Catherine pulled away and said, “You’re nuts. Get outta here.”
“Come to my room,” Decker said.
Catherine shook her head and gestured toward her husband.
“Leave him here,” Decker said playfully.
“He’ll notice if I get out of bed.”
“Just for a few minutes.”
“No—”
So he kissed her again. This time she gave a shy purr, which Decker correctly read more as tolerance than total surrender. The second kiss lasted longer than the first, and Decker was getting fairly heated up when James suddenly rolled over, snorted, and said, “Cath?”
Carefully she lay down on the pillow, Decker’s hand still resting on her breast. “Yes, hon?” she said.
Cath.
Hon.
Very sweet, Decker thought, a regular goddamn testimonial to marital bliss. He started to remove his hand but Catherine wouldn’t let him. Decker smiled in the dark.
“Cath,” James said torpidly, “did Bambi ever come in?”
“No, honey,” she said. “He’s probably out on the porch. Go back to sleep now.”
Catherine held motionless until James’s breathing grew thick and regular. Then she turned her back to him so that she and Decker were face-to-face at the edge of the bed.
“Go back to your room,” she whispered. “Give me about ten minutes.”
“Thatta girl,” Decker said, rising off his knees. “One more kiss.”
Catherine said, “Ssshhh,” but she kissed him back. This time she let her tongue sneak into his mouth.
“We’ll need your boat.”
Catherine and Decker opened their eyes mid-kiss and stared at each other. The whisper did not belong to James.
“The boat,” Skink said.
Catherine saw his tangled face looming impassively over Decker’s shoulder.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Skink said, “but there’s some cops out front.”
Decker stood up and fought back a panic. It had to be Al Garcia. He knew about the divorce, and Catherine would have been high on his list of interviews. The surprising thing was that he’d come in the dead of night—unless, of course, he knew Decker was inside the house.
Which any nitwit could have figured out from the rental car out front. Decker wondered if maybe deep down he wanted to go back to jail—what else could explain such carelessness? Skink took care of survival in the boonies, but the city was Decker’s responsibility and he kept making dumb mistakes.
“Your boat,” Skink said again to Catherine, “it’s tied up out back.”
She whispered, “I don’t know where the keys are.”
“I don’t need the keys,” Skink said, no longer making an effort to talk quietly. “We’ll leave ‘er up at Haulover, but don’t go looking right away.”
The doorbell rang, followed by three sharp knocks.
James sat up in bed and reached for a lamp on the nightstand. Blearily he eyed Decker and Skink. “What’s going on?”
Catherine was out from the covers, brushing her hair in the mirror. “You better get moving,” she said to Decker’s reflection. “I’ll keep them at the door.”
“We’ll need a head start.”
“Don’t worry, Rage.”
The doorbell rang again. The knocks turned to pounding. Slunk handed Decker his jeans and shoes.
“What’s going on?” James the doctor wondered. “Where’s the damn dog?”
Since the truck they’d been driving was registered to Dickie Lockhart, and since the New Orleans police had temporarily impounded it along with everything else belonging to Dickie, the Rundell brothers had been forced to take a Trailways all the way back to Florida. On the trip they talked primarily about two things—how their hero had died, and what had happened to their precious bass boat.
Dim as they were, even the Rundells realized that not much could be done for Dickie, but the boat was another issue. It had been stolen and then scuttled in the middle of Lake Maurepas, where it had turned up as bottom clutter on Captain Coot Hough’s Vexilar LCD Video sonic fish-finder. Once the lost boat had been pinpointed, the Rundells had recruited an amateur salvage team made up of fellow bass anglers, who raised the vessel with a hand-cranked winch mounted on a borrowed construction barge. The sight of their sludge-covered beauty breaking the surface was the second saddest thing Ozzie Rundell had ever seen—the first being Dickie Lockhart’s blue-lipped corpse in the big fish tank.