by Paul Levine - Free Book Online Page B

If three oranges come up, you win. Three gold bars pay top prize of $5,592. Nearby, in a perimeter room, a game of thirty-number bingo was under way.
    In the main hall, the crowd was still forming for the early-bird game. According to the signs, the games would continue until 4:00 A.M. Some of the old folks were ambling through the cafeteria line, bringing fried chicken and mashed potatoes with iced tea back to their seats. The Wachula retirees—white shoes and bright plaid outfits—were trooping toward the tables. Their voices, chirpy and expectant coming through the door, dropped into respectful murmurs as they entered the main hall, their cathedral of chance and providence.
    In the center of the hall was a small motorboat on a trailer, one of the many prizes of the night. Television monitors blinked out the numbers before they were called. “B, five; O, sixty-four.” The players, women in polyester slacks, men in bowling shirts, turned plastic ink bottles upside down and squooshed the sponge heads on their cards to record a number.
    “Jake, come have a look at this.”
    Charlie was toddling toward a glass showcase behind the motor-boat. Inside the case was what looked like a miniature town. Scale models of a main street of three-story buildings. Shops on the ground floor, offices and apartments above. Beige stucco walls, orange barrel-tile roofs, a faintly Spanish look. A few blocks away, a semicircle of twelve-story condos surrounded by a moat. An elementary school with tiny figures of children and even an Irish setter frolicking in a grassy yard. Gas stations and a bus depot and a familiar fast-food palace with golden arches. A golf course wended its way around bodies of water.
    A tasteful green-on-white sign announced:
     
CYPRESS ESTATES
ANOTHER FLORIO ENTERPRISES COMMUNITY
Reservation Deposits Now Being Accepted
     
    It could be anywhere, this generic white-bread community. You could stick it west of Boca Raton near the turnpike or down in Homestead by the old air force base. But it was intended to be built somewhere else entirely. Inside the glass play world were adornments not usually seen in models of dream towns.
    Plexiglas saw grass.
    Miniature wood storks and flamingos and spoonbills, lazing in shallow water.
    Cypress trees draped in cotton, spray-painted to resemble Spanish moss.
    An airboat seemingly skimming across the saw grass.
    A great blue heron—its wings swept high—in the sky above the man-made Glades, suspended in space by a single thread.
    Alligators, green and scaly, in a moat surrounded by a concrete wall.
    A restored Indian village, or at least a designer’s idea of one, with dugout canoes, campfires, and natives dressed in loincloths pointing bow and arrow at a Lilliputian deer.
    Charlie was thumbing through one of the brochures stacked by the display case. He read aloud: “‘Back to nature. Enjoy the beauty of the Everglades as no one ever has.’”
    “Or will again,” I said.
    Charlie tapped his cold pipe against the glass case. “They don’t show you the infrastructure, do they? You don’t see the bulldozers destroying the egrets’ nests. You don’t see the fill turning the water to slime or the sewers or the dredging or the leaks from the gas station’s tanks. You can’t hear the infernal racket of the pile drivers or smell the fumes of the diesel engines. You don’t see the Styrofoam cups or the plastic six-pack holders that strangle the fish and the birds.”
    “Easy, Charlie, you’ll pop a blood vessel.”
    “Surely you don’t approve of this, do you, Jake?”
    “No. I just can’t believe it will ever be built. Think of the permits required. County, state, Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Resource Management. Even with all Nicky’s lawyers and lobbyists, I don’t see the project getting the green light. It’ll be just another developer’s pipe dream, a model under glass.”
    “Let’s hope you’re right,” Charlie said, “and if the government