Duncan and the professor had visited ten doctors since morning, and the list was growing short. They might need to extend the radius out to twenty miles around Dragoon’s Hammock, and the fucking air-conditioning was busted.
Goodhue’s Alligator Eats had failed because few hungry tourists ventured this far west of the beach, and there weren’t enough locals ready to eat twice at Goodhue’s. Doctor Conklin was failing for similar reasons, but he didn’t care. He and Helga were having fun. She chained him, arms up, under a ceiling joist in what used to be, and still looked like, Goodhue’s kitchen. Helga was wearing his favorite black garter belt, stockings, and underwire bra with nipple cutouts. She opened his pants and with the toe of her black kid boot lowered them down around his ankles.
“You were a very naughty fuckface, and now I’m going to punish you severely.” She drew a horse crop from the top of her slithery boot.
“Oh, no, no, please don’t punish me, please, please—Helga, what was that? Did you hear something?”
“Like what?”
“A patient?”
“I doubt it. I’ll check.” Helga pulled on her lab coat.
“Good afternoon,” Duncan said to Helga, “I’m Agent Armbrister of the DEP and this is my associate, Professor Crashaw, from the Tropical Serpent Research Center. We’d like to talk to Dr. Conklin, please. Won’t take a minute of his valuable time.”
Wordlessly, Helga returned to the kitchen, where the doctor hung. After a while he appeared, wearing green plaid slacks, white loafers, no socks, and a starched white shirt with a stethoscope draped around the collar.
“I must protest,” said the doctor. “I paid my debt to society, and I resent being hounded by the DEA.”
“Not the DEA,” said Duncan, “the DEP. The Department of Environmental Protection.”
“Oh. That’s different.”
“We’re researching the frequency of snakebite injuries in the region, specifically those due to rattlesnake bites.” Duncan was growing bored with Doom’s spiel.
“Funny you should mention it. I had a remarkable one just yesterday.”
“You did?”
“Was it yesterday? Or Monday? Well, recently. It was a nasty one.”
“How so, Doctor?” asked the professor.
“My patient had this snake head the size of a small smoked ham stuck to his calf. I thought it was a sick joke at first, then I realized it wasn’t and I about tossed the old cookies.”
“You mean the fangs—?”
“Sunk to the hilts.”
“Did your patient survive?” Duncan pretended to take notes.
“Walked in under his own steam, walked out the same way. Took it with him.”
“What?”
“The head. Carried the damn thing out by the fangs like it was his lunch box.”
“How do you account for that, Doctor?” the professor asked.
“Insane, I guess.”
“I mean his condition. Did the snake not bite him?”
“Bite him? It pumped in enough venom to paralyze a rugby team. You see, my patient was enormous. That’s how he was able to—wait a minute. He didn’t die, did he? Look, I can’t be held responsible for his death—”
“I’m sure your procedures were deft and timely.”
“Oh, why thank you very much, Professor.”
“What was your patient’s name?” Duncan asked.
“Oh, well, now, you see, I’m not at liberty to disclose—”
“Doctor Conklin, the DEP, the DEA, the IRS are all under the same aegis. An uncooperative reputation with one is the same for all,” Duncan pointed out.
“…Well, in the interests of our fragile environment, my patient’s name was—what? It’s on the tip of my tongue…I’ll consult my nurse, if you’ll excuse me—”
The big snakebite victim’s name was Lucas Hogaboom.
FU AND FRIENDS
Donald Sikes?…Donald Sikes owned Tamarind Financial. That changed everything…Didn’t it? And what about Ozzie? Dead because he wronged Donny Sikes? Doris, too? Naw, just one of those coincidences you hear so much about.
Doom sat in Staggerlee’s cockpit and tried to delude himself. He read the New Revised Edition of The Annapolis Book of Seamanship, but he couldn’t concentrate on the rules of the road, buoyage, or marlinespike seamanship, so he looked at the pictures. He couldn’t concentrate on anything except the gathering clouds of responsibility. Embarkation with Rosalind for Newfoundland seemed a fantasy to him now. He wondered what Smiley was doing and decided to go see.
