The governor, coiling the limp rattlesnake at his feet, pretended to be insulted. He told Edie she was much too pretty to be such a cynic. He snapped off the snake's rattle and presented it to her for a souvenir.
"Just what I always wanted." She dropped it in the ashtray.
After ditching the car, Skink made a torch from a gummy stump of pine. For nearly two hours he led them through a shadowed canopy of buttonwoods, poisonwoods, figs, pigeon plums and mahogany. He'd slung Snapper over his shoulder like a sack of oats. In his right hand he held the torch; in his other was the Bill Blass suitcase. Edie Marsh followed along a path hardly wide enough for a rabbit. Bonnie went next, with Augustine close behind, carrying (at Skink's instruction) the tranquilizer rifle and The Club. The .38 Special was in his belt.
Eventually they entered a small clearing. In the center was a ring of sooty stones; a campfire site. A few yards away sat a junked truck with freckles of rust and a faded orange stripe. Bolted to the roof was a bar of cracked red lights. Bonnie and Augustine stepped closer-it was an old Monroe County ambulance, propped on cinder blocks. Augustine opened the tailgate and whistled appreciatively. The ambulance was full of books.
The governor deposited Snapper on the ground, propped against a scabby tree trunk. He went to a spot on the other side of the clearing and kicked at the leaves and loose twigs, exposing an olive-drab tarpaulin. Rummaging beneath it, he came out with a tin of bread crumbs, a jar of vegetable oil, a five-gallon jug of fresh water and a waxy stick of army insect repellent, which he passed around.
While he collected dry wood for the fire, Edie Marsh came up beside him. "Where are we?"
"Middle of nowhere."
"Why?"
"Because there's no better place to be."
They gathered to watch him skin the rattler. Edie was impressed by his enormous hands, sure and swift and completely at ease with the knife.
As the fire sparked up, Augustine pulled Bonnie closer and buried his face in the silkiness of her hair. He was soothed by the soft crackle of tinder; the owl piping on a distant wire; raccoons trilling and fussing in the shadows; the whoosh of nighthawks scooping insects above the firelit treetops. The sole discordant note was the stuporous snore of Lester Maddox Parsons.
The air tasted fresh; the rain was done for a while. Augustine wouldn't have traded places with another soul. Crocodile Lakes on a warm September night was fine. He kissed Bonnie lightly, having no special plans beyond the moment. He willed himself not to worry about Max Lamb, who would be coming tomorrow on a mission to retrieve his bride.
Skink began spooning out chunks of pan-fried snake. Edie Marsh facetiously said it was impolite not to save some for Snapper. Skink declared that he wouldn't so dishonor the memory of a dead reptile.
That's when he'd asked Augustine for The Club.
He turned his back to the others while he fitted it under Snapper's papery gray lips. Bonnie believed the procedure would have been physically impossible, were it not for the preexisting crookedness of those saurian jawbones. Afterwards nobody said a word, until Snapper made a groggy inquisitive murmur.
Skink bent over him. "Lester?"
"Mmmmmfrrrttthh."
"Lester Maddox Parsons!"
Snapper's eyelids fluttered. The governor asked Augustine to take a bucket down to the creek and get some water to wake up the sorry sonofabitch.
The pink-orange parfait of dawn failed to elevate Edie's spirits. She was sticky, scratched, hot, parched, filthy, as wretched as she'd ever been. She wanted to cry and pull at her hair and scream. She wanted to make a scene. Most of all she wanted to escape, but that was impossible. She was trapped on all sides by humming crackling wilderness; it might as well have been a twelve-foot wall of barbed wire. Her hands and feet weren't shackled. The governor held no gun to her head. Nothing whatsoever prevented her from running, except the grim certainty that she'd never find her way out, that she'd become blindly lost in the woods and starve, and that her emaciated body would be torn apart and devoured by crocodiles, rattlers and ravenous tropical ants. The prospect of an anonymous death in the swamps offended Edie's dignity. She didn't want her sun-bleached bones to be found by hunters, fishermen or bird-watchers; pieced together by wisecracking medical students and coroners; identified by X-rays from her childhood orthodontist.
She approached the governor. "I want to talk."
He was mumbling to himself, feeling around in his shirt. "Damn," he said. "Out of toad." He glanced at Edie: "You're a woman of the world. Ever smoke Bufo?"
"We need to talk," she said. "Alone."
"If it's about the suitcase, forget it."
"It's not that."
"All right, then. Soon as I finish chatting with Lester."
"No, now!"
Skink cupped her chin in one of his huge, rough palms. Edie Marsh sensed that he could break her neck as effortlessly as twisting the cap off a beer. He said, "You've got shitty manners. Go sit with the others."
Bonnie and Augustine were kneeling in the back of the junked ambulance, poring through Skink's library. Edie couldn't understand how they could seem so unconcerned.
She said, "We've got to do something." It came out like a command.
Augustine was showing Bonnie a first edition of Absalom, Absalom. He glanced up at Edie and said, "It's a ride. When it's over, it's over."
"But who is he?" She pointed toward Skink. Then, facing Bonnie: "Aren't you afraid? God, am I the only one with brains enough to be scared?"
"Last night I was," Bonnie said. "Not now."
Augustine told Edie to quiet down. "It'll be over when he says so. In the meantime, please do your best not to piss him off."
Edie was jarred by the harshness of Augustine's tone. He jerked a thumb toward Snapper, agape by the campfire. "What're you doing with that shitbird, anyway?"
Bonnie cut in: "Let's drop the whole thing."
"No, it's all right. I want to explain," said Edie. "It was just business. We were working a deal together."
"A scam."
"Insurance money," she admitted, "from the hurricane." She caught Bonnie staring. "Welcome to the real world, princess."
"So when's the big payoff?" Augustine asked.
Edie laughed ruefully. "The adjuster said any day. Said it was coming Federal Express. And here I am, lost in the middle of the fucking Everglades."
"It's not the Everglades," said Augustine. "In fact, this is Saint-Tropez compared to the Everglades. But I can see why you're upset, watching two hundred grand fly away."
Edie Marsh was dumbfounded. Bonnie said, "You're joking. Two hundred thousand dollars?"
"Two hundred and one." Augustine chided Edie with a wink.
She asked, almost inaudibly: "How'd you know?"
"You left something in the house on Calusa."
"Oh shit."
He unfolded the pink carbons of the Midwest Casualty claim-Edie recognized the cartoon badger at the top of the page. Augustine ripped the carbons into pieces. He said, "I were you, I'd come up with a clever excuse why your pocketbook might be in that particular kitchen. The police'll be mighty curious."
"Shit."
"What I'm saying is, don't be in such a rush to get back to civilization." He turned back to the governor's books.
Edie bit her lower lip. Lord, sometimes it was tough to stay cool. She felt like breaking down a'gain. "What's this all about-some kind of game?"