They dragged the pastor, chair and all, into the shallow water and up onto spongy ground.
Coleman kept slapping his arms and swatting in front of his face.
“They’re attracted to carbon dioxide,” said Serge. “Remember me telling you down in Flamingo at the tip of the state?”
“No.” Coleman spit something out of his mouth.
The captive struggled fiercely in the chair. “You won’t get away with this! I’ll yell!”
“I’ll yell,” said Serge. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Damn, that feels good. You should try it.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!” The hostage stopped and coughed and spit something out. “You’re insane!”
“Thank you.”
Coleman continued swatting and spitting. “What are these things?”
“The blind mosquitoes,” said Serge. “Scientific name Chironomidae, also known as lake flies, and in Florida—you’ll love this—chizzywinks. Guess what? The chizzywinks are back in season! I checked with the locals, and they expect them to be at maximum swarm strength tonight in the darkest hours just before sunrise. And that’s just their activity level back on land away from the lake. Out here—hoo-wee! . . . Back in the 1800s, there were rampant cases of entire herds of cattle dying from insect asphyxiation in this region. Just read A Land Remembered.”
Serge put on a surgical mask and safety goggles, and handed an identical pair to the now-coughing Coleman. He turned to the captive. “Oops, I’m short on supplies. I guess that’s where the power of prayer comes in.”
The pastor was blinking rapidly and trying to breathe through his nose.
“What a nature show you’re about to experience,” said Serge. “Kind of like something out of the Bible.”
Serge sloshed back out to the boat and helped Coleman aboard. They motored away in the direction of Dynamite Pass.
A buzzer rang on the night window of a budget motel on Lake Okeechobee.
Serge swatted away bugs. He cupped hands around his eyes and pressed his nose against the window, looking at the empty front desk.
Someone emerged from a back room. “There you are! I was wondering what kind of business took so long.”
“Totally tedious,” said Serge. “But I do need to report a missing chair from our room. It kind of got away from me. I’m good for it.”
“You know, I still have that extra room available next to yours, if, uh, your friend would like some privacy. On the house.”
“You’ve read my mind . . .”
A half hour later, Serge lay on his back in the bed, holding up a series of large pages like flash cards. “Here’s another cool tombstone rubbing, and here’s another, and this one has a little cherub on top. I’m a sucker for that. And this is Mitzi the Dolphin . . .”
Cheyenne continued massaging him below the belt. “Um, Serge? Am I doing something wrong?”
“I can accurately say no. I believe most of my gender would concur.”
“But you’re still looking at your rubbings.”
“Precisely.” Serge flipped to another page. “What you’re doing down there makes me appreciate them in a whole new light.”
“Serge . . .”
“O-kayyyyyyyy.” Serge set the pages on the nightstand and picked up something else. “What about View-Masters? No? My elongated penny collection? I thought women were into sex toys.”
“Is that what you call those?”
“Who doesn’t?” Serge set the penny album down. “Don’t tell anyone I have all this stuff. I’d be mortified if the public knew about my kinky trove.”
“What about simple vibrators?”
“You mean those things in the ads that people are using to rub tense facial muscles?”
“Those ads are kind of in code.”
Serge crinkled his nose. “That would explain so much.”
“Stop talking.”
“What?”
Cheyenne got on her hands and knees and slowly crawled up the bed toward him like a jungle cat. She growled.
“Yikes.”
Chapter 33
Pahokee
Coach Calhoun stuck his head in the principal’s office. “You wanted to see me?”
“Come in. And close the door.”
Uh-oh, that’s never good. Hopefully one of his players hadn’t made a mistake that couldn’t be reversed.
“Lamar, I can’t tell you how happy I was when you first showed up back at the school.”
“It was a special day for me, too.”
“I know, I know.”
“But . . . ?”
“Lamar, we all kind of wondered a little bit about your missing years,” said the principal.
“That would be natural,” said Calhoun. “I’m sort of a private person.”
“We weren’t being nosy, mind you. It’s just that you were so gifted, we all expected to see you someday in the NFL draft. But after a while, we simply assumed football didn’t work out for whatever reason, and the rest was your business. Until you finally decided to come back to your roots.”
“Life takes its turns,” said Calhoun. “I worked in an auto plant for a while, then a drydock . . . But by that look in your eyes, you already know that.”
It pained the principal, and Calhoun saw it all play out again like it was yesterday instead of more than twenty years ago . . .
The winters in the upper Midwest were far more freezing than Calhoun had ever imagined. It was his senior year at the university, and while he hadn’t torn up the Big Ten, Lamar was expected to go in the top six or seven rounds of the draft. He stared out at the snow that was crusting over the campus and piling up on the windowsill of the athletic dorm. His roommate was named Ted, but everyone called him Bruiser.
It was kind of a joke. Ted was a kicker, and they tend to be the smallest players on a team, usually by such a degree that they seem not to be football players at all. It held true in Ted’s case. Hence, Bruiser. Ted was from a small farm in an equally small dot on the map in Missouri, and he was lost on the big campus. He didn’t know the current music, how to talk to girls or even basic slang. “You mean when something’s ‘bad,’ it’s actually ‘good’? That doesn’t make sense.” They went to a club one night, and Ted tried to dance. Lamar almost lost a lung from laughing. The huge player from Pahokee, Florida, appointed himself Ted’s big brother, and they became the inseparable odd couple. That’s how Calhoun first developed an affinity for kickers.
There are many scandals in big-time college sports that make headlines, and many more that never leave the practice field or locker room. The head coach was in the mold of Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, who punched a player on national TV. Which meant he was a dinosaur. It was a new era, and the assistant coaches struggled to keep him in check. It came to a head halfway through the season. Ted had shanked a thirty-yarder, costing them the game against Michigan. For the next few days, the coach’s rage had been tightening in a vicious cycle until he was spring-loaded. On a Wednesday, the practice field was extra busy, pockets of activity where various specialty players honed their specialties. But the coach’s eyes were locked in on the kickers. They call it staring daggers, and all the assistants went on high alert, like a domestic abuse victim detecting the first signs of that telltale mood swing.