Skinny Dip

Eight

Chaz was sitting in the bathtub, scrubbing off the swamp grime, when Ricca showed up.

"Are you nuts?" he said.

"Nope. Just lonely." She stepped out of her oxblood heels.

"Did anybody see you drive up? Where'd you park?"

Ricca unfastened her hoop earrings and set them next to Chaz's stick deodorant on the vanity. "What are you so jumpy about? I thought you'd be happy to see me."

In a moment she was out of her clothes, straddling him imperiously.

"But I'm not finished," Chaz said.

"Damn right you're not."

Ricca placed her palms against his chest and pushed. Chaz took a quick breath, squeezing his eyes closed as he submerged. Being a clean freak, he was concerned about the health risks of rough sex in dirty bathwater. Who knew what pernicious tropical microbes had hitched a ride back from the Everglades?

It was too late to protest. He felt like he'd been thrown into a blender with a live coyote. The bare tile amplified Ricca's feral yips and howls to soul-chilling decibels, the racket seeming louder every time Chaz came up for air. Meanwhile she was pounding against him with such zest as to generate a seismic rhythm of concussive smacks. Chaz feared that his eardrums might blow out underwater. With both arms he helmeted himself, not only to save his hearing but to prevent his skull from cracking against the brass drain plate. Ricca was as speedy as she was rambunctious, and Chaz was confident that he could outlast her, providing he didn't drown.

True to form, she was done in less than four minutes. Chaz disentangled and stork-stepped out of the bathtub, which by then was nearly empty. He grabbed a couple of towels and began mopping up the floor and the walls.

"You're somethin' else," Ricca gasped.

She was splayed in the tub like a broken doll, one foot hooked on the soap tray and the other braced against the spigot. Jet-black hair fell in a dripping tangle across half her face.

"My God, Chaz. That was fantastic."

He said, "Yeah. You damn near killed me."

"Hey, you're still hard. What's the matter?"

"Not a thing." He snatched a robe off the hook on the door.

"Didn't you come?"

"Sure I did," he lied. "All over the place."

"So that means"-Ricca pointing-"you're ready to go again? Already?"

He shrugged. "Let's get some dinner."

"You are seriously amazing." She stood up and wrung out her hair. "Wanna b.j. or something?"

Chaz peered quizzically at her crotch. "What'd you do to yourself?"

"It's a shamrock. You like it?"

"A shamrock." He hadn't noticed earlier.

"For good luck," Ricca explained. "I wanted four leaves, but I only had enough pubes for three."

Chaz was trying to remember if she was Irish.

"It took, like, an hour to do. With two mirrors," she added.

"And they make green hair dye these days?"

"You bet."

"Well, I'm impressed," Chaz said.

"Then we're even. Come here, lemme take care of that."

Chaz was unnerved to realize that he wasn't in the mood. He glanced down at himself and wondered: What the hell's the matter with me?

"I think I heard the phone," he said, and hurried to get dressed.

A few minutes later, Ricca found him slouched on a corner of the bed. He wore one brown sock and a misbuttoned shirt, and he was staring dully into an open closet.

"What's wrong?" she asked, touching his shoulder.

He shook her off dismissively.

"Baby, I was thinking," she said. "Are you gonna have a service for Joey? You probably should."

"I hate funerals. Besides, there's no body to bury."

Ricca said, "A memorial service, I mean. They do it all the time for people who get burnt up in plane crashes, or when a ship sinks and everybody's lost at sea."

Chaz insisted there was no point. "Joey's only family is some hermit brother who lives on the other side of the world."

"What about her friends?"

"So, I'll put a notice in the paper. They can make donations to the World Wildlife Mission. Save the endangered yaks or whatever."

Ricca smoothed her skirt and sat beside him on the bed. "What happens next? I guess you've gotta have her declared legally… you know…"

"Dead?"

"Right."

"Christ, Ricca, it's only been a few days."

"Eventually, I mean."

"There's no rush," Chaz said.

That damn detective, Rolvaag, would be scrutinizing him for a while. Chaz didn't want to appear in a hurry to be single.

"How long, then?" Ricca asked.

