Durgess said to Asa London: "That was different. Teeble was a chump."
"All our customers are chumps," Asa Lando pointed out. "They damn sure ain't hunters. They just want somethin' large and dead for the wall. Talk about chumps, you can start with your Mr. Stoat."
"The man he's bringing here has done real big-game trips. He won't go for no Gummy routine," Durgess asserted. "He ain't gonna buy it if we tell him he shot two legs off that cat."
Asa Lando said, unflaggingly: "Don't be so
sure."
"Hey, the man wants a cheetah, which is the fastest land mammal in the whole entire world. This poor critter here"—Durgess gestured at the lopsided ocelot—"couldn't outrun my granny's wheelchair."
As if on cue, the cat hip-hopped itself in a clockwise motion, hoisted its tail and sprayed through the mesh of the cage, dappling both men's pants.
"Damn!" cried Asa Lando, jumping back from the stall.
Durgess turned and trudged out of the building.
Riding in silence, they crossed the old bridge in late afternoon. Twilly Spree headed for the beach instead of the bed-and-breakfast, even though they were hungry. He hoped a sunset would improve Desie's spirits.
But a front was pushing through, and the horizon disappeared behind rolling purple-tinged clouds. A grayness fell suddenly over the shore and a cool, wet-smelling breeze sprung off the Gulf. Twilly and Desie held hands loosely as they walked. McGuinn loped ahead to harass the terns and gulls.
"Rain's coming," Twilly said.
"It feels great." Desie took a long deep breath.
"At each end of this beach is where they want to put those condos," said Twilly, "like sixteen-story bookends. 'Luxury units starting in the low two hundreds!' " This was straight off a new billboard that Robert Clapley had erected on U.S. 19. Twilly had noticed it that morning while driving back to the island.
Desie said, "I've got a question. You don't have to answer if you don't want."
"OK."
"Two questions, actually. Have you ever killed a person?"
Twilly thought of Vecker Darby's house exploding in a chemical cloud with Vecker Darby, slow-footed toxic dumper, still inside.
"Have you?" Desie asked.
"Indirectly."
"What kind of answer is that?"
"A careful one," Twilly said.
"Would you do it again? Over toads? Honey, you arrest somebody for mushing toads. You don't murder them."
Twilly let her hand slip from his fingers. "Desie, it's not just the toads, and you know it."
"Then what—over condos? Two lousy high-rises? You act like they're paving the whole coast."
"And you're beginning to sound like your husband."
Desie stopped in her tracks, the tail of a wave washing over the tops of her feet. A gust of wind blew the hair away from her neck, her astonishingly lovely neck, and Twilly fought the impulse to kiss her there.
She said, "This is all my fault."
"What is?"
"I should never have told you about this island, about what they're planning to do."
"Why not? It's horrible what they're planning."
"Yes, but now you're talking about killing people, which is also wrong," said Desie, "not to mention a crime, and I don't particularly want to see you go to jail. Jail would not be good for this relationship, Twilly."
He said, "If it wasn't Shearwater, it'd be something else. If it wasn't this island, it would be another. That's what you need to understand."
"And if it wasn't me with you here on this beach, it would be someone else. Right?"
"Please don't." Twilly reached for her waist but she spun away, heading back (he assumed) toward the car.
"Desie!"
"Not now," she called over her shoulder.
From the other direction came an outburst of barking. At first Twilly thought it was another big dog, because he'd never heard McGuinn make such a racket.
But it was him. Twilly could see the familiar black hulk far down the beach, alternately crouching and dashing circles around somebody on the sand. The behavior looked anything but playful.
Twilly broke into a run. A nasty dog-bite episode was the last thing he needed to deal with—the ambulance, the cops, the wailing victim. Just my luck, Twilly thought glumly. How can you possibly piss off a Labrador retriever? Short of hammering them with a baseball bat, they'd put up with just about anything. Yet someone had managed to piss off ultra-mellow McGuinn. Probably some idiot tourist, Twilly fumed, or his idiot kids.
He jogged faster, kicking up water whenever a wave slid across his path. The run reminded him of his two dreams, without all the dead birds and the panic. Ahead on the beach, McGuinn continued to carry on. Twilly now could see what was upsetting the dog—a stocky, sawed-off guy in a suit. The man was lunging with both arms at the Labrador, which kept darting out of reach.
What now? Twilly wondered.
As he drew closer, he shouted for the dog to come. But McGuinn was in manic mode and scarcely turned his head to acknowledge Twilly's voice. The stranger reacted, though. He stopped grabbing for the dog and arranged himself into a pose of calm and casual waitfulness.
Twilly prepared for trouble. He pulled up and walked the last twenty yards, to catch his breath and assess the situation. Immediately, McGuinn positioned himself between Twilly and the stranger, who clearly was no tourist. The man wore a rumpled houndstooth suit and ankle-high leather shoes with zippers. He had a blond dye job and a chopped haircut that belonged on somebody with pimples and a runny nose.
