Carl Hiaasen (16 page)

With the stolen kayaks in tow, Sammy Tigertail relocated to the southeastern leg of the island. He built a new campfire while Gillian amused herself with Dealey.

When she pulled the crumpled socks from his mouth, he asked, “Who are you?”

“Thlocko’s hostage.”

“I guess that makes two of us.”

“No, you’re just temporary. Like a POW,” she said. “He also goes by ‘Tiger Tail.’ That’s a Seminole chief.”

“Don’t I get a chance to explain?”

“Doubtful. He’s hard-core.” Gillian opened one of the Halliburtons and began tinkering with the Nikon.

Dealey said, “Don’t do that.” When he reached for the camera, she swatted his hand.

Sammy Tigertail looked up from the fire and threatened to throw both of them in Pumpkin Bay, which he had misidentified as the nearest open body of water. It was, in fact, Santina Bay, an error of no immediate consequence.

“Ten thousand islands and these assholes had to pick this one,” the Seminole said.

Retreat had fouled his mood. The place was being infested by white people and white spirits. Two rifle shots had failed to scare off the kayakers, forcing Sammy Tigertail to abandon the shell-mound campsite upon which he had hoped to commune with the ancient Calusas. Now the three tourists were settling in, and Sammy Tigertail was stuck with both the college girl and the spirit of the dead white businessman.

“I’m not a goddamn ghost!” Dealey protested, displaying his bloody feet as evidence of mortality.

Gillian snapped a few close-ups and set the Nikon down. The Indian handed his guitar to her and told her to play something soft. She slowly worked into “Mexico,” by James Taylor, which Sammy Tigertail recognized and approved. It would have sounded better on an acoustic but he couldn’t complain. For the first time he noticed that Gillian had a lovely voice, and he feared it would add to her powers over him. Still, he didn’t tell her to stop singing.

When the number was over, Dealey stated that he was thirsty. Gillian told him to join the club. “We’ve been living for days on cactus berries and fried fish. I’d blow Dick Cheney for a Corona,” she said.

“What do you want with me?” Dealey asked the Seminole, who took the Gibson from Gillian and began twanging the B string over and over.

Gillian leaned close to Dealey and whispered, “Thlocko won’t talk to you because he thinks you’re a spirit. He says he’s done hassling with dead white guys.”

“Then tell him to let me go.”

“Go where?” Gillian smiled. “Please. You are so
not
getting out of here. Hey, who was that jerkoff with the Band-Aids on his hand?”

Dealey said he didn’t know the man. “Some freak named Louis who’s stalking a woman from the trailer park. He clubbed me with that shotgun and made me go with him.”

“That’s rich,” said Gillian, “getting kidnapped twice in the same day. It might be a world record.”

“I’m not makin’ this up. That’s the guy who gave me the black eye!”

Gillian told Dealey that she believed him. Sammy Tigertail instructed her to stop speaking to the death spirit.

“But I think he might be real,” Gillian said, giving Dealey a secret wink.

“That could be bad for him,” said the Seminole, who’d already considered the possibility. Unlike the spirit of Wilson, Dealey hadn’t faded away when Sammy Tigertail opened his eyes. More suspiciously, he’d made himself visible and audible to Gillian, who was plainly not an Indian.

Sammy Tigertail fingered a D chord and began to strum feverishly. He wished he had an amplifier. Gillian pulled out Dealey’s digital Nikon and took some shots of the Seminole playing, which she showed to him in the viewfinder. She said, “Damn, boy, you could be quite the rock star.”

The Seminole liked the way he looked holding the Gibson, though he tried not to appear too pleased. “I don’t want to be a rock star,” he said.

“Sure you don’t,” said Gillian. “All the free poon and dope you can stand, who’d want to live like that?”

“I need quiet. I can’t think.” Sammy Tigertail carefully wiped down the guitar and put it away. Then he unrolled his sleeping bag and ordered Dealey to crawl inside.

“Zip him up. I mean all the way,” Sammy Tigertail told Gillian.

“Even his head?”

“Especially his head.”

Dealey turned pink. “Don’t! I’m claustrophobic!”

“Where are those damn socks?” Sammy Tigertail asked.

“No—not that! I’ll keep quiet, I swear.”

Gillian said, “Come on, Thlocko, can’t you see he’s scared shitless?”

“Then you squeeze in there with him. For company,” Sammy Tigertail said. “There’s room for two.”

“Gross.”

“He can’t try anything. He’s dead.”

“Nuh-uh,” she said.