"What's the difference? I'm not getting any of her money anyway," he said. "The fucking yaks can wait."

"Well, suppose I can't?"

Chaz pretended not to hear. He approached the closet and focused once more upon the sheer black dress. It was scooped in the front and featured a racy slit up one side.

He took it out and showed Ricca. "Did you bring this with you tonight? Because Joey had one just like it, I mean identical."

Ricca was peeved. "It's not mine, Chaz. Not unless I've grown three inches taller and dropped ten pounds."

"Aw, come on."

"It's not mine."

"Okay, okay." He yanked the dress off the hanger, rolled it up and tossed it in a corner. "I swear I packed that away yesterday."

Ricca glanced uneasily around the room. "To be honest, this is kinda freaky, being in the house with your wife dead."

"What-it was easier when she was alive?"

"No, it's just very sad, what happened to her," Ricca said. "Can we get outta here?"

Chaz went to the dresser and pawed through the drawers one by one. He couldn't find Joey's panties and bra, the ones he'd meant to save for Ricca. He wondered if he was cracking up.

"Lookin' for your other sock? It's right there on the floor, under the nightstand."

"So it is," said Chaz. "Thanks."

As soon as Ricca went to fix her makeup, he slipped out the kitchen door and into the garage. The cardboard boxes containing Joey's belongings were exactly where he'd left them, piled next to the Camry. The boxes didn't appear to have been touched, causing Chaz to think that he had somehow forgotten to collect his wife's black dress. As for the missing undergarments, perhaps he'd moved them to another place.

In the living room he was gratified to see that the stinking dead fish had not re-materialized in his aquarium since he'd flushed them down the toilet. Chaz made himself a drink and began scanning the alphabetized-by-artist CD rack, looking for some kick-ass driving music. What he found while thumbing through the T's gave him a chill. Bad to the Bone was missing. So was Move It on Over. Even the Anthology was gone.

Ricca appeared, looking spectacular but troubled. She said, "I hope you don't mind-I borrowed some of Joey's lipstick."

Chaz felt the hairs prickle on his neck. "That's impossible."

"I left mine in the car. I'm sorry."

"You don't understand. I threw out all her lipstick," he said. "I went through the whole goddamn bathroom and tossed out every goddamn thing of hers."

"But it was right there, Chaz. In the vanity-"

"No! Not possible."

Chaz felt a bloom of cold sweat under his arms. He stalked up to Ricca, grabbed her chin and turned her mouth toward the light so that he could examine the color.

"Shit," he muttered. It was definitely Coral Tease, Joey's favorite.

His favorite, actually. Just like that slitted black dress, the one she'd worn at his request to Mark's on Las Olas for their first anniversary.

He let go of Ricca's face and said, "Something's fucked up around here."

"Why would I lie about lipstick?" Rubbing her jaw, she was bewildered and angry.

"You're right. I'm sorry," he said.

"Can we get outta here, like, now?"

"Absolutely," Chaz told her. "Right after I make a call."

"Swell. I'll be in the bathroom." She shut the door forcefully behind her and fumed for a minute.

"Where's your razor?" she called out, but Chaz was already on the phone.

Joey Perrone and Mick Stranahan were watching the house from a neighbor's driveway halfway down the block. Joey said it was safe because the neighbors had gone to upstate New York for a month and possibly longer.

"Dodging subpoenas," she explained. "They run a telephone boiler room, selling ethanol futures to senior citizens. Every time the feds shut 'em down, they dash off to their lodge in the Adirondacks."

"It's a great country," Stranahan said.

"What're you doing?"

"Trying to figure out the damn CD player."

For surveillance purposes, Joey had rented them a dark green Suburban with tinted windows.

She said, "Mick, please don't."

He was sorting through the George Thorogood discs that Joey had swiped from her husband's collection. "What, you don't like the slide guitar?"

"I don't like the memories," she said.

Joey meant to drop the subject, but then she heard herself saying, "We'd be going along in the car and whenever he'd put on 'Bad to the Bone,' that was the signal he wanted me to, you know…"

"Gotcha." Stranahan tossed the CDs into the backseat. "So he imagines himself a wit, Mr. Charles Perrone, and a sex machine to boot."

