Skinny Dip (26 page)

“Oliver Goldsmith,” he said.

Ricca raised her eyebrows quizzically. The man opened the book to a dog-eared page and placed it on her lap. “Read that aloud, please.”

“The whole thing?”

“Just the first stanza.”

Ricca, whose interest in poetry had peaked with “Green Eggs and Ham,” read it first to herself:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy?

What an can wash her guilt away?

When she recited it out loud, the man in the shower cap smiled patiently.

“You don’t much care for the poem. I can tell,” he said.

“What ‘guilt’ is he talking about? I don’t feel guilty, I feel pissed off!”

“Understandable. The sonofabitch shot you.”

“And he lied, too. About everything!”

The man took the volume of poetry from her hands and returned it to the duffel.

Ricca said, “I’m dying to get even with the bastard. Will you help me?”

The man popped the glass eye from its socket and cleaned it with the dingy tail of his T-shirt. He had heard the gunshots from half a mile away; slogged through the saw grass and muck and high water, half walking, half swimming. By the time he’d gotten there the shooter was already gone, a pair of red taillights shrinking down the levee. Ricca had desperately submerged herself in a clump of lily pads. The man with one eye had located her by following the intermittent gasps that she made when extending her lips and nose to the surface. Shaking and bleeding from a wound in the leg, she had nonetheless tried to fight him off, reasonably assuming from his appearance that he was some kind of dangerous swamp pervert.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I’m going through a rough personal spell,” he told her now.

“What do you mean?”

“For starters, I’m hearing the same weird duet all day and all night in my head—’Midnight Rambler’ as performed by Eydie Gorme and Cat Stevens. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice folks, but frankly I’m ready to shove a sawed-off down my throat. One blessed hour of silence,” the man said wistfully, “would be welcome.”

Ricca said nothing. The sight of his hollow eye socket, dank as a cave, was creeping her out.

“On top of that, I’m hallucinating almost constantly,” he went on. “I’m assuming, for example, that in reality you bear no resemblance to Lady Bird Johnson.”

“Who? “Ricca asked.

“The wife of our thirty-sixth president. He was the fellow who sent me to Vietnam,” the man explained. “To me, you look exactly like Mrs. Johnson, which I know must sound preposterous. You’re a much younger woman, with cinnamon freckles and curly hair, yet when I look at you, all I see is Lady Bird.”

“Know what you need? A doctor.”

The one-eyed man grinned, and it struck Ricca that he must have been extraordinarily handsome before he went bonkers. Even now, she felt an unnerving stir of attraction.

He said, “It’s entirely possible that I’m dying.”

“Noway, Captain.”

“There were times in my life when I would have jumped at the opportunity,” he allowed, “to hunt down your shiftless boyfriend and haul him out here for a private party. I’m not talking mundane revenge, either, but a textbook exercise in predation. Please understand, there’s a primordial formula for survival on this planet, and men like your Chad—”

“Chaz,” Ricca said.

“—tend to perform poorly without dry socks, dental floss and air conditioning. Even that wretched lowlife poacher whom I hog-tied this morning is better equipped for this world than—Chaz, is it?” The man clawed at his ears. “That god-awful singing, it will not stop.”

“I can’t hear a thing.”

“Last week it was David Lee Roth and Sophie Tucker. The panfish in these canals must be loaded with mercury.” He leaned over and stared hard for several moments into the flames. “You say your beau works out here in the ‘glades?”

“That’s right. He tests farm water for pollution.”

“Too bad we’ve never crossed paths, he and I.” The man chuckled to himself as he worked the glass orb back into its socket. “I can carry you as far as the dike. From there a friend of mine’ll drive you into town.”

“Then what?” Ricca asked.

“Me, I’m heading west.” He handed her a cup of coffee. “The other day I got so damn hungry, I ate a pygmy rattler. Normally I leave reptiles alone, but a mighty powerful urge took hold. Anyhow, I go to grab the little sucker, and suddenly there’s the face of Dr. Henry Kissinger staring up at me, flicking that little forked tongue of his! Fucking Kissinger!”

Ricca Spillman had never heard of him, either, but she politely asked, “So what’d you do?”

“I chewed off his head, of course,” the man said, “and fried his scaly ass in canola oil. Point is, I’m navigating a rocky patch in my private life—I positively can’t be anywhere near the highway, or crowds, or humanity in general. I wish to God I could help you, but I’m taking a pass.”

