Lily Shreave was rolling up her yoga mat when a Coast Guard ensign called with good news. Her “cousin” had been pulled alive from a creek near an uninhabited island called Dismal Key, a few nautical miles outside the boundary of Everglades National Park. Also rescued were two women, who gave their names as Gillian St. Croix and Jean Leigh Hill and stated their respective occupations as a TV weather personality and a freelance videographer.
Ms. Shreave said she had no idea who they were.
Twenty-two
As soon as Boyd Shreave heard the helicopter, he began scrambling up the old poinciana. Without Honey’s assistance he couldn’t reach the top, but he got high enough to consider it a lifetime achievement.
As a boy, Shreave had avoided tree play, impaired as he was by flabby musculature and a loathing for exertion. Now, wedged snugly into a crook of three branches, he felt like he belonged in an episode of Survivor, his favorite TV reality show. Every season a crop of youthful competitors was deposited on some remote tropical location and put through a delightfully pointless series of physical challenges resulting in the elimination of the weak and unreliable. While the program usually featured one or two contestants who were as desultory and unathletic as Shreave himself, he never rooted for them. It was the sunburned babes in their frayed cutoffs and ill-fitting halters whom he avidly tuned in to watch.
From the tree, Shreave flagged his arms and hollered for help. The crew of the hovering helicopter never glanced his way, and Shreave realized that he needed to go higher. However, he was intimidated by the prospect of scaling to a more visible position above the canopy-the breezy conditions, the slipperiness of the branches and his own lack of agility argued for caution.
From a pocket of his windbreaker he extracted what he falsely believed to be a portable marine radio, which along with two granola bars he’d pilfered from Honey’s belongings after she was snatched by the club-handed lunatic. Shreave started pressing buttons on the compact gadget and barking, “Mayday! Mayday!”
There was no response from the Coast Guard pilot or any other human, and for good reason. Except for its LED screen, the instrument in Shreave’s possession was electronically dissimilar to a radio in all significant respects. Most crucial was the absence of either an audio receiver or a transmitter.
“SOS! SOS!” he persisted. “Help!”
The device was in fact a mobile GPS unit, as technologically impenetrable to Shreave as the Taser gun he’d found beneath Honey’s bed. Commonly carried by boaters, campers and hunters, a GPS enables users to precisely track and then retrace their movements anywhere on the planet. Satellites record intermediate points in longitude and latitude in the instrument’s memory, which displays the information in a mapping format so elementary that even a drooling moron can read it.
Not Boyd Shreave. The singular result of his frantic button pushing was to engage the satellite signal and successfully identify his location as approximately 81°33' west of the prime meridian and 25°53' north of the equator. However, the flashing numerals were a meaningless jumble to Shreave.
“Mayday! SOS! Nine one one!” he screamed at the mute GPS as he watched the orange-and-white helicopter repositioning above the creek. From his bushy perch, Shreave couldn’t see what the Coast Guard spotters saw, so he was unable to appreciate their gallantry and resourcefulness. A routine search mission for an ailing middle-aged photographer had been complicated by the unexpected appearance of not one but two extremely attractive female evacuees.
The first woman had dived nearly naked into the chilly water to assist the wayward photographer as he clung to a small overturned vessel. Minutes later the second woman had emerged in a yellow kayak from the mangroves, waving what appeared to be a festively colored undergarment at the chopper. Swiftly the crew members took action to expand the retrieval operation, proceeding with an unbreakable focus and esprit de corps that reduced to zero the chances of them noticing a lone pale figure halfway up a distant tree and obscured by heavy foliage.
Bitterness engulfed Boyd Shreave as three times an empty basket unspooled from a cable in the belly of the aircraft, and three times the basket ascended holding a blanketed human form. Shreave was too far away to see who was being rescued; he knew only that it wasn’t he. When the helicopter buzzed away, he thought: Screwed again.
A silken quiet fell briefly over the island, but soon the seabirds began to pipe and the trees began to stir. From his lonely roost, Shreave watched a zebra-striped butterfly alight on a nearby poinciana leaf. With a sour cackle he hurled the GPS at it.
He missed by three feet, and the butterfly flitted away.
In the four years following her divorce, Honey Santana had gone out with five men. Only three of them got a second date, and only two of them got to see her bedroom.
The first was Dale Rozelle, who had advertised himself as a professional bowler from Boca Grande. He was thin and handsome and eleven years younger than Perry Skinner. During sex he slapped his own ass and grunted like a constipated hog, which distracted Honey and on at least two occasions awakened Fry down the hall. Honey might have overlooked the barnyard sound effects had Dale Rozelle distinguished himself in other ways, but he had not. An Internet troll by Fry revealed that Dale Rozelle was lying not only about his bowling career but also about his lifetime membership in the Sierra Club, a fictitious credential that he’d correctly surmised would boost his standing with Honey. Disgusted by her own gullibility, she had (against Fry’s counsel) stormed into the bowling alley on Mixed-League Night and confronted the duplicitous shithead in the ninth frame of his last game. The one-sided encounter had ended with Honey dropping a sixteen-pound Brunswick on Dale Rozelle’s left instep. Eventually he agreed not to prosecute, but only after Perry Skinner had promised to pay the medical bills.
The other man with whom Honey had slept was Fry’s orthodontist, Dr. Tyler Teehorn, whose wife had sold their Volvo sedan and run off to Montserrat with her husband’s star hygienist. It had happened on the same day that Tyler Teehorn was fitting Fry for a retainer, and the man was a mess. That night Honey had dropped her son at Skinner’s house, driven back to Naples and dragged Tyler Teehorn out to Ruby Tuesday’s for a drink. Never had she seen anyone so bereft, and in a moment of rum-soaked pity she’d invited him to go home with her. The sex, while slightly better than Honey had anticipated, was quite obviously the most spectacular in Dr. Tyler Teehorn’s sheltered experience. No sooner had he pulled on his socks than he proclaimed his eternal love for Honey. Not wishing to be the second woman-or possibly the third, considering how hard it was to find a top-flight hygienist-to break Tyler Teehorn’s heart in a twelve-hour span, Honey had murmured an endearment that she’d hoped was adequately tender yet vague. For the next four weeks the man had clung to her like a mollusk. In contrast to Dale Rozelle, Dr. Teehorn’s integrity and devotion were unassailable. Unfortunately, he was a suffocating bore. Ignorant of politics, world affairs and even sports, his personality sparked only when he steered the conversation to the topic of teeth. Honey had finally dumped him during a candlelit dinner when he’d offered to fix her overbite for free.
“Wake up!” she heard Louis Piejack say, yet she didn’t move. She intended to fake unconsciousness as long as possible. In addition to fracturing her jaw, the gumbo-limbo bludgeon had knocked all the songs out of her head. Inexplicably, the void had filled with that dispiritingly detailed recap of her post-divorce sex life. It made her long for a dual blast of Ethel Merman and the Foo Fighters.