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“I see,” said the tall man, rising to his feet. He was so tall his head seemed to almost touch the ceiling. He kept hold of Charlie’s hand and led him to the cluttered sink.
“Wow,” Charlie breathed, looking up at him. “Maybe I’ll have a big, massive scar.”
“Maybe,” said the man, running cold water on the stinging thumb. “You should have minded your mother.”
Charlie ignored the advice. He also ignored his mother, who stood by with an oddly disapproving look on her face. He would fix her for bringing him to this old Florida. He’d fix her by liking the tall man better than he liked her—so there.
“Who are you?” Charlie asked. “How come you don’t got no shirt?”
“Don’t have any shirt,” his mother corrected, but he hardly noticed.
“My name’s Hawkshaw,” said the man. “I don’t have a shirt because I don’t need one. This is the Florida Keys. It’s warm all year.”
“Then why do you have a hat?” Charlie asked.
“To keep the sun out of my eyes,” said the man, picking up the antiseptic. “Hold still. This is going to hurt.”
“I won’t cry,” Charlie vowed, but the smarting of the medicine made him dance in place.
“Charlie,” his mother asked, “do you need a bandage on your thumb?”
Charlie didn’t answer. He just gazed up, up, up at Hawkshaw. Hawkshaw, it was a good name, he thought. Like Batman. Or Rambo. Or Han Solo.
Hawkshaw’s cap was black with white letters. “What’s your hat say?” he demanded.
“I don’t think he needs a Band-Aid,” Hawkshaw told Mama. To Charlie he said, “It says United States Secret Service.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “Secret Service? Like the guys who guard the president?”
“Yeah,” Hawkshaw said in the purr-growl of his lion’s voice. “Like that.”
Charlie was swept up by excitement. “Are you in the Secret Service?”
“I was,” Hawkshaw said easily. “What say we take this dog out? She’s standing cross-legged, she has to pee so bad.”
Charlie saw his mother leading the dog outside, but the fact hardly registered. He was too rapt with admiration. “Did you have a gun and everything?”
“A gun and everything,” Hawkshaw said. “Come on. Your mother’s doing all the work.” He headed for the door and Charlie followed as if fastened to him by a string.
“Did you ever guard the president?” Charlie asked in awe.
“Sometimes,” Hawkshaw said. “Mostly I guarded other people.”
“Did you ever shoot anybody?” Charlie asked hopefully. “Did anybody ever shoot you?”
Hawkshaw’s lean face seemed to grow leaner, starker and sterner. “Outside, kid,” he ordered, holding the door.
And Charlie, dutiful as a page in training to a great knight, obeyed.
IN THE YARD, next to a cluster of flowering shrubs, Maybelline squatted modestly. Kate stared off in the opposite direction, trying to seem too dignified to notice.
She saw Hawkshaw come out on the deck. He tilted back the bill of his cap and stared down at her.
Self-conscious, Kate tried to ignore him. She was a mess, of course. She was pale with a Northerner’s pallor, and she hadn’t fastened her hair back, done anything to it except brush it.
Her jeans were baggy, her shirt mannish, and Hawkshaw probably wondered why anyone, least of all a stalker, would want her.
His gaze seemed to settle on the slight thrust of her breasts under the shirt, and, in embarrassment, she looked away. She was imagining things, she told herself. And if she wasn’t, the last thing she needed was anybody’s sexual interest. She’d had enough for a lifetime.
Her son was chattering a mile a minute to the man, and Hawkshaw answered with grunts and nods. But when she stole a glimpse at him, she saw his eyes were still on her.
Maybelline plodded a few steps into the shade and sat down among the deep-red phlox. Delicately, she began to gnaw at her haunch, as if besieging a flea.
Kate knelt beside her, slipping her arm around the dog affectionately. She nuzzled one of the velvety ears. Maybelline kept pursuing the flea.
Kate raised her eyes and stared toward the patch of sea that showed between the trees. The sun beat on her face, and she thought of Charlie, who was as fair-skinned as she. The both of them would need hats and sunscreen, or they’d be burned and blistered.
