Skink--No Surrender (18 page)

We were eyewitnesses to a crime, Skink and I, which meant Tommy either had to keep us as prisoners or kill us.

“How’d you find out where we were?” he asked. “Did she tell you?”

“No, I traced your cell phone signal. There’s an app called triangulated telemetry.”

Which sounded totally legit, even though I’d just made it up. Tommy seemed semi-persuaded until Malley butted in again.

“He’s full of crap, T.C. I told him where we were,” she said. “We had a code on the phone. Isn’t that right, Richard?”

I stared at her wordlessly. What I wanted to say was:
Are you out of your mind? You want to get us all shot?

“Would a real ‘girlfriend’ pull that sorta thing, T.C.?” my cousin went on. “Rat you out? No way! Because I wasn’t
ever
your girlfriend, so quit saying I was. ‘Triangulated telemetry,’ are you freakin’ serious?”

In a husky voice Tommy said: “What kinda code?”

Skink stood up, grumbling, “You youngsters are giving me a migraine.” He continued to keep his hands behind him. Tommy, who didn’t notice the rope fragments on the floor, ordered him to sit back down.

“Relax, son. What have you got to fear from a broken old street bum like me?” The governor was so tall that he had to stoop slightly inside the houseboat. “Just stretchin’ my legs,” he said.

“Sit your ass down. Final warning.” Tommy aimed the pistol at Skink’s heart, and for a sick man his arm seemed very steady. Frighteningly steady.

Malley was biting her lower lip. “Don’t make things worse, T.C.”

He gave a hollow laugh. “Worse than this? Not possible, babe.”

That’s when I stood up, too—not a hero move, I promise. When the governor lunged for Tommy (which I hoped would happen any second), my intention was to grab my cousin and get both of us out of there.

Skink said, “Thomas, let’s review why your integrity is being questioned.”

“Let’s not,” he snapped.

“You took advantage of this young lady’s situation, her problems at home, by luring her into accompanying you on this trip. To make a personal connection you hid behind a false name, the identity of a young Marine who died in combat—a hoax on your part that personally I find unforgivable.”

“Say one more word, old man, you’re dead. Talbo Chock was my best friend ever!”

“Then tell me the name of the cemetery where he’s buried. Surely you attended the funeral.”

“I don’t remember. It was Our Lady of the Blessed something.”

“Wrong.”

Tommy was busted and he knew it. He shivered wretchedly but he didn’t lower the pistol.

“I’m not a deeply religious person,” Skink continued, “but stealing a preacher’s car is a slime-dog move, even by the gutter standards of today’s common criminal. I presume this houseboat was obtained the same way—by theft rather than an honest purchase.”

“It’s a loaner,” Tommy said dully.

“No, he stole it,” Malley interjected, “in the middle of the night. After he sunk the car, we hitched a ride to some marina and jumped the fence.”

Skink brought his freed hands out from behind his back. No pocketknife.

You’re kidding me
, I thought.

“Son,” he said to Tommy, “you’ve chosen the proverbial dead-end highway. Anyone who takes pot shots at a lovely wading bird is a hopeless defective, in my view, an evolutionary mistake. There’s a natural order to what happens to you next, an inevitable conclusion to all this low villainy.”

It was quite a performance. Dodge Olney probably
heard the same sort of lecture before he wound up in the ambulance.

Tommy wore a crooked, clueless grin. “Oh yeah? Well, here’s
my
conclusion. I’m gonna kill all three of you and dump your dead bodies in the river.”

“No, you are NOT!” Malley was beet-faced, shaking a fist. “You’ve done enough, T.C. Too much!”

Skink parted the sheet and used a frayed edge to wipe a circle in the condensation on the windshield. Peering downstream he said, “By the way, Thomas, there
is
a word that rhymes with orange. ‘Sporange.’ S-p-o-r-a-n-ge. The definition can be found in the unabridged Oxford dictionary. I’d say go look it up, except you won’t have the opportunity.”

Tommy cocked the pistol’s hammer maybe two seconds before the houseboat struck the half-submerged tree stump that Skink must have spotted ahead of us when he looked through the window. The boat shuddered, swayed—then the gun went off. Blue light flashed from the muzzle, and the bang was deafening.

