“My name is Decker.”
“You from the IRS?” The man’s voice was deep and wet, like mud slipping down a drain.
“No,” Decker said.
“I pay no taxes,” Skink said. He was wearing a rainhat, though it wasn’t raining. He was also wearing sunglasses and the sun was down. “I pay no attention to taxes,” Skink asserted. “Not since Nixon, the goddamn thief.”
“I’m not from the government,” Decker said carefully. “I’m a private investigator.”
Skink grunted.
“Like Barnaby Jones,” Decker ventured.
Skink raised the rifle and aimed at Decker’s heart. “I pay no attention to television,” he said.
“Forget I mentioned it. Please.”
Skink held the gun steady. Decker felt moisture bead on the back of his neck. “Put the gun away,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Skink said. “I feel like shooting tonight.”
Decker thought: Just my luck. “I heard you do some guiding,” he said.
Skink’s gun lowered a fraction of an inch. “I do.”
“For bass,” Decker said. “Bass fishing.”
“Hundred bucks a day, no matter.”
“Fine,” Decker said.
“You’ll call me captain?”
“If you want.”
Skink lowered the rifle all the way. Decker reached into his pocket and pulled out a one-hundred-dollar bill. He unfolded it, smoothed it out, and offered it to Skink.
“Put it away. Pay when we get your fish in the boat.” Skink looked annoyed. “You act like you still want to talk.”
For some reason the banjo music from Deliverance kept tinkling in Decker’s head. It got louder every time he took a good look at Skink’s face.
“Talk,” Skink said. “Quick.” He reached over and set the rifle in a corner, its barrel pointing up. Then he removed the sunglasses. His eyes were green; not hazel or olive, but deep green, like Rocky Mountain evergreens. His eyebrows, tangled and ratty, grew at an angle that gave his tanned face the cast of perpetual anger. Decker wondered how many repeat customers a guide like Skink could have.
“Do you fish the tournaments?”
“Not anymore,” Skink said. “If it’s tournament fish you’re after, keep your damn money.”
“It’s cheaters I’m after,” Decker said.
Skink sat up so suddenly that his plastic rainsuit squeaked. The forest-green eyes impaled R. J. Decker while the mouth chewed hard on the corners of its mustache. Skink took a deep breath and when his chest filled, he looked twice as big. It was only when he got to his feet that Decker saw what a diesel he truly was.
“I’m hungry,” Skink said. He took ten steps toward his truck, stopped, and said, “Well, Miami, come on.”
As the pickup bounced down the old Mormon Trail, Decker said, “Captain, how’d you know where I was from?”
“Haircut.”
“That bad?”
“Distinctive.”
“Distinctive” was not a word Decker expected to hear from the captain’s lips. Obviously this was not the type of fellow you could sort out in a day, or even two.
Skink steered the truck onto Route 222 and headed south. He drove slow, much slower than he had driven on the trail. Decker noticed that he hunched himself over the wheel, and peered hawklike through the windshield.
“What’s the matter?” Decker asked.
“Hush.”
Cars and trucks were flying by at sixty miles an hour. Skink was barely doing twenty. Decker was sure they were about to get rearended by a tractor-trailer.
“You all right?”
“I pay no attention to the traffic,” Skink said. He turned the wheel hard to the right and took the truck off the road, skidding in the gravel. Before Decker could react, the big man leapt from the cab and dashed back into the road. Decker saw him snatch something off the center line and toss it onto the shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” Decker shouted, but his voice died in the roar of a passing gasoline tanker. He looked both ways before jogging across the highway to join Skink on the other side.
Skink was kneeling next to a plump, misshapen lump of gray fur.
Decker saw it was a dead opossum. Skink ran a hand across its furry belly. “Still warm,” he reported.
Decker said nothing.
“Road kill,” Skink said, by way of explanation. He took a knife out of his belt. “You hungry, Miami?”
Decker said uneasily, “How about if we just stop someplace and I buy you supper?”
