There were five bass in all, very nice ones. Decker figured the smallest to be four pounds; the biggest was simply grotesque. It had the color of burnt moss and the shape of an old stump. The eyes bulged. The mouth was as wide as a milkpail.
Dickie Lockhart’s helper carried the stringer of fish through the murmuring throng to the weighmaster, who dumped them in a plastic laundry basket. The hawg went on the scale first: twelve pounds, seven ounces. When the weight flashed on the official Rolex digital readout, a few in the crowd whistled and clapped.
Ten grand, Decker thought, just like that. He snapped a picture of Dickie cleaning his sunglasses with a bandanna.
The entire stringer went next. “Thirty-oh-nine,” the weighmaster bellowed. “We’ve got us a winner!”
Decker noticed that the applause was neither unanimous nor ebullient, save for the beer-drooling Rundells, Dickie’s most loyal worshipers.
“Polygraph!” a basser from Reserve shouted angrily.
“Put him on the box,” yelled another, one of Ed Spurling’s people.
Dickie Lockhart ignored them. He grabbed each end of the stringer and lifted the bass for the benefit of the photographers. True-life pictures, he knew, were the essence of product-endorsement advertisements in outdoor magazines. Each of Dickie’s many sponsors desired a special shot of their star and the prizewinning catch, and Lockhart effusively obliged. By the time he had finished posing and deposited the big fish into the tank, the bass were so dead that they sank like stones. The scorer chalked “30-9” next to Dickie’s name on the big board.
R. J. Decker’s camera ran out of film, but he didn’t bother to reload. It was all a waste of time.
The weighmaster handed Lockhart two checks and three sets of keys.
“Just what I need,” the TV star joked, “another damn boat.”
R. J. Decker couldn’t wait to get out, and he pushed the rental car, an anemic four-cylinder compact, as fast as it would go. On Route 51 a gleaming Jeep Wagoneer passed him doing ninety, minimum. The driver looked like Ed Spurling. The passenger had startling straw-blond hair and wore a salmon jogging suit. They both seemed preoccupied.
At the motel the skinny young desk clerk flagged Decker into the lobby.
“I gave the key to your lady friend,” he said with a wink. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Of course not,” Decker said. Catherine—she’d come after all. He almost ran to the room.
The moment he opened the door Decker realized that Skink could no longer be counted among the sane; he had vaulted the gap from eccentric to sociopath.
Lanie Gault was tied up on the floor.
Not just tied up but tightly wrapped—wound like a mummy from shoulders to ankles in eighty-pound monofilament fishing line.
She was alive, at least. Her eyes were wide open, but upside-down it was hard to read the emotions. Decker noticed that she was naked except for bikini panties and gray Reebok sneakers. Her mouth was sealed; Skink had run a strip of hurricane tape several times around Lanie’s head, gumming her curly brown hair. Decker decided to save the tape for last.
“Don’t move,” he said. As if she’d be going out for cigarettes.
Decker dug a pocket knife from his camera bag. He knelt next to Lanie and began sawing through the heavy strands. Skink had wrapped her about four hundred times, spun her like a top, evidently; cutting her free took nearly thirty minutes. He took extra care with the tape over her mouth.
“Christ,” she gasped, examining the purple grooves in her flesh. Decker helped her to the bed and handed her a blouse from her overnight bag.
“You know,” Lanie said, cool as ever, “that your friend is totally unglued.”
“What did he do to you?”
“You just saw it.”
“Nothing else?”
“This isn’t enough?” Lanie said. “He strung me up like a Christmas turkey. The weird thing was, he never said a word.”
Decker was almost afraid to ask: “Why’d he take your clothes off?”
Lanie shook her head. “He didn’t, that was me. Thought I’d surprise you when you got back. I was down almost to the bare essentials when Bigfoot barged in.”
“We’re sharing the room,” Decker said lamely.
“Cute.”
“He sleeps on the floor.”
“Lucky for you.”
Decker said, “He didn’t act angry?”
“Not really. Annoyed, I guess. He tied me up, grabbed his gear, and took off. Look at me, Decker, look what he did! I got stripes on my tits, stripes all over.”
