Skink--No Surrender (7 page)

My cousin is supersmart. She aces any class that she wants to ace, and blows off the ones that don’t hold her attention. But even if she were way smarter than the Talbo Chock impostor, it wouldn’t help her much if he decided to get rough. Although Malley’s almost three inches taller than me (thanks to a major “growth spurt”), she’s thin from all the long-distance running. Her arms are like noodles, and I doubted she could punch her way out of a soap bubble.

“Pray it doesn’t come to that,” said Skink.

I was too wired to nap in the car, so I was telling him more stuff about Malley.

“She ever had any boyfriends?” he asked.

“Not a
boyfriend
boyfriend. The guy she ran away with, she met him in a chat room.”

“But you said they met on their computers. This ‘chat room’—is it like a library?”

“Chat rooms
are
on the computer,” I said. “Come on, dude, they’re virtual.”

“Stop calling me ‘dude’ or you’ll virtually regret it.”

“Why? There’s nothing bad about ‘dude.’ Didn’t you see
The Big Lebowski
?”

Skink’s good eye turned away from the road and squinted at me. “The big what?”

“It’s a movie classic.”

“I haven’t been to the movies since 1974,” he said.

In a way, it was like traveling with a space alien.

A space alien who cussed a lot. I’ve been leaving out the bad words, even though they didn’t bother me at the time. The man went to war for this country and got shot at, so he could talk however he wanted to talk, as far as I was concerned.

Also, he was totally committed to finding my cousin and bringing her home. Maybe his friend Jim Tile had told him about the ten-thousand-dollar reward, but the governor never once mentioned that to me. It seemed unlikely that a person who’d spend his summer chasing turtle-egg robbers was interested in money.

“Are you a fugitive now?” I asked. “Because of what you did to Dodge Olney?”

“Nobody who saw what happened knows who I am.”

“Still, the cops will be hunting for whoever did it.”

“Not very hard,” Skink said, “considering Olney’s rap sheet.”

He was probably right. Some people would have given him a gold plaque for getting that lowlife off the beaches.

I plugged in my car charger and hooked it to my iPod. “Hey, can we play some of my music?”

“Under no circumstances,” said Skink.

A line of trucks was coming the other way, and their headlights were blinding. I shut my eyes and thought about my cousin. Was she in a motel tonight? A tent? Maybe the backseat of that Toyota.

I wondered if she’d brought any money with her, or if the bogus Talbo Chock was paying for all their gas and food. Anybody who swiped license tags would have no qualms about stealing a credit card. Maybe he really was a fabulously talented club DJ, like Malley said, or maybe she’d made up that part, too.

Evidently I fell asleep. Next thing I knew, the sun was up and I was alone in the Malibu, which was parked on the bank of a small brackish bay. What had awakened me was the whale song coming from my phone.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“Where
are
you?”

“On my way to find Malley.”

“Richard, have you lost your freaking mind?”

She’d already spoken to Blake’s father, who had been puzzled to hear about the nonexistent camping trip.

“Don’t be mad at Trent,” I said. “It’s a hundred percent my fault.”

“You come home right now!”

“I can’t, Mom.”

“Let the police handle this!”

“No, we’ve waited long enough.”

“Richard, I swear—”

“It’s fine, okay? Totally under control.”

“But who are you riding with? Who do you even know that’s old enough to drive?”

“Mom, it’s—”

A hand darted hawk-like through the open window and snatched the phone. Mr. Clinton Tyree was now calmly speaking to my mother.

Unbelievable.

“Ma’am, I want to assure you that Richard is safe and well supervised. He and I have set out to find your niece, God willing. I completely appreciate your concerns—do you have a pen or pencil at hand? I’m going to give you a phone number. The gentleman on the other end will tell you as much about me as he prudently can. He has an outstanding background in law enforcement, so please give him your complete attention. Richard will be in touch with you later. He is a promising young man, as you’re surely aware, and he deeply regrets deceiving his
stepfather, necessary though it was. Now, here’s that phone number.…”

That’s when I understood how Skink had gotten elected governor. He was smooth as silk when he chose to be. He said goodbye to my mother and handed me the phone.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“The wrong damn place. I’m sorry.”

We drove along the waterfront for maybe half a mile. Then he pulled over in the shade of a concrete span, four lanes across. It was tall enough for any tug or deepwater fishing boat to pass under; even a sailboat could make it through.

