I gave a short toot on my horn, just in case there were dogs. Of course they might be deaf, considering the Guns N’ Roses. Sure enough, a coonhound rose from one of the crooked wooden porches and loped, barking, toward the Jeep. Mr. Overalls lifted his head from the engine block and whistled to call the dog. I was surprised he was so young, mid-twenties maybe. Vintage hard rock must be enjoying a renaissance. Mercifully, he hit the volume button on the boom box just as Axl Rose entered full scream.

I drove up to the decrepit car and spoke from my window. “Camaro, huh? What year?”

He ran a hand over the fender, which seemed to be more grey body filler than actual metal. “Sixty-nine,” he said. “Found her in a sugarcane field over near Clewiston.”

I took another look at the car and resisted the urge to ask him if he was crazy. “Well, good luck.” I said instead. “Is the dog okay with me getting out?”

“Sure,” he said. “Slash only goes after what I tell him to.”

That was reassuring, I supposed. Climbing slowly from the Jeep, I offered a closed fist to the hound so he could sniff at me. I guarantee I smelled better than the dog did. I scratched a little behind his ears, until he seemed satisfied I wasn’t there to do harm to Overalls. As if I could. The guy had at least a hundred pounds and six or seven inches on me. Losing interest, the dog walked back through the dirt yard to Cabin No. 7. He settled himself in the shade next to the door, and went back to sleep.

“Nothin’ a coon dog loves more than a front porch.” I leaned against the Jeep’s fender, and smiled at Overalls. He didn’t smile back.

“What can I do for you?”

Right to the point. I followed his lead.

“Have you seen Darryl, the guy who owns this place?”

He jerked his head toward the docks. “There’s a fish-cleaning table back yonder, under them cypress trees. That’s probably where he’s at.”

I thanked him.

“Enjoy,” he said, cranking up the music again.

I smelled dead fish and cigarette smoke before I spotted Darryl. He stood at a high wooden table, which was washed by a faucet. As he cleaned his catch, he tossed heads and innards into the dark water of the lake-access canal below. He was bent over the task, but I could see the strong line of his jaw, and a thick head of tar-black hair. As he worked his knife, sinewy muscle stood out across his arms and broad shoulders. I got a pretty good look at his build, because he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Just filthy jean cut-offs and bare feet covered in the mucky sediment that plagues the natural sand bottom of Lake Okeechobee.

Darryl looked like a creature right out of the swamp.

I thought I’d been pretty quiet coming up. But his head lifted for just a moment, like an animal getting a scent in the wild. He didn’t turn around, and the knife never stopped, but he knew I was there.

“Yew lookin’ for me?” His voice was pure Florida redneck.

“Depends,” I said. “Are you Darryl?”

He nodded, still cutting. The sun reflected off the silver blade of his long knife. Slice. Glint. Slice. Glint. Slice. Glint. I waited, expecting he’d turn around to talk to me, but he didn’t. So I walked a little closer and situated myself alongside the fish table. When he tossed a handful of gills and guts from a black crappie right next to my boots, I spoke up.

“I wondered if I could ask you a few questions.”

He shrugged. Slice. Glint.

“I’m a friend of C’ndee Ciancio’s.”

The knife paused for just an instant. He quickly recovered his rhythm.

“I know you two were going around together.”

“So? What’s it to yew?” Slice. Glint.

He had me there. I wasn’t sure why I was so interested in C’ndee’s love life. I just knew I was. I’d learned in the last year or so to pay close attention to things that don’t seem to add up.

“Her friends have been kind of worried about her behavior.” I prayed the Lord wouldn’t strike me down for lying, though I couldn’t imagine He took much interest in a low-down snake like Darryl Dietz. “We’re trying to find out who she’s seeing,” I continued, “because we want to make sure she hasn’t hooked up with somebody dangerous.”

The knife went still. For the first time, he raised his face to me. I had to admit he was handsome, in the same way you can admire the beauty of a rattlesnake while still knowing its bite can kill you.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about C’ndee if I was yew. That’s one girl who can take care of herself. I’d worry about the poor guy she took up with instead.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

The smile he gave me was as cold as the ice in the chest full of fish at his feet. As I waited for him to answer, an osprey’s plaintive scree sounded from a tall pine. The breeze sighed a bit, rustling a Confederate flag on a pole. Axl Rose crooned “Out Ta Get Me.”

“Well?” I prodded.

He picked up the burning cigarette that had been balanced on the table’s edge. With a hand covered in fish blood, he drew it to his mouth and took a drag nearly to the filter. Then, he flicked the butt into the dark water and silently bent his head again over his mess of fish.

Slice. Glint. Slice. Glint.

I started to rephrase my question. I managed, “Who …”

“You’re a nosy bitch, yew know that?” His hiss was low and menacing, like a rattler before it strikes. “We got ways out here to deal with people who don’t know their place. Now, I’m gonna ask yew nice to take all your questions and shove ’em. And then get the hell off of my land.”

Slice. Glint.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I think what convinced me was that final, violent jerk of the knife, all the way from tail fin to head. I hurried to my Jeep and lit out of there, but the rutted driveway would let me go only so fast.

In the rearview mirror, I noticed Overalls fooling with a boat in a slip near the fish-cleaning table. How long had he been there? Then, I saw Darryl step from the dock into the yard to watch me go. His black eyes were hypnotic, holding my gaze without a blink. Heart pounding, I had to wait for traffic to pass before I could pull out onto the paved road. Behind me, Darryl propped a foot up on a tree stump. His eyes moved to the knife in his hand, and so did mine.

My last image of the camp was Darryl testing the sharpness of that silver blade by shaving a hair off his bare leg.

Barreling along US Highway 441, I’d put five miles between me and the fish camp before I finally felt my grip begin to loosen on the Jeep’s steering wheel. I was holding on like I expected Darryl to vault into the driver’s seat and yank me out with those blood-stained hands.

That was one creepy dude, for sure.

What had C’ndee Ciancio been thinking? I can understand occasional slumming. Bad boys can be exciting. Plus, let’s face facts: One of my exes showed up shirtless on Cops. It’s kind of hard for me to criticize another woman’s flawed taste in men.

But Darryl? He seemed to go beyond dangerous to deranged.

I searched through my purse on the passenger seat for my cell phone. I needed to call my boss. Nothing like hearing all the afternoon tasks that awaited me at work to banish the image of Darryl and that knife.

Slice, glint. Slice, glint.

I hit the speed dial for the park office. The cultured purr on the other end of the phone was reassuringly Rhonda, my way-too-gorgeous-for-government-work supervisor. Not only did she carry herself like an elegant African queen, she was smart, too. I always told her she was wasting her time shuffling schedules and pushing papers at a nature park in middle Florida. She could have been a model-turned-mega-industry, like Tyra Banks. But Rhonda had moved home to Himmarshee from New York to help care for her ailing grandmother. She wound up as the boss for the county’s parks.