Skin Tight Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  EPILOGUE

  PRAISE FOR

  CARL HIAASEN

  “One of America’s finest novelists.”

  —Pete Hamill

  “Hiaasen isn’t just Florida’s sharpest satirist—he’s one of the few funny writers left in the whole country . . . I think of him as a national treasure [and] I have yet to be disappointed. . . . Hiaasen is not just a good comic writer. He’s just a good writer.”

  —Newsweek

  “Hiaasen [is] king of the screwball comedies . . . a truly original comic novelist.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Hiaasen is always good for a number of laugh-aloud scenes and lines . . . His ear is pitch-perfect.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Hiaasen’s campfire voice, perpetually amused by the resourcefulness with which his characters reaffirm his opinion of human nature, provides a core of truthiness.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “When he’s in good form, Hiaasen, like Elmore Leonard, shouldn’t be missed.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A lifelong resident of the Sunshine State, [Hiaasen’s] novels have always addressed the state’s ecological and social ills with scathing satire, ironic comeuppance, and an ever-evolving sensibility.”

  —Time Out New York

  “He writes with an old-time columnist’s sense of righteous rage and an utterly current and biting wit.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A bird so rare—the humorous popular novelist with an acutely critical social perspective—that he’s practically an endangered species.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Carl Hiaasen

  NATURE GIRL

  SKINNY DIP

  BASKET CASE

  SICK PUPPY

  LUCKY YOU

  STORMY WEATHER

  STRIP TEASE

  NATIVE TONGUE

  DOUBLE WHAMMY

  TOURIST SEASON

  A DEATH IN CHINA

  (with William Montalbano)

  TRAP LINE

  (with William Montalbano)

  POWDER BURN

  (with William Montalbano)

  For Young Readers

  SCAT

  FLUSH

  HOOT

  Nonfiction

  THE DOWNHILL LIE:

  A HACKER’S RETURN TO A RUINOUS SPORT

  TEAM RODENT:

  HOW DISNEY DEVOURS THE WORLD

  KICK ASS: SELECTED COLUMNS

  (edited by Diane Stevenson)

  PARADISE SCREWED: SELECTED COLUMNS

  (edited by Diane Stevenson)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43663-9

  Hiaasen, Carl.

  Skin tight / Carl Hiaasen.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.I217S-31580 CIP

  813’.54—dc20

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43663-9

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  CHAPTER 1

  ON the third of January, a leaden, blustery day, two tourists from Covington, Tennessee, removed their sensible shoes to go strolling on the beach at Key Biscayne.

  When they got to the old Cape Florida lighthouse, the young man and his fiancée sat down on the damp sand to watch the ocean crash hard across the brown boulders at the point of the island. There was a salt haze in the air, and it stung the young man’s eyes so that when he spotted the thing floating, it took several moments to focus on what it was.

  “It’s a big dead fish,” his fiancée said. “Maybe a porpoise.”

  “I don’t believe so,” said the young man. He stood up, dusted off the seat of his trousers, and walked to the edge of the surf. As the thing floated closer, the young man began to wonder about his legal responsibilities, providing it turned out to be what he thought it was. Oh yes, he had heard about Miami; this sort of stuff happened every day.

  “Let’s go back now,” he said abruptly to his fiancée.

  “No, I want to see what it is. It doesn’t look like a fish anymore.”

  The young man scanned the beach and saw they were all alone, thanks to the lousy weather. He also knew from a brochure back at the hotel that the lighthouse was long ago abandoned, so there would be no one watching from above.

  “It’s a dead body,” he said grimly to his fiancée.

  “Come off it.”

  At that instant a big, lisping breaker took the thing on its crest and carried it all the way to the beach, where it stuck—the nose of the dead man grounding as a keel in the sand.

  The young man’s fiancée stared down at the corpse and said, “Geez, you’re right.”

  The young man sucked in his breath and took a step back.

  “Should we turn it over?” his fiancee asked. “Maybe he’s still alive.”

  “Don’t touch it. He’s dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  The young man pointed with a bare toe. “See that hole?”


  “That’s a hole?”

  She bent over and studied a stain on the shirt. The stain was the color of rust and the size of a sand dollar.

  “Well, he didn’t just drown,” the young man announced.

