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  “That fish,” Dennis Gault recalled angrily, “had been dead for two days.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know a stiff when I see one. That fish was cold, Mr. Decker, icebox-type cold. You follow?”

  “A ringer?” It was all Decker could do not to laugh.

  “I know what you’re thinking: Who cares if some dumb shitkicker redneck cheats with a fish? But think about this: Of the last seven big-money tournaments held in the United States, Dickie Lockhart has won five and finished second twice. That’s two hundred sixty thousand bucks, which makes him not such a dumb shitkicker after all. It makes him downright respectable. He’s got his own rigging TV show, if you can believe that.”

  Decker said, “Did you confront him about the ringer?”

  “Hell, no. That’s a damn serious thing, and I had no solid proof.”

  “Nobody else was suspicious?”

  “Shit, everybody else was suspicious, but no one had the balls to say boo. Over beers, sure, they said they knew it was a stiff. But not to Dickie’s face.”

  “This Lockhart, he must be a real tough guy,” Decker said, needling.

  “Not tough, just powerful. Most bass pros don’t want to piss him off. If you want to get asked to the invitationals, you’d better be pals with Dickie. If you want product endorsements, you better kiss Dickie’s ass. Same goes if you want your new outboard wholesale. It adds up. Some guys don’t like Dickie Lockhart worth a shit, but they sure like to be on TV.”

  Decker said, “He’s the only one who cheats?”

  Gault hooted.

  “Then what’s the big deal?” Decker asked.

  “The big deal”—Gault sneered—“is that Lockhart cheats in the big ones. The big deal is that he cheats against me. It’s the difference between a Kiwanis softball game and the fucking World Series, you understand?”

  “Absolutely,” Decker said. He had heard enough. “Mr. Gault, I really don’t think I can help you.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Look, this is not my strong suit....”

  “What is your strong suit? Divorces? Car repos? Workmen’s comp? If you’re doing so hot, maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me why you’re moonlighting at that shyster insurance agency where I tracked you down.”

  Decker headed for the door.

  “The fee is fifty thousand dollars.”

  Decker wheeled and stared. Finally he said, “You don’t need a P.I., you need a doctor.”

  “The money is yours if you can catch this cocksucker cheating, and prove it.”

  “Prove it?”

  Gault said, “You were an ace photographer once. Couple big awards—I know about you, Decker. I know about your crummy temper and your run-in with the law. I also know you’d rather sleep in a tent than a Hilton, and that’s fine. They say you’re a little crazy, but crazy is exactly what I need.”

  “You want pictures?” Decker said. “Of fish.”

  “What better proof?” Gault glowed at the idea. “You get me a photograph of Dickie Lockhart cheating, and I’ll get you published in every blessed outdoors magazine in the free world. That’s a bonus, too, on top of the fee.”

  The cover of Field and Stream, Decker thought, a dream come true. “I told you,” he said, “I don’t know anything about tournament fishing.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you weren’t my first choice.”

  It didn’t make Decker feel any better.

  “The first guy I picked knew plenty about fishing,” Dennis Gault said, “a real pro.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t work out. Now I need a new guy.”

  Dennis Gault looked uncomfortable. “Distracted” was the word for it. He set down his drink and reached inside the desk. Out came a fake-lizardskin checkbook. Or maybe it was real.

  “Twenty-five up front,” Gault said, reaching for a pen.

  R. J. Decker thought of the alternative and shrugged. “Make it thirty,” he said.

  2

  To Dr. Michael Pembroke fell the task of dissecting the body of Robert Clinch.

  The weight of this doleful assignment was almost unbearable because Dr. Pembroke by training was not a coroner, but a clinical pathologist. He addressed warts, cysts, tumors, and polyps with ease and certitude, but corpses terrified him, as did forensics in general.

  Most Florida counties employ a full-time medical examiner, or coroner, to handle the flow of human dead. Rural Harney County could not justify such a luxury to its taxpayers, so each year the county commission voted to retain the part-time services of a pathologist to serve as coroner when needed. For the grand sum of five thousand dollars Dr. Michael Pembroke was taking his turn. The job was not unduly time-consuming, as there were only four thousand citizens in the county and they did not die often. Most who did die had the courtesy to do so at the hospital, or under routine circumstances that required neither an autopsy nor an investigation. The few Harney Countians who expired unnaturally could usually be classified as victims of (a) domestic turmoil, (b) automobile accidents, (c) hunting accidents, (d) boating accidents, or (e) lightning. Harney County had more fatal lightning strikes than any other place in Florida, though no one knew why. The local fundamentalist church had a field day with this statistic.