Doom collected his snorkeling gear from the lazaret, pulled on his mask, and leaving his fins behind, stepped over the lifelines into the water. It felt cool and calming compared to life topside. When his splash bubbles cleared, he searched for Smiley. Doom always felt an instant of fear jumping in, as if Smiley might mistake his sudden arrival for a threat and reflexively lash out, yet empirically Doom knew the fish was far too comfortable in its evolutionary design to fear sudden visitors.
But where was Smiley? Behind. Hanging with perfect buoyancy three feet beneath the surface. Languidly sculling its pectoral fins to maintain station. Doom visited almost daily, and he wondered whether Smiley recognized him. If so, did he have any feelings about Doom’s presence? Did fish feel? Mammals did. Dogs and cats obviously had feelings. Doom’s beloved boyhood dog had feelings. With a stab of sadness Doom remembered Joey dreaming, running, and whining in his sleep, and he remembered the look in old, sick Joey’s eyes when at the end the vet inserted the needle. His wise eyes, cataract clouded, had said, Yes, I know it’s time to go, farewell. Smiley’s big black eyes followed Doom’s every move. One day perhaps Smiley would let Doom touch its flanks, feel its streamlined power, and if so that would denote trust, a feeling.
Doom approached the fish. Gently, slowly, Doom put out his hand, open as though showing a strange dog his goodwill before petting its head. There was still two feet between his hand and Smiley’s flank. Before Doom had closed that distance three inches, Smiley vanished, there one instant, away the next. Doom felt the ghostly wash of its tail in the water, but he saw nothing of its actual leaving. By now Doom knew where to find the fish after it vanished. Behind. And there it was, three feet from Doom’s heels, working its snaggly jaws to propel water across its gills.
Doom wondered if Smiley lived alone under the dock, and if so, was that how he wanted it? Solitary, a meditative existence. Perhaps Smiley was occasionally visited by an old female for a quick submarine assignation. For all Doom knew, Smiley was a female—probably took an experienced ichthyologist to sex a barracuda—but Doom preferred to think of Smiley as a lonely male adrift in a world not of his own making, lurking under a dock. Doom watched the fish for an hour, and the fish watched Doom, both motionless, a kind of communication across the gulf of evolution that Doom always found instructive and satisfying. He hoped Smiley did, too.
When Doom hauled himself up the rope ladder over Staggerlee’s stern, he found two assholes watching him from the dock. Hairy-legged, both sported plaid Bermudas. One was short and rotund with a stupid grin on his face, and the other, older, taller, fitter, wore a droopy Fu Manchu mustache that entirely covered his upper lip, hairs curling over it into his mouth. The two assholes peered at Doom across the lifelines. Doom pretended not to notice them. He sat down, dripping, in the cockpit and picked up his seamanship book, pretending to be absorbed in an explanation of anchoring technique.
“Police officers,” said the one with the Fu Manchu.
A great roll of fat spilled obscenely over the other asshole’s belt.
“You’re gonna have to come with us.”
“You’re arresting me?”
“Ain’t that what I said?” asked Fu, and his friend giggled, gut twitching.
“Not exactly, no.”
“We’re arresting you.”
“On what charge?”
“Real estate fraud.”
“I’ll need to see some ID.”
&nb
sp; “What?”
“Badges,” Doom clarified, trying to cover the fear churning in his bowels.
The porky asshole looked to Fu, who nodded, then drew up his paunch with both hands so Doom could see the handle of the nickel-plated revolver stuck in his belt. With an ugly heave Porky replaced his paunch. He had flat, cloudy eyes, like a day-old dead fish.
“I got a badge, too,” said Fu. “Only mine’s bigger. Makes a teeny hole going in. Going out makes a hole you could put your head in without getting blood on your ears.” Fu had read that line in a Mickey Spillane novel during Spanish class back in high school when he was a young, aspiring thug and since then always looked for an opportunity to haul it out. The porcine asshole chortled at the boss’s wit, teeth brown and broken.
