Air Dance Iguana Read Online Free PDF

was a jerk-off. I just hope you’re not his replacement.”
    “I fit the same category?” I said.
    “You’re the boss’s buddy. True or not, you’d be seen as a rat.”
    “What’s to tattle?” I said. “Does everyone have a side scam? Or is it just laziness?”
    “Don’t get the wrong idea, Rutledge. Things are clean these days, you compare it to the eighties. Worse than that, the seventies.”
    “That doesn’t mean the Keys haven’t gone downhill.”
    “You’re into another subject,” he said. “Like crime changes, the county changes.”
    I shut up, listened to the tires on concrete, and didn’t attempt to decipher his analogy.
    We came off the Seven Mile Bridge and slowed to pass a trooper who had stopped a Mustang convertible. The three men in the rental car looked half asleep, but we knew they were two-thirds blitzed. If they were lucky, the Florida Highway Patrol wouldn’t call in the drug-sniffing dog. One way or another, their holiday cash would be collected at the hotel with no reservations.
    “You napping or thinking?” said Bohner.
    “You must be thinking, too, or you wouldn’t have asked.”
    “That call you made on there being a murder weapon. It’s the first time I’ve seen why Liska respects you.”
    “I don’t know about respect,” I said. “He hires me, I work cheap, and I take good pictures. I shot four rolls on Ramrod. They’ll prove Kansas Jack was hung by his neck and not his ankles. I came up here with you and shot another couple rolls that will prove the same thing for Navarre. Hung by his neck.”
    “You’ll collect your hourly rate,” he said. “What’s to complain?”
    “When’s the last time you saw a davit hanging?”
    “These past eighteen years I’ve seen and heard it all, but never a davit. I mean, in the Keys we got more davits than pelicans, but not hooked to people. Now we get two in one day.”
    “That’s my point,” I said. “It’s too weird to be a coincidence. It’s a single crime with two crime scenes.”
    “I don’t think anybody would doubt that, Rutledge.”
    “Did you look closely at the victim on Ramrod?”
    Bohner shook his head. “I was told to stay out on the street.”
    “I’m a civilian?”
    “Excellent point.”
    “Then why am I the only person who’s had a close look at both of them? Why not two or three detectives investigating, comparing notes, all the shit they do? Where’s Sheriff Liska? Why isn’t he here in the car with us?”
    Bohner forced a bored look on his face. “Ask me ten more I can’t answer. I do my job, and I do what they tell me.”
    “Well, I didn’t beg for this, and I can’t stop thinking it’s going to bite me in the ass real soon.”
    “Got me already,” he said.
    I was going to let his statement hang, but he’d opened a door. “How so?”
    “The last few years I get my kids four weeks every summer. The rest of the time they live with their bitch of a mother up in Raleigh. Last summer I was a dictator worse than the bitch. My twelve-year-old, going on eighteen, told me she never wanted to come back. The boy kept complaining about always being wrong, no matter what he did right. At first I thought tough shit, but it started to eat at me. I bit the bullet, went to the shrink the boss keeps on retainer.”
    Hearing an introspective No Jokes Bohner talk about himself was as odd as having to view two davit hangings in a single day.
    “The shrink have an opinion?” I said.
    “He told me I was addicted to power but didn’t have any, so I overused my resources. In a word, I was pushy.”
    Bingo, I thought. If I had to pick from the dictionary, pushy would be it. “That was it?” I said.
    “He suggested I lose the push, and he sent me to meditation class.”
    I couldn’t picture it. “For what?”
    “To lower my blood pressure.”
    “Did it work?”
    “You bet. I can still be myself, but I won’t seize up and die from it.”
    “Did they sign up Millican for the same