“How'd you meet the captain?” he asked Jim Tile.
“Used to work for him,” the trooper said.
“In Tallahassee,” Skink added. “Long time ago.”
“What kind of work?” Decker asked.
“Scut work,” Skink said.
Decker was too tired to pursue it. He stretched out in the back seat and started to doze. He kept thinking about Ott Pickney and wondering what he was about to see. Skink and Jim Tile were silent up front. After about fifteen minutes Decker felt the patrol car brake and pull off the pavement. Now it bounced along with the sound of sticks and leaves scratching at the undercarriage.
Decker opened his eyes and sat up. They were at Morgan Slough.
Jim Tile got out first and checked around. The cool darkness was ebbing from the swamp; another half-hour and it would be dawn. Skink took his fishing rod from the car and went to the edge of the water, which was the burned color of black tea. The slough was a tangle of lilies and hydrilla, dead branches and live cypress knees. In the tall boughs hung tangled tresses of Spanish moss. The place looked prehistoric.
Jim Tile stood with his hands on his hips. Skink started to cast, reel in, cast again.
“What's going on?” Decker said, shaking off his drowsiness. The crisp winter air had a faint smoky smell.
“The plug I'm using is called a Bayou Boogie,” Skink said. “Medium-fast sinker, two sets of treble hooks. I sharpened 'em earlier, before you got here. You probably noticed I put new line on the reel since you and I went out.”
“I didn't notice,” Decker muttered. All this way for a goddamn fishing lesson. Didn't these people ever just come out and say something?
“Fifteen-pound test Trilene,” Skink went on. “You know how much weight this stuff lift?”
“No idea,” Decker said.
“Wellâthere we go!” Skink's fishing rod bent double. Instead of setting the hook, he pumped slowly, putting his considerable muscle into it. Whatever it was on the end of the line barely moved.
“You're snagged on a stump,” Decker said to Skink.
“Don't think so.”
Slowly it was coming up; somehow Skink was pulling the thing in. He pumped so hard that Decker was sure the rod would snap, then Skink would slack up, reel fast, and pump again. The line was stretched so tautly that it hummed.
“You're almost there,” Jim Tile said.
“Get ready!” Skink's voice strained under the effort.
He gave a mighty pull and something broke water. It was an iron chain. Skink's fishing lure had snagged in one of the links. Jim Tile knelt down and grabbed it before it could sink back into the slough. He unhooked the fishing lure, and Skink reeled in.
By now Decker knew what was coming.
Hand over hand, Jim Tile hauled on the chain. The wrong end came up first; it was an anchor. A new anchor, too, made of cast iron. A clump of hydrilla weed hung like a soggy green wig from the anchor's fork.
Jim Tile heaved it on shore. Wordlessly he started working toward the other end, the submerged end of the chain.
Instinctively, R. J. Decker thought of his cameras. They were locked in his car, back at Skink's shack. He felt naked without them, like the old days. Certain things were easier to take if you were looking through a camera; sometimes it was the only protection you had, the lens putting an essential distance between the eye and the horror. The horror of seeing a dead friend in the trunk of a Seville, for example. The distance existed only in the mind, of course, but sometimes the inside of a lens was a good place to hide. Decker hadn't felt like hiding there for a long time, but now he did. He wanted his cameras, longed for the familiar weight around his neck. Without the cameras he wasn't sure if he could look, but he knew he must. After all, that was the point of getting out of the business. To be able to look again, and to feel something.
Jim Tile struggled with the chain. Skink knelt beside him and loaned his weight to the tug.
“There now,” Skink said, breathing hard. The other end of the chain came out of the water in his right hand.
“Get it done,” said Jim Tile.
Tied to the end of the chain was a thin nylon rope. Skink's massive hands followed the rope down until the water was up to his elbows. His fingers foraged blindly below the surface; he looked like a giant raccoon hunting a crawfish.
“Ah!” he exclaimed.
Jim Tile stood up, wiped his hands on his uniform, and backed away. With a primordial grunt Skink lifted his morbid catch from the bottom of Morgan Slough.
“Oh God,” groaned R. J. Decker.
Ott Pickney floated up dead on the end of a fish stringer. Like a lunker bass, he had been securely fastened through both lips.
9
They were driving back toward Harney on the Gilchrist Highway.
“We can't just leave him there,” R. J. Decker said.
“No choice,” Skink said from the back seat of the patrol car.
