Carl Hiaasen Read Online Free

of fourteen.
    The bitter realization hardened Bode Gazzer against his MSG-gobbling parents, and society at large. He became “the bad element” in the neighborhood, the cocky ringleader of misdemeanors and minor felonies. He worked diligently at being a hood, taking up unfiltered cigarets, public spitting and gratuitous profanity. Every so often he purposely provoked his brothers into beating him up, so he could tell friends he’d been in a savage gang fight.
    Bode’s schoolteacher parents didn’t believe in whippings and (except for one occasion) never laid a glove on him. Jean and Randall Gazzer preferred “talking out” problems with their children, and spent many hours around the supper table “interacting” earnestly with the insolent Bodean. He was more than a match. Not only had he acquired the rhetorical skills of his mother and father, he was boundlessly creative. No matter what happened, Bode always produced an elaborate excuse from which he would not budge, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
    By the time he turned eighteen, his juvenile arrest record filled three pages, and his weary parents had put themselves in the hands of a Zen counselor. Bode had come to relish his role as the family outlaw, the bad seed, the misunderstood one. He could explain everything and would, at the drop of a hat. By the time he turned twenty-two, he was living on beer, bold talk and a multitude of convenient resentments. “I’m on God’s shit list,” he’d announce in barrooms, “so keep your damn distance.”
    A series of unhealthy friendships eventually drew Bode Gazzer into the culture of hate and hard-core bigotry. Previously, when dishing out fault for his plight, Bode had targeted generic authority figures—parents, brothers, cops, judges—without considering factors such as race, religion or ethnicity. He’d swung broadly, and without much impact. But xenophobia and racism infused his griping with new vitriol. Now it wasn’t just some storm-trooper cop who busted Bode with stolen VCR’s, it was the
Cuban
storm-trooper cop who obviously had a hard-on for Anglos; it wasn’t just the double-talking defense lawyer who sold Bode down the river, it was the double-talking
Jew
defense lawyer who clearly held a vendetta against Christians; and it wasn’t just the cokehead bondsman who refused to put up Bode’s bail, it was the cokehead
Negro
bondsman who wanted him to stay in jail and get cornholed to death.
    Bode Gazzer’s political awakening coincided with an overdue revision of his illicit habits. He’d made up his mind to forsake burglaries, car thefts and other property offenses in favor of forgeries, check kiting and other so-called paper crimes, for which judges seldom dispensed state prison time.
    As it happened, the hate movement in which Bode had taken an interest strongly espoused fraud as a form of civil disobedience. Militia pamphlets proclaimed that ripping off banks, utilities and credit-card companies was a just repudiation of the United States government and all the liberals, Jews, faggots, lesbians,Negroes, environmentalists and communists who infested it. Bode Gazzer admired the logic. However, he proved only slightly more skillful at passing bad checks than he was at hot-wiring Oldsmobiles.
    Between always-brief jail stints, he’d decorated the inside of his apartment with antigovernment posters purchased at various gun shows: David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Gorden Kahl were featured heroically.
    Whenever Chub visited the place, he raised a long-necked Budweiser in salute to the martyrs honored on Bode’s wall. Through television he’d acquired a vague awareness of Koresh and Weaver, but he knew little about Kahl except that he’d been a Dakota farmer and tax protester, and that the feds had shot the shit out of him.
    “Goddamn storm troopers,” Chub snarled now, parroting a term he’d picked up at a small but lively militia meeting on Big Pine Key. He carried his beer to a futon