From the backseat: "You ever been there?"

"Excuse me. Governor?"

"Jim, I'm talking to Lisa June. Darling, you ever been down to Toad Island?"

"No."

"You just might like it."

"I'm sure I would," she said.

"No, I meant you might like it the way it is.Without the fairways and yacht basins and all the touristy crap."

Lisa June Peterson turned to face him. "I know exactly what you meant, captain."

Jim Tile parked in the shade and left the back windows cracked, so the dog could get some fresh air. While a nurse changed Twilly Spree's dressing, the three of them – Skink, Lisa June and Jim Tile – waited outside the hospital room. Jim Tile spoke quietly to the four young troopers posted at the door, then led them down the hall for coffee. Skink flopped cross-legged on the bare floor. Lisa June borrowed a spring-backed chair from the nursing station and sat next to him.

He eyed her with an avuncular amusement. "So, you're going to stay put here in Tallahassee. Learn the ropes. Be a star." The ex-governor winked.

"Maybe I'll write a book about you instead."

"I enjoy Graham Greene. I'd like to think he would have found me interesting," Skink mused, "or at least moral."

"I do," Lisa June said.

"No, you write a book about Governor Dickless instead – and publish it before the next election. Wouldn't that be a kick in the kumquats!" Skink's mandrill howl startled a middle-aged patient wearing a neck brace and rolling an IV rig down the hallway. The man made a wobbly U-turn and steamed back toward the safety of his room.

Lisa June Peterson lowered her voice. "Look, I was thinking ... "

"Me, too." The captain, playfully pinching one of her ankles.

"Not about that."

"Well, you should. It'll do you good."

"The new bridge," Lisa June whispered. "Shearwater."

"Yeah?"

"The deal's not sewn up yet. There's one more meeting." She told him who would be there. "And Palmer Stoat, too, of course. He set the whole thing up. It's a hunting trip."

Skink's thatched eyebrows hopped. "Where?"

"That's the problem. They're going to a private game ranch outside Ocala. You need an invitation to get in."

"Darling, please."

"But let's say you did get in," Lisa June continued. "I was thinking you could talk to them about Toad Island. Talk to them the way you talked to me about Florida that night by the campfire. Who knows, maybe they'd agree to scale down the project. Leave some free beach and a few trees at least. If you can just get Dick on your side – "

"Oh, Lisa June – "

"Listen! If you can get Dick on your side, the others might go along. He can be incredibly persuasive, believe me. You haven't seen him at his best."

"I should hope not." Skink, toying with his buzzard beaks. "Lisa June, I just whittled a serious insult into the man's rear end. He ain't never evergonna be on my side. And you know that." The captain leaned sideways and smooched one of her kneecaps. "But I sincerely appreciate the information."

The door to Twilly Spree's room opened and they both got up. A pleasant freckle-faced nurse reported that Mr. Spree was improving by the hour.

Lisa June Peterson tugged Skink's sleeve. "I'd better be getting back to the capitol. The boss has a busy afternoon."

"Don't you want to meet the notorious psycho dognapper?"

"Better not. I just might like him."

Skink nodded. "That would be confusing, wouldn't it?"

"Heartbreaking is more like it," she said, "if something bad were to happen."

When he wrapped his great arms around her, Lisa June felt bundled and hidden; safe. He told her: "Between you and Jim, I've never seen such worriers."

From somewhere in the deep crinkly folds of his embrace he heard her ask: "But it wouldn't hurt to try, would it? Talking sense to them, I mean. What could it hurt?"

"It's a hunting trip, darling. Can't be talking out loud during a hunt. You gotta stay real quiet, in order to sneak up on the varmints." Skink pressed his lips to her forehead. "Sorry for making a mess of lunch. How about a rain check?"

"Anytime."

"Bye now, Lisa June."

"Good-bye, Governor."

They had sex on the lion-skin rug in the den, under the dull glassy gaze of the fish and wild animals Palmer Stoat had killed: the Cape buffalo, the timber wolf, the tuft-eared lynx, the bull elk, the striped marlin, the tarpon ...

Afterward, Estella, the right-wing prostitute from Swain's, asked: "You miss her?"

"Miss her? I booted her!" Stoat proclaimed. "The dog's a different story. Boodle was good company."

"You're fulla shit."

"How about another drink?"

"Why not," she said.

They were both nude, and smoking Havana's finest. Romeo y Julieta was the brand. Palmer Stoat was delighted to have found a partner who would keep a lit cigar in her mouth during athletic intercourse. Later, if he could get it up again, he would snap some pictures – the two of them going at it, stogie-to-stogie, like dueling smokestacks!

Her scotch freshened, Estella rolled on one side and stroked the frizzy auburn mane of the lion skin. "You shot this stud muffin yourself?"

"I told you, sweetheart. I shot all of 'em." Stoat fondly patted the tawny hide, as if it were the flank of a favorite saddle horse. "This sumbitch was tough, too. Took me three slugs at point-blank."

It would have taken only one had Stoat not been bowled off his feet by the pack of fourteen half-starved hounds that Durgess had deployed to tree the exhausted cat. While falling, Stoat had squeezed off two wild rounds that struck a hapless grackle and a cabbage palm, respectively. These colorful details were not shared with rapt Estella.

"Tell me about Africa," she said, pursing her painted lips to launch a halo of blue smoke.

"Africa. Yes." Most everything he knew about Africa came from National Geographic TV specials.

"Where did you go to 'bag' this lion – Kenya?"

"That's right. Kenya." Stoat ran a dry tongue across his lips, dawbing at the honeyed sheen of Johnnie Walker. "Africa is ... amazing," he ventured. "Incredible."

"Oh, I'd give anything to go there someday." Estella said it dreamily, with a shake of her hair.

Balancing a drink in one hand, Stoat carefully pivoted on his side and fitted himself to the slope of her bottom, spoon-style. "It's so big," he said quietly. "Africa is."

"Big. Yes." Estella arched seductively and Stoat deftly drew back, so as not to ignite her multi-hued locks with his cigar.

"Sweetheart, it would take years to see it all."

"We should go together, Palmer. You could hunt and I could go antiquing," she said. "No charge for the sex, either. You pay for my plane tickets, the nookie is free."

Stoat was tempted to say yes. God knows he needed to get away. And as soon as the legislature finished its final bit of nonsense next week ... well, why not a safari vacation to Africa? By the time he returned, the movers would have cleaned out Desie's stuff and the house would feel like his own again. Stoat could begin remodeling for bachelorhood. (He had changed his mind about moving; it would take years to find a place with such an ideal trophy room.)

"Let me see what I can do with my schedule," he told Estella, meaning he first wanted to float the Africa idea past his preferred choice of an overseas companion, the Pamela Anderson look-alike from Pube's. At the moment Stoat could not recall her Christian name, though he was sure he'd copied it on a cocktail napkin and saved it in his billfold.

"What's that empty spot?" Estella, pointing at a conspicuous space on the animal wall.

"That's for my black rhino. I bagged it a couple weeks ago."

"A rhinoceros!"

"Magnificent beast," Palmer Stoat said, taking a prodigious drag. "You'll see for yourself, when the mount is finished."