Sick Puppy

by Carl Hiassen

  But the station wagon wasrocking – not much, but enough to keep Twilly's shaky equilibrium in flux. Miserably he sunk to his knees and listed against the car, his cheek mashed against the cool steel. He groped for purchase and found a door handle.

  There he hung like a drunken rock climber until the latch clicked and the heavy door swung open. Twilly lost his grip and slid limply to the mud. He lay blinking at the heavens as his eardrums pealed with the jingle bells of the oncoming sleigh. Where's the snow? he wondered sleepily.

  Moments later, Twilly saw the sleigh shoot over him, a hulking black shadow that momentarily blotted out the stars and the clouds. He smelled it, too, though it didn't smell like Christmas. It smelled like a big wet dog. From inside the car came a startled cry, and suddenly Twilly remembered where he was, and what was happening. He remembered everything.

  "He'thinks it's a game," Desie explained.

  "Make him let go!"

  "He won't hurt you."

  "Get him off me, goddammit, so I can kill him."

  The mutt was riding Mr. Gash as if he were a pony. The wet, filthy mutt! Its yellow fangs were planted on his neck – not hard enough to break the skin, but firmly enough to bring severe distress to Mr. Gash, who was not an animal lover. (He regarded the 911 tape of the testicle-chomping chow as one of the most harrowing in his extensive collection.)

  "I've shot dogs," he hissed at Desie, "for a lot less than this."

  "He thinks we're playing."

  "You mean he's pulled this shit before? While you were screwing?"

  "To him it's wrestling. He hates to be left out." The combined weight and aromas of the two animals, the Lab and Mr. Gash, made it difficult for Desie to speak up.

  "Who taught him how to open a car door?" Mr. Gash said snidely.

  "I dunno. That's a new one."

  "Make him get off! He weighs a fucking ton."

  Weakly, Desie said, "McGuinn, down!"

  The dog held its position. They heard a tail flopping mirthfully against the upholstery.

  "Jesus, he's drooling all over me!" Mr. Gash cried.

  Desie saw a strand of slobber glistening from one of his earlobes. He swung the gun away from her neck and reached it behind his own head, so the barrel was jammed to the Labrador's jaw.

  "Big mistake," said Desie.

  "What?" The dumb mutt had todie – first, because he had interrupted Mr. Gash's strenuous efforts to achieve an erection; second, because he had fouled Mr. Gash's hair with spit.

  "You have any idea," Desie said, "how hard that dog's head is?"

  "What're you saying, Mrs. Stoat? This is a forty-five-caliber handgun."

  "I'm saying his noggin is like a cinder block. The bullet could bounce off him and wind up in you or me. It's something to think about, that's all."

  Mr. Gash did think about it. She had a point. The beast was glommed to his very spine, after all. Plus, it would be a blind shot, backhanded over the shoulder. Very risky.

  "Shit," said Mr. Gash. The evening was not playing out as he had hoped. "How long does he usually hang on?"

  "Till he gets bored. Or hungry." Desie felt suffocated and claustrophobic.

  "He farts again, I'm definitely pulling the trigger."

  "Tell that to him,"she muttered at Mr. Gash, "not me."

  Twilly Spree was on all fours in the slop, peering up into the backseat through the open door. In the greenish glow of the dome light he saw Desirata Stoat and her dog, with Mr. Gash sandwiched obscenely between them. None of them could see Twilly, who listened only briefly to the taut conversation before scooting like a water bug underneath the Roadmaster.

  He thought: Crazy damn dog, he'll get her killed.

  It wouldn't take much for Mr. Gash to blow a gasket and start shooting. The challenge was to get McGuinn off the killer, then somehow get the killer off Desie.

  "Let go a me, you dumb bastard! Let go a me!" The rising fury of Mr. Gash.

  Twilly licked his lips and tried to whistle. Nothing came out – he was trembling too much from the damp cold.

  He heard Desie cry out: "What're you doing!"

  Then Mr. Gash: "Making do."

  The car began rocking again. Twilly vigorously rubbed the clamminess from his cheeks. He was striving for a specific two-note whistle; the whistle used to summon McGuinn for supper. Twilly puckered and blew. This time it worked.