She turned to look at Charlie again and saw Hawkshaw take off his own cap and adjust it to make it tighter. “Here, kid,” he said, setting it on Charlie’s head. “You want to wear this?”
“Wow,” Charlie breathed, reverently fingering the bill. “You’ll let me?”
“Sure,” said Hawkshaw.
The boy smiled more widely than Kate had seen him smile in weeks. She swallowed.
He was a nice-looking boy, she thought, handsome, even. He had his father’s straight brown hair and angular, masculine features. But his eyes were the same color brown as hers, and in them shone a lively intelligence, a bright imagination.
But sometimes, because of his attention deficit, Charlie’s liveliness was too unfettered; it needed taming.
It seemed profoundly unfair to her that the boy had faced so many problems. The loss of his father, the insanity of her being stalked, his own disability—some—times her feelings of protectiveness for him almost overwhelmed her.
Hawkshaw turned his attention back to Kate. She dropped her gaze to the dog and started to unfasten the leash.
“Wait,” Hawkshaw ordered. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She looked up, surprise mingled with resentment. His tone had been abrupt, even imperious.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded.
He made his way down the narrow stairs, Charlie tagging behind him like a puppy.
“I just wouldn’t let her off yet,” Hawkshaw said. “The Keys aren’t like the city. Nature gets a little snarky down here.”
“Snarky?” she asked dubiously. It seemed an unlikely word for him to use.
“Dangerous,” he amended. “Come on. Let’s walk her around the yard. I’ll explain what I mean.”
“Look at me, Mama,” Charlie said, fairly dancing before her, adjusting the oversize cap on his head. “I’m a Secret Service man—I guard people.”
He dived on the unsuspecting Maybelline and caught her in a possessive embrace. “You’re a spy!” he informed the startled dog. “I got you!”
Maybelline sighed, martyrlike, and let him wrestle her to the ground. Kate stared down at the boy in shock. “Charlie! Where’s your shirt?”
He had been wearing a shirt only a moment before, she was certain of it. Now his thin, white back was as bare as Hawkshaw’s tanned one.
“Charlie, Charlie,” Kate said, pulling him off the dog. “I asked you—where’s your shirt?”
“I don’t remember,” he said carelessly. He picked up a stick and aimed it into the trees like a gun. “Bang!” he yelled. “Stick ’em up—you’re under arrest!”
Kate knelt before him and pushed the stick down firmly. “Why?” she said, very clearly, very carefully. “Why did you take off your shirt?”
“I don’t have a shirt because I don’t need one,” Charlie said, echoing Hawkshaw exactly. “This is the Florida Keys. It’s warm all year.”
She looked back toward the deck and saw the boy’s polo shirt lying inside out on the bottom stair. He had stripped it off and tossed it aside.
“Charlie,” Kate said firmly, “you have to wear a shirt. You’ll get a sunburn—a bad one.”
“I don’t need one,” the boy repeated stubbornly. “This is Florida.” He adjusted the cap again and looked up at Hawkshaw with shining eyes. “I like Florida better than I did,” he said.
Hawkshaw put his hands on his hips. “Charlie, your mother’s right. Put your shirt back on. Go on. Do it.”
Charlie stood, his face indecisive for a moment. Then he brightened and said, “Okay.” He dashed away and ran back to the stairs. He struggled with his shirt and at last got it on, but inside out.
Kate dropped the dog’s leash, rose to her feet and gave Hawkshaw a sarcastic look. She strode to where Charlie twisted and wriggled. She pulled the shirt off and then expertly put it on him again, right side out.
He jammed the hat back on his head and ran over to Hawkshaw. “I got my shirt on, see?” he said eagerly.
Hawkshaw nodded, keeping his face impassive. “That’s good,” he said. “A boy should mind his mother.”
Kate picked up Maybelline’s leash. She made her voice controlled, almost frosty. “You were going to give us the safety tour, Mr. Hawkshaw?”
“Yes,” Hawkshaw said. “Now the Keys are a special environment. This island we’re on—”
“We’re on an island?” Charlie interrupted, tugging at Hawkshaw’s bare knee. “An island? Where’s the ocean?”
Hawkshaw pointed between the trees. “Over there,” he said.
