"Oh yeah?"

Decisively he lit a cigaret. Then, in a tough voice: "I helped 'em steal it m'self."

Amber was quiet for a while, watching a long white yacht glide under the drawbridge. Shiner worried that he'd said too much and now she didn't believe any of it. Desperately he blurted, "It's the God's truth!"

"OK," said Amber. "But where do I fit in?"

Shiner thought: I wish I knew. Then he got an idea. "You believe in the white man?"

"Honey, I'll believe in Kermit the Frog if he leaves twenty percent on the table." She reached over and took hold of Shiner's left arm, causing him to tremble with enchantment. "Let's have a look at that tattoo," she said.

Chub was in no mood to hear whining about the pickup truck. "Leave it," he snapped at Bode Gazzer.

"Here? Right by the water?"

"Won't nobody fuck with it, you got the handicap deal on there."

"Yeah, like theycare."

"They who?"

"The Black Tide."

"Look here," Chub said, "the boat thing was your idea, so don't go chickenshit on me now. Not after the motherfucker of a day I've had."

"But – "

"Leave the goddamn truck! Jesus Willy, we got twenty-eight million bucks. Buy a whole Dodge dealership, you want."

Sullenly Bode Gazzer joined Chub in loading the stolen boat. The last thing to come out of the pickup was the rolled-up chamois.

"The hell's in there?" Chub said. "Or shouldn't I ast. Sounds like a bag a Budweiser cans."

Bode said, "The AR-15. I took it apart to clean."

"God help us. Let's go."

Bode knew better than to ask for the wheel; he could see there'd been problems on the boat. Chub's clothing was soaked, and his ponytail was garnished with a strand of cinnamon-colored seaweed. The deck and vinyl bucket seats were littered with small broken pieces of what appeared to be bluish ceramic, as if Chub had smashed a plate.

As they idled away from the ramp, Bode turned for one last look at his red Ram truck, which he fully expected to be stripped or stolen outright by dusk. He noticed a man standing a short distance up the shore, at the fringe of some mangroves. It was a white man, so Bode Gazzer wasn't alarmed; probably just a fisherman.

As the boat labored to gain speed, Bode shouted: "How's she run?"

"Like a one-legged whore."

"What's all the mud and shit in here?"

"I can't hear you," Chub yelled back.

Given the slop on deck and the halting performance of the outboards, it was pointless for Chub to deny that he'd run the thing aground. He saw no reason, however, to tell Bodean Gazzer how close he'd come to losing half the lottery jackpot.

Bravely kicking back to the shallows.

Flailing and groping in the marl and grasses until he'd found it in eighteen inches of water: the Lotto ticket, waving in the current like a small miracle.

Naturally it was in the claws of a blue crab. The nasty fucker had staked a claim to the moldy Band-Aid on which the ticket was stuck. The delirious Chub hadn't hesitated to leap upon the feisty scavenger, which gouged him mercilessly with one claw while clinging with the other to its sodden prize. With the crab fastened intractably to his right hand, Chub had clambered over the transom and thrashed the little bastard to pieces against the gunwale. In this manner he had reclaimed the Lotto ticket, but victory came with a price. The only intact segment of the defunct crab was the cream-blue pincers that hung from the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger; a macabre broach.

Bodean Gazzer noticed it immediately, but decided not to say a word. Thinking: I shoulda kept drivin' straight to Tall'hassee. I shoulda never turnt around.

"I got a map," he shouted over the hack of the mud-choked Mercurys.

No audible response from Chub.

"I picked out a island, too."

Chub seemed to nod.

"Pearl Key!" Bode shouted. "We'll be safe there."

Chub launched a gooey hawker over the windshield. "First we gotta make a stop."

"I know, I know." Bode Gazzer let the engines drown his words. "Jewfish goddamn Creek."

19

Demencio spent all day painting the rest of JoLayne's cooters. Without a reliable biblical archive, it was difficult to find thirty-three separate portraits for duplication on turtle shells. In the interest of time Demencio chose a generic saintly countenance, varying the details only slightly from cooter to cooter.

While the reptiles were drying, Trish burst into the house and exclaimed: "Four hundred and twenty bucks!"

Demencio's eyebrows danced – it was a gangbuster of a visitation.

"They flat-out love this guy," said his wife.

"Sinclair? My theory, it's more the apostles."

"Honey, it's the whole package. Him, the weeping Mary, the cooters ... There's a little something for everybody."

It was true; Demencio had never seen a group of pilgrims so enthralled.

Trish said, "Just think what we could clear, Christmas week. When did JoLayne say she'll be back?"

"Any day." Demencio began capping the paint bottles.

"I bet she'd loan us the cooters over the holidays!"

One thing about Trish, she had a ton of faith in human nature. "Loan or rent?"said Demencio. "And even if she did, what about him?"

"Sinclair?"

"He ain't wrapped for the long haul. By tomorrow he's liable to be flashin' his weenie at old ladies."

Trish said, "You should go have a talk."

Demencio reminded her that he couldn't understand very much Sinclair said. "It's like his tongue come off the hinges."

"Well, Mister Dominick Amador doesn't seem to have any trouble communicating." Tnsh stood at the front window, parting the drapes to get a view of the shrine.

Demencio jumped up. "Sonofabitch!"

He hurried outside and chased Dominick from the property. In retreat the stigmata man hastily discarded his new crutches, slick with Crisco, which Demencio snatched up and beat to pieces against a concrete utility pole. Demencio meant the outburst to serve as a warning. He scanned the distant ficus hedge into which Dominick Amador had disappeared, and hoped the pesky con artist was watching.

To Sinclair he admonished: "That guy's bad news."

Sinclair sat Buddha-style among the apostolic turtles. The white sheet he wore was bunched and soiled, crisscrossed with diminutive muddy tracks.

Demencio said, "What'd that asshole want? Did he ask you to work with him?"

Sinclair's expression was quizzical and remote, an accurate reflection of his state of mind.

"Did he show you his hands?" Demencio demanded.

"Yes. His feet, too," Sinclair said.

"Ha! Now here's a bulletin: He did that to himself.Bloody holes and all. That Dominick, he's one twisted sonofabitch."

Demencio felt he could speak freely, since the tourists were gone. "He bothers you again, let me know," he said.

"Oh, I'm fine," said Sinclair, which was the truth. Never had he felt such spiritual peace. Watching the clouds was as good as floating: cool and weightless, free from earthly burdens. Except for lemonade breaks, he'd scarcely moved a muscle all day. Meanwhile the turtles had explored him – up one arm, down one leg, back and forth across his chest. The march of miniature toenails tickled and soothed Sinclair. One of the cooters – was it Simon? – had made it up the steep slope of Sinclair's skull and settled on his vast unlined forehead, where it sunned itself contentedly for hours. The sensation had put Sinclair into a Zen-like trance; he lolled among the tiny creatures like a Gulliver, without the ropes. The crushing guilt of sending Tom Krome to his death evaporated like a gray mist. The Register'sfrenetic newsroom and the job that Sinclair had once taken so seriously receded into the vaguest of recollections, appearing to him in cacophonous and incoherent flashes. Every so often, all the headlines he'd ever composed would scroll through his consciousness one after another, like a demonic Dow Jones ticker, causing Sinclair to yodel alliteratively. He understood these eruptions to mean he was forever finished with daily journalism, a revelation that contributed in no small way to his serenity.