  His fiancée shivered a little and buttoned her sweater. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now we get out of here.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “It’s our vacation, Cheryl. Besides, we’re a half-hour’s walk to the nearest phone.”

  The young man was getting nervous; he thought he heard a boat’s engine somewhere around the point of the island, on the bay side.

  The woman tourist said, “Just a second.” She unsnapped the black leather case that held her trusty Canon Sure-Shot.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want a picture, Thomas.” She already had the camera up to her eye.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Otherwise no one back home will believe us. I mean, we come all the way down to Miami and what happens? Remember how your brother was making murder jokes before we left? It’s unreal. Stand to the right a little, Thomas, and pretend to look down at it.”

  “Pretend, hell.”

  “Come on, one picture.”

  “No,” the man said, eyeing the corpse.

  “Please? You used up a whole roll on Flipper.”

  The woman snapped the picture and said, “That’s good. Now you take one of me.”

  “Well, hurry it up,” the young man grumped. The wind was blowing harder from the northeast, moaning through the whippy Australian pines behind them. The sound of the boat engine, wherever it was, had faded away.

  The young man’s fiancée struck a pose next to the dead body: She pointed at it and made a sour face, crinkling her zinc-coated nose.

  “I can’t believe this,” the young man said, lining up the photograph.

  “Me neither, Thomas. A real live dead body—just like on the TV show. Yuk!”

  “Yeah, yuk,” said the young man. “Fucking yuk is right.”

  THE day had begun with only a light, cool breeze and a rim of broken raspberry clouds out toward the Bahamas. Stranahan was up early, frying eggs and chasing the gulls off the roof. He lived in an old stilt house on the shallow tidal flats of Biscayne Bay, a mile from the tip of Cape Florida. The house had a small generator powered by a four-bladed windmill, but no air-conditioning. Except for a few days in August and September, there was always a decent breeze. That was one nice thing about living on the water.

  There were maybe a dozen other houses in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville, but none were inhabited; rich owners used them for weekend parties, and their kids got drunk on them in the summer. The rest of the time they served as fancy, split-level toilets for seagulls and cormorants.

  Stranahan had purchased his house dirt-cheap at a government auction. The previous owner was a Venezuelan cocaine courier who had been shot thirteen times in a serious business dispute, then indicted posthumously. No sooner had the corpse been air-freighted back to Caracas than Customs agents seized the stilt house, along with three condos, two Porsches, a one-eyed scarlet macaw, and a yacht with a hot tub. The hot tub was where the Venezuelan had met his spectacular death, so bidding was feverish. Likewise the macaw—a material witness to its owner’s murder—fetched top dollar; before the auction, mischievous Customs agents had taught the bird to say, “Duck, you shithead!”

  By the time the stilt house had come up on the block, nobody was interested. Stranahan had picked it up for forty thousand and change.

  He coveted the solitude of the flats, and was delighted to be the only human soul living in Stiltsville. His house, barn-red with brown shutters, sat three hundred yards off the main channel, so most of the weekend boat traffic traveled clear of him. Occasionally a drunk or a total moron would try to clear the banks with a big cabin cruiser, but they did not get far, and they got no sympathy or assistance from the big man in the barn-red house.

  January third was a weekday and, with the weather blackening out east, there wouldn’t be many boaters out. Stranahan savored this fact as he sat on the sun deck, eating his eggs and Canadian bacon right out of the frying pan. When a pair of fat, dirty gulls swooped in to nag him for the leftovers, he picked up a BB pistol and opened fire. The birds screeched off in the direction of the Miami skyline, and Stranahan hoped they would not stop until they got there.

  After breakfast he pulled on a pair of stringy denim cutoffs and started doing push-ups. He stopped at one hundred five, and went inside to get some orange juice. From the kitchen he heard a boat coming and checked out the window. It was a yellow bonefish skiff, racing heedlessly across the shallows. Stranahan smiled; he knew all the local guides. Sometimes he’d let them use his house for a bathroom stop, if they had a particularly shy female customer who didn’t want to hang it over the side of the boat.

  Stranahan poured two cups of hot coffee and went back out on the deck. The yellow skiff was idling up to the dock, which was below the house itself and served as a boat garage. The guide waved up at Stranahan and tied off from the bow. The man’s client, an inordinately pale fellow, was preoccupied trying to decide which of four different grades of sunscreen to slather on his milky arms. The guide hopped out of the skiff and climbed up to the sun deck.