“What do you mean? We've got a murder here. Last time I checked, that's still against the law, even in a shitbucket town like this.”
Jim Tile said, “You don't understand.”
Skink leaned forward and mushed his face against the grating. “How do we explain being out in the slough? A spade cop and a certifiable lunatic like me.” And an ex-con, Decker thought. From under the flowered shower cap Skink winked at him. “It's Jim I'm really worried about, Miami. They'd love a shot at State Trooper Jim Tile, am I right?”
Decker said, “Screw the locals, then. Go to the state attorney general and get a grand jury. We've got two dead men, first Clinch and now Ott Pickney. We can't let it lie.”
“We won't,” said Jim Tile.
Terrific, Decker thought, the three musketeers.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked the trooper. “You think they'd really try to frame us?”
“Worse,” said Jim Tile. “They'll ignore us. Clinch was already ruled an accident.”
“But Ott's floating out there on a fish stringer,” Decker said. “I think somebody might legitimately raise the question of foul play.”
Jim Tile pulled the car off the pavement and stopped. They were a mile and a half outside the town limits. A pair of headlights approached from the other direction.
“Duck down,” Jim Tile said.
Skink and Decker stayed low until the other car had passed. Then Skink climbed out with his fishing rod. “Come on,” he said to Decker, “we'll hoof it from here. It's best that nobody sees Jim with the two of us.”
Decker got out of the car. The sky in the east was turning a metallic pink.
“Explain it to him,” Jim Tile said to Skink, and drove away.
Decker started trudging down the highway. He felt a hundred years old. He wished he were back in Miami, that's how rotten he felt. He was trying to remember if Ott Pickney had any kids, or an ex-wife somewhere. It was entirely possible there was nobody, just the orchids.
“I'm sorry about your friend,” Skink said, “but you've got to understand.”
“I'm listening.”
“The body will be gone by noon, if it's not already. They'll be back for it. They saw Jim Tile out by the slough, and that was that.”
Decker said, “We should've stayed there. Jim could have called for help on the radio.”
Skink marched ahead of Decker and turned around, walking backward so he could face him directly. “The sheriff's office scans all police frequencies. They would've picked up the call and sent a couple marked cars. Next thing you know, the locals grab jurisdiction and they're questioning you and me, and they're calling Tallahassee about poor Jim Tileâhow there's all these irregularities in his report, how uppity and uncooperative he is. Whatever bullshit they can make up, they will. You know how many black troopers there are in this whole state? Not enough for a goddamn basketball team. Jim's a good man and I'm not gonna let him get hung by a bunch of hicks. Not over a fish, for Christ's sake.”
Decker had never heard Skink say so much in one breath. He asked, “So what's the plan?”
Skink stopped backward-walking. “Right now the plan is to get off the road.”
Decker spun around and saw a pickup truck coming slowly down the highway. Rays from the new sun reflected off the windshield, making it impossible to see who was driving, or how many there were up front.
Skink tugged Decker's arm and said, “Let's stroll through the woods, shall we?”
They left the pavement and walked briskly into a stand of tall pine. They heard the truck speed up. When it was even with them, it stopped. A door slammed, then another.
Skink and Decker were twenty-five yards from the highway when the first shots rang out. Decker hit the ground and pulled Skink with him. A bullet peeled the bark off a tree near their feet.
Decker said, “I'm sure glad you're wearing that orange raincoat, captain. Bet they can only see us a mile or two away.”
“Semiautomatic?” Skink asked through clenched teeth.
Decker nodded. “Sounds like a Ruger Mini-14.” Very popular with the Porsche-and-powder set in Miami, but not the sort of bangbang you expected upstate.
The rifle went off again, so rapidly that it was impossible to tell the fresh rounds from the echoes. The slugs slapped at the leaves in a lethal hailstorm. From where they huddled Decker and Skink couldn't see the truck on the highway, but they could hear men's voices between the volleys.
“Will they come for us?” Decker whispered.
“I expect.” Skink's cheek was pressed against a carpet of pine needles. A fire ant struggled in the tangle of his mustache; Skink made no move to brush it away. He was listening to the ground.
There's only two of them,” he announced.
“Only?” One with a Ruger was plenty.
Skink's right hand fished under his rainsuit and came out with the pistol.
Decker heard twigs crackle at the edge of the pine.
“Let's run for it,” he said. They wouldn't have a prayer in a shoot-out.
