In all his many years of surveilling cheaters, layabouts and fraud artists, nobody had ever pointed a gun at Dealey, much less fired a round past his head. Louis Piejack was both vengeful and nuts, an unpromising combination.
“I’m not a great swimmer,” he’d warned Piejack as they got in the johnboat.
“Tough shit.”
Dealey’s hearing had returned to normal, so there was nothing fuzzy about Piejack’s response.
“Why don’t we wait for Honey to come back?” the investigator suggested. “What kind of sexy pictures you expect me to get when she’s paddling a kayak?”
“Shut your fat yap,” said Piejack.
Dealey had positioned the bulky Halliburtons on his lap to shield his vital organs from another gunshot, accidental or intended. As the small flat-bottomed craft headed downriver, he settled upon a strategy of falsely befriending Louis Piejack so that the man would let down his guard.
“What exactly happened with those stone crabs?” Dealey inquired in a plausible tone of sympathy. He couldn’t stop staring at the man’s fingertips, which protruded from the gauze like nubs of dirty chalk. Something wasn’t right.
“It was these goddamn Cubans hired by Honey’s shitwad ex-husband. They shoved my hand into a loaded trap and the fuckin’ crabs went to town,” Piejack said. “I know it was him that set me up, ’cause, first off, he speaks Cuban real good. Second off, he’s jealous of my hots for Honey.”
Dealey said, “Makes sense.”
“Then, when they got me to surgery, some doctor fucked up and sewed my fingers back all wrong. Look here.”
Louis Piejack held up what appeared to be a pinkie where a thumb ought to have been. Dealey was unnerved by the sight, although he wasn’t sure if he believed any of the man’s story, from the crabs to the surgeon. Piejack seemed entirely capable of self-mutilation.
He said, “I got me a sharp lawyer, don’t you worry. Come back in a year and I’ll own that fuckin’ hospital.”
“Can’t you find another doctor to stitch your fingers back where they belong?”
“I s’pose,” Piejack said, “but I’m gonna wait a spell and see how this new setup works.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Honey might like me better this way.” Piejack attempted without success to wiggle the misplaced pinkie. “You follow?”
Dealey nodded agreeably, thinking: What a loon.
It was tempting to blame Lily Shreave for his predicament, but Dealey knew it was his own fault. Lily was merely rich and kinky; he easily could have said no to the Florida trip. Greed, pure and simple, had drawn him into this mess.
“I’ll say this: Them doctors put me on some superior dope for the pain,” Piejack remarked as they chugged past a row of commercial fishing boats.
“Yeah, like what?”
“Vikes,” he said. “But I et up the whole damn bottle the first day! Lucky I know this pharmacist up in East Naples—he traded me a hundred pills for five pounds of swordfish.”
Beautiful, thought Dealey. The man’s not only deranged, he’s overmedicated. Add the loaded shotgun and it’s party time.
“If you’re not feelin’ good, I can steer for a while,” Dealey offered.
“Yeah, right.” Piejack coughed once and spat over the side.
Dealey turned in his seat so that he could see where the madman was taking him. Soon the brown river emptied into a broad calm bay fringed with dense trees. There wasn’t a hotel or a high-rise to be seen, which Dealey found surprising. Piejack gunned the throttle and the johnboat picked up speed. Dealey hugged his camera cases and shivered at the rush of cool air.
“Now where the hell are they?” Piejack wondered, his voice rising above the whine of the motor.
Dealey saw birds diving and silver fish jumping, but no kayaks on the water.
“Maybe they turned back already,” he said hopefully.
Louis Piejack laughed. “Naw, they’re out here somewheres. I’ll find ’em, too. That’s a damn fact.”
Fourteen
The plan was to steal water but no food from other campers. Water was essential for life, Sammy Tigertail said. Pringles were not.
“How would you feel about beer?” Gillian asked.
“That’ll do.”
They searched for hours but spotted no other fires, and encountered nobody else on the water. When the moon disappeared behind a gray-blue ridge of clouds, Sammy Tigertail began navigating back toward the island. He feared getting lost in the web of unmarked creeks, although he didn’t let on to Gillian.
