Double Whammy

Decker heard honking. Somebody was leaning on the horn of the truck; long urgent blasts. From the highway a man shouted somebody's name. Decker couldn't make out the words. He took his hands from his face and was relieved to discover that he wasn't blind. His cheeks were wet from his eyes, and his eyes certainly stung, but they seemed to be working.

It was not until he heard the pickup roar away that Decker dared to move, and then he wasn't sure which way to go. The direction that made the most sense was away from the road, but he didn't want to abandon Skink, if Skink were still alive.

Decker crawled to a tree and stood up, cautiously aligning his profile with the trunk. Nothing moved in the clearing; the morning lay dead silent, the songbirds still mute with fear.

What the hell, Decker thought. At the top of his lungs he shouted, "Skink!"

Something big and pale moved at the edge of the woods across the clearing. It made a tremendous noise. "I told you to call me captain!" it bellowed.

Skink was fine. He stood stark naked except for his military boots. "Look what that asshole did to my suit!" He held up the plastic rain jacket. There were three small holes between the shoulder blades. "I got out of it just in time," Skink said. "Hung it on a limb. When I rustled the branch the guy squared around perfectly and cut loose. He was looking the wrong place, slightly."

Hairy and bare-assed, Skink led Decker to the body. The dead man had a black crusty circle between his sandy eyebrows. His mouth was set in an O.

"You were right about the Ruger," Skink said. The rifle lay at the man's side. The clip had been removed.

"To answer your question, no, I've never seen him before," Skink said. "He's hired help, somebody's out-of-town cousin. His pal stayed at the treeline as a lookout."

"I'm sure they figured one gun was enough," Decker said.

"Guy's all of thirty years old," Skink mused, looking down at the dead man. "Stupid jerkoff."

Decker said, "May I assume we won't be notifying the authorities?"

"You learn fast," Skink said.

In the mid-1970s a man named Clinton Tyree became governor of Florida. He was everything voters craved: tall, ruggedly handsome, an ex-college football star (second-team All-American lineman), a decorated Vietnam veteran (a sniper once lost for sixteen days behind enemy lines with no food or ammunition), an eligible bachelor, an avid outdoorsman—and best of all, he was native-born, a rarity at that time in Florida. At first Clinton Tyree's political ideology was conservative when it was practical to be, liberal when it made no difference. At six-foot-six, he looked impressive on the campaign trail and the media loved him. He won the governorship running as a Democrat, but proved to be unlike any Democrat or Republican that the state of Florida had ever seen. To the utter confusion of everyone in Tallahassee, Clint Tyree turned out to be a completely honest man. The first time he turned down a kickback, the bribers naturally assumed that the problem was the amount. The bribers, wealthy land developers with an eye on a particular coastal wildlife preserve, followed with a second offer to the new governor. It was so much money that it would have guaranteed him a comfortable retirement anywhere in the world. The developers were clever, too. The bribe money was to emanate from an overseas corporation with a bank account in Nassau. The funds would be wired from Bay Street to a holding company in Grand Cayman, and from there to a blind trust set up especially for Clinton Tyree at a bank in Panama. In this way the newly acquired wealth of the newly elected governor of Florida would have been shielded by the secrecy laws of three foreign governments.

The crooked developers thought this was an ingenious and foolproof plan, and they were dumbfounded when Clinton Tyree told them to go fuck themselves. The developers had naively contributed large sums to Tyree's gubernatorial campaign, and they could not believe that this was the same man who was now—on a state letterhead!—dismissing them as "submaggots, unfit to suck the sludge off a septic tank."

The rich developers were further astounded to discover that all their conversations with the governor had been secretly tape-recorded by the chief executive himself. They learned about this when carloads of taciturn FBI agents pulled up to their fancy Brickell Avenue office tower, stormed in with warrants, and arrested the whole gold-chained gang of them. Soon the Internal Revenue Service merrily leapt into the investigation and, within six short months, one of the largest land-development firms in the Southeastern United States went belly-up like a dead mudfish.

It was an exciting and historic moment in Florida history. Newspaper editorials lionized Governor Clint Tyree for his courage and honesty, while network pundits promoted him as the dashing harbinger of a New South.