“I can’t see it,” Charlie almost wailed in disappointment. “Where?”
Hawkshaw hoisted him up easily, so the boy’s head was as high as his own. “Over there. See it?”
“Oh,” Charlie said with disappointment. “I thought it’d be bigger.”
Hawkshaw laughed. “It is bigger. You can’t see much of it from here, that’s all.”
“Can we go closer?” Charlie begged.
“Sure,” Hawkshaw said. “Why not? You better ride on my shoulders. There’s poisonwood between here and there. You’ll have to learn how to identify it, stay away from it.”
“Poisonwood?” Charlie asked, charmed at the exotic and dangerous sound of it.
“Yeah. I’ll show you.” Hawkshaw let the boy settle on his shoulders. He turned to Kate, who stood, holding the dog’s leash and eyeing him warily. “You should come, too,” he said. “You need to learn these things.”
“Then by all means,” she said with a shrug, “let the lesson begin.”
For the first time, he smiled at her, the barest curve at one corner of his lip. He seemed to be saying, You have a problem with this, lady? He moved off through the trees, Charlie on his shoulders.
She felt a strange, primal emotion surge deep within her, a feeling so foreign that at first she didn’t recognize it. And when she recognized it, she was ashamed.
Even when her husband had been alive, Charlie was very much her child. Since Chuck’s death, it had seemed like her and Charlie, the two of them, together against the world. She was used to being the most important person in the boy’s life.
Now, in a matter of moments, he had fallen under the spell of Hawkshaw—Hawkshaw, of all people. And Kate, suddenly relegated to second place in the boy’s regard, was shocked to feel the sting of jealousy.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN HAWKSHAW’S BOYHOOD, Cobia Key had been wild and solitary, and it had suited him; he had been wild and solitary himself.
Now he felt the slight weight of the boy on his shoulders and remembered being carried by his own father the same way in this same place. He remembered how his father had introduced him to this mysterious land that could be at once both beautiful and fearful.
The famous Keys highway had run through Cobia to end in Key West, its tipsy and not quite respectable final destination. But in those days hardly anyone stopped in Cobia, for it seemed there was nothing to stop for.
But the island had its inhabitants. They were few but hardy, independent souls who relished Cobia’s privacy and its isolation for their own reasons, sometimes legal, sometimes not.
Over the years, while Hawkshaw had been gone, the edges of Cobia’s splendid loneliness had been eaten away. The highway through it now sported an ugly restaurant, an uglier motel, and a small but hideous strip mall.
A new housing subdivision had grown up along the open water, concrete dwellings colored in pastels like different flavors of ice cream. They looked as if they were made for mannequins, not people, and Hawkshaw didn’t like them.
He was glad that here, in the backcountry, the wilderness remained, and so did the loneliness.
He walked across the weedy yard, conscious that the loneliness was violated now by the boy and his mother. He was an unwilling host, and they were his unwilling guests.
He might begrudge their presence, but he would have to make the best of it. He would begin by pointing out the boundaries and setting the rules. The woman beside him walked gingerly and so did the basset hound, like the city creatures they were.
“There,” Hawkshaw said to Charlie. He pointed at a tall, spindly tree on the opposite side of the tidal stream. “That’s a poisonwood tree. You don’t want to touch any part of it or put it in your mouth. You have to memorize how it looks, the big shiny leaves, the black splotches on the bark.”
“Wow,” Charlie breathed, clearly awed. “Will it kill you?”
“No, it’s more like poison ivy. But it makes some people pretty sick,” said Hawkshaw. “So steer clear of anything that looks like it. That’s an order.”
Kate Kanaday shifted uneasily and gripped the dog’s leash more tightly. “Snakes,” she said. “There are snakes here, aren’t there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hawkshaw said. “Coral snakes. And cottonmouths. And rattlesnakes.”
“Rattlesnakes—that’s awesome,” Charlie said. “Can we catch one?”
“No, you certainly can’t,” Kate said. “If you see a snake, don’t even think of touching it—run.”
Hawkshaw glanced down at her. Her pallor clearly marked her as an outsider to this world of perpetual summer. But the sunshine did dazzling things to her hair, making it glint with live sparks of red and gold.
