Sick Puppy (38 page)
“You see that?” Twilly stiffened at the wheel.
“See what?”
“That black Firebird ahead.”
“What about it,” Skink said.
But of course he had seen what Twilly had seen: a beer bottle fly out the front passenger’s window, spooking a great blue heron off the canal bank.
“Asshole,” Twilly muttered, knuckles tightening on the wheel.
Another airborne beer bottle, this time from the driver’s side. Skink counted four bobbing heads inside the Firebird—two couples, launching a festive vacation. They looked young. The car was a rental.
“Unbelievable,” Twilly said.
No, it’s not, Skink thought dismally. More, more, more. . . .
The next item of litter from the Firebird was a plastic go-cup, followed by a lighted cigarette butt, which skittered into the crackling dry grass along the shoulder of the road.
Skink swore. Twilly hit the brakes, threw the station wagon into reverse and backed up to the spot where the cigarette had landed. He jumped from the car and stomped out the small flame, and kept on stomping in tight circles for a full minute. It looked like excellent therapy. Skink felt like joining him.
When Twilly got back in the driver’s seat, he calmly put the pedal to the floor. Skink watched the speedometer tick all the way up to 110. The Firebird was no longer a distant speck on the blacktop; it was getting bigger rapidly.
“I was wondering,” Twilly said, perfectly composed. “You in a rush to get home?”
Skink thought about it; thought about everything. Palmer Stoat. Dick Artemus. Doyle. Twilly. The hardworking heron whose supper was so rudely interrupted by a beer bottle.
And he thought of the two couples in the Firebird, laughing and drinking but plainly oblivious to the two unkempt, deeply disturbed men riding their bumper. How else to explain what happened next—an Altoids tin casually ejected through the Firebird’s sunroof. It glanced off the windshield of the pursuing station wagon and landed, as trash, in the water.
Twilly clicked his tongue impatiently. “Well, Governor? Shall we?”
He thought: Oh, what the hell.
“Anytime you’re ready, son.”
EPILOGUE
With the death of
ROBERT CLAPLEY
, the Zurich-based SwissOne Banc Group withdrew all lines of credit for the Shearwater Island Development Corporation, which immediately folded. At a bankruptcy auction arranged by Clapley’s estate, his extensive waterfront holdings on Toad Island were sold to an anonymous buyer, who eventually renamed it Amy Island and deeded every parcel for preservation. No new bridge was built.
NORVA STINSON
, the only remaining private landowner on Toad Island, staunchly refused to sell her tiny bed-and-breakfast to the Nature Conservancy for any sum less than $575,000—six times its appraised value. Her demand was politely rejected, and Mrs. Stinson still lives in the house today, subsisting mainly on canned donations from a local church group.
Three months after the collapse of the Shearwater project, bird-watchers hiking on Toad Island discovered a man’s skeleton. The legs had been crushed by an enormous weight, and a Nokia cellular telephone was clutched in the bones of one hand. FBI pathologists later identified the remains as
DARIAN LEE GASH
, a convicted felon, registered sex offender and well-known player on the South Beach club scene. The cause of death was determined to be bullet wounds from two different .357-caliber handguns, only one of which was ever recovered.
The 911 tape recording of Mr. Gash’s frantic, though largely unintelligible, plea for help has been included in Volume Four of
The World’s Most Bloodcurdling Emergency Calls
, and widely marketed on television and the Internet. The cassette is priced at $9.95 and the compact disc is $13.95, not including shipping and handling.
The body of
KARL KRIMMLER
was found in the shallows of a brackish marsh in the pine uplands of Toad Island. He was pinned inside the cab of a Caterpillar D-6 bulldozer that he inexplicably had driven at full throttle into the water. An autopsy determined he had drowned, the pathologist noting “a large number of viable tadpoles in the victim’s upper trachea.” In the same marsh, police divers discovered a Smith & Wesson model .357 pistol that was later linked to the shooting of Darian Lee Gash. Because of Mr. Gash’s checkered past, detectives theorized that the deaths of the two men were a sordid murder-suicide. The remains of
DR. STEVEN BRINKMAN
were never recovered.
