CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Snapper regained consciousness with the dreamy impression of being someplace he hadn't been in twenty-two years-a dentist's chair. He sensed the dentist hovering, and felt large deft hands working inside his mouth. The last time Snapper had a cavity filled, he'd reflexively chomped off the top joint of the dentist's right thumb. This time he was becalmed by the ejaculate of the dart rifle.

"Lester Maddox Parsons!" The dentist, attempting to wake him.

Snapper opened his eyes in a fog bank. Looming out of the psychedelic mist was a silvery-bearded grin. A dentist in a plastic shower cap? Snapper squirmed.

"Whhaannffrr?" he inquired.

"Relax, chief."

The dentist's basso chuckle rolled like a freight train through Snapper's cranium. His jaws were wedged wide, as if awaiting the drill. Come on, he thought, get it over with.

He heard buzzing. Good!

But the buzzing wasn't in his mouth; it was in his ears. Bugs. Fucking bugs flying in his ears!

"Hrrrnnnff!" Snapper shook his head violently. It hurt. All of a sudden he was drenched by a wave of salty water. What he didn't cough up settled as a lukewarm puddle in his protruded mandible, which functioned as a natural cistern.

Now he was completely awake. Now he remembered. The fog cleared from his mind. He saw a campfire. Edie, sweaty and barefoot. And the young broad, Bonnie, with her arms around the asshole punk who'd shot him.

"Yo, Lester." It was the giant one-eyed fruitcake, holding an empty bucket. There was no dentist.

But Snapper definitely felt a cold steel object bracing his jaws open, digging into the roof of his mouth, pinching the tender web of flesh beneath his tongue; something so heavy that it caused his head to nod forward, something that extended diagonally upward from his chin to beyond his forehead.

A heavy bar of some type. Snapper crossed his eyes to put it in focus. The bar was red.

Oh fuck.

He wailed, trying to rise. His legs tangled. With rubbery arms he flailed uselessly at the thing locked in his mouth.

Skink held up a small chrome key and said, "Accept no imitations."

"Nnnnngggggoooo!!"

"You shot my friend. You called him a nigger." Skink shrugged in resignation. "You beat up a lady, stole her momma's wedding ring, dumped her on the roadside. What choice have you left me?"

He took Snapper by the hair and dragged him, blubbering, to the shore of a broad milky-green creek.

"What choice?" Skink repeated, softly.

"Unngh! Unnnggghhhh!"

"Sure. Now you're sorry."

Edie, Bonnie and Augustine appeared on the bank. Skink crouched in the mud next to Snapper.

"Here's the deal. Most any other species, you'd have been dead long ago. Ever heard of Charles Darwin?"

Mosquitoes tickled Snapper's eyelids as he nodded his head.

"Good," Skink said. "Then you might understand what's about to happen." He turned to the others. "Somebody tell Mister Lester Maddox Parsons where we are."

Augustine said: "Crocodile Lakes."

"Yes indeedy." Skink rose. Once more he displayed the chrome key, the only thing that could unlock The Club from Snapper's achingly prolongated jowls.

Skink threw it in the water. He said, "Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge. Guess how it got its name."

Mournfully Snapper stared at the circle of ripples where the key had plopped into the creek.

They'd stopped once along County Road 905, so Skink could snatch a dead diamondback off the blacktop.

"Don't tell me," said Edie. "It tastes just like chicken."

The governor, coiling the limp rattlesnake at his feet, pretended to be insulted. He told Edie she was much too pretty to be such a cynic. He snapped off the snake's rattle and presented it to her for a souvenir.

"Just what I always wanted." She dropped it in the ashtray.

After ditching the car, Skink made a torch from a gummy stump of pine. For nearly two hours he led them through a shadowed canopy of buttonwoods, poisonwoods, figs, pigeon plums and mahogany. He'd slung Snapper over his shoulder like a sack of oats. In his right hand he held the torch; in his other was the Bill Blass suitcase. Edie Marsh followed along a path hardly wide enough for a rabbit. Bonnie went next, with Augustine close behind, carrying (at Skink's instruction) the tranquilizer rifle and The Club. The .38 Special was in his belt.

Eventually they entered a small clearing. In the center was a ring of sooty stones; a campfire site. A few yards away sat a junked truck with freckles of rust and a faded orange stripe. Bolted to the roof was a bar of cracked red lights. Bonnie and Augustine stepped closer-it was an old Monroe County ambulance, propped on cinder blocks. Augustine opened the tailgate and whistled appreciatively. The ambulance was full of books.

The governor deposited Snapper on the ground, propped against a scabby tree trunk. He went to a spot on the other side of the clearing and kicked at the leaves and loose twigs, exposing an olive-drab tarpaulin. Rummaging beneath it, he came out with a tin of bread crumbs, a jar of vegetable oil, a five-gallon jug of fresh water and a waxy stick of army insect repellent, which he passed around.

While he collected dry wood for the fire, Edie Marsh came up beside him. "Where are we?"

"Middle of nowhere."

"Why?"

"Because there's no better place to be."

They gathered to watch him skin the rattler. Edie was impressed by his enormous hands, sure and swift and completely at ease with the knife.

As the fire sparked up, Augustine pulled Bonnie closer and buried his face in the silkiness of her hair. He was soothed by the soft crackle of tinder; the owl piping on a distant wire; raccoons trilling and fussing in the shadows; the whoosh of nighthawks scooping insects above the firelit treetops. The sole discordant note was the stuporous snore of Lester Maddox Parsons.

The air tasted fresh; the rain was done for a while. Augustine wouldn't have traded places with another soul. Crocodile Lakes on a warm September night was fine. He kissed Bonnie lightly, having no special plans beyond the moment. He willed himself not to worry about Max Lamb, who would be coming tomorrow on a mission to retrieve his bride.

Skink began spooning out chunks of pan-fried snake. Edie Marsh facetiously said it was impolite not to save some for Snapper. Skink declared that he wouldn't so dishonor the memory of a dead reptile.