The license tag on the black Cherokee was stolen from a Camaro on the morning after the hurricane, in a subdivision called Turtle Meadow. That's where Augustine was headed when Skink directed him to stop at a makeshift tent city, which the National Guard had erected for those made homeless by the hurricane.
Skink bounded from the truck and stalked through rows of open tents. Bonnie and Augustine kept a few steps behind, taking in the sobering scene. Dazed eyes followed them. Men and women sprawled listlessly on army cots, dull-eyed teenagers waded barefoot through milky puddles, children clung fiercely to new dolls handed out by the Red Cross.
"All these souls!" Skink cried, simian arms waving in agitation.
The soldiers assumed he was shell-shocked from the storm. They let him alone.
At the front of a ragged line, Guardsmen gave out plastic bottles of Evian. Skink kept marching. A small boy in a muddy diaper scurried across his path. With one hand he scooped the child to eye level.
Bonnie Lamb nudged Augustine. "What do we do?"
When they reached Skink's side, they heard him singing in a voice that was startlingly high and tender: "It's just a box of rain, I don't know who put it here. Believe it if you need it, Or leave it if you dare."
The little boy-scarcely two years old, Bonnie guessed-had chubby cheeks, curly brown hair and a scrape healing on his brow. He wore a sleeveless cotton shirt with a Batman logo. He smiled at the song and tugged curiously on a silver sprout of the stranger's beard. A light mist fell from scuffed clouds.
Augustine reached for Skink's shoulder. "Captain?"
Skink, to the boy: "What's your name?"
The reply was a bashful giggle. Skink peered at the child. "You won't ever forget, will you? Hurricanes are an eviction notice from God. Go tell your people."
He resumed singing, in a nasal pitch imposed by tiny fingers pinching his nostrils.
And it's fust a box of rain, Or a ribbon in your hair. Such a long, long time to be gone And a short time to be there.
The child clapped. Skink kissed him lightly on the forehead. He said, "You're good company, sonny. How's your spirit of adventure?"
"No!" Bonnie Lamb stepped forward. "We're not taking him. Don't even think about it."
"He'd enjoy himself, would he not?"
"Captain, please." Augustine lifted the boy and handed him to Bonnie, who hurried to find the parents before the wild man changed his mind.
The pewter sky filled with a loud thwocking drone. People in the Evian line pointed to a covey of drab military helicopters, flying low. The choppers began to circle, causing the tents to flutter and snap. Quickly a procession of police cars, government sedans, black Chevy Blazers and TV trucks entered the compound.
Skink said, "Ha! Our Commander in Chief."
Five Secret Service types piled out of one of the Blazers, followed by the President. He wore, over a shirt and necktie, a navy-blue rain slicker with an emblem on the breast. He waved toward the television cameras, then compulsively began to shake the hands of every National Guardsman and Army soldier he saw. This peculiar behavior might have continued until dusk had not one of the President's many aides (also in a blue slicker) whispered in his ear. At that point a family of authentic hurricane refugees, carefully screened and selected from the sweltering masses, was brought to meet and be photographed with the President. Included in the family was the obligatory darling infant, over whom the leader of the free world labored to coo and fuss. The photo opportunity lasted less than three minutes, after which the President resumed his obsessive fraternizing with anyone wearing a uniform. These unnatural affections were extended to a snowy-haired officer of the local Salvation Army, around whom the Commander in Chief flung a ropy arm. "So," he chirped at the befuddled old-timer, "what outfit you with?"
A short distance away, Augustine stood with his arms folded. "Pathetic," he said.
Skink agreed. "Check the glaze in his eyes. There's nothing worse than a Republican on Halcion."
As soon as Bonnie Lamb returned, they left for Turtle Meadow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Skink had gotten the address from the police report, courtesy of Jim Tile. The mailboxes and street signs were down, so it took some searching to find the house. Because of his respectable and clean-cut appearance, Augustine was chosen to make the inquiry. Skink waited in the back of the pickup truck, singing the chorus from "Ventilator Blues." Bonnie Lamb wasn't familiar with the song, but she enjoyed Skink's bluesy bass voice. She stood by the truck, keeping an eye on him.
Augustine was met at the door by a tired-looking woman in a pink housedress. She said, "The trooper mentioned you'd be by." Her tone was as lifeless as her stare; she'd been whipped by the hurricane.
"It's been, like, three days since I called the cops."
"We're stretched pretty thin," Augustine said.
The woman's entire family-husband, four children, two cats-was bivouacked in the master bedroom, beneath the only swatch of roof that the hurricane hadn't blown away. The husband wore a lime mesh tank top, baggy shorts, sandals and a Cleveland Indians cap. He had a stubble of gray-flecked beard. He tended a small Sterno stove on the dresser; six cans of pork and beans were lined up, the lids removed. The kids were preoccupied with battery-operated Game Boys, beeping like miniature radars.
"We still got no electric," the woman said to Augustine. She told her husband it was the man the Highway Patrol sent about the stolen license plate. The husband asked Augustine why he wasn't wearing a police uniform.
"Because I'm a detective," Augustine said. "Plainclothes."
"Oh."
"Tell me what happened."
"These four kids pulled up and took the tag off my Camaro. I was out'n the yard, burying the fish-see, when the power went off it took care of the aquarium, so we had dead guppies—"
"Sailfin mollies!" interjected one of the kids. "Anyway, I had to bury the damn things before they stunk up the place. That's when this Jeep comes up, four colored guys, stereo cranked full blast. They take a screwdriver and set to work on the Camaro. Me standin' right there!"
The woman said, "I knew something was wrong. I brought the children inside the bedroom."
Her husband dumped two cans of pork and beans into a small pot, which he held over the royal-blue flame of the Sterno. "So I run over with a shovel and say what do you think you're up to, and one of the brothers flashes a gun and tells me to you-know-what. I didn't argue, I backed right off. Getting shot over a damn license plate was not on my agenda, you understand."