Palmer Stoat opened the note:

Mr. Yee called from Panama City about your "vitamins. " Also, Jorge from Ocean BMW – they'll have another ragtop by Monday. This time be more careful where you park it!

Stoat's hands were shaky when he put down the napkin. He scanned the bar: no sign of the boat guy. Stoat flipped open his cell phone, dialed the nonlisted number to his den, and punched in the numeric code of his answering machine. The first two messages, recorded on the same morning he'd flown to Tallahassee, were exactly as described in the boat guy's note. Mr. Yee – Durgess's elusive rhino-horn connection – had finally returned Stoat's call. (Without Desie's knowledge, Stoat intended to score some of that magic erection powder; he was scheming some wild recreation for his next business trip.) And the second phone message on the machine was indeed from the BMW salesman, a young go-getter named Jorge Hernandez.

Spooky, Stoat thought. Either the boat guy pirated my phone code or he's been snooping inside my house. Stoat laid a twenty on the bar and raced home. Once inside the front door, he sidestepped the dog and hurried to his den. The room did not appear ransacked, and none of the personal items on his desk had been taken or moved out of place.

Then Palmer Stoat noticed the polished glass eyeballs, arranged in a pentagram star. The geometry was so flawless that it appealed in an occult way to Stoat's obsession with neatness and order. (The inverse manifestation of this fetish was a compulsion to jettison all traces of potential untidiness – every scrap of trash, waste or rubbish – with no regard for the consequences. It's what made Stoat the impenitent litterbug he was.)

So he did not disturb the mystery pentagram. Slowly he raised his face to look at the walls; at the stuffed lynx, the timber wolf, the mule deer, the bighorn ram, the elk, the marlin, the tarpon, the peacock bass. Stoat stared at all of them, but they weren't staring back.

Twilly Spree had a habit of falling in love with any woman who was nice enough to sleep with him. One was named Mae, and she was ten years older. She had straight straw-blond hair, and caramel freckles from her cheeks to her ankles. Her family was wealthy, and she showed an endearing lack of interest in Twilly's inheritance. He likely would have married her, except for the fact she was already married to a businessman in Singapore. Mae filed for divorce three days after meeting Twilly, but the lawyers said it would take years for her to get free, since her spouse avoided the United States and therefore could not be served with papers. Having nothing else to do, Twilly got on a plane and flew to Singapore and met briefly with Mac's husband, who quickly arranged for Twilly to be beaten up, arrested in a brothel and deported. After Twilly was returned to Florida, he said in all innocence to Mae: "What'd you ever see in a creep like that?"

Mae and Twilly lived together five months. She said she wanted him to help her become a free spirit. Twilly had heard the same line from other girlfriends. Without him asking, Mae gave up her bridge league and her Wednesday pedicures and took up the mandolin and bromeliads. Mac's father became concerned and flew down from Sag Harbor to check Twilly out. Mae's father was a retired executive from the Ford Motor Company, and was almost single-handedly responsible for ruining the Mustang. To test Twilly's character, he invited him to a skeet range and placed a 12-gauge Remington in his hands. Twilly knocked down everything they tossed up. Mae's father said, Sure, but can you hunt? He took Twilly to a quail plantation in Alabama, and Twilly shot the first four birds they jumped. Then Twilly set the gun in the grass and said, That's plenty. Mae's father said, What the hell's the matter with you, we're just getting warmed up.

And Twilly said, I can't eat more than four birds so what's the point?

The point, thundered Mae's father, isn't the eating. It's the sport of it!

Is that so? Twilly said.

To shoot something fast and beautiful out of the sky, Mae's father told him. That's the essence of it!

Now I see, said Twilly.

And that evening, as Mae's father's chartered King Air took off from a rural Montgomery airport, somebody hiding in the trees with a semiautomatic rifle neatly stitched an X pattern in one wing, rupturing a fuel bladder and forcing the plane to turn back for an emergency landing. The sniper was never found, but Mae's father went on a minor rampage to the authorities. And while he ultimately failed in his efforts to see Twilly Spree prosecuted, he succeeded in convincing his daughter that she had taken up with a homicidal madman. For a while Twilly missed Mac's company, but he took satisfaction in knowing he'd made his point emphatically with her father, that the man definitely got the connection between his own vanities and the Swiss-cheese holes that appeared in his airplane.

And, really, that was the most Twilly ever hoped for, that the bastards would get the message. Most of them did.

But not the litterbug. Twilly decided he'd been too subtle with Palmer Stoat; the man needed things spelled out plainly, possibly more than once. For days Twilly tailed him, and wherever Stoat went, he continued to toss garbage out the car window. Twilly was weary of picking up after him.

One afternoon Stoat and his wife returned from a senator's wedding in Jacksonville and found a note under a windshield wiper of the Range Rover. The note said: "Quit trashing the planet, fuckwad." Stoat gave a puzzled shrug and showed Desie. Then he crumpled the note and dropped it on the pavement of the parking garage.

When Stoat sat down in his sport-utility vehicle, he was aghast to find it full of dung beetles. One pullulating mass covered the tops of his shoes, while a second wave advanced up the steering column. Massing on the dashboard was a third platoon, shiny brown shells clacking together like ball bearings.

Despite appearances, dung beetles actually are harmless, providing a unique and invaluable service at the cellar of the food chain; that is, the prodigious consumption of animal waste. Worshiped by ancient Egyptians, the insects are almost as dearly regarded by modern cattle ranchers. In all there are more than seven thousand known species of dung beetles, without which the earth would literally smother in excrement. This true fact would not have been properly appreciated by Palmer Stoat, who couldn't tell a ladybug from a cockroach (which is what he feared had infested his Range Rover). He yelped and slapped at his thighs and burst from the vehicle as if shot from a cannon.

Desie, who had been standing in wait for her husband to unlock the passenger door, observed his athletic exit with high interest. In a flash she produced her cellular phone, but Palmer whisked it from her hand. No cops! he exclaimed. I don't want to read about this in the newspapers. Desie wondered what made him think such nonsense would rate press attention.

On his own phone Palmer Stoat summoned an exterminator, who used a canister-styled vacuum to remove the bugs from the Range Rover – a total approaching three thousand, had anyone endeavored to count them. To Desie, they sounded like pebbles being sucked through the hose. After consulting an illustrated field guide, the exterminator correctly identified the intruders.

"A what?" Desie asked.

"Dung beetle. A common bovine dung beetle."

"Let me guess," Desie said dryly, "how they get their name."

"Yes, it's true," the exterminator acknowledged.

Stoat scowled. "What're you saying? You saying they eat shit?"

And still he missed the whole damn point.