"Three?"
"For now. Let's see how it goes."
Max warily eyed the remote. Skink promised there would be no electronic penalty for dumb queries. "So fire away."
Max Lamb said, "All right. Who are you?"
"My name is Tyree. I served in the Vietnam conflict, and later as a governor of this fair state. I resigned because of disturbing moral and philosophical conflicts. The details would mean nothing to you."
Max Lamb failed to mask his disbelief. "You were governor? Come off it."
"Is that question number two?"
Impatiently, Max fingered the dog collar. "No, the second question is: Why me?"
"Because you made a splendid target of yourself. You with your video camera, desecrating the habitat."
Max Lamb got defensive. "I wasn't the only one taking pictures. I wasn't the only tourist out there."
"But you were the one I saw first." Skink poured hot soup into a tin cup and handed it to his sulking prisoner. "A hurricane is a holy thing," he said, "but you treated it as an amusement. Pissed me off, Max."
Skink lifted the pot off the hot coals and tipped it to his lips. Steam wisped from his mouth, fogging his glass eye. He put the pot down and wiped the turtle drippings from his chin. "I was tied up on a bridge," he said, "watching the storm roll out of the ocean. God, what a thing!"
He stepped toward Max Lamb and lifted him by the shirt, causing Max to drop the soup he had not touched.
Skink hoisted him to eye level and said: "Twenty years I waited for that storm. We were so close, so goddamn close. Two or three degrees to the north, and we're in business...."
Max Lamb dangled in the stranger's iron clasp. Skink's good eye glistened with a furious, dreamy passion. "You're down to one question," he said, returning Max to his feet.
After settling himself, Max asked: "What happens now?"
Skink's stormy expression dissolved into a smile. "What happens now, Max, is that we travel together, sharing life's lessons."
"Oh." Max's eyes cut anxiously to the airboat.
The governor barked a laugh that scattered a flock of snowy egrets. He tousled his prisoner's hair and said, "We go with the tides!"
But a despairing Max Lamb couldn't face the prospect of true adventure. Now that it seemed he would not be murdered, he was burdened by another primal concern: If I don't get back to New York, I'm going to lose my job.
Edie Marsh was daydreaming about teak sailboats and handsome young Kennedys when she felt the moist hand of Tony Torres settle on her left breast. She cracked an eyelid and sighed.
"Quit squeezing. It's not a tomato."
"Can I see?" Tony asked.
"Absolutely not." But she heard the squeaky shift of weight as the salesman edged the chaise closer.
"Nobody's around," he said, fumbling with her buttons. Then an oily laugh: "I mean, you are my wife."
"Jesus." Edie felt the sun on her nipples and looked down. Well, there they were-the pig had undone her blouse. "Don't you understand English?"
Tony Torres contentedly appraised her breasts. "Yeah, darling, but who's got the shotgun."
"That's so romantic," Edie Marsh said. "Threaten to shoot me-there's no better way to put a girl in the mood. Fact, I'm all wet just thinking about it." She pushed his hand away and rebuttoned her blouse. "Where's my shades," she muttered.
Tony cradled the Remington across his belly. Sweat puddled at his navel. He said, "You will think about it. They all do."
"I think about cancer, too, but it doesn't make me horny." To Edie, the only attractive thing about Tony Torres was his gold Cartier wristwatch, which was probably engraved in such a gaudy way that it could not be prudently fenced.
He asked her: "Have you ever been with a bald man?"
"Nope. You ever seen venereal warts?"
The salesman snorted, turning away. "Somebody's in a pissy mood."
Edie Marsh dug the black Ray-Bans out of her purse and disappeared behind them. The shotgun made her nervous, but she resolved to stay cool. She tried to shut out the summer glare, the ceaseless drone of chain saws and dump trucks, and the rustle of Tony Torres reading the newspaper. The warmth of the sun made it easy for Edie Marsh to think of the duned shores at the Vineyard, or the private beaches of Manalapan.
Her reverie was interrupted by footsteps on the sidewalk across the street. She hoped it was Snapper, but it wasn't. It was a man walking two small dachshunds.
Edie felt Tony's hand on hers and heard him say, "Darling, would you squirt some Coppertone on my shoulders?"
Quickly she rose from the chair and crossed the road. The man was watching his dachshunds pee on the stem of a broken mailbox. He held both leashes in one hand, loosely. There was a melancholy slump to his shoulders that should have disappeared with the approach of a pretty woman, but did not.
Edie Marsh told him the dogs were adorable. When she stooped to pet them, the dachshunds simultaneously rolled over and began squirming like worms on a griddle.
"What're their names?"
"Donald and Maria," the man replied. He wasn't tall, but he was built like a furnace. He wore a peach knit shirt and khaki slacks. He said to Edie: "You live at that house?"
She saw Tony Torres eyeing them from the chaise. She asked the stranger if he was from the Midwest Casualty insurance company. He motioned sarcastically toward the dogs and said, "Sure. And my associates here are from Merrill Lynch."
The dachshunds were up, wagging their butts and licking at Edie's bare ankles. The man jerked his double chin toward Tony Torres and said, "You related to him? A wife or sister maybe."
"Please," Edie Marsh said, with an exaggerated shudder.
"OK, then I got some advice. Take a long fuckine walk."
Edie's mind began to race. She looked in both directions down the street, but didn't see Snapper.
The man said, "The hell you waiting for?" He handed her the two leashes. "Go on, now."
Augustine awoke to the smell of coffee and the sounds of a married woman fixing breakfast in his kitchen. It seemed a suitable time to assess the situation.
His father was in prison, his mother was gone, and his dead uncle's wild animals had escaped among unsuspecting suburbanites. Augustine himself was free, too, in the truest and saddest sense. He had absolutely no personal responsibilities. How to explain such a condition to Bonnie Lamb?
My father was a fisherman. He ran drugs on the side, until he was arrested near the island of Andros. My mother moved to Las Vegas and remarried. Her new husband plays tenor saxophone in Tony Bennett's orchestra.
My most recent ex-girlfriend was a leg model for a major hosiery concern. She saved her modeling money and bought a town house in Brentwood, California, where she fellates only circumcised movie agents, and the occasional director.
But what about you? Mrs. Lamb will ask. What do you do for a living?
I read my bank statements.
And Mrs. Lamb will react with polite curiosity, until I explain about the airplane accident.
It happened three years ago while flying back from Nassau after visiting my old man in Fox Hill Prison. I didn't realize the pilot was drunk until he T-boned the twin Beech into the fuselage of a Coast Guard helicopter, parked inside a hangar at the Opa-Locka airport.
Afterwards I slept for three months and seventeen days in the intensive care unit of Jackson Hospital. When I awoke, I was rich. The insurance carrier for the charter-air service had settled the case with an attorney whom I did not know and to this day have never met. A check for eight hundred thousand dollars appeared, and much to my surprise, I invested it wisely.