  When news of Robert Clinch’s death arrived at the laboratory, Dr. Pembroke was staring at a common wart (verruca vulgaris) that had come from the thumb of a watermelon farmer. The scaly brown lump was not a pleasant sight, but it was infinitely preferable to the swollen visage of a dead bass fisherman. The doctor tried to stall and pretend he was deeply occupied at the microscope, but the sheriffs deputy waited patiently, leafing through some dermatology pamphlets. Dr. Pembroke finally gave up and got in the back of the squad car for the short ride to the morgue.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Dr. Pembroke asked, leaning forward.

  “It’s Bobby Clinch,” the deputy said over his shoulder. “Musta flipped his boat in the lake.”

  Dr. Pembroke was relieved. Now he had a theory; soon he’d have a cause-of-death. In no time he could return to the wart. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

  The police car pulled up to a low red-brick building that served as the county morgue. The building had once been leased out as a Burger King restaurant, and had not been refurbished since the county bought it. While the Burger King sign had been removed (and sold to a college fraternity house), the counters, booths, and drive-up window remained exactly as they had been in the days of the Whopper. Dr. Pembroke once wrote a letter to the county commission suggesting that a fast-food joint was hardly the proper site for a morgue, but the commissioners tersely pointed out that it was the only place in Harney with a walk-in freezer.

  Peering through the plate-glass window, Dr. Pembroke saw a pudgy man with a ruddy, squashed-looking face. It was Culver Rundell, whose shoulders (the doctor remembered) had been covered with brown junctional moles. These had been expertly biopsied and found to be nonmalignant.

  “Hey, doc!” Culver Rundell said as Dr. Pembroke came through the door.

  “Hello,” the pathologist said. “How are those moles?” Pathologists seldom have to deal with whole patients so they are notoriously weak at making small talk.

  “The moles are coming back,” Culver Rundell reported, “by the hundreds. My wife takes a Flair pen and plays connect-the-dots from my neck to my butthole.”

  “Why don’t you come by the office and I’ll take a look.”

  “Naw, doc, you done your best. I’m used to the damn things, and so’s Jeannie. We make the best of the situation, if you know what I mean.”

  Culver Rundell ran a fish camp on Lake Jesup. He was not much of a fisherman but he loved the live-bait business, worms and wild shiners mainly. He also served as official weighmaster for some of America’s most prestigious bass tournaments, and this honor Culver Rundell owed to his lifelong friendship with Dickie Lockhart, champion basser.

  “Are you the one who found
the deceased?” Dr. Pembroke asked.

  “Nope, that was the Davidson boys.”

  “Which ones?” Dr. Pembroke asked. There were three sets of Davidson boys in Harney County.

  “Daniel and Desi. They found Bobby floating at the bog and hauled him back to the fish camp. The boys wanted to go back out so I told ’em I’d take care of the body. We didn’t have no hearse so I used my four-by-four.”

  Dr. Pembroke climbed over the counter into what once had been the kitchen area of the Burger King. With some effort, Culver Rundell followed.

  The body of Robert Clinch lay on a long stainless-steel table. The stench was dreadful, a mixture of wet death and petrified french fries.

  “Holy Jesus,” said Dr. Pembroke.

  “I know it,” said Rundell.

  “How long was he in the water?” the doctor asked.

  “We were kind of hoping you’d tell us.” It was the deputy, standing at the counter as if waiting for a vanilla shake.

  Dr. Pembroke hated floaters and this was a beaut. Bobby Clinch’s eyes were popping out of his face, milkballs on springs. An engorged tongue poked from the dead man’s mouth like a fat coppery eel.

  “What happened to his head?” Dr. Pembroke asked. It appeared that numerous patches of Robert Clinch’s hair had been yanked raw from his scalp, leaving the checker-skulled impression of an underdressed punk rocker.

  “Ducks,” said Culver Rundell. “A whole flock.”

  “They thought it was food,” the deputy explained.

  “It looks like pickerel weeds, hair does. Especially hair like Bobby’s,” Rundell went on. “In the water it looks like weeds.”

