by Carl Hiaasen
“I have no idea, Paul. But if I were you—”
“Oh, absolutely. We’re taking the President and First Lady back to Washington.”
But the President and the First Lady refused to go.
* * *
—
The daily deluge of death threats had dropped to a trickle, but Diego Beltrán knew better than to relax. Now that the venture capitalist charged with making child pornography had fallen seventeen times on his fork in the cafeteria, Diego was the highest-profile inmate at the Palm Beach County Jail.
Held alone in a cell, he felt scalding stares whenever he walked down the corridor. He was the only prisoner branded a killer terrorist by the President of the United States, and there was no Honduran brotherhood to protect him while he was in custody. The other inmates derisively called him “Pinky” because of the conch pearl he was alleged to have stolen from the rich old woman he was alleged to have slain.
Diego kept his mouth shut. Every few days the garrulous scumbag in the cell next to his would be replaced by a new garrulous scumbag, who immediately would try to initiate incriminating conversation. It was from one such aspiring snitch that Diego first heard of DBC-88, the Diego Border Cartel, a nonexistent alien gang of which he supposedly was the leader. Diego couldn’t stop himself from chuckling when the snitch—an addled fentanyl mule from southern Mississippi—asked if he and his friends could join the group.
The other prisoners knew little about Diego except what they’d heard, and they were suspicious of his unwillingness to open up. One of many personal facts that he chose not to share was that he’d learned how to box while in college, won several amateur matches, and on two occasions had knocked a larger opponent unconscious. That information would have been useful to a man named Tuck Nutter. He was doing eight months for stealing Amazon packages from the porch of a group home for seniors, though he considered himself first and foremost an American, and a thief second.
One day Nutter was approached in the chow line by an inmate who said a group of patriots on the outside was offering serious bank for the death of Diego Beltrán. When Nutter asked who those people were, he was told they were part of a small but well-connected organization dedicated to saving the country from a takeover by dark-skinned, non-English-speaking foreigners.
Nutter, a fledgling white supremacist who shared similar views, asked how much money was being offered.
“Six thousand dollars,” the inmate whispered, and handed him a shiv.
“Tell ’em I’ll do it for fifty-six hundred. Aryan discount.”
Although he’d never killed anybody, Tuck Nutter was under the misimpression that it happened all the time in jails and would be easy to get away with because prisoners didn’t rat each other out.
The weapon was the sharpened handle of a plastic soup ladle. Nutter tested it by stabbing his mattress and was satisfied with the damage, although the rounded spoon end of the shiv proved awkward to grip. For days he continued to rehearse by goring his bedding, and then one afternoon he contrived to be in the shower area at the same time as Diego Beltrán.
It was a galloping ambush, and poorly executed. Nutter slipped on the wet tiles, clipped a faucet with his hip, and dropped the shiv. While fumbling to retrieve it he left his upper body unprotected and Diego, wearing only a towel, threw a flurry of upper cuts that flattened the hapless porch pirate. He awoke with swollen eyelids and a cracked sternum in the medical wing of the jail.
The next morning, when Diego met with his defense lawyers, he told them what had happened. They promised to try to get him transferred to a more secure facility.
“How about ICE detention?” he said. “I was safer there.”
“We’re still working on that.”
“Is the President’s mob still outside?”
“Not very many.”
“It’s definitely trending the right direction,” the other attorney added. “At least nobody spit on us today.”
“Finally some good news,” Diego said tonelessly, staring at his bruised knuckles. “That’s so encouraging.”
NINETEEN
Pruitt was staying at the first-floor apartment of a divorced sister who was away for the winter, working as a pansexual escort in London. Paul Ryskamp was able to locate the poacher because the genius had gone online and ordered ten boxes of Remington bullets on a stolen AmEx card. The ammo was delivered by UPS to the sister’s address, signature required.