“That used to be a drawbridge,” he said dejectedly. “Long time ago.”

The new bridge arched from the mainland to a barrier island where the shoreline bristled with private docks. Once upon a time it was all mangroves. On the Gulf side of the island was a tourist beach. I only knew that because a small plane was flying back and forth, pulling a banner advertising “Happy Hula Hour” at some tiki bar.

“This is where I thought your cousin might be,” Skink said. “But last time I was here, there weren’t any high-rises. It was a quiet place.”

To myself I counted six condo towers, lined up like smokestacks.

“Wonder when they took out the old bridge,” Skink said. He was seriously bummed.

“Hey, we’ll just keep looking,” I told him. “There are plenty of other islands.”

“The old snowbirds who own those condos, they don’t like waitin’ on a drawbridge. That’s why it got torn down. Don’t want to miss that early-bird special at the Macaroni Grill. Ha!”

He kept on muttering like that until I turned up his driving mix again. Then he settled down. I even made him smile by guessing the title of an incredibly old Bob Dylan number called “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Skink asked how in the flippin’ world I knew that one. I explained that my father had loved Dylan and lots of old bands, and that the day after Dad died, I’d downloaded his whole playlist to my iPod.

“Yeah? Then let’s hear it,” Skink said.

So there we were, rolling along the interstate through downtown Tampa, rocking out to my dad’s music. Sometimes when I’d look over at the governor, I couldn’t believe he was seventy-two. Other times he looked about a hundred and ten. Now he was like a teenager, shaking a fist and howling the lines in a Pearl Jam song. We had the volume cranked up so loud that I didn’t hear my phone ringing.

Later we stopped for lunch at a beachside café in Clearwater, where I got to see Skink eat a meal that didn’t have to be skinned or plucked. It was then I noticed the voice messages on my cell. The first was from Beth, asking where I was and if I’d found Malley yet.

The second call was from a blocked number.

“ ’Sup, Ricardo? Yours truly, checkin’ in. Everything here in paradise is just amazingly awesome. Guess what I saw way up in a tree this morning? An ivory-billed woodpecker! It sounded so lonesome, it made me sad.”

On the message, Malley was coughing and her voice sounded rough. When I replayed it for Skink, he raised an eyebrow. “She calls you Ricardo?”

“First time ever. Weird.”

“She wants you to pay attention.”

“Also, ivory-billed woodpeckers are extinct. I did a project on them for science fair in sixth grade, and Malley helped with the graphics.”

“I know where those birds live,” Skink said.

“You mean
lived
.”

“Only one place in Florida,
Ricardo
, and it’s not an island.”

“I know that.”

“The girl’s trying to tell you where she’s at.”

“And the ‘lonesome’ part—that means she wants to come home.”

“Correct,” he said.

“Maybe the fake Talbo won’t let her go.”

“Assume the worst. That’s my motto.” With that, the governor got up and strode rapidly toward the car.

I crammed the chili dog into my mouth and hustled after him.

SEVEN

Marine Corporal Talbo Chock could have been buried with full honors at the national cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, but his mother wanted him closer to home. The funeral had been held on a sticky July afternoon in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, a month before my cousin ran away.

During the church service, somebody had crept onto the property and hot-wired a 2007 white Toyota Camry belonging to the pastor. On the front seat of the car was a printout of the pastor’s eulogy recalling the short life and brave death of Earl Talbo Chock. The pastor had meant to present the copy of his stirring words to Talbo’s parents, but instead it had ended up in the hands of a car thief, who decided to also steal the dead soldier’s name.

This fact was relayed to me over the phone by Detective Trujillo.

“Probably not what you want to hear,” he said, “but it’s progress. The preacher’s Toyota has a small hole in the rear windshield that matches one on the car in the security video from the Orlando airport.”

“Where exactly on the rear window?” I asked.

“Dead center. Preacher gave his kid a pellet gun for his eighth birthday. Not a genius move.”

I didn’t tell the detective that I was on the road with a one-eyed former governor, searching for my cousin. We’d already counted twenty-three white Toyota Camrys, none of them carrying a couple that looked like Malley and her Online Talbo.

