Sick Puppy

by Carl Hiassen

  That's what Mr. Gash was daydreaming about doing – dangling from his ceiling above three writhing long-legged women, one of them wielding platinum ice tongs – when a station wagon carrying a large dog sped past going the other direction, across the bridge toward the island. Mr. Gash was sniggering as he wheeled around to follow. He could see the dog's pitch-black head jutting from a window; Mr. Gash was almost certain it was a Labrador. And, from a quarter of a mile away, Mr. Gash counted only one black ear flapping in the wind.

  Bingo! he thought, and eagerly stepped on the gas.

  The dog, it turned out, was a black Labrador retriever. Both ears, however, were intact – the one invisible to Mr. Gash had merely been turned inside out. The dog's name was Howard and he belonged to Ann and Larry Dooling of Reston, Virginia. They did not resemble the young couple described to Mr. Gash by the fatally dweebish Dr. Brinkman. The Doolings were in their mid-sixties; she was retired from the Smithsonian, he from the U.S. Commerce Department. They had come to Florida for the sunshine, and to Toad Island in particular for the beach, where Mr. Gash had approached them on the pretense of seeking directions. Once he determined they were tourist goobs, not ecoterrorists or dognapping extortionists, he endeavored to terminate the conversation and clear out.

  But Larry Dooling slapped a cold sweaty Budweiser in his hand and said: "We been all over this damn state, looking for a decent beach. By 'decent,' I mean peaceful and quiet."

  "The brochures," chimed Ann Dooling, "are verymisleading."

  Howard the dog sniffed the tops of Mr. Gash's shoes while Larry Dooling recounted the many beaches in Florida that had disappointed them on their travels. "Fort Lauderdale, of course – just try to find a parking space there, I dare ya'. Miami we steered clear of. Vero was OK but they had a shark warning posted, so we couldn't swim. Palm Beach, it was poison jellyfish. And what possessed us to take a chance on Daytona, I'll never know."

  "Don't forget Clearwater," interjected Ann Dooling. "What a zoo – all those college kids!"

  The couple's voices bore like titanium augers into Mr. Gash's skull. When the woman remarked for the third time upon his "modern hairstyle," Mr. Gash enthusiastically immersed himself in another daydream. He imagined the Doolings writhing from toxic jellyfish stings; imagined he was listening to them not on a sunny beach but in the cool dark privacy of his own apartment, in 5.1 Dolby Surround sound.

  He imagined the Doolings on a 911 emergency tape.

  "Aren't you warm in that suit?" Ann Dooling asked.

  Oh, part of him wanted to peel off the houndstooth coat and let the Doolings eyeball his gun; wanted to watch their jaws drop as he snatched it from the holster and leveled it to their shiny cocoa-buttered foreheads – the yappy goobs rendered speechless at last ...

  But it was broad daylight and nearby on the sand were children playing Frisbee. So Mr. Gash tossed his beer can, turned away and tromped disgustedly to the car.

  He made it halfway across the old bridge when he spotted another station wagon coming fast the other way; a Buick Roadmaster woody, the mother of all wagons, carrying another couple, another black dog with its head out the window.

  Mr. Gash reflexively braked. Then he thought: Fuck that.I'm all tapped out on tourists today. What he needed now was a stack of porny magazines and a bottle of Meyer's. So he kept driving, away from Toad Island.

  Tomorrow, Mr. Gash told himself. Tomorrow I'll come back to check out the Roadmaster.

  In the spring of 1966, two brothers went to Vietnam. One came back a hero, the other came back a casualty. Doyle Tyree was riding in an army Jeep when it turned over, ten miles outside of Nha Trang. The driver, a sergeant, died instantly. Doyle Tyree suffered a broken leg and grave head injuries, and he was airlifted stateside to spend six weeks in a VA hospital. To his everlasting torment, the Jeep accident had not been caused by hostile fire but by recklessness. He and his sergeant had polished off a case of Hong Kong ale and decided to go carp fishing in a flooded rice paddy – carp fishing after dark in a combat zone! All because Doyle Tyree was homesick for Florida and worried out of his mind about his little brother, Clint, who was playing sniper somewhere out in the steamy highland fog, among the Gong and the leeches and the cobras.

