At about noon a third bass boat raced up to the fishing spot, and Dickie started hollering like a madman. “Goddammit, stop the tape! Stop the tape!” He hopped up and down on the bow and shook his fist at the man in the other boat. “Hey, can’t you see we’re filming a goddamn TV show here? You got the whole frigging lake but you gotta stop here and wreck the tape!” Then he saw that the other angler was Ozzie Rundell, Culver’s brother, so Dickie stopped shouting. He didn’t apologize, but he did pipe down.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ozzie said. He was a mumbłer. Dickie Lockhart told him to speak up.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt!” Ozzie said, a bit louder. In his entire life he had never boated a bass over four pounds, and was in awe of Dickie Lockhart,
“Well?” Dickie said.
“I thought you’d want to know.”
Dickie shook his head. He kicked a button on the bow and used the trolling motor to steer his boat closer to Ozzie’s. When the two were side by side, Dickie said impatiently, “Now start over.”
“I thought you’d want to know. They found Bobby Clinch.”
“Where?”
“Dead.”
Ozzie would get around to answering the questions, but not in the order he was asked. His mind worked that way.
“How?” Dickie said.
“In Lake Harney.”
“When?”
“Flipped his boat and drowned,” Ozzie said.
“Goddamn,” said Dickie Lockhart. “I’m sorry.”
“Yesterday,” Ozzie said in conclusion.
Dickie turned to the cameraman and said, “Well, that’s it for the day.”
Ozzie seemed thrilled just to be able to touch the deck of the champion’s boat. He gazed at Dickie Lockhart’s fishing gear the way a Little Leaguer might stare at Ted Williams’ bat. “swell, sorry to interrupt,” he mumbled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dickie Lockhart said. “They stopped biting two hours ago.”
“What plug you usin’?” Ozzie inquired.
“My special baby,” Dickie said, “the Double Whammy.”
The Double Whammy was the hottest lure on the pro bass circuit, thanks in large measure to Dickie Lockhart For the last eight tournaments he’d won, Dickie had declared it was the amazing Double Whammy that had tricked the trophy fish. His phenomenal success with the hire—a skirted spinnerbait with twin silver spoons—had not been duplicated by any other professional angler, though all had tried, filling their tackleboxes with elaborate variations and imitations. Most of the bassers caught big fish on the Double Whammy, but none caught as many, or at such opportune times, as Dickie Lockhart.
“It’s a real killer, huh?” Ozzie said.
“You betcha,” Dickie said. He took the fishing line in his front teeth and bit through, freeing the jangling lure. “You want it?” he asked.
Ozzie Rundell beamed like a kid on Christmas morning. “Shoot yeah!”
Dickie Lockhart tossed the lure toward Ozzie’s boat. In his giddiness Ozzie actually tried to catch the thing in his bare hands. He missed, of course, and the Double Whammy embedded its needle-sharp hook firmly in the poor man’s cheek. Ozzie didn’t seem to feel a thing; didn’t seem to notice the blood dripping down his jawline.
“Thanks!” he shouted as Dickie Lockhart started up his boat. “Thanks a million!”
“Don’t mention it,” the champion replied, leaning on the throttle.
3
R. J. Decker had been born in Texas. His father had been an FBI man, and the family had lived in Dallas until December of 1963. Two weeks after Kennedy was shot, Decker’s father was transferred to Miami and assigned to a crack squad whose task was to ensure that no pals of Fidel Castro took a shot at LBJ. It was a tense and exciting time, but it passed. Decker’s father eventually wound up in a typically stupefying FBI desk job, got fat, and died of clogged arteries at age forty-nine. One of Decker’s older brothers grew up to be a cop in Minneapolis. The other sold Porsches to cocaine dealers in San Francisco.