“They’ll go away,” Decker said, “once the circulation comes back.”
“That line cut into the back of my legs,” Lanie said, examining herself in the mirror.
“I’m sorry,” Decker said. He was impressed that Lanie was taking it so well. “He didn’t say where he was going?”
“I told you, he didn’t say a damn thing, just sang this song over and over.”
Decker was past the point of being surprised. “A song,” he repeated. “Skink was singing?”
“Yeah. ‘Knights in White Satin.’ ”
“Ah.” Moody Blues. The man was a child of the Sixties.
“He’s not much of a crooner,” Lanie grumbled.
“As long as he didn’t hurt you.”
She shot him a look.
“I mean, besides tying you up,” Decker said.
“He didn’t try to pork me, no,” Lanie said, “and he didn’t stick electrodes into my eyeballs, if that’s what you mean. But he’s still totally nuts.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I could call the cops, you know.”
“What for? He’s long gone.”
Not so long, Lanie thought, maybe fifteen minutes. “Mind if I take a shower?”
“Go ahead.” Decker slumped back on the bed and closed his eyes. Soon he heard water running in the bathroom. He wished it were rain.
Lanie came out, still dripping. Already the purple ligature bars were fading.
“Well, here we are,” she said, a bit too brightly. “Another night, another motel. Decker, we’re in a rut.”
“So to speak.”
“Remember the last time?”
“Sure.”
“Well, don’t get too damn excited,” she said, scowling. She wrapped herself in the towel.
Decker had always been a sucker for fresh-out-of-the-shower women. With considerable effort he pushed ahead with purposeful conversation. “Dennis told you I was here.”
“He mentioned it, yeah.”
“What else did he mention?”
“Just about Dickie and the tournament, that’s all,” Lanie said. She sat on the bed and crossed her legs. “What’s with you? I came all this way and you act like I’ve got a disease.”
“Rough day,” Decker said.
She reached over and took his hand. “Don’t worry about your weird friend, he’ll find his way back to Harney.”
Decker said, “He forgot his plane ticket.” Not to mention the insistent New Orleans bail bondsman; the airline disturbance was a federal rap.
“He’ll be fine,” Lanie said. “Put him on a highway and he’ll eat his way home.”
Decker perked up. “So you know about Skink?”
“He’s a legend,” Lanie said. She started unbuttoning Decker’s shirt. “One rumor is he’s a mass murderer from Oregon. Another says he’s ex-CIA, helped kill Trujillo. One story goes he’s hiding from the Warren Commission.”
“Those are first-rate,” Decker said, but he had nothing more plausible to offer in the way of Skink theories. A bomber for the Weather Underground. Owsley’s secret chemist. Lead singer for the Grass Roots. Take your pick.
“Come under the covers,” Lanie said, and before Decker knew it the towel was on the floor and she was sliding between the muslin sheets. “Come on, you tell me about your rough day.”
This, thought Decker, from a woman who’d just been strung up nude by
a madman. Good old irrepressible Lanie Gault.
Later she got hungry. Decker said there was a good burger joint down the street, but Lanie nagged him into driving all the way to New Orleans. She tossed her overnight bag in the back seat and announced that she’d get her own room in the Quarter because she didn’t want to stay at the Quality Court, in case Skink returned. Decker didn’t blame her one bit.
They went to the Acme for raw oysters and beer. Lanie kept making suggestive oyster remarks while Decker smiled politely, wishing like hell he were back in Miami, alone in his trailer. He had enjoyed rolling around in bed with her—at least he’d thought so at the time—but was having difficulty recalling any of the prurient details.
Shortly after midnight he excused himself, went to a pay phone on Iberville, and called Jim Tile in Florida. Decker told him what had happened with Skink, Lanie, and the bass tournament.
“Man,” the trooper said. “He tied her up?”
“And took off.”
“Come on home,” Tile said.
“What about Skink?”
“He’ll be all right. He gets these moods.”
Decker told Tile about Skink’s histrionics on the airplane. “He has arraignment tomorrow,” Decker said. “In the federal building on Poydras. If he calls, Jim, please remind him.”
