“Don’t you talk down to me.”
“And maybe a watermelon patch!”
“You gone kill me, girl?” Chub asked.
“Well, it’s tempting.”
“Why can’t you jes answer me straight.”
The white guy’s face appeared over the woman’s shoulder. He whistled and said, “Hey, sport, what happened to your eye?”
Chub exerted himself to make a sneer. “You muss be some kind a nigger-lover.”
“Just a beginner,” the white man said.
The last thing Chub heard before blacking out was Bodean Gazzer bellowing: “Hey, I changed my mind! You kin let him die! Go ‘head and let the asshole die!”
JoLayne Lucks couldn’t do it.
Couldn’t, although the stench of the robber had brought everything rushing back, the bile to her throat and the stinging to her eyes. All that had happened that night inside her own house—the horrible words they’d used, the casual way they’d punched her, the places on her body where they’d put their hands.
She still could taste the barrel of the man’s revolver, oily and cool on her tongue, yet she couldn’t let him die.
Even though he deserved it.
JoLayne willed herself to think of Chub as an animal—a sick confused animal, not unlike the raccoon she’d patched up the night before. It was the only way she could suppress her rage and concentrate on the seeping crater in the man’s shoulder; cleaning the wound as best she could, squeezing out the whole tube of antibiotic and dressing the pulp with wads of thin gauze.
The bastard finally passed out, which made it easier. Not having to listen to him call her nigger: that sure helped.
At one point, maneuvering to get the tape on, JoLayne wound up with his head in her lap. Instead of feeling repulsed, she was overwhelmed by an anthropological curiosity. Studying Chub’s slack unconscious face, she searched for clues to the toxic wellspring. Was the hatred discernible in his deep-set eyes? The angry-looking creases in his sunburned brow? The dull unhappy set of his stubbled jaw? If there was a telltale mark, a unique congenital feature identifying the man as a cruel sociopath, JoLayne Lucks couldn’t find it. His face was no different from that of a thousand other white guys she’d seen, playing out hard fumbling lives. Not all of them were impossible racists.
“Are you all right?” Tom Krome, stooping beside her.
“Fine. Brings back memories of my trauma-unit days.”
“How’s Gomer?”
“Bleeding’s stopped for now. That’s about all I can do.”
“You want to talk with the other one?”
“Most definitely,” JoLayne said.
As Krome approached the buttonwood stump, he sensed something was different. He should’ve stopped right away to figure it out, but he didn’t. Instead he picked up the pace, hurrying toward Bodean Gazzer.
By the time Krome saw the limp rope and noticed the prisoner’s legs were tucked under his butt—boot heels braced against the tree trunk—it was too late. With a martial cry the stubby thief vaulted from the ground, spearing Krome in the chest. He toppled backward, sucking air yet clinging madly with both fists to the shotgun. From a bed of damp sand he raised his head to see Bode Gazzer running away, into the mangroves.
Running toward the other end of Pearl Key, where Tom and JoLayne had hidden the other boat.
Which was, now, the only transportation off the island.
Krome hadn’t slugged anybody for years. The last time it happened was in the Meadowlands stadium, where he and Mary Andrea were watching the Giants play the Cowboys. The temperature was thirty-eight degrees and the New Jersey sky looked like churned mud. Sitting directly behind Tom Krome and his wife were two enormous noisy men from somewhere in Queens. Longshoremen, Mary Andrea speculated with a scowl, although they would later be revealed as commodities brokers. The men were alternating vodka screwdrivers and beer, and had celebrated a Giants field goal by shedding their coats and jerseys and pinching each other’s bare nipples until their eyes watered. By the second quarter Krome was scouting the stands for other seats, while Mary Andrea was packing to go home. One of the New Yorkers produced a pneumatic boat horn, which he deployed in sustained bursts six to ten inches from the base of Krome’s skull. Irately Mary Andrea wheeled and snapped at the two men, impelling one of them—he sported a beer-flecked walrus mustache, Krome recalled—to comment loudly upon the modest dimensions of Mary Andrea’s breasts, a subject about which she was known to be sensitive.