Skinny Dip

Thirty-one

Joey Perrone burrowed into the folds of her brother's sheepskin coat.

"Can't you stay a few more days?"

"Romance and adventure beckon," Corbett Wheeler said. "Besides, my ewes are lost without me."

"I hope you know what you're doing. What if she does turn out to be a bimbo?"

"There are worse tragedies, little sister."

Joey let out a cry of mock indignation and tugged Corbett's hat over his eyes. Mick Stranahan carried the luggage to the helicopter, which had nearly given Strom a coronary when it touched down on the island. The pilot re-started the engines and Joey backed away from the din, fighting tears.

Corbett blew a kiss and rakishly twirled his walking stick. Before stepping aboard, he stopped to shake Stranahan's hand. Joey could see the two men talking intently, Mick nodding and appearing to ask questions. He trotted back and stood with her as the chopper lifted off, both of them waving broadly as it thumped away toward the mainland.

"Ricca's meeting him at the airport. She had a quick stop in Boca this morning," Stranahan reported.

"What else? "Joey asked.

"That's it."

"Come on, Mick. What were you guys talking about?"

"Nothing, honest," he insisted. "Your brother just wanted to thank me for taking care of you. He said he knew what a pain in the ass you can be."

She chased him all the way to the dock, where they stripped off each other's clothes and dove in. They were making a third lap around the island when a park ranger's boat surprised them. It was a big SeaCraft with twin Mercs, driven by a muscular Cuban officer in his early forties. As he idled up to the swimmers he broke into a grin.

"Some things never change," he said.

"Hey, Luis."

"Hello, Mick. Hello, pretty lady."

Peeking modestly over Mick's shoulder, Joey gave a minisalute.

"Meet the legendary Luis Cordova," Stranahan said, treading water. "We've known each other since the grand old days of Stiltsville, back when he was a rookie with the marine patrol. Now he's a hotshot storm trooper for the Park Service, spying on innocent skinny-dippers."

Luis Cordova laughed as he tossed a rope. "I'm here on official business, you horny old deadbeat."

"Aw, please don't tell me Senor Zedillo kicked the bucket," Stranahan said.

Miguel Zedillo was the Mexican novelist who owned the island. Joey remembered the name from a stack of books on a shelf in Mick's bedroom. He had told her that the writer was in fragile health, and that the island would probably be sold after he died. That's when Joey had piped up and said she'd like to buy it, which had so delighted Mick that he'd immediately made love to her under the picnic table.

"Relax, man," said Luis Cordova. "Far as I know, the old man is still alive and kicking in Tampico. I came out here to ask you about an abandoned boat."

Mick grabbed the rope and Joey clung monkey-style to his back. The ranger pulled them to the transom of the SeaCraft, so that they could rest on the dive platform. Joey was pleased to note that Luis Cordova was a gentleman, strenuously averting his gaze from her bare bottom.

"What boat?" Mick asked.

"Twenty-three-foot rental floated up on the rocks at Cape Florida last night, probably when that weather moved through. No dive gear, no tackle, nobody on board. Just a busted spotlight and some blood spots on the gunwale."

"Human?"

Luis Cordova spread his arms. "That's why I'm here."

"Who did the paperwork trace back to?"

"No paper, Mick," the ranger said. "Rental company says the boat was stolen from the marina before the storm, but I've got a hunch they owed somebody a favor."

"Twenty-three-footer, you said?"

"Blue Bimini top. Yamaha four-stroke."

Stranahan said, "Sorry, Luis. I didn't see any boats."

Joey spoke up. "We stayed indoors all night. The weather was horrible."

"That it was," agreed Luis Cordova, gallantly trying to keep his eyes fixed above her neck. "What's your name, ma'am?"

Joey, who had been covering her breasts with her free arm, let go just long enough to jab Mick in the rib cage. He took the cue.

"She's trying to keep a low profile," he confided to the ranger. "Family problems back home. You know what I mean."

"Did I mention there was a bullet hole in the windshield?"

"No, Luis, you didn't."

"Maybe you folks heard something-like a gunshot?"

"Not with all that hellacious thunder," Stranahan said.

Joey added, "We could barely hear ourselves talk."

Luis Cordova was nodding, but Joey sensed that he wasn't entirely sold.

He said, "Well, I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. Every time there's a bloodstained boat, I think of you first, Mick."

