Somehow Skink had wedged himself between the bathroom sink and the toilet, compressed his bulk into a massive, musty cube on the tile floor. At first Decker couldn’t even pinpoint the location of his head; the wheezing seemed to come from under the toilet tank. Decker knelt down and saw Skink’s scaly face staring out from behind the water pipes. He looked like a bearded iguana.
“Why’d you turn on the light?” he asked.
“So I wouldn’t step on your vital organs.”
“Worse things could happen,” Skink said.
Freud would have a picnic, Decker thought. “Look, captain, we’ve got to get going.”
“I’m safe right here,” Skink observed.
“Not really,” Decker said. “You’re hiding under a toilet in a hundred-dollar beachfront hotel room. Someone’s bound to complain.”
“You think?”
Decker nodded patiently. “It’s much safer back in Harney,” he said. “If we leave now, we’ll be back at the lake by midnight.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll kill you, Miami, if this is a trap. I’ll fucking cut out your bladder and wring it in your hair.”
“It’s no trap,” Decker said. “Let’s go.”
It took forty-five minutes to disengage Skink from the plumbing. In the process the sink snapped clean off its legs; Decker left it lying on the bed.
In the lobby of the hotel he rented a Ford Escort. He got it out of the underground parking and pulled around back to the hotel’s service entrance, where Skink was waiting by the dumpsters. As Skink got in the car, Decker noticed something white tucked under one arm.
“Whatcha got there?” he said.
“Seagull.” Skink held up the limp bird by its curled orange feet. “Hasn’t been dead more than ten minutes. I scarfed it off the grille of that seafood truck.”
“Lucky us,” Decker said thinly.
“You hungry? We can stop and make a fire once we get out of this traffic.”
“Let’s wait, okay?”
“Sure,” Skink said. “It’ll keep for a couple hours.”
Decker headed west from the beach on the Seventeenth Street Causeway, past Port Everglades and the Ocean World aquarium. It was typical January beach traffic, bumper-to-bumper nitwits as far as the eye could see. Every other car had New York plates.
Skink fit the dead bird into the glove compartment and covered it with a copy of the rental agreement. He seemed in a much better mood already. He put on his sunglasses and flowered shower cap, and turned around to get his fluorescent rainsuit from the back seat. Through the rear window he noticed a dark blue Chrysler sedan following two car-lengths behind. He spotted a plastic bubble on the dashboard; not flashing, but a bubble just the same. The driver’s face was obscured by the tinted windshield, but a red dot bobbed at mouth-level.
“Your buddy Garcia smoke?”
Decker checked the rearview. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Skink struggled into the rainsuit, adjusted his sunglasses, and said, “Well, Miami, what’s it going to be?”
The blue light on the Chrysler’s dashboard was flashing now. Hopelessly Decker scanned the traffic on the causeway; it was jammed all the way to the next traffic signal, and beyond. There was nowhere to go. Al Garcia was up on his bumper and flashing his brights. Decker figured he had a better chance one-on-one, with no Fort Lauderdale cops. He decided to stop before it turned into a convoy.
He pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store. With the big Chrysler Garcia easily blocked off the little Escort, parked, kept the blue light turning. A bad sign, Decker thought.
He turned to Skink: “I don’t want to see your gun.”
“Relax,” Skink said. “Mr. Browning sleeps with the fishes.”
Al Garcia approached the car in a bemused and almost casual manner. At the driver’s window he bent down and said, “R.J., you are the king of all fuckups.”
“Sorry I stood you up the other day,” Decker said.
“Everyone but the National Guard is looking for you.”
“Now that you mention it, Al, aren’t you slightly out of your jurisdiction? I believe this is Broward County.”
“And you’re a fleeing felon, asshole, so I can chase you wherever I want. That’s the law.” He spit out his cigarette and ground it into the asphalt with his shoe.