A good athlete and a fair student in college, R. J. Decker surprised all his classmates by becoming a professional photographer. Cameras were his private passion; he was fascinated with the art of freezing time in the eye. He never told anyone but it was the Zapruder film that had done it. When Life magazine had come out with those grainy movie pictures of the assassination, R. J. Decker was only eight years old Still he was transfixed by the frames of the wounded president and his wife. The pink of her dress, the black blur of the Lincoln—horrific images, yet magnetic. The boy never imagined such a moment could be captured and kept for history. Soon afterward he got his first camera.
For Decker, photography was more than just a hobby, it was a way of looking at the world. He had been cursed with a short temper and a cynical outlook, so the darkroom became a soothing place, and the ceremony of making pictures a gentle therapy.
Much to his frustration, the studio-photography business proved unbearably dull and profitable. Decker did weddings, bar mitzvahs, portraits, and commercial jobs, mostly magazine advertisements. He was once paid nine thousand dollars to take the perfect picture of a bottle of Midol. The ad showed up in all the big women’s magazines, and Decker clipped several copies to send to his friends, as a joke on himself.
And, of course, there were the fashion layouts with professional models. The first year Decker fell in love seventeen times. The second year he let the Hasselblad do the falling in love. His pictures were very good, he was making large sums of money, and he was bored out of his skull.
One afternoon on Miami Beach, while Decker was on a commercial shoot for a new tequila-scented suntan oil, a young tourist suddenly tore off her clothes and jumped into the Atlantic and tried to drown herself. The lifeguards reached her just in time, and Decker snapped a couple of frames as they carried her from the surf The woman’s blond hair was tangled across her cheeks, her eyes were puffy and half-closed, and her lips were grey. What really made the photograph was the face of one of the lifeguards who had rescued the young woman. He’d carefully wrapped his arms around her bare chest to shield her from the gawkers, and in his eyes Decker’s lens had captured both panic and pity.
For the hell of it Decker gave the roll of film to a newspaper reporter who had followed the paramedics to the scene. The next day the Miami Sun published Decker’s photograph on the front page, and paid him the grand sum of thirty dollars. The day after that, the managing editor offered him a full-time job and Decker said yes.
In some ways it was the best move he ever made. In some ways it was the worst Decker only wished he would have lasted longer.
He thought of this as he drove into Harney County, starting a new case, working for a man he didn’t like at all.
Harney was Dickie Lockhart’s hometown, and the personal headquarters of his bass-fishing empire.
Upon arrival the first thing Decker did was to find Ott Pickney, which was easy. Ott was not a man on the move.
He wrote obituaries for the Harney Sentinel, which published two times a week, three during boar season. The leisurely pace of the small newspaper suited Ott Pickney perfectly because it left plenty of time for golf and gardening. Before moving to Central Florida, Pickney had worked for seventeen years at the Miami Sun, which is where Decker had met him. At first Decker had assumed from Ott’s sluggish behavior that here was a once-solid reporter languishing in the twilight of his career; it soon became clear that Ott Pickney’s career had begun in twilight and grown only dimmer. That he had lasted so long in Miami was the result of a dense newsroom bureaucracy that always seemed to find a place for him, no matter how useless he was. Ott was one of those newspaper characters who got passed from one department to another until, after so many years, he had become such a sad fixture that no editor wished to be remembered as the one who fired him. Consequently, Ott didn’t get fired. He retired from the Sun at full pension and moved to Harney to write obits and grow prizewinning orchids.
R. J. Decker fo
und Pickney in the Sentinel’s newsroom, such as it was. There were three typewriters, five desks, and four telephones. Ott was lounging at the coffee machine; nothing had changed.
He grinned when Decker walked in. “R.J.! God Almighty, what brings you here? Your car break down or what?”
Decker smiled and shook Ott’s hand. He noticed that Ott was wearing baggy brown trousers and a blue Banlon shirt. Probably the last Banlon shirt in America. How could you not like a guy who wasn’t ashamed to dress like this?
“You look great,” Decker said.
