Read 09-Twelve Mile Limit for Free Online Page B

… everything just seems like a bunch of bullshit. I mean, this makes all our silly little worries seemed stupid. We’re alive! And we’re alive for such a short time, why not have fun? Why not be with the people you care about and make them feel great?”
    She was bouncing around, not tracking clearly. I said, “Well … sure, very short lives. Yeah, I guess.”
    Her voice took on a small, rueful quality. “Does what I’m saying make any sense? Or am I just making an ass of myself because of what I’m asking?” She was stammering now. Standing there in her thin white T-shirt in the chill wind, brown hair tinted amber in the moonlight, oddly embarrassed.
    I said, “No, I have no idea what you’re getting at. Rhonda sent you to ask me what?”
    She tapped fingers to her forehead. “You mean I didn’t say it? Jeez, my brain really is scrambled. Turns out she gave Jeth two Valiums, and he’s out like a light, the poor babe. So Rhonda and I want you to come down … to, well, basically to hang out with us.”
    I chuckled, pulled her to me, and kissed her on the top of the head. “Know what? Our little hugging session actually did make me feel better so, yeah, I’ll come down to say good night. Give me a minute to get some dry shorts on and a T-shirt.”
    She touched her fingers to my shoulder, stopping me as I turned away. She stood there looking up at me in the moonlight—a friend I’d known so long and so intimately that I no longer saw the features of her face, only the warmth of her expression. “Don’t make this hard on me, Doc. What I’m telling you is, you don’t need your shorts or your shirt. Come just the way you are.”
    I said, “JoAnn? Are you asking … wait a minute, do you mean—?”
    She said, “Yeah, ol’ buddy. That’s exactly what we mean.”
    I stood there, mouth agape, until she took my elbow and tugged.
    “We’ve got wine,” she said.

4
    Florida has the population of a fair-sized nation, and the disappearance of three people grabbed some quick headlines. But, very soon, it was business as usual on what Tomlinson once described as the “Disney Peninsula—a multitonomous fantasy that features every brilliance of the racial rainbow, along with every human fakery and illusion.”
    The media wave peaked with interest momentarily but then flooded away just as fast, once again indifferent to the fact that three people had lived and died.
    Physically and metaphorically, Janet and her companions had been swept out of sight, and the news gatherers went on to more current matters: On Thanksgiving Day in Miami’s Liberty City, members of a ghetto gang called the Spliffs stopped four Canadians in a rental car and shot them to death because the Canadians had made the outrageous mistake of taking the wrong exit off Interstate 95, and then onto the gang’s neighborhood street.
    In the gorgeous country town of Arcadia, a Brahma bull busted out of its loading ramp and gored three rodeo fans as they walked to their cars, but the fans refused the entreaties of clamoring personal injury attorneys to sue. As one fan told a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times, “Rodeo’n’s risky business whether you’re in the ring or in the stands. That’s the way we like it.”
    And on the main sawgrass plain of the Everglades, immigration police arrested forty-seven illegal aliens of various nationalities who’d been jettisoned off the uninhabited Ten Thousand Islands and left to wade ashore by flesh merchants who’d smuggled them into U.S. waters from Colombia. The illegals were dehydrated, cut all to hell by the coral rock that lies at the base of the sawgrass, and starving. In the November heat, many days without good water, it became a death march of sorts. Three of the weakest fell and were left to the vultures. Another died shortly after being hospitalized. One of the survivors, though, was quoted as saying, “Why did I risk my life to come to America? Because here I can live as a person, as an individual with dignity, not as a beast of