Free Air Dance Iguana by Tom Corcoran

sheriff. But this was the first time I’d seen him so far out of character, the first time I had seen him act suspiciously. His voice had given him away more than his actions and words. I hadn’t heard the sluggish tone of an injured or depressed man. I had heard quivers of anxiety.
    At least his job offer was off the table, relegated to history. And I was commencing, as the Navy called it, my “holiday routine.”
    I stuffed my shaving kit and cell phone into my camera satchel, watered a ficus, and stopped for a minute before I locked up to picture young Pokey Fields, not three years out of high school, standing in my main room. I looked around the house—gathering memories just as she had—and thanked my lucky stars that I’d hedged the truth with Bobbi Lewis in describing my relationship with the girl.
    My next week would be neither routine nor holiday.

7
    I rode the Triumph away from Key West into damp air under broken midlevel stratus. Whenever I rode in humid weather, my shirt doubled in weight and salt caked my skin. It felt like a fine way to begin a vacation. A swollen cumulus line above the reef resembled far mountains and reminded me that I’d forgotten to call the ad agency in Naples.
    Nearing Boca Chica, I watched a succession of jets drop for touch-and-gos, then launch eastward to altitude. Their percussion split the sky, their grace inspired a traveler’s freedom. The highway that skirted the naval air station became my course to calmer waters, its odd dips and rises mimicking the lazy chop of open ocean. All I needed was a steering vane and a guiding dolphin at my bow. I didn’t need a roadblock. Or complications.
    The northbound traffic off Big Coppitt picked up speed as it passed Boca Chica Road. Riding the incline past the entrance to Shark Key, I looked south to sailboats anchored in Similar Sound. A sole angler poled a pale blue skiff west of Pelican Key. I turned my head forward just in time to see a brake light, and throttled down before I pancaked myself on the ass end of a Honda Odyssey. Traffic slowed to a walking pace. A minute later, from the Channel #4 Bridge rise, I saw vehicles crawling to Bay Point and red and blue flashing lights declaring an emergency up the road.
    Probably the phone call Liska received as he left my house.
    I had no wish to wait for a wreck mop-up. I began to turn back for a crab-cake lunch at BobaLu’s but decided that any move away from an afternoon’s quiet on Little Torch was the opposite of progress. I opted for patience and tried not to fry my clutch. Twenty minutes later I reached the flashing lights. A squad of deputies had blocked Bay Point’s entrance roads. Deputy Bohner motioned me toward him, no doubt assuming that I had been called to the scene. He was in civvies, grabbing a few overtime hours.
    I stopped between two cruisers and loosened my helmet strap.
    “Ever get suspended?” he said.
    I thought about high school, my brother Tim’s constant after-school detention. I had pulled the same juvenile crap, but I was never caught. Then I matched Bohner’s words to his odd sense of humor. “Do we have another davit job?”
    “You could specialize, Rutledge,” he said. “Your own gallows portfolio. No matter what, we got our wind chimes.”
    Glaring truth from Billy Bohner, of all people. With “gallows portfolio” he had defined in two words my collective work in law enforcement.
    “How’s Liska dealing with it?” I said.
    “From a remote location,” said Bohner. “No sign of him yet.”
    “How far down is it?”
    He directed me onto West Circle Drive.
    I passed the tennis courts and ran the stop sign. As I slowed to turn right and cross the bridge to the trailer subdivision down Beach Road, a deputy waved me farther down Bay Drive, toward the more exclusive neighborhood. “What I heard, they don’t need you down there,” he said. “It’s on the left.”
    If a link existed, the killer had changed his pattern, found a victim with a