Bitterness engulfed Boyd Shreave as three times an empty basket unspooled from a cable in the belly of the aircraft, and three times the basket ascended holding a blanketed human form. Shreave was too far away to see who was being rescued; he knew only that it wasn’t he. When the helicopter buzzed away, he thought: Screwed again.
A silken quiet fell briefly over the island, but soon the seabirds began to pipe and the trees began to stir. From his lonely roost, Shreave watched a zebra-striped butterfly alight on a nearby poinciana leaf. With a sour cackle he hurled the GPS at it.
He missed by three feet, and the butterfly flitted away.
In the four years following her divorce, Honey Santana had gone out with five men. Only three of them got a second date, and only two of them got to see her bedroom.
The first was Dale Rozelle, who had advertised himself as a professional bowler from Boca Grande. He was thin and handsome and eleven years younger than Perry Skinner. During sex he slapped his own ass and grunted like a constipated hog, which distracted Honey and on at least two occasions awakened Fry down the hall. Honey might have overlooked the barnyard sound effects had Dale Rozelle distinguished himself in other ways, but he had not. An Internet troll by Fry revealed that Dale Rozelle was lying not only about his bowling career but also about his lifetime membership in the Sierra Club, a fictitious credential that he’d correctly surmised would boost his standing with Honey. Disgusted by her own gullibility, she had (against Fry’s counsel) stormed into the bowling alley on Mixed-League Night and confronted the duplicitous shithead in the ninth frame of his last game. The one-sided encounter had ended with Honey dropping a sixteen-pound Brunswick on Dale Rozelle’s left instep. Eventually he agreed not to prosecute, but only after Perry Skinner had promised to pay the medical bills.
The other man with whom Honey had slept was Fry’s orthodontist, Dr. Tyler Teehorn, whose wife had sold their Volvo sedan and run off to Montserrat with her husband’s star hygienist. It had happened on the same day that Tyler Teehorn was fitting Fry for a retainer, and the man was a mess. That night Honey had dropped her son at Skinner’s house, driven back to Naples and dragged Tyler Teehorn out to Ruby Tuesday’s for a drink. Never had she seen anyone so bereft, and in a moment of rum-soaked pity she’d invited him to go home with her. The sex, while slightly better than Honey had anticipated, was quite obviously the most spectacular in Dr. Tyler Teehorn’s sheltered experience. No sooner had he pulled on his socks than he proclaimed his eternal love for Honey. Not wishing to be the second woman-or possibly the third, considering how hard it was to find a top-flight hygienist-to break Tyler Teehorn’s heart in a twelve-hour span, Honey had murmured an endearment that she’d hoped was adequately tender yet vague. For the next four weeks the man had clung to her like a mollusk. In contrast to Dale Rozelle, Dr. Teehorn’s integrity and devotion were unassailable. Unfortunately, he was a suffocating bore. Ignorant of politics, world affairs and even sports, his personality sparked only when he steered the conversation to the topic of teeth. Honey had finally dumped him during a candlelit dinner when he’d offered to fix her overbite for free.
“Wake up!” she heard Louis Piejack say, yet she didn’t move. She intended to fake unconsciousness as long as possible. In addition to fracturing her jaw, the gumbo-limbo bludgeon had knocked all the songs out of her head. Inexplicably, the void had filled with that dispiritingly detailed recap of her post-divorce sex life. It made her long for a dual blast of Ethel Merman and the Foo Fighters.
“Giddup right now!” Piejack snapped.
The toe of a shoe poked Honey in the ribs, and a fog of fish stink confirmed that Piejack was looming over her. She hoped that her face was so pulped that he would lose interest in raping her.
“C’mon, goddammit, I didn’t hit you that hard,” he said.
She noticed a new sound-not a tune, but rather a single distant note, rising in volume. Soon it grew to a sustained chord, complete with percussion. Honey was relieved that Piejack could hear it, too.
“What the hell?” he cried with alarm.
Honey recognized the noise and smiled. She peeked up just in time to see an orange-and-white shape streak overhead. Impulsively she tried to shout, but only a bubble of blood came out; the left side of her face was numb, and her tongue felt like she’d been licking broken glass.
“You be still!” Louis Piejack was ducking and bobbing as he watched for the return of the Coast Guard helicopter. His level of alertness was impressive, considering the gorilla dosage of Vicodin that he’d consumed.
“Don’t get no ideas,” he warned her.
Honey was brimming with ideas. Unfortunately, she was also tied to a tree. It had happened while she was knocked out, when the dexterously challenged Piejack had had time to work.
“Long as we stay still, they won’t never see us,” he said confidently. He hunkered beside her and, with his misassembled hand, stroked her thigh. When he lasciviously wiggled a blackened pinkie, she swatted it away.
Piejack chuckled. “You’ll feel better soon, angel. When we’re snug at home.”
Honey knew that he was too weak to carry her; otherwise they’d already be on his boat, speeding back to the mainland. Slowly she sat up, testing the rope that he’d secured to her wrists and then looped around her neck. The fit was tight enough to limit her options-and to make her slightly sorry for having pretended to tie up Boyd Shreave.
“Damn, I’m thirsty,” Piejack said.
Honey was parched, too. Her throat felt like she’d been gargling sawdust.
She heard the chopper hovering nearby yet she couldn’t see it through the trees. Maybe it’s me they’re looking for, she thought, although she couldn’t imagine why. Fry wasn’t expecting her home until the following day, so he had no reason to call out the Coast Guard.
Unless…
Honey stiffened.
…unless it was her ex-husband who’d summoned a search helicopter, which he wouldn’t do unless there was an emergency back in town.
Like something awful had happened to Fry.
Honey Santana lunged to her feet, nearly garroting herself. Piejack brought her down with one sharp yank.
“What’s your problem, woman?” he said.
Frantically she scanned the sky. A vision became fixed in her mind of Fry motionless on a stretcher in a speeding ambulance. The boy’s head was bandaged and his father was sitting beside him, stroking his hair. The image was so vivid that Honey thought she could hear the ambulance siren above the high drone of the helicopter.
Then the chopper flew away and the vision faded. Honey was overtaken by a desire to murder Louis Piejack on the spot, and she would have tried had she not been bound by the neck.
He stood up shakily and said, “Let’s get a move on, ’fore that whirlybird comes back.”
Honey watched with a bent fascination as Piejack struggled to untie the rope from the tree, no easy task for a man with a set of jumbled fingers. After several frustrating attempts he decided to attack the knot with his teeth, freeing both hands to hoist the gumbo branch as a sobering reminder for Honey to behave.
Once the rope was loose, he managed to rehitch the free end around his chest. Wordlessly he headed into the woods, leading Honey like a pack mule. They walked for half an hour, following a dense and unfamiliar shoreline until they broke into a large clearing. At one end was an untidy campsite with a small fire pit that was piled with ashes. Piejack tethered Honey to another tree while he rifled the gear belonging to the campers, who were nowhere to be seen. He found an uncapped jug of water, which he guzzled without so much as a glance toward Honey, who was too proud to ask for a drink.