  “Morning, Captain.” Stranahan handed a mug of coffee to the guide, who accepted it with a friendly grunt. The two men had known each other many years, but this was only the second or third occasion that the captain had gotten out of his boat and come up to the stilt house. Stranahan waited to hear the reason.

  When he put down the empty cup, the guide said: “Mick, you expecting company?”

  “No.”

  “There was a man this morning.”

  “At the marina?”

  “No, out here. Asking which house was yours.” The guide glanced over the railing at his client, who now was practicing with a fly rod, snapping the line like a horsewhip.

  Stranahan laughed and said, “Looks like a winner.”

  “Looks like a long goddamn day,” the captain muttered.

  “Tell me about this guy.”

  “He flagged me down over by the radio towers. He was in a white Seacraft, a twenty-footer. I thought he was having engine trouble, but all he wanted was to know which house was yours. I sent him down toward Elliott Key, so I hope he wasn’t a friend. Said he was.”

  “Did he give you a name?”

  “Tim is what he said.”

  Stranahan said the only Tim he knew was an ex-homicide cop named Gavigan.

  “That’s it,” the fishing guide said. “Tim Gavigan is what he said.”

  “Skinny redhead?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shit,” said Stranahan. Of course it wasn’t Timmy Gavigan. Gavigan was busy dying of lung cancer in the VA.

  The captain said, “You want me to hang close today?”

  “Hell, no, you got your sport down there, he’s raring to go.”

  “Fuck it, Mick, he wouldn’t know a bonefish from a sperm whale. Anyway, I’ve got a few choice spots right around here—maybe we’ll luck out.”

  “Not with this breeze, buddy; the flats are already pea soup. You go on down south, I’ll be all right. He’s probably just some process-server.”

  “Somebody’s sure to tell him which house.”

  “Yeah, I figure so,” Stranahan said. “A white Seacraft, you said?”

  “Twenty-footer,” the guide repeated. Before he started down the stairs, he said, “The guy’s got some size to him, too.”

  “Thanks for the info.”

  Stranahan watched the yellow skiff shoot south, across the flats, until all he could see was the long zipper of foam in its wake. The guide would be heading to Sand Key, Stranahan thought, or maybe all the way to Caesar Creek—well out of radio range. As if the damn radio still worked.

  BY three o’clock in the afternoon, the wind had stiffened, and the sky and
the water had acquired the same purple shade of gray. Stranahan slipped into long jeans and a light jacket. He put on his sneakers, too; at the time he didn’t think about why he did this, but much later it came to him: Splinters. From running on the wooden deck. The raw two-by-fours were hell on bare feet, so Stranahan had put on his sneakers. In case he had to run.

  The Seacraft was noisy. Stranahan heard it coming two miles away. He found the white speck through his field glasses and watched it plow through the hard chop. The boat was heading straight for Stranahan’s stilt house and staying clean in the channels, too.

  Figures, Stranahan thought sourly. Probably one of the park rangers down at Elliott Key told the guy which house; just trying to be helpful.

  He got up and closed the brown shutters from the outside. Through the field glasses he took one more long look at the man in the Seacraft, who was still a half mile away. Stranahan did not recognize the man, but could tell he was from up North—the guy made a point of shirtsleeves, on this kind of a day, and the dumbest-looking sunglasses ever made.

  Stranahan slipped inside the house and closed the door behind him. There was no way to lock it from the inside; there was no reason, usually.

  With the shutters down, the inside of the house was pitch-black, but Stranahan knew every corner of each room. In this house he had ridden out two hurricanes—baby ones, but nasty just the same. He had spent both storms in total darkness, because the wind knifed through the walls and played hell with the lanterns, and the last thing you wanted was an indoor fire.

  So Stranahan knew the house in the dark.

  He selected his place and waited.

  After a few minutes the pitch of the Seacraft’s engines dropped an octave, and Stranahan figured the boat was slowing down. The guy would be eyeing the place closely, trying to figure out the best way up on the flat. There was a narrow cut in the marl, maybe four feet deep at high tide and wide enough for one boat. If the guy saw it and made this his entry, he would certainly spot Stranahan’s aluminum skiff tied up under the water tanks. And then he would know.