26

Bodean Gazzer watched the Negro woman pick through his wallet until she found the condom packet. How could she have possibly known?

Another mystery, Bode thought despondently. Another mystery that won't matter in the end.

As nonchalant as a nurse, the woman unrolled the rubber and plucked out the lottery ticket, which she placed in a pocket of her jeans.

"That ain't yours," Bode Gazzer blurted.

"Pardon?" The Negro woman wore a half smile. "What'd you say, bubba?"

"That one ain't yours."

"Really? Whose might it be?"

"Never mind." Bode didn't like the way her eyes kept cutting to the shotgun, which she'd handed to the white guy while she searched the wallet.

"Funny," she said. "I checked the numbers on that ticket. And they were mynumbers."

"I said never mind."

Chub began to moan and writhe. The white guy said, "He's losing lots of blood."

"Yes, he is," said the Negro woman.

Bode asked, "Is he gone die?"

"He most certainly could."

The white guy said to the woman: "It's your call."

"I suppose so."

She walked briefly out of Bode's view. She reappeared carrying a flat white box with a small red cross painted on the lid. She knelt beside Chub and opened it.

Bode heard her saying: "I wish I could stand here and let you die, but I can't. My whole life, I've never been able to watch a living thing die. Not even a cockroach. Not even a despicable damn sonofabitch like you ... "

The words lifted Bode's hopes for reprieve. Covertly he began rubbing his wrists back and forth, to loosen the rope that held him to the tree.

The shotgun blast had excavated from Chub',s left shoulder a baseball-sized chunk of flesh, muscle and bone. He was not fortunate enough to pass out immediately from pain. The woman's touch ignited splutter and profanity.

Firmly she told him to be still.

"Get away from me, nigger! Get the hell away!" Chub, wild-eyed and hoarse.

"You heard the man." It was the white guy, holding the Remington. "He wants to bleed out. You heard him, JoLayne."

Another agitated voice. Sounded like Bode Gazzer. "For God's sake, Chub, shut up! She's only trying to save your life, you stupid fuck!"

Yep. Definitely the colonel.

Chub shook himself like a dog, spitting blood and sandy grit. The bicycle patch had peeled, so now he had two open eyes with which to keep a bead on the nigger girl; more like one and a half, since the unhealed lid drooped like a ripped curtain.

"What're you gone do to me, if I might ast?"

"Try to clean this messy gunshot and stop your bleeding."

"How come?"

"Good question," the woman said.

Craning his head, Chub saw it was attached to a striped, sand-caked body that could not possibly be his. The cock, for example, was puckered to the size of a raspberry; definitely not a millionaire's cock.

Had to be a nightmare is all, a freak-out from the boat glue. That must be how come the nigger girl looks 'zackly like the one they'd robbed upstate, the one clawed the shit outta us with those hellacious electric-looking fingernails.

"You ain't no doctor," Chub said to her.

"No, but I work in a doctor's office. An animal doctor – "

"Jesus Willy Christ!"

" – and you're about the dumbest, smelliest critter I ever saw," the woman said matter-of-factly.

Chub was too weak to hit her. He wasn't even a hundred percent sure he'd heard it right. Delirium slurred his senses.

"Whatcha gone do with all that lottery money, nigger?"

"Well, I thought I'd buy me a Cadillac or two," JoLayne said, "and a giant-screen color TV."

"Don't you talk down to me."

"And maybe a watermelon patch!"

"You gone kill me, girl?" Chub asked.

"Well, it's tempting."

"Why can't you jes answer me straight."

The white guy's face appeared over the woman's shoulder. He whistled and said, "Hey, sport, what happened to your eye?"

Chub exerted himself to make a sneer. "You muss be some kind a nigger-lover."

"Just a beginner," the white man said.

The last thing Chub heard before blacking out was Bodean Gazzer bellowing: "Hey, I changed my mind! You kin let him die! Go 'head and let the asshole die!"

JoLayne Lucks couldn't do it.

Couldn't, although the stench of the robber had brought everything rushing back, the bile to her throat and the stinging to her eyes. All that had happened that night inside her own house – the horrible words they'd used, the casual way they'd punched her, the places on her body where they'd put their hands.

She still could taste the barrel of the man's revolver, oily and cool on her tongue, yet she couldn't let him die.

Even though he deserved it.

JoLayne willed herself to think of Chub as an animal – a sick confused animal, not unlike the raccoon she'd patched up the night before. It was the only way she could suppress her rage and concentrate on the seeping crater in the man's shoulder; cleaning the wound as best she could, squeezing out the whole tube of antibiotic and dressing the pulp with wads of thin gauze.

The bastard finally passed out, which made it easier. Not having to listen to him call her nigger: that sure helped.

At one point, maneuvering to get the tape on, JoLayne wound up with his head in her lap. Instead of feeling repulsed, she was overwhelmed by an anthropological curiosity. Studying Chub's slack unconscious face, she searched for clues to the toxic wellspring. Was the hatred discernible in his deep-set eyes? The angry-looking creases in his sunburned brow? The dull unhappy set of his stubbled jaw? If there was a telltale mark, a unique congenital feature identifying the man as a cruel sociopath, JoLayne Lucks couldn't find it. His face was no different from that of a thousand other white guys she'd seen, playing out hard fumbling lives. Not all of them were impossible racists.

"Are you all right?" Tom Krome, stooping beside her.

"Fine. Brings back memories of my trauma-unit days."

"How's Gomer?"

"Bleeding's stopped for now. That's about all I can do."

"You want to talk with the other one?"

"Most definitely," JoLayne said.

As Krome approached the buttonwood stump, he sensed something was different. He should've stopped right away to figure it out, but he didn't. Instead he picked up the pace, hurrying toward Bodean Gazzer.

By the time Krome saw the limp rope and noticed the prisoner's legs were tucked under his butt – boot heels braced against the tree trunk – it was too late. With a martial cry the stubby thief vaulted from the ground, spearing Krome in the chest. He toppled backward, sucking air yet clinging madly with both fists to the shotgun. From a bed of damp sand he raised his head to see Bode Gazzer running away, into the mangroves.

Running toward the other end of Pearl Key, where Tom and JoLayne had hidden the other boat.

Which was, now, the only transportation off the island.

Krome hadn't slugged anybody for years. The last time it happened was in the Meadowlands stadium, where he and Mary Andrea were watching the Giants play the Cowboys. The temperature was thirty-eight degrees and the New Jersey sky looked like churned mud. Sitting directly behind Tom Krome and his wife were two enormous noisy men from somewhere in Queens. Longshoremen, Mary Andrea speculated with a scowl, although they would later be revealed as commodities brokers. The men were alternating vodka screwdrivers and beer, and had celebrated a Giants field goal by shedding their coats and jerseys and pinching each other's bare nipples until their eyes watered. By the second quarter Krome was scouting the stands for other seats, while Mary Andrea was packing to go home. One of the New Yorkers produced a pneumatic boat horn, which he deployed in sustained bursts six to ten inches from the base of Krome's skull. Irately Mary Andrea wheeled and snapped at the two men, impelling one of them – he sported a beer-flecked walrus mustache, Krome recalled – to comment loudly upon the modest dimensions of Mary Andrea's breasts, a subject about which she was known to be sensitive.