Stoat slept past noon and woke up to a grim hangover and a silent house. Spears of sunlight slanted harshly through the Bahamas shutters. Stoat buried his face in a pillow and thought again of the voluble prostitute at Swain's. To meet someone with genuine political ideals was a rarity in Stoat's line of work; as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. So, at election time, Palmer Stoat always advised his clients to hedge generously by donating large sums to all sides. The strategy was as immensely pragmatic as it was cynical. Stoat himself was registered independent, but he hadn't stepped inside a voting booth in fourteen years. He couldn't take the concept seriously; he knew too much.
Yet it was refreshing to hear the call girl go on so earnestly about the failure of affirmative action and the merit of prayer in public schools and the dangerous liberal assault on the Second Amendment. None of those subjects affected Palmer Stoat's life to the point that he'd formed actual opinions, but it was entertaining to meet someone who had, someone with no covert political agenda.
If only he'd been able to screw her, Erika the call girl. Or was it Estelle? Brightly Stoat thought: Now there's a candidate for an evening of fine wine and rhino powder. He reminded himself to reach out once more to the mysterious Mr. Yee in Panama City.
The ring of the telephone cleaved Stoat's cranium like a cutlass, and he lunged for the receiver. The sound of his wife's voice befuddled him. Maybe he was in the wrong house! If so, how had Desie found him?
"I didn't want you to worry," she was saying on the other end.
"Right." Stoat bolted upright and looked around the room, which he was relieved to recognize.
"I can explain," Desie was saying, an odd jittery edge in her tone.
"OK."
"But not right now," she said.
"Fine."
"Aren't you going to ask if I'm all right?"
"Yes, sweetie. I've been, huh, out of my mind wondering where you went."
An unreadable pause on the other end. Then, too sweetly, Desie saying, "Palmer?"
"Yes, hon."
"You didn't even know I was gone, did you?"
"Sure I did. It's just... see, I got home late and crashed in one of the guest bedrooms—"
"Sixteen hours."
"—so I wouldn't wake you up."
"Sixteen bloody hours!"
Stoat said, "What?"
"That's how long it's been."
"Christ. Where? Tell me what happened."
"You just got up, didn't you? Unbelievable." Now Desie sounded disgusted. "You were so smashed, you never bothered to check in the bedroom."
"Desie, I'll come get you right now. Tell me where."
But when she told him, he thought she was joking.
"An Amoco station in Bronson? Where the hell's Bronson?"
"Not far from Gainesville," Desie said. "That's where you should send the plane to pick me up."
"Now hold on—"
"It doesn't need to be, like, a jet. I'm sure one of your rich big-shot clients has something they can loan out. Did I mention I was kidnapped?"
Stoat felt bilious and fevered. Bobbling the phone, he sagged back on the pillows.
"It was a kidnapping, sort of," Desie was saying. "It's a long freaky story, Palmer."
"OK."
"But I did find Boodle."
"Hey, that's great." Stoat had almost forgotten about the missing dog. "How's the big guy doin'?"
"Fine. But there's a slight problem."
Stoat grunted. "Why am I not surprised."
Desie said, "I'll tell you everything when I see you."
"In Bronson," Stoat said weakly.
"No, Gainesville. Remember?"
"Right. Where I send the private plane."
Once they got some black coffee into Dr. Brinkman, he was able to pull himself together for a short tour of soon-to-be Shearwater Island.
Here's where the yacht harbor will be dredged. There's where the golf courses go. That's being cleared for the airstrip. And, everywhere else: homesites.
"Houses?" Desie asked.
"Very expensive houses," Brinkman said. "But also condominiums and town homes and even some year-round rentals. Duplexes and triplexes."
Twilly pulled off the road into the shade of some pine trees. "What's the tallest building they've got in the plans?" he asked Brinkman.
"Sixteen stories. There'll be one at each end of the island."
"Assholes," Twilly muttered.
Desie remarked on the multitude of peeling, bleached-out signs advertising other past projects. Brinkman said they'd all gone bust.
"But these new fellows have serious capital and serious financing," he added. "This time I think it's a done deal."
"Provided they get their bridge," said Twilly.
"Obviously."