"Down!" Twilly said to McGuinn.
But the Lab kept snapping and snarling, his lush coat bristling like a boar's. Twilly was impressed. Like Desie, he believed animals possessed an innate sense of danger—and he believed McGuinn's intuition was correct about the out-of-place stranger.
"Obedience school," the man said. "Or try one of those electrified collars. That'll do the trick."
"He bite you?" Twilly's tone made it clear he was not stricken with concern for the stranger's health.
"Naw. We're just playing. What's his name?"
"You might be playing," Twilly said to the man, "but he's not."
McGuinn lowered himself on all fours. He rumbled a low growl and panted unblinkingly. His haunches remained bunched and taut, as if readying to launch at the stranger.
"What's his name?" the man asked again.
Twilly told him.
"Sounds Irish," the man remarked. His eyes cut back and forth between Twilly and the dog. "You Irish?" he said to Twilly.
"You'll have to do better than this."
The stranger acted innocent. "What do you mean? I'm just trying to be friendly."
Twilly said, "Cut the shit."
The weather was coming up on them fast. A cold raindrop hit the side of Twilly's neck. The man with the spiky hair took a fat one on the nose. He wiped it dry with the sleeve of his jacket.
"Rain'll ruin those shoes of yours," Twilly said, "in about two minutes flat."
"Let me worry about the footwear," the stranger said, but he glanced down anyway at his feet. Twilly knew he was thinking about how much the brown leather shoes had cost.
"McGuinn! Let's go." Twilly clapped his hands loudly.
The dog wouldn't move, wouldn't shift his stare from the man in the musty-smelling suit. The Labrador had retained little from his short-lived time as a hunting dog in training, but one thing that had stayed with him was an alertness to guns. A human with a gun carried himself in a distinctly different manner. The Palmer Stoat who clomped through the marsh with a 20-gauge propped on his shoulder practically was a separate species from the Palmer Stoat who each night clipped McGuinn to a leash and covertly led him next door to crap on the neighbor's garden. To Stoat and his human hunter friends, the transformation in themselves—bearing, gait, demeanor and voice—was so subtle they didn't notice, yet it was glaringly obvious to McGuinn. A visual sighting of the gun itself was superfluous; humans who carried them ha
d an unmistakable presence. Even their perspiration smelled different—not worse, for in the ever-ripe world of dogs there was hardly such a thing as a bad odor. Just different ones.
For a moment the stranger acted as if he wanted to make friends. He reached a hand beneath his moldy-smelling coat and said, "Here, boy. I've got something you'll like... "
McGuinn, cocking his head, licking his chops, never taking his hopeful brown eyes off the stranger's hand, which emerged from under the coat with...
The gun. Had to be.
Now, from behind, the Labrador heard the young man say:
"Stay, boy. Don't move!"
Never had McGuinn detected such urgency in a command. He decided, on a whim, to obey.
There was another gun-toting human on Toad Island: Krimmler, who had taken to carrying a loaded.357 after Robert Clapley's hired freak accosted him in the Winnebago.
The pistol added to Krimmler's nervousness, and he had plenty of time to be nervous. Construction on the Shearwater resort project remained suspended? and the lush new quiet on the island made Krimmler restless and edgy—it was the very sound of Nature, gradually reclaiming the ground plowed up by his beloved bulldozers. One morning he was appalled to find a green shoot sprouting in the old dirt tracks of a front-end loader. A baby tree! Krimmler thought, ripping it from the soil. A baby tree that would otherwise grow to be a tall chipmunk-harboring tree!
The tranquillity that had once merely annoyed Krimmler now turned him into a paranoid basket case. At night he slept with the.357 under his pillow, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his own ear while groping for the gun in a moment of dire need. By day he tucked it in the front of his pants, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his genitals if danger surfaced.
Krimmler did not, as it turned out, shoot off any of his own body parts. He went for the.357 exactly once, dislodging it from his waistband and knocking it all the way down his baggy right pants leg. It landed with a clunk on the flimsy floor of the construction trailer, where it was retrieved by the smiling bald-headed bum with the racing flag around his waist.
"You rascal," the bum said to Krimmler.
"Gimme that!" Krimmler exclaimed.
The bum tapped the bullets out of the cylinder, then handed the empty gun to the engineer.
"Good way to shoot off your pecker," the bum remarked.
"What do you want!"
"I'm looking for a young man, a woman and a dog. A black Labrador retriever."
Krimmler said, "What is this! Don't tell me you work for Mr. Clapley, too?"
The bald bum began twirling the long, grungy-looking braids of his beard. Some sort of shrunken-looking artifact was attached to each end.