Dealey turned on one side to make space. Gillian slid into the sleeping bag behind him, positioning her elbows for distance enforcement. The Seminole zippered the top, sealing them in warm musty darkness. He said, “I told you, I need to think.”

After a few moments he heard their breathing level off. He sat down not far from the lumpy bulk. It was a mean thing to do, putting Gillian together with a possible death spirit, but maybe she’d finally come to her senses and abandon the notion of staying on the island. No normal young woman would tolerate the sack treatment, but then Gillian was miles from normal.

A part of Sammy Tigertail didn’t want to drive her away; the weak and lonely part. But what did he need her for? Surely not to teach him the Gibson. He could learn on his own, like so many of the great ones. His father had told him that Jimi Hendrix had taken one guitar lesson in his whole life, and that the Beatles couldn’t even read music.

“Hey.” Dealey’s hushed voice, inside the bundle.

“Hey what?” said Gillian.

Sammy Tigertail edged closer to listen.

“There’s a motorboat,” Dealey was saying.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“No, there’s a boat on the island. That’s how we got here.”

“You and Band-Aid Man?” Gillian said.

“Yeah, his boat,” Dealey whispered. “I think I could find it.”

“And your point is?”

A short silence followed. The larger of the two lumps shifted in the sleeping bag. Sammy Tigertail massaged the muscles of his neck, waiting.

“The point is,” Dealey said impatiently, “with the boat we can get away from
him
!”

“And why in the world would I want to do that?” Gillian whispered back, with an earnestness that made the eavesdropping Seminole smile in spite of himself.

Sixteen

The vice mayor of Everglades City borrowed from his neighbor a skiff rigged with a 35-horsepower outboard and an eighteen-foot graphite pole for pushing across the shallows. Perry Skinner brought a cooler of water and food, a spotlight, two bedrolls and the .45 semiautomatic. Fry, who was still hammered from the pain medicine, dozed in the bow for an hour while his father poked around Chokoloskee Bay. There was no sign of Honey and her guests, or of Louis Piejack’s johnboat.

Fry awoke as the sun was setting.

“What now?” he asked his father.

“We keep lookin’.”

“Can I take off this helmet? I feel okay.”

“You lie.” Perry Skinner knew that Honey would blame him if anything happened to the boy. She would, in fact, go berserk.

Fry felt his ribs and grimaced. “It’s gettin’ dark,” he said.

“Better for us.”

“But they’ll hear us coming a mile away.”

“Give me some credit, son.”

Perry Skinner hadn’t forgotten the art of night running, which was essential to prospering as a pot smuggler in the islands. He had never been busted on the water because the feds couldn’t find him, much less catch him. They’d arrested him on dry land at daybreak, along with half the male population of Everglades City. Five DEA guys had come crashing through the screen door, Honey half-naked and hurling a fondue pot at the lead agent, who’d been too entertained to book her.

During his outlaw career Skinner had been exceptionally cautious and discreet. His only mistake was trusting a man he’d known since kindergarten. To save his own hide, the friend had ratted out both Perry and Perry’s brother, betrayal being the boilerplate denouement of most drug-running enterprises. Skinner only fleetingly had contemplated revenge against the person who’d turned him in. It was, after all, his first cousin.

The shit had gone down before Fry was born, and he wouldn’t have been born at all if Honey Santana hadn’t been waiting for Skinner when he got out of prison; waiting in a lemon-colored sundress and white sandals. It was a total surprise, especially the smile. She’d mailed 147 letters to Skinner while he was locked up; few were conciliatory and none were forgiving. Yet there she’d been, all dressed up and glowing in the Pensacola sunshine when he’d stepped through the gates at Eglin. The first words from her mouth were: “If you ever run another load of weed, I’m gonna cut off your pecker and grind it into snapper chum.”

Perry Skinner had resumed a life of honest crabbing, and things at home had been good, for a while.

“You gave the GPS to your mom?” he asked Fry.

“Yep.”

“And showed her how to use it?”

“I tried,” Fry said.

“What are the odds?”

“Fifty-fifty. She still can’t figure out the cruise control on her car.”

Nothing ever changes, Skinner thought. “How are you feelin’? And tell the truth.”

“Shitty.”

“That’s more like it.” Skinner was still worried about bringing Fry. He was not a fan of hospitals, and leaving the boy with strangers in the emergency room had seemed unthinkable at the time.

“You gonna shoot him, Dad?”

“Piejack? If it comes to that, yeah.”

