Skin Tight

SKIN TIGHT
Carl Hiaasen
[23 jan 2002-scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]
1

On the third of January, a leaden, blustery day, two tourists from Covington, Tennessee, removed their sensible shoes to go strolling on the beach at Key Biscayne.

When they got to the old Cape Florida lighthouse, the young man and his fiancee sat down on the damp sand to watch the ocean crash hard across the brown boulders at the point of the island. There was a salt haze in the air, and it stung the young man’s eyes so that when he spotted the thing floating, it took several moments to focus on what it was.

“It’s a big dead fish,” his fiancee said. “Maybe a porpoise.”

“I don’t believe so,” said the young man. He stood up, dusted off the seat of his trousers, and walked to the edge of the surf. As the thing floated closer, the young man began to wonder about his legal responsibilities, providing it turned out to be what he thought it was. Oh yes, he had heard about Miami; this sort of stuff happened every day.

“Let’s go back now,” he said abruptly to his fiancee.

“No, I want to see what it is. It doesn’t look like a fish anymore.”

The young man scanned the beach and saw they were all alone, thanks to the lousy weather. He also knew from a brochure back at the hotel that the lighthouse was long ago abandoned, so there would be no one watching from above.

“It’s a dead body,” he said grimly to his fiancee.

“Come offit.”

At that instant a big, lisping breaker took the thing on its crest and carried it all the way to the beach, where it stuck-the nose of the dead man grounding as a keel in the sand.

The young man’s fiancee stared down at the corpse and said, “Geez, you’re right.”

The young man sucked in his breath and took a step back.

“Should we turn it over?” his fiancee asked. “Maybe he’s still alive.”

“Don’t touch it. He’s dead.”

“How do you know?”

The young man pointed with a bare toe. “See that hole?”

“That’s a hole?”

She bent over and studied a stain on the shirt. The stain was the color of rust and the size of a sand dollar.

“Well, he didn’t just drown,” the young man announced.

His fiancee shivered a little and buttoned her sweater. “So what do we do now?”

“Now we get out of here.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“It’s our vacation, Cheryl. Besides, we’re a half-hour’s walk to the nearest phone.”

The young man was getting nervous; he thought he heard a boat’s engine somewhere around the point of the island, on the bay side.

The woman tourist said, “Just a second.” She unsnapped the black leather case that held her trusty Canon Sure-Shot.

“What are you doing?”

“I want a picture, Thomas.” She already had the camera up to her eye.

“Are you crazy?”

“Otherwise no one back home will believe us. I mean, we come all the way down to Miami and what happens? Remember how your brother was making murder jokes before we left? It’s unreal. Stand to the right a little, Thomas, and pretend to look down at it.”

“Pretend, hell.”

“Come on, one picture.”

“No,” the man said, eyeing the corpse.

“Please? You used up a whole roll on Flipper.”

The woman snapped the picture and said, “That’s good. Now you take one of me.”

“Well, hurry it up,” the young man grumped. The wind was blowing harder from the northeast, moaning through the whippy Australian pines behind them. The sound of the boat engine, wherever it was, had faded away.

The young man’s fiancee struck a pose next to the dead body: She pointed at it and made a sour face, crinkling her zinc-coated nose.

“I can’t believe this,” the young man said, lining up the photograph.

“Me neither, Thomas. A real live dead body-just like on theTV show. Yuk!”

“Yeah, yuk,” said the young man. “Fucking yuk is right.”

The day had begun with only a light, cool breeze and a rim of broken raspberry clouds out toward the Bahamas. Stranahan was up early, frying eggs and chasing the gulls off the roof. He lived in an old stilt house on the shallow tidal flats of Biscayne Bay, a mile from the tip of Cape Florida. The house had a small generator powered by a four-bladed windmill, but no air-conditioning. Except for a few days in August and September, there was always a decent breeze. That was one nice thing about living on the water.

There were maybe a dozen other houses in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville, but none were inhabited; rich owners used them for weekend parties, and their kids got drunk on them in the summer. The rest of the tune they served as fancy, split-level toilets for seagulls and cormorants.

Stranahan had purchased his house dirt-cheap at a government auction. The previous owner was a Venezuelan cocaine courier who had been shot thirteen times in a serious business dispute, then indicted posthumously. No sooner had the corpse been air-freighted back to Caracas than Customs agents seized the stilt house, along with three condos, two Porsches, a one-eyed scarlet macaw, and a yacht with a hot tub. The hot tub was where the Venezuelan had met his spectacular death, so bidding was feverish. Likewise the macaw-a material witness to its owner’s murder-fetched top dollar; before the auction, mischievous Customs agents had taught the bird to say, “Duck, you shithead!”

By the time the stilt house had come up on the block, nobody was interested. Stranahan had picked it up for forty thousand and change.

