“What’s she doing out here?” Gillian asked. “Did she, like, run away?”
Skinner didn’t answer. He said, “We heard gunfire on this island.”
“That was him”-Gillian was pointing at the Seminole-“shooting him.” She turned and nodded toward the prone pudgy white man.
“I didn’t mean to, Mr. Skinner,” Sammy Tigertail said. He noticed that the sky in the east was beginning to turn lavender. The sun would be coming up soon.
Skinner bent over and studied the man with the bloody shoulder, who was breathing loudly but steadily. Skinner said he didn’t recognize him.
“We call him Lester. He’s a private eye,” Gillian volunteered.
“Sammy, listen to me,” Skinner said. “There’s a sick fucker with a taped-up hand chasing after Honey. He’s got a johnboat, and he’s also carryin’ a sawed-off. You seen him?”
Gillian started to blurt something but the Seminole silenced her with a glare.
“Sammy?” Skinner said evenly.
“No, I haven’t seen anybody like that.” Sammy Tigertail hated lying to Mr. Skinner, but he didn’t need another corpse in his life.
“Tell him the truth. You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Gillian.
The Indian watched helplessly as she wrapped herself in the blanket and hurried to the other side of the campsite. She came back holding the sawed-off shotgun for Perry Skinner to see.
“Band-Aid Man was gonna shoot Lester, so Thlocko whacked him on the head,” she said.
“You kill him?” Skinner asked.
Sammy Tigertail shrugged. “He looked pretty dead. Smelled dead, too.”
“That would be wonderful news.” Skinner came very close to smiling.
“I didn’t mean to hit the man so hard.”
“We’ll take care of it, Sammy. Don’t worry.”
“Where was your wife headed?” the Seminole asked.
“Out here somewheres. And it’s ‘ex-wife,’ Sammy. She was taking some friends on a kayak tour.”
“How many people?”
“A man and a woman from Texas,” Skinner said.
“The kayaks, were they red and yellow?”
“That’s right. I found ’em tied in the mangroves not far from here.”
Sammy Tigertail was pleased to know that soon he’d have the island all to himself. “I think I know where she’s campin’, Mr. Skinner. Sorry, but I stole their food and water.”
“The boats, too,” Gillian chimed in.
“Water was all I wanted but the munchies were stashed in the same bag,” the Seminole explained.
Perry Skinner said, “You’re gonna take me there right away.”
“Definitely.”
“First let me run back and get my boy. I left him in the woods.”
“We’ll wait here,” Gillian promised.
After Skinner had gone, she said, “You do not want to mess with that guy.”
Sammy Tigertail nodded. “His old lady, either.”
Gillian leaned back and admired at the blushing sky. “Hey, there’s the sun!”
“Yup. Another day in paradise.”
“What should we do with the shotgun?”
“Toss it,” said the Seminole.
Waiting for sunrise, Boyd Shreave flailed at a lone mosquito floating about his head and shoulders. It felt too cold for mosquitoes, and Shreave feared he was being pursued by a dangerous rogue.
Earlier Honey had insisted upon reading aloud from a paperback text devoted to the insects, which were by far the deadliest creatures on earth. Shreave knew this was true because he’d seen a show about it on the Animal Planet channel. Millions of humans perished from hideous mosquito-borne maladies, including dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, St. Louis encephalitis and the West Nile virus. Over the centuries the flying pests had brought painful death to popes and peasants alike, and ravaged robust armies.
However, of approximately 2,500 known species, the smallish mosquito common to the salt marshes of the western Everglades carries no pathogens lethal to man. The fact would have thrilled Boyd Shreave, had he been aware of it. Desperately he continued slapping at his tiny tormentor, which he could not see in the dim pre-dawn but whose sinister presence was betrayed by a faint taunting hum. Any cessation in the buzzing sound unnerved him, for it meant that the mosquito surreptitiously had alighted somewhere-probably upon a vulnerable tract of Shreave’s flesh. Occasionally he found himself clawing at imagined bites to dislodge the toxic microbes.
As Shreave conducted his frantic duel with the hypodermic predator, Honey Santana grew weary of watching him swing clownishly at thin air or scratch madly at himself like a psoriatic baboon. Finally she rolled up her paperback and, with one deft swipe, flattened the mosquito on a button of Shreave’s flowered shirt. He aimed a flashlight at the small death splotch, the sight of which comforted him until he remembered from the Animal Planet program that mosquito blood wasn’t red. It was his own mortal nectar that had squirted from the mushed corpse; the sneaky prick had pricked him after all.
“I’m dead,” he groaned.
Honey sneezed. “Don’t be such a wuss,” she said.
Her allergies had been acting up all night. She sneezed again and said, “How about a ‘bless you’? Were you raised by wolves, or what?”
Shreave flicked away the dead bug. “Don’t these things carry the bird flu, too?”
“No, Boyd, that would be a bird.”
“How about HIV?”
“How about a Xanax?” Honey said.
Shreave worriedly examined himself for telltale bumps. “I could damn well die out here thanks to that little bastard.”
“Only the females bite,” Honey remarked.
Shreave looked up and made a sour face. “Christ, somethin’ stinks.”
Honey couldn’t smell anything because her nose was runny. She wiped it somewhat undaintily on her shirt.
“Like fish,” Shreave complained. “Smells like a ditchful of rotten fish.”
“It’s low tide, that’s all.” Honey sneezed again. She stood up and said, “Let’s go, Boyd.”
He eyed her uncertainly. “Where to?”
She pointed upward, toward the top of the royal poinciana.
“What if I said no?” he asked.
“Let me guess: You’re terrified of sparrows, too.”
“What if I just don’t feel like it?”
“Then you can find your own damn way off this island,” Honey said, and started up the gnarled, winding trunk.
Shreave followed reluctantly and with an ungainliness that was almost painful to observe. The man’s a born straggler, Honey thought, another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would’ve been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger.
She heard his panting call: “How far up?”
“All the way, Boyd. Otherwise there’s no point.”
At the top of the old poinciana, forty feet off the ground, Honey selected a sturdy bough. She sat down facing east, dangling her long legs and rocking in the mild breeze. It made her feel like she was sailing.
By the time Shreave finished the climb, he was red-faced and wheezing. “I bet I got a fever. I bet that fuckin’ mosquito was loaded.”
Honey told him to be still, and to watch.
She was thinking of her son, as she always did at that time of day. Dawn was when she felt the safest, the surest, the most optimistic about sending into the world a boy of Fry’s earnestness and full heart. Dawn was when her private terrors disappeared, if only briefly, and warm hope shined. The evening news made her wonder if God was dead; the morning sun made her believe He wasn’t.
As the first shards of light appeared along the pinkish rim of the Everglades, Honey drew in her breath. To her the moment was infinitely soothing and redemptive; Boyd Shreave seemed oblivious.
“Long way down,” he mumbled, glancing anxiously below.
“Hush,” Honey told him.
Fry had been born precisely at sunrise, and motherhood had crashed over her like a hurricane tide. Nothing afterward was the same, and no relationships went untested-with her husband, her family and the rest of humanity. Honey’s life had jumped orbits, and shining alone at the new center of the universe was her son.