Fu’s real name was Roger Vespucci. Roger Vespucci’s sainted mama used to tell him he was directly related to Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus’s navigator to whom “this whole stinkin’ country owe its name.” Once, in show-and-tell, Roger told the entire seventh-grade class about his noteworthy ancestor, only to have a rotten little four-eyed egghead say that Amerigo Vespucci didn’t discover dick, that Amerigo wasn’t even aboard for any of Columbus’s four voyages to the New World and that the only reason they named America after a bullshitter like Vespucci was because he kissed ass in the Spanish court. Tears ran down Roger’s face in front of everyone. He could still remember the heat of their tracks.
He bided his time until one day, mysteriously, a ten-pound chunk of roofing tile dropped on four-eyes’s noggin while he was playing steal-the-bacon, leaving him without the speech function.
“Forget it, I’m not going anywhere with you two assholes.”
A sallow tourist and his gawky, gangly son fished from the end of the dock. A knot of disaffected youth, the knees sliced out of their jeans, passed a joint in and around a ruined pickup truck. These were merely the nearest witnesses. Surely the assholes wouldn’t try anything now. Doom scrawled something across the title page of his seamanship book and closed the book on his pen. Then he scanned the cockpit for weapons with which to repel boarders. There was a twelve-gauge flare launcher, but that was in the gear locker below. There were two stout winch handles within reach, in pockets port and starboard near the bridge deck.
The fat guy made to board Staggerlee.
“You, Porky, get off this vessel!”
Porky stepped back and looked to Roger Vespucci for further instructions. Something was wrong here. Up in Detroit you pull heat on a gink, he lies down and flies right.
Then Doom heard the marine engine approaching from aft. A short skiff with white topsides and two hulking outboards slipped up beside Staggerlee. A skinny kid with a bouncing Adam’s apple stood at the helm—and Doom was surrounded. Now both dockside thugs were coming over the rail with malicious intent. Doom dove for the port-side winch handle—
Porky caught his toe in the lifeline and fell hard to the deck on his hands and knees—directly in front of Doom. So he took the opportunity to clout Porky midspine with the hefty steel winch handle. Porky screamed and twitched and spasmed. Doom swung the handle in a sweeping rearward arc to get the boatman coming over the port rail. Had it landed, the blow would have staved in the boy’s brainpan, but he remained aboard his boat, out of range.
Doom continued the arc on around, hoping to clock Fu, but he bobbed and weaved away. Deftly, between swings, Fu sapped Doom above the ear with a cowhide-covered chunk of lead.
At first Doom didn’t think he was hurt, even though the blow sounded so very loud inside his head. Doom kept swinging—maybe he’d find some bone—but the world seemed odd, cloudy, distant, and inexplicable. Doom was staring at the bottom of the cockpit, the floor—called the “sole” on boats, he distinctly remembered reading in the nautical-terminology chapter. And then there was that shiny little drain grate in the forward corner. He had never noticed that grate before. Wasn’t it a lovely touch of craftsmanship that the screw heads in its outer flange were perfectly aligned? One’s appreciation of a thing is often enhanced by getting really close to it. Porky, supine on the seat, moaned in Doom’s ear.
Roger Vespucci drew Doom’s hands behind his back and cuffed them there. He clicked another pair of handcuffs around Doom’s ankles. Doom felt very comfortable and thought he might rest for a while before he started hitting at the assholes again. He made a mental note to read a definitive treatise on cockpit drain grates.
“I’m paralyzed! Paralyzed, I tell you!” keened Porky.
Just look at the morons and nincompoops Roger Vespucci was saddled with. Can’t even snatch a lone, largely unarmed individual without incident. And now a small crowd was collecting on the dock.
“Police. We’re police officers. This man is fifth on the ten-most-wanted list,” said Roger Vespucci.
“I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill—!” Porky gave out a moan when he tried to move, stabbing pain coursing all the way down the backs of his thighs.
Look at him there like a dying elephant seal. And then there was that drooling inbred cracker cretin standing in his boat like an audience. “Hey, Byron, you mind helping us pull this guy aboard! I don’t mean to bother you.”
“I’ll kill him!” Porky repeated.
“Forget it, you aren’t going to kill him.”
“Aww, please let me kill him!”
“Hey, dickbrain Byron, will you get over here and help!”
“My boat’ll drift away.”
“Tie it off!”
“Can I kick him?” Porky wanted to know.