He coveted the solitude of the flats, and was delighted to be the only human soul living in Stiltsville. His house, barn-red with brown shutters, sat three hundred yards offthe main channel, so most of the weekend boat traffic traveled clear of him. Occasionally a drunk or a total moron would try to clear the banks with a big cabin cruiser, but they did not get far, and they got no sympathy or assistance from the big man in the barn-red house.

January third was a weekday and, with the weather blackening out east, there wouldn’t be many boaters out. Stranahan savored this fact as he sat on the sun deck, eating his eggs and Canadian bacon right out of the frying pan. When a pair of fat, dirty gulls swooped in to nag him for the leftovers, he picked up a BB pistol and opened fire. The birds screeched off in the direction of the Miami skyline, and Stranahan hoped they would not stop until they got there.

After breakfast he pulled on a pair of stringy denim cutoffs and started doing push-ups. He stopped at one hundred five, and went inside to get some orange juice. From the kitchen he heard a boat coming and checked out the window. It was a yellow bonefish skiff, racing heedlessly across the shallows. Stranahan smiled; he knew all the local guides. Sometimes he’d let them use his house for a bathroom stop, if they had a particularly shy female customer who didn’t want to hang it over the side of the boat.

Stranahan poured two cups of hot coffee and went back out on the deck. The yellow skiff was idling up to the dock, which was below the house itself and served as a boat garage. The guide waved up at Stranahan and tied off from the bow. The man’s client, an inordinately pale fellow, was preoccupied trying to decide which of four different grades of sunscreen to slather on his milky arms. The guide hopped out of the skiff and climbed up to the sun deck.

“Morning, Captain.” Stranahan handed a mug of coffee to the guide, who accepted it with a friendly grunt. The two men had known each other many years, but this was only the second or third occasion that the captain had gotten out of his boat and come up to the stilt house. Stranahan waited to hear the reason.

When he put down the empty cup, the guide said: “Mick, you expecting company?”

“No.”

“There was a man this morning.”

“A tthe marina?”

“No, out here. Asking which house was yours.” The guide glanced over the railing at his client, who now was practicing with a fly rod, snapping the line like a horsewhip.

Stranahan laughed and said, “Looks like a winner.”

“Looks like a long goddamn day,” the captain muttered.

“Tell me about this guy.”

“He flagged me down over by the radio towers. He was in a white Seacraft, a twenty-footer. I thought he was having engine trouble but all he wanted was to know which house was yours. I sent him down toward Elliott Key, so I hope he wasn’t a friend. Saidhe was.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“Tim is what he said.”

Stranahan said the only Tim he knew was an ex-homicide cop named Gavigan.

“That’s it,” the fishing guide said. “Tim Gavigan is what he said.”

“Skinny redhead?”

“Nope.”

“Shit,” said Stranahan. Of course it wasn’t Timmy Gavigan. Gavigan was busy dying of lung cancer in the VA.

The captain said, “You want me to hang close today?”

“Hell, no, you got your sport down there, he’s raring to go.”

“Fuck it, Mick, he wouldn’t know a bonefish from a sperm whale. Anyway, I’ve got a few choice spots right around here-maybe we’ll luck out.”

“Not with this breeze, buddy; the flats are already pea soup. You go on down south, I’ll be all right. He’s probably just some process-server.”

“Somebody’s sure to tell him which house.”

“Yeah, I figure so,” Stranahan said. “A white Seacraft, you said?”

“Twenty-footer,” the guide repeated. Before he started down the stairs, he said, “The guy’s got some size to him, too.”

“Thanks for the info.”

Stranahan watched the yellow skiff shoot south, across the flats, until all he could see was the long zipper of foam in its wake. The guide would be heading to Sand Key, Stranahan thought, or maybe all the way to Caesar Creek-well out of radio range. As if the damn radio still worked.

By three o’clock in the afternoon, the wind had stiffened, and the sky and the water had acquired the same purple shade of gray. Stranahan slipped into long jeans and a light jacket. He put on his sneakers, too; at the time he didn’t think about why he did this, but much later it came to him: Splinters. From running on the wooden deck. The raw two-by-fours were hell on bare feet, so Stranahan had put on his sneakers. In case he had to run.

The Seacraft was noisy. Stranahan heard it coming two miles away. He found the white speck through his field glasses and watched it plow through the hard chop. The boat was heading straight for Stranahan’s stilt house and staying clean in the channels, too.

Figures, Stranahan thought sourly. Probably one of the park rangers down at Elliott Key told the guy which house; just trying to be helpful.

He got up and closed the brown shutters from the outside. Through the field glasses he took one more long look at the man in the Seacraft, who was still a half mile away. Stranahan did not recognize the man, but could tell he was from up North-the guy made a point of shirt-sleeves, on this kind of a day, and the dumbest-looking sunglasses ever made.

