1
The Big Caper
Lionel White
Chapter One
1.
Kosta arrived on Tuesday.
Frank had already left for the gas station, over in town on Route Number 1, two blocks from where the principal street of Indio Beach intersected the four-lane north-south highway. This main street, Orange Drive, continued on east for another three or three and a half miles, through the better residential section of the town. It then crossed the new, state-financed concrete bridge spanning the river, ultimately terminating in a dead end at the public beach on the Atlantic Ocean.
Kosta came in a taxi, driven by a colored man, at eight-thirty on this Tuesday morning, the last week in January. Kay was alone on the flagged patio, sitting there with her third cup of coffee and her seventh cigarette and postponing what awaited her in the large, rather old-fashioned kitchen.
What waited was the collection of dishes from their breakfast, along with the dishes from the night before, when they had entertained the Loxleys, the young couple that lived a quarter mile down the narrow sand road and ran the laundromat on Coral Street.
The Loxleys, like themselves, were fairly new in town. In a community such as Indio Beach, population 4,351 in the summer and 9,332 in the winter, there are three distinct and separate groups of people. There are, first of all, the "natives," those that have lived there for a long time. A long time, in Florida, is anywhere from ten years to a generation or so. There are the newcomers, that group which has almost doubled the static population of the town within the boom years since th