by Carl Hiassen
And Twilly said, I can't eat more than four birds so what's the point?
The point, thundered Mae's father, isn't the eating. It's the sport of it!
Is that so? Twilly said.
To shoot something fast and beautiful out of the sky, Mae's father told him. That's the essence of it!
Now I see, said Twilly.
And that evening, as Mae's father's chartered King Air took off from a rural Montgomery airport, somebody hiding in the trees with a semiautomatic rifle neatly stitched an X pattern in one wing, rupturing a fuel bladder and forcing the plane to turn back for an emergency landing. The sniper was never found, but Mae's father went on a minor rampage to the authorities. And while he ultimately failed in his efforts to see Twilly Spree prosecuted, he succeeded in convincing his daughter that she had taken up with a homicidal madman. For a while Twilly missed Mac's company, but he took satisfaction in knowing he'd made his point emphatically with her father, that the man definitely got the connection between his own vanities and the Swiss-cheese holes that appeared in his airplane.
And, really, that was the most Twilly ever hoped for, that the bastards would get the message. Most of them did.
But not the litterbug. Twilly decided he'd been too subtle with Palmer Stoat; the man needed things spelled out plainly, possibly more than once. For days Twilly tailed him, and wherever Stoat went, he continued to toss garbage out the car window. Twilly was weary of picking up after him.
One afternoon Stoat and his wife returned from a senator's wedding in Jacksonville and found a note under a windshield wiper of the Range Rover. The note said: "Quit trashing the planet, fuckwad." Stoat gave a puzzled shrug and showed Desie. Then he crumpled the note and dropped it on the pavement of the parking garage.
When Stoat sat down in his sport-utility vehicle, he was aghast to find it full of dung beetles. One pullulating mass covered the tops of his shoes, while a second wave advanced up the steering column. Massing on the dashboard was a third platoon, shiny brown shells clacking together like ball bearings.
Despite appearances, dung beetles actually are harmless, providing a unique and invaluable service at the cellar of the food chain; that is, the prodigious consumption of animal waste. Worshiped by ancient Egyptians, the insects are almost as dearly regarded by modern cattle ranchers. In all there are more than seven thousand known species of dung beetles, without which the earth would literally smother in excrement. This true fact would not have been properly appreciated by Palmer Stoat, who couldn't tell a ladybug from a cockroach (which is what he feared had infested his Range Rover). He yelped and slapped at his thighs and burst from the vehicle as if shot from a cannon.
Desie, who had been standing in wait for her husband to unlock the passenger door, observed his athletic exit with high interest. In a flash she produced her cellular phone, but Palmer whisked it from her hand. No cops! he exclaimed. I don't want to read about this in the newspapers. Desie wondered what made him think such nonsense would rate press attention.
On his own phone Palmer Stoat summoned an exterminator, who used a canister-styled vacuum to remove the bugs from the Range Rover – a total approaching three thousand, had anyone endeavored to count them. To Desie, they sounded like pebbles being sucked through the hose. After consulting an illustrated field guide, the exterminator correctly identified the intruders.
"A what?" Desie asked.
"Dung beetle. A common bovine dung beetle."
"Let me guess," Desie said dryly, "how they get their name."
"Yes, it's true," the exterminator acknowledged.
Stoat scowled. "What're you saying? You saying they eat shit?"
And still he missed the whole damn point.
The very next afternoon, on his way to the driving range, Stoat tossed a Kentucky Fried Chicken box. At the time, he was stopped for the drawbridge on the Seventeenth Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale. Stoat casually leaned across the front seat and heaved the chicken box through the passenger window and over the bridge railing. Waiting three cars back in traffic, Twilly Spree watched the whole thing; saw the cardboard box and fluttering napkin and gnawed-on drumsticks and coleslaw cup tumble downward, plopping into the Intracoastal Waterway. That's when Twilly realized that Palmer Stoat was either unfathomably arrogant or unfathomably dim, and in either case was in need of special instruction.
On the morning of May 2, the maid walked into the bedroom and announced that Boodle, the dog, was missing.
"Oh, that's not possible," said Stoat.
