Free Carl Hiaasen by Nature Girl Page B

for?”
    “A couple of friends of mine from Texas,” she said. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I get another job. I already put in for cashier at the Super Wal-Mart in Naples.”
    He smiled. “You don’t have to pay me back. And, no offense, Honey, but Wal-Mart ain’t ready for the likes of you.”
    “Hey, I’ve been doing real good,” she said defensively. “Didn’t Fry tell you how great I was doing?”
    “Still on the medicine?”
    “Twice a day.”
    “Because otherwise I’d offer you a drink,” he said.
    “No mixing booze with the happy pills. Doctor’s orders.” It was the easiest part of the charade; Honey had never cared much for alcohol. “So, we’re cool with the tickets?”
    “I’ll need the names of your two friends.”
    “Here, I wrote everything down.” She took a paper from her purse and handed it to him. “I appreciate it,” she said. “This is important.”
    Skinner turned toward the river, where a snook was blasting minnows under the dock lights.
    “It sucks that you’re not tellin’ me everything,” he said.
    “When are you gonna stop worrying?”
    “Maybe when you get a grip on the world.”
    “Boy, that’s a shitty thing to say.” But Honey could barely hear her own words above the melodies clashing in her brainpan.

Six
    Three days later, Eugenie Fonda sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor, listening to Sacco’s theory that Bill Gates was not only the Antichrist but the illegitimate spawn of Jesse Helms and Grace Slick.
    Evidently it had been Sacco’s misfortune to sign on with a software company that vaingloriously decided to compete with some arcane pop-up blocking service provided by Microsoft. The technical details were beyond Eugenie’s grasp, or interest, but she had no difficulty understanding the reason for Sacco’s consumptive bitterness. At one point the young man had been worth approximately two million dollars on paper, a figure reduced to bus change by his firm’s brief skirmish with Sir William Gates.
    Sacco’s sorrowful tale was related from the depths of Eugenie’s claw-footed tub, where he’d retreated morosely after a late lunch at which he’d refused wine, beer and several choices of hard liquor. Eugenie was perturbed to see he had no intention of relaxing, not even for a fifteen-minute hump on the sofa. Sacco was obsessed, and nothing was more tedious than a man with an obsession.
    “It’s getting late,” Eugenie hinted.
    “They talk about free enterprise but in America it’s a myth. They talk about a level playing field, ha! It’s tilted sideways,” Sacco declared, “so that every last penny rolls into Bill Gates’s pocket. That four-eyed fucker’s wired himself a monopoly over the whole damn universe!”
    He arose, dripping and agitated. “Where’s your PC? I’ll prove it to you, Genie.”
    “I don’t have a PC,” she said.
    Sacco looked mortified. “You aren’t serious?”
    “Listen, sport, you want to do it or not? Because I need to get ready for work.”
    She’d had her hopes up, having persuaded Sacco first to admit that he was a heterosexual, and then to visit her apartment. It was the inaugural step of her commitment to refocus on unmarried men.
    Yet, appraising the bony, mirthless figure in her bathroom, Eugenie Fonda thought: Am I hard up or what?
    Sacco said, “You don’t give a damn what they did to me, do you?”
    Eugenie tossed him a towel. “Hey. Sometimes life is a shit-flavored Popsicle.”
    “Don’t you at least want to hear about the lawsuit, and how they paid off the judge with a free laptop and lifetime DSL?”
    “Not really.”
    Sacco mulled over this information, then stepped purposefully out of the tub. “Well, I suppose we could try having sex,” he said.
    Try? thought Eugenie.
    “Lord, I wouldn’t want you to damage yourself,” she said. So much for the quiet, brooding types.
    “No, Genie, it’ll be great,” Sacco said.
    She doubted that. “Why don’t you go wait for me on the