Carl Hiaasen (17 page)

Now, lying in the moonlight, Shreave tensely attuned himelf to the many sounds of the night. He felt foolishly exposed and defenseless against feral predators. What did that goofball Honey know about panthers? The hairs on his arms prickled when he heard an animal with heft—surely no raccoon—scraping slowly through the trees. Shreave groped around for a rock or a sturdy stick, but all he came up with was a handful of oyster shards.

“I smell fish.” It was Honey’s voice.

“From the campers before us,” said Shreave. Secretly he was glad to know that someone else was awake.

“Not cooked fish.
Raw
fish,” she said. “I swear I know that smell.”

Trying to be casual, Shreave said, “I hear that critter you guys were talkin’ about.”

“Sounds substantial, doesn’t it?”

“For sure.”

“So go check it out,” Honey suggested. “Don’t forget your flashlight.”

Shreave rolled over, thinking: She’s quite the comedienne.

“Nighty-night, Boyd.”

“Go to hell.”

After a while the noise in the trees stopped, and one of the women began to snore softly. Shreave had to piss like a fountain, but he was reluctant to venture out among the nocturnal fauna. Besides, the painful Taser mishap temporarily had taken the pleasure out of urination.

With no success he slapped at some gnats that had developed a fondness for his hair. Minute by wretched minute, the mystique of Florida was bleeding away. Bitterly Shreave reappraised his grandiose dream of launching a new life with Eugenie Fonda. If the trip continued on its present downward trajectory, the dimension of this particular failure would dwarf all the others in Shreave’s lackluster past. As usual he deflected both blame and responsibility; cruel chance had imbedded him here—stranded on a scraggly island with a psychotic divorcée, an increasingly unresponsive girlfriend and a half-barbecued cock.

Lulled by the hiss of the dying campfire, Shreave was surprised when his thoughts turned to Lily back in Fort Worth. His longing was characteristically base and unsentimental; the memory stirring him was that of his heiress wife clad in those red thong panties, dry-humping his lap on the living room sofa. Shreave regretted not having taken advantage of that extraordinary interlude, for Lily—who by now must have figured out that he’d flown the coop—was lost to him forever.

He would have been shocked to know that he wasn’t the only man on Dismal Key thinking about her.

The Indian had slipped away, leaving the young woman named Gillian to supervise Dealey. The investigator knew he was in trouble when she said, “I think I’d make a good TV weather personality. They don’t call ’em weathermen anymore—they’re ‘weather personalities.’ Forget the hurricanes and tornadoes, but I’d love to do the winter ski reports. You ever been to Aspen?”

Dealey shook his head.

“Me neither. Park City?”

“I really need to sleep,” Dealey said.

“Let’s make a demo tape.”

At first Dealey refused, but then the girl jabbed his gut with the sawed-off shotgun, a weapon with which she was clearly, and harrowingly, unfamiliar. So he took out the video camera and taped her holding the gun while she pretended to do a television weather report. When he replayed it for her to see, she said, “Jesus, my hair’s a wreck. Did you bring some conditioner?”

“Oh sure. And rose-petal bath crystals.”

Gillian said, “Maybe I’ll switch my major to communications. I can’t see myself in a classroom full of third graders.”

“It’s a stretch,” Dealey agreed.

“Or maybe I won’t go back to college at all. I’ll just stay here on the island with you and Thlocko.”

“Look, I need a favor. I want to call home and let my wife know I’m okay.”

Gillian looked more amused than sympathetic. “You got a cell phone, Lester?” She’d decided he looked like a Lester and to address him that way.

“Two minutes is all I need. She’s probably worried to death,” Dealey said.

“Where’s your wedding ring?”

Dealey hesitated a half second too long while making up an answer. Gillian wagged a finger. “You think just ’cause I’m young I can’t tell when a guy’s lying his balls off? I’m an expert, Lester, so you’d better watch out. I’m like a human polygraph!”

“Can I make the call or not?”

“To who?” Gillian was sighting the sawed-off through her toes.

Dealey said, “I need to speak with the lady who hired me. I’m a private investigator.”

“For real? How cool is that!”

“At the moment, not cool at all.”

“By the way, I know how to use this,” Gillian said, hoisting the shotgun. “Thlocko told me it was okay to blast away if you try anything funny. He told me to aim for the legs, in case you’re really alive and not a spirit.”

“Mighty white of him,” Dealey said.

“So tell me your story, Lester, and stick to the truth.”

“Sure,” said Dealey, and he did.

Gillian thought it was fantastic. “She’s paying you twenty-five grand to tape her old man boning some bimbo! That’s awesome, L-man.”

Dealey said, “I won’t see a dime, because I’ll never get the triple-X shot that my client wants. She’s a total kink.”

