James the doctor was gone again, this time to Montreal for a big trade show. He and several other chiropractors had agreed to endorse a new back-pain product called the Miracle VibraCouch, and the Canadian trade show was to be the scene of its unveiling. Saying good-bye at the car, James had promised to bring back videotapes of all the excitement, and Catherine had said that’ll be wonderful and pecked him on the cheek. James had asked her which model VibraCouch would go best in the Florida room, the tartan or the dusty rose, and Catherine had said neither, I don’t want an electric couch in my house, thank-you. James was pouting as he drove away.
When the bell rang, Catherine slipped into a short chiffon robe and padded barefoot to the door. The house was bright, and the clock in the alcove said nine-thirty. She’d overslept again.
Through a window she saw the gray Plymouth Volare parked in the driveway. Catherine smiled—here we go again. She checked herself in the mirror and said what the hell, it’s hopeless this early in the morning. When she opened the door she said, “Great timing as usual, Rage.”
But the man turned around and it wasn’t R.J. It was a heavyset stranger wearing R.J.’s brown leather coat. Catherine had bought the coat for him at a western shop near Denver. The stranger wore it on his shoulders like a cape. Maybe it wasn’t R.J.’s coat after all, Catherine thought anxiously; maybe it was one just like it.
” ‘Scuze me,” said the man, “you Mrs. Decker?”
“Stuckameyer,” Catherine said. “I used to be Mrs. Decker.”
The man had thin sandy hair, a flat crooked nose, and tiny dull eyes. He handed Catherine a crisp brown office envelope containing a sheaf of legal papers. Catherine scanned them and looked up quizzically.
“So?” she said. “These are my old divorce papers.”
“But that is you? Catherine Decker.”
“Where’d you get this stuff?” she said irritably.
“I found it,” the man said, “at Mr. Decker’s.”
Catherine studied him closely. She saw that he was also wearing one of R.J.’s knit shirts. She tried to slam the door but the man blocked it with a black round-toed boot.
“Don’t be a dumb cunt,” he said.
Catherine was turning to run when she saw the pistol. The man pointed it with his right hand extended from under the leather coat. Something round and mottled and awful was attached to the stranger’s arm. It looked like a football with ears.
“Oh Jesus,” Catherine cried.
“Don’t mind him,” the man said, “he don’t bite.”
He pushed his way into the house and shut the door. He shifted the pistol to his other hand, and tucked the dog-headed arm back under the coat.
“Decker’s in some deep shit,” said the stranger.
“Well, I don’t know where he is.” Catherine pulled her robe tight in the front.
Thomas Curl said, “You know why I’m here?”
“No, but I know who you are,” Catherine said. “You’re one of the Fish People, aren’t you?”
Jim Tile’s patrol car passed Garcia on Route 222 and led them into town, which was as dark as a mortuary. The trooper took them directly to the house of an old black doctor, who packed and dressed, Skink’s seeping eye wound. Silently Decker and Garcia watched the old man dance a penlight in front of Skink’s haggard face and peer into the other eye for quite a long time. “He needs a neurologist right away,” the doctor said finally. “Gainesville’s your best bet.”
Skink himself said nothing. When they got back to the cabin, he curled up on a mattress and went to sleep. Jim Tile got the campfire going. Al Garcia selected an oak stump of suitable width and sat down close to the flames. “Now what?” he said. “We tell ghost stories?”
R. J. Decker said, “This is where he lives.”
“Unbelievable,” the detective muttered.
Jim Tile went to the car and came back with two black-and-white photographs, eight-by-tens. “From our friends in the bayou,” he said, handing the pictures to R. J. Decker.
“Christ,” Decker mumbled. They were the caught-in-the-act shots of the bass cheaters in the reeds at Lake Maurepas—except that Dickie Lockhart’s head had been supered onto one of the other men’s bodies. Decker recognized the mug of Dickie from the bunch he’d shot at the Cajun Classic weigh-in. Looking at the doctored photographs made him feel angry and, in a way, violated.