The trees thinned and the trooper found a bleached rocky ridge that led him to the edge of a shallow tannic-looking lake. He realized he had stumbled into the federal crocodile refuge, a fact that impelled him to sit down, slap the spiders off his ankles and reconsider the practical boundaries of friendship.
Jim Tile was parched, exhausted, well lacerated—and no great fan of carnivorous reptiles. He rose with rictus-grim determination. Rocking on tender feet, he cupped both hands to his mouth.
“HEY!” he yelled out across the lake. “IT’S ME!”
High overhead, a lone osprey piped.
“I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT!” Jim Tile shouted.
Nothing.
“YOU HEAR ME? GODDAMN CROCODILES—YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY? I GOT A WIFE, GOVERNOR! I GOT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITIES!”
The trooper was shouting nearly at the top of his lungs.
“COME ON OUT, MAN, I’M SERIOUS! SERIOUS AS A FUCKING HEART ATTACK! YOU COME OUT!”
Jim Tile sucked in his breath and sat down again. He folded both arms across his knees and rested his head. He would’ve strangled a nun for a drop of warm ginger ale.
Then came the gunshot, followed by two, three, four more. The trooper raised up and smiled.
“Melodramatic sonofabitch,” he said.
The man whom Jim Tile had been sent to find was almost sixty now, but he stood formidably erect and broad-shouldered. Beneath a thin plastic shower cap his pate gleamed egg pink and freshly shorn. He had taken to wearing a kilt and little else; a kilt fashioned from a checkered racing flag. Jiffy Lube 300, the man said, I sort of stole it. He offered no explanation whatsoever for the origin of his weapon, an AK-47.
The man had grown out his silver beard in two extravagant tendrils, one blossoming from each cheek. The coils hung like vines down his broad leathery chest, and were so intricately braided that Jim Tile wondered if a woman had done it. Fastened by a ribbon to the end of each braid was the hooked beak of a large bird. Vultures, the man acknowledged. Big fuckers, too. His tangled eyebrows were canted at a familiar angle of disapproval, and somewhere he had gotten himself a new glass eye. This one had a crimson iris, as stunning as a fresh-bloomed hibiscus. Jim Tile found the effect disarming, and somewhat creepy.
The one-eyed kilted man had once been a popular and nationally famous figure, a war hero turned political crusader; brash, incorruptible and of course doomed to fail. It was Jim Tile who had driven the limousine that finally carried the man away from the governor’s mansion, away from Tallahassee and a creeping volcanic insanity. It was Jim Tile who had delivered him—his ranting friend—into a private and sometimes violent wilderness, and who had endeavored for more than two decades to keep track of him, watch over him, stop him when he needed to be stopped.
The trooper had done the best he could, but there had been the occasional, unpreventable eruption. Gunplay. Arson. Wanton destruction of property. Even homicide—yes, his friend had killed a few men since leaving Tallahassee. Jim Tile was sure of it. He was equally sure the men must have behaved very badly, and that in any case the Lord, above all, was best qualified to judge Clinton Tyree. That day would come soon enough. In the meantime, Jim Tile would remain recklessly loyal to the man now known as “Skink.”
“How’s your lovely bride?”
“Just fine,” the trooper replied.
“Still like your steaks scorched?” The ex-governor was bending over a crude fire pit, flames flicking perilously at the ringlets of his beard.
Jim Tile said, “What’s on the menu tonight?” It was a most necessary question; his friend’s dining habits were eclectic in the extreme.
“Prime filet of llama!”
“Llama,” said the trooper, pensively. “Should I even ask?”
“A circus came to town. I swear to God, up in Naranja, a genuine carny.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Not what you think,” Skink said. “Poor thing fell off a truck ramp and fractured both front legs. The girl who owned the critter, she didn’t have the heart to put it down herself.”
“I get the picture.”
“So I did it as a favor. Plus you know how I feel about wasting meat.”