Sick Puppy (8 page)

Twilly walked her to the telephone booth and put a quarter in her right hand. He said, “I’ll be on my way now.”

“Can’t I say good-bye to Bood—I mean, McGuinn?”

“You two already said your good-byes.”

“Now, remember the trick I showed you to give him his pills. The roast-beef trick. He’s partial to rare.”

“We’ll manage,” Twilly said.

“And keep him out of the water until those stitches are healed.”

“Don’t worry,” he said.

Desie caught her reflection in the cracked glass door of the phone booth. With a frail laugh, she said, “God, I’m a mess. I look like a drowned canary.” She was stalling because she couldn’t make sense of her feelings; because she didn’t want to go home to her wealthy powerful husband. She wanted to stay with the edgy young criminal who had broken into her home and abducted her pet dog. Well, of course she did. Wouldn’t any normal, settled, well-adjusted wife feel the same way?

“You’re serious about this?” she said to Twilly.

He was incredulous at the question. “You saw what I saw. Hell yes, I’m serious.”

“But you’ll go to jail.”

“That all depends.”

Desie said, “I don’t even know your name.”

Twilly smiled. “Yes, you do. It’s printed on the car-rental receipt, the one you swiped out of the glove compartment last night in Fort Pierce.”

She reddened. “Oops.”

As Twilly turned away, Desie reached for his arm. She said, “Before I go home, I want to be sure. That was no joke back there? They deliberately buried all those harmless little—”

“Yeah, they did.”

“God. What kind of people would do something like that?”

“Ask your husband,” said Twilly, pulling free.

7

The airplane was a twin-engine Beech. When Desie stepped aboard, the pilot asked, “Where’s your friend?”

Desie was flustered; she thought he meant the kidnapper.

“The dog,” said the pilot. “Mr. Stoat said you were traveling with a dog.”

“He was mistaken. I’m alone.”

The plane took off and banked to the west. Desie expected it to turn southbound, but it didn’t. Squinting into the sun, she leaned forward and tried to raise her voice above the engines.

“Where are you going?”

“One more stop,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “Panama City.”

“What for?” Desie asked, but he didn’t hear her.

It was a choppy and uncomfortable flight, more than an hour, and Desie was steaming by the time they got there. Palmer should have come up on the plane to pick her up; that’s what a husband ought to do when his wife is freed from a kidnapping. At the least, he should have directed the pilot to bring her straight home, instead of making her sit through a bumpy add-on leg. Desie assumed Palmer was taking advantage of the plane’s availability to pick up one of his big-shot cronies, thereby saving a few bucks on a separate charter. She wondered who’d be riding with her on the return trip to Lauderdale, and hoped it wasn’t some asshole mayor or senator. Some of Palmer’s lobbying clients were tolerable in small doses, but Desie couldn’t stand the politicians with whom her husband avidly fraternized. Even Dick Artemus, the undeniably charismatic governor, had managed to repulse Desie with a distasteful ethnic joke within moments of being introduced; Desie had been poised to launch a margarita in his face when Palmer intervened, steering her to a neutral corner.

But no other passenger boarded the Beechcraft in Panama City. The pilot stepped off briefly and returned carrying a Nike shoe box, which he asked Desie to hold during the flight.

“What’s inside?” she said.

“I don’t know, ma’am, but Mr. Stoat said to take special care with it. He said it’s real valuable.”

Through the window Desie saw a gray Cadillac parked on the tarmac near the Butler Aviation Terminal. Standing by the driver’s side of the car was a middle-aged Asian man in a raspberry-colored golf shirt and shiny brown slacks. The man was counting through a stack of cash, which he placed into a billfold. Once the plane began to taxi, the Asian man glanced up and waved, presumably at the pilot.

Desie waited until they were airborne before opening the shoe box. Inside was an opaque Tupperware container filled with a fine light-colored powder. Desie would have guessed it was cake mix, except for the odd musky smell. She snapped the lid on the container and set it back in the box and began to wonder, irritably, if her husband had gone into the narcotics business.

Palmer Stoat didn’t fly to Gainesville to meet Desie because Robert Clapley unexpectedly had phoned to congratulate him for icing the funds to build the new Toad Island bridge. In the course of the conversation Clapley mentioned he was headed to a friend’s farm near Lake Okeechobee for some off-road bird shooting, and he’d be delighted if Stoat joined him.

“Oh, and I’ve got the rest of your money,” Clapley added.

Stoat took the interstate to U.S. 27 and sped north toward Clewiston. An hour later he located Clapley, waiting in a field of bare dirt that not so long ago had been a tomato patch. The field had been baited heavily with seeds, and all that remained for the two hunters was to wait for the doves to show up. It wasn’t much of a challenge but that was fine with Palmer Stoat, who hadn’t yet shaken the bleary bone-ache from his hangover. Clapley set up a roomy canvas shooting blind and broke out a bottle of expensive scotch. With a matching flourish, Stoat produced two large cigars from a pocket of his hunting vest. The men drank and puffed and told pussy-related lies until the birds started arriving. The blind was spacious enough for both men to fire their shotguns simultaneously, and in only two hours they shot forty-one doves, very few of which were actually airborne at the time. The rest of the doves were on the ground, obliviously pecking up birdseed, when they got blasted. The men didn’t even need a retriever, since the doves all succumbed within twenty yards of the portable blind, where the bulk of the food had been sprinkled.

