“But where?” Gillian asked.

Sammy Tigertail said he didn’t know. “But if we can’t find our own, then we’ll steal it.”

Gillian thought of the loaded rifle and got worried. He didn’t seem like the type who’d shoot somebody for water, but what did she know about such men? Sometimes the Indian acted hard-core, sometimes just the opposite.

“No big deal. I’m really not that thirsty,” she told him.

“Well, I am,” he said.

The first time I laid eyes on Van Bonneville, he was cutting down a grapefruit tree in front of the Elks Lodge on Freeman Street. He wore a faded indigo bandanna and a silver Saint Christopher medal that the police would find after the big hurricane, in his dead wife’s sunken car.

As Van worked, sweat trickled down the cords of his neck and glistened on his bare chest. His arms were like ship cables and his shoulders looked as broad as a meat freezer. But it was his dark, weathered hands that intrigued me-they were covered with long, pale, delicate-looking scars. Van must have noticed me staring, because he smiled.

I’d been out walking my neighbor’s toy poodle, Tito, who was fourteen years old and suffered from bladder problems. He was valiantly trying to relieve himself on the Elks’ shrubbery (Van later told me it was a ficus hedge), and there I was, dragging him like a wagon along the sidewalk. The poor dog was yapping and hopping and struggling to keep one leg in the air, but I didn’t even notice. I couldn’t take my eyes off that gorgeous stranger with the chain saw.

Suddenly the tree toppled, and Van backed away in the nick of time. A flying grapefruit struck him on the temple, yet he just shrugged and put down the saw.

The first thing he said to me was: “Canker.”

“What?”

“Citrus canker,” he explained. “That’s why this old tree had to die.”

That night I touched those magnificent hands for the first time, and they touched me.

Boyd Shreave closed the book and turned to gaze with a rush of desire at the author, who’d fallen into a deep snooze beside him. He wanted to awaken Eugenie Fonda and make crazed, howling, back-bending love to her. He wanted to shake the double-wide off its blocks. That’s what Van Bonneville would have done, or so Shreave believed after reading (and re-reading) Eugenie’s breathless opening passage. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a book without pictures, but none of the handful he’d actually read had affected him as powerfully as this one. He was half-hoping that Genie would open her eyes and see the copy of Storm Ghoul on the bed. He didn’t care how she reacted, as long as she did. Ever since they’d arrived at the cheesy eco-lodge, she’d been an icicle.

And now she began to snore, a moist warbling enhanced by the stud in her tongue. As Boyd Shreave reached for her, he despondently took notice of his own unmagnificent hands, which featured no masculine wounds or even a dime-sized callus. They were hands that had spent a lifetime in the safe fuzzy harbor of pockets. Shreave had only one genuine scar-the faint purple dotting of his pubic area, caused by that long-ago crash against the potted cactus-but so far Eugenie’s interest had seemed more clinical than erotic.

As he endeavored to tug her into his arms, she scowled through her sleep and pushed him away. A muscular woman, Shreave thought longingly. Having invested so much hope in their illicit Everglades jaunt, he could hardly bear the idea that Eugenie might be tiring of him already. She was his future; his freedom. For Shreave, returning to Fort Worth-specifically, to his wife-seemed out of the question. Lily wasn’t an idiot. She’d soon figure out that he’d lost his job at Relentless and that there was no prestigious clinic for aphenphosmphobics in South Florida, leaving Boyd’s trip exposed as the sneaky tryst it was. Lily would pauperize him in the ensuing divorce, while his mother would stomp on the remaining crumbs of his self-esteem. More tragically, being both broke and unemployed would reduce to nil his chances of finding another lover as tall, beautiful and exciting as Eugenie Fonda.

After dropping Storm Ghoul into his Orvis bag, Shreave got up to marvel at the hokey decor of the bedroom. Honey, their goofball tour guide, had redone it like the interior of a safari tent-billows of muslin bedsheets tacked to the ceiling, and a Coleman lantern glowing on a faux-cane nightstand. Incredibly, there was no television or even a CD player.

The Dancing Flamingo Lodge, Shreave mused acidly. Try the Fleabag Flamingo. It was plain to him that the Royal Gulf Hammocks promotion was doomed; only a certified retard would buy real estate from such a lame and bumbling outfit.

He took his NASCAR toothbrush and travel tube of Colgate into the bathroom and went to work on his smile. When he came out, Eugenie was upright in bed, shedding her clothes.

“I had a god-awful nightmare,” she said. “I’m at the call center and I’ve got Bill frigging Gates on the line, all hot to buy a timeshare at Port Aransas. But then that damn Sacco crawls under my desk and starts licking my knees-Boyd, what does that big number three on your toothbrush mean?”

Shreave said, “You’re kidding me, right?”

Eugenie kicked off her panties. “Okay. Never mind.”

“Come on. Number three was Dale Earnhardt’s number!”

“And he is…?”

“Genie, that’s not even funny,” Shreave said.

“Whatever. I gotta take off my makeup.”

Hope renewed, Shreave slapped some cologne on his neck and dimmed the lantern. Kneeling on the floor, he hastily fished through the Orvis bag for his box of condoms. A black object under the bed caught his eye-it looked like a gun.

Shreave was waving it around when Eugenie Fonda walked out of the bathroom. She stopped in her tracks. He was ready.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Just in case. They’ve got panthers down here, you know.”

“How’d you get it on the plane?”

Shreave said, “I didn’t. I bought it when we stopped at that mall.”

When Eugenie asked to hold it, he said, “No. It’s loaded.”

Sounding, he was sure, as calm and knowledgeable about firearms as Van Bonneville would have been.

She smiled. “I didn’t know you were a gun guy, Boyd.”

“It pays to be prepared.”

“What is it-a.38?”

“Good guess,” he said, having not a clue.

Had Boyd Shreave been a gun guy, he would have known that what he’d found beneath Honey Santana’s bed was actually a Taser, a handheld shocking device used by police to subdue drunks and meth freaks. Instead of bullets it fired fifty thousand volts.

Shreave coolly stashed it in his bag, under a stack of Tommy Bahama shorts.

“And that little thing’ll work on a big hungry panther?” Eugenie asked.

“Oh yeah.”

She climbed into bed and tugged the covers up to her breasts. “You tired, Boyd?”

“Not really.”

“Excellent. Get your ass over here.”

Dealey drove to a Winn-Dixie in Naples and bought two pounds of ground chuck, into which he inserted his last four Ambiens. The pit bulls were still loose when he returned to the trailer park, but they keeled soon after wolfing the bloody meat.

The investigator parked one street over from the mobile home in which Boyd Shreave and his girlfriend were staying. At half past midnight, he emerged from the Escalade and began walking. He carried a small video camera equipped with an infrared attachment. He had rented it from a competitor back in Fort Worth.

Approaching the trailer, Dealey saw a faint glow through the droopy curtains on one of the windows. Quickly he stepped off the road and into the shadows. Using a penlight, he found some loose cinder blocks near the wall. He stacked them beneath the window and climbed up to have a look.

Only vague shapes and forms were discernible; the curtains turned out to be an elaborate spread of bed linens that offered no opening through which Dealey could peer. He couldn’t hear a damn thing on the inside, either, thanks to the rumble of a corroded air conditioner that protruded crookedly from the wall.