Twilly had spent the day in Gainesville at the University of Florida veterinary college, reputedly one of the best in the country. Many famous nature parks and zoos, including the one at Walt Disney World, sent their dead animals there to be necropsied. Twilly had gone to deliver a red-shouldered hawk that appeared to have been shot. The bird had fallen on a remote patch of beach at a place called Madeira Bay, in Everglades National Park. Twilly had bubble-wrapped the broken body and placed it on dry ice in a cooler. He'd made the drive from Flamingo to Gainesville in less than seven hours. He hoped the bullet had remained in the bird, because the bullet was a key to resolving the crime.
Which wasn't exactly the same thing as solving it. Knowing the caliber of the weapon would have been useful: something to file away in case the shooter returned to the park and was foolish enough to let himself get stalked, captured and lashed naked for a month to a mangrove tree.
Twilly Spree wasn't a park ranger or a wildlife biologist or even an amateur birdwatcher. He was an unemployed twenty-six-year-old college dropout with a brief but spectacular history of psychological problems. Not incidentally, he also had inherited millions of dollars.
At the veterinary school, Twilly found a young doctor who agreed to do a postmortem on the hawk, which had in fact succumbed to a single gunshot wound. Unfortunately the slug had passed cleanly through the bird's breast, leaving no fragments, no clues, only blood-crusted feathers. Twilly thanked the young doctor for trying. He filled out a form for the U.S. government stating where he had found the dead hawk, and under what circumstances. At the bottom of the paper he signed his name as "Thomas Stearns Eliot, Jr." Then Twilly got in his black pickup truck and drove south. He intended to return directly to the Everglades, where he had been living in a pup tent with a three-legged bobcat.
On the turnpike somewhere south of Kissimmee, Twilly came up behind a pearl-colored Range Rover. Normally he wouldn't have paid attention to the style of the vehicle, but this one had a vanity plate that said in green capital letters: cojones. As Twilly swung into the passing lane, a Burger King hamburger carton flew out the driver's window of the Rover. Next came an empty cup and then a wadded paper napkin, followed by another hamburger carton.
Twilly put a heel on the brake, steered his truck to the shoulder of the highway and waited for a gap in traffic. Then he sprinted into the road and picked up the litter, piece by piece, depositing it in the cab of his truck. Afterward it took him only a few miles to catch up with the pig in the Range Rover; Twilly got behind him and camped there, contemplating his options. He thought about what his therapists would recommend, what his former teachers would say, what his mother would suggest. They were indisputably mature and sensible people, but their advice often proved useless to Twilly Spree. He remained baffled by their outlook on the world, as they were baffled by his.
All Twilly could see of the litterbug was the man's shoulders and the top of his head. To Twilly, it seemed like an exceptionally large head, but possibly this was an illusion caused by the cowboy-style hat. Twilly doubted that an authentic cowboy would be caught dead in a pearl-colored, fifty-thousand-dollar, foreign-made SUV with vanity tags that celebrated the size of his testicles, in espanol.Nor, Twilly thought, would a true cowboy ever toss hamburger wrappers out the window. No, that would be the work of a garden-variety asshole ...
Suddenly the Range Rover cut ahead of a slow-moving travel camper, then vectored sharply off the highway at the Yeehaw Junction exit. Twilly followed toward the toll plaza before switching to the exact-change lane, and scooting past. Then he drove across State Road 60 to I-95 and headed at imprudent speeds toward Fort Pierce, where he again hooked up with the turnpike southbound. He parked in the shade of an overpass, raised the hood of the pickup and waited. Twenty minutes later the Rover sped by, and Twilly resumed the pursuit. This time he stayed farther back. He still had no plan but at least he had a clearly defined mission. When the litterbug flicked a cigar butt out the window, Twilly didn't bother to stop. Biodegradable., he thought. Onward and upward.
2
After three glasses of wine, Desie could no longer pretend to be following her husband's account of the canned rhinoceros hunt. Across the table she appraised Palmer Stoat as if he were a mime. His fingers danced and his mouth moved, but nothing he said reached her ears. She observed him in two dimensions, as if he were an image on a television screen: an animated middle-aged man with a slight paunch, thin blond hair, reddish eyebrows, pale skin, upcurled lips and vermilion-splotched cheeks (from too much sun or too much alcohol). Palmer had a soft neck but a strong chiseled chin, the surgical scars invisible in the low light. His teeth were straight and polished, but his smile had a twist of permanent skepticism. To Desie, her husband's nose had always appeared too small for his face; a little girl's nose, really, although he insisted it was the one he'd been born with. His blue eyes also seemed tiny, though quick and bright with self-confidence. His face was, in the way of prosperous ex-jocks, roundish and pre-jowly and companionable. Desie wouldn't have called Stoat a hunk but he was attractive in that gregarious southern frat-boy manner, and he had overwhelmed her with favors and flattery and constant attention. Later she realized that the inexhaustible energy with which Palmer had pursued their courtship was less a display of ardor than an ingrained relentlessness; it was how he went after anything he wanted. They dated for four weeks and then got married on the island of Tortola. Desie supposed she had been in a fog, and now the fog was beginning to lift. What in the world had she done? She pushed the awful question out of her mind, and when she did she was able to hear Palmer's voice again.
"Some creepo was tailing me," he was saying, "for like a hundred miles."
"Why?"
Her husband snorted. "To rob my lily-white ass, that's why."
"This was a black guy?" Desie asked.
"Or a Cuban. I couldn't see which," Stoat said, "but I tell you what, sweets, I was ready for the sonofabitch. Senor Glock was in my lap, locked and loaded."
"On the turnpike. Palmer?"
"He would have been one stone-dead mother."
"Just like your rhino," Desie said. "By the way, are you getting her stuffed like the others?"
"Mounted," Stoat corrected. "And just the head."
"Lovely. We can hang it over the bed."
"Speaking of which, guess what they're doing with rhinoceros horns."
"Who's they?" Desie asked.
"Asians and such."
Desie knew, but she let Palmer tell the story. He concluded with Durgess's fanciful rumor of two-day erections.
"Can you imagine!" Stoat hooted.
Desie shook her head. "Who'd even want one of those?"
"Maybe youmight, someday." He winked.
Desie glanced around for the waiter. Where was dinner? How could it take so long to boil pasta?
Stoat poured himself another glass of wine. "Rhino horns, Holy Christ on a ten-speed. What next, huh?"
"That's why poachers are killing them off," his wife said.
"Yeah?"
"That's why they're almost extinct. God, Palmer, where have you been?"
"Working for a living. So you can sit home, paint your toenails and learn all about endangered species on the Discovery Channel."
Desie said, "Try the New York Times."
"Well, pardon me." Stoat sniffed sarcastically. "I read the newspaper today, oh boy."
This was one of her husband's most annoying habits, dropping the lyrics of old rock songs into everyday conversation. Palmer thought it clever, and perhaps it wouldn't have bothered Desie so much if occasionally he got the words right, but he never did. Though Desie was much younger, she was familiar with the work of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and so on. In college she had worked two summers at a Sam Goody outlet.