Free Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

wall by the galley. “Hey, we can put on some porn.”
    “Why don’t you try and get some rest?” the photographer suggested.
    “Claude, I got a question. When’s the last time you got laid? And tell the truth.”
    Bang Abbott felt his cheeks redden. “You mean where I didn’t pay for it?” He tried to make it sound like a joke.
    To his astonishment, Cherry Pye peeled out of her jeans and straddled him on the seat.
    “Oh, you’ll pay for this, too,” she growled in his ear. “Nuthin good is ever free.”

6
    The man called Skink told Ann DeLusia she was a good sport.
    He said, “I’ll drop you at Alabama Jack’s. There’s a guy named Jim on a blue Harley, he’ll take you back to the mainland. I’d be grateful if you didn’t contact the authorities for a day or so.”
    “Let me think about that.”
    “Nearest hospital is Homestead.”
    “I feel okay,” Ann said.
    This was after the man had taken the people on the hijacked bus to a wide clearing near the ocean, arranged them in a circle around a bonfire of their luggage, and berated them with wild profanity for forty-five minutes. The one named Jackie had gotten the worst of it—Skink had tied him to a tree while Ann and the bus driver stood off in the shadows, listening and sharing a beer. Evidently Jackie had recruited some itinerant crackheads with machetes to shear twenty wild acres of red mangroves, an illegal enterprise designed to provide a premium view of the Atlantic from the future town houses that Jackie and his investors planned to erect. It was Ann’s impression that the investors themselves were not enamored of Jackie, though for other reasons.
    “How did you know they were coming?” she asked Skink.
    “It was all over the bulletin boards at Ocean Reef. I stopped by one night to return some cutlery.”
    “And how’d you know their bus would stop for me?”
    He grinned. “Because a meteor would stop for you, dear Annie.”
    This was after she’d changed back into her vacation clothes and Skink had fastened the checkered flag around his bare waist like a kilt. He’d returned her purse and her cell phone, and treated her abrasions from the car crash with antibiotic cream he’d found in a first-aid kit on the bus. Afterward he had taken her to see the grave of a panther that had been hit by a beer truck many years ago, or so he’d said. It was there, in a stand of old buttonwoods, that he’d sat beside her with a penlight and read aloud Baudelaire’s “The Remorse of the Dead.” She had expected the man to make a grab for her boobs, at least, but nothing happened. He said he’d once been the governor of Florida, and she said she was the empress of Japan.
    “I need to clear the record,” he said. “I sunk your rental car on purpose, so no one would see it and come looking for you.”
    “That sounds like a lot of work.”
    “Jim will tell the hospital he found you stumbling along the road.”
    “No problem. I can do dazed and disoriented,” Ann said.
    This was later, on the way to Alabama Jack’s. As the bus was climbing the Card Sound Bridge, Skink’s fake eye fell out and rolled down the aisle. Ann found it under the wet bar and handed it back to him. He made her promise to download Gram Parsons when she got home, and she told him to check out the new Farrelly brothers flick. He declared there was no hope for the Jackie Sebagos of the world and said it was a waste of energy, trying to make cretins like that come to Jesus. Ann DeLusia asked if he was going back to the bonfire at the construction site, and he said of course.
    “What’re you going to do to that guy?”
    “Nothing his medical plan won’t cover.”
    “Have you been to jail before?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “But I see your point. I’m not getting any younger.”
    “Ever killed anyone?”
    “Yes, I have.”
    “Me, too,” said Ann.
    He reacted as if he believed her. “It’s damned unpleasant, isn’t it?” he said.
    “The