The governor didn’t go down. He was on top of Tommy in an instant, yelling for me and Malley to get off the bleeping boat. I dragged her breathless and squirming through the cabin door. Outside in a stinging rain I pulled her close and told her everything was all right. She was shuddering, weeping into the front of my shirt. I’d never seen her that way before, and I won’t lie. It shook me up.

Skink appeared, hauling Tommy by the hair and backlit
by the strobing flashlight, which was rolling around the floor of the cabin. Once again the old man had been lucky, the bullet barely grazing an ear lobe. He hurled something overboard, and from the heavy splash I knew it was the gun.

“Okay, let’s go! Let’s go!” I screamed.

“With no further delay,” he said in that canyon-deep rumble, and with a gentle sweep of an arm he launched me and my cousin over the side, into the muddy roiling Choctawhatchee.

Malley and I are both good swimmers, but swimming for fun is way different than swimming for your life. We got to shore, but you wouldn’t call it graceful. Like two weary frogs we shimmied up the slick bank and hugged the trunk of a cypress, flinching at every thunderclap.

I turned my head so I could see the houseboat. It was drifting away at a peculiar tilt, pulling the canoe like a sleek dog on a leash. A familiar wide-shouldered silhouette remained visible on the aft deck. He’d been watching to make sure Malley and I had made it. I called out his name, but of course he wasn’t coming.

A fork of lightning split the clouds, a phenomenal silver-yellow pulse that froze Skink in place like the flash from an old-time camera. One arm was raised skyward, the hand open in a farewell wave. At the end of his other arm hung the thrashing, raging form of Tommy Chalmers.

The governor’s smile seemed to cast its own light.

That insane movie-star smile.

I swear I could still see it after the sky went black.

EIGHTEEN

During the storm I fell fast asleep. Incredible but true.

Scared stiff, plastered to a tree, soaked to the bone, thunder booming, Malley huddled at my side.…

Not only did I sleep, I had a dream, which I blame on watching too much TV with my stepfather. A Bigfoot was chasing me through the parking lot of an Applebee’s. It wasn’t your standard Bigfoot, all hairy and ape-like. This one was scaly and pink and stunk like a garfish, though it was wearing a really sweet pair of Oakley shades. Trent would have been blown away. The Bigfoot didn’t look like Tommy Chalmers, but instead it was a dead ringer for Mrs. Curbside, my seventh-grade Language Arts teacher. FYI, in real life Mrs. Curbside weighs maybe a hundred pounds.

The dream Bigfoot didn’t ever catch me, but I felt worn out when I woke up. There was rapid tapping, like a drum roll, on the tree trunk. I could feel the vibration in my fingertips. Malley was sitting on the bank trying to dry her sneakers. Her soaked hoodie lay in a heap beside her.

She said, “See? I really saw one.”

“Saw what?”

“Shh. Don’t spook him.”

I followed her gaze up the branches to where a tall red-crested woodpecker was drilling holes in the bark. It was a cloudless morning, so the bird’s dark feathers stood out vividly against the pale sky.

“Mal, that’s not an ivorybill,” I whispered.

“Is too!”

“There’s no white down its back. And check out the beak,” I said. “It’s too dark and pointy. That’s a male pileated.”

“You’re wrong, Richard.”

The woodpecker quit drumming and cocked its head to scope us out. I wished it had been an ivorybill, but it wasn’t.

“Still very cool,” I said to my cousin.

She snorted. “You think you know everything.”

The bird gave several high-pitched squawks and took off. I sat down beside Malley and removed my own wet sneakers. Above us the tree limbs looked stark except for wispy flags of Spanish moss that reminded me of the governor’s beard. In front of us the Choctawhatchee rolled high and fast, creamy with mud. Overnight it had carried the damaged houseboat downstream, and possibly engulfed it.

“Decision time, Richard. Do we stay here or make a run for it?”

There was a third option, too, but I said, “Let’s wait here for some fishermen to come along. Somebody’ll have a phone we can use.”

“But what about your one-eyed, leech-slurping friend?”

“I know.” Skink wouldn’t want us to go searching for him, though Malley and I were both thinking about it.

“There’s a reason he shoved us off the boat,” I said.

“Something really bad could happen to him. Tommy’s totally whacked.”

“Tommy’s in over his head.”

I told her some of what I knew about Skink, starting with Vietnam. How later he was elected governor, got depressed, freaked out and disappeared. How he lives off eating roadkill. How he lost his left eye to thugs. I mentioned there were crazy rumors on the Internet, but nobody could prove a thing. I told her about him fighting the turtle-egg robber on the beach, about the gray getaway car that mysteriously had been left in town for him. How it was his idea to come save her from T.C. How his foot got run over when was he saving the baby skunk.

