Augustine said: “Crocodile Lakes.”
“Yes indeedy.” Skink rose. Once more he displayed the chrome key, the only thing that could unlock The Club from Snapper’s achingly prolongated jowls.
Skink threw it in the water. He said, “Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge. Guess how it got its name.”
Mournfully Snapper stared at the circle of ripples where the key had plopped into the creek.
They’d stopped once along County Road 905, so Skink could snatch a dead diamondback off the blacktop.
“Don’t tell me,” said Edie. “It tastes just like chicken.”
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, bracing 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.”
br /> “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 again. “What’s this all about—some kind of game?”
“I don’t think so,” Bonnie said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Ride it out. Hang on till it’s over.”
Not me, thought Edie. No fucking way.
The Club exaggerated Snapper’s pre-exaggerated features. It pushed the top half of his mug into pudgy creases, like a shar-pei puppy; the eyes were moist slits, the nose pugged nearly to his brow. The rest was all maw.
“An authentic mouth-breather,” Skink said, studying him as if he were a museum piece.
“Fhhhrrrggaaah,” Snapper retorted. His elbows stung from scrapes received when the lunatic had dragged him to the creek.
Now the lunatic was saying: “God, I hate the word ‘nigger.’ Back at the motel I considered killing you when you said it. Blowing your three pitiful teaspoons of brain matter all over the Jeep. Even if you hadn’t shot my friend, the thought would’ve crossed my mind.”
Snapper stopped moaning. Worked at controlling his slobber. Watched gnats and mosquitoes float in and out of his mouth.
“Nothing to be done about that.” Skink flicked at the insects. He’d already spread a generous sheen of repellent on his captive’s neck and arms. “‘Not to be taken internally.’ Says so right on the package.”
Snapper nodded submissively.
“Lester Maddox Parsons is the name on your license. Wild guess says you’re named after that clay-brained Georgia bigot. Am I right?”
A weaker nod.
“So you started out two strikes against you. That’s a shame, Lester, but I expect even if your folks had called you Gandhi, you still would’ve grown up to be a world-class dickhead. Here, let me show you something.”
The governor yanked the Bill Blass suitcase from under his butt. He positioned it in front of Snapper and opened it with a gay flourish. “Drool away,” he said.
Snapper rose to his haunches. The suitcase was packed with money: bank-wrapped bundles of twenties.
“Ninety-four thousand dollars,” Skink reported. “Plus assorted shirts, socks and casual wear. Two packs of French condoms, a set of gold cuff links, a tube of generic lubricant—what else? Oh yes, personal papers.”
He probed in the luggage. “Bank statements, newspaper clippings about the hurricane. And this…”
It was a glossy color sales brochure for a real estate project called Gables-on-the-Bay. Skink sat next to Snapper and opened the brochure.
“There’s our boy. Christophe Michel. ‘Internationally renowned construction engineer.’ See, here’s his picture.”
Snapper recognized him as the dork at the Circle K.
“What would you do,” Skink mused, “if you designed all these absurdly expensive homes—and they fell down in the first big blow. I believe a smart person would grab the money and split, before subpoenas started flying. I believe that was Monsieur Michel’s plan.”
Snapper didn’t give two shits about the Frenchman. He was transfixed by the sight of so much money. He would have gaped rapturously even if his jaws weren’t bolted open. He remembered a Sally Jessy, or maybe it was a Donahue, with some hotel maid from Miami Beach who’d found like forty-two grand under a bed. The maid, for some reason, instead of grabbing the dough she’d turned it in to the manager! That’s how come she’d got on Sally Jessy; the theme that day was “honest people.” Snapper remembered shouting at the TV screen: What a dumb cunt! They’d showed a picture of the cash, and he’d almost come in his pants.
And here he was staring at twice as much. In person.
“Whhrrrrooognnn? Whhhaaakkkfff?”
“Good question, Lester.”
Without warning, the one-eyed freak stood up, unbuttoned his army trousers, whipped out his unit and—to Snapper’s mortification—urinated prodigiously upon the hurricane money.
Woefully Snapper rocked on his heels. He felt sick. Skink tucked himself in and went for the monkey rifle. He opened the chamber, peered inside. Then he strolled over to Snapper, flipped him on his belly and shot a tranquilizer dart into his ass. Right away the fog rolled in and Snapper got drowsy. The last thing he heard came from Skink.
“Who wants to go for a swim?”
Bonnie and Augustine stayed to look at the books while the governor took Edie to the creek. She wanted to talk; Skink wanted to get wet. He stripped, starting with the shower cap.
As he stepped into the water, she said: “What about the crocodiles?”
