Carl Hiaasen (20 page)

Gillian found one among the Indian’s supplies and handed it to Eugenie, who went off toting Dealey’s video case into the darkness. Gillian thought: That girl’s not scared of anything.

“Where’s she going?” Sammy Tigertail raised up on one elbow. “Tell her to get back here.”

Gillian walked over and lay down on top of him, her lips lightly touching his neck and her breasts pressing against the warmth of his chest. She could feel his heart pounding, and it made her smile.

“This time you be the alligator,” she said.

The moaners had been right. Somebody was firing a gun.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, I heard it.” Skinner nudged the throttle and aimed the skiff into the waves.

Fry bounced like a sack of apples in the bow. The football helmet felt as if it weighed twenty pounds. Three hundred yards from the island his father raised the engine and started poling again. Fry was in charge of the spotlight.

“You sure this is where the shot came from?”

“Fifty-fifty. So damn windy it’s hard to tell.”

“There’s no beach like at the other place,” Fry observed.

“I’m gonna stuff the boat in the mangroves. Give me some light off the starboard.”

“You got it.” The beam cut a smoky purple groove through the dark. Fry was growing numb from riding in the cold, but numb wasn’t bad. It kept him from breaking down when he thought about his mother.

“Does Mr. Piejack have a gun?” he asked.

Perry Skinner said nothing. He was huffing up on the platform, battling the wind and the current. Fry heard the tip of the pole crunching against a submerged oyster bar.

“Dad, does Louis Piejack keep a gun?”

“That was a rifle we heard.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Piejack’s got a shotgun, a crappy little sawed-off. You can shut down that spotlight now, we’re almost there.”

Fry hardly ever thought about the divorce; when it had happened, he wasn’t surprised and certainly not traumatized. His mother and father were so different that he’d long been baffled by their marriage. He was now old enough to understand that Honey Santana and Perry Skinner cared in some eternal and deep-running way for each other, but from his earliest memories it seemed clear that they had no business living under the same roof. Just as Fry couldn’t picture his own life without both of them in it, he couldn’t picture the two of them together again. For his dad this trip was a mission of duty and not devotion, but Skinner would be shattered—Fry knew—if something happened to Honey.

“Dad, what’s the name of this island?”

“Dismal Key.”

“That’s sick.”

“I’m not jokin’,” Skinner said.

“I know.”

They stepped out onto the flats and pulled the skiff toward the trees. The shoreline was longer than on the other island, and more densely foliated. Fry thought he smelled camp smoke but he couldn’t see any fires.

After securing the boat, Skinner started threading through the mangroves. Fry stayed close and kept quiet, even when the barnacle-covered prop roots raked his legs. They followed the curve of a small bay, searching for an opening.

“Light,” Skinner whispered.

Fry aimed the beam.

“No. Over there.” His father pointed.

The spot fell on a red kayak and a yellow kayak, empty and tethered together.

“Those are Mom’s!” At first, Fry was elated, then queasy with dread. What if they were too late?

Skinner weaved quickly through the trees. Once he broke onto dry land, he began to run. Fry struggled to keep pace but soon he fell, overcome by a shooting pain in his ribs and a hot wave of nausea. Before vomiting he adjusted his Dolphins helmet to avoid soiling the face guard. In a moment Skinner was there, steadying him by the shoulders.

“Go on. I’ll catch up later,” Fry said. He was embarrassed to be puking in front of his father, who already felt guilty about taking him out of the hospital.

“Don’t leave this spot—you understand?” Skinner gave the boy’s arm a firm but affectionate squeeze.

Fry handed over the spotlight. “But I want to help find Mom.”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do
not
move.”

“I heard you, Dad.”

He waited until he was alone before upchucking again. He hoped it wasn’t fear that was making him sick. He hoped it was a flu bug, or even the knot on his head.