“And these are the kayak people we’re talkin’ about, right? The same ones camping near Beer Can Gulch.”

“The Yuppie couple from Texas, yeah. The trailer-park woman, she’s not involved.”

Gillian was so delighted to learn some juicy details about the mysterious intruders that she gave Dealey permission to call his client.

“But first, my turn.” She motioned for the cell phone.

Dealey removed it from an inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to her. Gillian punched the number and waited.

“My mother,” she said to Dealey.

“Save me some battery.”

Gillian nodded and whispered, “It’s her machine, thank God.”

Dealey could hear the beep on the other end.

“Hey, Mom, just me,” said Gillian brightly. “My cell’s not workin’ and I didn’t want you guys to worry. Everything’s awesome except I’m takin’ some extra vacation. I broke up with Ethan, which you predicted of course, but now I met this new guy—he’s real
real
different, and I bet you’ll like him. Give my love to Dad, and I’ll try again in a few days.”

She tossed the phone to Dealey and said, “Whew! That’s a load off. You want some privacy?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I’ll be in the ladies’ room.” She pointed toward a thicket at the edge of the clearing.

Dealey waited until she was out of sight. By moonlight he fished through his wallet for the scrap of paper upon which Lily Shreave had written her mobile number. She answered on the first ring.

“I hope this is good news, Mr. Dealey.”

“Yes and no,” he said.

“Uh-oh. Here we go.”

“The good part is, I got what you asked for.” He knew Boyd Shreave’s wife would believe it.

“Penetration? You got penetration?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“On the beach, right? And she was on top, wasn’t she?”

“Big-time,” said Dealey. He had no intention of ripping Lily Shreave off, but a lie was still a lie. He might have felt worse about it, if she weren’t such a perv.

“So what’s the bad news?” she asked.

“I’m trapped. I can’t get outta this fuckin’ place.”

“And where exactly would you be?”

“I got no earthly idea, Mrs. Shreave. There’s ten thousand goddamn islands out here, and I’m stuck on one of ’em.”

“With my twenty-five-thousand-dollar sex tape.”

“Correct,” Dealey said.

“May I ask how you got there?”

“At gunpoint.”

“Holy Christ,” said Lily Shreave. “It wasn’t Boyd, was it?”

“Get serious.”

“Please don’t tell me you were kidnapped.”

“Twice,” Dealey said.

“But somehow you escaped.”

“Negative. Not by a long shot.”

“So who’s got you now?” Lily Shreave demanded.

“Not important.” Dealey saw no benefit to admitting that he was the prisoner of a guitar-toting Seminole Indian and a college sorority girl.

“Here’s what I need you to do,” he said to Mrs. Shreave, and he told her.

“I like it,” she said. “You’re a smart fella, Mr. Dealey. I’ll call first thing in the morning.”

He held no illusion that she cared whether he lived or died. Getting her mitts on the video was all that mattered to her.

Dealey heard a rustling and Gillian stepped from the thicket. He said into the phone, “I’ve gotta go.”

“Wait! One more question.”

“What?”

“The tape—how’d it turn out? Can you see…
everything
?”

“The works,” Dealey said.

“Wow.”

“More like double wow.”

“I can’t wait,” said Boyd Shreave’s wife.

“Oh, you’ll be surprised,” Dealey told her, and hung up.

Seventeen

Cecil McQueen died in a chokehold at a nightclub called Le Lube, where he and six friends had gone for a bachelor party. The branch supervisor of the trucking firm was being married the next day to his ex-wife’s divorce accountant, and his buddies couldn’t decide if it was a masterstroke or an act of self-destruction.

At the strip joint the men drank festively but set no records. Normally a shy person, Cecil McQueen surprised his companions when he bounded into the mud-wrestling pit to take on a dancer known as Big Satin, who outweighed him by fifty-three pounds and was unaware (as was Cecil) of his obstructed cardiac arteries. Afterward Big Satin felt terrible. So did Cecil’s co-workers and supervisor, although the wedding went on as scheduled.

The police ruled the death as accidental, but nonetheless it dominated the TV news, which is how the victim’s only son—then addressed as Chad—learned that his father had not perished while rescuing a vanload of orphans from a flooded drainage canal. That was the yarn his stepmother had cooked up.

Years later Sammy Tigertail often thought about his dad, a cheery and harmless soul who believed that the three essential ingredients of contentment were classic rock, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a hot tub. It was the music that had cheered young Chad, even after he’d moved out to the Big Cypress and shed his name and turned forever away from white people (except for one). His affinity for rock was what had led to the foolish, soul-bruising lapse with Cindy, whom he’d met at a Stones concert in Lauderdale. Within ten seconds Sammy Tigertail had known she was poison, yet he’d willingly opened his veins.

