“I’ve told the publisher I want to push back the tour a month so we can grow the ambient buzz about your bizarre need for privacy and seclusion, and when the public appetite is too much to stand,
“The publisher isn’t going to go along with this foolishness.”
“They already have a team working on your mystique. They want everyone wondering who or what it is you’re hiding from.”
“I’m not hiding from anything—”
“Start.”
“What?”
“Don’t leave the house, and don’t answer the phone. Unless it’s me.”
“How will I know it’s you?”
“Caller ID.”
“I don’t have caller ID.”
“Even better. Adds to the myth. The recluse completely out of touch, shunning the new technology. We’ll build you up like those Japanese living in island caves who think the war’s still on. Maybe you’ve even gone
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Let me worry about that. You stick to the books. Later.”
Ralph put down the phone. “Unbelievable.”
It rang again.
“Hello?”
“I thought I told you not to answer the phone.”
“I didn’t know we had started yet.”
“We have.”
“Sorry.”
“While I’ve got you on the line, I want you to grow a beard. And start getting drunk in public.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out…”
“You can for that. It’s pretty important.”
“Anything else?”
“Do you think you can get arrested? I mean, do you know any local cops, some minor thing where you can arrange beforehand to get out immediately on bail? Do you have any drug connections?”
“Tanner—”
“I’m just thinking out loud now. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. Later.”
Click.
7
Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in peninsular Florida. It is an unforgettable sight, a stone monument rising alone on a pristine ridge called Iron Mountain, near the center of the state.
“The Singing Tower,” as it is known, features a fifty-seven-bell carillon, the centerpiece of the tranquil Bok Tower Gardens, a meditative retreat of unmatched serenity.
A car engine roared. People screamed. Tires squealed. A beat-up pink Cadillac convertible patched out of the parking lot. Serge and Lenny turned around in the front seat and looked back at the two young women called City and Country as they ran and yelled through a dust cloud, trying to catch the Cadillac as it pulled back on the highway and sped off.
“Hated to ditch them like that,” said Lenny.
“They left us no choice,” said Serge.
“Our sanity had to come first,” said Lenny, pushing the gas all the way to the floor, watching the women grow smaller in the rearview mirror.
“They never stopped talking,” said Serge. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”
“They were smoking up all my weed.” Lenny held a can of Cruex to his eye to gauge the damage. “And they were starting to get fat.”
“Of course they were getting fat — they never stopped eating. I thought I was watching some kind of unnerving nature special on the Discovery Channel, constrictor snakes dislocating their jaws to ingest small mammals headfirst.”
“That’s what the munchies do to you.”
“I’m glad I was never part of the drug culture,” said Serge, loading an automatic pistol in his lap.
“This isn’t about the drug culture — it’s about
“If we let them stay, pretty soon they’d be telling us what to do…”
“Making us wipe our feet…”
“Getting mad at us all the time for things we do not understand…”
Serge and Lenny looked at each other and shook with the heebie-jeebies.
“Still, I’m disappointed we had to leave the tower so fast,” said Serge. “I haven’t been to Bok since I was a kid.”
“You’re really into this history stuff, aren’t you?” asked Lenny, lighting a joint.
“Fuckin’-A. Built by Dutch immigrant Edward W. Bok, who dedicated it in 1929 to all Americans.”
“Nice gesture,” Lenny said through pursed lips.
“Guess what publication he was editor of.”
Lenny shook his head.
“Get outta here.”
“I shit you not. And guess who he had write for him?”
Lenny shook his head again.
“Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.”
“Not too shabby,” said Lenny. “But how do you find out all this stuff? How do you
“I assign each fact a geometric shape and then string them together in a crystalline lattice in the image center of my brain.”
Lenny exhaled a hit and nodded. “Works for me.”
“You see the funky colors in the masonry?”
Lenny nodded, although he didn’t know what masonry was.
“Pink and gray marble from Georgia and native coquina rock from St. Augustine,” said Serge, shaking the geopositioning tracker.
“What’s it say?” asked Lenny.
“The signal’s fading in and out, but it’s consistently pointing east, so the transmitter in the briefcase must still be working.” He put the tracker down on the seat beside him. “I’m pretty hacked I didn’t get to the gift shop. You know I’m always required to buy an enamel pin for my archives.”