  The station wagon stopped shaking. There was a shout, a splash, an inquisitive bark. The dog had let go of the killer and was out of the car, hunting for the source of the dinner call. Twilly could track McGuinn's pacing by the tinkling of his collar. It was only a matter of moments before the ever-hungry Lab sniffed out Twilly's hiding place.

  "Who made that noise!" Mr. Gash bellowed from the backseat.

  "What noise?" came Desie's voice. "That bird, you mean."

  "It was no goddamned bird."

  Twilly whistled again, this time with a whimsical lilt. He saw McGuinn's legs stiffen – all senses on full alert. The dog was zeroing in.

  Not yet, Twilly thought, please. He heard more movement above him: Mr. Gash, scrambling from the station wagon.

  "That's it," the killer was saying, "somebody's out there. Some asshole troublemaker."

  Twilly sucked in his breath as McGuinn's twitching snout appeared below the rear bumper. The dog began to whine and scratch at the ground. No! Twilly thought. Stay!

  Finally, the two pale feet Twilly was awaiting emerged from the car and descended into view. They disappeared into the mud as the killer stood up.

  "Damn," Mr. Gash rasped. "That's cold."

  From Twilly's vantage, the bony white ankles looked like aspen saplings. He clasped a hand around each one and jerked. The killer went down hard and unquietly. McGuinn retreated, moon-howling in confusion.

  Twilly wriggled from under the car and hurled himself upon the thrashing Mr. Gash. The resulting splatter of muck glooped uncannily into Twilly's good eye, completing his decline to full sightlessness. Wild punches landed harmlessly upon the brawny arms and shoulders of Mr. Gash, who simply bucked Twilly aside, raised his gun and fired.

  This time Twilly knew it for a fact: He was shot. The slug slammed into the right side of his chest and knocked him goony. He didn't fall so much as fold.

  He heard the wind blowing. Desie sobbing. That weird sleigh-bell jingling in the trees. His own heart pounding.

  Twilly believed he could even hear the blood squirting from the hole in his ribs.

  And a strange new voice, possibly imaginary.

  "I'll take it from here," it said, very deeply.

  "What? Like hell you will." That was Mr. Gash, the killer.

  "The boy comes with me."

  "Ha! Pops, I should've shot your ass, back up the road. Now get the fuck outta here."

  "Mister, run! Go get help! Please." That would be Desie.

  "Shut up, Mrs. Stoat" – the killer again – "while I blow this sorry old fart's head off."

  "I said, the boy's mine." The deep voice, astoundingly calm.

  "You mental or what? I guess maybe so," Mr. Gash said. "Whatever. It's just one more dead troublemaker to me."

  Twilly felt himself sliding away, as if he were on a raft spinning languidly downriver. If this was dying, it wasn't half-bad. And if it was only a dream, he had no desire to awaken. Twenty-six years of unspent dreams is what they owed him.

  On impulse he decided to summon McGuinn – a dog was always good company on a river.

  "I said, the boy is mine. "

  Who's he talking about? Twilly wondered. What boy?

  He also wondered why he could no longer hear himself whistling, why suddenly he couldn't hear anything at all.

  24

  "What is it you want, Willie?"

  The age-old question. Palmer Stoat tinkled the ice cubes in his glass and awaited a reply from the vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

  "You and your rude-ass manners," Willie Vasquez-Washington said. "Man, I'll tell you w
hat I want. I want the Honorable Richard Artemus to not fuck with my spring snow skiing, Palmer. I want to be in Canada next week. I do notwant to be in Tallahassee for some bullshit 'special session.' "

  "Now, Willie, it's too late – "

  "Don't 'now Willie' me. This isn't about the schools budget, amigo, it's about that dumb-ass bridge to that dumb-ass Cracker island, which I thought – no, which you told me ! –was all ironed out a few weeks ago. And then ... " Willie Vasquez-Washington paused to sip his Long Island iced tea. "Then your Governor Dick goes and vetoes the item. His own baby! Why?"

  Palmer Stoat responded with his standard you-don't-really-want-to-know roll of the eyes. They were sitting at the bar in Swain's, the last place on the planet where Stoat wanted to retell the squalid dognapping saga. After all, it was here the lunatic had sent the infamous phantom paw. The bartender was even rumored to have named a new drink after it, to Stoat's mortification.

