Carl Hiassen - Sick Puppy

From somewhere in the deep crinkly folds of his embrace he heard her ask: "But it wouldn't hurt to try, would it? Talking sense to them, I mean. What could it hurt?"

"It's a hunting trip, darling. Can't be talking out loud during a hunt. You gotta stay real quiet, in order to sneak up on the varmints." Skink pressed his lips to her forehead. "Sorry for making a mess of lunch. How about a rain check?"

"Anytime."

"Bye now, Lisa June."

"Good-bye, Governor."

They had sex on the lion-skin rug in the den, under the dull glassy gaze of the fish and wild animals Palmer Stoat had killed: the Cape buffalo, the timber wolf, the tuft-eared lynx, the bull elk, the striped marlin, the tarpon ...

Afterward, Estella, the right-wing prostitute from Swain's, asked: "You miss her?"

"Miss her? I booted her!" Stoat proclaimed. "The dog's a different story. Boodle was good company."

"You're fulla shit."

"How about another drink?"

"Why not," she said.

They were both nude, and smoking Havana's finest. Romeo y Julieta was the brand. Palmer Stoat was delighted to have found a partner who would keep a lit cigar in her mouth during athletic intercourse. Later, if he could get it up again, he would snap some pictures – the two of them going at it, stogie-to-stogie, like dueling smokestacks!

Her scotch freshened, Estella rolled on one side and stroked the frizzy auburn mane of the lion skin. "You shot this stud muffin yourself?"

"I told you, sweetheart. I shot all of 'em." Stoat fondly patted the tawny hide, as if it were the flank of a favorite saddle horse. "This sumbitch was tough, too. Took me three slugs at point-blank."

It would have taken only one had Stoat not been bowled off his feet by the pack of fourteen half-starved hounds that Durgess had deployed to tree the exhausted cat. While falling, Stoat had squeezed off two wild rounds that struck a hapless grackle and a cabbage palm, respectively. These colorful details were not shared with rapt Estella.

"Tell me about Africa," she said, pursing her painted lips to launch a halo of blue smoke.

"Africa. Yes." Most everything he knew about Africa came from National Geographic TV specials.

"Where did you go to 'bag' this lion – Kenya?"

"That's right. Kenya." Stoat ran a dry tongue across his lips, dawbing at the honeyed sheen of Johnnie Walker. "Africa is ... amazing," he ventured. "Incredible."

"Oh, I'd give anything to go there someday." Estella said it dreamily, with a shake of her hair.

Balancing a drink in one hand, Stoat carefully pivoted on his side and fitted himself to the slope of her bottom, spoon-style. "It's so big," he said quietly. "Africa is."

"Big. Yes." Estella arched seductively and Stoat deftly drew back, so as not to ignite her multi-hued locks with his cigar.

"Sweetheart, it would take years to see it all."

"We should go together, Palmer. You could hunt and I could go antiquing," she said. "No charge for the sex, either. You pay for my plane tickets, the nookie is free."

Stoat was tempted to say yes. God knows he needed to get away. And as soon as the legislature finished its final bit of nonsense next week ... well, why not a safari vacation to Africa? By the time he returned, the movers would have cleaned out Desie's stuff and the house would feel like his own again. Stoat could begin remodeling for bachelorhood. (He had changed his mind about moving; it would take years to find a place with such an ideal trophy room.)

"Let me see what I can do with my schedule," he told Estella, meaning he first wanted to float the Africa idea past his preferred choice of an overseas companion, the Pamela Anderson look-alike from Pube's. At the moment Stoat could not recall her Christian name, though he was sure he'd copied it on a cocktail napkin and saved it in his billfold.

"What's that empty spot?" Estella, pointing at a conspicuous space on the animal wall.

"That's for my black rhino. I bagged it a couple weeks ago."

"A rhinoceros!"

"Magnificent beast," Palmer Stoat said, taking a prodigious drag. "You'll see for yourself, when the mount is finished."

"You went back to Africa? When was this?" Estella asked. "How come you never told me?"

"That's because we're always talking politics, babe. Anyway, it was a quickie trip, just for a couple days," he added dismissively. "I believe it was the same weekend you went to that Quayle-for-President brunch."

She wriggled around to face him on the lion skin. "Let me get this straight. You went all the way to Kenya for a weekend? God, you must really love to hunt."

"Oh, I do. And I'm going back Saturday." Instantly, Stoat was sorry he'd said it.

Estella sat up excitedly, sloshing scotch on both of them. "Can I go, too, Palmer? Please?"

"No, honey, it's business this time. I'm taking along an important client. I promised him a rhino like mine."

"Aw, come on. I'll stay out of your way."

"Sorry, sweetheart."

"Then bring me back a nice present, all right? And not just cheapo beads or a grass skirt. A cool wood carving, or maybe – I know! – a Masai spear."

"Consider it done." Stoat, thinking dismally: Where am I going to find something like that in Ocala, Florida?

"Wow. All the way to Africa." Estella raised her violet-rimmed lashes to the long wall of stuffed animal heads and laminated fish – Stoat's prize trophies. She said: "I've never even fired a cap pistol, Palmer, but every year I give a little money to the NRA. I am totally behind the Second Amendment."

"Me, too. As you can tell." Stoat airily swept his arm toward the blank-eyed taxidermy. "Like the song says, happiness is a hot gun."

Estella smiled inquisitively. "I don't think I ever heard that one."

Krimmler couldn't sleep.

I might never sleep again, he thought.

And Roger Roothaus had not believed the "bum in the tree" story!

Asked Krimmler if he'd been drinking. Suggested he take a vacation, drive the Winnebago up to Cedar Key or Destin.

"Nothing's happening on the island anyway," Roger Roothaus had said. "Not until we hear otherwise from Mr. Clapley. So go enjoy yourself. It's on me."

Krimmler protested. Insisted he felt fine. A bum really did break into my camper and beat me up and drag me up a goddamn tree. And left me stranded there, Roger! I had to crawl down in a blinding rainstorm. Nearly broke my ass.

Man, I'm worried about you, Roothaus had said.

You should be!

Don't say a word about this to Mr. Clapley, OK?

But Clapley sent a guy, too., another freak who busted into my place and roughed me up. He had snuff tapes –

I gotta take another call, Roothaus had said curtly. You get off the rock for a while, Karl. I'm serious.

But Krimmler had no intention of leaving Toad Island, because a general never abandoned the battleground, even for an all-expenses-paid beach vacation. So Krimmler loaded his .357 and hunkered down in the Winnebago to await the next intruder.

Hours passed and nobody came, but the pulse of the island murmured ominously at his door. The breeze. The seabirds. The rustle and sigh of the leaves. Krimmler was a haunted man. Besieged by Nature, he possessed the will and armaments to fight back – but no troops. Truly he was alone.

Oh, to hear the familiar backfire of an overloaded dump truck, the plangent buzz of chain saws, the metallic spine-jolting ploink of a pile driver ... how Krimmler's soul would have cartwheeled with joy!

But the earth-moving machines he so loved sat mute and untended, and with each passing moment the cursed island resurged; stirred, blossomed, flexed to life. Locked inside the dank-smelling travel camper, Krimmler began to worry for his own sanity. He was teased and tormented by every cry of a sandpiper, every trill of a raccoon, every emboldened bark of a squirrel (which he had come to dread nearly as much as he dreaded chipmunks). The onset of a blustery dusk only seemed to amplify the primeval racket at Krimmler's door, and to drown the din he slammed a Tom Jones CD into the stereo. He turned on all the lights, wedged a deck chair under the doorknob, crawled under the covers – and waited for a slumber that would not come.