Skink—No Surrender: Chapters 17–20

The pump had been running nonstop during the heavy squall, draining so much juice from the boat’s battery that there wasn’t enough left to spark the big outboard.

“Unbelievable!” Tommy seethed. “You got to be kidding.”

Tommy positioned the flashlight on the console with the feeble beam aimed at us.

“See, some people really care, T.C. They don’t just fake it. It’s called a conscience.”

“He looks like some hobo got run over by a train!” Tommy chortled.
“Actually, it was a truck,” I said.
“Partially run over,” Skink added for clarification, “although I make no excuses.”

“No, I traced your cell phone signal. There’s an app called triangulated telemetry.”

Skink said, “Thomas, let’s review why your integrity is being questioned.”

Tommy was busted and he knew it. He shivered wretchedly but he didn’t lower the pistol.

“I’m not a deeply religious person,” Skink continued, “but stealing a preacher’s car is a slime-dog move, even by the gutter standards of today’s common criminal. I presume this houseboat was obtained the same way—by theft rather than an honest purchase.”

“Son,” he said to Tommy, “you’ve chosen the proverbial dead-end highway. Anyone who takes pot shots at a lovely wading bird is a hopeless defective, in my view, an evolutionary mistake. There’s a natural order to what happens to you next, an inevitable conclusion to all this low villainy.”

The definition can be found in the unabridged Oxford dictionary.

“With no further delay,” he said in that canyon-deep rumble, and with a gentle sweep of an arm he launched me and my cousin over the side, into the muddy roiling Choctawhatchee.

Above us the tree limbs looked stark except for wispy flags of Spanish moss that reminded me of the governor’s beard.

In front of us the Choctawhatchee rolled high and fast, creamy with mud. Overnight it had carried the damaged houseboat downstream, and possibly engulfed it.

He emailed me this one poem—‘a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair.’

She looked downcast.

“How will we get somebody to stop and pick us up?”
“Uh, we yell ‘Help’?”
“Not funny, Richard.”
“I’m serious. That’s what marooned people do.”

This was my cousin in full-on diva mode—too vain to call for help.

We definitely weren’t in ninja mode—more like two buffaloes splashing through a rice paddy.

The hiking would have gone easier if we’d had higher, drier ground, but the deep woods that lay ahead of us were low-lying and boggy.

As thirsty as we were, neither of us would drink the murky river water.

There was no time to continue the discussion because our stalker had materialized like a glistening ghost at the edge of the clearing.

On May 25, 1539, de Soto’s flotilla sailed into Tampa Bay and pitched camp.

Pigs require supervision, because they’re so curious and crafty, adaptable to almost every type of habitat.

Over the decades, however, many have escaped from farm pens and scuttled into the woods, where they’ve become as wild as bobcats or coyotes—only bigger, and way more destructive.

These so-called feral pigs now roam forty-five states and they party hard, destroying valuable crops and wetlands with their sloppy rooting.

Some places have officially declared war on free-roaming swine and offer cash bounties to hunters.

His shoulders were low to the ground, and he kept slashing his tusks in an upward motion that would have sliced the tendons in my legs, had I faltered.

Optimistically I surmised that he wasn’t interested in eating me for breakfast (pigs will eat anything), but rather that he only wished to drive us out of his territory.

No sense in both of us getting mauled.

So onward I ran until spying a young maple that forked conveniently at a height of maybe five feet. I scaled straight up the bark, wedged a foot into that snug cleft and slapped both hands around a sturdy branch.

He just yawned, unfurling his long pink slug of a tongue.

The boar stopped circling below me and squinted intently in her direction.

Malley took a dainty step forward and said, “You’re such a nice piggy.”

It’s almost impossible to describe the wild jerky moves that Malley was making, her black braids twirling like helicopter rotors, her pale eyes rolled back in the sockets. At first I thought she was having some sort of convulsion, then she started to sing.

And Malley—cynical, selfish, tough-as-nails Malley—began crying, too.

Southbound on U.S. 331, I went around a battered pickup loaded with bulbous watermelons.

The rippled shine of Choctawhatchee Bay came into view, and I pulled off at a picnic area on the north side of the causeway.

The man licked his dingy teeth and thought some more.

“How big a deposit?” Malley asked warily.