“But what if we’re too late? What if he already did something bad to Mom?”

“Then he dies for sure,” Skinner said.

Fry nodded. It was the answer he’d expected.

Louis Piejack hadn’t heard anyone sneak up behind him. The blow had caught him at the base of the skull and he was out cold before he hit the cactus patch.

At dusk he regained consciousness, roused by an onslaught of medieval pain. He thrashed free of the clinging limbs, lost his balance and skidded backward into a ravine full of Busch beer cans. His landing sounded like a Krome Avenue head-on.

In the twilight, the prone and panting Piejack surveyed upon his fishy clothing and sunburned flesh a bristle of fine needles. Incessant stinging enabled him to map mentally a pattern of perforation extending from his forehead to his shins. Miraculously spared from puncture were the tender digits protruding from the grubby gauze on his left hand. Unfortunately, because of the surgical bungling, his forefinger and thumb were now situated so far apart and at such inopportune angles as to render impossible the simplest of tweezing motions. Consequently Piejack had to rely on his weaker and less facile right hand to pluck at the tiny cactus spines, the number of which he calculated to exceed one hundred.

A less inspired degenerate might have been laid low by such a handicap, but Piejack quickly collected himself. He didn’t much care who’d clobbered him, or why. He wasn’t overly concerned about losing his shotgun, or forgetting where he’d beached the johnboat. Nor did he feel especially motivated to hunt down his former captive, the fatass suit with the video camera, before the law came looking.

Louis Piejack had only one thing on his mind: Honey Santana.

He was fixated in the twitchy, pathological style of true-blue stalkers, and as he lay throbbing among the rusted beer cans he found himself deliciously reliving the single lightning-quick grope that had catapulted him toward this adventure; a deftly aimed hand, snaking out to cup Honey’s magnificent right breast as she’d unsuspectingly leaned over the display cooler to set on chipped ice a tray of fresh wahoo steaks. That she’d been wearing a bra had in no way diminished Piejack’s thrill; if anything, the intimate crinkle of fingertip upon fabric had only heightened his arousal.

Honey’s retaliatory malleting had caught him off guard, yet he’d experienced only the slightest ebb of lust as his nuts swelled to the size of Brazilian limes. Soon thereafter Piejack had been abducted by the Miami thugs and subjected to the sadistic stone-crab torture.

In fact, his whole existence had been a scroll of searing agony since he’d fondled Honey Santana, yet he desired her more avidly than ever. He’d come to believe that she secretly felt the same way, a pathetic delusion fueled by Honey’s surprise visit to his house. It was true that she’d hastily fled, but Piejack had chosen to interpret her apparent revulsion to his overtures as a tease.

Possessing Honey would be a triumph—and also a dagger in the soul of her ex-husband, the man who Piejack believed was responsible for the mutilation of his hand. He could hardly wait to be seen, arm in arm with his new mate, strolling the waterfront of Everglades City.

Piejack had no particular plan for capturing Honey; lust alone was his co-pilot. Even after the cacti encounter his focus remained singular and unbreakable, for his pain was so intense as to erase such primal distractions as thirst, hunger and exhaustion.

Under a rising moon he emerged from the pile of cans and on pricked knees began to ascend the shell mound from which he’d earlier fallen. After reaching the top he wilted feverishly, hurt pulsing in every pore. Feminine voices rose from the campsite below, and Piejack rallied with the hope that one of them belonged to Honey. He thought about the other woman in the group—the big blonde who’d gone topless in the kayak—and he fantasized for himself a star role in a writhing, glistening three-some. He recalled that the male camper was of lumpy build and not much good with a paddle, and from him Piejack foresaw minimal resistance. The man would either flee on impulse or be hurled into the creek.

Like a rheumatic old crocodile, Piejack began his long crawl, guided by the soft voices and a reddish smudge of flame at the edge of his vision.

Dear Geenie,

Last night in my truck was magikal and prefect. I never had such amayzing you-no-what!

Truly I believe we’re destinationed to be together for eternalty, and I will do everthing in my par to make it happen!!! I am a man of my werd, as soon you’ll find out.

Yours fourever,

V. Bonneville

What a fucking Neanderthal, thought Boyd Shreave. The woman’s obviously got a thing for primitive hunks.

“What are you doing down there with the flashlight?” Eugenie Fonda inquired. “Or maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Just reading,” Shreave replied crossly.

“Right. Under a blanket in the woods.”

“I’m not up for socializing. Sorry.”