Tile said, “Don’t hold your breath.”
Lanie had ordered another dozen on the half-shell while Decker was on the phone.
“I’m stuffed,” he said, but ate one anyway.
“Dennis says you’re getting close to Lockhart.”
She’d been trying all night to find out what happened with the tournament. Decker hadn’t said much.
Lanie said, “I heard on the radio that Dickie won.”
“That’s right.” Radio? What kind of radio station covers a fish tournament? Decker wondered.
“Did he cheat again?” Lanie asked.
“I don’t know. Probably.” Decker paused. “I’ll send your brother a full report.”
“He’ll be pissed.”
Tough shit, Decker wanted to say. But instead: “We’re not giving up.”
“You and Bigfoot?”
“He’s got a particular talent.”
“Not with women,” Lanie said.
Decker dropped her off at the Bienville House. His feelings were not the least bit wounded when she didn’t invite him to stay the night.
He took his time driving back to Hammond. It was past two in the morning, but 1-10 was loaded with big trucks and semis, citybound. Their headlights made Decker’s eyes water.
At the junction near Laplace he decided to take Route 51 instead of the new interstate. The bumpy unlit two-lane was Skink’s kind of highway. Decker flicked on his brights and drove slowly, hoping against all reason to spot the big orange rainsuit skulking roadside. By the time Decker reached Pass Manchac all he’d seen was a gray fox, two baby raccoons, and a fresh-dead water moccasin.
Decker pumped the brakes as he drove by the Sportsman’s Hideout. Someone had left the spotlights on at the dock. It made no sense; the tournament was over, the bassers long gone. Decker negotiated a sleepy U-turn and went back.
When he got out of the car, he noticed that the lake air was not nearly as chilly as the night before. Too late for the fishermen, the wind had finally shifted from north to south; it was a balmy Gulf breeze that made the spotlights tremble on the poles.
One of the beams aimed at the tournament scoreboard, another more or less at the giant aquarium.
Decker wondered if anyone had remembered to free the bass. He strolled down to the docks to see.
The aquarium pump labored, grinding noisy bubbles. The water had turned a silty shade of brown. With the back of his hand Decker wiped a window in the condensation and peered into the glass tank. Right away he spotted three dead fish, gaping and jelly-eyed, rolling slow-motion with the current along the bottom. Decker felt like a tourist at some Charles Addams rendition of Marineland.
The shadow of something larger drifted over the dead bass. Decker glanced toward the top of the ten-foot tank, but looked away when the spotlight caught him flush in the eyes.
To escape the glare he climbed the wooden stairs to the weighmaster’s platform, which overlooked both the scoreboard and the release tank. From this vantage Decker spotted more dead bass floating on the surface, and something else, whorling slowly in the backwash of the pump. The form was big-shouldered and brown—at first Decker thought it might be a sea cow, somebody’s sick idea of a joke.
When the thing drifted by, he got a better look.
It was a man, floating facedown; a chunky man dressed in a brown jumpsuit.
Decker watched the corpse go around the tank again. This time, when it floated by, he grabbed the stiff cold shoulders and flipped it over with a splash.
Dickie Lockhart’s eyes stared wide but were long past seeing. He wore a plum-sized bruise on his right temple. If the blow hadn’t killed him outright, it had definitely rendered him unfit for a midnight swim.
The killer’s final touch was diabolical, and not without wit: a fishing lure, the redoubtable Double Whammy, had been hooked through Dickie Lockhart’s lower lip. It hung off Dickie’s face like a queer Christmas ornament. Unfortunately, being just as dead as Dickie, none of the bass in the aquarium could appreciate the piquancy of the killer’s gesture.
R. J. Decker lowered the corpse back into the water and walked quickly to the car. The scene screamed for a photograph, but it screamed something else too. Decker heard it all the way back to the motel and even afterward, deep into fitful dreams.
15
According to his official church biography, Charles Weeb had turned to God after an anguished boyhood of poverty, abuse, and neglect. His father had died a drunk and his mother had died a dope fiend, though not before selling Charlie’s two sisters to a Chinese slavery ring in exchange for sixty-five dollars and three grams of uncut opium.
