shave and possibly a stool softener. Return at dawn for his wife.”
Skink grabbed Max under the arms and lowered him to the speedboat. He cut the line with a pocketknife, pushing the bow away from the sagging stilt house. He flung one arm around Bonnie and with the other began to wave. As the boat drifted out of the lantern’s glow, Skink saw a third figure rise in the stern of the boat- where had he been hiding? Then the young man at the wheel brought a rifle to his shoulder.
“Damn,” said Skink, pushing Bonnie Lamb from the line of fire.
Something stung him fiercely, spinning him clockwise and down. He was still spinning when he hit the warm water, and wondering why his arms and legs weren’t working, wondering why he hadn’t heard a shot or seen a muzzle flash, wondering if perhaps he was already dead.
THIRTEEN
Late on the night of August 27, with a warm breeze at his back and nine cold Budweisers in his belly, Keith Higs-trom decided to go hunting. His friends declined to accompany him, as Keith was as clumsy and unreliable a shooter as he was a drunk.
Truthfully there wasn’t much to hunt in South Florida, the wild game having long ago fled or died. However, the hurricane had dispersed throughout the suburbs an exotic new quarry: livestock. Mile upon mile of ranch posts in rural Dade County had been uprooted, freeing herds of cattle and horses to explore vistas beyond their mucky flooded pastures. Motivated more by dull hunger than by native inquisitiveness, the animals began appearing in places where they were not customarily encountered. One such place was Keith Higstrom’s neighborhood, a subdivision of indistinguishable clam-colored houses, stacked twenty deep and twenty-five across and bordered on every side by bankrupt strip shopping malls.
It was here Keith Higstrom had spent his childhood. His father’s family had moved to Miami from northern Minnesota in the early 1940s bringing an affinity for long guns and an appetite for the great outdoors. An impressionable boy, Keith had listened to hunting yarns his entire life-timber wolves and trophy black bears in the north woods, white-tailed deer and wild turkeys in the Florida scrub. The head of an eight-point buck, stoic but marble-eyed, hung over the Higstrom dinner table; the tawny pelt of a prized panther was tacked spread- / eagle on the west wall of the den. At age five, Keith began collecting in leatherbound volumes each edition of Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield. His most treasured possession was an autographed photo of the famous Joe Foss, standing over a dead grizzly. At age six, young Keith got a Daisy popgun, a BB pistol at age nine, a pellet rifle at age eleven, and his first .22 at thirteen.
Yet … even plinking beer cans at the local rock pit, the boy displayed an unfailing lack of proficiency with firearms. His father was more than slightly disappointed. Young Keith was a pure menace with a gun. Practice brought no improvement, nor did experimenting with different styles of weapons. Scopes didn’t help. Tripods didn’t help. Recoil cushions didn’t help. Even goddamn breathing exercises didn’t help.
Often these father-son target practices disintegrated into sulking and tears until the elder Higstrom relented, allowing young Keith to fire a few rounds with a twelve-gauge Mossberg, just so he could have the experience of hitting something. Clearly the family lineage of crack dead-eye shots had come to a sorry end. Keith’s father returned from these outings looking pale and shaken, although he said nothing to Keith’s mother about what he’d witnessed at the rock pit.
Fortunately, by the time Keith was old enough to go out hunting, there was practically nothing left to shoot in Miami except for rats and low-flying seagulls. Every autumn, Keith badgered his father into taking him to the Big Cypress Swamp or private hunting camps in the Everglades, where the deer were chased into high water by airboats and shot at point-blank range. The elder Higstrom dreaded these excursions and found no sport in the killing, but his son couldn’t have been happier had he been lobbing grenades at crippled fawns.