  "Fine. Don't tell me," said Willie Vasquez-Washington. "But guess what? It ain't my problem, Palmer."

  "Hey, you got your inner-city community center."

  "Don't start with that."

  "Excuse me. Community OutreachCenter," said Stoat. "Nine million bucks, wasn't it?"

  "Backoff!"

  "Look, all I'm saying ... " The lobbyist dropped his voice, for he did not wish to appear to be insulting an Afro-Haitian-Hispanic-Asian-Native American, or any combination thereof (assuming Willie Vasquez-Washington was telling the truth about at least one of the many minorities he professed to be). In any case, the upscale cigar-savoring clientele at Swain's was relentlessly Anglo-Saxon, so the presence of a person of color (especially one as impeccably attired as Representative Vasquez-Washington) raised almost as many eyebrows as had the sight of the severed Labrador paw.

  "Willie, all I'm saying," Palmer Stoat continued, "is that the governor kept his end of the deal. He did right by you. Can't you help him out of this one lousy jam? These were circumstances beyond his control."

  "Sorry, man."

  "We can't pull this off without you."

  "I'm aware of that." Willie Vasquez-Washington, drumming his fingernails on the oak. "Any other time. Palmer, but not now. I've been planning this vacation for years."

  Which was a complete crock, Stoat knew. The junket was being paid for secretly by a big HMO as a show of gratitude to Willie Vasquez-Washington, whose timely intervention had aborted a potentially embarrassing investigation of certain questionable medical practices; to wit, the HMO encouraging its minimum-wage switchboard operators to make over-the-phone surgical decisions for critically ill patients. What a stroke of good fortune (Stoat reflected wryly) that Willie Vasquez-Washington played golf every Saturday with the State Insurance Commissioner.

  "Willie, how's this? We fly you in for the Toad Island vote, then fly you straight back to Banff. We'll get a Lear."

  Willie Vasquez-Washington eyed Stoat as if he were a worm on a Triscuit. "And you're supposed to be so damn sharp? Lemme spell it out for you, my brother: I cannot skip the special session and go skiing, like I want. Why? Because they would crucify my ass in the newspapers, on account of the newspapers have bought into the governor's bullshit. They think we're all headed back to the capital to vote more money for poor little schoolkids. Because, see, the papers don't know jack about your bridge scam. So I am one stuck-ass motherfucker, you follow?"

  Now it was Willie Vasquez-Washington's turn to lower his voice. "I'm stuck, man. I gotta go to this session, which means no skiing, which means the wife and kids will be supremely hacked off, which means – sorry! – no new bridge for Honorable Dick and his friends."

  Palmer Stoat calmly waved for another round. He handed a genuine Montecristo Especial No. 2 to Willie Vasquez-Washington, and lighted it for him. Stoat was mildly annoyed by this impasse, but not greatly worried. He was adept at smoothing over problems among self-important shitheads. Stoat hoped someday to be doing it full-time in Washington, D.C., where self-importance was the prevailing culture, but for now he was content to hone his skills in the swamp of teeming greed known as Florida. Access, influence, introductions – that's what all lobbyists peddled. But the best of them also were fast-thinking, resourceful and creative; crisis solvers. And Palmer Stoat regarded himself as one of the very best in the business. A virtuoso.

  Shearwater! Jesus H. Christ, what a cluster fuck. It had cost him his wife and his dog and nearly his life, but he would not let it cost him his reputation as a fixer. No, this cursed deal wouldget done. The bridge would get funded. The cement trucks would roll and the high rises would rise and the golf courses would get sodded. The governor would be happy, Robert Clapley would be happy, everybody would be happy – even Willie Vasquez-Washington, the maggot. And afterward they would all say it never would have come together except for the wizardly lobbying of Palmer Stoat.

  Who now whispered through a tingling blue haze to the vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee: "He wants to talk to you, Willie."

  "I thought that was your job."

  "Face-to-face."

  "What the hell for?"

  "Dick's a people person," Stoat said.

  "He's a damn Toyota salesman."

  "He wants to make this up to you, Willie. He wants to know what he can do to make things right."

  "Before the session starts, I bet."

  Stoat nodded conspiratorially. "They'll be some money floating around next week. How's your district fixed for schools? You need another school?"