He sat back, resting against the rock-hard trunk of a gumbo limbo. His ankles stung from the barnacle scrapes, but at least his stomach was settling. Still, he meant to obey his father and remain right where he was. He had no intention of going anywhere….

Until he heard among the stirring leaves a soft voice. Fry cupped the ear holes of his helmet and listened—it was definitely a woman. She was speaking in a hurried, secretive tone.

The boy sprang up and ran toward the voice. He was moving at a steady jog, snapping branches and kicking deadwood, when he burst from a thicket and surprised her. He was crestfallen to see that it wasn’t his mother.

“Well, if it ain’t Dan Marino,” the woman said, “scaring the holy crap outta me.”

Fry was out of breath and nauseated again. The woman steered him to an aluminum suitcase and made him sit on it. She had thick light-colored hair and wore a cotton pullover, and she was nearly as tall as his father. In one hand she held a cell phone and in the other a flashlight. Fry doubted she was the college girl who’d run off with the poacher; she looked too old to be in school.

“What’s up with the helmet?” she asked.

“I got a concussion. I’m out here lookin’ for my mom.”

“Yeah, and I’m lookin’ for Johnny Depp.”

“I’m serious. She took some people on a kayak trip.”

The woman turned the flashlight on Fry’s face. “Oh my Lord. Are you Honey’s boy?”

Fry pushed to his feet. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

The woman was silent for a few moments. “Damn,” she said finally.

“What’s wrong? Tell me!”

“Oh, she’s fine. It’s just that I honestly wasn’t planning to go back there…but now here you are. How in the name of Mother Mary you found us in the middle of the night, I can’t imagine.”

Fry said, “Wait—you’re one of the kayakers.” She was the woman he’d seen from a distance, outside his mother’s trailer, while they were loading the car for the trip.

“Where’s your husband?” he asked.

The woman made a pinched face. “We are
not
married, thank you very much. He’s my former travel companion and he’s with your mom right now, griping like a brat and driving her crazy, no doubt. It’s a long, pitiful story.”

“She said she knew you both from junior high. Said you were old friends.”

The woman was grandly amused. “Where’s your boat, by the way? Can I hitch a ride back to the real world?”

“But we heard a gunshot, my dad and I.”

“Yeah, some spaced-out Seminole accidentally plugged the guy who loaned me this cell phone, which unfortunately just ran out of juice in the middle of an extremely urgent call. My name’s Genie, by the way.” The woman firmly shook his hand. “It’s okay, the guy who got shot didn’t die or anything. Technically, he didn’t even loan me the phone—I sorta borrowed it while he was passed out.”

Fry said, “That’s how I found you. I heard you talking to somebody.”

“The reservation desk at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples,” the woman explained. “Tragically, the battery croaked before they could take my MasterCard number. You mentioned your father—where’d he waltz off to?”

Fry pointed. “Out there somewhere.” He filled her in about Louis Piejack.

“Whoa, hold on—your old man’s sneakin’ around this godforsaken jungle in the middle of the night, risking his butt to rescue his ex-wife. Is that possibly true?” The woman named Genie seemed enchanted by the notion.

“Is there a gun in that suitcase?” Fry asked.

“Just a videocam,” she said, “but don’t worry, sport, you won’t need to shoot anybody. The Indian’s girlfriend told me he brained some pervo that sounds like your mom’s stalker. She said the guy looked dead as a doornail.”

“Yesssss!” Fry pumped a fist.

Genie tossed the useless cell phone into the bushes. “Let’s go find your folks,” she said, “and get the hell outta here.”

Twenty

In the summary of his report for the Smithsonian Institution, the Rev. Clay MacCauley thoughtfully editorialized about future relations between the Seminoles and the white settlers who by 1880 were flooding into Florida. The ethnologist foresaw that “great and rapid change” was inevitable, and that the Seminole was “about to enter a future unlike any past he has known.” MacCauley argued for justice and fairness in dealing with the tribe, so that the young braves would be friendlier toward whites than their jaded, battle-weary elders. It was the minister’s hope that the Indians might in a climate of peaceful cooperation forget “their tragic past,” but he warned that angering them could be a costly blunder.

