Around Rodale & Burns, the Old Faithful Root Beer account was regarded as a lucrative but hopeless loser. Nobody liked the stuff because one sixteen-ounce bottle induced thunderous belching that often lasted for days. At a party, Pete Archibald drunkenly offered a joke slogan: "The root beer you'll never forget-because it won't let you!"
Lying there alone in Augustine's house, Max Lamb savored the prospect of single-handedly resuscitating Old Faithful. It was the sort of coup that could make him a legend on Madison Avenue. For inspiration he turned on the Home Shopping Network. Into the wee hours he tinkered determinedly with beverage-related alliterations, allusions, puns, verses and metaphors. Bonnie didn't cross his mind.
Eventually Max struck on a winner, something that sounded like good silly fun to kids, and at the same time titillating to teens and young adults: "Old Faithful Root Beer-Makes You Tingle in Places You Didn't Know You Had Places!"
Max Lamb was so excited he couldn't sleep. Once more he tried calling the apartment in New York. No Bonnie, but the answering machine emitted a telltale beep. He punched the three-digit code and waited.
Bonnie had gotten his message-and left him a reply that caused him to forget temporarily about the Old Faithful account. The flesh under Max's shirt collar prickled and perspired, and stayed feverish until dawn.
He wasn't surprised by the symptoms. The downside of seeing his wife would be seeing the deranged kidnapper again. Only an idiot wouldn't be scared shitless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Snapper regained consciousness with the dreamy impression of being someplace he hadn't been in twenty-two years-a dentist's chair. He sensed the dentist hovering, and felt large deft hands working inside his mouth. The last time Snapper had a cavity filled, he'd reflexively chomped off the top joint of the dentist's right thumb. This time he was becalmed by the ejaculate of the dart rifle.
"Lester Maddox Parsons!" The dentist, attempting to wake him.
Snapper opened his eyes in a fog bank. Looming out of the psychedelic mist was a silvery-bearded grin. A dentist in a plastic shower cap? Snapper squirmed.
"Whhaannffrr?" he inquired.
"Relax, chief."
The dentist's basso chuckle rolled like a freight train through Snapper's cranium. His jaws were wedged wide, as if awaiting the drill. Come on, he thought, get it over with.
He heard buzzing. Good!
But the buzzing wasn't in his mouth; it was in his ears. Bugs. Fucking bugs flying in his ears!
"Hrrrnnnff!" Snapper shook his head violently. It hurt. All of a sudden he was drenched by a wave of salty water. What he didn't cough up settled as a lukewarm puddle in his protruded mandible, which functioned as a natural cistern.
Now he was completely awake. Now he remembered. The fog cleared from his mind. He saw a campfire. Edie, sweaty and barefoot. And the young broad, Bonnie, with her arms around the asshole punk who'd shot him.
"Yo, Lester." It was the giant one-eyed fruitcake, holding an empty bucket. There was no dentist.
But Snapper definitely felt a cold steel object bracing his jaws open, digging into the roof of his mouth, pinching the tender web of flesh beneath his tongue; something so heavy that it caused his head to nod forward, something that extended diagonally upward from his chin to beyond his forehead.
A heavy bar of some type. Snapper crossed his eyes to put it in focus. The bar was red.
Oh fuck.
He wailed, trying to rise. His legs tangled. With rubbery arms he flailed uselessly at the thing locked in his mouth.
Skink held up a small chrome key and said, "Accept no imitations."
"Nnnnngggggoooo!!"
"You shot my friend. You called him a nigger." Skink shrugged in resignation. "You beat up a lady, stole her momma's wedding ring, dumped her on the roadside. What choice have you left me?"
He took Snapper by the hair and dragged him, blubbering, to the shore of a broad milky-green creek.
"What choice?" Skink repeated, softly.
"Unngh! Unnnggghhhh!"
"Sure. Now you're sorry."
Edie, Bonnie and Augustine appeared on the bank. Skink crouched in the mud next to Snapper.
"Here's the deal. Most any other species, you'd have been dead long ago. Ever heard of Charles Darwin?"
Mosquitoes tickled Snapper's eyelids as he nodded his head.
"Good," Skink said. "Then you might understand what's about to happen." He turned to the others. "Somebody tell Mister Lester Maddox Parsons where we are."
Augustine said: "Crocodile Lakes."
"Yes indeedy." Skink rose. Once more he displayed the chrome key, the only thing that could unlock The Club from Snapper's achingly prolongated jowls.
Skink threw it in the water. He said, "Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge. Guess how it got its name."
Mournfully Snapper stared at the circle of ripples where the key had plopped into the creek.
They'd stopped once along County Road 905, so Skink could snatch a dead diamondback off the blacktop.
"Don't tell me," said Edie. "It tastes just like chicken."
The governor, coiling the limp rattlesnake at his feet, pretended to be insulted. He told Edie she was much too pretty to be such a cynic. He snapped off the snake's rattle and presented it to her for a souvenir.
"Just what I always wanted." She dropped it in the ashtray.
After ditching the car, Skink made a torch from a gummy stump of pine. For nearly two hours he led them through a shadowed canopy of buttonwoods, poisonwoods, figs, pigeon plums and mahogany. He'd slung Snapper over his shoulder like a sack of oats. In his right hand he held the torch; in his other was the Bill Blass suitcase. Edie Marsh followed along a path hardly wide enough for a rabbit. Bonnie went next, with Augustine close behind, carrying (at Skink's instruction) the tranquilizer rifle and The Club. The .38 Special was in his belt.
Eventually they entered a small clearing. In the center was a ring of sooty stones; a campfire site. A few yards away sat a junked truck with freckles of rust and a faded orange stripe. Bolted to the roof was a bar of cracked red lights. Bonnie and Augustine stepped closer-it was an old Monroe County ambulance, propped on cinder blocks. Augustine opened the tailgate and whistled appreciatively. The ambulance was full of books.