Every winter transients flock to Florida as sure as the tourists and turkey buzzards. Their numbers are not so great, but often they are more visible; sleeping in the parks and public libraries, panhandling the street corners. The weather is so mild that there is almost no outdoor place that a bum would find uninhabitable in southern Florida. Paradise is how many of them would describe it. Some towns address the problem with less tolerance than others (Palm Beach, for example, where loitering is treated the same as ax-murder), but usually the bums get by with little fear of incarceration. The reason is simple, and in it lies another prime attraction for the nation's wandering winos: there is no room for them in South Florida's jails because the jails already are too crowded with dangerous criminals.

Beginning in late December, then, the transients start appearing on the streets. Rootless, solitary, and unwelcome, they are ideal victims for the randomly violent. Kyle and his high-school friends discovered this the very first time. On a five-dollar bet from Cole, Kyle slugged a wino under a bridge. The boys ran away, but nothing happened. Of course the transient never reported the attack—the local cops would have laughed in his face. A week later the teenagers tried it again when they discovered an old longhair sleeping on a golf course in Boca Raton. This time Jeff and Cole pitched in, while Kyle added a few whacks with his stepfather's four-iron. This time when they ran away, the kids were laughing.

Soon bum-bashing became part of the weekly recreation; a thrill, something to do. The boys were easily bored and not all that popular at school, shunned by the jocks, dopers, and surfers alike. So whenever Kyle could get the car and swipe some beer money, Jeff and Cole were raring to go. Shooting the rifle always seemed to put them in the right mood.

As soon as they left the dump they started scouting for bums to bash. It was Jeff who spotted the guy curled up beneath the Turnpike overpass. Kyle drove by once, turned the car around, and drove past again. This time he parked fifty yards down the road. The three teenagers got out and walked back. Kyle liked the way it was shaping up—a dark stretch of highway with practically no traffic.

Skink was nearly asleep, stretched out halfway up the concrete embankment and faced away from the road. He heard someone coming, but assumed it was only Decker and the Cuban detective. As the men got closer, their footsteps did not alarm Skink nearly so much as their whispering. He was turning over to take a look just as Kyle ran up and kicked him brutally in the head.

Skink rolled down the embankment and lay still, facedown on the flat ground.

"Hey, Mr. Hobo," said Kyle, "sorry I busted your shades." He held up the broken sunglasses for the others to see.

Jeff and Cole each took a turn kicking Skink in the ribs. "I like his outfit," Jeff said. He was a bony kid with volcanic pustular acne. "This'd be great for hunting," he said, fingering the rainsuit.

"Then take it," Kyle said.

"Yeah, go ahead," Cole said, "even though it's about ten sizes too big."

"You'll look like an orange tepee," Kyle teased.

Jeff knelt and tried to roll Skink on his back. "He's a big sumbitch," he said. "Gimme a hand."

They turned Skink over and stripped him.

"He looks dead," Cole remarked.

"Check out the ponytail," Jeff said. He had climbed into Skink's enormous rainsuit. The hood flopped down over his eyes, and the legs and arms were way too long. The other boys laughed as Jeff did a little jig under the highway bridge. "I'm Mr. Hobo!" he sang. "Dead Mr. Hobo! Have a drink, make a stink—"

Jeff stopped singing when he saw the stranger. The man was sprinting toward them from across the road. Jeff tried to warn Kyle but it was too late.

The man took down both Kyle and Cole with a diving knee-high tackle. On the ground it was madness. The man hit Cole three times, crushing his nose and shattering his right cheekbone with an eggshell sound that made Jeff want to gag. While this was going on, Kyle, who was taller than the stranger, managed to get on his feet and grab the man around the neck, from behind. But the stranger, still on his knees, merely brought both elbows up sharply into Kyle's groin. Sickened, Jeff watched his other friend crumple. Then the man was on top of Kyle, aiming tremendous jackhammer punches at the meat of his throat.

Jeff turned from the scene to run but he stumbled inside the baggy rainsuit, got up, faltered again. A hand gripped the back of his neck and something cold pressed against the base of his skull. A gun.

"Don't move, you little fuckwad." A tough-looking dark man with a mustache.

He dragged Jeff back to the overpass, where the bigger stranger was still straddling Kyle and wordlessly redesigning the young man's face.

"Stop it!" yelled the dark man with the gun. "Decker, stop!"

But R. J. Decker couldn't stop; he couldn't even hear. Al Garcia's voice echoed under the bridge but not a word reached Decker's ears. All that registered in his consciousness was the sight of a face and the need to punish it. Decker was working mechanically, his knuckles raw and bloody and numb. He stopped punching only when heavy damp arms encircled his chest and lifted him in the air, as if he were weightless, and suspended him there for what seemed like a very long time. Coming down, unwinding finally, the first thing Decker could hear was the furious sound of his own breathing. The second thing, from the beast with the big arms, was a tired voice that said, "Okay, Miami, I'm impressed."

Skink slipped unconscious in the back seat. His head sagged against R. J. Decker's shoulder and the breath rattled deep in his ribs. Decker felt warm drops seeping through his shirt.

"He's lost that eye," Al Garcia said grimly, chewing on a cigarette as he drove.

Decker had seen it too. Skink's left eye was a jellied mess—Kyle, the big kid, had been wearing Texas roach-stomper boots. A whitish fluid oozed down Skink's cheek.

"He needs a doctor," Decker said.

So did the teenage thugs, Garcia thought, but they would live—no thanks to Decker. Barehanded he would have killed them all if Skink hadn't stopped him. Garcia felt certain that the kids wouldn't tell the police about the beating—Jeff, the acne twerp, was the type to spill the beans and the others knew it. Together they'd invent some melodramatic story of what had happened under the bridge, something that would play well at school. Garcia was pretty sure two of them would spend the rest of the semester in the hospital, anyway.

Decker felt exhausted and depressed. His arms ached and his knuckles stung. He touched Skink's face and felt a crust of blood on the big man's beard.

"Maybe I ought to give up," Decker said.

"Don't be a moron."

"Once we get him to a doctor, you drop me off on the highway and haul ass back to Dade County. Nobody'll know a thing."

"Fuck you," Garcia said.

"Al, it's not worth it."

"Speak for yourself." It was Skink. He raised his head and wiped his face with the sleeve of his rainsuit. With a forefinger he probed his broken eye socket and said, "Great."

"There's a hospital near the St. Lucie exit," Garcia said.

Skink said, "Naw, just keep driving."

"I'm sorry, captain," Decker said. "We shouldn't have left you alone."

"Alone is how I like it." He slid over to the corner of the back seat. His face sank into the shadow.

Garcia pulled off the Turnpike at Fort Pierce and stopped at a Pic 'n' Pay convenience store. Decker got out to make a phone call. While he was gone Skink stirred again and straightened up. In the washhouse light his face looked pulpy and lopsided; Garcia could tell he was in agony.