“And I feel great, R.J., I really do. Hey, I know it’s not exactly the big city, but I had my fill of that, didn’t I?” Ott was talking a little too loudly. “We got out just in time, R.J., you and me. That paper would have killed both of us one way or another.”
“It tried.”
“Yeah, boy,” Ott said. “Sandy, get over here! I want you to meet somebody.” A wrenlike man with thick eyeglasses walked over and nodded cautiously at Decker. “R.J., this is Sandy Kilpatrick, my editor. Sandy, this is R. J. Decker. R.J. and I worked together down in the Magic City. I wrote the prose, he took the snapshots. We covered that big voodoo murder together, remember, R.J.?”
Decker remembered. He remembered it wasn’t exactly a big voodoo murder. Some redneck mechanic in Hialeah had killed his wife by sticking her with pins; safety pins, hundreds of them. The mechanic had read something about voodoo in Argosy magazine and had totally confused the rituals. He loaded his wife up on Barbancourt rum and started pricking away until she bled to death. Then he pretended to come home from work and find her dead. He blamed the crime on a Haitian couple down the street, claiming they had put a hex on his house and Oldsmobile. The cops didn’t go for this and the redneck mechanic wound up on Death Row.
As Ott was reinventing this story, Sandy Kilpatrick stared at R. J. Decker the way visitors from Miami got stared at in this part of Florida. Like they were trouble. Kilpatrick obviously had heard Ott’s voodoo-murder story about four hundred times and soon started to shrink away.
“Nice meeting you,” Decker said.
Kilpatrick nodded again as he slipped out of the office.
“Good kid,” Ott Pickney said avuncularly. “He’s learning.”
Decker helped himself to a cup of coffee. His legs were stiff from the long drive.
“What the hell brings you here?” Ott asked amiably.
“Fish,” Decker said.
“Didn’t know you were a basser.”
“I thought I’d give it a try,” Decker said. “They say Harney’s a real hotspot for the big ones.”
“Lunkers,” Ott said.
Decker looked at him quizzically.
“In these parts, they’re not big ones, they’re lunkers,” Ott explained. “The most mammoth bass in the hemisphere.”
“Hawgs,” Decker said, remembering one of Dennis Gault’s phrases.
“Sure, you got it!”
“Where’s the best place to try, this time of year?”
Ott Pickney sat down at his desk. “Boy, R.J., I really can’t help you much. The man to see is Jamie Belliroso, our sports guy.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Maui,” Ott Pickney said.
Jamie Belliroso, it turned out, was one of a vanishing breed of sportswriters who would accept any junket tossed their way, as long as gourmet food and extensive travel were involved. This month it was a marlin-fishing extravaganza in Hawaii, sponsored by a company that manufactured polyethylene fish baits. Jamie Belliroso’s air fare, room, and board would all be paid for with the quiet understanding that the name of the bait company would be mentioned a mere eight or ten times in his feature article, and that the name of the company would be spelled correctly—which, in Belliroso’s case, was never a sure thing. In the meantime, the blue marlin were striking and Jamie was enjoying the hell out of Maui.
“When will he be back?” Decker asked.
“Who knows,” Ott said. “From Hawaii he’s off to Christmas Island for bonefish.”
Decker said, “Anyone else who could help me? Someone mentioned a guide named Dickie Lockhart.”
Ott laughed. “A guide? My friend, Dickie’s not a guide, he’s a god. A big-time bass pro. The biggest.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he wouldn’t be seen in the same boat with a greenhorn putz like you. Besides, Dickie doesn’t hire out.”
Decker decided not to mention Dennis Gault’s grave allegations. Ott was obviously a huge fan of Dickie Lockhart’s. Decker wondered if the whole town was as starstruck.
“There’s a couple good guides work out on the lake,” Ott suggested. “Think they’re up to two hundred dollars a day.”
The world has gone mad, Decker thought. “That’s too rich for my blood,” he said to Ott.
“Yeah, it’s steep all right, but they don’t give the tourist much choice. See, they got a union.”
“A union?” It was all too much.