When I informed Trujillo about my cousin’s last phone message, I kept the summary brief. It would have been hard to convince the detective that her mentioning a lost species of woodpecker was a coded cry for help.

Besides, the remote area where Skink and I believed she was being held
—if
she was being held—called for a stealthy approach. A convoy of speeding police cars might spook the bogus Talbo Chock into doing something drastic.

For now, at least, he didn’t realize anybody was on his trail.

From Clearwater, Skink took Highway 19, which tracks along the Gulf side of Florida all the way to the town of Perry, where you hang a hard left into the Panhandle. That’s the route I’d mapped out on my smartphone. It was the quickest way to get where we needed to be, but very soon we got sidetracked.

A blue SUV blew past doing eighty, the driver tossing an empty Budweiser can out the window. One lousy can, all right?

The governor said the guy was a moron, which he undoubtedly was, and after that I didn’t think about it. For sure I didn’t look at the speedometer, which would have clued me in that Skink was accelerating to keep pace with the blue SUV. I was preoccupied with my laptop, rereading a worried email from my mother.

When the SUV slowed down and made the westward turn toward Homosassa, we turned, too.

“Where you going?” I asked Skink.

The look on his face was something different—not angry, or agitated. Just cold as granite. Probably the same expression he wore when he heard the scrape of Dodge Olney’s trowel in the sand.

I tried once more. “Governor, what are you gonna do?”

No answer.

“It was just a beer can. Seriously.”

He shook his head, like he was disappointed in me.

“Anyway, we don’t have time,” I said. “We’ve gotta hurry to catch up with Malley.”

“Son, this won’t take long.”

That was it, as if no explanation was necessary. He just expected me to understand.

The sky was darkening with low storm clouds as the SUV pulled into a restaurant called Bucky’s Deluxe Dining. It looked more like a bar. Skink kept going until he found a convenience store. Fifteen minutes later we were back at Bucky’s in a driving rain.

I won’t defend what the governor did, but it could
have turned out way worse for the moron with the SUV. He could have ended up in a hospital like Dodge Olney. Instead his vehicle was the only thing that got hurt.

You don’t need to be a trained mechanic to know that gasoline engines won’t run on water, barley malt, hops, rice and yeast, which are the basic ingredients of Budweiser beer. I Googled it while hunkered low in the Malibu.

Skink knelt by the blue SUV and calmly poured an entire six-pack into the fuel tank. Then, just to make sure his message was received, he jammed the empties up the tailpipe. I was praying that nobody in the restaurant could see what was happening through the downpour.

Once we were back on Highway 19, I sat upright and told the governor he was crazy. “What were you thinking? I mean it!”

“Litterbugs are the lowest.” His clothes were sopping, his shower cap spangled with raindrops.

“What happens if you get thrown in jail?” I was pretty upset. “Am I supposed to go save Malley all by myself?”

“There’s some beautiful country up in this part of the state. I see some jackass trashing it, I can’t turn away.”

The governor’s glass eye had fogged, but of course he didn’t know it. Earlier I’d asked him why he didn’t get a green one to match his real one. He said that the brown eye came from a stuffed bear (which is why it didn’t fit properly in his semi-human skull). He’d never, ever harm a bear, he said. Bears carry heavy mojo. The taxidermied specimen belonged to some fool who fancied himself a
big-game hunter. Skink had gone to visit the hunter on a “non-social visit.” His words.

After calming down, I said, “What you just did back there was a crime. You totaled that dude’s engine.”

“He might coax a mile or two out of it.”

“What if they had security cameras in the parking lot?”

“In Homosassa, Florida? Ha!”

Trying to reason with him was hopeless.

“Friend of mine,” he said, “once emptied a loaded Dumpster into a BMW convertible. Same basic scenario—driver had thrown all his Burger King bags out on the turnpike.”

“I get why you’re mad. It makes me mad, too, but—”

“We are who we are.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said.

Beth called again. She’d gotten a text from Malley and it was, like, la-de-da, T.C. is so awesome, etc. I told Beth I was heading upstate on a hunch, and I’d check back in a few days. She kept on talking. Honestly, I didn’t really want to hear about her problems with her boyfriend, Taylor. All he cared about was baseball, she said. Plus he was a lame dancer. I hardly knew Taylor, but I had no interest in getting between him and Beth. Once she dumped him, different story.