"I'm flattered, but these days I'm living a quiet, normal life."

"Yeah, I can see that," Luis Cordova said dryly. "Sorry to interrupt your afternoon. You want a lift back to the dock?"

"Naw, we'll swim." Stranahan pushed away from the stern, Joey riding his shoulders. "Good seeing you again, man," he called to the ranger.

"Same here, amigo."

"Are you looking for a body?" The question popped out of Joey's mouth before she realized it. Stranahan reached down and pinched her on the butt.

"A body?" Luis Cordova said.

Joey, thinking: How could I be such a ditz!

"What I meant," she said, "was that maybe somebody fell off that boat during the storm."

The ranger told her that nobody had been reported missing. "But don't forget it's Miami," he added. "Sometimes people disappear and nobody ever calls the cops. Anyway, it's a big ocean."

Tell me about it, Joey said to herself.

Swimming toward the house, she couldn't stop wondering about her husband. Had a suitcase crammed with half a million dollars been found on the abandoned boat, Luis Cordova likely would have mentioned it.

And if no suitcase or corpse had turned up, Joey reasoned, the odds were better than even that Chaz Perrone had survived and made off with the cash. It was almost unbearable to contemplate.

"You kept telling me not to worry," she shouted to Mick, who trailed her by ten yards in the water. "Now you happy? The worthless creep got away!"

"Why won't you trust me?" Stranahan called back.

"Because you're a man." Joey blew bubbles as she laughed.

"Fine," he said, "then you owe me two weeks' room and board!"

"Gotta catch me first."

She lowered her head and lengthened her strokes, knifing across the foamy crests of the waves. She could barely hear him shouting, "Hey, Joey, slow down! I love you!"

Geezer, she thought.

Happily she kicked toward the seawall where Strom paced, yapping and wagging his silly stump of a tail.

Red Hammernut licked at the corners of his lips. He'd been spitting and swearing so much that his tongue had gone to chalk. For about the sixth time he proclaimed, "That was the worst job a shootin' I ever saw from a man with two good eyes."

Earl Edward O'Toole kept his two good eyes on the levee road and said nothing. Evidently he was done apologizing.

Red was nearly apopletic about Chaz Perrone's escape. Tool had told him to quit worrying; said the guy was a hopeless pussy who'd never get out of the 'glades alive.

Only what if he does? Red thought.

"That boy can flat-out ruin me," he said somberly.

Tool chuckled. "He ain't gone ruin nobody, chief. He's gone run till he drops."

"You know sumpin' I don't?"

"Just that he's got plenty to be a-scared of," Tool said, "he ever comes out."

"And what if somebody else catches him first? Ever thought about that? Boy's lookin' at Death Row, he'd be tickled to rat out yours truly for a plea bargain."

Tool said, "Don't getcha self all worked up."

On the chance that Chaz might backtrack, they had waited a long time in the darkness on the levee-listening, watching for a shadow to move-until Red could no longer endure the bugs. They left Perrone's Hummer but took the keys, in the event that the sonofabitch was waiting in the weeds nearby. His maudlin suicide note lay prominently displayed on the dashboard-"in case he's polite enough to float up dead," Red had explained.

Now, riding next to Tool in the dusty pickup, Red couldn't stop stewing about all that had happened since the screwball biologist had gotten rid of his wife. It was uncanny how things had unraveled, how swiftly order and reason had spun into mayhem. Red Hammernut was not a complicated or ruminative person; he was a pragmatist and a fixer and a kicker of asses. He didn't believe in fate or karma or the fortuitous alignment of the constellations. If a tide of bad shit was rolling his way, it meant that somebody down the line had fucked up.

Normally Red Hammernut had no difficulty identifying the source of the problem and fixing it-a payoff, a beating or a plane ticket usually did the trick-but the Perrone situation was unlike any he'd ever come up against. All of Red's clout and political connections would be useless if Chaz resurfaced and started blabbing about the Everglades scam. Red now regretted destroying the two videotapes of Joey Perrone's murder, which in retrospect would have been useful in turning the tables on Chaz.

That back-stabbing lowlife.

Oh well, Red thought, at least I got my money back. The Samsonite was sliding noisily around the bed of the pickup as they jounced along the berm, heading out of the Loxahatchee preserve.