He said, "The Lab might be missing an ear. Other parts, too."
"I'll you tell you the same thing I told that other guy," Krimmler said. This bounty hunter was even bigger and worse-dressed than Mr. Gash. He also had a bad eye, which made him appear even more unstable.
"I don't know where your boy is," Krimmler said, "or his goddamned dog, either. If he's not camping at the beach, he's probably at the b-and-b. Or maybe he left the island. Tourists sometimes do, you know."
The bum said, "I don't work for Clapley."
"I knew it, you asshole!"
"I work for Governor Richard Artemus."
"Right," said Krimmler, "and I'm Tipper Gore."
"One question, sir."
"Go fuck yourself," Krimmler said, "but first go take a bath."
That's when the bum slapped Krimmler. He slapped him with an open hand—Krimmler saw it coming. Slapped him with an open hand so hard it knocked Krimmler unconscious for forty-five minutes. When he awoke, he was naked and halfway up a tall pine tree, wedged loosely in the crotch of three branches. The scratchy bark was murder on his armpits and balls. His jaw throbbed from the blow.
The sky had clouded and the wind had kicked up cold from the west. Krimmler felt himself swaying with the tree. On a nearby limb sat the bum in the racing-flag skirt. He was sipping a cream soda and reading (with his normal eye) a paperback book.
He glanced up at Krimmler and said: "One question, sir."
"Anything," Krimmler said weakly. He had never been more terrified. The treetops undoubtedly were full of goddamned squirrels, mean as timber wolves!
The bum said, "What 'other guy'?"
"The one with the snuff tape."
"Tell me more." The bum closed his book and put it in the pocket of his rain jacket, along with his empty cream-soda can.
"He had a tape of some poor slob dying. Getting stabbed to death by his girlfriend. Live, as it happened." Krimmler was scared to look down, as he was afraid of heights. He was also scared to look up, for fear of seeing one of those squirrels or possibly even a band of mutant chipmunks. So he squeezed his eyes shut.
The bum said: "What'd this other guy look like?"
"Short. Muscle-bound. Bad suit, and hair to match."
"Blondish?" the bum inquired. "Spiked out like a hedgehog?"
"That's him!" Krimmler felt relieved. Now the bum knew he was being truthful, and therefore had no compelling reason (other than Krimmler's general obnoxiousness) to push him out of the tree. The bum rose to stretch his arms, the pine bough creaking under his considerable weight. At the sound, Krimmler opened his eyes.
The bum asked, "What's the guy's name?"
"Gash," Krimmler replied. A chilly raindrop landed on his bare thigh, causing him to shiver. Another drop fell on his back.
"Last name or first?"
"Mr. Gash is what he called himself."
"What did he want with the young man and the dog?"
"He said Mr. Clapley had sent him. He said the kid was a troublemaker. I didn't ask him what he meant." The rising wind made the pine needles thrum. Krimmler clawed his fingernails into the bark. "Can you please get me down from here?"
"I can," said the bum, hopping to a lower branch, "but I don't believe I will."
"Why the hell not! What're you doing!" "
Gotta go," the bum informed the quaking Krimmler. "Bath time."
22
The man in the zippered shoes said, "I've killed my share of dogs."
"I don't doubt it," said Twilly.
"Kitty cats, too."
"Oh, I believe you."
"And one time, some jerkwad's pet monkey. Bernardo was his name. Bernardo the baboon. Came right out of his halter and went for my scalp," the man said. "They say monkeys are so smart? Bullshit. Dogs're smarter."
"Yeah," said Twilly.
"But I'll shoot this one, you try and get cute."
"Well, he's not mine."
"What're you saying?" The rain was flattening the spikes in the man's hair. He held his right arm straight, the gun trained on the Labrador's brow. "You don't care if I pop this mutt?"
Twilly said, "I didn't say that. I said he doesn't belong to me. He belongs to the guy who sent you here."
"Wrong!" The man made a noise like the buzzer on a TV game show. "He belongs to a major asshole named Palmer Stoat."
"Didn't he hire you?"
The man cackled and made the sarcastic buzzer noise again. "Would I work for a fuck-head like that? Ha!"
"What was I thinking," Twilly said.
"Mr. Clapley's the one that hired me."
"Ah."
"To clean out the troublemakers. Now, how about you get a move on. Call the damn dog and let's go," the man said, "before we get soaked. Where's your car?"
"That way." Twilly nodded down the beach.
"Your lady friend?"
"Gone." Twilly thinking: God, I hope so. "We had a fight. She split."
"Too bad. I had some plans."
Twilly changed the subject. "Can I ask you something?"
"My name is Mr. Gash."
That's when Twilly became aware that the man in the brown zippered shoes intended to kill him. The man would not have offered his name unless he knew Twilly wouldn't be alive to repeat it.