Joey recited the ten things that Chaz disliked most about her, with hiding Thorogood being number six.

"That's not why he tried to kill you. Believe me," Stranahan said.

"See, this is what's driving me crazy," she said. "I can't figure out why he would do what he did."

"Money's my guess."

"But I told you, he's not getting a dime if I'm dead."

Stranahan fiddled with the radio dials. "Most murders come down to lust, anger or greed," he said. "From what you've told me about your husband, I'm betting on greed. If this isn't about your money then it's about somebody else's."

Joey said that, in a way, she hoped he was right. "I'd hate to think he threw me off that ship just so he could be with her." She shot a glare toward the house.

"Not likely," said Stranahan.

"I wish you could've met Benny, my first husband. He was a sweetheart," she said fondly. "Not exactly a firecracker in certain departments, but a good honest guy."

Stranahan aimed the binoculars at the bay window of the Perrone residence. The lights had come on, though the curtains remained closed. It had been an hour since the dark-haired woman had arrived, parking a blue Ford compact next to Chaz's Humvee.

"You don't know who she is?"

"No idea. It's pitiful," Joey said. "He's got so many bimbos, you'd need radio collars to track them all."

Stranahan secretly was pleased that Chaz Perrone was entertaining female company only three tender days into widowhood. Such a boggling lack of self-restraint could open a world of squalid opportunities for someone seeking to mess with Chaz's head.

"Let's call it a night," Stranahan suggested.

"Honestly, did she look that smokin' hot to you?"

"The longer we stay, the riskier it gets."

"This is what the Secret Service drives. Chevy Suburbans."

"Joey, we're not the Secret Service. I'm supposed to be retired and you're supposed to be deceased."

"Hey, we should copy the license off her car!"

"Done." Too tired to trust his memory, Stranahan had jotted the tag number on the inside of his wrist.

"Fifteen more minutes," she said. "Then we can go."

"Thank you."

Earlier, after leaving the car-rental agency, they had, over Strana-han's objections, stopped at an outlet mall. Joey had decided that she couldn't continue wearing the clothes of his ex-wives and girlfriends, and noted as an example that their bras were all too large. Grimly, Stranahan had trailed after her as she accumulated $2,400 worth of slacks, tops, skirts, shoes, cosmetics and other personal items. She was the most ruthless and efficient shopper that he'd ever seen, but the experience had exhausted him so thoroughly that his senses now seemed cauterized.

Or perhaps that's how everyone came to feel in West Boca Dunes Phase II.

"You didn't even ask about the black dress," Joey was saying. "There's quite a naughty history there."

"I was letting my imagination run wild."

"Whatever he's doing with her tonight, he's thinking about me. That I can guarantee. And wait'll he finds the lipstick!"

Stranahan leaned his head against the window and shut his eyes.

"Don't you dare go to sleep," Joey said.

"I miss my dog. I want to go back to the island."

She poked him in the shoulder. "There they are!"

Two figures emerged from the Perrone house, a man and a woman, hurrying down the walkway. In the darkness Stranahan couldn't make out their faces but undoubtedly it was Joey's husband and his guest. As they got into the blue Ford, their expressions were briefly illuminated by the dome light. Both of them appeared soberly preoccupied, and not exactly radiating the afterglow of love.

Joey said, "He's driving. You know what that means."

"No, what?"

"He's been doing her," she said. "Guys never ask to drive your car until after they've slept with you at least twice. That's what Rose says, and she's been with, like, forty-nine men."

"Sounds like it's time for an oil change."

"Hey, let's follow 'em," Joey said.

"Let's not. Let's assume he screwed her and he's taking her to dinner and then he's sending her on her way."

"I'm going back inside my house."

"Bad idea," Stranahan said. "You've creeped him out enough for one night."

"Give me ten minutes. I've got to use the bathroom."

Joey hopped out of the Suburban and jogged down the street. When she returned, "Move It on Over" was blasting from the speakers.

She frowned at Stranahan. "That's cold."

"It's not the CD. It's the radio." He twisted the volume down. "I lucked into classic rock."

"What's so funny?"

"At my age I'm a sucker for ironies. Buckle up."

