“You see that?” Twilly stiffened at the wheel.
“See what?”
“That black Firebird ahead.”
“What about it,” Skink said.
But of course he had seen what Twilly had seen: a beer bottle fly out the front passenger’s window, spooking a great blue heron off the canal bank.
“Asshole,” Twilly muttered, knuckles tightening on the wheel.
Another airborne beer bottle, this time from the driver’s side. Skink counted four bobbing heads inside the Firebird—two couples, launching a festive vacation. They looked young. The car was a rental.
“Unbelievable,” Twilly said.
No, it’s not, Skink thought dismally. More, more, more…
The next item of litter from the Firebird was a plastic go-cup, followed by a lighted cigarette butt, which skittered into the crackling dry grass along the shoulder of the road.
Skink swore. Twilly hit the brakes, threw the station wagon into reverse and backed up to the spot where the cigarette had landed. He jumped from the car and stomped out the small flame, and kept on stomping in tight circles for a full minute. It looked like excellent therapy. Skink felt like joining him.
When Twilly got back in the driver’s seat, he calmly put the pedal to the floor. Skink watched the speedometer tick all the way up to 110. The Firebird was no longer a distant speck on the blacktop; it was getting bigger rapidly.
“I was wondering,” Twilly said, perfectly composed. “You in a rush to get home?”
Skink thought about it; thought about everything. Palmer Stoat. Dick Artemus. Doyle. Twilly. The hardworking heron whose supper was so rudely interrupted by a beer bottle.
And he thought of the two couples in the Firebird, laughing and drinking but plainly oblivious to the two unkempt, deeply disturbed men riding their bumper. How else to explain what happened next—an Altoids tin casually ejected through the Firebird’s sunroof. It glanced off the windshield of the pursuing station wagon and landed, as trash, in the water.
Twilly clicked his tongue impatiently. “Well, Governor? Shall we?”
He thought: Oh, what the hell.
“Anytime you’re ready, son.”
Epilogue
With the death of robert clapley, the Zurich-based SwissOne Banc Group withdrew all lines of credit for the Shearwater Island Development Corporation, which immediately folded. At a bankruptcy auction arranged by Clapley’s estate, his extensive waterfront holdings on Toad Island were sold to an anonymous buyer, who eventually renamed it Amy Island and deeded every parcel for preservation. No new bridge was built.
norva stinson, the only remaining private landowner on Toad Island, staunchly refused to sell her tiny bed-and-breakfast to the Nature Conservancy for any sum less than $575,000—six times its appraised value. Her demand was politely rejected, and Mrs. Stinson still lives in the house today, subsisting mainly on canned donations from a local church group.
Three months after the collapse of the Shearwater project, bird-watchers hiking on Toad Island discovered a man’s skeleton. The legs had been crushed by an enormous weight, and a Nokia cellular telephone was clutched in the bones of one hand. FBI pathologists later identified the remains as darian lee gash, a convicted felon, registered sex offender and well-known player on the South Beach club scene. The cause of death was determined to be bullet wounds from two different.357-caliber handguns, only one of which was ever recovered.
The 911 tape recording of Mr. Gash’s frantic, though largely unintelligible, plea for help has been included in Volume Four of The World’s Most Bloodcurdling Emergency Calls, and widely marketed on television and the Internet. The cassette is priced at $9.95 and the compact disc is $13.95, not including shipping and handling.
The body of karl krimmler was found in the shallows of a brackish marsh in the pine uplands of Toad Island. He was pinned inside the cab of a Caterpillar D-6 bulldozer that he inexplicably had driven at full throttle into the water. An autopsy determined he had drowned, the pathologist noting “a large number of viable tadpoles in the victim’s upper trachea.” In the same marsh, police divers discovered a Smith & Wesson model.357 pistol that was later linked to the shooting of Darian Lee Gash. Because of Mr. Gash’s checkered past, detectives theorized that the deaths of the two men were a sordid murder-suicide. The remains of dr. steven brinkman were never recovered.