  They had grown up on a fine little bass lake, all the Tyree boys, but it was Doyle and Clint who could never get enough of the place – after school and Saturday mornings, and Sundays, too, when church let out. And it wasn't the fishing so much as the good hours together and the unbroken peace – the breeze bending the cattails, the sunlight shimmering the slick-flat water, the turtles on the logs and the gators in the lilies and the querulous calls of the meadowlarks drifting down from the pastures. Doyle Tyree was wretched with longing and loneliness when he suggested to his sergeant that they go carp fishing that evening, not even knowing if there werecarp or any other damn fish in the flooded-out rice paddy; knowing only that in the twilight it reminded him of the lake back home. So they'd cut down bamboo shoots for poles and bowed sewing needles into hooks and for bait swiped a bread loaf from the mess, then grabbed up their remaining bottles of ale – bitter and piss-warm, but who cared? – and set off to catch some major motherfucking carps. The dirt road was unlit and potholed but ultimately it was the damn goat that did the job, some sleepy peasant's runaway goat. When the sergeant swerved to avoid it, the Jeep flipped (as those army Jeeps would do) and kept on flipping until an ox-drawn wagon stopped it as conclusively as a concrete wall.

  And Doyle Tyree awoke in a chilly white room in Atlanta, Georgia, with steel pins in his femur and a plate in his head and more guilt and shame on his twenty-five-year-old soul than seemed bearable. He asked to return to duty in Vietnam, which was not unusual for soldiers injured under such circumstances, but the request was turned down and he was handed an honorable discharge. So back to Florida he went, to wait for his heroic little brother. Only after Clint returned safely from the jungle, only after they'd hugged and laughed and spent a misty morning on the family lake, only then did Doyle Tyree allow the breakdown to begin. Within a week he was gone, and nobody knew where.

  It was many years before his brother found him. By then Clinton Tyree was governor and had at his disposal the entire state law-enforcement infrastructure, which on occasion displayed bursts of efficiency. The governor's brother, who had been using the name of his dead sergeant from Vietnam, was unmasked by a sharp-eyed clerk during a routine fingerprint screen. The fingerprint data located Doyle Tyree in an Orlando jail cell, where he was doing thirty days for trespassing. He had been arrested after pitching his sleeping bag and firing up a Sterno camp stove inside the tower of Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World – the thirty-sixth time it had happened during a two-year stretch.

  Disney police figured Doyle Tyree for a wino, but in fact he had not swallowed a drop of alcohol since that night outside of Nha Trang. He was bailed out of the Orlando jail, bathed, shaved, dressed up and brought to Tallahassee on a government plane.

  For Clinton Tyree, the reunion was agony. Doyle grasped his hand and for a moment the dead-looking eyes seemed to spark, but he uttered not one word for the full hour they were together at the governor's mansion; sat ramrod-straight on the edge of the leather sofa and stared blankly at the sprig of mint floating in his iced tea. Eventually Clinton Tyree said, "Doyle, for God's sake, what can I do to help?"

  Doyle Tyree took from his brother's breast pocket a ballpoint pen – a cheap give-away souvenir, imprinted with the state seal – and wrote something in tiny block letters on the skin of his own bare arm. Doyle Tyree pressed so forcefully that each new letter drew from his flesh a drop of dark blood. What he wrote was: put me somewhere safe.

  A week later, he began work as the keeper of a small lighthouse at Peregrine Bay, not far from Hobe Sound. The red-striped tower, a feature tourist attraction of the Peregrine Bay State Park, had not been functional for almost four decades, and it had no more need of a live-in keeper than would a mausoleum. But it was indeed a safe place for th
e governor's unraveled brother, whose hiring at a modest $17,300 a year was the one and only act of nepotism committed by Clinton Tyree.

  Who scrupulously made note of it in his personal files, to which he attached a copy of Doyle Tyree's military and medical records. Also attached was the letter Clinton himself had written to the division of parks, politely requesting a position for his brother.

  The letter was one of the documents that Lisa June Peterson had dutifully shown to her boss, Dick Artemus, the current governor of Florida, upon delivering the boxes of background material about Clinton Tyree. Lisa June Peterson had also reported that the name Doyle Tyree continued to appear on the state payroll – at his original salary – suggesting that he was still encamped at the top of the Peregrine Bay lighthouse.

