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.
“I hear somethin’,” his father said from the back of the skiff.
Fry stopped tapping and listened. “Sounds like…like a funeral or somethin’. People cryin’.”
“Where’s it coming from? Can you make out anything?”
“Just shadows.” Fry balled his fists to keep from shaking.
By now his dad had pushed the skiff close enough for them to see the orange flames dancing and to smell the woody smoke. At first the shapes around the fire had looked like small pines, bowing and shaking in the breeze. Now Fry wasn’t so certain. The moaning chorus swelled and faded, making him shudder. His father poled faster.
“We’ll go ashore here,” Skinner announced, angling toward the beach. Four long strokes and the hull scraped up on the sand.
Fry hopped out and was beset with dizziness. “It’s gettin’ cold,” he murmured to himself.
His father jumped down and with both hands hauled the skiff farther up on land, so that the rising tide wouldn’t carry it away. Then he tossed Fry a sweatshirt, which the boy absentmindedly attempted to put on without removing his bulbous helmet.
“Dad, I’m stuck,” he said sheepishly.
Once extricated, he jogged after his father as they hurried away from the shoreline, into the trees. He felt like he was five years old again.
Skinner said, “If I tell you to run for it, you damn well run.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“The other way, son. Opposite of me.”
“But-”
“Don’t be lookin’ back, either-I’ll come find you later.”
“I can’t go fast with this stupid thing on my head.”
“Pretend you’re Mercury Morris.”
“Who?”
“Pitiful.” Skinner pretended to kick him in the pants. “Come on, let’s do it.”
Watchfully they moved through the scraggle and scrub, keeping parallel to the beach. The eerie keening sounds grew louder as they neared the campfire. Skinner dropped to a crouch and motioned for his son to do the same. They crossed a sandy clearing in a faint circle of moonlight and took cover in a stand of Australian pines.