"And your job here," Desie said to the biologist, "is what exactly?"
Brinkman told them about the field survey. "Basically a complete inventory," he explained, "of every living plant, animal and insect species on the island."
"Wow," said Desie.
Twilly snickered contemptuously. "Fuck 'wow.' Dr. Steve, please tell Mrs. Stoat why she shouldn't be so impressed."
"Well, because... " Brinkman looked uncomfortable. "Because it's fairly routine, a survey like this. More bureaucracy than science, if you want the truth. Sure, it makes us appear responsible and concerned, but the purpose isn't to figure out what trees and animals to save. The purpose is to make sure the developers don't run into a snail-darter type of crisis."
Desie looked to Twilly for elaboration.
"Endangered species," he told her. "That would be a showstopper, am I right, Dr. Steve? Shut down the whole works."
Brinkman nodded emphatically.
"And I'm guessing," Twilly continued, "that you finished your field study this week, and didn't come across anything like a snail darter or a spotted owl on this entire island. Nothing so rare that it would get in the way of the building permits. And I'm also guessing that's why you went out and got plastered last night, because you'd secretly been hoping to come across something, anything, to block this project—even an endangered gnat. Because you're probably a decent human being at heart, and you know exactly what's going to happen out here once these bastards get rolling."
In a voice raw with sadness, Brinkman said, "It's already started."
Then he took them into the upland woods to see what had become of the oak toads. Right away McGuinn started digging.
"Make him stop," Brinkman implored.
Desie hooked the dog to his leash and tugged him along. Twilly Spree walked ahead, kicking at the fresh-churned dirt, following the checkerboard tread marks of a large earth-moving machine. When they reached the area where the bulldozers were parked, Brinkman pointed and said: "That's the one I fell from. I was trying to get the darn thing started."
"What for?" Desie asked.
"I was drunk."
"That, we've established."
"I had a notion to destroy Mr. Clapley's billboard."
Twilly said, "He's the main guy?"
"Mr. Shearwater Island himself," said Brinkman. "Robert Clapley. I've never met the man, but he put up a huge sales sign. You must've seen it when you came across the old bridge. I suppose I was wondering what it might look like, that goddamn billboard, all busted to splinters."
Twilly said, "I could be persuaded to wonder the same thing."
"What about the frogs?" Desie asked. McGuinn was on the prowl again, jerking her around like a puppet.
"Toads." Steven Brinkman made a sweeping notion with one arm. "They buried them."
"Nice," said Twilly.
"Because Clapley's people g
ot it into their heads that they might be a problem later on, when the crews started clearing the island. They were afraid somebody like the Sierra Club would make a stink with the newspapers, because the toads were so small and there were so many. So Clapley's people decided to bulldoze 'em in advance, to play it safe."
Desie was watching Twilly closely. She said: "He's making this up, right?"
"I wish."
She said, "No, it's too awful."
"Well," said Brinkman, "you didn't hear it from me. We never spoke, OK?" He turned his back on them and slowly made his way into the pines. He walked with his head down, pausing every few steps as if he was searching for something.
Twilly said to Desie: "I've seen enough."
"You think he was on the level? I say he's still drunk."
"Turn the dog loose."
"I will not."
He pried the leash from her fist and unclipped it from McGuinn's collar. The Lab bounded to a hillock of freshly turned soil and began digging exuberantly, his shiny black rump waggling high. After a minute or so, Twilly told Desie to call him back. Twilly went over to the place where McGuinn had been digging and, with the toe of a shoe, finished the hole. Then he reached down and picked up a pearly gelatinous clot of mushed toads.
"Come here, Mrs. Stoat."
"No, I don't think so."
"You wanted proof, didn't you?"
But she was already running, McGuinn at her heels.
Later, in the car, Twilly told Desie it was time for her to go home. She wasn't prepared to argue. He dropped her at a gas station in Bronson and gave her two fifties for breakfast and clothes and a cab ride to Gainesville. So she wouldn't be walking around half-naked, Twilly purchased a plastic raincoat from a vending machine. The raincoat was bright yellow and folded into a kit no larger than a pack of Camels. Desie unwrapped it and, without a word, slipped it on.
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.