Carl Hiassen - Sick Puppy

"We could live off that for two weeks!"

Twilly sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Why are you stopping?"

"Waste not, want not."

"You love bacon that much, let me buy you a Benny's franchise," Twilly said. "But I'll be damned if you're stashing a four-hundred-pound pig corpse in my new station wagon. No offense, captain."

In the back of the car, McGuinn whined and fidgeted.

"Probably gotta pee," Skink concluded.

"Makes two of us," Twilly said.

"No, makes three."

They all got out and walked toward the fringe of the woods. The ex-governor glanced longingly over his shoulder, toward the road-kill hog. McGuinn sniffed at it briefly before loping off to explore a rabbit trail. Twilly decided to let him roam for a few minutes.

When they got back to the car, the captain asked Twilly how he felt.

"Stoned. Sore." With a grunt, Twilly boosted himself onto the hood. "And lucky," he added.

Skink rested one boot on the bumper. He peeled off the shower cap and rubbed a bronze knuckle back and forth across the stubble of his scalp. He said, "We've got some decisions to make, Master Spree."

"My mother saved all the clippings from when you disappeared. Every time there was a new story, she'd read it to us over breakfast," Twilly recalled. "Drove my father up a wall. My father sold beachfront."

Skink whistled sarcastically. "The big leagues. More, more, more."

"He said you must be some kind of Communist. He said anybody who was anti-development was anti-American."

"So your daddy's a patriot, huh? Life, liberty and the pursuit of real estate commissions."

"My mother said you were just a man trying to save a place he loved."

"And failing spectacularly."

"A folk hero, she said."

Skink seemed amused. "Your mother sounds like a romantic." He refitted the shower cap snugly on his skull. "You were in, what, kindergarten? First grade? You can't possibly remember back that far."

"For years afterward she talked about you," Twilly said, "maybe just to give my dad the needle. Or maybe because she was secretly on your side. She voted for you, that I know."

"Jesus, stop right there – "

"I think you'd like her. My mother."

Skink pried off the sunglasses and studied his own reflection in the shine off the car's fender. With two fingers he repositioned the crimson eye, more or less aligning it with his real one. Then he set his gaze on Twilly Spree and said, "Son, I can't tell you what to do with your life – hell, you've seen what I've done with mine. But I will tell you there's probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody's got to be angry or nothing gets fixed. That's what we were put here for, to stay pissed off."

Twilly said, "They made me take a class for it, captain. I was not cured."

"A class?"

"Anger management. I'm perfectly serious."

Skink hooted. "For Christ's sake, what about greed management? Everybody in this state should get a course in that. You fail, they haul your sorry ass to the border and throw you out of Florida."

"I blew up my uncle's bank," Twilly said.

"So what!" Skink exclaimed. "Nothing shameful about anger, boy. Sometimes it's the only sane and logical and moral reaction. Jesus, you don't take a class to make it go away! You take a drink or a goddamn bullet. Or you stand and fight the bastards."

The ex-governor canted his chin to the sky and boomed:

"Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;

Where the rage of the vultures, the love of the turtle,

Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?"

Quietly, Twilly said, "But I'm already there, captain."

"I know you are, son." Slowly he lowered his head, the braids of his beard trailing down like strands of silver moss. The two bird beaks touched hooks as they dangled at his chest.

"Lord Byron?" Twilly asked.

Skink nodded, looking pleased. "The Bride of Abydos."

With a thumb Twilly tested his bandaged wound. The pain was bearable, even though the dope was wearing off. He said, "I suppose you heard about this big-game trip."

"Yes, sir."

"You wouldn't happen to know where it is."

Here was Skink's chance to end it. He could not.

"I do know where," he said, and repeated what Lisa June Peterson had told him.

"So, what do you think?" Twilly asked.

"I think a canned hunt is as low as it gets."

"That's not what I mean."

"Ah. You mean as the potential scene of an ambush?"

"Well, I keep thinking about Toad Island," Twilly said, "and how to stop that damn bridge."

Skink's blazing eye was fixed on the highway, the cars and trucks streaking past. "Look at these fuckers," he said softly, as if to himself. "Where could they all be going?"

Twilly slid off the hood of the station wagon. "I'll tell you where I'm going, Governor, I'm going to Ocala. And on the way I intend to stop at a friendly firearms retailer and purchase a high-powered rifle. Want one?"

"The recoil will do wonders for your shoulder."

"Yeah, it'll hurt like a sonofabitch, I imagine." Twilly plucked the car keys from Skink's fingers. "You don't want to come, I can drop you in Lake City."

"That's how you treat a folk hero? Lake City?"

"It's hot out here. Let's get back on the road."

Skink said, "Did I miss something? Is there a plan?"

"Not just yet." Twilly Spree licked his lips and whistled for the dog.

Durgess warmed his hands on a cup of coffee while Asa Lando gassed up the big forklift. It was three hours until sunrise.

"You sure about this?" Durgess asked.

"He ain't moved since yesterday noon."

"You mean he ain't woke up."

"No, Durge. He ain't moved."

"But he's still breathin', right?"

Asa Lando said, "For sure. They said he even took a dump."

"Glory be."

"Point is, it's perfectly safe. Jeffy isn't going anywheres."

Durgess poured his coffee in the dirt and entered the building marked Quarantine One. Asa Lando drove the forklift around from the rear. The rhinoceros was on its chest and knees, a position the veterinarian had described as "sternal recumbency." The vet had also estimated the animal's age at thirty-plus and used the word dottering, which Asa Lando took to mean "at death's door." Time was of the essence.

Durgess opened the stall and Asa Lando rolled in atop the forklift. They couldn't tell if the rhino was awake or asleep, but Durgess kept a rifle ready. El Jefe exhibited no awareness of the advancing machine. Durgess thought he saw one of the ears twitch as Asa Lando cautiously slid the steel tines beneath the rhino's massive underbelly. Slowly the fork began to rise, and a tired gassy sigh escaped the animal's bristly nostrils. Hoisted off the matted straw, the great armored head sagged and the stringy tail swatted listlessly at a swarm of horseflies. The stumpy legs hung motionless, like four scuffed gray drums.

"Easy now," Durgess called, as Asa Lando backed out the forklift and headed for the flatbed truck. Durgess was astounded: Suspended eight feet in the air, the rhinoceros was as docile as a dime-store turtle. A tranquilizer dart would have put the damn thing into a coma.

In preparation for the fragile cargo, Asa Lando had padded the truck bed with two layers of king-sized mattresses. Upon being deposited there, the pachyderm blinked twice (which Durgess optimistically interpreted as a sign of curiosity). Asa tossed up an armful of fresh-cut branches and said, "Here go, Mr. El Jeffy. Breakfast time!"

Durgess himself had selected the location for the kill: an ancient moss-covered live oak that stood alone at the blue-green cleft of two vast grassy slopes, about a mile from the Wilderness Veldt lodge. A hundred years ago the land had produced citrus and cotton, but back-to-back winter freezes had prompted a switch to more durable crops – watermelon, cabbage and crookneck squash. It was the sons and grandsons of those early vegetable growers who eventually abandoned the farm fields and sold out to the Wilderness Veldt Plantation Corporation, which turned out to be co-owned by a Tokyo-based shellfish cartel and a Miami Beach swimsuit designer named Minton Tweeze.