Angie Armstrong arrived before dawn and found an unlocked sliding door in the back. After shooing Pruitt’s Bichon and Labradoodle out of the apartment, she carried the hissing travel kennel to the threshold and set loose the occupant—a robust male bobcat weighing twenty-four pounds. Angie had captured it at an orchid farm where it had been feasting on the owner’s juicy domestic ducks.
She watched as the nub-tailed cat darted down the hallway seeking an escape. There was a cry, and Pruitt emerged at a run wearing only tartan boxer shorts and his mechanical hand. He was searching for the deer rifle that Angie had already kicked underneath the sofa.
Pruitt looked up and shouted, “The fuck are you doin’ here?”
“I heard you were in need of a specialist.” She stood blocking his way and wielding the long-handled noose. From the bedroom arose a low, feral rumble.
Pruitt said, “Get that goddamn cat outta here.”
“First we need to reach an agreement.”
“Just ’cause I only got one hand don’t mean you can take me, bitch. I’ll go all Jaime Lannister on your ass.”
Pruitt grabbed a mop and charged back down the hall. Angie heard tables overturn and lamps crash as he flailed at the agile intruder. Moments later he lurched out of the bedroom and flung the mangled mop.
“I’m gonna call the cops!” Pruitt rasped. “Say you busted into my place.”
“Great idea. When they come, they can bring your outstanding warrants.”
Through a doorway Angie could see the bobcat. Agitated but unharmed, it was crouched on the handlebar of a Peloton bike.
Pruitt himself looked wobbly and distraught, his pale legs striated with bleeding claw marks. He shook his polymer fist at Angie and told her to go fuck herself with the catch pole.
Without blinking she slipped the noose around his neck and jerked with sufficient emphasis to put him on his knees.
“Ever bother my stepson again, I’ll kill you,” she said, “and not in a statutorily humane way.”
Pruitt shook his head back and forth, swiping at the capture pole. Angie hung on easily and waited for him to tire. Soon he fell wheezing on the carpet; his watery eyes were half-open, his cheeks the color of ripe turnips.
“Listen up, Señor Fuckwhistle,” Angie said. “I’m about to remove the noose from your neck and chase after the bobcat. I suggest you shelter.”
Pruitt grunted. “Don’t trash this fuckin’ place. It ain’t even mine.”
As soon as he was freed, he crabbed into the bathroom, climbed up on the toilet seat, and knee-shut the door. Angie put on her canvas gloves and entered the bedroom, which had been newly redecorated in rose, pale blue, and white, as if a little girl lived there. The soft décor reflected charmingly on Pruitt’s worldly sister, though it also reminded Angie that she herself hadn’t gone on a shopping spree in years, possibly because she didn’t have any close female friends. Still there was no aching void in her life. She probably would have met some interesting women had she learned to play tennis, joined a gym, or gone down the yoga path, but she’d always preferred the unstructured Zen of solitary boat trips through the Ten Thousand Islands, or camping alone in a cypress forest. Moreover, she’d chosen a predominantly male occupation, and in any case covered so much territory that there was no central after-hours gathering spot to connect with colleagues and develop relationships. At the end of a day as a wildlife wrangler, all you wanted to do was go home,
scrub off the stink, and dress your wounds.
When Angie stepped forward to extend the capture pole, the bobcat bounded from the Peloton to a bookshelf to the pleated window drapes, which turned to shreds during the struggle that followed. Afterward she hauled the thrashing animal through the apartment, pausing momentarily to rap on the bathroom door. Pruitt peeked out and quailed at the sight, a tawny blur of fangs and claws.
“Remember what I told you,” Angie said, “or I’ll come back here one night and put something way worse than this thing under your sheets.”
Pruitt answered with a slam of the door. Angie loaded her snarling detainee into the transport kennel and drove out the Bee Line to a stretch of pine scrub near the motorsports track, where she let it go.
Then she went home, showered, put on some normal clothes, and went to meet a man who was rumored to know a man who was rumored to be unusually comfortable among snakes.