From the bow of the canoe she asked, “Do you know a rain dance?”
“First I need a virgin.”
“I’m serious,” Gillian said.
Sammy Tigertail wasn’t sure if the Seminoles had a dance for making rain. He knew firsthand about the Green Corn Dance, a purification and feasting ritual dating back to the tribe’s Creek origins. The celebration took place every spring and required participants to swallow boiled black concoctions that induced copious vomiting. Sammy Tigertail attended with his mother and his uncle Tommy, who customarily brought a flask of Johnnie Walker to wash away the taste of the black drinks.
Gillian said, “Speaking of virgins, you wanna hear how I lost it? I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”
“Not interested.”
“It was on a riding mower.”
“Stop.”
“On the sixteenth hole of the south course at the Firestone Country Club,” she said.
“I get the picture.”
“Which happens to be the jewel of Akron, Ohio. What about you?”
“I don’t remember,” said Sammy Tigertail. He spotted their island around the bend and increased the pace of his paddling, heedless of his thirst or the blister rising on his left palm.
Gillian went on: “It was my best friend’s big brother. Is that a fucking cliché or what? And you do too remember.”
“We’re almost there,” said the Seminole.
“So—what was her name?”
“Sally Otter.”
“Excellent!”
After stowing the canoe, they ate some cactus berries and moved their sleeping bags from the cistern to open ground, where they could see the stars. They lay down side by side, shoulders touching.
“Hey, Thlocko,” Gillian whispered.
“I’m tired.”
“You go to college?”
“Never finished high school.”
One week after his son was born, Sammy Tigertail’s father had gone to the bank and opened the “Chad McQueen College Fund,” into which he faithfully deposited one hundred dollars every month. When Chad/Sammy had turned twelve, his stepmother had persuaded his father to close the account and invest the accumulated balance—$16,759.12—in 307 Beanie Baby dolls, which she grandly predicted would quintuple in value by the time the boy finished high school. Each tagged with an insipidly perky nickname, the rarest and most valuable of the small stuffed animals was reputed to be Leroy the Lemming, of which Sammy’s stepmother owned four. The collection was locked inside a steamer trunk that occupied many cubic feet of the boy’s bedroom. Upon the sudden death of Sammy’s father, his stepmother immediately hawked her entire Beanie Babies stash for $3,400, which she put down on a new Lexus coupe.
The Indian elected not to share that memory with Gillian. His half-white past was a private matter.
“So what’s your problem with college?” she asked.
“Be quiet,” Sammy Tigertail said.
“Hey, what about the Fighting Irish?”
“The who?”
“Remember you gave me a ration of shit about my Seminoles jersey? What about Notre Dame, huh? How come all the Irishmen aren’t all pissed off about the name of that team?”
Sammy Tigertail reached out and clapped his hand over Gillian’s mouth. “Shut the hell up. I’m begging you.”
She pushed his arm away and rolled over. “Is that how you talked to Sally Beaver?”
&nb
sp; “Otter was her name.”
“Whatever,” said Gillian.
The Indian closed his eyes, longing for a peaceful sleep. A thousand years ago, Calusa warriors had lain under the same winter sky. When he was in the eighth grade (and still Chad McQueen), Sammy Tigertail had written a school paper about the Calusa, who had predated by twelve centuries the arrival in Florida of the beleaguered Seminoles. The Calusa’s highly structured society revolved around fishing, and they were accomplished makers of palm-fiber nets, spears, throat gorges and hooks. They traveled widely in dugout canoes, dominating by trade and force all other Indian tribes throughout the peninsula. Sammy Tigertail remembered seeing photographs of intricate tribal masks, shell jewelry and delicate wooden bird carvings excavated from a Calusa midden on Marco Island. The body paint favored by Calusa braves had been mixed with the oil of shark livers, to repel mosquitoes. (Sammy Tigertail once asked his uncle why the Seminoles didn’t try the same formula, and his uncle said he would rather swat a bug than kill a shark.)