At dusk the men quit shooting and removed their earmuffs. Clapley began picking up the small ruffled bodies and dropping them in a camo duffel. Behind him walked the wobbly Stoat, his shotgun propped butt-first across his shoulder.

“How many a these tasty little gumdrops you want?” Clapley asked.

“Not many, Bob. Just enough for me and the wife.”

Later, when he got home and began to sober up, Stoat realized that Robert Clapley had forgotten to give him the $50,000 check.

When Desie arrived, Palmer was plucking the birds in the kitchen. He got up to hug her but she ducked out of reach.

He said, “Tell me what happened, sweetie. Are you all right?”

“Like you care.”

And so it went for nearly an hour—Stoat apologizing for coming home so bombed the previous night that he’d failed to notice Desie was missing; apologizing for not being on the airplane to meet her in Gainesville; apologizing for not personally picking her up at the Fort Lauderdale airport (although he’d sent a chauffeured Town Car!); apologizing for failing to comment upon her odd attire—baggy sweatpants and an orange mesh University of Florida football jersey, purchased in haste at a campus bookstore; apologizing for not inquiring sooner if the deranged kidnapper had raped her or roughed her up; and, finally, apologizing for stacking dead doves on the kitchen table.

Then Desie said: “Aren’t you even going to ask about Boodle?”

So Stoat apologized again, this time for not being properly concerned about the abducted family pet.

“Where is he, hon?”

“The kidnapper’s still got him,” Desie announced.

“Oh, this is crazy.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“How much does he want?” Stoat asked.

“He’s not after money.”

“Then what?”

Desie repeated what the strange young dognapper had instructed her to say. She omitted the fact that she was the one who’d tipped him off to the Shearwater project.

When Stoat heard the kidnapper’s demand, he cackled.

“Palmer, the man is
serious.
”

“Really.”

“You’d better do what he wants.”

“Or what,” said Stoat. “He’s going to kill my dog? My
dog
?”

“He says he will.”

Again Stoat chuckled, and resumed cleaning the birds. “Come on, Des. The sickest bastard in the whole world isn’t going to hurt a Labrador retriever. Especially Boodle—everybody falls head over heels for Boodle.”

Exhausted though she was, Desie couldn’t help but watch as her husband meticulously tugged out the gray feathers one by one and placed them in a soft velvety pile. Naked, the doves looked too scrawny to eat. The breasts were gaunt and the flesh was pocked unattractively with purple-tinged holes from the shotgun pellets.

He said, “Oh, I almost forgot—the package from Panama City?”

“On the porch,” Desie said. “What is it, anyway?”

“Stationery.”

“In Tupperware?”

“Oh . . . well, yeah,” her husband stammered. “Keeps out the humidity. It’s good stuff. Embossed.”

“Cut the crap, Palmer. It’s powder.”

“You opened it!”

“Yeah. My husband the smack dealer. No wonder you didn’t want it sent by regular mail.”

Stoat threw back his head and laughed. “Heroin? Now you think I’m moving heroin! Oh, that’s priceless.”

“Then what is it?” Desie demanded angrily. “What’s in the Tupperware? Tell me, Palmer.”

So he did, adding: “But I wanted it to be a surprise.”

She stared at him. “Rhino sex powder.”

“Hon, they don’t always shoot the animals to get the horns. That’s a common myth.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Desie said.

“I just thought it might liven things up for you and me. Hey, can it hurt to try?”

Wordlessly she stood up and went to the bedroom.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Stoat called hopefully after her. “Marisa’s firing up the barbecue.”

It took another forty-five minutes to finish with the heads and the skins of the birds. Not wishing to stink up his garbage can with the innards, he wrapped them in butcher paper and carried it across the backyard, through the hedge, to the well-manicured property of his neighbors, the Clarks, where he dumped the whole mess in the goldfish pond. Ned and Susan Clark, Stoat happened to know, were on a gambling cruise to Nassau.

After Stoat returned to the house, he sent the cook home, stored the doves in the refrigerator, stood for a long time under a hot shower and pondered what to do about Desirata. He didn’t believe the kidnap story but took it as proof that something was seriously amiss, something was unraveling inside her mind. Maybe she’d run off with some guy on a whim, then changed her mind. Or maybe she’d simply freaked out and bolted. Manic depression, multiple-personality syndrome—Stoat had heard of these illnesses but was unclear about the symptoms. This much was true: Given the hinky events of the past twenty-four hours, he had come to suspect that his own unhappy spouse had conspired in the defacing of his prize taxidermy, the trashing of the red BMW, and even the infesting of his luxury sport-utility vehicle with shit-eating insects.

