Fry pointed. “Out there somewhere.” He filled her in about Louis Piejack.

“Whoa, hold on-your old man’s sneakin’ around this godforsaken jungle in the middle of the night, risking his butt to rescue his ex-wife. Is that possibly true?” The woman named Genie seemed enchanted by the notion.

“Is there a gun in that suitcase?” Fry asked.

“Just a videocam,” she said, “but don’t worry, sport, you won’t need to shoot anybody. The Indian’s girlfriend told me he brained some pervo that sounds like your mom’s stalker. She said the guy looked dead as a doornail.”

“Yesssss!” Fry pumped a fist.

Genie tossed the useless cell phone into the bushes. “Let’s go find your folks,” she said, “and get the hell outta here.”

Twenty

In the summary of his report for the Smithsonian Institution, the Rev. Clay MacCauley thoughtfully editorialized about future relations between the Seminoles and the white settlers who by 1880 were flooding into Florida. The ethnologist foresaw that “great and rapid change” was inevitable, and that the Seminole was “about to enter a future unlike any past he has known.” MacCauley argued for justice and fairness in dealing with the tribe, so that the young braves would be friendlier toward whites than their jaded, battle-weary elders. It was the minister’s hope that the Indians might in a climate of peaceful cooperation forget “their tragic past,” but he warned that angering them could be a costly blunder.

Now that he can no longer retreat, MacCauley wrote, now that he can no longer successfully contend, now that he is to be forced into close, unavoidable contact with men he has known only as enemies, what will he become?

A gambling tycoon like my uncle Tommy, thought Sammy Tigertail, recalling the passage. Or a fucked-up half-breed like me.

He was pondering the irony of MacCauley’s question while Gillian made love to him. It was the closest-possible contact one could have with a white person, and indeed it seemed unavoidable. Sammy Tigertail believed the pacifist preacher would have approved of what he and Gillian were doing-the conciliatory spirit of the act, if not some of the boisterously subjugating positions. It’s better than smoking a damn peace pipe, he thought.

The Indian had succumbed to the college girl’s advances because it wasn’t a surrender, or the commencement of another foolish doomed affair; it was farewell. Gillian would be departing the island the next day, whether she wanted to or not. Never would Sammy Tigertail set eyes on her again. There was no other choice-not after his stray bullet had struck Lester. A wounded white man was apt to stir up more trouble than a dead one.

Reverend MacCauley was wrong about one thing, Sammy Tigertail thought. Retreat is always an option when there are ten thousand places to hide.

Gillian rocked briskly on top of him, her eyes half-closed and the golden lick of firelight on her skin.

“I wish you’d hold me the way you hold that damn guitar,” she was saying, “like you’ll never let go.”

“Quiet,” Sammy Tigertail whispered.

“Quiet’s okay sometimes,” she said, slowing down. “Sexy, even.”

“Exactly.”

“You know who’s quite the talker? Ethan. In the sack, I mean.”

“Not now, please?”

She arched, playfully clenching a certain muscle. “What’s the matter, Thlocko, you jealous?”

Sammy Tigertail measured his response.

“Don’t worry, you got him beat by a mile.” Gillian squeezed again. Then on she went: “Ethan’s gotta talk dirty or he can’t keep it up. But at the same time he’s, like, unbelievably shy. I’m serious, he won’t even say the F word!”

Sammy Tigertail bucked his hips so forcefully that Gillian hiccuped. “You go on with this story,” he told her, “I’m gonna stuff Lester’s socks in your mouth.”

“That old trick?” She giggled. “I don’t think so.”

He weighed the pros and cons of gagging her, then decided against it. Once she was gone, a life of sublime silence awaited him.

Gillian said, “He was so shy-Ethan was-that whenever we did it, he spoke German. That’s the only way he could make himself talk dirty! Problem is, nothing sounds dirty in German the way Ethan says it. But here he goes, poundin’ away, yankin’ on my hair, tellin’ me do this, Fraulein, do that-only I haven’t got a frigging clue what he’s talkin’ about. No lie, Thlocko, it’s like he’s reading from the owner’s manual of his old man’s Mercedes. Is that wild or what?”

The Indian said, “I’ve got a question.”

“But this is only after he told me about setting free those dolphins-before then I wouldn’t go to bed with him. What is it you just said?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Like?”

“Could you check and see if we’re still having sex?”

Gillian smiled. “We are,” she said. “In front of Lester, too. Does it still count if he’s unconscious?”

Sammy Tigertail began pumping at such a pace that Gillian quit gabbing and hung on with both hands. Somehow they finished together, he with a low sigh and she with a sequence of piercing, feral yelps. Afterward he gently rolled her onto a blanket, where she curled up like a kitten.

He was standing away from the campfire, struggling to turn his khakis right-side out, when a gun barrel poked him in the small of the back. His first thought was that the wounded white man had made a miraculous recovery.

But it wasn’t Lester.

“Be still,” the voice warned.

“Yes, sir.”

A pause, then: “Sammy, is that you?” The gunman spun him around and exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!”

“Hello, Mr. Skinner.”

“What happened to your head, man?”

“I fell on an oyster shell,” Sammy Tigertail lied.

Gillian drowsily looked up, tugging the blanket over her breasts. “Who’s that?”

“A friend,” the Seminole said hopefully.

He and Perry Skinner had met when Sammy Tigertail was a teenager and new to the tribe. Skinner had rolled his truck after swerving to miss an otter pup on the Tamiami Trail. Sammy Tigertail and his uncle had been the first to drive up on the scene, and they’d dragged Skinner out of the wreck moments before it caught fire. Later Sammy Tigertail learned that Skinner was an important and prosperous man in Everglades City. It was he who’d loaned the young Indian the crab boat on which Wilson’s body was ferried to Lostmans River.

Sammy Tigertail assumed that’s why Skinner had tracked him down-the cops must have sorted out what had happened, then informed Skinner that his vessel had been illegally used to transport a dead tourist.

“I can guess why you’re here,” the Seminole said.

Skinner stuck the handgun in his belt. “Excellent. Where is she?”

Sammy Tigertail was puzzled. “Who, Mr. Skinner?”

“Honey.” For Gillian’s edification he added: “My ex.”

Sammy Tigertail tried to conceal his relief that Skinner’s surprise appearance was unconnected to the Wilson fiasco.

“She’s out here somewhere, Sammy. You remember what she looks like, right?”

“It’s big country, Mr. Skinner. I haven’t seen her.”

The Indian had met Honey Santana only once, but that was enough. Every autumn since the truck accident, Skinner had given Sammy Tigertail twenty-five pounds of fresh stone-crab claws to take back to the reservation. The gift was always picked up on October 15, the first day of the trap season, when the largest crabs were caught. One year when the Seminole came to get the cooler, Honey Santana happened to be at the packing house. She was reaming out her then-husband about a cracked exhaust pipe on one of his boats, which she said was polluting the air on the river, gassing the herons and ospreys. Sammy Tigertail had never seen a woman so lovely and so possessed. She had rattled him, and he hadn’t forgotten the episode. He had also not forgotten the sight of Perry Skinner calmly slipping on a set of Remington earmuffs to block out his wife’s fulminations.