Now that he can no longer retreat,
MacCauley wrote,
now that he can no longer successfully contend, now that he is to be forced into close, unavoidable contact with men he has known only as enemies, what will he become?

A gambling tycoon like my uncle Tommy, thought Sammy Tigertail, recalling the passage. Or a fucked-up half-breed like me.

He was pondering the irony of MacCauley’s question while Gillian made love to him. It was the closest-possible contact one could have with a white person, and indeed it seemed unavoidable. Sammy Tigertail believed the pacifist preacher would have approved of what he and Gillian were doing—the conciliatory spirit of the act, if not some of the boisterously subjugating positions. It’s better than smoking a damn peace pipe, he thought.

The Indian had succumbed to the college girl’s advances because it wasn’t a surrender, or the commencement of another foolish doomed affair; it was farewell. Gillian would be departing the island the next day, whether she wanted to or not. Never would Sammy Tigertail set eyes on her again. There was no other choice—not after his stray bullet had struck Lester. A wounded white man was apt to stir up more trouble than a dead one.

Reverend MacCauley was wrong about one thing, Sammy Tigertail thought. Retreat is always an option when there are ten thousand places to hide.

Gillian rocked briskly on top of him, her eyes half-closed and the golden lick of firelight on her skin.

“I wish you’d hold me the way you hold that damn guitar,” she was saying, “like you’ll never let go.”

“Quiet,” Sammy Tigertail whispered.

“Quiet’s okay sometimes,” she said, slowing down. “Sexy, even.”

“Exactly.”

“You know who’s quite the talker? Ethan. In the sack, I mean.”

“Not now, please?”

She arched, playfully clenching a certain muscle. “What’s the matter, Thlocko, you jealous?”

Sammy Tigertail measured his response.

“Don’t worry, you got him beat by a mile.” Gillian squeezed again. Then on she went: “Ethan’s gotta talk dirty or he can’t keep it up. But at the same time he’s, like, unbelievably shy. I’m serious, he won’t even say the
F
word!”

Sammy Tigertail bucked his hips so forcefully that Gillian hiccuped. “You go on with this story,” he told her, “I’m gonna stuff Lester’s socks in your mouth.”

“That old trick?” She giggled. “I don’t think so.”

He weighed the pros and cons of gagging her, then decided against it. Once she was gone, a life of sublime silence awaited him.

Gillian said, “He was so shy—Ethan was—that whenever we did it, he spoke German. That’s the only way he could make himself talk dirty! Problem is,
nothing
sounds dirty in German the way Ethan says it. But here he goes, poundin’ away, yankin’ on my hair, tellin’ me do this,
Fräulein,
do that—only I haven’t got a frigging clue what he’s talkin’ about. No lie, Thlocko, it’s like he’s reading from the owner’s manual of his old man’s Mercedes. Is that wild or what?”

The Indian said, “I’ve got a question.”

“But this is only after he told me about setting free those dolphins—before then I wouldn’t go to bed with him. What is it you just said?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Like?”

“Could you check and see if we’re still having sex?”

Gillian smiled. “We are,” she said. “In front of Lester, too. Does it still count if he’s unconscious?”

Sammy Tigertail began pumping at such a pace that Gillian quit gabbing and hung on with both hands. Somehow they finished together, he with a low sigh and she with a sequence of piercing, feral yelps. Afterward he gently rolled her onto a blanket, where she curled up like a kitten.

He was standing away from the campfire, struggling to turn his khakis right-side out, when a gun barrel poked him in the small of the back. His first thought was that the wounded white man had made a miraculous recovery.

But it wasn’t Lester.

“Be still,” the voice warned.

“Yes, sir.”

A pause, then: “Sammy, is that you?” The gunman spun him around and exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!”