The imagined fate of the missing Weeb sisters was a recurring theme in Charlie’s TV sermons on the Outdoor Christian Network; nothing sucked in money faster than a lingering close-up of those snapshots of the two little girls, June-Lee and Melissa, under the plaintive caption: “WHAT HAS SATAN DONE WITH THESE ANGELS?”
The Reverend Charles Weeb knew, of course. The angels in question were both alive and well, and presumably still working for Mr. Hugh Hefner in the same capacity that had first attracted Reverend Weeb’s attention. He had personally clipped their childhood photographs from the pages of Playboy magazine—that hokey section featuring family pictures of the centerfold as a little girl. Charlie Weeb had long since forgotten the real names of these models, or even what month and year they had starred in the publication. However, he wasn’t the least bit worried that the pictures would be recognized and his scheme revealed, since no devout OCN viewer could ever admit to looking at such a magazine. The Reverend Charles Weeb made sure to regularly warn his flock that Playboy was a passport to hell.
In fact Charlie Weeb had no sisters, just an older brother named Bernie, who had been busted selling phony oil leases from a North Miami boiler room and was now doing seven years for wire fraud. Weeb’s father had been a shoe salesman with an ulcer intolerant of alcohol; his mother was not a dope fiend but a successful real-estate agent, and from her Charlie Weeb had drawn the inspiration for his dream project in Florida, Lunker Lakes.
The Weeb family had never been particularly religious, so neighbors were surprised, even somewhat skeptical, to learn that little Charlie had grown up to become a fundamentalist preacher. The Weebs, after all, were Jewish. Acquaintances were even more puzzled to turn on the television and see Charlie going on about his wretched parents and kidnapped sisters. Bernie the Bum was the only one whom the neighbors remembered.
Charles Weeb’s path to religious prominence had been a curious and halting one. After being expelled from the Citadel for moral turpitude, he had spent ten years chasing fads, hoping to hit it big. “Eighteen-to-twen
ty-five alive!” was Charlie’s slogan, because that was always his target market. His schemes were always about two years too late and fifty percent undercapitalized. For a while he ran a health-food store in Tallahassee, then a disco in Gulf Shores, then a hot-tub factory in Orlando. Though his track record made him look like a loser, Charlie Weeb was basically a clever man; no matter how catastrophically his enterprises failed, Weeb’s bank account always prospered. In the late 1970s the IRS expressed an avid interest in Charlie Weeb’s fortunes; this he took as a signal to find God, and quickly. Thus was born the First Pentecostal Church of Exemptive Redemption.
Charlie Weeb didn’t own an actual church, but he had something even better: a TV station.
For two million dollars he had purchased a small UHF operation whose programming consisted entirely of game shows, Atlanta Braves baseball, and The Best of Hee-Haw. Nothing changed for four months, until one Sunday morning a man with straw-blond hair and messianic eyebrows stood behind a cardboard pulpit and introduced himself as the Most Holy Reverend Charles Weeb. From now on, he said, WEEB-TV would be the voice of Jesus Christ.
Then, live on the air, Charlie Weeb healed a crippled cat.
Hundreds of viewers saw it. The calico kitten limped to the stage and—after a tremulous Reverend Weeb prayed for its soul and passed a hand over its furry head—the animal scampered away, cured.
The following Sunday Charlie Weeb performed the same miracle on a gimpy beagle. The Sunday after that, a shoat. Two weeks later, a baby llama, on loan from a traveling circus.
Weeb saved the master coup for Christmas Sunday, the start of a ratings-sweep week. Before his biggest TV audience ever, he healed a lamb.
It was a magnificent performance, full of biblical symbolism. Few viewers who saw the nappy dull-eyed critter rise off the floor were not deeply moved. No one in Charlie Weeb’s flock seemed to mind that the miracle took about an hour longer than expected; they figured that, it being a busy Christmas, God was running a little late. In fact, the reason for the delay in the much-promoted lamb healing was that Charlie Weeb’s assistant had injected way too much lidocaine into the animal’s hind legs before the show, so it took an extra long time for the effect of the drug to wear off.