He would pursue these solitary adventures relentlessly until the inevitable day when the heavy machinery appeared, and the guys in the hard hats would tell him to beat it, not knowing he was the boss's kid.

On those nights, lying in his bed at home, he would wait for his mother to come in and console him. Often she would suggest a new place for his expeditions, a mossy parcel off Old Cutler Road, or twenty acres in the Gables, right on the bay. Pieces his father's company had bought, or was buying, or was considering.

Raw, tangled, hushed, pungent with animals, buzzing with insects, glistening with extravagant webs, pulsing, rustling and doomed. And always the portal to these mysterious places was a trail.

Which is what Winder needed on this night.

Soon he found it: an ancient path of scavengers, flattened by raccoons and opossums but widened recently by something much larger. As Winder slipped into the woods, he felt ten years old again. He followed the trail methodically but not too fast, though his heart was pounding absurdly in his ears. He tried to travel quietly, meticulously ducking boughs and stepping over rotted branches. Every thirty or so steps, he would turn off the flashlight, hold his breath and wait. Before long, he could no longer hear the cars passing on Card Sound Road. He was so deep in the wetlands that a shout or a scream would be swallowed at once, eternally.

He walked for fifteen minutes before he came upon the remains of a small campfire. Joe Winder knelt and sniffed at the half-burned wood; somebody had doused it with coffee. He poked at the acrid remains of something wild that had been cooked in a small rusty pan. He swung the flashlight in a semicircle and spotted a dirty cooler, some lobster traps and a large cardboard box with the letters "EDTIAR" stamped on the side. On the ground, crumpled into a bright pile, was a fluorescent orange rainsuit. Winder unfolded it, held it up to gauge the size. Then he put it back the way he found it.

Behind him, a branch snapped and a voice said, "How do you like the new pants?"

Winder wheeled around and pointed the flashlight as if it were a pistol.

The man was eating – and there was no mistaking it – a fried snake on a stick.

"Cottonmouth," he said, crunching off a piece. "Want some?"

"No thanks."

"Then we've got nothing to talk about."

Joe Winder politely took a bite of snake. "Like chicken," he said.

The man was cleaning his teeth with a fishhook. He looked almost exactly as Joe Winder remembered, except that the beard was now braided into numerous silvery sprouts that drooped here and there from the man's jaw. He was probably in his early fifties, although it was impossible to tell. The mismatched eyes unbalanced his face and made his expression difficult to read; the snarled eyebrows sat at an angle of permanent scowl. He wore a flowered pink shower cap, sunglasses on a lanyard, a heavy red plastic collar and no shirt. At first Joe Winder thought that the man's chest was grossly freckled, but in the flashlight's trembling beam the freckles began to hover and dance: mosquitoes, hundreds of them, feasting on his blood.

In a strained voice Joe Winder said, "I can't help but notice that thing on your neck."

"Radio collar." The man lifted his chin so Winder could see it. "Made by Telonics. A hundred fifty megahertz. I got it off a dead panther."

"Does it work?" Winder asked.

"Like a charm." The man snorted. "Why else would I be wearing it?"

Joe Winder decided this was something they could chat about later. He said, "I didn't mean to bother you. I just wanted to thank you for what you did the other night."

The stranger nodded. "No problem. Like I said, I got a pair of pants out of the deal." He slapped himself on the thigh. "Canvas, too."

"Listen, that little guy – Angel Gaviria was his name. They found him hanging under the bridge." Winder's friend at the medical examiner's office had confirmed the identity.

"What do you know," the stranger said absently.

"I was wondering about the other one, too," said Winder, "since they were trying to kill me."

"Don't blame you for being curious. By the way, they call me Skink. And I already know who you are. And your daddy, too, goddamn his soul."

He motioned for Joe Winder to follow, and crashed down a trail that led away from the campfire. "I went through your wallet the other night," Skink was saying, "to make sure you were worth saving."

"These days I'm not so sure."

"Shit," said Skink. "Don't start with that."

After five minutes they broke out of the hardwoods into a substantial clearing. A dump, Joe Winder noticed.

"Yeah, it's lovely," muttered Skink. He led Winder to the oxidized husk of an abandoned Cadillac, and lifted the trunk hatch off its hinges. The nude body of Spearmint Breath had been fitted inside, folded as neatly as a beach chair.

"Left over from the other night," Skink explained. "He ran out of steam halfway up the big bridge. Then we had ourselves a talk."

"Oh Jesus."

"A bad person," Skink said. "He would've brought more trouble."

An invisible cloud of foul air rose from the trunk. Joe Winder attempted to breathe through his mouth.

Skink played the beam ol the flashlight along the dead goon's swollen limbs. "Notice the skeeters don't go near him," he said, "so in one sense, he's better off."

Joe Winder backed away, speechless. Skink handed him the light and said, "Don't worry, this is only temporary." Winder hoped he wasn't talking to the corpse.

Skink replaced the trunk hatch on the junked Cadillac. "Asshole used to work Security at the Kingdom. He and Angel baby. But I suppose you already knew that."

"All I know," said Winder, "is that everything's going bad and I'm not sure what to do."

"Tell me about it. I still can't believe they shot John Lennon and it's been – what, ten years?" He sat down heavily on the trunk of the car. "You ever been to the Dakota?"

"Once," Joe Winder said.

"What's it like?"

"Sad."

Skink twirled the fishhook in his mouth, bit off the barb, and spit it out savagely. "Some crazy shithead with a .38 – it's the story of America, isn't it?"

"We live in violent times. That's what they say."

"Guys like that, they give violence a bad name." Skink stretched out on the trunk, and stared at the stars.

"Sometimes I think about that bastard in jail, how he loves all the publicity. Went from being nobody to The Man Who Shot John Lennon. I think some pretty ugly thoughts about that."

"It was a bad day," Joe Winder agreed. He couldn't tell if the man was about to sleep or explode.

Suddenly Skink sat up. With a blackened fingernail he tapped the radio collar on his neck. "See, it's best to keep moving. If you don't move every so often, a special signal goes out. Then they think the panther's dead and they all come searching."

"Who's they?"

"Rangers," Skink replied. "Game and Fish."

"But the panther is dead."

"You're missing the whole damn point."

As usual. Joe Winder wondered which way to take it, and decided he had nothing to lose. "What exactly are you doing out here?" he asked.

Skink grinned, a stunning, luminous movie-star grin.

"Waiting," he said.