“Hello, Mr. Skinner.”

“What happened to your head, man?”

“I fell on an oyster shell,” Sammy Tigertail lied.

Gillian drowsily looked up, tugging the blanket over her breasts. “Who’s that?”

“A friend,” the Seminole said hopefully.

He and Perry Skinner had met when Sammy Tigertail was a teenager and new to the tribe. Skinner had rolled his truck after swerving to miss an otter pup on the Tamiami Trail. Sammy Tigertail and his uncle had been the first to drive up on the scene, and they’d dragged Skinner out of the wreck moments before it caught fire. Later Sammy Tigertail learned that Skinner was an important and prosperous man in Everglades City. It was he who’d loaned the young Indian the crab boat on which Wilson’s body was ferried to Lostmans River.

Sammy Tigertail assumed that’s why Skinner had tracked him down—the cops must have sorted out what had happened, then informed Skinner that his vessel had been illegally used to transport a dead tourist.

“I can guess why you’re here,” the Seminole said.

Skinner stuck the handgun in his belt. “Excellent. Where is she?”

Sammy Tigertail was puzzled. “Who, Mr. Skinner?”

“Honey.” For Gillian’s edification he added: “My ex.”

Sammy Tigertail tried to conceal his relief that Skinner’s surprise appearance was unconnected to the Wilson fiasco.

“She’s out here somewhere, Sammy. You remember what she looks like, right?”

“It’s big country, Mr. Skinner. I haven’t seen her.”

The Indian had met Honey Santana only once, but that was enough. Every autumn since the truck accident, Skinner had given Sammy Tigertail twenty-five pounds of fresh stone-crab claws to take back to the reservation. The gift was always picked up on October 15, the first day of the trap season, when the largest crabs were caught. One year when the Seminole came to get the cooler, Honey Santana happened to be at the packing house. She was reaming out her then-husband about a cracked exhaust pipe on one of his boats, which she said was polluting the air on the river, gassing the herons and ospreys. Sammy Tigertail had never seen a woman so lovely and so possessed. She had rattled him, and he hadn’t forgotten the episode. He had also not forgotten the sight of Perry Skinner calmly slipping on a set of Remington earmuffs to block out his wife’s fulminations.

“What’s she doing out here?” Gillian asked. “Did she, like, run away?”

Skinner didn’t answer. He said, “We heard gunfire on this island.”

“That was him”—Gillian was pointing at the Seminole—“shooting
him.
” She turned and nodded toward the prone pudgy white man.

“I didn’t mean to, Mr. Skinner,” Sammy Tigertail said. He noticed that the sky in the east was beginning to turn lavender. The sun would be coming up soon.

Skinner bent over and studied the man with the bloody shoulder, who was breathing loudly but steadily. Skinner said he didn’t recognize him.

“We call him Lester. He’s a private eye,” Gillian volunteered.

“Sammy, listen to me,” Skinner said. “There’s a sick fucker with a taped-up hand chasing after Honey. He’s got a johnboat, and he’s also carryin’ a sawed-off. You seen him?”

Gillian started to blurt something but the Seminole silenced her with a glare.

“Sammy?” Skinner said evenly.

“No, I haven’t seen anybody like that.” Sammy Tigertail hated lying to Mr. Skinner, but he didn’t need another corpse in his life.

“Tell him the truth. You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Gillian.

The Indian watched helplessly as she wrapped herself in the blanket and hurried to the other side of the campsite. She came back holding the sawed-off shotgun for Perry Skinner to see.

“Band-Aid Man was gonna shoot Lester, so Thlocko whacked him on the head,” she said.

“You kill him?” Skinner asked.

Sammy Tigertail shrugged. “He looked pretty dead. Smelled dead, too.”

“That would be wonderful news.” Skinner came very close to smiling.

“I didn’t mean to hit the man so hard.”

“We’ll take care of it, Sammy. Don’t worry.”

