Read Online Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen - Free Book Online

woman, elderly, like his granny—Chub knew he wouldn’t have had the guts to go through with the robbery. Much less slug her in the face and the privates, as was necessary with that wild JoLayne bitch.
    And a white girl, you shove a pistol in her lips and she’ll do whatever she’s told. Not this one.
    Where’s the ticket?
    Not a word.
    Where’s the goddamn ticket?
    And Bode Gazzer saying, “Hey, genius, she can’t talk with a gun in her mouth.”
    And Chub removing it, only to have the woman spit all over the barrel. Then she’d spit on him, too.
    Leaving Chub and Bode to conclude there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to this person, in the way of rape or torture, to make her give up that ticket.
    It had been Bode’s idea to shoot one of the turtles.
    Give him credit, Chub thought, for figuring out the woman’s weakness.
    Grabbing a baby turtle from the tank, setting it at JoLayne’s feet, chuckling in anticipation as it started marching toward her bare toes.
    And Chub, firing a round into the center of the turtle’s shell, sending it skidding like a tiny green hockey puck across the floor, bouncing off walls and corners.
    That’s when the woman broke down and told them where she’d hidden the Lotto stub. Inside the piano, of all places! What a racket they’d made, getting it out of there.
    But they’d done it. Now here they were, parked in the amber glow of a streetlight; taking turns with the rearview, checking how badly the nigger girl had messed them up.
    Chub’s multiple lacerations gave a striped effect to his long sunken face. The softest breeze stung like hot acid. He said, “I reckon I need stitches.”
    Bode Gazzer, shaking his head: “No doctors till we git home.” Then he got a good look at Chub’s seeping cuts and, recognizing a threat to his new truck’s gorgeous upholstery, announced, “Band-Aids. That’s what we’ll get.”
    He made a U-turn on the highway and drove back to town at high speed. His destination was the Grab N’Go, where they would purchase first-aid supplies and also settle a piece of militia business.
     
    Shiner’s teenage years had been tolerable until his mother had gotten religion. Before then, she’d allowed him to play football without a helmet, shoot his .22 inside the city limits, go bass fishing with cherry bombs, smoke cigarets, bother the girls and skip school at least twice a week.
    One night Shiner had returned home late from a Whitesnake concert in Tampa to find his mother waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing plastic thong sandals, a shortie nightgown and her ex-husband’s mustard blazer, left over from his days at Century 21—for Shiner, a jarring apparition. Wordlessly his mother had taken his hand and led him out the front door. In the moonlight they’d traipsed half a mile to the intersection where Sebring Street meets the highway. There Shiner’s mother had dropped to her knees and begun to pray. Not polite praying, either; moans and wails that fractured the peacefulness of the night.
    Shiner had been further dumbfounded and embarrassed to watch his mother crawl into the road and nuzzle her cheek to the grimy pavement.
    “Ma,” he’d said. “Cut it out.”
    “Don’t you see Him?”
    “See who? You’re gonna get runned over.”
    “Shiner, don’t you see Him?” She’d bounced to her feet. “Son, it’s Jesus. Look there! Our Lord and Savior! Don’t you see His face in the road ?”
    Shiner had walked to the spot and peered intently. “It’s just an oil stain, Ma. Or maybe brake fluid.”
    “No! It’s the face of Jesus Christ.”
    “OK, I’m outta here.”
    “Shiner!”
    He’d figured the Jesus thing would blow over once she’d sobered up, but he was wrong. His mother had spent the whole next day praying at the edge of the road, and the day after as well. Some vacationing Christians gave her an ice-blue parasol and a Styrofoam cooler full of soda pop. The following Saturday, a reporter from a TV station in Orlando