“The Lake Jesup Bass Captains Union. They keep the charter rates fixed, I’m afraid.”
“Christ, Ott, I came here to catch a fish and you’re telling me the lake’s locked up by the fucking Izaak Walton division of the Teamsters. What a swell little town you’ve got here.”
“It’s not like that,” Ott Pickney said in a you-don’t-understand tone. “Besides, there’s other options. One, rent yourself a skiff and give it a shot alone—”
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Decker said.
“Or two, you can try this guy who lives out at the lake.”
“Don’t tell me he’s not in the union?”
“He’s the only one,” Ott said. “When you meet him you’ll know why.” Ott rolled his eyeballs theatrically.
Decker said, “I sense you’re trying to tell me the man is loony.”
“They say he knows the bass,” Ott said. “They also say he’s dangerous.”
Decker was in the market for a renegade. The mystery man sounded like a good possibility.
“What does he charge?” Decker asked, still playing the rube.
“I have no idea,” Ott said. “After you see him, you may want to reconsider. In that case you can hook up with one of the regulars out of Rundell’s marina.”
Decker shook his head. “They sound like hot dogs, Ott. I just want to relax.”
Ott’s brow wrinkled. “I know these folks, R.J. I like ’em, too. Now I won’t sit here and tell you bassers are completely normal,’cause that’s not true either. They’re slightly manic. They got boats that’ll outrace a Corvette, and they’re fairly crazy out on the water. Just the other day I wrote up a young man who flipped his rig doing about sixty on the lake. Hit a cypress knee and punched out.”
“He died?”
“It was dawn. Foggy. Guess he was racing his pals to the fishing hole.” Pickney chuckled harshly. “No brakes on a boat, partner.”
“Didn’t the same thing happen a few years ago in one of those big tournaments?” Decker said. “I read about it in the Orlando papers. Two boats crashed on the way out.”
Ott said, “Yeah, over on Apopka. Officially it’s a grand-prix start, but the boys call it a blast-off. Fifty boats taking off from a dead stop.” Ott shaped his hands into two speedboats and gave a demonstration. “Kaboom! Hell, those tournaments are something else, R.J. You ought to do a color layout sometime.”
“I’ve heard all kinds of stuff goes on. Cheating and everything.”
“Aw, I heard that too, and I just can’t believe it. How in the world can you cheat? Either you’ve got fish on a stringer, or you don’t.” Ott sniffed at the idea. “I know these folks and I don’t buy it, not for a second. Texas, maybe, sure. But not here.”
Ott Pickney acted like it was all city talk. He acted like the desk made him an authority—his desk, his newsroom, his town. Ott’s ego was adapting quite well to the rural life, Decker thought. The wise old pro from Miami.
Pickney perked up. “You on expens
e account?”
“A good one,” Decker said.
“Buy me lunch?”
“Sure, Ott.”
“The guy at the lake, his name is Skink. As I said, they talk like he’s only got one oar in the water, so watch your step. One time we sent a kid to write a little feature story about him and this Skink took an ax and busted the windows out of the kid’s car. He lives in a cabin off the old Mormon Trail. You can’t miss it, R.J., it’s right on the lake. Looks like a glorified outhouse.”
“Skink what?” Decker asked.
“That’s his whole name,” Ott Pickney said. “That’s all he needs up here.” He rolled his chair back and clomped his shoes up on the bare desk. “See, sport, you’re not in Miami anymore.”
The man named Skink said, “Go.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“You got thirty seconds.” The man named Skink had a gun. A Remington, Decker noted. The rifle lay across his lap.
It was a large lap. Skink appeared to be in his late forties, early fifties. He sat in a canvas folding chair on the porch of his cabin. He wore Marine-style boots and an orange rainsuit, luminous even in the twilight. The shape and features of his face were hard to see, but Skink’s silver-flecked hair hung in a braided rope down his back. Decker figured long hair was risky in this part of the woods, but Skink was substantial enough to set his own style.