  "Man. You serious?" Willie Vasquez-Washington laughed harshly. "Suburbs get all the new schools."

  ""Not necessarily," said Palmer Stoat. "There's state pie, federal matching, lottery spill. Listen, you think about it."

  "I am not believin' this shit."

  Stoat took out a fountain pen and wrote something in neat block letters on a paper cocktail napkin. He slid it down the bar to Willie Vasquez-Washington, who chuckled and rolled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  Then he said: "OK, OK, I'll meet with him. Where?"

  "I've got an idea. You ever been on a real big-game safari?"

  "Not since I took the bone out of my nose, you asshole."

  "No, Willie, this you'll dig. Trust me." Stoat winked and signaled for the check.

  Willie Vasquez-Washington's gaze once more fell upon the cocktail napkin, which he discreetly palmed and deposited in an ashtray. On the drive back to Miami, he thought about the words Palmer Stoat had written down, and envisioned them five feet high, chiseled into a marble facade.

  WILLIE VASQUEZ-WASHINGTON

  SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

  Asa Lando urged Durgess to check out the horn; the horn was first-rate. Durgess could not disagree. However ...

  "This rhino is how old?" he asked.

  "I don't honestly know," said Asa Lando. "They said nineteen."

  "Yeah? Then I'm still in diapers."

  It was the most ancient rhinoceros Durgess had ever seen; even older and more feeble than the one procured for Palmer Stoat. This one was heavier by at least five hundred pounds, which was but a small consolation to Durgess. The animal had come to the Wilderness Veldt Plantation from a wildlife theme park outside Buenos Aires. The park had "retired" the rhino because it was now sleeping, on average, twenty-one hours a day. Tourists assumed it was made from plaster of paris.

  "You said money was no object."

  Durgess raised a hand. "You're right. I won't even ask."

  "His name's El Jefe." Asa Lando pronounced it "Jeffy," with a hard J.

  "Why'd you tell me that?" Durgess snapped. "I don't wanna know his name." The guide slept better by pretending that the animals at Wilderness Veldt actually were wild, making the hunts less of a charade. But named quarry usually meant tamed quarry, and even Durgess could not delude himself into believing there was a shred of sport to the chase. It was no more suspenseful, or dangerous, than stalking a pet hamster.

  "El Jeffy means 'the boss,' " Asa Lando elaborated, "in S
panish. They also had a name for him in American but I forgot what."

  "Knock it off. Just knock it off."

  Durgess leaned glumly against the gate of the rhino's stall in Quarantine One. The giant creature was on its knees, in a bed of straw, wheezing in a deep and potentially unwakable slumber. Its hide was splotched floridly with some exotic seeping strain of eczema. Bottleflies buzzed around its parchment-like ears, and its crusted eyelids were scrunched into slits.

  Asa Lando said: "What'd ya expect, Durge? He's been locked in a box for five damn days."

  With a mop handle Durgess gingerly prodded the narcoleptic pachyderm. Its crinkled gray skin twitched, but no cognitive response was evident.

  "Besides," said Asa Lando, "you said it didn't matter, long as the horns was OK. Any rhinoceros I could find, is what you said."

  Durgess cracked his knuckles. "I know, Asa. It ain't your fault."

  "On short notice, you can't hope for much. Not with endangereds such as rhinos and elephants. You pretty much gotta take what's out there, Durge."

  "It's awright." Durgess could see that El Jefe once had been a strapping specimen, well fed and well cared for. Now it was just old, impossibly old, and physically wasted from the long sweltering flight.

  "Can he run," Durgess asked, "even a little bit?"

  Asa Lando shook his head solemnly.

  "Well, can he walk?'

  "Now and again," said Asa Lando. "He walked outta the travel crate."

  "Hooray."

  "Course, that was downhill."

  "Well, hell," Durgess said impatiently. "He must move around enough to eat. Lookit the size of the bastard."

  Asa Lando cleared his throat. "See, they, uh, brought all his food to him – branches and shrubs and such. He pretty much just stood in the same spot all day long, eatin' whatever they dumped in front of his face. Give him a big shady tree, they told me, and he won't go nowheres."

  Durgess said, "I'm sure."

  "Which is how I figure we'll set up the kill shot. Under one a them giant live oaks."