He crept down the midden and, except for tripping once and dropping the rifle, his approach was practically furtive. Hearing snores, he assumed that all the kayakers were asleep. Quickly he padded into the clearing and snatched up a large duffel bag.
That’s when a head poked out from one of the tents. Sammy Tigertail saw the movement and whirled, waving the rifle. His heart hammered.
“Easy, big guy,” the woman whispered.
“We need water!”
“Like we don’t?”
“But I got the gun!” said Sammy Tigertail. “Now, shut up.”
“Did you steal our kayaks?” The woman had a mild southern accent and light hair, but the angles of her face were obscured by a shadow. “Hold on,” she said, squirming from the sleeping bag.
“What are you doin’?”
“Comin’ with you.”
“No fucking way. Not again,” the Seminole said angrily.
The woman stood up and stepped into her shoes, some sort of rubberized Yuppie sneakers. She was a tall one.
“You’ve got the boats, and now the last of our water-I’ll be damned if I’m stayin’ out here to die,” she said.
A breeze stirred the mangroves and riffled the leaves of the big poinciana. The woman folded her arms against the chill and said, “Well?”
Sammy Tigertail knew that if he left her behind, she would awaken the others, and they’d contact the authorities to report that a thieving redskin was loose on the island.
She said, “I’ll do whatever you want. And I mean whatever.”
The Seminole raised his eyes to the leering moon. The spirits seemed to be punishing him. He suspected it had something to do with Wilson, the dead tourist.
“You’ll do anything?” he asked the woman.
She nodded.
“Then carry this bag.”
“Yes, bwana.”
“And be quiet,” said the Indian, “or I’ll cut off your tongue.”
The woman stuck it out for him to see, the pearl stud burnished by the moonlight. Sammy Tigertail frowned.
“Oh well. Some guys dig it,” she said.
“My girlfriend had one attached somewhere else. It didn’t feel so good.”
The Indian turned and darted into the trees. He heard the woman trailing behind him, breathing fast under the weight of the duffel. He expected her to start chattering like a crow, but she didn’t. It was a nice surprise.
Thirty years in the seafood business combined with grossly irregular bathing habits had cloaked upon Louis Piejack a distinct and inconquerable funk. Were it cologne, the essence would have included the skin of Spanish mackerel, the roe of black mullet, the guts of gag grouper, the wrung-out brains of spiny lobster and the milky seepage of raw oysters. The musk emanated most pungently from Piejack’s neck and arms, which had acquired a greenish yellow sheen under a daily basting of gill slime and fish shit. Nothing milder than industrial lye could have cleansed the man.
He stunk like a bucket of bait.
Honey Santana eventually would have pinpointed the smell-and the danger-were it not for an untimely pollen allergy that kept her clogged and sniffling. No sooner had she dozed off than Louis Piejack hoisted himself, with a hellish groan, into the old cistern. Woozy with pain, the spine-covered stalker was spying through a gap in the cinder blocks when Eugenie Fonda departed stealthily with a dark-skinned young gunman. Piejack felt no curiosity about the peculiar event; Honey was his only concern.
The person who would have been least surprised by the fishmonger’s felonious pursuit was his wife, who two decades earlier had been the object of a more subtle courtship. At the time, Louis Piejack had been smoother and more attentive to hygiene, and in the meager male talent pool of rural Collier County he’d sparkled like a gem. After the wedding he’d gone downhill fast, and when his wife had threatened to leave he torched her mother’s minivan and warned that it was only the beginning. Even when her family moved away to the Redlands, Becky Piejack remained with Louis out of sheer cold dread.
So awful was the marriage that she hadn’t been entirely dismayed to learn she had cancer-anything to get out of the house. There were no chemotherapy facilities in Everglades City, so Becky looked forward to the twice-monthly trips to Gainesville as furloughs from her deviant and disgusting spouse. When after three years the oncologists pronounced her disease-free, Becky withheld the news from Louis and continued to travel every other week. On those long drives she often brought a young orchid collector named Armando and a box of Berlitz language tapes, with which she schooled herself in French and Portuguese. Becky Piejack was gearing up for the day when she’d gather the courage to leave her husband, which she assumed would require fleeing the continental United States. Either Paris or Rio sounded good.
In truth, it had been a long while since Louis Piejack had thought of his wife in a criminally possessive way. Except when inconvenienced by her illness, he seldom thought of her at all. Now, shivering on the concrete slab of the cistern, Piejack went about planning a new life of passion with Honey Santana. Once they returned to the mainland, he would immediately evict Becky and her hospital bed, along with the wicker furniture that he so detested. He might allow Honey to repaint the living area but not the bedroom, which would remain black with red crown molding. For a moving-in gift he’d buy his sex angel a set of new cookware, including a kettledrum fryer for wild boar and turkey. Then he’d put her back to work at the fish market, peeling shrimp or running the cash register, so that he could keep an eye on her. As for Honey’s teenaged son, the smartass punk could go live with his old man.
At some point in his ruminations Louis Piejack experienced a new and unfamiliar pain-a hot welter of stings on the palm of his left hand, a location he could not access without gnawing through the surgical dressing. In the darkness Piejack hadn’t seen the platoons of fire ants march the length of his aching arm and disappear through one of the ragged finger holes into the moist cocoon of dirty gauze and sticky tape. He didn’t cry out, or even whimper. Stoically he ground his molars while the little red demons tore divots in his flesh.
He consoled himself with dream visions of his breathtaking goddess, who in real life lay snoring like a stevedore less than fifty feet away. To Louis Piejack, scorching physical agony seemed a small price to pay for the midlife companionship of a woman such as Honey Santana. He was morbidly amused to realize that the extremity now being devoured by insects was the same one that had touched her illicitly that tumultuous day at the market.
Go ahead and eat me, he mocked the ants. See if I give a fuck.
Perry Skinner followed Sandfly Pass to the Gulf and slowly headed up the coast, scouting the outermost islands for signs of campers. The wind had stiffened, pushing a troublesome chop that slapped the hull of the skiff and made silent running impossible. Another problem was debris in the water; the previous summer’s hurricanes had uprooted scores of old mangroves and strewn their knobby skeletons throughout the shallow banks and creeks. To avoid an accident, Skinner was forced to use the spotlight continually, though it risked betraying their approach.
As the skiff entered a deeper bay, the waves kicked higher, misting salt spray. From the bow Fry shouted, “Dad, you see that?”
Skinner had already spotted it-the flicker of fire on a nearby shore. He cut the engine and dimmed the spotlight.
“Is it them?” Fry asked anxiously.
“Son, I don’t know.”
The breeze and the tide were at odds, foiling his drift and nudging the boat onto the flats. Skinner tilted the engine and picked up the long graphite pole. Fry watched him scale a wobbly platform above the outboard motor and said, “You’re kidding me.”