And learned nothing from the ordeal, because the same thing seemed to be happening with Gillian.

“I’m gettin’ a complex,” she told him. “Why aren’t you trying to do me?”

“You asked to be the hostage.”

“So?”

“Hostages don’t get laid.”

“Who made up that stupid rule? Besides, I can tell you’ve been thinkin’ about it.”

“Bull,” Sammy Tigertail said.

She rose on her tiptoes and tried to peck him on the chin. He dodged sideways and said, “You don’t understand.”

“About being nervous? I do so.”

He grabbed the rifle from the crook of a tree, and nodded toward Dealey. “Keep an eye on Mr. Camera Man,” he told Gillian. “I won’t be long.”

“What if he tries somethin’? Like, jumps me and rips off my clothes?”

“Then shoot him. The shotgun’s over there,” the Indian said.

“Okeydoke.”

“But aim low, in case he turns out to be real. I don’t need to hassle with another dead body.”

“When you say low—”

“The legs.”

“Gotcha,” said Gillian.

On a rash impulse Sammy Tigertail leaned forward and kissed the top of her head, then he quickly moved into the night. The sky held enough moon that he was able to make headway without using a flashlight, though his sense of direction was as unreliable as ever. Fortunately, the island was small enough that it was difficult to stay lost. The Seminole eventually located the old oyster mound and took a position overlooking the campsite and the cistern. Embers from the fire glowed faintly, and Sammy Tigertail could make out the steepled shapes of two tents, and one bundled form on the ground.

He crept down the midden and, except for tripping once and dropping the rifle, his approach was practically furtive. Hearing snores, he assumed that all the kayakers were asleep. Quickly he padded into the clearing and snatched up a large duffel bag.

That’s when a head poked out from one of the tents. Sammy Tigertail saw the movement and whirled, waving the rifle. His heart hammered.

“Easy, big guy,” the woman whispered.

“We need water!”

“Like we don’t?”

“But I got the gun!” said Sammy Tigertail. “Now, shut up.”

“Did you steal our kayaks?” The woman had a mild southern accent and light hair, but the angles of her face were obscured by a shadow. “Hold on,” she said, squirming from the sleeping bag.

“What are you doin’?”

“Comin’ with you.”

“No fucking way. Not again,” the Seminole said angrily.

The woman stood up and stepped into her shoes, some sort of rubberized Yuppie sneakers. She was a tall one.

“You’ve got the boats, and now the last of our water—I’ll be damned if I’m stayin’ out here to die,” she said.

A breeze stirred the mangroves and riffled the leaves of the big poinciana. The woman folded her arms against the chill and said, “Well?”

Sammy Tigertail knew that if he left her behind, she would awaken the others, and they’d contact the authorities to report that a thieving redskin was loose on the island.

She said, “I’ll do whatever you want. And I mean
whatever.
”

The Seminole raised his eyes to the leering moon. The spirits seemed to be punishing him. He suspected it had something to do with Wilson, the dead tourist.

“You’ll do anything?” he asked the woman.

She nodded.

“Then carry this bag.”

“Yes, bwana.”

“And be quiet,” said the Indian, “or I’ll cut off your tongue.”

The woman stuck it out for him to see, the pearl stud burnished by the moonlight. Sammy Tigertail frowned.

“Oh well. Some guys dig it,” she said.

“My girlfriend had one attached somewhere else. It didn’t feel so good.”

The Indian turned and darted into the trees. He heard the woman trailing behind him, breathing fast under the weight of the duffel. He expected her to start chattering like a crow, but she didn’t. It was a nice surprise.

Thirty years in the seafood business combined with grossly irregular bathing habits had cloaked upon Louis Piejack a distinct and inconquerable funk. Were it cologne, the essence would have included the skin of Spanish mackerel, the roe of black mullet, the guts of gag grouper, the wrung-out brains of spiny lobster and the milky seepage of raw oysters. The musk emanated most pungently from Piejack’s neck and arms, which had acquired a greenish yellow sheen under a daily basting of gill slime and fish shit. Nothing milder than industrial lye could have cleansed the man.

He stunk like a bucket of bait.

Honey Santana eventually would have pinpointed the smell—and the danger—were it not for an untimely pollen allergy that kept her clogged and sniffling. No sooner had she dozed off than Louis Piejack hoisted himself, with a hellish groan, into the old cistern. Woozy with pain, the spine-covered stalker was spying through a gap in the cinder blocks when Eugenie Fonda departed stealthily with a dark-skinned young gunman. Piejack felt no curiosity about the peculiar event; Honey was his only concern.

