“If I were you,” Andy was saying to Pony, “I’d send Trooper Truth an e-mail and see if he can get to the truth of why you’re still in lockup.”
“You think he’d do that for me?” Pony noticed that a boxwood was shaking and smoke was rising from it.
“It can’t hurt to ask.”
“Well, I don’t got access to e-mail, either.” Pony watched the shaking, smoking boxwood with growing alarm. He thought of the fisherman and panicked. “I think that boxwood over there’s about to blow up!” he exclaimed as a loud, dull detonation sounded from behind the shrubs.
Andy sprang from the stone bench and raced over to the smoking, foul-smelling bush as Regina gave up her cover and rose like a mountain.
“What are you doing?” Andy demanded.
“Practicing investigative techniques,” she replied as she clutched her huge quivering gut.
“Well, don’t you be hiding behind things and looking like you might explode, Miss Reginia,” Pony said, weak with relief. “Lord, you had me going for a minute, thought that crazy man had planted a pipe bomb in the garden and we was all gonna burn up.”
“It’s time for me to go,” Andy said.
“Pick me up first thing in the morning so we can start working this case,” Regina said. Even when she wasn’t feeling well, she had a manner of making suggestions as if she were ordering an air strike. “I’ll be waiting for you early.”
“Not possible,” Andy replied. “I need to go to the morgue first thing to check on what the medical examiner finds in the case of the man who was killed at the river. You certainly don’t want to see something like that. It’s very unpleasant.”
“Of course I want to see it,” Regina said with inappropriate enthusiasm.
“It’s very, very unpleasant and upsetting.” Andy tried to dissuade her. “You ever smelled a dead animal that has flies all over it? Well, it’s much worse than that, and the stench has a way of clinging deep up in your sinuses so that every time you get around food, the smell wakes up and makes you quite nauseous. Not to mention the sights and sounds in the morgue.”
“I’m going!” Regina would not take no for an answer.
Andy’s mood was very dark as he drove through downtown. He was beginning to wish he had never met the Crimms at the steak house the night before. There was no one he would have avoided more arduously than Regina, and now it appeared that he was going to have to be around her constantly. Not to mention, the governor was contemplating that Trooper Truth might be Trader’s poisonous accomplice, on top of some psycho’s carving Trooper Truth into a dead body and then leaving evidence at Andy’s house.
“I’ve gotten myself into quite a situation,” he said over the car phone to Judy Hammer.
“Andy, do you have any idea what time it is?” said Hammer, who had been sound asleep when her phone had startled her back into this world. “You sound very discouraged. What happened?”
Once again, Andy happened to be close to Hammer’s Church Hill neighborhood, and she suggested that he drop by at the precise moment Fonny Boy decided to drop by the clinic and check on Dr. Sherman Faux, who was shivering blindly in the folding chair.
“Lord, I ask you for a miracle. Not a big one. Just one tiny miracle,” Dr. Faux was praying. “Maybe a spare angel could drop by and get me out of here. I promise I’ll move quickly and not take unnecessary time, because I know there are so many people and animals who need Your help far more than I do. But I can’t do anybody any good as long as I’m tied up here on this island. And I’m stiff and getting sore in this metal chair. So just one angel, that’s all I ask. For maybe an hour or two–however long it takes to get me back to the mainland.”
Fonny Boy listened attentively without being detected, because he had known since birth not to make sudden movements that might alert fish and crabs that they were about to be caught. Crabs especially were very wily and had excellent vision. If one didn’t keep the wire pot perfectly clean, then the crab wouldn’t be able to see all the way through it and would get suspicious as to why a piece of rotten fish was inside a box-shaped tangle of eel grass. Fonny Boy kept the family crab pots impeccably clean and could be as silent as a butterfly when necessary.