She said, “I’m not askin’ you to square-dance, Boyd, I just want to know how you’re feeling.”

“How do you think I feel? I Tasered myself in the schlong.”

“Did it get burned?”

“Don’t pretend like you care.”

“Let me see.”

“No thanks,” Shreave said, too emphatically. Quickly he added, “Not right now,” on the chance that Eugenie might later choose to demonstrate her concern in a more generous way.

“Why don’t you come out and join us by the fire?” she asked.

“In a minute.”

Even more punishing than the fifty thousand volts was the withering embarrassment. Once the convulsions had ceased, Shreave had staggered to his feet, removed the now-broken stun gun from his pocket and mutely gimped away. He’d been sulking shamelessly ever since, certain that the two women had nothing more interesting than him to talk about.

Eugenie said, “So, what’re you reading down there?”

“A book.” He was strongly tempted to show her the front jacket of
Storm Ghoul,
just to get a rise.

“Must be a good one,” she said.

“Not really. It’s pretty dull.”

Reading the tree trimmer’s love letter depressed Boyd Shreave, although not because of the kindergarten spelling or even the leering allusion to Eugenie’s seismic sexual energy. Shreave was bummed because the note was a black-and-white reminder that Van Bonneville was all about action. The guy had made good on his written vow, however crudely expressed. He’d actually gone out and killed his wife, in order to spend the rest of his life with the woman of his dreams.

Sure, he was a moron, but he wasn’t a bullshitter. He was a man of his “werd.”

Which was more than Shreave could say for himself.

He dimmed the flashlight and threw off the woolen blanket and followed Eugenie Fonda back to the campsite, where he surreptitiously re-stashed her memoir in the Orvis bag. The space case named Honey was heating a kettle over the fire.

“Green tea?” she offered.

Shreave sneered. “I don’t think so.”

“There was a raccoon over in the beer cans,” Eugenie reported, pointing up the hill. “A big sucker, too, it sounded like.”

“Maybe that’s who stole our kayaks,” Shreave said caustically.

“Honey also thought she heard a guitar.”

“A guitar, huh?” Shreave tossed a broken oyster shell into the flames. “Sure it wasn’t a harp? Maybe we’re all dead and this is Heaven. That’d be my luck.”

Honey handed a steaming cup to Eugenie. “Boyd’s right, it probably wasn’t anything. It was just in my head,” she said quietly.

Eugenie asked about panthers. Honey told her there were wild ones on the mainland. “But only a few. They’re almost extinct.”

“What a tragedy
that
would be,” Shreave muttered.

“They don’t eat people, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

Shreave laughed thinly. “The only thing I’m afraid of is getting bored out of my skull. I don’t suppose you two came up with a game plan.”

Eugenie said, “We sure did. Our plan is to ignore all your dumbass comments.”

Honey raised a hand. “Shhhh. Hear that?”

“Don’t pay attention to her,” Shreave told Eugenie. “She’s a complete nut job, in case you didn’t notice.”

Honey remarked upon how different Boyd had sounded when he’d phoned to sell her a cheap piece of Gilchrist County. “You’ve got a wonderful voice when you’re lying,” she said. “The rest of the time you’re just a whiny old douchebag.”

Eugenie laughed so hard that green tea jetted through her front teeth. Shreave was furious but low on options. Honey emptied the kettle over the fire and said it was time to hit the sack.

“Big day tomorrow,” she added. “We’re gonna search the whole island ’til we find those kayaks.”

“What if they’re not here?” Genie asked.

“Then I guess we start swimming. Either way, you’ll need a good night’s rest.”

Once it became clear that Eugenie had no intention of ministering to his wounded member, Shreave dragged his bedding out of the pup tent and relocated closer to the fire. He’d been camping only once, twenty years earlier, during a brief hitch with the Boy Scouts. His mother had signed him up as part of an ongoing (and ultimately futile) campaign to imbue her only male child with character. Almost immediately young Boyd had alienated the other Scouts with his nettlesome commentary and disdain for physical labor. By the time the troop made its first overnight expedition, Shreave had been accurately pegged as the resident slacker. Soon after midnight a prankster had opened his sleeping bag and set loose a juvenile armadillo, which innocently began to explore Shreave’s armpits for grubs. The unhappy camper had reacted by clubbing the bewildered creature to death with his boom box, a second-degree misdemeanor resulting in the troop’s ejection from the Lady Bird Johnson State Floral Gardens and Nature Preserve, and of course in Shreave’s lifetime banishment from the Scouts.