“You run,” Skink said.
And draw fire, Decker thought. What a grand idea. At least in Beirut you had a chance because of the doorways; doorways made excellent cover. You simply ran a zigzag from one to another. Right now there wasn't a doorway in sight. Even the trees were too skinny to offer protection.
Decker heard footsteps breaking the scrub a few yards behind him. Skink motioned for him to go.
He bunched up on his knees, dug his toes into the moist dirt, and pushed off like a sprinter. He ran erratically, weaving through the pine trunks and hurdling small palmetto bushes. A man shouted and then the gunfire started again. Decker flinched as bullets whined off the tree trunksâlow, high, always a few feet behind him. Whoever was shooting was running too, and his aim was lousy.
Decker didn't know the terrain so he picked his openings as they appeared. He spotted promising cover across a bald clearing and he pumped for it, holding his head low. He almost made it, too, when something struck him in the eyes and he crumpled in pain.
A rifle slug had caught a pine branch and whipped it flush across Decker's face. He lay panting on the ground, his fists pressed to his eyes. Maybe they would think he'd been hit. Maybe they would go looking for Skink.
Abruptly the shooting was over.
Decker heard honking. Somebody was leaning on the horn of the truck; long urgent blasts. From the highway a man shouted somebody's name. Decker couldn't make out the words. He took his hands from his face and was relieved to discover that he wasn't blind. His cheeks were wet from his eyes, and his eyes certainly stung, but they seemed to be working.
It was not until he heard the pickup roar away that Decker dared to move, and then he wasn't sure which way to go. The direction that made the most sense was away from the road, but he didn't want to abandon Skink, if Skink were still alive.
Decker crawled to a tree and stood up, cautiously aligning his profile with the trunk. Nothing moved in the clearing; the morning lay dead silent, the songbirds still mute with fear.
What the hell, Decker thought. At the top of his lungs he shouted, “Skink!”
Something big and pale moved at the edge of the woods across the clearing. It made a tremendous noise. “I told you to call me captain!” it bellowed.
Skink was fine. He stood stark naked except for his military boots. “Look what that asshole did to my suit!” He held up the plastic rain jacket. There were three small holes between the shoulder blades. “I got out of it just in time,” Skink said. “Hung it on a limb. When I rustled the branch the guy squared around perfectly and cut loose. He was looking the wrong place, slightly.”
Hairy and bare-assed, Skink led Decker to the body. The dead man had a black crusty circle between his sandy eyebrows. His mouth was set in an O.
“You were right about the Ruger,” Skink said. The rifle lay at the man's side. The clip had been removed.
“To answer your question, no, I've never seen him before,” Skink said. “He's hired help, somebody's out-of-town cousin. His pal stayed at the treeline as a lookout.”
“I'm sure they figured one gun was enough,” Decker said.
“Guy's all of thirty years old,” Skink mused, looking down at the dead man. “Stupid jerkoff.”
Decker said, “May I assume we won't be notifying the authorities?”
“You learn fast,” Skink said.
Â
In the mid-1970s a man named Clinton Tyree became governor of Florida. He was everything voters craved: tall, ruggedly handsome, an ex-college football star (second-team All-American lineman), a decorated Vietnam veteran (a sniper once lost for sixteen days behind enemy lines with no food or ammunition), an eligible bachelor, an avid outdoorsmanâand best of all, he was native-born, a rarity at that time in Florida. At first Clinton Tyree's political ideology was conservative when it was practical to be, liberal when it made no difference. At six-foot-six, he looked impressive on the campaign trail and the media loved him. He won the governorship running as a Democrat, but proved to be unlike any Democrat or Republican that the state of Florida had ever seen. To the utter confusion of everyone in Tallahassee, Clint Tyree turned out to be a completely honest man. The first time he turned down a kickback, the bribers naturally assumed that the problem was the amount. The bribers, wealthy land developers with an eye on a particular coastal wildlife preserve, followed with a second offer to the new governor. It was so much money that it would have guaranteed him a comfortable retirement anywhere in the world. The developers were clever, too. The bribe money was to emanate from an overseas corporation with a bank account in Nassau. The funds would be wired from Bay Street to a holding company in Grand Cayman, and from there to a blind trust set up especially for Clinton Tyree at a bank in Panama. In this way the newly acquired wealth of the newly elected governor of Florida would have been shielded by the secrecy laws of three foreign governments.