“They won’t bother us. There aren’t enough of them left to bother anybody. I wish there were.”
Serenely he sank beneath the surface, then burst into the air, shaking bubbles and spray from his beard. He was as brown as a manatee, and so large he seemed to bridge the creek. Edie was unprepared for the sight of his body: the lodgepole arms and broad chest, his bare neck as thick as a cypress trunk. The baggy army fatigues had given none of it away.
“Coming in?”
“Only if we can talk,” she said.
“What else would we do?”
Edie thought: There’s that damn smile again. She asked him to turn around while she took off her clothes.
He heard her slip into the creek. Then he felt her slender arms and legs; she was clinging to his back. As he moved into deeper water, she wrapped herself around his thighs.
“I’m a little scared,” she said.
“Haw! You and I are the scariest beasts in the jungle.”
Edie’s mouth was at his ear. “I want to go back to Miami.”
“So go.”
“But I don’t know the way out.”
The governor was treading against the push of a strong tidal current. It cleaved around their bobbing heads as if they were dead stumps in the creek.
Edie’s breath quickened from the thrill of being in fast water. She said, “From the minute you and Pollyanna showed up at the house, I knew it was over. Snapper’s gun—it meant nothing. We didn’t kidnap you; you kidnapped us!”
“Nature imposes hierarchy. Always,” Skink said.
Edie, in a taut whisper: “Please. Show me the way out of here.”
“And I was so sure you’d be angling for that suitcase.”
“No way,” she said, although it fleetingly had crossed her mind. Instead she’d decided to concentrate on getting out of the Keys alive.
A small silver fish jumped nearby. Playfully Skink swiped at it. He said, “Edie, your opinion of men—it’s not good. That much we share. Christ, imagine what Florida would look like today if women had been in charge of the program! Imagine a beach or two with no ugly high-rises. Imagine a lake without golf courses.” He clapped his hands, making a merry splash.
Edie said, “You’re wrong.”
“Darling, I can dream.” He felt her lips feather against his neck. Then a tongue, followed by the unsubtle suggestion of a nibble. He said, “And what was that?”
“What do you think.”
When she kissed him again, they went down. The saltiness burned her eyes, but she opened them anyway. He was smiling at her, blowing bubbles. They surfaced together and laughed. Carefully she repositioned herself, climbing around him as if he were a tree—hanging from his rock-hard forearms and shoulders, bracing her knees against his hipbones as she swung to the front. All the time she felt him easing toward a shallower spot in the creek, so he could stand while holding her.
Now they were eye-to-eye, green water foaming up between them. Edie said, “Well?”
“Weren’t you the one worried about crocodiles?”
“He’d have to eat both of us, wouldn’t he?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“That means he’d have to be awfully big and hungry.”
Skink said, “We should be quiet, just in case. Certain noises do attract them.” He
sounded serious.
“How quiet?” Lightly she brushed her nipples along the lines of his ribs.
“Very quiet. Not a sound.”
“That’s impossible.” She felt his hands on the curve of her bottom. He was lifting her, keeping her in a gentle suspension. Then he was inside her. Just like that.
“Hush,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can, Edie.”
They made love so slowly that often it seemed they weren’t moving a muscle. All sense of touch and motion came from the warm summer tide that rushed past and around and between them. In the mangroves an outraged heron squawked. More silver mullets jumped toward the shallows. A long black snake drifted by, indifferently riding the slick of the current as if it were floating on jade-colored silk.
Edie Marsh was good. She hardly made a sound. For quite a while she even forgot the purpose of the seduction.
Afterwards she wanted to dry off and take a nap together, but Skink said there was no time. They dressed quickly. Without a word he led her through the tangled woods. Edie saw no particular trail; at times it seemed they were hiking in circles. Once they reached a paved road, he took her arm. They walked another mile to an intersection with a flashing traffic light. A sign said that one road went to Miami, the other toward Key West.
Skink told her to wait there.
“For what?”
“Somebody’s taking you to the mainland. He’ll be coming soon.”
Edie was caught by surprise. “Who?”
“Relax.”
“But I wanted you to take me.”
“Sorry,” said Skink. “This is as far as I go.”
“It’s going to rain again.”
“Yep.”
“I heard lightning!” Edie said.
“So don’t fly any kites.”
“When did you plan this? Dropping me out here…” She was angry now. She realized he’d always meant to let her go—which meant the sex-in-the-creek had been unnecessary.
Not that she hadn’t enjoyed it, or wouldn’t love to try it again, but still she felt tricked.
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
Skink flashed her the politician’s smile. “Slipped my mind.”