“Where was your wife headed?” the Seminole asked.

“Out here somewheres. And it’s ‘ex-wife,’ Sammy. She was taking some friends on a kayak tour.”

“How many people?”

“A man and a woman from Texas,” Skinner said.

“The kayaks, were they red and yellow?”

“That’s right. I found ’em tied in the mangroves not far from here.”

Sammy Tigertail was pleased to know that soon he’d have the island all to himself. “I think I know where she’s campin’, Mr. Skinner. Sorry, but I stole their food and water.”

“The boats, too,” Gillian chimed in.

“Water was all I wanted but the munchies were stashed in the same bag,” the Seminole explained.

Perry Skinner said, “You’re gonna take me there right away.”

“Definitely.”

“First let me run back and get my boy. I left him in the woods.”

“We’ll wait here,” Gillian promised.

After Skinner had gone, she said, “You do
not
want to mess with that guy.”

Sammy Tigertail nodded. “His old lady, either.”

Gillian leaned back and admired at the blushing sky. “Hey, there’s the sun!”

“Yup. Another day in paradise.”

“What should we do with the shotgun?”

“Toss it,” said the Seminole.

Waiting for sunrise, Boyd Shreave flailed at a lone mosquito floating about his head and shoulders. It felt too cold for mosquitoes, and Shreave feared he was being pursued by a dangerous rogue.

Earlier Honey had insisted upon reading aloud from a paperback text devoted to the insects, which were by far the deadliest creatures on earth. Shreave knew this was true because he’d seen a show about it on the Animal Planet channel. Millions of humans perished from hideous mosquito-borne maladies, including dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, St. Louis encephalitis and the West Nile virus. Over the centuries the flying pests had brought painful death to popes and peasants alike, and ravaged robust armies.

However, of approximately 2,500 known species, the smallish mosquito common to the salt marshes of the western Everglades carries no pathogens lethal to man. The fact would have thrilled Boyd Shreave, had he been aware of it. Desperately he continued slapping at his tiny tormentor, which he could not see in the dim pre-dawn but whose sinister presence was betrayed by a faint taunting hum. Any cessation in the buzzing sound unnerved him, for it meant that the mosquito surreptitiously had alighted somewhere—probably upon a vulnerable tract of Shreave’s flesh. Occasionally he found himself clawing at imagined bites to dislodge the toxic microbes.

As Shreave conducted his frantic duel with the hypodermic predator, Honey Santana grew weary of watching him swing clownishly at thin air or scratch madly at himself like a psoriatic baboon. Finally she rolled up her paperback and, with one deft swipe, flattened the mosquito on a button of Shreave’s flowered shirt. He aimed a flashlight at the small death splotch, the sight of which comforted him until he remembered from the Animal Planet program that mosquito blood wasn’t red. It was his own mortal nectar that had squirted from the mushed corpse; the sneaky prick had pricked him after all.

“I’m dead,” he groaned.

Honey sneezed. “Don’t be such a wuss,” she said.

Her allergies had been acting up all night. She sneezed again and said, “How about a ‘bless you’? Were you raised by wolves, or what?”

Shreave flicked away the dead bug. “Don’t these things carry the bird flu, too?”

“No, Boyd, that would be a bird.”

“How about HIV?”

“How about a Xanax?” Honey said.

Shreave worriedly examined himself for telltale bumps. “I could damn well die out here thanks to that little bastard.”

“Only the females bite,” Honey remarked.

Shreave looked up and made a sour face. “Christ, somethin’ stinks.”

Honey couldn’t smell anything because her nose was runny. She wiped it somewhat undaintily on her shirt.

“Like fish,” Shreave complained. “Smells like a ditchful of rotten fish.”

“It’s low tide, that’s all.” Honey sneezed again. She stood up and said, “Let’s go, Boyd.”

He eyed her uncertainly. “Where to?”

She pointed upward, toward the top of the royal poinciana.

“What if I said no?” he asked.