Decker got out of the car. The sky in the east was turning a metallic pink.
"Explain it to him," Jim Tile said to Skink, and drove away.
Decker started trudging down the highway. He felt a hundred years old. He wished he were back in Miami, that's how rotten he felt. He was trying to remember if Ott Pickney had any kids, or an ex-wife somewhere. It was entirely possible there was nobody, just the orchids.
"I'm sorry about your friend," Skink said, "but you've got to understand."
"I'm listening."
"The body will be gone by noon, if it's not already. They'll be back for it. They saw Jim Tile out by the slough, and that was that."
Decker said, "We should've stayed there. Jim could have called for help on the radio."
Skink marched ahead of Decker and turned around, walking backward so he could face him directly. "The sheriffs office scans all police frequencies. They would've picked up the call and sent a couple marked cars. Next thing you know, the locals grab jurisdiction and they're questioning you and me, and they're calling Tallahassee about poor Jim Tile—how there's all these irregularities in his report, how uppity and uncooperative he is. Whatever bullshit they can make up, they will. You know how many black troopers there are in this whole state? Not enough for a goddamn basketball team. Jim's a good man and I'm not gonna let him get hung by a bunch of hicks. Not over a fish, for Christ's sake."
Decker had never heard Skink say so much in one breath. He asked, "So what's the plan?"
Skink stopped backward-walking. "Right now the plan is to get offthe road."
Decker spun around and saw a pickup truck coming slowly down the highway. Rays from the new sun reflected off the windshield, making it impossible to see who was driving, or how many there were up front.
Skink tugged Decker's arm and said, "Let's stroll through the woods, shall we?"
They left the pavement and walked briskly into a stand of tall pine. They heard the truck speed up. When it was even with them, it stopped. A door slammed, then another.
Skink and Decker were twenty-five yards from the highway when the first shots rang out. Decker hit the ground and pulled Skink with him. A bullet peeled the bark off a tree near their feet.
Decker said, "I'm sure glad you're wearing that orange raincoat, captain. Bet they can only see us a mile or two away."
"Semiautomatic?" Skink asked through clenched teeth.
Decker nodded. "Sounds like a Ruger Mini-14." Very popular with the Porsche-and-powder set in Miami, but not the sort of bang-bang you expected upstate.
The rifle went off again, so rapidly that it was impossible to tell the fresh rounds from the echoes. The slugs slapped at the leaves in a lethal hailstorm. From where they huddled Decker and Skink couldn't see the truck on the highway, but they could hear men's voices between the volleys.
"Will they come for us?" Decker whispered.
"I expect." Skink's cheek was pressed against a carpet of pine needles. A fire ant struggled in the tangle of his mustache; Skink made no move to brush it away. He was listening to the ground.
"There's only two of them," he announced.
"Only?" One with a Ruger was plenty.
Skink's right hand fished under his rainsuit and came out with the pistol.
Decker heard twigs crackle at the edge of the pine.
"Let's run for it," he said. They wouldn't have a prayer in a shoot-out.
"You run," Skink said.
And draw fire, Decker thought. What a grand idea. At least in Beirut you had a chance because of the doorways; doorways made excellent cover. You simply ran a zigzag from one to another. Right now there wasn't a doorway in sight. Even the trees were too skinny to offer protection.
Decker heard footsteps breaking the scrub a few yards behind him. Skink motioned for him to go.
He bunched up on his knees, dug his toes into the moist dirt, and pushed off like a sprinter. He ran erratically, weaving through the pine trunks and hurdling small palmetto bushes. A man shouted and then the gunfire started again. Decker flinched as bullets whined off the tree trunks—low, high, always a few feet behind him. Whoever was shooting was running too, and his aim was lousy.
Decker didn't know the terrain so he picked his openings as they appeared. He spotted promising cover across a bald clearing and he pumped for it, holding his head low. He almost made it, too, when something struck him in the eyes and he crumpled in pain.
A rifle slug had caught a pine branch and whipped it flush across Decker's face. He lay panting on the ground, his fists pressed to his eyes. Maybe they would think he'd been hit. Maybe they would go looking for Skink.
Abruptly the shooting was over.
Decker heard honking. Somebody was leaning on the horn of the truck; long urgent blasts. From the highway a man shouted somebody's name. Decker couldn't make out the words. He took his hands from his face and was relieved to discover that he wasn't blind. His cheeks were wet from his eyes, and his eyes certainly stung, but they seemed to be working.
It was not until he heard the pickup roar away that Decker dared to move, and then he wasn't sure which way to go. The direction that made the most sense was away from the road, but he didn't want to abandon Skink, if Skink were still alive.
Decker crawled to a tree and stood up, cautiously aligning his profile with the trunk. Nothing moved in the clearing; the morning lay dead silent, the songbirds still mute with fear.
What the hell, Decker thought. At the top of his lungs he shouted, "Skink!"
Something big and pale moved at the edge of the woods across the clearing. It made a tremendous noise. "I told you to call me captain!" it bellowed.
Skink was fine. He stood stark naked except for his military boots. "Look what that asshole did to my suit!" He held up the plastic rain jacket. There were three small holes between the shoulder blades. "I got out of it just in time," Skink said. "Hung it on a limb. When I rustled the branch the guy squared around perfectly and cut loose. He was looking the wrong place, slightly."
Hairy and bare-assed, Skink led Decker to the body. The dead man had a black crusty circle between his sandy eyebrows. His mouth was set in an O.
"You were right about the Ruger," Skink said. The rifle lay at the man's side. The clip had been removed.
"To answer your question, no, I've never seen him before," Skink said. "He's hired help, somebody's out-of-town cousin. His pal stayed at the treeline as a lookout."
"I'm sure they figured one gun was enough," Decker said.
"Guy's all of thirty years old," Skink mused, looking down at the dead man. "Stupid jerkoff."
Decker said, "May I assume we won't be notifying the authorities?"
"You learn fast," Skink said.
In the mid-1970s a man named Clinton Tyree became governor of Florida. He was everything voters craved: tall, ruggedly handsome, an ex-college football star (second-team All-American lineman), a decorated Vietnam veteran (a sniper once lost for sixteen days behind enemy lines with no food or ammunition), an eligible bachelor, an avid outdoorsman—and best of all, he was native-born, a rarity at that time in Florida. At first Clinton Tyree's political ideology was conservative when it was practical to be, liberal when it made no difference. At six-foot-six, he looked impressive on the campaign trail and the media loved him. He won the governorship running as a Democrat, but proved to be unlike any Democrat or Republican that the state of Florida had ever seen. To the utter confusion of everyone in Tallahassee, Clint Tyree turned out to be a completely honest man. The first time he turned down a kickback, the bribers naturally assumed that the problem was the amount. The bribers, wealthy land developers with an eye on a particular coastal wildlife preserve, followed with a second offer to the new governor. It was so much money that it would have guaranteed him a comfortable retirement anywhere in the world. The developers were clever, too. The bribe money was to emanate from an overseas corporation with a bank account in Nassau. The funds would be wired from Bay Street to a holding company in Grand Cayman, and from there to a blind trust set up especially for Clinton Tyree at a bank in Panama. In this way the newly acquired wealth of the newly elected governor of Florida would have been shielded by the secrecy laws of three foreign governments.