I ended with a description of the canoe being pulled away by a gigantic alligator, Skink plunging in after it.

My cousin said, “God, but he’s so
old
. He’s, like, older than Grandpa Ed, and Grandpa Ed couldn’t wrestle a gecko.”

“The governor’s a serious freak of nature.”

“You think he’s gonna hurt Tommy?”

“That’ll depend on Tommy’s attitude.”

“I hope he does,” she said. “Hurt him. Does that sound terrible? I don’t care.”

“Did Tommy hurt
you
?”

The sun was sneaking over the treetops, warming our
arms and legs. Malley was braiding her hair into two long strands, scowling at the black dye job.

“He kissed me a couple times,” she said, “which I told him to knock off. When he didn’t, I slugged him in the nose. You should’ve seen the mess, like a rotten tomato exploded on his face. After that was when he brought out the handcuffs.”

“What else?” I asked.

“Online he came across so different, so … normal. And not mean at all. He emailed me this one poem—‘a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair.’ Said he wrote it late one night just for me, and like an airhead I’m all, ‘Oh, Talbo, that’s so sweet!’

“Then he picks me up at the airport in Orlando, and after a day or two he isn’t sounding so much like a great poet. So I Google a few lines of his masterpiece and guess what? He stole it from Alfred Lord Tennyson, or Lord Alfred Tennyson, whatever. Some English writer who died like a hundred years ago. I called Tommy out on it, and that’s when he smashed my laptop. I was so pissed.”

“When did you find out he wasn’t Talbo Chock?”

My cousin smiled ruefully. “I busted him on that deal right away. Lots of people use weird screen names, so it didn’t seem like a biggie. But, seriously, I had no idea the real Talbo was a soldier, swear to God. Turns out there’s lots of stuff about T.C. I didn’t know.”

“Like the poet was driving a stolen car?”

“Yeah. I figured that out when he decided to sink it.”

“What else happened? What else did he do?” I asked.

“I’m fine. Stop worrying, you sound like Dad.”

“Let me see your wrists.”

“He always made the handcuffs too tight. He said he bought ’em at a gun show.”

Behind Malley was a stand of wild azaleas, the leaves yellow and pale orange. It was a peaceful burst of color.

“Know what I feel really bad about?” she said. “The beer and gas we brought back in the canoe—Tommy swiped all that from a house trailer on a lot about a mile down the river. The ice cubes, too. I said why don’t we leave these people some money, and he just laughed.”

“I still feel bad about Saint Augustine. Same thing.”

“Richard, that was so
not
the same thing. You were just freaked about losing your dad. I mean, dude, you don’t even like to skateboard.”

“Stealing is stealing.”

She said, “Hey, I’m really sorry I ever brought it up. I’d never,
ever
in a jillion years tell your mother, okay? But I had to say whatever so you wouldn’t rat me out, even though you did anyway, until I was far away. The scene at home, I don’t know, I was just ultra-stressed and I had to shake free. You understand? Talbo—I mean Tommy—he was my ticket out. Big mistake, no doubt.
Major
mistake. But, God, Mom was on my case all the time and Dad’s always takin’ her side—no way am I going to school at the Twirp Academy! Sorry, sports fans. A New Hampshire winter is
not
on this girl’s wish list.”

Another blue heron glided low across the Choctawhatchee trailing its stick-thin legs the way they do. I knew it wasn’t the same one Tommy Chalmers had fired at. That poor critter was probably halfway to Mexico, and still flying.

Malley went on: “He told me he understood everything I was going through. He said we’d just be good friends and not to worry—if I changed my mind about running away, he’d turn the car around and drive me straight home. That’s what he promised, word for word. I was so beyond stupid to believe him.”

“That’s what liars are pro at, making people believe them.”

“I know, right? Tommy had the nice-guy act totally down.”

“Still, not a genius move on your part,” I said, “taking off with a stranger you met in a chat room.”

“I really thought I could handle him, but what a psycho. That whole wedding-on-the-beach thing? Perv World.”

The river life was waking up. We saw a fat sturgeon jump, about as graceful as a flying log. Ospreys were on patrol calling to each other. Our gaze turned downriver, and so did our thoughts.