  Which Dick Artemus was now threatening to condemn and demolish if Clinton Tyree turned him down and refused to go after the deranged young extortionist who was cutting up dogs in protest of the Shearwater project.

  That was the ball-grabbing gist of the unsigned demand delivered by Lt. Jim Tile to the man now known as Skink: "Your poor, derelict, mentally unhinged brother will be tossed out on the street unless you do as I say. Sorry, Governor Tyree, but these are lean times in government," the letter had said. "What with cutbacks in the Park Service – there's simply no slack in the budget, no extra money to pay for a seldom-seen keeper of a defunct lighthouse.

  "Unless you agree to help."

  So he did.

  Lisa June Peterson had become uncharacteristically intrigued by the subject of her research, the only man ever to quit the governorship of Florida. She'd devoured the old newspaper clippings that charted Clinton Tyree's rise and fall – from charismatic star athlete and decorated-veteran candidate to baleful subversive and party outcast. If half the quotes attributed to the man were accurate, Lisa June mused, then quitting had probably saved his life. Somebody surely would've assassinated him otherwise. It was one thing to recite the standard gospel of environmentalism – for heaven's sake, even the Republicans had learned to rhapsodize about the Everglades! – but to rail so vituperatively against growth in a state owned and operated by banks, builders and real-estate developers ...

  Political suicide, marveled Lisa June Peterson. The man would've had more success trying to legalize LSD.

  To an avid student of government, Clinton Tyree's stay in Tallahassee was as fascinating as it was brief. He was probably right about almost everything, thought Lisa June Peterson, yet he did almost everything wrong. He cursed at press conferences. He gave radical speeches, quoting from Dylan, John Lennon and Lenny Bruce. He let himself go, shambling barefoot and unshaven around the capitol. As popular as Clinton Tyree had been with the common folk of Florida, he'd stood no chance – none whatsoever – of disabling the machinery of greed and converting the legislature to a body of foresight and honest ethics. It was boggling to think a sane person would even try.

  But perhaps Tyree was not sane. Look at his brother, thought Lisa June Peterson; maybe it runs in the family. Look at the way the governor had blown town, fleeing the capitol after his Cabinet had betrayed him by closing a wildlife preserve and selling the seaside property to well-connected developers. So swift and complete was Tyree's disappearance that people initially thought he'd been kidnapped or murdered, or even had done himself in – until the letter of resignation arrived, the angry slash of a signature verified by FBI experts. Lisa June Peterson had made two photocopies of the historic missive; one for Dick Artemus and one for her scrapbook.

  For a short while after Clinton Tyree vanished, the newspapers had been full of gossip and speculation. Then nothing. Not a single journalist had been able to find him for an interview or a photograph. Over the years his name had popped up intermittently in the files of the state Department of Law Enforcement – purported sightings in connection with certain crimes, some quite bizarre. But Lisa June Peterson had found no record of an arrest, and in fact no solid proof of the ex-governor's involvement. Yet the mere idea he was still alive, brooding in some gnarly wilderness hermitage, was beguiling.

  I'd give anything to meet him, Lisa June thought. I'd love to find out if he really snapped.

  Never would she have guessed what her boss wanted with her research. She didn't know Dick Artemus had stayed up until 4:00 a.m. one night, grubbing through the documents and clippings until he seized with excitement upon the tragic story of Doyle Tyree, the ex-governor's brother. Nor did Lisa June Peterson know about the unsigned communique given by her boss to the black state trooper, or the icy nature of her boss's threat.

  And so she was unaware of the event she had set in motion: a man coming wounded and bitter out of deep swamp; a man such as she had never known, or imagined.

  "Money is no object," Palmer Stoat said into the phone.

  On the other end was Durgess. "This ain't only about money. It's about major jail time."

  "The Chinaman hung up on me."

  "Yessir. He don't like telephones."

  "One lousy horn is all I need," Stoat said.

  "Can't you reach out to him? Tell him the money's no object."

  Durgess said, "You gotta understand, it's not been a good year for the rhino trade. Some of the boys we normally use, they got busted and went to jail."

