His wounded hand, as it happened; swollen and gray, still adorned with a severed crab claw.
As fishermen know, the scent of bait is diffused swiftly and efficiently in saltwater, attracting scavengers of all sizes. Chub knew this, too, although the information currently was stored beyond his grasp. Not even a doctorate in marine biology would’ve mitigated the stupefying volume of polyurethane fumes he’d inhaled from the tube of boat glue. He was completely unaware that his wounded mitt hung so tantalizingly in the water, just as he was unaware of the cannibalistic proclivities of Callinectes sapidus, the common blue crab.
In fact, Chub was so blitzed that the sensation of extreme pain—which ordinarily would have reached his brain stem in a nanosecond—instead meandered from one befogged synapse to another. By the time his subconscious registered the feeling, something horrible was well under way.
His screams ruined an otherwise golden morning.
The other three had been awake for hours. Bodean Gazzer was patrolling the woods not far from the campsite. Amber was attempting to revise Shiner’s tattoo, using a honed fishhook and a dollop of violet mascara. Before starting she’d numbed his upper arm with ice, but the pricking still stung like hell. Shiner hoped the procedure would be brief, since only two of the three initials required altering. Amber warned him it wasn’t an easy job, changing the letters from W.R.B. to W.C.A.
“The B won’t be bad. I’ll just add legs to make it look like a capital A. But the R is tricky,” she said, frowning. “I can’t promise it’ll ever pass for a C.”
Shiner, through clenched teeth: “Do your best, ‘K?” He turned away, so he wouldn’t see the punctures. Occasionally he’d let out a grunt, which was Amber’s cue to apply more ice. Despite the discomfort, Shiner found himself enjoying being the focus of her concentration. He liked the way she’d rolled up the sleeves of the camouflage jumpsuit and pinned her hair in a ponytail; all business. And her touch—clinical as it was—sent a pleasurable tickle all the way to his groin.
“I had a friend,” she was saying, “he was paranoid about dying in a plane crash. So he got his initials tattooed on his arms and his legs, his shoulders, the soles of his feet, both cheeks of his butt. See, because he’d read where that’s one way they can identify the body parts, if there’s tattoos.”
Shiner said, “That’s pretty smart.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t help. He was, like, a smuggler.”
“Oh.”
“His plane went down off the Bahamas. Sharks got him.”
“There wasn’t nothin’ left?”
“One of his Reeboks is all they found,” Amber said. “Inside was something that looked like a toe. Of course, it wasn’t tattooed.”
“Damn.”
To Shiner’s surprise, Amber began to sing as she went at him with the fishhook:
“Smile like a princess but bite like a snake—
Got ice in her veins and a heart that don’t ache.
She a nut-cutting bitch and that’s no lie,
’em both off with a gleam in her eye… ”
Shiner said, “You got a nice voice.”
“White Rebel Brotherhood,” said Amber, “the song I told you about. It’s killer.” As she worked on the tattoo, her face was so close he could feel the soft breath on his skin.
He said, “Maybe I’ll check out the CD.”
“They do it more hip-hop.”
“Yeah, I figgered.”
“Am I hurting you?”
“Naw,” Shiner lied. “Matter a fact, I was wonderin’ if mebbe you could add somethin’ extry. Under the eagle.”
“Such as?”
“A swatch ticker,” said Shiner.
“A what?”
“You know—a swatch ticker. Like the Nazis had.”
Amber glanced up sharply. “Swastika, you mean.”
“Yeah!” He practiced the proper pronunciation. “That’d be cool, don’tcha think?”
“I don’t know how to draw one. Sorry.”
Shiner mulled it over, wincing every so often at the stabs of the fishhook. “I seen some good ones at the colonel’s place,” he said eventually, “if I can only ‘member how they went. Look here… ”
He cleared a place in the sand and, using a forefinger, drew his version of the infamous German cross.
Amber shook her head. “That’s not right.”
“You sure?”
“You made it look like… like something from the Chinese alphabet.”