Ricca said, “That’s okay. I’ll figure something out.” She wondered if the rattlesnake story was intended as some sort of mystical lesson.

As if reading her mind, the man said, “Go with your gut, darling. Simple as that.”

“I’ll work on it.”

After dousing the fire, the burly hermit scooped her up and splashed out across the marsh. It was an hour’s hike under a blistering sun, yet he wasn’t even breathing hard when they reached the levee. A mud-splattered Jeep was parked on the road. Waiting behind the wheel sat a younger man wearing a knit watch cap and dark shades. He looked restless and intense.

The captain kissed Ricca on the forehead and told her to be careful on that bum leg.

She returned the kiss and said, “Thanks for saving my butt.”

The man with one eye saluted dashingly. “It was an honor, Mrs. Johnson.”

Twenty-four

Dr. Charles Regis Perrone bounced behind the steering wheel of his Hummer, weaving down the levee at a ludicrous speed. Every so often he poked his head out to scan the sky, which was full of helicopters. It was the weirdest spectacle, choppers buzzing over the Everglades like giant candy-colored dragonflies.

Chaz felt like the Ray Liotta character in GoodFellas, racing around like a lunatic with a load of hot guns, wondering if the helicopter following him was real or imaginary—except that instead of that Harry Nilsson song from the movie, Papa Thorogood was blasting in Chaz Perrone’s ears, asking who did he love.

It was ideal road music, but Chaz couldn’t get into the spirit. He was heading out to collect another water sample, and he was highly agitated. Maybe there was an innocent explanation for the helicopters— baby blue, green, red, white, baby blue again….

Maybe a hunter or fisherman had gotten lost, Chaz speculated. Except these weren’t rescue-type choppers he was seeing—they were private executive-style models, similar to the nifty little Bell 206 leased by Hammernut Farms to ferry Samuel Johnson Hammernut back and forth across his holdings. Red had given him the grand tour soon after Chaz signed on as his mole; Chaz’s first and only helicopter ride, swooping low over the checkerboard fields of crops. From the air Chaz had been able to track the precise path of the pollution, the gridwork of shallow brown canals that carried the tainted runoff from the soil of Hammernut Farms to the throat of the Everglades. “God’s septic tank,” Red had called it, guffawing behind tinted goggles that had made him look like a psychedelic fruit fly. Dr. Charles Perrone had laughed, too, an obsequious reflex though hardly insincere. Chaz gave not a damn about the wetlands below, or what a continual soaking with fertilizer might do to them… .

Shit, Chaz thought, here comes another one!

He kept his eyes on the red-striped helicopter for so long that he nearly drove the Hummer off the levee. The jostling awakened Tool, who mumbled, “Slow down, dickbrain.”

Urgently, Chaz jabbed a finger upward. “Check it out!”

“A whirlybird. So what?”

“There’s a whole bunch of ‘em!”

Tool sneezed, then wiped a woolly arm across his nose. “Maybe they’s shootin’ a movie.”

As Chaz scanned the horizon, his head twitched back and forth. It reminded Tool of a lizard scouting for bugs.

Tool said, “You crash this fucker into the water, I’ll strangle your ass before ya can drown.”

“But what if they’re following us?” Chaz asked.

“What if fish had tits?”

“I’m serious. Jesus, see that blue one? Right behind us! Look in the mirror!”

Tool, who was feeling the effects of a fresh fentanyl patch, slammed his eyes shut. “Whirlybirds. I swear to God,” he said, and promptly nodded back to sleep.

Chaz parked at the spillway, struggled into his wading gear, grabbed the two-iron and slogged into the brothy water. He counted seven helicopters in the sky, each circling at different heights. That they were surveilling him seemed chillingly obvious, so Chaz was careful to conduct the runoff sampling with diligence and deliberation. He tried his hardest to appear unconcerned, although he peed copiously into his waders when the baby-blue chopper dipped low and slowed to a hover directly above his head.

By the time Tool awoke again, Chaz was racing back, halfway down the levee. The helicopters were gone.

“Gimme the cell,” Chaz said.

“Whaffor?”

“I need to call Red.”

Tool tossed the phone to Chaz, who was sweaty and flushed with anger. Chaz speed-dialed the office in LaBelle and demanded to speak to Mr. Hammernut.

