Catherine reddened. "His brother's got a practice on Long Island. It's going gangbusters, James says."

"No shit?"

"Don't look so cocky, R.J. This has nothing to do with you."

"So you wouldn't come see me," Decker said. "I mean, if I were to move to New York and you somehow wound up on Long Island, you wouldn't drop by and chat?"

Catherine wiped her hands on a napkin. "Jesus, I don't know." Her voice was different now, the airy confidence gone. "I don't know what I've done, R.J. Sometimes I wonder. James is special and I realize how lucky I am, but still ... The man irons his socks, did I tell you that?"

Decker nodded. "You called me from your honeymoon to tell me that." From Honolulu she'd called.

"Yeah, well."

"That's okay," Decker said. "I didn't mind." It was better than losing her completely. He would miss her if the sock-ironing chiropractor whisked her away to New York.

"You know the hell of it?" Catherine said. "My back's still killing me."

Decker's telephone was ringing when he returned to the trailer. The man on the other end didn't need to identify himself.

"Hello, Miami."

"Hey, captain." Decker was surprised. Skink would do anything to avoid the phone.

"The Armadillo is dead," said Skink.

Decker figured Skink was talking about his supper.

"You listening?" Skink said.

"The armadillo."

"Yeah, your little pal from the newspaper."

"Ott?"

"Officially he's only missing. Unofficially he's dead. You better get up here. It's time to go to work."

Decker sat down at the kitchen counter. "Start at the beginning," he said. Gruffly Skink summarized the facts of the disappearance, closing with a neutral explanation of Ott Pickney's alter ego, Davey Dillo.

"They say he was very convincing," Skink said, by way of condolence.

Decker had a hell of a hard time imagining Ott in an armadillo costume on a skateboard. He had a harder time imagining Ott dead.

"Maybe they just took him somewhere to put a scare in him," he speculated.

"No way," Skink said. "I'll see you soon. Oh yeah—when you get to Harney, don't check in at the motel. It's not safe. You'd better stay out here with me."

"I'd rather not," Decker said.

"Aw, it'll be loads of fun," Skink said with a grunt. "We can roast weenies and marshmallows."

Decker drove all night. He shot straight up Interstate 95 and got off at Route 222, just west of Wabasso. Another ninety minutes and he was in Harney County. By the time he got to Skink's place on the lake, it was four-thirty in the morning. Already one or two bass boats were out on the water; Decker could hear the big engines chewing up the darkness.

At the sound of Decker's car Skink clumped onto the porch. He was fully dressed—boots, sunglasses, the orange weathersuit. Decker wondered if he slept in uniform.

"That's some driving," Skink said. "Get your gear and come on inside."

Decker carried his duffel into the shack. It was the first time he had ventured beyond the porch, and he wasn't sure what to expect. Pelts, maybe. Wallpaper made from rabbit pelts.

As he pushed past the screen door, Decker was amazed by what he saw: books. Every wall had raw pine shelves to the ceiling, and every shelf was lined with books. The east wall was for classic fiction: Poe, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Jack London, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, even Boris Pasternak. The west wall was for political biographies: Churchill, Sandburg's Lincoln, Hitler, Huey Long, Ei-senhower, Joseph McCarthy, John F. Kennedy, even Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson, though it looked like a book-club edition. The south wall was exclusively for reference books: the Britannica, Current Biography,the Florida Statutes,even the Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature.This was the wall of the shack that leaned so precipitously, and now Decker knew why: it held the heaviest books.

The shelves of the north wall were divided into two sections. The top was philosophy and the humanities. The bottom half was for children's books. The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Dr. Seuss. Charlotte's Weband the Brothers Grimm.

"What're you staring at?" Skink demanded.

"These are great books," Decker said.

"No shit."

In the middle of the floor there was a bare mattress and army blanket, but no pillow. The Remington was propped in a corner. The Coleman lantern hung from a slat in the ceiling; it offered only a fuzzy white light that would flare or dim as the mantle burned down. Decker thought Skink must do his reading in the daytime, or else he'd go blind.

Another car pulled up outside the shack. Decker glanced at Skink. He looked as if he were expecting somebody. He pushed open the screen door and a cop walked in; a state trooper. Stiff cowboy-style hat, pressed gray uniform (long sleeves of course). On one shoulder was a patch shaped like a Florida orange. The cop was almost as big as Skink. He was younger, though—a wedge of muscle from the waist up.

Decker noticed that this state trooper was different from most.

Most were big, young, lean, and white. This trooper was black. Decker could not imagine a more miserable place than Harney County to be a black cop.

"This is Jim Tile," Skink said. "Jim, this is the guy I told you about."

"Miami," Tile said, and shook Decker's hand. Skink dragged a rocker and a folding chair in from the porch. Tile took off his hat and sat down in the rocker, Decker took the chair and Skink sat on the bare pine floor.

Decker said, "What happened to Ott?"

"He's dead," Skink said.

"But what the hell happened?"

Skink sighed and motioned to Jim Tile. "Yesterday morning," the trooper said, in a voice so deep it seemed to shake the lantern, "I was on road patrol about dawn. Out on the Gilchrist Highway where it crosses Morgan Slough."

"Some of the guys fish the slough when the water's up," Skink cut in. "You need a johnboat, and no outboard. Ten minutes from the highway and you're into heavy bass cover."

Jim Tile said, "So I see a pair of headlights back in the scrub. I can tell it's a truck. I pull off and park. Ten minutes go by and the truck hasn't moved, though the lights are still on. If it's two kids screwing they wouldn't be leaving the headlights on, so I go to check it out."

"You're alone?" Decker asked.

Tile laughed. "Nearest backup is in frigging Orlando. Yeah, I'm alone, you could say that. So I take my pumpgun and my Kevlar light and start slipping toward the truck through the scrub, moving close as I can to the big cypresses so whoever's back there won't see me. All of a sudden I hear a door slam and the truck comes tearing out of the bush. I go down in a crouch and jack a round into the shotgun, but they never slow down, just hit the highway and take off."

"Three guys," Skink said.

"In a dark green pickup," Tile said. "I'm pretty sure it was a Ford, but it wasn't local. I didn't catch the tag."

"Did the men see you?" Decker asked.

"The one on the passenger side, no doubt about it."

"Did you recognize him?"

"Let him finish, Miami," Skink said.

"So I go down to where the truck was parked," Tile said, "right on the edge of the slough. I mean, from the tire tracks you could see they'd backed right up to the water. I figure they're poaching gators or maybe jacklighting a deer that came down to drink. Makes sense, except the ground is completely dry and clean. No blood, no skin, no shells, no nothing."

"Except this," Skink said. He reached into his rainsuit and took out a notebook. He handed it to R. J. Decker. It was a news reporter's notebook, the standard pocket-size spiral. On the front, written in blue ink, were the words: "pickney/clinch obit." Decker could tell from the thinness of the notebook that some of the pages had been torn out. Those that remained were blank.