Skinny Dip

by Carl Hiaasen

  “All those years working for the state,” Rolvaag said, “did you ever get a case that wrapped itself up in a nice neat package, and all you could do was sit back and watch? Where all the bad guys just canceled each other out and saved everybody the hassle of a trial?”

  “A rare treat,” Stranahan said.

  “Well, this is my first.” Rolvaag picked up his notebook and sailed it into a litter basket, spooking the bird. “I figure it’s a good note to leave Florida on. What do you think, Mr. Stranahan?”

  “I think timing is everything, Karl.”

  The two men stopped talking when they spotted Joey returning along the beach. She had put on her sunglasses and taken off her shoes and pulled the tie from her ponytail. A big striped ball rolled into her path and, without breaking stride, she gently kicked it back to a small blond boy, who skipped away laughing. Every now and then she would stop to watch the waves froth around her legs, or to pick up a seashell.

  The burly unkempt stranger who came shouldering out of the saw grass carried no weapon. Chaz Perrone heaved the rock, which splashed in front of the stranger, and screamed, “Stay the fuck away from me, old man!”

  The intruder’s grin was alarming in its perfection. From his deportment, Chaz initially had pegged him as a homeless wino, but winos typically did not make a priority of dental hygiene.

  “Don’t get any closer,” Chaz warned. He snatched another rock off the ground and cocked his arm.

  The grizzled intruder kept coming. When he was ten yards away, Chaz let loose. The man caught the rock bare-handed and threw it back with surprising velocity, over Chaz’s head.

  “I played some college ball myself,” the man said, “about a jillion years ago.”

  Chaz shielded his shriveling, bug-bitten privates as he backed against the bay tree. He told himself that the situation could be worse; it could be Red and Tool, with the twelve-gauge.

  The man said, “I heard the shots last night, but I was a long ways off.”

  “What do you want?” Chaz asked shakily.

  “Thought it might be a deer poacher. Five rounds from a shotgun means somebody’s trying to kill something.”

  “Yeah, me.” Chaz turned to reveal the pellet marks in his backside.

  “Close call,” the man said, with no abundance of concern.

  If he was a game warden, Chaz thought, he must have been lost in the boonies for decades. He wore a tattered Stones T-shirt, filthy dungarees and moldy boots that had long ago come unstitched at the toes. A plastic shower cap was stretched over his hair, and one misaligned eyeball stared emptily at the sky. His silver beard, intricately braided, was accented by a necklace made of teeth.

  Human teeth, Chaz observed with consternation. He could see the amalgam fillings.

  The stranger noticed Chaz gawking and said, “They’re real, if that’s what you’re wondering. I took ’em off a guy who killed a momma otter for no good reason. Where are your clothes, sir?”

  “They got torn off in the saw grass.”

  Chaz was thirsty, famished and nearly unhinged from lack of sleep, having spent the night ribaldly serenaded by alligators.

  “And where’s the fellow who tried to shoot you?” inquired the man in the shower cap.

  Chaz motioned haplessly at the outlying marsh. “Who knows. There was two of ’em, back on the levee.”

  The stranger nodded. “Before I decide what to do with you, I need some answers. You mind?”

  Chaz answered emphatically. “Anything you want. Just get me out of this goddamn hellhole.”

  “Understand that I’m not a well person. I’m muddling through a rough spell at the moment,” the man said. “For instance, I’ve got a hunch you don’t even marginally resemble H. R. Haldeman. Bob, they used to call him at the White House.”

  Chaz said he didn’t know who that was.

  “An arrogant, perjuring, justice-obstructing shitweasel who worked for the thirty-seventh president of the United States of America, an amoral maggot in his own right,” the stranger related somewhat testily. “Anyway, that’s who I’m hallucinating when I look at you—Bob Haldeman. So keep that in mind. Plus, I’ve got a hideous duet running like a freight train through my skull—‘Hey Jude,’ as performed by Bobbie Gentry and Placido Domingo. It’s a fucking miracle I haven’t disemboweled myself.”

  “What’s your name?” Chaz was trying to stay calm, trying to sound amiable and harmless.

  “You just call me Captain. But I’m asking the questions here, you understand?”

  Chaz signaled cooperatively.

  The man said, “Good. Let’s start with basic identification.”

  “All right. My name is Charles Perrone and I have a Ph.D. in wetlands ecology. I’m employed as a field biologist for the South Florida Water Management District.”

  “Doing what, Mr. Perrone?”

  “It’s Dr. Perrone.” Chaz hoped that the substance of his title would counterpoise his forlorn appearance. “I work mostly out here in the Everglades, testing the water for phosphates,” he said. “It’s part of the big government restoration project.”

  The stranger did not seem as impressed, or deferential, as Chaz had hoped. He removed his artificial eye and, with a scrofulous pocketknife, scraped a dried clot of algae off the polished glass.