  “This time of year ducks’ll eat anything,” the deputy added.

  Dr. Pembroke felt queasy. Sometimes he wished he’d gone into radiology like his dumb cousin. With heavy stainless surgical shears he began to cut Robert Clinch’s clothes off, a task made more arduous by the swollen condition of the limbs and torso. As soon as Clinch’s waterlogged dungarees were cut away and more purple flesh was revealed, both Culver Rundell and the sheriffs deputy decided to wait on the other side of the counter, where they took a booth and chatted about the latest scandal with the University of Florida football team.

  Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Pembroke came out with a chart on a clipboard. He was scribbling as he talked.

  “The body was in the water at least twenty-four hours,” he said. “Cause of death was drowning.”

  “Was he drunk?” Rundell asked.

  “I doubt it, but I won’t get the blood tests back for about a week.”

  “Should I tell the sheriff it was an accident?” the deputy said.

  “It looks that way, yes,” Dr. Pembroke said. “There was a head wound consistent with impact in a high-speed crash.”

  A bad bruise is what it was, consistent with any number of things, but Dr. Pembroke preferred to be definitive. Much of what he knew about forensic medicine came from watching reruns of the television show Quincy, M.E. Quincy the TV coroner could always glance at an injury and announce what exactly it was consistent with, so Dr. Pembroke tried to do the same. The truth was that after the other two men had left the autopsy table, Dr. Pembroke had worked as hastily as possible. He had drawn blood, made note of a golf-ball-size bruise on Bobby Clinch’s skull and, with something less than surgical acuity, hacked a Y-shaped incision from the neck to the belly. He had reached in, grabbed a handful of lung, and quickly ascertained that it was full of brackish lake water, which is exactly what Dr. Pembroke wanted to see. It meant that Bobby Clinch had drowned, as suspected. Further proof was the presence of a shiny dead minnow in the right bronchus, indicating that on the way down Bobby Clinch had inhaled violently, but to no avail. Having determined this, Dr. Pembroke had wasted not another moment with the rancid body; had not even turned it over for a quick look-see before dragging it into the hamburger cooler.

  The pathologist signed the death certificate and handed it to the deputy. Culver Rundell read it over the lawman’s shoulder and nodded. “I’ll call Clarisse,” he said, “then I gotta hose out the truck.”

  The largemouth bass is the most popular gamefish in North America, as it can be found in the warmest waters of almost every state. Its appeal has grown so astronomically in the last ten years that thousands of bass-fishing clubs have sprung up, and are swamped with new members. According to the sporting-goods industry, more millions of dollars are spent to catch largemouth bass than are spent on any other outdoor activity in the United States. Bass magazines promote the species as the workingman’s fish, available to anyone within strolling distance of a lake, river, culvert, reservoir, rockpit, or drainage ditch. The bass is not picky; it is hardy, prolific, and on a given day will eat just about any God-awful lure dragged in front of its maw. As a fighter it is bullish, but tires easily; as a jumper its skills are admirable, though no match for a graceful rainbow trout or tarpon; as table fare it is blandly acceptable, even tasty when properly seasoned. Its astonishing popularity comes from a modest combination of these traits, plus the simple fact that there are so many largemouth bass swimming around that just about any damn fool can catch one.

  Its democratic nature makes the bass an ideal tournament fish, and a marketing dream-come-true for the tackle industry. Because a largemouth in Seattle is no different from its Everglades cousin, expensive bass-fishing products need no regionalization, no tailored advertising. This is why hard-core bass fishermen everywhere are outfitted exactly the same, from their trucks to their togs to their tackle. On any body of water, in any county rural or urban, the uniform and arsenal of the bassing fraternity are unmistakable. The universal mission is to catch one of those freakishly big bass known as lunkers or hawgs. In many parts of the country, any fish over five pounds is considered a trophy, and it is not uncommon for the ardent basser to have three or four such specimens mounted on the walls of his home; one for the living room, one for the den, and so on. The geographic range of truly gargantuan fish, ten to fifteen pounds, is limited to the humid Deep South, particularly Georgia and Florida. In these areas the quest for the world’s biggest bass is rabid and ruthless; for tournament fishermen this is the big leagues, where top prize money for a two-day event might equal seventy-five thousand dollars. If the weather on these days happens to be rotten or the water too cold, a dinky four-pound bass might win the whole shooting match. More than likely, though, it takes a lunker fish to win the major tournaments, and few anglers are capable of catching lunkers day in and day out.