“No need,” Skink said, and he sawed off the opossum’s head. He lifted the carcass by its pink tail and stalked back to the truck. Decker now understood the reason for the fluorescent rainsuit; a speeding motorist could see Skink a mile away. He looked like a neon yeti.
“You’ll like the flavor,” Skink remarked as Decker got in the truck beside him.
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Nope.”
“What?”
“We both eat, that’s the deal. Then you get the hell out. Another day we’ll talk fish.”
Skink pulled the rainhat down tight on his skull.
“And after that,” he said, turning the ignition, “we might even talk about cheaters.”
“So you know about this?” Decker said.
Skink laughed bitterly. “I do, sir, but I wisht I didn’t.”
Clouds of insects swirled in and out of the high-beams as the truck jounced down the dirt road. Suddenly Skink killed the lights and cut the ignition. The pickup coasted to a stop.
“Listen!” Skink said.
Decker heard an engine. It sounded like a lawn mower.
Skink jumped from the truck and ran into the trees. This time Decker was right behind him.
“I told the bastards,” Skink said, panting.
“Who?” Decker asked. It seemed as if they were running toward the noise, not away from it.
“I told them,” Skink repeated. They broke out of the pines, onto a bluff, and Skink immediately shrank into a crouch. Below them was a small stream, with a dirt rut following the higher ground next to the water. A single headlight bobbed on the trail.
Decker could see it clearly—a lone rider on a dirt bike. Up close the motorcycle sounded like a chainsaw, the growl rising and falling with the hills. Soon the rider would pass directly beneath them.
Decker saw that Skink had a pistol in his right hand.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Quiet, Miami.”
Skink extended his right arm, aiming. Decker lunged, too late. The noise of the gun knocked him on his back.
The dirt bike went down like a lame horse. The rider screamed as he flew over the handlebars.
Dirt spitting from its rear tire, the bike tumbled down the embankment and splashed into the stream, where the engine choked and died in bubbles.
Up the trail, the rider moaned and began to extricate himself from a cabbage palm.
“Christ!” Decker said, his breath heavy.
Skink tucked the pistol in his pants. “Front tire,” he reported, almost smiling. “Told you I was in the mood to shoot.”
Back at the shack, Skink barbecued the opossum on an open spit and served it with fresh com, collards, and strawberries. Decker focused on the vegetables because the opossum tasted gamy and terrible; he could only take Skink’s word that the animal was fresh and had not lain dead on the highway for days.
As they sat by the fire, Decker wondered why the ferocious mosquitoes were concentrating on his flesh, while Skink seemed immune. Perhaps the captain’s blood was lethal.
“Who hired you?” Skink asked through a mouthful of meat.
Decker told him who, and why.
Skink stopped chewing and stared.
“You know Mr. Gault?” Decker asked.
“I know lots of folks.”
“Dickie Lockhart?”
Skink bit clean through a possum bone. “Sure.”
&nb
sp; “Lockhart’s the cheater,” Decker said.
“You’re getting close.”
“There’s more?” Decker asked.
“Hell, yes!” Skink tossed the bone into the lake, where its splash startled a mallard.
“More,” Skink muttered. “More, more, more.”
“Let’s hear it, captain,” Decker said.
“Another night.” Skink spit something brown into the fire and scowled at nothing in particular. “How much you getting paid?”
Decker was almost embarrassed to tell him. “Fifty grand,” he said.
Skink didn’t even blink. “Not enough,” he said. “Come on, Miami, finish your damn supper.”
4
Ott Pickney stopped by the motel before eight the next morning. He knocked loudly on R. J. Decker’s door.
Groggily, Decker let him in. “So how’d it go?” Ott asked.
“A lively night.”
“Is he as kooky as they say?”
“Hard to tell,” Decker said. Living in Miami tended to recalibrate one’s view of sanity.
Ott said he was on his way to a funeral. “That poor fella I told you about.”
“The fisherman?”
“Bobby Clinch,” Ott said. “Sandy wants a tearjerker for the weekend paper—it’s the least we can do for a local boy. You and Skink going out for bass?”
“Not this morning.” Skink had left the proposition in the air. Decker planned to meet him later.