But the most remarkable thing that Sammy Tigertail remembered from his middle-school project about the noble Calusa was how suddenly they were wiped out—erased from the landscape barely two hundred years after their first fateful contact with Spanish soldiers, who carried diseases more deadly than their muskets.
The Calusa brave who plugged Ponce de León with an arrow had the right idea, Sammy Tigertail thought. He knew those white fuckers were bad news.
In the end, ravaged bands of Calusa were hunted down by mercenary Creeks and other newly armed Indians, who sold them to slavers. Sammy Tigertail recalled that a few hundred Calusa were thought to have escaped with their cacique to Havana in the mid-1700s, and he wondered what had become of them. He’d always thought it sad that the Calusa had disappeared from Florida’s southernmost wilderness before the Seminoles—driven by another rapacious bunch of white men—had settled there. Because the two tribes had never crossed paths, there was no chance that even a droplet of Calusa blood flowed in Sammy Tigertail’s veins. In dark moments he actually worried that he might be descended from one of the slave-hunting Creeks who’d preyed upon the Calusa, for ironically it was displaced Creek clans and other cimmarones who would later become the Seminole Nation.
Sammy Tigertail took several deep breaths and pressed his arms against his sides. He was hoping to feel the power and wisdom of a hundred warriors rising up from the ancient bones and shells beneath him….
Yet when he opened his eyes, he felt no different from the way he’d felt before—like a man who didn’t fit in anybody’s world, red or white.
Emptily he blinked at the milky heavens. The sun had risen and the morning haze was burning off. He lay shirtless on top of the sleeping bag, clutching the Gibson guitar to his breast. Somewhere down by the shore, Gillian was saying, “Right side, Boyd, right side. Watch out for those snags, Genie.”
Which made no sense, until the Indian realized that it wasn’t Gillian’s voice he was hearing from the water. Gillian was in the limbs of the poinciana, signaling for him to get up.
Sammy Tigertail sprang to his feet and unwrapped the rifle. Gillian dropped lightly out of the tree. She touched his arm and said, “You think they’ve got water, Thlocko?”
“Time to behave,” he advised, “otherwise I’m gonna leave you out here alone to die.”
“I can be quiet. I swear I can.” She gave a crisp salute and mimed a zippering motion along her lips.
Eugenie Fonda recognized Boyd Shreave’s self-transformation from ambivalent dullard to condescending asshole as a last-ditch attempt to raise his game. It wasn’t the first time one of her lovers had tried to re-invent himself, but for sheer detestability Boyd had outdone all the rest. He’d pay dearly for it, of course. Instead of lounging on a beach with chilled rum runners in hand—Eugenie’s ideal of a proper Florida vacation—they were paddling through a funky-smelling, bug-infested swamp. Worse, she was doing all the hard work; as a kayaking partner, Boyd was useless, his strokes splashy and mistimed. He snottily spurned instruction from their tour guide, who—Eugenie had noticed in the light of day—was quite attractive. Most of Eugenie’s past loser boyfriends would have been hitting on Honey Santana by now, but not Boyd. He’d decided to advertise his virility by behaving like a conceited dipshit.
“I gotta take another leak,” he announced to the world. Eugenie Fonda disregarded him. Honey spun her kayak and said, “Everything okay back there?”
“No, it’s not. I’ve gotta piss again,” Shreave said.
“We’ll stop for lunch up ahead.” Honey pointed to an island a half-mile away.
“Better hurry,” Boyd growled to Eugenie, “or you’ll be up to your ankles in something nasty.”
He resumed his spastic paddling, which immediately put the kayak off course. To neutralize him, Eugenie shed her life vest and matter-of-factly unstrung her halter.
“What’re you doin’?” she heard Boyd ask.
“My New Year’s resolution: no more tan lines.”
“But what if another boat comes by?”
“Who cares, Boyd? They’re just tits.”
