Read Online Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen - Free Book Online Page B

“Long, long time ago.”
    “Answer the question, Mick. What did you do to the guy who tried to murder you?”
    He took a slow breath before answering. “I killed them.”
    She sat back as forcefully as if she’d been shoved. “Wow,” she said.
    “Want a papaya?”
    “Them? You’re talking dead guys plural?”
    “I was in the military, too,” Stranahan said. “Be right back.”
    He went to the kitchen and returned with two bagels and a platter of glistening papaya slices.
    “Tell me everything,” Joey said, her eyes shining.
    “Under no circumstances.”
    Stranahan’s two least favorite topics of chat were, in order, the women he’d married and the men he’d killed. Of the latter, Raleigh Goomer, the crooked judge, was the most well known, although others had come before and after. All the killings were by most moral standards justified, from the North Vietnamese Army regulars he’d shot in a firefight to the slow-footed hit man he’d impaled with the sword of a stuffed marlin. They made for colorful stories, Stranahan supposed, but none he wished to share with a young stranger.
    Joey said, “I guess I should be scared of you.”
    He shook his head. “Other way around.”
    “I told you, Mick, I don’t want to kill Chaz. I can’t even squish a darn palmetto bug without feeling guilty. But he needs to pay for what he did.”
    “What have you got against prisons?” Stranahan asked. “Trust me, ten years at Raiford will rock your husband’s little world worse than anything you can dream up.”
    Joey popped a crescent of papaya into her mouth. “Assuming he’s convicted,” she said, “which ain’t exactly a slam dunk. Not without eyewitnesses, or at least a motive. Am I right?”
    “There’s got to be a motive, Joey. There’s always a motive.”
    “Look, I haven’t got all the angles figured out. But let me tell you—Chaz is slicker than pig snot on a doorknob, or however the saying goes.”
    “Close enough,” Stranahan said.
    “The thought of me against him in court, it’s too scary. I can’t take that risk.”
    Stranahan appreciated Joey’s misgivings. Trials in South Florida were famously unpredictable.
    “Before I met Chaz, he worked for a cosmetics company,” she said. “He was their big scientific hotshot, the one they’d trot in to testify how safe their perfumes were. He showed me a tape of himself on the witness stand, and you know what? He was good, Mick. I can totally see a jury buying his act.”
    Stranahan knew that he should tell her to trust the system, but he couldn’t say the words with a straight face. He’d seen more than a few cold-blooded monsters stroll out of a courtroom scot-free.
    “So where do we stand?” Joey asked him. “What’re you going to do with me now?”
    He was pondering a reply when he noticed a blaze-orange helicopter approaching low from the ocean. Strom spotted it, too, and began barking insanely, leaping in circles.
    Joey’s hat fell off when she tilted her head to see the aircraft, which flew directly over them and slowed to a hover. Stranahan could make out the Coast Guard spotter, positioned at an open door. The man was wearing a white helmet and aiming binoculars, and almost certainly he was searching for Mrs. Charles Perrone, believed lost at sea.
    To end it, Stranahan had only to stand up, wave both arms and point toward the woman in the yellow sundress—the one who had hastily ducked back under her floppy hat and was now eyeing him anxiously.
    How easy it would be, he thought, and how tempting, too, because honestly he was too old for this shit.
    Yet he didn’t wave or point or signal to the chopper in any of the usual ways. Instead he reached for Joey’s left hand and brought it to his lips, lightly but long enough for the Coast Guard spotter to see him do it.
    So that the searcher would conclude, as any observer might, that the woman in the sundress wasn’t a castaway but obviously the wife or girlfriend of the lucky