Expressionless, she gazed up the barrel.

“Now, git yourself naked and let’s start this romance off proper,” Piejack said. “Then we’ll take the boat home and be happy ever after, just you, me and Charlie Main. As for your boy, well, he’s better off with his daddy. You can visit him maybe on Saturdays, if I don’t need you at the market. That’s the fuckin’ deal, angel, take it or leave it.”

Honey said, “I need time to think, Louis.”

“How long, goddammit?”

“About three seconds.”

“Okay,” Piejack said. “One…two…”

On the count of three, something sharp and heavy struck him from behind and knocked the air from his lungs. Piejack pitched sideways, thinking: This ain’t love.

The first white person to betray Sammy Tigertail had been his stepmother, who’d dumped him at the reservation the morning after his father was buried. The second white person to betray him had been Cindy, his ex-girlfriend, who’d started screwing anyone with a functioning cock after the Seminole demolished her backyard meth lab and confiscated a butane-powered menorah that she’d swiped from a local Hanukkah display.

Sammy Tigertail would concede that his Native American heritage wasn’t a factor in either instance of treachery-his stepmother was simply a self-centered shrew who didn’t want to be saddled with a teenager, while poor Cindy was a buzzed-out tramp who would have cheated on Prince William for a thimbleful of crank. As it turned out, both women had done Sammy Tigertail a favor. One had liberated him from his pallid existence as Chad McQueen, and the other had sprung him from a destructive and potentially gene-thinning romance.

Like many modern Seminoles, he had never been personally abused, subjugated, swindled or displaced by a white settler. The “injurious accompaniments” to which the Rev. Clay MacCauley had alluded in his nineteenth-century journal were old, bitter history; there had been no significant perfidy or bloodshed for generations. By the 1970s Florida was being stampeded from coast to coast, and the fortunes of the Seminoles had begun to change in a most unexpected way. It all started with a couple of bingo halls, and the knowledge that bored white people were fools for gambling. Soon they were swarming to the reservations by the busloads, and the bingo venues expanded to make room for card games and electronic poker.

Even as its numbers dwindled, the tribe’s prominence was inversely escalating to a dimension that boggled the elders. Wealth brought what three bloody wars had failed to win from the whites: deference. Once written off as a ragged band of heathens, the Seminole Nation grew into a formidable corporate power with its own brigade of lawyers and lobbyists. The Indians found themselves embraced by the lily-white business establishment, and avidly courted by politicians of all persuasions.

Some tribal members called it justice while others, such as Sammy Tigertail, called it a sellout. His uncle Tommy, who had helped mastermind the Seminole casino strategy, respected and even sympathized with the misgivings of his half-blooded nephew.

“My heart was in the same place,” he’d once told Sammy, “but then one day I asked myself, Who is there left to fight? Andrew Jackson’s dead, boy. His face is on the twenty-dollar bill, and we’ve got suitcases full at the casinos. Every night we stack ’em in a Brink’s truck and haul ’em to the bank. It’s better than spitting on the old bastard’s grave. Think of it, boy. All their famous soldiers are gone-Jackson, Jesup, Clinch-yet here we are.”

Yeah, thought Sammy Tigertail, here I am. Risking my dumb ass to help a white man rescue his wacko ex-wife.

The shot had sounded odd; like a firecracker in a toilet.

Skinner was running hard, the Indian close on his heels. Still it took several minutes to cross the island, choked as it was with vines and undergrowth. Eventually the two men burst into a broad clearing and Sammy Tigertail saw, on the other side, his own campsite. Some sort of unholy fight was under way-yelling, grunting, writhing amid the dirt and shells.

No one appeared to have been wounded, despite the ominous echo of gunfire earlier. The Seminole briefly considered dashing to his canoe, for the frenzied scene in front of him promised a messy climax that was certain to further complicate his life. There are at least 9,999 other islands, he thought, where a man might find peace and isolation.

And Sammy Tigertail might have bolted if it weren’t for the improbable sight of Skinner’s adolescent son whaling at a figure whom the Indian recognized as the malodorous mutant he’d clocked with his rifle butt, the one Gillian called Band-Aid Man and Skinner called Piejack. The man had rebounded impressively from the head bashing, for he was able to fend off the boy while at the same time wrestle a youthful and athletically built woman. From her salty dockside vocabulary, Sammy Tigertail pegged her as the kid’s missing mother, Skinner’s former wife. She and Band-Aid Man were struggling for control of a metallic object that looked like a modified shotgun of the crude, chopped-down style favored by redneck felons and myopic urban gangsters. The Seminole heard the weapon make two dull clicks, as if a shell had jammed in the chamber.

Ahead he saw Skinner go down at full speed, tumbling and grabbing at his left knee. What happened next took only a few seconds, but it unfolded before Sammy Tigertail with a halting and grim inevitability. Skinner’s ex-wife pushed away from Piejack and scrambled to Skinner’s side. Their son made two steps in the same direction before Piejack grabbed his ankle and jerked him violently backward, causing him to drop the piece of lumber he’d been wielding.

The man then leered and displayed for the boy’s horrified parents the shiny black.45, which had been jarred from Skinner’s grasp when he fell. “Lookie who’s here!” Piejack cackled at Skinner. “This is perfect! Now I aim to pay you back for what your Latino gorillas did to my hand.”

As the fiend placed the weapon to Fry’s temple, Sammy Tigertail regretted losing his composure and busting his rifle into pieces, as now he had no means by which to end the mayhem. Without moving a step, he took inventory. Skinner was still down and in terrible pain. Honey Santana embraced him, whispering and sniffling softly. Her lower jaw was badly bruised and hanging slack. A few yards away, Piejack kept one arm hooked around their son’s neck, the kid looking sick and dizzy again. Balanced tenuously in Piejack’s bare and gangrenous left hand was Skinner’s semiautomatic, the trigger covered by a discolored kernel of a finger. The discarded sawed-off was on the ground.

“Get lost, asswipe.” It was Piejack, finally taking notice of the Seminole. “This ain’t yer bidness.”

The creep might be right, Sammy Tigertail thought, but here I am.

“Be on your way,” Piejack said, “’less you wanna hole in your belly.”

The Indian could almost hear his uncle saying: What’s happening there has nothing to do with you. It’s more crazy shit among white people, that’s all.

“Can I get my guitar?” Sammy Tigertail asked. He had spotted the Gibson, his fondest connection to the white world, in the cinders of the dead campfire.

Piejack said, “That thing’s yours? Ha!”

Sammy Tigertail recalled a quote he’d memorized as a teenager. It was from Gen. Thomas Jesup, appraising the long Indian war in Florida:

We have, at no former period of our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance ever occurred of a first rate warrior having surrendered.

Sammy Tigertail’s uncle had said it was mostly true. He’d also said there were some in the tribe who’d dropped their weapons and run like jackrabbits; others who’d taken bribes from the U.S. generals in exchange for scratching their names on worthless treaties.