Following the botched rhinoceros “hunt,” the
WILDERNESS VELDT PLANTATION
was raided by federal wildlife agents, who broke into the compounds and discovered twelve impalas, eight Thompson’s gazelles, a defanged Malaysian cobra, a juvenile Cape buffalo, three missing circus chimpanzees, a troop of heavily sedated baboons, a mule painted to resemble a zebra, and a feisty two-legged ocelot. The facility was swiftly shut down by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which alleged multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act and other statutes. The rhinoceros known as
EL JEFE
was safely recaptured, tranquilized and transported to a protected game reserve in Kenya, not far from where it had been born thirty-one years earlier. Its massive front horn was painlessly removed, so that the animal would have no value to poachers or hunters.
JOHN RANDOLPH DURGESS
relocated to West Texas, where he took a job as a guide on a private 22,000-acre hunting reserve called Serengeti Pines. There he was killed and partially devoured by a wild cougar, which had jumped the fence to feast on imported dik-diks.
ASA LANDO
was hired as an animal handler at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom theme park, near Orlando. Two months later he was quietly dismissed, following the unexplained disappearance of the attraction’s only male cheetah.
Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Pain
, featuring
KATYA GUDONOV
and
TISH KARPINSKI
, was released by Avalon Brown Productions and went instantly to home video. Within weeks, the Mattel Corporation obtained an emergency injunction prohibiting the two stars of the film from “performing, portraying, attiring, advertising or in any way representing themselves as Barbie dolls, a trademarked symbol; this order to include but not expressly be limited to such oral and visual depictions as ‘Goth Barbies,’ ‘Undead Barbies,’ and ‘Double-Jointed Vampire Barbies.’ ” Both women received unfriendly visits from agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and soon thereafter left the United States on an extended working vacation to the Caribbean.
ESTELLA HYDE
, also known to Fort Lauderdale vice officers as Crystal Barr, Raven McCollum and Raven Bush, became volunteer treasurer of the Broward County Chapter of Citizens for Quayle. During a fund-raising brunch for the former vice president at Pier 66, she met and befriended Governor Dick Artemus, who soon afterward invited her to Tallahassee to serve on the Public Service Commission.
After surrendering his California real estate license to avoid prosecution,
PHILLIP SPREE, JR
., moved to Beaufort, South Carolina, where he specialized in peddling oceanfront property on low-lying barrier islands. Before long, Little Phil came to believe his own bubbly sales pitch, and built himself a getaway house on pilings at the edge of the Atlantic. He, his fourth wife and their architect perished there one summer, when Hurricane Barbara smashed the beach bungalow to matchsticks.
AMY SPREE
married her yoga instructor and moved to Cassadaga, Florida, where she is faithfully visited by her son every year on her birthday.
LT. JIM TILE
retired from the Florida Highway Patrol and opened a fish camp and diner near Apalachicola. The following Christmas, he received in the mail a gaily wrapped package. Inside was a new Nokia cellular phone, the speed dial programmed to an unlisted number in North Key Largo. Callers are treated to a voice-mail greeting that consists entirely of the solo guitar lead-in to “Fortunate Son,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
LISA JUNE PETERSON
resigned her job as executive assistant to Governor Dick Artemus and went to work as a lobbyist for the Clean Water Action Group. The following spring, she was instrumental in pushing for a new anti-pollution law that resulted in a $5,000-a-day fine against a notoriously virulent Magnusson Phosphate plant in Polk County. As a result, mine owner Dag Magnusson angrily switched political parties and spent the rest of his days bitterly funneling thousands of dollars in illicit campaign contributions to Democratic candidates.
Ten months after the hunting fiasco at Wilderness Veldt, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Miami on the future site of the
WILLIE VASQUEZ-WASHINGTON SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL
. Governor Dick Artemus attended the event and posed graciously with the honoree, both men wielding gold-painted shovels while photographers took their picture.
The
PEREGRINE BAY LIGHTHOUSE
remains closed to the public, though on occasion mariners along Florida’s southeast coast claim to see a bright light flashing at the dome of the barber-striped tower. The Coast Guard routinely discounts these sightings as an illusion caused by foul weather, since the lighthouse is known to be empty and out of service.
ALSO BY CARL HIAASEN
Fiction
Lucky You
Stormy Weather
Strip Tease
Native Tongue
Skin Tight
Double Whammy
Tourist Season
Nonfiction
Team Rodent:
How Disney Devours the World
Kick Ass:
Selected Columns
(
edited by Diane Stevenson
)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 1999 by Carl Hiaasen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hiaasen, Carl.
Sick puppy: a novel / by Carl Hiaasen. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS
3558.
I
217
S
53 2000
813’.54—dc21 99-33435
CIP
eISBN: 978-0-375-41273-8
v3.0