The person who would have been least surprised by the fishmonger’s felonious pursuit was his wife, who two decades earlier had been the object of a more subtle courtship. At the time, Louis Piejack had been smoother and more attentive to hygiene, and in the meager male talent pool of rural Collier County he’d sparkled like a gem. After the wedding he’d gone downhill fast, and when his wife had threatened to leave he torched her mother’s minivan and warned that it was only the beginning. Even when her family moved away to the Redlands, Becky Piejack remained with Louis out of sheer cold dread.

So awful was the marriage that she hadn’t been entirely dismayed to learn she had cancer—anything to get out of the house. There were no chemotherapy facilities in Everglades City, so Becky looked forward to the twice-monthly trips to Gainesville as furloughs from her deviant and disgusting spouse. When after three years the oncologists pronounced her disease-free, Becky withheld the news from Louis and continued to travel every other week. On those long drives she often brought a young orchid collector named Armando and a box of Berlitz language tapes, with which she schooled herself in French and Portuguese. Becky Piejack was gearing up for the day when she’d gather the courage to leave her husband, which she assumed would require fleeing the continental United States. Either Paris or Rio sounded good.

In truth, it had been a long while since Louis Piejack had thought of his wife in a criminally possessive way. Except when inconvenienced by her illness, he seldom thought of her at all. Now, shivering on the concrete slab of the cistern, Piejack went about planning a new life of passion with Honey Santana. Once they returned to the mainland, he would immediately evict Becky and her hospital bed, along with the wicker furniture that he so detested. He might allow Honey to repaint the living area but not the bedroom, which would remain black with red crown molding. For a moving-in gift he’d buy his sex angel a set of new cookware, including a kettledrum fryer for wild boar and turkey. Then he’d put her back to work at the fish market, peeling shrimp or running the cash register, so that he could keep an eye on her. As for Honey’s teenaged son, the smartass punk could go live with his old man.

At some point in his ruminations Louis Piejack experienced a new and unfamiliar pain—a hot welter of stings on the palm of his left hand, a location he could not access without gnawing through the surgical dressing. In the darkness Piejack hadn’t seen the platoons of fire ants march the length of his aching arm and disappear through one of the ragged finger holes into the moist cocoon of dirty gauze and sticky tape. He didn’t cry out, or even whimper. Stoically he ground his molars while the little red demons tore divots in his flesh.

He consoled himself with dream visions of his breathtaking goddess, who in real life lay snoring like a stevedore less than fifty feet away. To Louis Piejack, scorching physical agony seemed a small price to pay for the midlife companionship of a woman such as Honey Santana. He was morbidly amused to realize that the extremity now being devoured by insects was the same one that had touched her illicitly that tumultuous day at the market.

Go ahead and eat me,
he mocked the ants.
See if I give a fuck.

Perry Skinner followed Sandfly Pass to the Gulf and slowly headed up the coast, scouting the outermost islands for signs of campers. The wind had stiffened, pushing a troublesome chop that slapped the hull of the skiff and made silent running impossible. Another problem was debris in the water; the previous summer’s hurricanes had uprooted scores of old mangroves and strewn their knobby skeletons throughout the shallow banks and creeks. To avoid an accident, Skinner was forced to use the spotlight continually, though it risked betraying their approach.

As the skiff entered a deeper bay, the waves kicked higher, misting salt spray. From the bow Fry shouted, “Dad, you see that?”

Skinner had already spotted it—the flicker of fire on a nearby shore. He cut the engine and dimmed the spotlight.

“Is it them?” Fry asked anxiously.

“Son, I don’t know.”

The breeze and the tide were at odds, foiling his drift and nudging the boat onto the flats. Skinner tilted the engine and picked up the long graphite pole. Fry watched him scale a wobbly platform above the outboard motor and said, “You’re kidding me.”

It took Skinner a few moments to steady himself. “The water’s only twelve inches deep. You got a better idea?”

He planted the double-pronged foot of the pole in the mud and, with slow tentative strokes, began pushing the skiff across the bank toward the island where the campfire burned. Backcountry guides made it look easy, but Skinner felt awkward and tense, rocking on the thin wafer of molded plastic. One slip and he’d tumble into the water or, worse, fall backward and crack his skull on the propeller.

Fry said, “You’re the one who needs a football helmet.”

Skinner gently poked him with the dry end of the pole. “Keep your eyes peeled, ace. We don’t need a welcome party.”

“Where’s the gun anyway?”

“Just relax,” said Skinner.

Fry felt like hurling, he was so anxious. He kept flashing back to the moment when Louis Piejack’s pickup had nearly run him down at the trailer park, and he wondered what he could have done to stop the guy from pursuing his mother. Fry had hated Mr. Piejack for groping her at the fish market, but he’d pegged him as just some twisted old turd—not a mad stalker.

The boy drummed his fingers on the gunwale and thought: Relax? No way.