Ott Pickney said, “Why don’t you ride along with me?”
“To a funeral?”
“The whole town’s closing down for it,” Ott said. “Besides, I thought you might want to see some big-time bassers up close. Bobby had loads of friends.”
“Give me a second to shower.”
Decker hated funerals. Working for the newspaper, he’d had to cover too many grim graveside services, from a cop shot by some coked-up creep to a toddler raped and murdered by her babysitter. Child murders got plenty of play in the papers, and a shot of the grieving parents was guaranteed to run four columns, minimum. A funeral like that was the most dreaded assignment in journalism. Decker didn’t know quite what to expect in Harney. For him it was strictly business, a casual surveillance. Maybe even Dickie Lockhart would show up, Decker thought as he toweled off. He was eager to get a glimpse of the town celebrity.
They rode to the graveyard in Ott Pickney’s truck. Almost everyone else in Harney owned a Ford or a Chevy, but Ott drove a new Toyota flatbed. “Orchids,” he explained, a bit defensively, “don’t take up much space.”
“It’s a fine truck,” Decker offered.
Ott lit a Camel so Decker rolled down the window. It was a breezy morning and the air was cold, blowing dead from the north.
“Can I ask something?” Ott said. “It’s personal.”
“Fire away.”
“I heard you got divorced.”
“Right,” Decker said.
“That’s a shame, R.J. She seemed like a terrific kid.”
“the problem was money,” Decker said. “He had some, I didn’t.” His wife had run off with a timeshare-salesman-turned-chiropractor. Life didn’t get any meaner.
“Jesus, I’m sorry.” The divorce wasn’t really what Ott wanted to talk about. “I heard something else,” he said.
“Probably true,” Decker said. “I did ten months at Apalachee, if that’s what you heard.”
Pickney was sucking so hard on the cigarette that the ash was three inches long. Decker was afraid it would drop into Ott’s lap and set his pants on fire, which is what had happened one day in the newsroom of the Miami Sun. None of the fire extinguishers had been working, so Ott had been forced to straddle a drinking fountain to douse the flames.
“Do you mind talking about it?” Ott said. “I understand if you’d rather not.”
Decker said, “It was after one of the Dolphin games. I was parked about four blocks from the stadium. Coming back to the car, I spotted some jerkoff breaking into the trunk, trying to rip off the cameras. I told him to stop, he ran. He was carrying two Nikons and a brand-new Leica. No way was I going to let him get away.”
“You caught up with him?”
“Yeah, he fell and I caught up to him. I guess I got carried away.”
Pickney shook his head and spit the dead Camel butt out the window. “Ten months! I can’t believe they’d give you that much time for slugging a burglar.”
“Not just any burglar—a football star at Palmetto High,” Decker said. “Three of his sisters testified that they’d witnessed the whole thing. Said Big Brother never stole the cameras. Said he was minding his own business, juking on the corner when I drove up and asked where I could score some weed. Said Big Brother told me to get lost, and I jumped out of my car and pounded him into dog meat. All of which was a goddamn lie.”
“So then?”
“So the state attorney’s office dropped the burglary charge on Mr. Football Hero, and nailed me for agg assault. He gets a scholarship to USC, I get felony arts-and-crafts. That’s the whole yarn.”
Pickney sighed. “And you lost your job.”
“The newspaper had no choice, Ott.” Not with the boy’s father raising so much hell. The boy’s father was Levon Bennett, big wheel on the Orange Bowl Committee, board chairman of about a hundred banks. Decker had always thought the newspaper might have rehired him after Apalachee if only Levon Bennett wasn’t in the same Sunday golf foursome as the executive publisher.
“You always had a terrible temper.”
“Luck, too. Of all the thieves worth stomping in Miami, I’ve got to pick a future Heisman Trophy winner.” Decker laughed sourly.
“So now you’re a ...”
“Private investigator,” Decker said. Obviously Ott was having a little trouble getting to the point.
The point being what in the hell Decker was doing as a P.I. “I burned out on newspapers,” he said to Ott.
