It had taken the better part of the morning to get Skink arraigned and bailed out of jail, and by now it was the middle of the day; not hot, but piercingly bright, the way it gets in January in the Deep South. Skink said there was no point in going out on the water now because the bass would be in thick cover. He curled up on the floor of the motel room and went to sleep while Decker read the New Orleans Times-Picayune. On the back page of the local section was a small item about a local man who had disappeared on a fishing trip to Florida and was presumed drowned somewhere in the murky vastness of Lake Okeechobee. The young man’s name was Lemus Curl, and except for the absence of a blackened bullet hole in his forehead, the picture in the paper matched the face of the man whom Skink had shot dead near Morgan Slough; the man who had tried to murder them with the rifle. Obviously it was Lemus Curl’s brother whom Jim Tile had stopped for speeding shortly afterward. Interestingly, the same Thomas Curl was quoted in the newspaper as saying that his brother had slipped off the dike and tumbled into the water on the west side of the big lake. The article reported that Lemus Curl had been tussling with a hawg bass at the time of the tragic accident. Decker thought this last detail, though untrue, lent a fine ironic touch to the story.
Skink snored away and Decker felt alone. He felt like calling Catherine. He found a pay phone outside the lobby of the Quality Court. She answered on the fifth ring, and sounded like she’d been sleeping.
“Did I wake you?”
“Hey, Rage, where you at?”
“In a motel outside New Orleans.”
“Hmmm, sounds romantic.”
“Very,” Decker said. “My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he’s fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we’re taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some semi-retarded fishermen. Don’t you wish you were here?”
“I could fly in tomorrow, get a hotel in the Quarter.”
“Don’t be a tease, Catherine.”
“Oh, Decker.” She was stretching, waking up, probably kicking off the covers. He could tell all that over the phone. “I had to get up early and take James to the airport,” she said.
“Where to now?”
“San Francisco.”
“And of course he didn’t want you to come along.”
“That’s not true,” Catherine said. ‘Those conventions are a bore, and besides, I’ve got plans of my own. What are you doing out in the bayous?”
“Rethinking Darwin,” Decker said. “Some of these folks didn’t evolve from apes; it was the other way around.”
“You should have gotten a nice room downtown.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Decker said. “The fish people, I’m talking about.”
“Take notes,” Catherine said, “it sounds like it’ll make a terrific movie. Attack of the Fish People. Now, be honest, Rage, wouldn’t you rather be shooting pictures of golfers?”
Decker said, “I’d better go.”
“That’s it?”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you, but not over the phone.”
“It’s all right,” Catherine said. “Anytime you want to talk.” He wished she’d been serious about flying up to New Orleans, though it was a nutty scheme. She would have been safer in San Francisco with her chiropractor.
“I’ll call you when I get back,” Decker said.
“Take care,” Catherine said. “Slurp an oyster for me.”
At dusk Skink was ready to roll. Shower cap, weathersuit, mosquito netting, lamps, flippers, regulator, scuba tank, dive knife, spear-gun and, purely for show, a couple of cheap spinning rods. R. J. Decker was afraid the johnboat would sink under the weight. He decided there was no point in bringing the cameras at night; a strobe would be useless at long distance. If his theory was correct, Dickie Lockhart wouldn’t be anywhere near the lake anyway.
They made sure they were alone at the dock before loading the boat and shoving off. It was a chilly night, and a northern breeze stung Decker’s cheeks and nose. At the throttle, Skink seemed perfectly warm and serene behind his sunglasses. He seemed to know where he was going. He followed the concrete ribbon of 1-55, which was sunk into the marshlands on enormous concrete pilings. The highway pilings were round and smooth, as big as sequoias but out of place; the cars that raced overhead intruded harshly on the foggy peace of the bayous. After twenty minutes Skink cut off the motor.