  Weekend anglers are fond of noting that the largest bass ever caught was not landed by a tournament fisherman. It was taken by a nineteen-year-old Georgia farm kid named George W. Perry at an oxbow slough called Montgomery Lake. Fittingly, young Perry had never heard of Lowrance fish-finders or Thruster trolling motors or Fenwick graphite flipping sticks. Perry went out fishing in a simple rowboat and took the only bass lure he owned, a beat-up Creek Chub. He went fishing mainly because his family was hungry, and he returned with a largemouth bass that weighed twenty-two pounds, four ounces. The year was 1932. Since then, despite all the spaceage advancements in fish-catching technology, nobody has boated a bass that comes close to the size of George Perry’s trophy, which he and his loved ones promptly ate for dinner. Today an historical plaque commemorating this leviathan largemouth stands on Highway 117, near Lumber City, Georgia. It serves as a defiant and nagging challenge to modern bass fishermen and all their infernal electronics. Some ichthyologists have been so bold as to suggest that the Monster of Montgomery Lake was a supremely mutant fish, an all-tackle record that will never be bested by any angler. To which Dickie Lockhart, in dosing each segment of Fish Fever, would scrunch up his eyes, wave a finger at the camera, and decree: “George Perry, next week your cracker butt is history!”

  There was no tournament that weekend, so Dickie Lockhart was taping a show. He was shooting on Lake Kissimmee, not far from Disney World. The title of this particular episode was “Hawg Hunting.” Dickie ne
eded a bass over ten pounds; anything less wasn’t a hawg.

  As always, he used two boats; one to fish from, one for the film crew. Like most TV fishing-show hosts, Dickie Lockhart used videotapes because they were cheaper than sixteen-millimeter, and reusable. Film was unthinkable for a bass show because you might go two or three days shooting nothing but men casting their lures and spitting tobacco, but no fish. With the video, a bad day didn’t blow the whole budget because you just backed it up and shot again.

  Dickie Lockhart had been catching bass all morning, little two-and three-pounders. He could guess the weight as soon as he hooked up, then furiously skitter the poor fish across the surface into the boat. “Goddammit,” he would shout, “rewind that sucker and let’s try again.”

  During lulls in the action, Dickie would grow tense and foul-mouthed. “Come on, you bucket-mouthed bastards,” he’d growl as he cast at the shoreline, “hit this thing or I’m bringing dynamite tomorrow, y’hear?”

  Midmorning the wind kicked up, mussing Dickie Lockhart’s shiny black hair. “Goddammit,” he shouted, “stop the tape.” After he got a comb from his tacklebox and slicked himself down, he ordered the cameraman to crank it up again.

  “How do I look?” Dickie asked.

  “Like a champ,” the cameraman said thinly. The cameraman dreamed of the day when Dickie Lockhart would get shitfaced drunk and drop his drawers to moon his little ole fishing pals all across America. Then Dickie would fall out of the boat, as he often did after drinking. Afterward the cameraman would pretend to rewind the videotape and erase this sloppy moment, but of course he wouldn’t. He’d save it and, when the time was right, threaten to send it to the sports-and-religion network that syndicated Dickie Lockhart’s fishing show. Dickie would suddenly become a generous fellow, and the cameraman would finally be able to afford to take his wife to the Virgin Islands.

  Now, with the tape rolling, Dickie Lockhart was talking man-to-man with the serious bass angler back home. Dickie’s TV accent was much thicker and gooier than his real-life accent, an exaggeration that was necessary to meet the demographic of the show, which was basically male Deep Southern grit-suckers. As he cast his lure and reeled it in, Dickie Lockhart would confide exactly what brand of crankbait he was using, what pound line was on the reel, what kind of sunglasses (amber or green) worked better on a bright day. The patter carried an air of informality and friendliness, when in fact the point was to shill as many of Dickie Lockhart’s sponsors’ products as possible in twenty-four minutes of live tape. The crankbait was made by Bagley, the line by Du Pont, the reel by Shimano, the sunglasses by Polaroid, and so on. Somehow, when Dickie stared into the camera and dropped these bald-faced plugs, it didn’t seem so cheap.