From then on he was so preoccupied that he scarcely paddled at all, which had been Eugenie’s objective. Unhindered by his inept flailing, she guided the kayak effortlessly with the tide. As they closed in on the mangrove island, Honey called out, “Right side, Boyd, right side. Watch out for those snags, Genie.”
No sooner had the bow creased the bank than Shreave stepped into the shallows, clambered ashore and vanished. Honey Santana and Eugenie Fonda dragged the kayaks up on dry land.
“Can I ask you something?” Honey said.
“Yeah, but there’s no good answer. I was bored, I guess,” Eugenie said. “I mean really bored.”
“He sure doesn’t seem like your type.”
“I’ve never met my type. That’s a problem,” Eugenie said. “How about you?”
Honey nodded. “Once I did. We stayed together a long time.”
“I’d settle for that. You have no idea.”
Shreave reappeared. His hat was crooked and he was struggling to remove a twig from the zipper of his pants. He said, “Ladies, you won’t believe what yours truly found up the hill.”
“An ounce of charm?” Eugenie said.
“A campfire!”
“Way out here?” Honey looked concerned.
“It’s still warm,” Shreave reported, “and it smells like greasy fish.”
Honey said they should move to another island immediately.
“What’re you scared of? They’re gone now.” Shreave swept his arms dismissively. “Besides, I’m starving.”
“Well, that settles it. His Majesty wants supper.” Eugenie opened her backpack and removed a light cotton pullover, which she put on despite Boyd’s adolescent protests. She had no intention of marching topless through spiderwebs.
Fry woke up giggling. He didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t much care. He heard his father’s voice say, “Nice job, champ.”
“Whah?”
“You T-boned a garbage truck.”
Fry tried to remember.
“On your skateboard,” his dad said.
“Shit,” Fry mumbled. Normally he tried not to cuss in front of his parents, but at the moment he had no self-control. The sun was blinding and his neck throbbed when he turned away.
His father said, “The truck was parked, by the way. Six tons of solid steel and you couldn’t see it.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” Fry laughed again and scrambled to recover. “I know it’s not funny. Really, I know it’s not.”
“You’re wasted,” his father said. “Don’t get too used to it.”
“Ohhhhhh.” Fry closed his eyes, floating. He comprehended that he was in his father’s pickup, and it was speeding along the Tamiami Trail.
“They gave you some heavy-duty pain pills,” Perry Skinner said.
“For what?”
“Three busted ribs. Concussion with a hai
rline skull fracture. Plus you’ve got a knot on your head as big as a strawberry.”
Fry tried to touch it but all he could feel was smooth plastic.
“What’s the deal?” he asked.
“The hospital wanted to hold you for observation but we had to get a move on, so I stopped at the mall and bought a football helmet.”
“Bucs or Dolphins?”
“Dolphins,” his father said. “In case you get dizzy and fall, I didn’t want you to spill your brains all over the place.”
Fry’s memory was returning in muddy waves. “Where was I going when it happened? To school, right?”
“Yep.”
“Dad, are you driving superfast, or is it the medicine?”
“Both.”
Fry recalled looking up and seeing the garbage truck broken down directly in his path, unavoidable. He wondered what he’d been thinking about at the time, what had distracted him so completely.
“Where we goin’?” he asked.
“For a boat ride,” Perry Skinner replied.
“Why?” Fry didn’t feel like getting on a boat. He felt like going home and shutting the blinds and crawling under the sheets.
“Because I can’t leave you alone is what the doctors told me. In case you have a damn seizure or somethin’,” his father said sharply. “There’s nobody else to watch over you ’cept me.”
“What about Mom?”
Skinner didn’t answer. Fry now remembered seeing Louis Piejack cruise past the trailer that morning. He also remembered rushing to tell his dad at the crab docks.
“What about Mom?” he asked again. This time he opened his eyes. “Dad?”
“That’s where we’re goin’, to find your mother.”
“But where is she?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“Is Mr. Piejack after her?” Fry asked.
“It’s possible.”
Fry slumped to one side, the football helmet clunking against the truck window.
Perry Skinner said, “I should’ve let ’em keep you in the hospital. What the hell was I thinking?”