"Oh, don't be such a pussy," Joey said.
"Excuse me?"
But off she ran, barefoot in her underwear. Stranahan heard the bang of the screen door, followed by a splash. When he reached the dock, there was nothing to do but dive in and try to catch up. Strom watched quizzically but made no move to join them.
Halfway around the island, Joey said, "You're in pretty good shape for a geezer."
Stranahan stopped midstroke and treaded water.
"What's wrong?" she called out.
Ominously he pointed at the waves beyond her. Joey spotted the three gray dorsals cutting the surface and let out a shriek. She kicked backward, straight into Mick's arms.
"Don't slug me," he whispered after a few moments, "but those are just dolphins."
Slowly she exhaled, blinking the salt from her eyes. "So this is how you get your thrills," she said.
"I'm fairly harmless. You can ask around."
The dolphins rolled away, and Stranahan lost sight of them in the sun's glare. Joey kept her arms around his neck, which surprised him.
"That was pretty wild," she conceded. "Better than the Seaquarium."
"I see them playing out here all the time. You want to keep going?"
"You mean with the swimming, or the groping?"
"I'm not groping," Stranahan said, "I'm trying to keep us afloat."
"Your hand is on my ass."
"Technically that's a thigh, and it's the easiest place to get a grip."
"Oh, nice," she said. "How much do you think I weigh?"
"Not with a gun to my head would I answer that question." He ducked out of her grasp and pushed away.
"A hundred and thirty-one pounds," Joey announced, smoothing the water from her hair. "But I'm tall. Almost five ten."
"You look terrific," he said. "So shut up and let's swim. This was your brilliant idea, remember?"
Forty-five minutes later they were dry and dressed. He was fixing waffles and she was brewing coffee and the dog was baying at a boat full of snapper fishermen drifting past the island.
Joey said, "Tell me more about the blackmail plan."
"Oh, that reminds me." He left the kitchen for a minute and returned with the cell phone, which he handed to her. "Dial your house."
"Noway!"
"You don't have to talk to him. Just dial the number and give me the phone."
"He's got caller ID. He'll see your name," Joey said.
"Then do star sixty-seven to block it."
"Mick, what are you going to say to him?"
"Just do it, please."
"Aye, aye, sir."
Stranahan wedged the receiver under one ear as he tended to the waffles. He spoke in a stage voice that caused Joey to stifle a giggle.
"Is this Charles Perrone? Chaz, we don't know each other yet, but soon you'll be giving me a shockingly large sum of money… No, this isn't the cable company. This is the person who saw you push your lovely wife off the Sun Duchess last Friday night… That's correct. At eleven p.m. sharp, in a drizzling rain. You grabbed her by the ankles and chucked her overboard. Chaz, you still there? Oh, Cha-az?"
Joey applauded after Mick hung up. "That was Charlton Heston you were doing, right? Back in college we got stoned one night and watched The Ten Commandments and Planet of the Apes back-to-back."
Stranahan said, "I believe I've ruined your husband's morning."
"What'd he say?"
"At first he thought I was trying to sell him digital Pay-per-View. Then he accused me of being somebody named Rolvad or Rolvag, playing a sick trick on him. Toward the end it was more of a gurgle, really. Like he'd swallowed some bleach."
"What you just did, is that legal?" Joey asked.
"Possibly not. I'll run it by Father Rourke the next time I go to confession."
"You certainly seem to be enjoying yourself."
"Chaz deserved a hot little rocket up the ass."
"Well, I admire your style."
"Now, please tell me again," Stranahan said, "why you married a jerkoff like that."
Joey's smile evaporated. "You'd never understand."
"It's also none of my business, I admit."
"No, I'll tell you why. Because three guys in a row had dumped me for somebody else, okay? Because Chaz sent a single long-stemmed pink rose to my house every day for two weeks after our first date. Because he wrote me mushy notes and called me when he promised and took me out for romantic dinners. I was lonely, and obviously he was a pro at that sort of thing," Joey said. "And I said yes the second time he asked me to marry him, because honestly I didn't want to get dumped again. By the way, this is an unbelievably humiliating subject."
Stranahan said, "For God's sake, you're not the first woman to get conned. But then once you realized it was a mistake-"
"Why did I stay married to him? Mick, it was only two years," she said, "and not all of it was horrible. Let me try to explain this without sounding like a bubblehead-Chaz was good in bed, and I confess there were times when that canceled out his less admirable qualities."
"I understand perfectly," Stranahan said. "Hell, that's the story of my life." He stacked three waffles on her plate. "Several of my worst marriages were based on dumb lust and not much else. You hungry?"
Joey nodded.
"Me, too," Stranahan said. "Maple syrup, butter, or both?"
"The works."
"Thattagirl."
They were interrupted by Strom yelping in pain. Stranahan ran outside, with Joey close behind. The dog lay at the end of the dock, pawing at an angry knot on his snout. Joey sat down and pulled the whimpering animal onto her lap.
In the water, no more than a hundred feet away, was the boat with the snapper fishermen; four of them, chuckling as they pretended to tend their baits. Stranahan spotted an egg-shaped piece of lead on the dock, and slowly he bent to pick it up.
"What's that?" Joey said.
"Two-ounce sinker."
"Oh no."
Stranahan called out to the men in the boat. "Did you guys throw this at my dog?"
The fishermen glanced over, murmuring among themselves, until finally the largest one piped up: "Damn thing wouldn't shut up, bro."
Bro? Stranahan thought. So that's what I'm dealing with. "Come over here," he said. "We need to talk."
"Go fuck yourself!" shouted another of the fishermen, a smaller version of the first. "And your puta girlfriend too." Defiantly he swung back his fishing rod and cast a heavy yellow jig at the dock. It landed short, making a hollow plonk in the water.
Stranahan said to Joey: "Please take Strom inside the house."
"Why? What're you going to do?"
"Go."
"No way am I leaving you alone out here with those morons."
"I won't be alone," he said.
Stranahan counted three separate breaches of etiquette for which the fishermen deserved rebuke. The first was the casual manner in which they'd violated his privacy by coming so close to the island. The second was their contemptible assault on a rather dull-witted beast that was merely doing its job. The third was the coarse insult directed at Joey Perrone, who had done nothing to provoke it.
From the kitchen window, Joey could see the boat motoring toward the dock, all four of the fishermen now standing in anticipation of a fight. Stranahan disappeared briefly inside the shed. He emerged with what he later would identify as a Ruger Mini-14, a semi-automatic rifle of formidable caliber.
The intruders' boat was equipped with a ninety-horsepower Mer-
cury outboard, into which Stranahan methodically fired three rounds. The men could be seen throwing their arms high in frantic gestures of surrender, and their fearful pleas were audible to Joey even through the closed windows. She couldn't make out Stranahan's precise instructions, but the fishermen dropped to their knees, leaned over the gunwales and began paddling with their arms. The visual effect was that of an addled centipede in a toilet bowl.
Joey tied Strom's leash to a leg of the kitchen table and hurried outside. Stranahan stood with the rifle on one shoulder as he watched the boat laboring crazily toward the mainland.