Desie pulled on some clothes and tennis shoes and hurried out to search the neighborhood. She was sobbing when she returned, and said to her husband: "This is all your fault."
He tried to hug her but she shook him off. "Honey, please," he said. "Settle down."
"Somebody took him – "
"You don't know that."
" – and it's all your fault."
"Desie, now."
It washis fault that she was so jittery. In retrospect, he shouldn't have shown her what had been done to the trophy heads in the den. Yet at the time Stoat was half-wondering if the furtive vandal might be Desie herself; maybe she'd gone postal on him. She definitely was no fan of his big-game hobby – he remembered the grief she'd given him about the rhinoceros kill. And, in truth, it wasn't difficult to envision his wife perched on the library ladder and using one of the sterling lobster forks – a wedding gift from the pari-mutuel industry – to meticulously remove the simulated eyeballs from his hunting trophies.
But Desie couldn't have been the one who had done it. Palmer Stoat knew by her reaction to the macabre pentagram on the desk and the wall of eyeless animal faces. Desie had paled and run from the room. Later she implored her husband to hire some security guards to watch the house; she didn't feel safe there anymore. Stoat said, Don't worry, it's just some local weirdos. Kids from the neighborhood breaking in for kicks, he told her. But privately he suspected that both the glass eyeball episode and the desecration of the BMW were connected to his lobbying business; some disgruntled, semi-twisted shithead of a client ... or possibly even a jealous competitor. So Stoat had the locks on the house changed, got all new phone numbers, and found an electronics dweeb who came through and swept the place for listening devices. For good measure, he also polygraphed the maid, the gardener and the part-time cook. Desie made her husband promise to set the alarm system every night from then on, and he had done so faithfully ...
With the exception of the previous night, when he'd gone to a Republican fund-raiser and gotten so plastered that a cab had to carry him home. The time was 3:00 a.m., an hour at which Stoat could barely identify his own house, much less fit the new key in the door; typing a nonsequential five-digit code on the alarm panel required infinitely too much dexterity.
Still, he couldn't believe somebody had snuck in behind him and grabbed the Labrador. For one thing, Boodle was a hefty load – 128 pounds. He had been trained at no small expense to sit, fetch, shake, lie down, heel, and not lope off with strangers. To forcibly abduct the dog, Stoat surmised, would have required more than one able-bodied man.
Then Desie reminded him that Boodle wasn't functioning at full strength. Days earlier he had been rushed into emergency surgery after slurping five of the glass eyeballs from Stoat's desktop. Stoat didn't notice the eyes were missing until the taxidermy man came to repair the mounts. Soon afterward Boodle grew listless and stopped eating. An X ray at the veterinarian's office revealed the glass orbs, lodged in a cluster at the anterior end of the Lab's stomach. Four of them were removed easily during a laparotomy, but the fifth squirted into the intestinal tract, out of the surgeon's reach. Another operation would be needed if Boodle didn't pass the lost eyeball soon. In the meantime the dog remained lethargic, loaded up on heavy antibiotics.
"He's gonna die if we don't get him back," Desie said morosely.
"We'll find him, don't worry." Stoat promised to print up flyers and pass them around the neighborhood.
"And
offer a reward," Desie said.
"Of course."
"I mean a decentreward, Palmer."
"He'll be fine, sweetie. The maid probably didn't shut the door tight and he just nosed his way out. He's done that before, remember? And he'll be back when he's feeling better and gets hungry, that's my prediction."
Desie said, "Thank you, Dr. Doolittle." She was still annoyed because Palmer had asked the veterinarian to return the glass eyes Boodle had swallowed, so that they could be polished and re-glued into the dead animal heads.
"For God's sake, get some new ones," Desie had beseeched her husband.
"Hell no," he'd said. "This way'll make a better story, you gotta admit."
Of the surgically retrieved eyeballs, one each belonged to the Canadian lynx, the striped marlin, the elk and the mule deer. The still-missing orb had come from the Cape buffalo, Stoat's largest trophy head, so he was especially eager to get it back.
Her own eyes glistening, Desie stalked up to her husband and said: "If that poor dog dies somewhere out there, I'll never forgive you."