“He’s where? Fishing? That’s terrific,” Chaz snapped at Red’s secretary.

Tool smiled drowsily. Fishing sounded like a pretty sweet way to spend the day.

Chaz was fuming. “Then put me through to his voice mail.”

“Call him later,” Tool advised.

“No, no, this can’t wait. Red? Red, this is Chaz. Listen to me real good: We get out to the second spillway this morning and the whole damn sky is full of helicopters—I’m not sure who they are, or where they came from, or what the fuck’s going on. But since you’re the only one I know that can afford to hire a goddamn fleet of choppers … what I’m trying to tell you, Red, is be careful. Very, very careful. You don’t want anything bad happening to me, you truly don’t. You want me to stay happy and calm and cool, which is dead opposite of the way I feel right now—shit, the machine cut me off!”

Chaz was so upset that he was panting. Tool grabbed the phone and said, “Boy, you done lost your marbles.”

“That’s what you want me to think, isn’t it? That’s the secret plan, right?”

Chaz poked his head out of the Hummer and looked up anxiously. The sky was bright and clear and empty, except for a solitary vulture rafting high in the thermals.

Joey Perrone had remembered that GoodFellas was one of her husband’s favorite movies; that’s what gave her the idea for helicopters. Corbett was thrilled and said it would be spectacular. He called the charter service himself and put the whole tab, more than twenty-three grand, on his platinum card. Joey didn’t like to fly because of what had happened to her parents, but Corbett promised that she’d have a fine time. Choppers are a blast, he said.

And he was right. The baby-blue Bell Ranger picked them up on the island and shot out low across the bay, then up the coast. Corbett took the seat next to the pilot; Joey sat beside Mick Stranahan, both hands latched to his left arm. He pointed out Stiltsville, where he’d once lived; then Key Biscayne, South Beach, the high-rise canyons along Collins Avenue. The helicopter banked and began to pass over dense suburbs gridded by impossibly congested roads. Joey could see that the interstate was locked down in both directions because of an accident; at the vortex of the traffic jam was a twinkling of red and blue emergency lights.

Corbett swiveled in his seat and raised his voice to be heard over the rotors: “No offense, Sis, but I’d stick darning needles in my brain before I’d live in a place like this.”

Later, as the pilot angled northward, Joey heard her brother gag in revulsion at the sight of western Broward County, where new subdivisions were erupting like cankers in all directions; thousands upon thousands of cookie-cutter houses, jammed together so tightly that it looked like you could jump from roof to roof for miles on end. Where there were no homes stood office parks, shopping plazas and enormous auto malls—acres and acres of Toyotas and Chryslers, cooking in the sun. Only a slender dirt levee separated the clamorous tide of humanity from the Everglades.

“At least they left a lake or two for the kids,” Joey remarked. Mick shook his head sadly. “Rock pits,” he informed her. “Hundreds of feet deep. That’s where they dredged up the fill for the roads and houses.”

“But what used to be out here? Before all this?” He pointed toward the other side of the levee. “That,” he said. “The widest river in the world.”

Corbett let out a sarcastic whoop. “I just saw a tree!” he cried. “I swear to God. A real tree!”

Before long, the sprawl gave way to wet saw grass prairies that undulated like flooded wheat in the brisk spring breeze. Except for an occasional airboat, gnat-sized specks on the tan landscape, there was no evidence of human occupation. Stranahan spotted three small deer bounding for the shelter of a tree island, and it occurred to Joey that— except for the occasional garbage-looting raccoon—these were the first truly wild animals that she’d seen since moving to Florida. She’d always been curious about the Everglades, but Chaz had refused to take her along on field trips, claiming it would violate the water district’s rules. That he never spoke of the place, except to gripe about the snakes and the insects, was even more stunning to Joey now that she’d finally seen it for herself. How could Chaz—a biologist, for God’s sake—not be dazzled?

Obviously, however, he wasn’t. He had betrayed the wetlands as nonchalantly as he had betrayed Joey. He had sold out—this greedy swine she’d married—so that megatons of noxious crap could be pumped day and night into the glistening waters below. Maybe for someone as soulless as her husband it wasn’t much of a reach, Joey thought, from killing a place to killing a person.

“Look out there,” Stranahan said.

The other choppers had arrived, six in all, flying clockwise in concentric circles. It was quite a show. Joey turned to Corbett and said, “You’ve outdone yourself. This is fantastic!”