* * *
—
He lived alone on a small tree island, surrounded by shimmering Everglades marsh. His camp couldn’t be seen from the air or water. Tall, lush hardwoods shaded the hammock when the weather was hot, and shielded it from biting north winds during the short so-called winter. The funky black soil that anchored the ferns and gumbo limbos stayed moist throughout the year.
Although the old man had only one good eye, he could navigate comfortably in the dark, sometimes guided by the lights of the big jets lining up to land at Miami International. He traveled in a flat-bottom johnboat powered by a small outboard, so it ran shallow and quiet through the creeks and saw grass prairies. There was nobody else for miles, anyway.
The man owned a diesel pickup, elevated for off-roading. He kept it at a Miccosukee village on the Tamiami Trail, a historic cross-state highway which the government belatedly was elevating in sections, to let more needed water flow south. The Indian settlement was only forty minutes by boat from the tree island. On Mondays and Fridays the man tied up to a piling, got into his truck, and drove to Dade Corners to meet his connection for frozen rabbits, which were shrink-wrapped on pallets over dry ice.
Other nights he cruised slowly up and down the narrow dirt levees, lamping the wetlands with supercharged LEDs racked on the roof and bumper of his truck. If he saw other hunters he pulled off to the side, rolled up his windows, yanked the shower cap down over his face, and pretended to be asleep. Often wildlife officers patrolled the same dikes, but they knew who the man was and they let him be. He owned none of the required licenses or permits; the only identification he carried was a counterfeit Arizona driver’s license bearing a photograph of Jackson Browne and the name George W. Hayduke Jr.
The predawn return drive to the Miccosukee settlement was usually devoted to collecting fresh road kills, mostly small gators and coons, that the old man would skin and salt for his own meals. If the bed of the truck was full, he piled the bloody carcasses next to him on the passenger side. Occasionally, when the traffic thinned, he would stomp the accelerator and lean his six-and-a-half-foot frame out the window crooning while he emptied a pistol into the sky. On those nights his silver beard was clotted black with mosquitoes by the time he reached the Indian docks. There he carefully transferred his cargo, living and dead, to the johnboat. Because of the added weight, the ride back to the tree island always took longer. Once ashore, the one-eyed man used a sled made from mahogany limbs to move the frosted pallets and holding containers inland to his hidden campsite.
Only one person, his sole lifelong friend, had ever visited him there. The friend didn’t stay long. He was shaken by what he saw.
“You’re too old for this shit,” the friend said.
“I’ve been working out.”
“They could kill you in your sleep.”
“So could a heart attack,” said the one-eyed man. “Haven’t you been following the news? The country we both fought for is getting ass-raped by a paranoid, draft-dodging, whore-hopping—”
“There’s no TV out here. How the hell do you even know what’s going on?”
“Because I’ve got a generator, a laptop, and my very own Wi-Fi hotspot. These days I stay painfully informed, watching rat-toothed politicians drag the planet into a smoking death spiral.”
“You told me you gave up a long time ago,” the friend reminded him.
“It’s no longer possible to look away and live with myself.”
“So this ‘operation’ is how you cope?”
“Oh fuck, no. I cope by micro-dosing.”
“What’s that?” the friend asked.
“LSD 25. Fifteen micrograms, every other day.”
“Now you’re scarin’ the shit out of me.”
“Like old times.” The old man grinned and lifted the denim patch where his left eye used to be. A mottled, whitish form protruded from the scarred socket.
“What’ve you done now, captain?”
“I’m incubating an iguana egg.”
“Lord Almighty,” the friend murmured.
“I get bored out here. The acid helps.”
“That’s some cage you built.”
“Let’s call it an enclosure,” said the one-eyed man. “Tell the truth: Do I look as ancient and damaged as you do?”
“Way worse—and I can still kick your sorry white ass.”