"I'm telling you, nobody stole Boodle – "
"Doesn't matter, Palmer. It's your dumb hobby, your dumb dead animals with their dumb fake eyeballs. So it's your damn fault if something happens to that sweet puppy."
As soon as Desie had left the den, Stoat phoned a commercial printer and ordered five hundred flyers bearing a photograph of Boodle, and an offer of $10,000 cash to anyone with information leading to his recovery. Stoat wasn't worried, because he was reasonably sure that none of his enemies, no matter how callous, would go so far as to snatch his pet dog.
The world is a sick place, Stoat thought, but not thatsick.
Twilly Spree had followed the litterbug's taxi from the party to the house. He parked at the end of the block and watched Palmer Stoat stagger up the driveway. By the time Stoat had inserted the key, Twilly was waiting thirty feet away, behind the trunk of a Malaysian palm. Not only did Stoat neglect to lock the front door behind him, he didn't even shut it halfway. He was still in the hall bathroom, fumbling with his zipper and teetering in front of the toilet, when Twilly walked into the house and removed the dog.
With the Labrador slung fireman-style across his shoulders, Twilly jogged all the way back to the car. The dog didn't try to bite him, and never once even barked. That was encouraging; the big guy was getting the right vibrations. The smart ones'll do that, Twilly thought.
Even after they got to the motel, the Lab stayed quiet. He drank some cold water from the bathtub faucet but ignored a perfectly scrumptious rawhide chew toy.
"What's the matter, sport?" Twilly asked. It was true he often spoke to animals. He didn't see why not. Even the bobcat with which he'd shared a tent in the swamp. Don't bite me, you little bastardis what Twilly had advised.
The dog settled in at his feet. Twilly patted its glossy rump and said, "Everything's going to be all right, buddy." He couldn't bring himself to address the animal by the name on its tag – Boodle. It was a quaint synonym for bribe,Palmer Stoat at his wittiest.
"From now on," Twilly said to the dog, "you're McGuinn."
The Lab raised its head, which seemed as wide as an anvil.
"After a great guitar player," Twilly explained. The dog uncurled and stretched out on his side. That's when Twilly noticed the tape and bandage. He knelt beside the dog and gingerly peeled the dressing from a shaved patch of belly. Beneath the gauze was a fresh surgical incision, in which Twilly counted twelve steel staples. He pressed the tape back in place and lightly stroked the dog's ribs. It let out one of those heavy sighs that Labs do, but didn't appear to be in pain.
Twilly worried about the wound, wondered what could have gone haywire on such a strapping critter – the gallbladder? Do dogs even havegallbladders? I know they get arthritis and heart disease and autoimmune disorders and cancers – for sure, they get cancer. All this was going through Twilly's mind; a juicer commercial on the television and Twilly hunched with his elbows on his knees, on the corner of the bed, with McGuinn snoozing on the burnt-orange shag.
That dog, it had the softest breathing for an animal that size. Twilly had to bend close to hear it, the breathing like a baby's in a crib.
And Twilly thinking: This poor fella's probably on some heavy-duty dope to get past the surgery. That would explain why he'd come along so meekly. And the longer Twilly thought about it, the more certain he became about what to do next: Return to Palmer Stoat's house and find the dog's medicine. Risky – insanely risky – but Twilly had no choice. He wanted nothing bad to happen to McGuinn, who was an innocent.
Master Palmer, though, was something else.
He got fooled. He went back the next night, arriving at the same moment Stoat was driving away, the silhouette of a woman visible beside him in the Range Rover. Twilly assumed it was the wife, assumed the two of them were going to a late dinner.
But it turned out to be one of the maids riding off with the litterbug; he was giving her a lift home. And so Twilly made a mistake that changed everything.
Ever since his previous incursion, the Stoats had been more scrupulous about setting the house alarm. But Twilly decided to hell with it – he'd bust in and grab the dog's pills and run. He'd be in and out and on the road in a minute flat.