“With your portfolio you could have done anything, R.J. Magazines, free-lance, the New York agencies. You could write your own ticket.”
“Not with a rap sheet,” Decker said.
It was a comfortable lie. A lawyer friend had arranged for Decker’s criminal record to be legally expunged, wiped off the computer, so the rap sheet wasn’t really the problem.
The truth was, Decker had to get away from the news business. He needed a divorce from photography because he had started to see life and death as a sequence of frames; Decker’s mind had started to work like his goddamn cameras, and it scared him. The night he made up his mind was the night the city desk had sent him out on what everybody figured was a routine drug homicide. Something stinky dripping from the trunk of a new Seville parked on the sky level of the Number Five Garage at Miami International. Decker got there just as the cops were drilling the locks. Checked the motor drive on the Leica. Got down on one knee. Felt the cold dampness seep through his trousers. Raining like a bitch. Trunk pops open. A young woman, used to be, anyway. Heels, nylons, pretty silk dress, except for the brown stains. Stench bad enough to choke a maggot. He’d been expecting the usual Juan Doe—Latin male, mid-twenties, dripping gold, no ID, multiple gunshot wounds. Not a girl with a coat hanger wrapped around her neck. Not Leslie. Decker refocused. Leslie. Jesus Christ, he knew this girl, worked with her at the paper. Decker fed the Leica more film. She was a fashion writer—who the fuck’d want to murder a fashion writer? Her husband, said a homicide guy. Decker bracketed the shots, changed angles to get some of the hair, but no face. Paper won’t print faces of the dead, that’s policy. He fired away, thinking: I know this girl, so why can’t I stop? Leica whispering in the rain, click-click-click. Oh God, she’s a friend of mind so why the fuck can’t I stop. Husband told her they were flying to Disney World, big romantic weekend, said the homicide man Decker reloaded, couldn’t help himself. Strangled her right here, stuffed her in the trunk, grabbed his suitcase, and hopped a plane for Key West with a barmaid from North Miami Beach. She’d only been marr
ied what, three months? Four, said the homicide guy, welcome to the Magic Kingdom. Haven’t you got enough pictures for Chrissakes? Sure, Decker said, but he couldn’t look at Leslie’s body unless it was through the lens, so he ran back to his car and threw up his guts in a puddle.
Three days later, Levon Bennett’s son tried to steal R. J. Decker’s cameras outside the stadium, and Decker chased him down and beat him unconscious. Those are my eyes, he’d said as he slugged the punk. Without them I’m fucking blind, don’t you understand?
At Apalachee he’d met a very nice doctor doing four years for Medicare fraud, who gave him the name of an insurance company that needed an investigator. Sometimes the investigator had to take his own pictures—“sometimes” was about all Decker figured he could handle. Besides, he was broke and never wanted to see the inside of a newsroom again. So he tried one free-lance job for the insurance company—took a picture of a forty-two-foot Bertram that was supposed to be sunk off Cat Island but wasn’t—and got paid two thousand dollars. Decker found the task to be totally painless and profitable. Once his rap sheet was purged, he applied for his P.I. license and purchased two cameras, a Nikon and a Canon, both used. The work was small potatoes, no Pulitzers but no pain. Most important, he had discovered with more and more cases that he still loved the cameras but could see just fine without them—no blood and gore in the darkroom, just mug shots and auto tags and grainy telescopic stills of married guys sneaking out of motels.
None of this he told Ott Pickney. Being a private detective isn’t so bad, is what he said, and the pay’s good. “It’s just temporary,” Decker lied, “until I figure out what I want to do.”
Ott managed a sympathetic smile. He was trying to be a pal. “You were a fine photographer, R.J.”
“Still am,” Decker said with a wink. “I waltzed out of that newspaper with a trunkload of free Ektachrome.”
The funeral was like nothing R. J. Decker had ever seen, and he’d been to some beauties. Jonestown. Beirut. Benghazi.
But this was one for the books. The L. L. Bean catalog, to be exact.
They were burying Bobby Clinch in his bass boat.