"Why you goin' so damn slow?" he griped at Tool. "Because I gotta keep the headlights off." "And why exactly do you gotta do that?"

" 'Cause they's park rangers and game wardens out here," Tool explained. "It ain't like back home, Red. This is a federal deal." "They can kiss my ass, them feds." "Plus your boy only left us 'bout a quarter tank of gas."

"Well, that figgers."

By choice Red Hammernut hadn't spent much time in what little remained of the original, untouched Everglades. He preferred the parts that had been drained, plowed or paved-such as the vegetable fields he patrolled by Cadillac or helicopter; flat and orderly rectangles, neatly delineated by ditches and shorn of unruly tree cover. Sometimes you might run across a feral pig or a stray coon, but wildlife was generally sparse on the farm.

Red was not afraid of the wilderness but he wasn't truly comfortable there, especially at night; especially with a shotgun that was empty.

"Those fuckin' feds," he said contemptuously, "and the state of Florida, too, they're gonna bust my hump about dumpin' shit in this water. You wait and see, son. A damn travesty is what it is!"

"Yessir," said Tool, with not as much empathy as his boss would have liked.

"Take them bull gators we heard tearin' it up out there tonight," Red went on. "They been around-what, a hundred trillion years? You think a little fertilizer's gonna bother 'em? Fungicides? Pesticides? Hell, those badass fuckers could eat their weight in DDT and not get sick enough to fart. They're dinosaurs, for Christ's sake. They don't need the damn U.S. guv'ment to watch out for 'em."

Tool fixed his gaze straight ahead. "But didn't all the other dinosaurs get extincted?"

"What?" Red Hammernut couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Son, whose side are you on? I don't know what the hell happened to the other damn dinosaurs, and who gives two shits anyhow?"

Tool said, "I shot me a li'l gator just the other day. Wasn't but a four-footer, but still."

"Still what?"

Red simmered all the way out of Loxahatchee. He started feeling better only when the truck finally hit dry pavement and he could see the sodium lights of Palm Beach County glowing to the east. "We're gonna put a chopper up first thing tomorrow," he announced coolly. "I ain't worried. We'll track down that gutless bastard."

"If the dinosaurs don't get him first," said Tool, stone-faced.

"Son, you tryin' to bust my balls? Because I ain't in the mood, case you didn't notice."

"Yessir."

"Know what you could do tomorrow, Mr. O'Toole? You could take that twelve-gauge out to the range for target practice, so that maybe next time you'll be able to hit the side of a motherfuckin' barn."

Tool accepted the insult impassively, a silence that Red Hammer-nut misread as submission. He failed entirely to perceive the flimsiness of Tool's loyalty, or to sense the anger that had begun to simmer in the man's simple thinking.

"It's all 'cause of you he escaped!" Red fumed. "It's your damn fault and nobody else's!"

Tool gave a half shrug. "Try shootin' a shotgun with a slug in your armpit."

"Goddammit, just drive. Just get me home."

Closing his eyes, Red thought of the steaming Jacuzzi that awaited. He couldn't wait to scrub the sweat and sunscreen and dead bugs off his skin; sit down to a sixteen-ounce T-bone and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He was jolted from this reverie when Tool braked the pickup to an abrupt halt on the grassy shoulder of the highway.

Red looked around. "Now what? We blow a tire?"

"Sit tight." Tool pushed himself out of the truck.

"Hey! Get back here," Red hollered. He hopped out and chased after him. "Where the hell you think you're goin'? I ain't got time tonight for this nonsense!"

Tool did not alter his pace. Red got up beside him and began calling him every name he could think of.

"You hush," Tool said, raising a brick-size hand. He stooped to study the small white cross, and removed a spray of shriveled lilies.

"Not now, son. You come back some other day and fetch it, but not tonight," Red admonished him. "Not on my time."

"It'll just take a second."

"You gone deaf? Deaf and dumb?"

The name on the homemade cross was visible in the wash from the truck's headlights:

Pablo Humberto Duarte

Loving Husband, Father, Son, and Brother

B. Sept. 3, 1959. D.March 21, 2003

Now He Rides with God Almighty

Remember: Seat Belts Save Lives!

"Just some damn beaner," Red Hammernut grumped. "Probably got trashed and drove hisself into the canal."

"You don't know that," said Tool.