The kitchen door was a breeze; a screwdriver did the job and, surprisingly, no alarm sounded. Twilly flipped on the lights and began searching. The kitchen was spacious, newly refurbished in a desert-Southwest motif with earth-tone cabinets and all-stainless appliances. This is what guys like Palmer Stoat do for their new young wives, Twilly thought; kitchens and jewelry are pretty much the upper reach of their imaginations.
He found the dog's medicines on the counter next to the coffee machine: two small prescription bottles and a tube of ointment, all antibiotics, which Twilly put in his pocket. The Lab's leash hung from a hook near the door, so Twilly grabbed that, too. For the daring raid he awarded himself a cold Sam Adams from the refrigerator. When he turned around, there stood Desirata Stoat with the chrome-plated .38 from the bedroom.
"You're the one who stole our dog," she said.
"That's correct."
"Where is he?"
"Safe and sound."
"I said where.'"'She cocked the hammer.
"Shoot me, you'll never see McGuinn again."
"Who?"
"That's his new name."
Twilly told Mrs. Stoat he hadn't known about the dog's surgery – not an apology but an explanation for why he was there. "I came back for his medicine. By the way, what happened to him?"
The litterbug's wife said, "You wouldn't believe it if I told you. Put your hands on top of your head."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Stoat, but that's not how it goes in real life." Twilly took a minute to polish off the beer. "You recycle?" he asked.
Desie motioned toward a closet. Inside was a plastic crate, where Twilly deposited the empty bottle. Then he turned around and calmly snatched the revolver away from the litterbug's wife. He shook out the bullets and put them in the same pocket as the dog's medicine. The gun he placed in a silverware drawer.
Mrs. Stoat lowered her chin and muttered something inaudible. She wore no shoes and a long white T-shirt and pearl earrings, and that was about it. Her arms were as tanned as her legs.
"You're the sicko who put the bugs in my husband's truck?"
"Beetles. Yes."
"And left those nasty notes? And pulled the eyes out of all the animal heads?"
"Correct." Twilly saw no point in mentioning the attack on her red Beemer.
Desie said, "Those were terrible things to do."
"Pretty childish," Twilly conceded.
"What's the matter with you anyway?"
"Evidently I'm working through some anger. How's Palmer holding up?"
"Just fine. He took the maid home and went over to Swain's for a cocktail."
"Ah, the cigar bar." That had been Twilly Spree's original target for the insect infestation, until
he'd hit a technical snag in the ventilation system. Also, he had received conflicting scientific opinions about whether dung beetles would actually eat a cured leaf of Cuban tobacco.
"What's your name?" Desie asked.
Twilly laughed and rolled his eyes.
"OK," she said, "you're kidnapping our dog?"
"Your husband's dog."
"I want to come."
Of course Twilly chuckled. She couldn't be serious.
"I need to know what this is all about," she said, "because I don't believe it's money."
"Please."
"I believe it's about Palmer."
"Nice meeting you, Mrs. Stoat."
"It's Desie." She followed Twilly out to the rental car and hopped in. He told her to get out but she refused, pulling her knees to her chin and wrapping both arms around her legs.
"I'll scream bloody murder. Worsethan bloody murder," she warned.
Twilly sat down heavily behind the wheel. What a twist of rancid luck that Stoat's wife would turn out to be a head case. A light flicked on in the house across the street. Desie saw it, too, and Twilly expected her to start hollering.
Instead she said: "Here's the situation. Lately I've been having doubts about everything. I need to get away."
"Take a cruise."
"You don't understand."
"The dog'll be fine. You've got my word."
"I'm talking about Palmer," she said. "Me and Palmer."
Twilly was stumped. He couldn't think of anything else to do but drive.
"I'm not very proud of myself," she was saying, "but I married the man, basically, for security. Which is a nice way of saying I married him for the dough. Maybe I didn't realize that at the time, or maybe I did."
"Desie?"
"What."
"Do I look like Montel Williams?"
"I'm sorry – God, you're right. Listen to me go on."
Twilly found his way to the interstate. He was worried about McGuinn. He wondered how often the dog needed the pills, wondering if it was time for a walk.
"I'll let you see the dog, Mrs. Stoat, just so you know he's all right. Then I'm taking you back home."