“Assisted living agrees with you, Jim.”
The friend was too troubled to smile at the joke. He couldn’t stop staring up at the tree canopy, which at first he’d thought was decorated with long streamers of dingy crepe. Now he realized that the garlands in the boughs were made of something else.
Nor was the scene on the ground reassuring: Hundreds of books that the old man had accumulated over the years were now stacked high with their spines facing outward, makeshift bricks that formed a square of connected walls domed by a roll of chicken wire.
The visiting friend’s view of the back wall was blocked, though by moving closer he was able to read the titles on the others. One had been constructed with political biographies—Lincoln, Churchill, Huey Long, Teddy Roosevelt, Joe McCarthy, most of Caro’s LBJ series, Reagan, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons, all the way up to Obama. The opposite side had been fortified with fiction, from Dickens to Rushdie, including multiple editions of every John D. MacDonald novel. A third, east-facing wall appeared to be reference volumes—several old sets of encyclopedias, the Florida Statutes, dictionaries, gazetteers, medical textbooks, even a 1987 edition of the Federal Criminal Code and Rules; in the center of the partition was a space barely large enough for a grown man to squeeze through, and fitted with a removable panel of clear aquarium glass.
“That’s quite a structure,” said the one-eyed man’s friend.
“Not up to code, I admit, but it serves the purpose.”
The books were dank and blackening with mold, and the old man’s friend could smell the rotting paper. It made him feel sad.
He said, “Put an end to this nonsense, Clint. Please.”
“It’s my last motherfucking rodeo, I promise.”
“I’d better go now. I got another damn CT scan this afternoon.”
The friend began walking down the path toward the water, but the tip of his cane got plugged in soft dirt. The one-eyed man helped him to the airboat and told the driver about a shortcut back to the Miccosukee village.
A week or so passed before the friend decided to do something about what he’d seen at the tree island. He made the call from his handicap-accessible apartment at the Rainbow of Life Senior Center, one of those “compassionately structured” settings where elderly widows and widowers transitioned from ambulatory to bedridden to dead.
He didn’t know if the phone number he dialed was still good, but the kid answered right away and said, “I’m glad to hear from you. It’s been a while.”
“Sorry, but I need a favor.”
&nb
sp; “Anything, of course,” the kid said.
“It’s time for your stepmother to meet my friend.”
“I never said a word to her. She doesn’t even know his name.”
“And he appreciates that. We both do.”
“But why all of a sudden does he want to see her?”
“It’s not his idea, it’s mine,” replied the one-eyed man’s friend. “She’ll understand as soon as she sees what’s going on.”
“So this will be a surprise for both of them?”
“Oh yes, Joel.”
* * *
—
Mastodon reacted scornfully when the Secret Service informed him of a possible python threat at Casa Bellicosa. He said that it sounded like the plot of a shitty horror movie, and that he’d look like a pussy for fleeing to Washington just because a snake or two turned up.
The mansion would soon be hosting the season’s most sensational event, Mastodon added, and he wouldn’t miss it for anything. He was, after all, the star attraction.
Mockingbird had a different reason for refusing to leave Palm Beach, and she had no intention of revealing it. She summoned Special Agent Paul Ryskamp to a one-on-one brunch at her private beach cabana and offered him fresh fruit and stone crab claws, which he declined. As soon as he began discussing python scenarios, she reminded him about the headless one that had turned up along the route of her motorcade.
“I wasn’t scared then. I’m not scared now,” she said.
“Until the individual responsible for the snakes is in custody, we believe it’s best if you and the President return to the White House.”
Mockingbird plucked a strawberry from the sterling platter and nibbled off the tip. “I know Agent Josephson’s real name,” she said. “What do you think the media would do with a crazy story like that?”
“How would such a story get out?” Ryskamp asked mildly.
“Oh, who knows. But what a scandal for the Secret Service.”
“It wouldn’t be great, I agree.”