"Just lookit the name. Pah-blow Humm-bear-toe-tell me that ain't a beaner name."

Tool sat on his haunches, elbows propped on his knees.

"Well, hurry it up, then," Red said crossly. "Pull the damn thing outta the ground and let's go. I need a drink and a steam."

Tool didn't budge. Red glowered at him.

"What the fuck, son?"

"I just been workin' the 'rithmetic in my head. This old boy was 'bout the same age as me," Tool said, "give or take."

"The beaner?"

"Mr. Doo-arty here. However you say it."

"Mercy." Red thinking: Lord, please don't let this moron go soft on me.

Tool gestured at the wooden cross. "Least he was a 'husband, father, son, brother'-I ain't none a those things, Red. I got no wife and no family… one lousy cousin, he's up at Starke for robbin' a goddamn laundry-mat."

That was the end of Red Hammernut's patience. In his judgment there was no good reason for a man of his stature to be standing on the side of State Road 441 on a Saturday night while some hairy half-wit with a bullet up his butt cheeks suddenly gets a middle-life crisis, all because some dead Meskin forgot to buckle his damn seat belt.

Without a thought, Red slapped Earl Edward O'Toole across the top of the head. It was a poor decision, conveying what Tool regarded as an intolerable lack of respect.

"Listen here, you doped-up dickhead of a gorilla," Red said. "There's half a million bucks of my money sittin' like a big hot buzzard turd in the back of that pickup, out in the wide-open spaces, where any damn crackhead in basketball shoes can rip it off and be gone in five seconds. Now, I don't honestly know what's got into you, son, but I'm gonna count to ten and you're gonna yank that stupid fuckin' cross outta the ground and we're gonna get the hell outta Dodge. You understand me?"

Tool didn't move, even to wipe Red's spittle off his overalls.

"One…" Red huffed, "two… three… four…"

He had no earthly notion of what to do if the sulking fool refused to obey. Slap him again?

To Red's immeasurable relief, Tool rose slowly and said, "You the boss."

He placed his huge hands around the shaft of the white cross and worked it slowly out of the dirt, so as not to split the pine.

Red said, "It's about damn time. Now hurry up, let's go."

"Not you, chief."

"What?" It was amazing, Red mused, how all the nuts and bolts of one's existence could rattle loose with one bump. "What did you say?" he demanded again, somewhat heedlessly.

Earl Edward O'Toole positioned himself between Red and the truck, his broad frame blocking the headlights. Red felt small and, for the first time, fearful. He was chilled by the sound of Tool's breathing, slow and easy compared to his own.

With a desolate curiosity Red peered upward at the towering shadow. "What now, you dumb ape?"

"Hold still," Tool advised.

Samuel Johnson Hammernut could see the huge man raise both arms high, and for a moment he could see the cross of Pablo Duarte silhouetted against the pearly clouds, and after that he couldn't see anything at all.

The murder of the Everglades, as perpetrated by Red Hammernut and others, is insidiously subtle and undramatic. Unlike more telegenic forms of pollution, the fertilizers pouring by the ton from the sugarcane fields and vegetable farms of southern Florida do not produce stinking tides of dead fish or gruesome panoramas of rotting animal corpses. Instead, the phosphates and other agricultural contaminants work invisibly to destroy a mat of algae known as periphyton, the slimy brown muck that underlies the river of grass and is its most essential nutrient. As the periphyton begins to die, the small fish that feed and nest there move away. Next to go are the egrets and herons, the bluegills and largemouth bass, and so on up the food chain. Soon the saw grass prairies wither and starve, replaced by waves of cattails and other aquatic plants that thrive on the torrent of phosphorus, yet provide miserable habitat for native birds and wildlife.

A primary objective of the government's Everglades restoration project was to reduce the steady deluge of man-made fertilizers. Grudging cooperation came from sugar barons and corporate farmers who could no longer rely on favored politicians to keep the EPA and other regulators off their backs. And while filtration marshes designed to strain out some of the pollutants had shown early promise, the Everglades was still dying at the rate of two acres per day when Charles Regis Perrone made his lonely, woeful trek through Loxahatchee.

