Read Online Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen - Free Book Online

they’d bought an Aquasport powered with a i5o-horse Yamaha.
    Stranahan’s boxy old Evinrude started on the third try. Joey nudged the throttle forward and checked over her shoulder. There was no sign of Mick, but the Doberman was watching her from the end of the dock, his ears pricked and his butt wiggling excitedly. She waved at the dog, then took off toward the Miami skyline.
    “Not again,” Stranahan muttered, kicking at a fallen coconut.
    He sat down at the picnic table with a cup of coffee, Strom settling at his feet. Joey wasn’t the first woman to take off with Stranahan’s skiff, but she was the first he hadn’t already slept with, lived with and then driven away in a state of exasperation. When they made up their minds to go, melodrama seemed mandatory.
    The last one to try the same stunt had been a successful patent attorney named Susan. She had professed to adore the isolation of the island, but in fact she was going batty because she couldn’t uplink her BlackBerry—whatever the hell that meant—due to unspecified atmospheric anomalies. Possibly other factors contributed to her restlessness, as well, Stranahan had concluded afterward.
    One evening at sunset, Susan snapped. After lacing Stranahan’s rum-and-Coke with Ambien, she packed her bags, boosted his boat and promptly piled into the submerged rocks off the Ragged Keys. She cracked not only her collarbone but the shaft on the Evinrude, which set Stranahan back eighteen hundred bucks.
    “For God’s sake, why didn’t you just ask me to give you a lift?” he’d said to her later in the emergency room.
    “Because I didn’t want to upset you,” she’d replied. “I know how you are.”
    That’s what they all said—I know how you are—and usually they were mistaken. They didn’t really know him at all. But since Stranahan wasn’t much good at revealing his sensitive inner self, the women who took an interest couldn’t be blamed for misreading the signs. The Susan incident had cast him into a mood of frank introspection, but in the meantime he’d taken steps to protect his humble vessel from future hijackings by disgruntled companions.
    With a hunting scope he easily located Joey Perrone, adrift less than two miles from the island. “Wanna come along?” he asked Strom, who declined in favor of licking his privates.
    Stranahan dragged the yellow ocean kayak from the shed and pushed it into the water. He stripped off his shirt, kicked away his flip-flops and climbed in. He paddled through the light chop with short, hard strokes, and the burn in his shoulders felt good. With the wind behind him, he reached the disabled skiff in twenty minutes.
    Joey sat on the bow with her legs dangling. She said, “Twice in three days. How lame is that?”
    Stranahan pulled himself aboard and secured the kayak to a cleat on the stern. “This one definitely doesn’t count as a rescue,” he said. “This is purely a fuckup.”
    “Mick, I wasn’t stealing the boat. Honest.”
    He opened one of the front hatches and with some effort inserted his head and arms inside.
    “I was going to leave it tied up at Dinner Key,” Joey insisted. “Look, I didn’t mean to break the darn thing. I’ll pay for the damage, okay?”
    From below he said, “What makes you think it’s broken?”
    “No?”
    “Actually, it’s working perfectly.” He got up, wiped his palms on his khakis and stepped back to the console. The instant he turned the key, the engine rumbled to life.
    Peevishly, Joey asked, “How’d you do that?”
    “I’ve got a manual valve on the fuel line, near the tank. Last night I shut it off,” he said. “Force of habit, I guess.”
    “A cutoff valve.”
    “Exactly. Whatever gas was left in the hose, that’s all you had to run on this morning,” he explained, “and that’s why the engine crapped out.”
    “Clever.” Joey was working her lower jaw.
    “See, I’ve had my boat swiped before.”
    “That doesn’t surprise me.”
    Stranahan