Bone Deep by Randy Wayne White Read Free Book Online Page B

around a bar near where we left the boat.”
    “You
need
a tour guide,” I said. “The Gulf of Mexico is
that
way. The marina is another ten blocks north.”
    Fallsdown said, “You’re shitting me.”
    Tomlinson tried to reassure the Crow medicine man. “Don’t worry, Dunk, you just need to brush up on your Indian skills. I’ll help you, brother.”
    Fallsdown asked, “Do you remember me ever getting lost back when I was a drunk? I don’t.”
    Perfect,
I thought.
    •   •   •
    A WHILE LATER, Dunk regained some of my confidence when a man who resembled Mick Jagger, but with braided pirate hair, said, “I’m part Indian,” and Dunk replied, “Which tribe? Sicilian or whitefoot?”
    Up until then, I’d been ready to pull the plug. There are worse ways to waste a day than gunkholing the Gulf Coast, but I’d had enough. We’d found the tour guide, whose name
was
Mick-something, at a tiki bar on the water. Osprey Nest was a nice marina—orderly docks, with a fueling station and a patio restaurant. A busy place during high season, I guessed, but quiet on this June afternoon, where Mick, a shirtless man drinking beer and smoking a pipe while in full lotus position, did not inspire confidence. Yes, he knew a relics collector by the name of Finn Tovar, but I was restless. Work awaited me at the lab. I was irritable from lack of sleep. So I had wandered off to check my boat but returned just in time to hear the tour guide’s claim and Fallsdown’s response.
    “Whitefoot?” Mick asked. “Never heard of that tribe, man. You’re trying to be funny, right?”
    When Dunk told him, “They’re part of the Fawnee Nation,” I decided it was getting interesting and moved into the shade to listen.
    Mick asked, “Faw-nee?” Then got the joke. “Oh . . .
phony
nation,” and decided to ride with it instead of taking offense. “No, but I know what you’re saying, there are so many fakes out there, man. See, I’m one-quarter Cherokee. My mother’s side. That’s why I hit it off with Old Man Tovar. It’s where my talent for finding things comes from.” After a glance in my direction, he relit the clay pipe in his hand—
puff-puff-puff
. A mixture of tobacco and weed, the smell. Then continued talking.
    “The old man was a bastard—he’d say it himself, ‘I’m a ruthless bastard’—but Finn trusted me. We did a lot of hunts together. Once, these three dudes were bird-dogging us, heard we’d found a very hot spot off the Myakka River. So what’s Finn do? Doubled back and slit their tires. That didn’t—what do you call it?—
deter
them, so next time Finn set what he called a werewolf wire. You know, a wire stretched neck-high? One schlub was bleeding pretty bad, but, of course, we were all trespassing, so they couldn’t call the cops. Finn, he’d say, ‘In the bone biz, you need balls or you end up bones.’”
    When I took a seat, Mick stared at me, and asked Tomlinson and Dunk, “Is he a cop?”
    “My pal’s cool,” Tomlinson said.
    Mick accepted that. “No offense, mate.”
    “I took it as a compliment,” I replied, which he decided was another joke and laughed. “Funny bunch, you guys. Yeah, but
seriously . . .
The Brown Shirts arrested thirteen collectors a while back. Something like four hundred felony charges, man. Confiscated all their shit. Like, perfect—I mean
perfect
—Clovis knives andarrowheads. Tools of this semitranslucent coral you would not believe. One poor schlub they got was in his seventies, spent his life bone hunting. They took a giant condor skull he could have retired on. His whole collection of shark teeth and shark points”—Mick used his hands to indicate size: three to six inches—“and they put his ass in jail.”
    Tomlinson explained to Dunk that Brown Shirts were “Swamp Cops,” or Florida Fish & Wildlife officers, and that Florida’s first people had worked shark’s teeth into hunting points, “which,” he added, “provides a