A cry for help, Palmer Stoat figured. Obviously the kid’s got some loose shingles.

But whatever weird was happening within Desie, it was the part of her yarn about the dog that Stoat couldn’t sort out. What had she done with poor Boodle, and why?

He toweled off and crawled into bed. He felt her go tense when he slipped an arm around her waist.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Never felt better.”

“You smell good.”

“Compared to a sack of dead pigeons, I hope so.”

“I know you’re upset, sweetie. I think we should talk.”

“Well, I think we should be calling the police.” Desie knew he wouldn’t do it, but she was ticked off that he hadn’t raised the prospect. What concerned husband wouldn’t at least consider notifying the authorities after an intruder breaks into his home and takes off with his wife! So maybe it hadn’t been a
real
kidnapping (since it was Desie’s idea to go), but Palmer didn’t know that.

He said, “Sweetie, we can’t possibly get the police involved.”

“Why not? You said he’ll never hurt the dog, so what’ve we got to lose?”

“Because it’ll be all over the TV and the newspapers, that’s why. My clients rely on me to be low-profile and discreet,” he explained. “This would be a disaster, Desie. I’d be a laughingstock. ‘Dognapper Targets Prominent Lobbyist.’ Jesus Hubbard Christ, can you imagine the headlines?”

She squirmed out of his embrace.

Stoat said, “Honestly, how could I show my face in Tallahassee or Washington? A story like that, I’m telling you, it might turn up in a Letterman monologue. Try to understand what that could do to my business.”

“Fine,” she said curtly.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get our puppy back.”

“Then you’ll do what this maniac wants. It’s the only way,” she said.

With an exaggerated sigh, Palmer rolled on his back. “It’s
not
the only way. Trust me.”

Desie turned to face him. “Please just do what he says.”

“You can’t be serious.”

She said, “It’s just a bridge, Palmer. One lousy bridge to one lousy little island. They’ll get by fine without it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, it’s already done. I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

“Don’t lie to me. Not about this.”

Stoat sucked in his breath, wondering: What the hell does she mean by
that
?

Desie said what she’d been told to say by the dognapper: “Your buddy Governor Dick—he hasn’t signed the budget bill yet, has he? Tell him to veto the money for the bridge.”

“OK, that’s it.” Stoat sat up and reached for the lamp. “Darling, you’ve obviously lost your goddamned mind.”

She closed her eyes but kept her cheek to the pillow. “Otherwise we’ll never see the dog again,” she said. “The lunatic has already changed his name, Palmer. He calls him McGuinn.”

“Yeah. Whatever.” What a whacked-out imagination she has, Stoat thought. He’d had no idea.

Desie stiffened beside him. “So you think I’m out of my mind? Isn’t that what you just said?”

Palmer bowed his head and gingerly massaged his tender temples. “Look, Des, let’s please finish talking about this tomorrow. I’m having a tough day’s night.”

His wife groaned in exasperation and rolled over.

Robert Clapley celebrated in his own special style. He returned with his share of the dove kill to the oceanfront condominium his company owned in Palm Beach. There he cooked the birds in a light wine sauce and lovingly served them to Katya and Tish, whom Clapley half-whimsically referred to as Barbie One and Barbie Two. Katya was from Russia; Tish was from the Czech Republic. They were both five ten and weighed approximately 130 pounds. Clapley didn’t know their last names, or their true ages, and didn’t ask. He had met them six months earlier on South Beach, at an all-night party thrown by a bisexual German real estate tycoon. The women told Clapley they were models and had come to Miami for new career opportunities. Steady fashion work was hard to come by in Eastern Europe, and the pay was lousy compared with that in France or the States. Robert Clapley thought Katya and Tish looked a bit flashy for big-time modeling, but they were plenty attractive enough for him. The fellow who’d thrown the party had taken Clapley aside and confided that it was he who had purchased the transatlantic plane tickets for Katya and Tish, and half a dozen other women who were exceptionally eager to come to America. The man had chosen them from an array of more than one hundred who had appeared on an audition videotape mailed to him by a “talent agency” in Moscow.

“But don’t get the wrong idea, Bob. These girls are
not
common prostitutes,” the man had assured Clapley.

No, Katya and Tish were not common. Within a week Clapley had installed them in one of his part-time residences, the sixteenth-floor Palm Beach condo, which featured a seven-jet Jacuzzi, a Bose sound system, and a million-dollar view of the Atlantic Ocean from every room. Katya and Tish were in heaven, and demonstrated their gratitude to Clapley with ferocious ardor. Occasionally they would go out to actual modeling tryouts, but for the most part they filled their days with swimming, sunning, shopping and watching American soap operas. When eventually it came time for their visas to expire, Katya and Tish were crestfallen. They appealed to their generous new boyfriend, Bob, who suggested he might be able to fix their immigration problems in exchange for a favor; not a small favor, though.