Stranahan slipped inside the house and closed the door behind him. There was no way to lock it from the inside; there was no reason, usually.

With the shutters down the inside of the house was pitch-black, but Stranahan knew every corner of each room. In this house he had ridden out two hurricanes-baby ones, but nasty just the same. He had spent both storms in total darkness, because the wind knifed through the walls and played hell with the lanterns, and the last thing you wanted was an indoor fire.

So Stranahan knew the house in the dark.

He selected his place and waited.

After a few minutes the pitch of the Seacraft’s engines dropped an octave, and Stranahan figured the boat was slowing down. The guy would be eyeing the place closely, trying to figure out the best way up on the flat. There was a narrow cut in the marl, maybe four feet deep at high tide and wide enough for one boat. If the guy saw it and made this his entry, he would certainly spot Stranahan’s aluminum skiff tied up under the water tanks. And then he would know.

Stranahan heard the Seacraft’s engines chewing up the marly bottom. The guy had missed the deep cut.

Stranahan heard the big boat thud into the pilings at the west end of the house. He could hear the guy clunking around in the bow, grunting as he tried to tie it off against the tide, which was falling fast.

Stranahan heard-and felt-the man hoist himself out of the boat and climb to the main deck of the house. He heard the man say: “Anybody home?”

The man did not have a light step; the captain was right-he was a big one. By the vibrations of the plankboards, Stranahan charted the intruder’s movements.

Finally the guy knocked on the door and said: “Hey! Hello there!”

When no one answered, the guy just opened the door.

He stood framed in the afternoon light, such as it was, and Stranahan got a pretty good look. The man had removed his sunglasses. As he peered into the dark house, his right hand went to the waist of his trousers. “State your business,” Stranahan said from the shadows. “Oh, hey!” The man stepped backward onto the deck, forfeiting his silhouette for detail. Stranahan did not recognize the face-an odd and lumpy one, skin stretched tightly over squared cheekbones. Also, the nose didn’t match the eyes and chin. Stranahan wondered if the guy had ever been in a bad car wreck. The man said: “I ran out of gas, and I was wondering if you had a couple gallons to get me back to the marina. I’ll be happy to pay.”

“Sorry,” Stranahan said.

The guy looked for the source of the voice, but he couldn’t see a damn thing in the shuttered-up house. “Hey, pal, you okay?”

“Just fine,” Stranahan said.

“Well, then, would you mind stepping out where I can see you?”

With his left hand Stranahan grabbed the leg of a barstool and sent it skidding along the bare floor to no place in particular. He just wanted to see what the asshole would do, and he was not disappointed. The guy took a short-barreled pistol out of his pants and held it behind his back. Then he took two steps forward until he was completely inside the house. He took another slow step toward the spot where the broken barstool lay, only now he was holding the pistol in front of him.

Stranahan, who had squeezed himself into a spot between the freezer and the pantry, had seen enough of the damn gun. “Over here,” he said to the stranger. And when the guy spun around to get a bead on where the voice was coming from, Mick Stranahan lunged out of the shadows and stabbed him straight through with a stuffed marlin head he had gotten off the wall.

It was a fine blue marlin, maybe four hundred pounds, and whoever caught it had decided to mount only the head and shoulders, down to the spike of the dorsal. The trophy fish had come with the Venezuelan’s house and hung in the living room, where Stranahan had grown accustomed to its indigo stripes, its raging glass eye and its fearsome black sword. In a way it was a shame to mess it up, but Stranahan knew the BB gun would be useless against a real revolver.

The taxidermied fish was not as heavy as Stranahan anticipated, but it was cumbersome; Stranahan concentrated on his aim as he charged the intruder. It paid off.

The marlin’s bill split the man’s breastbone, tore his aorta, and severed his spine. He died before Stranahan got a chance to ask him any questions. The final puzzled look on the man’s face suggested that he was not expecting to be gored by a giant stuffed fish head.

The intruder carried no identification, no wallet, no wedding ring; just the keys to a rented Thunderbird. Aboard the Seacraft, which was also rented, Stranahan found an Igloo cooler with two six-packs of Corona and a couple of cheap spinning rods that the killer had brought along just for looks.

Stranahan heaved the body into the Seacraft and took the boat out into the Biscayne Channel. There he pushed the dead guy overboard, tossed the pistol into deep water, rinsed down the deck, dove off the stern, and swam back toward the stilt house. In fifteen minutes his knees hit the mud bank, and he waded the last seventy-five yards to the dock.

That night there was no sunset to speak of, because of the dreary skies, but Stranahan sat on the deck anyway. As he stared out to the west, he tried to figure out who wanted him dead, and why. He considered this a priority.