Now they were on a wooden stilt house in the middle of the bay. Skink dangled his long legs off the end of a dock, which was twisted and buckled like a Chinese parade dragon. The hurricane had sucked the wooden pilings from their holes. Most of the other stilt houses were shorn at the stems, but this one had outlasted the storm, though barely. It lurched and creaked in the thickish breeze; Max Lamb suspected it was sinking with the tide. Skink said the house belonged to a man who’d retired on disability from the State Attorney’s Office. The man recently had married a beautiful twelve-string guitarist and moved to the island of Exuma.
Under a swinging lantern, Skink lighted another exotic-smelling joint; marijuana and French onion soup, thought Max Lamb. Something strong and cheesy.
“The toad itself is toxic,” Skink explained. “Bufo marinus. A South American import-overran the local species. Sound familiar?” He took a long sibilant drag. “The glands of Sefior Bufo perspire a milky sap that can kill a full-grown Doberman in six minutes flat.”
To Max, it didn’t sound like a substance that one should be inhaling.
“There’s a special process,” Skink said, “of extraction.” He took another huge hit.
“What does it do, this toad sap?”
“Nothing. Everything. What all good drugs do, I suppose. Psychoneurotic roulette.” Skink’s chin dropped to his chest. His good eye fluttered and closed. His breathing rose to a startling volume; the exhalations sounded like the brakes of a subway train. For fifteen minutes Max Lamb didn’t make a move; the notion to escape never occurred to him, such was the Pavlovian influence of the collar.
In the interval of enforced suspension, Max’s thoughts drifted to Bill Knapp up at Rodale. The scheming viper undoubtedly had his sights on Max’s corner office, with its partially obstructed but nonetheless energizing view of Madison Avenue. Each day lost to the ambivalent kidnapper was a potential day of advancement for Billy the Backstabber; Max Lamb was burning to return to the agency and crush the devious little fucker’s ambitions. Brutal humiliation was called for, and Max hoped he was up to the task. Darkly he imagined Billy Knapp a jobless, wifeless, homeless, toothless wretch, hunched over a can of Sterno in a wintry alley, sucking on a moist spliff laced with poisonous toad sweat…
When Skink snapped awake, he coughed hard and flipped the butt of the dead joint into the storm-silted water. Not far from the house, the broken mast of a submerged sailboat protruded from the waves. Skink pointed at the ghostly wreck but said nothing. His leathery finger stayed in the air for an exceptionally long time.
“Tell me,” he said to Max Lamb, “the most breathtaking place you’ve ever seen.”
“Yellowstone Park. We took a bus tour.”
“Good God.”
“So what?”
“Outside Yellowstone they’ve got a grizzly-bear theme park. Did you go? I mean, some truly sad cases- no claws, no testicles. They’re about as wild as goddamn hamsters, but tourists line up to see ’em. Deballed grizzly bears!”
Rapidly Skink shook his head back and forth, as if trying to roust a bumblebee from his ear. Max Lamb wasn’t sure how the conversation had gone so far astray. He did not share the madman’s compassion for the altered grizzly bears; removing the claws seemed an entirely sensible procedure, liability-wise, for a public amusement park. But Max knew there was no percentage in arguing. He remained quiet as Skink withdrew into a heap on the planks of the spavined deck. The kidnapper trembled and heaved and cried out names that Max Lamb didn’t recognize. A half hour later he was up, scouting the starlit horizons.
“You all right?” Max asked.
Skink nodded soberly. “The down side of toad. I do apologize.”
“Are you sure Bonnie can find us out here?”
“Why in the name of God would you marry a woman who can’t follow simple directions?”
“But it’s so dark-”
The trip to Stiltsville had frightened Max Lamb beyond exclamation-full throttle, no running lights, a wet nasty chop in an open skiff. Infinitely more harrowing than the airboat. The hurricane had turned the bay into a spectral gauntlet of sunken yachts, trawlers, cabin cruisers and runabouts. On the way out, Skink had removed his glass eye and pressed it, for safekeeping, into the palm of Max’s right hand. Max had clenched it as if it were the Hope diamond.