  "Does he know who I am? The Chinaman," said Stoat, "does he know how well connected I am?"

  "Sir, you shot the last rhino we had on-site. Used to be Mr. Yee could do business direct with Africa, but Africa's shut down for a couple months. Africa got too hot."

  Palmer Stoat paused to light up an H. Upmann, only to find the taste metallic and sugary. It was then he remembered, with revulsion, the cherry cough drop in his cheek. Violently he spit the lozenge onto his desk.

  "You mean to tell me," he said to Durgess, "that for the obscene price of fifty thousand dollars, your intrepid Mr. Yee cannot locate one single solitary rhinoceros horn anywhere on planet Earth?"

  "I didn't say that," said Durgess. "There's a private zoo in Argentina wants to sell us an old male that's all broke down with arthritis."

  "And he's still got his horns?"

  "Damn well better," Durgess said.

  "Perfect. How soon can you get him?"

  "We're workin' on it. They tell me a month or so."

  "Not good enough," Stoat said.

  "Lemme see what I can do."

  "Hey, while I got you on the line" – Stoat, giving the Upmann another try – "how's my head mount coming? Did you get with your fiberglass guy?"

  "He's on the case," Durgess said. "Says it'll look better'n the real thing, time he gets done. Nobody'll know it's fake except you and me."

  "I can't wait," Palmer Stoat said. "I can't wait to see that magnificent beast on the wall."

  "You bet."

  Stoat failed to detect the mockery in Durgess's tone, and he hung up, satisfied that he'd lit a blaze under the guide's slothful butt. Stoat fastidiously nubbed the ash of his cigar and went to shower. He carried a portable phone into the bathroom, in case Desie called from Hostage World, wherever ...

  The lights went out while Stoat had a head covered with shampoo lather. He groped in the dark, cursing and spitting flecks of soapy foam, until he found the shower knobs. When he tried to open the door, it wouldn't budge. He leaned a shoulder to the glass, with no better result.

  Through stinging eyes Stoat saw a hulking shadow on the other side of the shower door. A cry died in his throat as he thought: Mr. Gash again. Who else could it be?

  Then the glass disintegrated, an earsplitting echo off the imported Italian marble. The door fell in pieces around Stoat's bare feet. Afterward the only sound in the bathroom was his own stark, rapid breathing. He felt a stinging sensation on his right leg, and a warm trickling toward his ankle.

  The shadow no longer loomed face-to-face; now it was seated on the toilet, evidently evacuating its bowels.

  "Mr. Gash?" The words came out of Palmer Stoat in a choke.

  "Wrong," the shadow said.<
br />
  "Then who are you?"

  "Your friend Dick sent me," the shadow man said. "Dick the governor. Something about a missing pooch."

  "Yes!"

  "Suppose you tell me."

  "Now? Here?"

  The lights came on. Palmer Stoat squinted, raising one hand to his brow. With the other hand he covered his shrunken genitals. Broken glass lay everywhere; it was a miracle he'd only been nicked.

  "Start talking," said the shadow man. "Hurry, soldier, life is passing us by."

  As Stoat's eyes adjusted, the broad-shouldered figure on the toilet came into focus. He had sun-beaten features and a silvery beard, exotically platted into two long strands. Tied to each of the strands was a beak, yellow and stained like old parchment. The man wore ancient mud-caked boots and a dirty orange rain jacket. Bunched at his ankles was a legless checkered garment that might have been a kilt. On his head the man wore a cheap plastic shower cap, through which shone a shiny bald scalp. Something was odd about his eyes, but Stoat couldn't decide what it was.

  "Do you have a name?" he asked.

  "Call me captain." The visitor spoke in a low rumble, like oncoming thunder.

  "All right, captain."Stoat didn't feel quite so terrified, with the guy sitting where he was. "Why didn't you just ring the doorbell?" Stoat said. "Why break into the house? And why'd you bust the shower door?"

  "To put you in the proper frame of mind," the man replied. "Also, I was in the mood for some serious goddamn noise."

  "Dick Artemus sent you?"

  "Sort of."

  "Why – to get my dog back?"

  "That's right. I'm from Animal Control." The man barked sarcastically.