“Wait,” said the hooker, slowly backing away from the convertible. “This is the pink Cadillac. This is the car!” She quickly pulled a cell phone from her leopard purse.
“We’ve been made!” said Serge, starting up the car. “To the hideout!”
22
Well after midnight on the island of Palm Beach. The streets were empty; the people with five-hundred-dollar sweaters tied around their necks had all gone home. Waiters mopped and turned chairs upside down on the tables at Ta-boo, a popular piano bar on Worth Avenue.
It had been quiet outside, but now the windows shook, and the help looked up to see a purple Jeep Wrangler fly by with a pulsating stereo producing the kind of sound used by surgical instruments to pulverize gallstones. The Jeep continued west, past the showroom windows, Cartier, Tiffany, Gucci, Saks, ten-thousand-dollar purses, framed autographs of Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson, handcrafted figurines depicting the Boer War. Past Via De Mario, Via Roma, Via Parigi, Renato’s and the Everglades Club. Across Hibiscus Avenue, weaving erratically over the yellow center line. But the car was local, and the attention of the police was directed elsewhere, outward, defending the social perimeter from the unwashed mainland people.
The Jeep rounded the corner at South Lake and turned up a winding slab driveway to a private waterfront residence inspired by the Acropolis. The Jeep’s doors opened; two men in loafers got out. Cameron and Brandon, home for semester break from the Ivy League. They had started vacation as a group of four frat brothers, but the other two had been beaten to pâté in a Miami Beach traffic misunderstanding and were respectively undergoing orthodontic surgery and groin reconstruction.
“Don’t forget the beer.”
“Whoops.”
They were fairly good-sized boys, 215 pounds each at the start of the year, now 240 with the anabolics — stars of the sculling team and Greek intramural touch football. Everything was going their way. They had just made it home without a DUI, and that called for a celebration. Time to get out the speedboat.
According to the manufacturer’s literature, the thirty-three-foot Donzi Daytona can reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour, but it was only going sixty when it ran over the pelicans in the darkness under the Royal Palm Bridge and spread a wide wake across the Intracoastal Waterway.
“Do you think we’re going too fast?” Brandon yelled over the wind and spray.
“What?” yelled Cameron. “Go faster?”
He pushed the throttle forward and headed for the next bridge, Flagler Memorial. The draw spans were up and a yacht was coming the other way.
“There’s a bunch of cars stopped up there,” said Brandon. “Can you do a rooster tail?”
“In my sleep,” said Cameron. He slowed and hit a switch, raising the pitch of the propellers, and a small geyser of water shot a couple feet into the air behind the boat.
“This is going to be so great!”
They didn’t go under the draw spans, instead picking a solid span three to the left. When they came out the other side, Cameron slammed the throttle all the way forward, and a giant rooster tail shot thirty feet in the air, up onto the bridge. Ninety gallons of salt water flooded the interior of a convertible BMW, killing the electronics and the engine.
Cameron and Brandon looked back and saw the Beemer’s headlights flicker and go out. They were still giggling as they idled the yellow-and-white boat up to the seawall just past the bridge. That was the thing about Palm Beach — all the best off-limits places were wired tighter than Fort Knox. You couldn’t get near them from the street. A different story from the water.
The brothers only banged the prow of their father’s boat into the seawall four times as they moored and climbed over the wall into the backyard.
“You remember the beer?”
“Yep. You remember the spray paint?”
Brandon rattled the can in his right hand.
Cameron pointed. “There it is!”
“This is going to be so excellent!”
It was a huge yard, and their target of opportunity stood alone in the middle. They stumbled across the grass and giggled some more and began spray-painting something ungrammatical about a rival fraternity sucking donkey dicks.
They finished and stood there looking at the dripping paint. They felt empty. That’s it? This is as fun as it gets? They stood there some more, in case it would change, drinking and smoking, but no luck. Cameron got an idea. What if they broke something? That usually felt good.
They climbed some stairs and smashed a pane in the back door. They found their way around inside from the moonlight coming through the windows. Brandon put a cigarette out on a century-old sofa. “What’s a train car doing out here anyway?”
“Do I look like a fucking conductor? Here — help me break this.”
Legs snapped crisply off the antique divan.
“Let’s go get the baseball bats,” said Cameron.
“Good idea.”
