Just then a sorrowful cry sheared the dusk. It rose up from the water in a guttural animal pitch that made Garcia flinch and shiver.
Jim Tile bowed his head. He’d tried to tell him.
Decker dropped the Minicam and ran toward the boat ramp.
Skink was on his knees in the shallow water. All around him fish were rising in convulsions, finning belly-up, cutting the glassy surface in jerky zigzag vectors.
Skink scooped up one of the addled bass as it swam by and held it up, dripping, for Decker and the others to see.
“They’re all dying,” he cried.
“Take my boat,” Eddie Spurling offered. “I got six of the damn things.”
“Thank you,” Skink said hoarsely. Decker and Catherine climbed in after him.
“I hope you find her,” Fast Eddie called as the boat pulled away. He would never forget the sight of that magnificent beast in the fish cage; he couldn’t bear the thought of her dying in bad water, but it seemed inevitable.
In the bass boat Skink stood up and opened the throttle. First the straw hat blew off, then the sunglasses. Skink didn’t seem to care. Nor did he seem to notice the gnats and bugs splatting against his cheeks and forehead, and sticking in his beard by the glue of their own blood. In the depthless gray of early night, Skink drove wide open as if he knew the canals by heart, or instinct. The boat accelerated like a rocket; Decker watched the speedometer tickle sixty and he clenched his teeth, praying they wouldn’t hit an alligator or a log. Catherine turned her head and clung to his chest with both arms. Except for the bone-chilling speed, it might have been a lovely moment.
Over the howl of the engine, Skink began to shout.
“Confrontation,” he declared, “is the essence of nature!”
He shook his silvery braid loose and let his hair stream out behind him.
“Confrontation is the rhythm of life,” he went on. “In nature violence is pure and purposeful, one species against another in an act of survival!”
Terrific, Decker thought, Marlin Perkins on PCP. “Watch where you’re going, captain!” he shouted.
“All I did with Dennis Gault,” Skink hollered back, “was to arrange a natural confrontation. No different from a thousand other confrontations that take place every night and every day out here, unseen and uncelebrated. Yet I knew Gault’s instincts as well as I knew the fish. It was only a matter of timing, of matching the natural rhythms. Putting the two species within striking distance. That’s all it was, Miami.”
Skink pounded the steering wheel ferociously with both fists, causing the speeding boat to skitter precipitously off its plane.
“But goddamn,” he groaned. “Goddamn, I didn’t know about the water.”
Decker rose beside him at the console and casually edged his knee against the wheel, just in case. “Of course you didn’t know!” Decker shouted. He ducked, unnecessarily, as they roared beneath an overpass for the new superhighway.
“We’re running through poison,” Skink said, incredulously. “They built a whole fucking resort on poison water.”
“I know, captain.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You don’t understand!” Skink turned around and said to Catherine: “He doesn’t understand. Do you love this man? Then make him understand. It’s my fault.”
Shielding her face from the cold, Catherine said, “You’re being too hard on yourself. That’s what I think.”
Skink smiled. His classic anchorman teeth were now speckled with dead gnats. “You’re quite a lady,” he said. “I wish you’d dump your doctor and go back—”
Suddenly, in front of them, another boat appeared. Just a flat shadow hanging in the darkness, dead across the middle of the canal. Someone in a yellow rain slicker was sitting in the bow of the boat, hunched in the seat.
Skink wasn’t even looking, he was talking to Catherine, who had opened her mouth to scream. Desperately Decker leaned hard left on the steering wheel and drew back on the throttle. Fast Eddie’s boat nearly went airborne as it struck the other craft a glancing mushy blow on the stern. They spun twice before Decker found the kill switch that cut the engine.