Joey didn't speak again until they were southbound on the interstate. "Chaz definitely noticed the dress in the closet, because it was gone when I went back."

"Excellent."

"But I found something really weird in the sink."

"What?" Stranahan was thinking maybe Jell-O or whipped cream.

"Pubic hair," Joey reported indignantly. "Kelly-green pubic hair. That nasty woman shaved herself all over my vanity."

Mick Stranahan reached over and squeezed her hand. "Nobody said this was going to be easy."

The man called Tool lived in a trailer outside of LaBelle, not far from Lake Okeechobee. The trailer had come with a half-acre parcel upon which the previous owner had cultivated tomatoes, a crop despised by Tool since his days as a crew boss. The day he moved in, he hitched an old Pontiac engine block to his truck and dragged it back and forth across the tomato patch until all that remained was churned dirt.

In place of vegetables Tool began planting highway-fatality markers that he collected on his travels throughout southwest Florida. The small homemade crosses often displayed colorful floral arrangements, which Tool found pleasing to the eye. Whenever he spied one of the markers along a road, he would yank it from the ground and place it in the back of his truck. Often this act was witnessed by other motorists, though nobody ever attempted to interfere.

Tool stood six three and weighed 280 pounds and owned a head like a cinder block. His upper body was matted so heavily with hair that he perspired copiously, even in cold weather, and found it uncomfortable to wear a shirt. Nearly a year had passed since Tool had been shot in broad daylight by a poacher who had mistaken him for a bear. No entry wound had been visible, as the slug had uncannily tunneled into the seam of Tool's formidable buttocks. Because bleeding was minimal, he elected to forgo medical treatment-a decision that would come back to haunt him.

Soon the pain became so unbearable that he gave up his job as a crew boss, no longer physically able to harass and abuse migrant farmworkers for twelve hours at a stretch. Such was his misery that a concerned dope-addict friend recommended fentanyl, a high-octane painkiller used during surgery but also available in a convenient skin patch.

Tool had no prescription for the medicine, but he did have a lock-pick. Once a week he'd drive to Fort Myers, break into a nursing home and meticulously peel the fentanyl patches from torsos of sedated cancer patients. In no time Tool was hopelessly hooked, his dosage escalating to levels that would have euthanized a more highly evolved organism. The only serious obstacle to his drug habit was his excess of body hair, so dense and oily as to defy conventional adhesives. Daily cropping was required, often in checkerboard patterns to accommodate multiple stolen patches.

That was how Red Hammernut found him, buck naked in a rusty washtub behind the house trailer, scraping brutally at his shoulder blades with a disposable razor.

"Hey," Tool said. "Long time no see."

"I been to Africa after them tarpon." With a groggy sigh Red Hammernut lowered himself into a tattered lawn chair. "Just got back to Tampa this morning and I'm jet-lagged outta my skull. May I ask what in the name of Jesus P. Christ you're doin'?"

"You got a job for me?"

That was one thing Red Hammernut admired about Tool-the sumbitch got right to the point.

"Go on and finish your bath. We'll talk after," Red said. "Meantime, where's my ole friend Mr. Daniel?"

"They's a bottle in the bedroom somewheres."

Tool's bedroom was the last place that Red Hammernut yearned to explore, so he took a beer from the refrigerator instead. When he came back outside, Tool was hosing himself off.

Red pointed at the field of white fatality markers behind the trailer. "How many you got now?"

"Sixty odd. Mebbe seventy." Tool shook himself like a drenched buffalo. "Say, Red, throw me that damn towel."

It was a wadded scrap stained with what appeared to be transmission fluid. Red Hammernut tossed it to Tool, who fashioned a do-rag crookedly around his head.

"I still can't understand why you save those damn things. It's pretty fuckin' depressing, you ask me," Red said.

Tool turned to contemplate the orderly rows of crosses. He didn't give a shit about the car-crash victims, but he liked the visual symmetry of his design. "It's sorta like that famous soldier graveyard up in Washington-what's it called?"

"Arlington?"

"Yeah. Sorta like a mini Arlington!"

"Christ, I'm sure."

"Well, it's better'n goddamn tomatoes."

