“Sure I can. It’s none of your damn business who I am.”
“Shit,” Lanie said, “you’re impossible.”
Skink hit the brakes hard and downshifted. The sports car fishtailed severely and spun off the Gilchrist and came to rest in a field of crackling dry pastureland.
“My Vette is now parked in cowshit,” Lanie observed, more perturbed than frightened.
Skink took his hands off the steering wheel.
“Want to know who I am? I’m the guy who had a chance to save this place, only I blew it.”
“Save what?”
Skink made a circular gesture. “Everything. Everything that counts for anything. I’m the guy that could have saved it, but instead I ran. So there’s your answer.”
“Clue me in, please.”
“Don’t worry, it’s ancient history.”
Lanie said, “Were you famous or something?”
Skink just laughed. He couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” she asked. He had a terrific smile, no doubt about it.
“No more damn questions.”
“Just one,” Lanie said, moving in. “How about a kiss?”
It didn’t stop at just one, and it didn’t stop with just kissing. Skink was impressed by both her energy and agility—unless you had circus experience, it wasn’t easy getting naked in the bucket seat of a Corvette. Skink himself tore the inseam of his orange weathersuit in the struggle. Lanie had better luck with her jeans and panties; somehow she even got her long bare legs wrapped around him. Skink admired her tan, and said so. She hit a button and the seat slid down to a full recline.
Once she was on top Lanie allowed her breasts to brush back and forth against Skink’s cheeks. She looked down and saw that he seemed to be enjoying himself. His huge boots were braced against the dashboard.
“What do you like?” she asked.
“Worldly things.”
“You got it,” Lanie said. “We’re going to do it and then we’re going to lie here together and talk, all right?”
“Sure.”
She pressed down hard and began to rock her hips. “Get to know each other a little better.”
“Fine idea,” Skink said.
Then she leaned down, snuck her tongue in his ear, and said, “Leave the sunglasses on, okay?”
Even for Lanie Gault, the owl eye would have been a glaring distraction.
Later that afternoon, after Lanie was gone and Jim Tile had stashed Ellen O’Leary at his apartment, Skink took the truck to town. He came back towing a dented old boat trailer with a sagging rusty axle. In the flatbed of the pickup truck was a six-horsepower Mercury outboard that had seen brighter days. There was also a plastic forty-gallon garbage bucket, eight feet of aquarium tubing, and four dozen D-size batteries, which Skink had purchased at Harney Hardware.
He was fiddling with his trash-bucket contraption when Decker came up and said, “Why’d you let her go?”
“No reason to keep her.”
To Decker the reason seemed obvious. “She’ll run straight to her brother.”
“And tell him what?”
“Where I am, for starters.”
“You won’t be here that long,” Skink said. “We’re all heading south. Jim Tile and the Cuban—they been practicing?”
“All day,” Decker said. “Garcia’s hopeless.”
“He can play captain, then.”
Decker needed to ask something else but he didn’t want to set Skink off.
“She doesn’t know the plan, does she?”
It was another way of asking what had happened in the Corvette. Skink clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
“Some of us know how to get laid with our mouths shut,” he said sourly. “No, she doesn’t know the damn plan.”
Decker was getting ominous vibrations; maybe the beating in Delray had loosened a few more bolts in the big man’s brainpan. Skink was forever pulling guns, and he looked like he wanted to pull one now. Decker asked Jim Tile for a ride to town, to make some phone calls. Al Garcia went along; he was out of cigarettes.
“Town’s a bad idea,” Jim Tile said, heading away from Harney on Route 222. “The three of us shouldn’t be seen together. There’s a Zippy Mart about eight miles along here.”
Decker said, ‘This idea of his… I don’t know, Jim.”
“It’s his last chance,” the trooper said. “You saw how bad he looks.”