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.It was a total surprise, especially the smile.She’d mailed 147 letters to Skinner while he was locked up; few were conciliatory and none were forgiving.Yet there she’d been, all dressed up and glowing in the Pensacola sunshine when he’d stepped through the gates at Eglin.The first words from her mouth were: “If you ever run another load of weed, I’m gonna cut off your pecker and grind it into snapper chum.”Perry Skinner had resumed a life of honest crabbing, and things at home had been good, for a while.“You gave the GPS to your mom?” he asked Fry.“Yep.”“And showed her how to use it?”“I tried,” Fry said.“What are the odds?”“Fifty-fifty.She still can’t figure out the cruise control on her car.”Nothing ever changes, Skinner thought.“How are you feelin’? And tell the truth.”“Shitty.”“That’s more like it.” Skinner was still worried about bringing Fry.He was not a fan of hospitals, and leaving the boy with strangers in the emergency room had seemed unthinkable at the time.“You gonna shoot him, Dad?”“Piejack? If it comes to that, yeah.”“But what if we’re too late? What if he already did something bad to Mom?”“Then he dies for sure,” Skinner said.Fry nodded.It was the answer he’d expected.Louis Piejack hadn’t heard anyone sneak up behind him.The blow had caught him at the base of the skull and he was out cold before he hit the cactus patch.At dusk he regained consciousness, roused by an onslaught of medieval pain.He thrashed free of the clinging limbs, lost his balance and skidded backward into a ravine full of Busch beer cans.His landing sounded like a Krome Avenue head-on.In the twilight, the prone and panting Piejack surveyed upon his fishy clothing and sunburned flesh a bristle of fine needles.Incessant stinging enabled him to map mentally a pattern of perforation extending from his forehead to his shins.Miraculously spared from puncture were the tender digits protruding from the grubby gauze on his left hand.Unfortunately, because of the surgical bungling, his forefinger and thumb were now situated so far apart and at such inopportune angles as to render impossible the simplest of tweezing motions.Consequently Piejack had to rely on his weaker and less facile right hand to pluck at the tiny cactus spines, the number of which he calculated to exceed one hundred.A less inspired degenerate might have been laid low by such a handicap, but Piejack quickly collected himself.He didn’t much care who’d clobbered him, or why.He wasn’t overly concerned about losing his shotgun, or forgetting where he’d beached the johnboat.Nor did he feel especially motivated to hunt down his former captive, the fatass suit with the video camera, before the law came looking.Louis Piejack had only one thing on his mind: Honey Santana.He was fixated in the twitchy, pathological style of true-blue stalkers, and as he lay throbbing among the rusted beer cans he found himself deliciously reliving the single lightning-quick grope that had catapulted him toward this adventure; a deftly aimed hand, snaking out to cup Honey’s magnificent right breast as she’d unsuspectingly leaned over the display cooler to set on chipped ice a tray of fresh wahoo steaks.That she’d been wearing a bra had in no way diminished Piejack’s thrill; if anything, the intimate crinkle of fingertip upon fabric had only heightened his arousal.Honey’s retaliatory malleting had caught him off guard, yet he’d experienced only the slightest ebb of lust as his nuts swelled to the size of Brazilian limes.Soon thereafter Piejack had been abducted by the Miami thugs and subjected to the sadistic stone-crab torture.In fact, his whole existence had been a scroll of searing agony since he’d fondled Honey Santana, yet he desired her more avidly than ever.He’d come to believe that she secretly felt the same way, a pathetic delusion fueled by Honey’s surprise visit to his house.It was true that she’d hastily fled, but Piejack had chosen to interpret her apparent revulsion to his overtures as a tease.Possessing Honey would be a triumph—and also a dagger in the soul of her ex-husband, the man who Piejack believed was responsible for the mutilation of his hand.He could hardly wait to be seen, arm in arm with his new mate, strolling the waterfront of Everglades City.Piejack had no particular plan for capturing Honey; lust alone was his co-pilot
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