He cursed the pungent mire that sucked the socks off his feet, the whips of saw grass that shredded his undershirt and boxers, the clots of lilies and leafy bladderwort that impeded his flight. The sprouts of newly blossomed cattails announced the presence of fertilizer in the water, but that wasn't the source of Chaz's trepidation. He knew that phosphorus was not toxic in the nasty bacterial style of, say, fecal sewage. He also understood that the lower levels recorded at Loxahatchee were more hospitable to native life than the felonious amounts found in the waters contiguous to Red Hammernut's fields.

Still, Chaz Perrone crossed the breeze-swept marsh with a puckering fear that he was being stalked-by Red and his shotgun-toting goon; by voracious disease-bearing insects; by needle-fanged cotton-mouth moccasins, blood-slurping leeches and deer ticks; by hydropho-bic bobcats and inbred panthers; by the gators whose husky mating calls fractured the brittle silence…

Chaz saw no irony in his own plight, having always regarded himself as more of a bystander than a villain in the poisoning of the wilderness. Blaming the demise of the Everglades on science whores such as himself seemed as silly to Chaz as blaming lung cancer on the medical doctors employed by tobacco companies, who for generations had insisted that cigarettes were harmless. The truth was that people were determined to smoke, regardless of what any pinhead researchers had to say. Likewise, cities and farms were bound to dispose of their liquefied crap in the cheapest, most efficient way-flushing it into public waters-regardless of the environmental hazards.

You can't buck human nature, Chaz had reasoned, so you might as well go with the flow, so to speak.

After taking the job as Red Hammernut's undercover biostitute, he had familiarized himself with Everglades ecology only enough to converse with colleagues and not reveal himself as an ignorant fraud. From his crash course he recalled that the ripe muck through which he now trudged was important in some nebulous way to the ecology, and that the other scientists jokingly referred to it as "monkey puke"-a description for which Chaz held newfound appreciation.

He abhorred getting wet even in benign settings, refusing even to tiptoe into country-club shallows to retrieve an errant golf ball. The idea of slogging buck naked and unarmed through a dark bog was so mortifying to Chaz that he couldn't dwell on it without risking a breakdown. The sky had begun to clear, and enough starlight was being cast upon the water that he could finally make shapes out of shadows. He was especially attentive to those that even vaguely resembled alligators, whose abundance was being confirmed by full-throated rumbles near and far. Chaz remembered from basic herpetology that such territorial outbursts were sexual in origin, and he wondered whether he was in greater danger of being devoured, or defiled. He was aware that most snakes had two operative penises-a topic of high mirth in undergraduate biology-but he could not recall if crocodil-ians were similarly endowed. It wasn't long before his recurring nightmare of being eaten by a two-headed gator had been supplanted by a vision even more harrowing.

In the distance loomed a tree island, an oasis of higher ground in the midst of the watery savanna. Chaz splashed ahead at a savage pace, adrenalized with dread at the prospect of being double-boned by a randy five-hundred-pound lizard. The saw grass sliced him mercilessly as he advanced, but he remained driven and unbowed. It was only when he reached the bushy hump of dry land and sagged against a bay tree that Chaz paused to contemplate the full measure of his misery. His muscles were cramping from fatigue and dehydration. His back stung hotly from a freckling of buckshot. His arms and torso were striped bloody from the grass blades. His face was covered by a humming shroud of mosquitoes. His crotch and thighs itched mysteriously.

And that was only the physical torment. Emotional pain assailed Chaz Perrone, as well.

The $13 million inheritance he'd dreamed of receiving had turned out to be a sadistic hoax.

The wife he had tried to kill was still alive, and on her way to the police.

The girlfriend he'd shot with similar intent had survived, and set him up for an abduction.

The man with whom he'd so profitably conspired had turned on him, and ordered him put down like a lame horse.

And now Chaz found himself filthy wet and abjectly naked, lost and defenseless in a place that he loathed more than any other.

Do I deserve this? he wondered. Really?

He ran a forefinger along one of his shins, skimming off the muck like chocolate icing. Holding it to his nose, he detected no noxious or rancid odor. Even if this gunk is loaded with fertilizers, so what? Chaz thought. It's just mud, for God's sake. It's not like I was clubbing baby harp seals.

A sliver of moon spread a pale bluish light across the savanna. Something rustled heavily, out of sight. Chaz Perrone drew his knees to his chest and silently groped for a rock. Another alligator boomed from a nearby pond.

Who… do… you love?

Yeah, who… do… you love?