  Then he twisted the orb back into its socket and said, “What’s your name again?”

  “Perrone.” Chaz spelled it.

  “No, ace, your first name.”

  “Charles. But everybody calls me Chaz.”

  The stranger cocked his head. “Chad?”

  “No, Chaz. With a z.”

  That brought an inexplicable laugh. “Small world,” said the man in the shower cap.

  “How so?” Chaz asked, though he was already dreading the answer.

  “I met a lady friend of yours out here the other night,” the man told him.

  Chaz’s stomach pitched and his tongue turned to sandpaper.

  “Ricca was her name,” the stranger went on. “She had quite a story to tell.”

  Chaz smiled weakly. “Well, she’s got quite an imagination.”

  “Yeah? You think she imagined that thirty-eight-caliber hole in her leg?” The man fished into his dungarees, first one pocket and then another. He cackled when he located the bullet slug, which he held up for Chaz to inspect in the pink early-morning light.

  The man said, “I dug it out with a bent fishhook and a pair of needle-nose. Hurt like hell, but she’s a champ, that girl.” He flicked the damaged bullet into the water.

  Chaz Perrone stood slack and helpless in defeat. What were the stratospheric odds, he wondered, that this half-senile, cockeyed hippie was the same person who’d rescued Ricca?

  The stranger said, “Let me address a couple of points, Mr. Perrone. First, I’m not that old a fellow that I can’t snap your neck bones with my bare hands. Second, this isn’t a hellhole, this is my home and I happen to think it’s heaven. Third, if you’re a real scientist, then I’m Goldie Hawn.”

  In a monotone Chaz recited his academic credentials, which caused the man to squint down at him in brutal incredulity.

  “Won’t you hear my side of the story, Captain? Please?” Chaz scarcely recognized his own voice.

  The madman leaned back and frowned at the rising sun. “We need to be moving along. I expect somebody’ll come searching for you soon.”

  “Nobody I’d ever want to find me.”

  “Then let’s go, junior. There’s no time for a pity party.”

  With dull obedience Chaz followed the one-eyed hermit away from the shaded knoll and into the broiling flat savanna. The saw grass sliced Chaz’s flesh with every step, but the sensation no longer registered as pain. Not far away, crossing the same stretch of marsh, were two creamy-colored snakes as thick as tugboat cables; they moved with a fluid and fearless tropism, as energized by their wild new surroundings as Charles Regis Perrone was cowed by his.

  “I realize I’ve been an asshole
,” he called ahead to the stranger, “but people do change if they get the chance.”

  “Haldeman didn’t,” the man snapped over his shoulder. “Besides, I don’t think of you as a garden-variety asshole, Chaz. I think of you as a nullity.”

  Chaz wasn’t sure what that meant, but given the context, he assumed the worst. Ricca had doubtlessly painted a most unflattering portrait.

  As they advanced deeper into the hostile wasteland, the leaden weight of Chaz’s predicament settled fully upon him. Christ, he thought, I can’t catch a break to save my life.

  Literally.

  After what seemed like an hour, the derelict in the shower cap stopped marching and held out a dented canteen, for which Chaz lunged unashamedly. As he slugged down the water, it occurred to him that the hoary bushman would probably know precisely how many penises a bull alligator had.

  Another question to which there was no soothing answer, Chaz decided upon reflection.

  Still another: What happens to me now?

  It was as if the crazed wanderer had been reading his thoughts.

  “Did you ever study Tennyson? I’m guessing not,” the man said. “ ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw.’ That’s a very famous line.”

  To Chaz, it didn’t sound promising. “I’m not going back to Boca Raton, am I?”

  “No, Dr. Perrone, you are not.”

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of ten previous novels, including Sick Puppy, Lucky You, Stormy Weather, Basket Case, and, for young readers, Hoot. He also writes a regular column for the Miami Herald.

  ALSO BY CARL HIAASEN

  Fiction

  Basket Case

  Sick Puppy

  Lucky You

  Stormy Weather

  Strip Tease

  Native Tongue

  Skin Tight

  Double Whammy

  Tourist Season

  Hoot

  (for young readers)

  Nonfiction

  Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World

  Kick Ass: Selected Columns

  (edited by Diane Stevenson)

  Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns

  (edited by Diane Stevenson)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2004 by Carl Hiaasen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A portion previously appeared in Men’s Health Best Life.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hiaasen, Carl.

  Skinny dip: a novel / by Carl Hiaasen.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Agricultural industries—Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 3. Marine scientists—Fiction. 4. Everglades (Fla.)—Fiction. 5. Hazardous wastes—Fiction. 6. Attempted murder—Fiction. 7. Married people—Fiction. I. Title.

  ps3558.i217s575 2004

  813′.54—dc22 2004044106

  eISBN: 978-0-375-41108-3

  v3.0