"You're right about that." Red Hammernut laughed.

The two men had met four years earlier when Red Hammernut's company purchased the vegetable farm where Tool was running crews of pickers and packers. After observing Tool's specialized management techniques, Red had recruited him for side jobs that required muscle and a lack of conscience. Red had found him to be reliable and focused in the way of a natural predator, though not as ruthlessly gung ho as his precedessor, Crow Beacham. It was Crow who had eagerly volunteered to dispose of that foolish young Mexican, the one griping about the curdled toilets and brown-running water at the migrant camps. Barely nineteen, the boy had marched his complaint to the faggot Communist lawyers at Rural Legal Services, who were preparing to share it with a federal judge, when their star witness vanished. It was almost two years before they'd found the Mexican kid's skeleton, in a phosphate pit a hundred miles away, but by then Crow Beacham was dead from syphilis and tapeworms. Tool took better care of himself, Red Hammernut noted, though not much.

"What's the work," Tool asked, "and how much does it pay?"

"Five hundred a day."

Tool looked amazed, and doubtful. "Do I gotta kill somebody or somethin'?"

"I doubt it."

"Don't be jerkin' me around, Red, I ain't in the mood. Not with a bullet in the crack of my ass." He lumbered indoors and banged about for a few minutes. He emerged wearing black denim overalls and carrying a pizza that was frozen solid. When he took a bite, it sounded like the crack of a.22.

Red Hammernut decided not to ask about the three flesh-colored patches that Tool had attached to the shaven areas on his back. The less known about the man's personal habits, the better.

"Let's have it," Tool said.

"Okay, here's the deal. I got a boy does some work for me, he lost his wife a few days back. He's a little shaky right now and I need you to keep a eye on him."

"How'd she die?" Blood was trickling out of Tool's mouth from where the pizza crust had lacerated his gums.

"She fell off one a them cruise liners out in the ocean."

"No shit? Was she some kinda retard or somethin'?"

"Not hardly." From experience Red Hammernut knew it was best not to clutter Tool's brain with a surplus of information.

"Anyway, the boy's nerves are 'bout fried on account of her bein' lost at sea and the cops askin' questions and so forth. This mornin' I get a message on my machine. Now he thinks somebody's sneakin' into his house and movin' shit around and generally tryin' to freak his ass out. Personally, I got a feelin' it's all in his head. Either way, he needs a guardian angel, and that would be you."

Tool nodded, chewing savagely. "You say he works on the farm?"

Red Hammernut raised his arm in time to deflect an errant chunk of pepperoni. "Nope. He lives over in Boca Raton."

"Oh fuck, Red."

"I know, it's hor'ble. That's how come the five hundred a day."

Tool spat again, this time intentionally, and stomped back into the trailer. He came out with a bag of beef jerky sticks.

"Gimme one a them bad boys," Red Hammernut said, helping himself.

"Boca! I swear to God, Red."

"I'm really sorry, man."

"What kinda work he do for you, this guy?"

"Nuthin' I want advertised, unnerstand? You notice any funny bid-ness, I spect you to call me."

"Sure thing," said Tool.

"And don't hurt nobody," Red Hammernut said, "less I say so."

Once, when the feds were investigating potentially damaging (though well-founded) accusations that Red was holding farm laborers as indentured slaves, he sent Tool to discourage the aggrieved workers from cooperating with the authorities. While nobody disappeared or died, the few workers who dared to testify unanimously portrayed "Mr.

Hammernut" as a saintly, paternal figure who'd plucked them from a life of aimless destitution and given them a bright future in modern agriculture.

Based on what he'd seen in the labor camps of Immokalee and Belle Glade, Red felt confident that Tool would have no trouble handling a weak, pampered white boy like Chaz Perrone.

With a grunt Red stretched his arms and announced he was going home to sleep for about four days. Tool followed him out to the paved road, where the gray Cadillac waited. As usual, Red's driver had kept the engine running and the thermostat set at sixty-eight degrees.

"She a pretty girl?" Tool asked.

"Who-the wife? Yeah, she was."

Tool scratched at his neck. "Maybe he kilt her."

"I don't care," said Red Hammernut, "and neither do you."