“Okay, if you can get up and help, you can kick him.” Like dealing with fifth-graders.
Porky wheezed as he got to his feet in sections. He kicked Doom in the ribs, but it seemed to hurt Porky more than Doom.
A murmur ran through the crowd, and Roger Vespucci heard the phrase “police brutality” more than once. It was high time to get in the wind before this developed into a nasty incident with real cops.
Doom could see but couldn’t move as Fu and Byron loaded him, loglike, aboard the skiff. Somebody slid him into the cuddy cabin, where his head fetched up against the forward bulkhead. After a time he came to recognize the motion—the skiff was banging through ocean swells at full throttle.
“Lemme kick him again.”
“COPS!”
Rosalind rented dock space from Ponce’s Place, a sunburned blue stucco, gone-to-seed motel, where guests seldom spent an entire night. Ponce’s Place would have been bulldozed into oblivion a decade ago to make way for whatever the market would bear were it not for the deep-water dockage out back. Down here, latter-day Ponce de Leóns come in search of deep-water dockage, more precious than gold. Sociopaths on Jet Skis swerve heedlessly around the marina. The live-aboards wear earplugs.
Rosalind pushed four full scuba tanks in a shopping cart through the motel grounds to her boat, loaded them aboard, and strapped them into the amidships rack with bungee cord. The inbred handyman brazenly leered at Rosalind’s ass and thighs as she strained at the load. Had she glanced in his direction, the inbred handyman would have made obscene gestures with his swimming-pool skimmer.
Rosalind was ready to go, but Doom was late. He had never been late before. He always arrived early to help lug tanks…There was no reason for alarm; Doom might have been delayed in traffic. Happens all the time. Why did she feel sick with fear?
She walked back to the dive shop where her grandmother was waiting and phoned the Flamingo Tongue. Dawn answered.
“Hi, Dawn, this is Rosalind. Is Doom there?”
“Uh, well, no, he isn’t…He got arrested,” said Dawn.
“Arrested? When?”
“This morning. They came and took him from his boat.”
“Who did?”
“Well, the police, I guess.”
“Sheriff Plotner?”
“No, he’s here right now—stinking up the place.”
Rosalind hung up. “Come on, Lisa, we’ve got to go—somebody kidnapped Doom!�
�
“Gotta shoot those kinds. It’s the only way to reason with them,” said Lisa Up-the-Grove.
Rosalind fired up her engines as Lisa cast off fore and aft spring lines, and together they motored slowly, obeying as few did the no-wake regulations, until they cleared Possible Pass. Then Rosalind shoved the throttle forward to the stop. A short wind-against-current chop made the going lumpy, but Rosalind didn’t slow down until, twenty-five minutes later, they entered Bird Cut on a slack tide and rafted up beside Staggerlee.
Anne-on-camera was filming Anne-on-sound as she talked to the fisherman and his son at the end of the dock.
“They arrested him all right,” said the father.
“They hit him in the head,” said the gawky son, “then they kicked him when he was down.”
“He resisted arrest,” said the father.
“He did not.”
“Sure he did. He hit the fat one with a club.”
Rosalind broke in. “What did it say on the police car?” Anne spun to shoot Rosalind’s frightened face. “Did it say Broadnax County or what?”
“There wasn’t no car. They took him off in a boat,” the son replied. The father didn’t really want to get involved.
“A boat?” Rosalind noticed the seamanship book lying on the cockpit sole at her feet. When she picked it up, the book fell open to the title page. Doom’s pen dropped out.
She saw: “Cops!” scrawled in bold black ink…in quotation marks. Why quotation marks? She thought of the skinless alligator corpses she and Lisa had just buried, flies buzzing, with help from her neighbor’s backhoe. Why did they take him off in a boat?…Why quotation marks?
“What did it say on the boat?” she asked the son, still hanging around enjoying having his picture taken.
“Nothin’.”
Rosalind marched straight to the Flamingo Tongue. She smelled him before she saw him sitting in a booth scouring his plate with a crust of bread. She decided to try polite reason. “May I have a word with you, Sheriff?”
“Why, it’s Rosalind. Always a pleasure to see kin.” He looked her up and down, but not in the way of kinfolk. “Have a seat.”
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