82 Desire

and I bought this blue polo shirt, but then when I walked out, this guy stopped me—this guard or something. He searched my bag, and sure enough, there were two in there. I don’t know how the other one got there—I swear I don’t.”
    “Son, don’t lie to me.”
    “I’m not lying.”
    He was, though. Ray felt as if a Toyota had been lowered onto his chest.
    Much as Ray wanted him out of his life right now, Ronnie lived at home and it would probably be best for him to be there until things cooled a little. So, against his own wishes, Ray took the boy home.
    He had called Cille from the processing center, to say Ronnie’d had a little trouble and they’d be home soon. She was waiting up, and when she saw her son, she asked no questions, simply enfolded him in her arms. And when she had hugged him enough, she said simply, “Go to bed now.”
    Ronnie certainly didn’t wait to be told a second time. He disappeared around a corner, not even detouring by the kitchen—and he had to be starving.
    When they heard the door to his room close, Cille came close and hugged her husband this time. “What’d they do to him?” She was wearing only a T-shirt and a robe, which was now gapped open to reveal a pair of black bikini panties. To him, she looked like a high school girl.
    Ray nodded to himself, not even realizing he had done it. She had a right to know, and he knew she could take it. He told her.
    She said, “Oh, honey! Oh, honey, we can’t even say, ‘You don’t have to steal. If you need shirts, just ask us,’ like normal parents would.” She started to cry.
    “Yeah.” That was the part that got him, too.
    “Those bastards have done this to us, Ray.”
    He only nodded.
    “They don’t know who they’re fooling with. They really have no idea what’s coming at them.” It was scary how much alike they thought.

Twenty-one
    RUSSELL HAD NEVER been all that fond of Fort Lauderdale, and now he was growing to hate it. The good things were the beach and the old marina, straight out of John D. MacDonald. But the bad things were myriad. There were the wall-to-wall condos, the acres of low-ceilinged ‘50s houses, the dumb bars where they had hot-bod contests and wet T-shirt contests and raw oyster-eating contests and, unwittingly, dumb-joke, dumb-line, dumb-talk contests. And there were the horrible restaurants. He’d found a good place for sushi, and one where they had nice Asian dishes, but mostly it was suburb cuisine—plenty of salt, not much style. This might not mean much to most people, but it was the kind of thing a person from New Orleans noticed.
    He’d only gone there to get the Pearson, and make plans for what to do next, but so far he had only one plan—lose Dean Woolverton. Dean was like an albatross around his neck—he wished he’d never heard of the man—but he owed him. He owed him because it was his stupid name that had caught Dina Wolf’s attention.
    Dina Wolf was certainly the most interesting thing about Fort Lauderdale, by far its most unique property. Plenty of towns had beaches, but few had wild, wriggling aliens with animal names.
    He was established here as Dean Woolverton (meaning he had a phone, a leased car, a boat, and a slip for it), which made it tempting to stay a little bit, except that he was so restless. What he really needed were some papers—a driver’s license, passport, maybe even a credit card, though how an imaginary person got credit, he wasn’t sure. But he figured with the amount of dope traffic in Miami, South Florida was the counterfeit-papers capital of the universe. It was just a matter of getting to know the right people. And figuring out who he wanted to be.
    Dean Woolverton was three things and three things only, it seemed to him: blond hair, an earring, and a name. He’d already dumped the earring and started growing a beard. Now all he had to do was figure out how to change his hair color and name without arousing the suspicion of the only person he knew. He could, of course, simply set sail for somewhere else—even somewhere close, Delray, say—and that would be that. But, aside from the Pearson, Dina Wolf was all he had. Literally all he had—the only person he had to talk to, the only distraction from a life of solitary afternoon movies. He was desperate to buy golf clubs, but he had no idea how much the fake papers were going to cost, or how much he’d need for other expenses. He had treated himself to a tennis racket, and