That wasPalmer Stoat's world. Those were his people. This other sicko shit, it had to stop. It wouldstop, too, once Porcupine Head tracked down the creep who was holding poor Boodle.
Stoat opened the top drawer of his desk and found a favorite stack of sex Polaroids. He had taken them in Paris, while he and Desie were on a weeklong junket paid for by a multinational rock-mining conglomerate. There wasn't much of Desie to be seen in the photographs – here a thigh, there a shoulder – but it was enough to give her husband a pang in his heart and a tingle in his groin. Where the hell was she?
Palmer Stoat noticed the message light blinking on his answering machine. He punched the play button and leaned back. The first message was from Robert Clapley, sounding uncharacteristically edgy and out of breath.
"It's about that rhino powder," he said on the tape. "Call me right away, Palmer. Soon as you get this message!"
The second call, thirty minutes later, also from Clapley: "Palmer, you there? I gotta talk to you. It's the Barbies, they're ... Call me,OK? No matter how late."
The third message on Stoat's machine was from Desie. When he heard her voice, he quickly rocked forward and turned up the volume.
"Palmer, I'm all right. I'm going to be gone for a few days. I just need some time away. Please don't worry, uh ... we'll talk when I get home, OK?"
She didn't sound upset or frightened. She sounded perfectly calm. But there was something quite alarming on the tape – a noise in the background. It happened the moment before Desie said good-bye.
Palmer Stoat listened to the message three times, to be sure. The noise was familiar and unmistakable: a dog barking.
Not just any dog, either. It was Boodle.
Stoat moaned and pressed his fleshy knuckles to his forehead. Now the sick bastard had gone and snatched his wife!
Again.
On a warm breezy morning in late April, twelve Japanese men and women stepped from an air-conditioned charter bus that had parked on the shoulder of a two-lane road in North Key Largo. The travelers paired off and climbed into half a dozen candy-colored canoes. Under a creamy porcelain sky they began paddling down a winding creek called Steamboat toward Barnes Sound, where they planned to eat box lunches and turn around. The entire trip was supposed to take four hours, but the canoeists went missing for almost three days. Eventually they were found trudging along County Road 905 in the dead of night and, except for a few scrapes and insect bites, were all found to be in excellent health. Oddly, though, they refused to tell police what had happened to them, and fled from reporters seeking interviews.
The men and women were employed by MatsibuCom, one of Tokyo's most prolific construction companies. Timber being scarce and exorbitant in Japan, MatsibuCom imported millions of board feet annually from the United States; specifically, Montana and Idaho, where entire mountains had been clear-cut, essentially razed down to dusty bald domes, for the purpose of enhancing Tokyo's skyline and, not incidentally, MatsibuCom's profit margin. Having weathered Asia's financial upheaval in relatively robust shape, the company rewarded a dozen of its top executives with a group vacation to Florida. They would begin the week at unavoidable Walt Disney World and finish down in the Keys, at the upscale (and safely Republican) Ocean Reef Club. Ironically, the MatsibuCom executives expressed an interest in ecotourism activities, and so the Steamboat Creek canoe trip was arranged. The men and women were told they might come across manatees, indigo snakes, bald eagles and perhaps even the elusive North American crocodile (which lived in the mangrove lakes and grew to a length of fourteen feet). Many rolls of film were purchased in anticipation.
When the Japanese failed to return on time from the expedition, an intense search was launched using ultralight planes, airboats, skiffs and swamp buggies. Governor Dick Artemus even dispatched a pair of state helicopters to assist (a modest favor, in his view, compared to the free membership he'd been given at Ocean Reef on the day of his inauguration). Meanwhile, Florida tourism officials gloomily pondered how many millennia it would take for the industry to recover if it came to pass that twelve foreign business executives had been devoured by crocodiles – or perished under some equally horrific circumstances – while vacationing in the Sunshine State.
Publicly, authorities stuck to the theory that the Japanese visitors were "lost" in the mangrove creek system, although reporters found no shortage of locals who were both skeptical and happy to be quoted. Steamboat Creek was about as complicated to navigate as Interstate 95, and a thousand times safer. Fear of foul play rose with the ominous discovery of the missing canoes, shot full of holes and strung together with blue ski rope. The canoes had been hung off the Card Sound Bridge to dangle and spin high over the Intracoastal Waterway, like the baubled tail of an oversized kite. Boaters stopped to snap pictures until police showed up and hastily cut down the rope. The spectacle of the bullet-riddled boats all but vanquished hopes that the MatsibuCom executives would be found safe.
It now appeared that they'd been abducted by either psychopaths or terrorists – a far more devastating scenario, publicity-wise, than a simple crocodile attack. A dour-faced contingent from the Japanese consulate in Miami arrived by private jet at Ocean Reef, where they were given a suite of waterfront rooms and unlimited long-distance privileges. Meanwhile, in Washington, a team of FBI forensic experts already had packed for the trip to Florida – they awaited only the somber phone call, reporting that the decomposing bodies had been located.
Then the dozen Japanese canoeists surprised everybody by turning up alive, unharmed and closemouthed. By daybreak on April 30, the MatsibuCom men and women were on a chartered Gulfstream 5, speeding back to Tokyo. The local press milked what it could from the ecotour-gone-awry angle, but in the absence of first-person quotes (and corpses), the story faded quickly from the headlines.
Lt. Jim Tile had heard about it before it made the TV news; the state Highway Patrol sent five road troopers and its top K-9 unit to join the search for the important visitors. The discovery of the canoes – and the emphatic manner in which they'd been sabotaged and strung up for display – confirmed Jim Tile's suspicions about the incident on Steamboat Creek. He was hopeful the Japanese would remain silent, so that no other authorities would make the connection. Obviously Dick Artemus had not. Jim Tile purposely hadn't shared his theory about the ecotour abduction with the governor during their brief meeting in Tallahassee.
That afternoon, though, the trooper dialed the voice-mail number they customarily used to trade messages – he and his friend, the long-ago governor – and was annoyed to find the line disconnected. So he packed an overnight bag, kissed Brenda good-bye and drove south nonstop, virtually the full length of the state. The sun had been up an hour by the time he arrived at the gatehouse of the Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo. The trooper was admitted to the premises by a surly young security guard who apparently had failed the rudimentary knuckle-dragging literacy quiz required to join regular police departments. The guard reluctantly escorted Jim Tile to the club's executive offices, where – after producing a letter of introduction from the attorney general – the trooper was permitted to examine a roll of film that had been found in a camera bag left behind by one of the Japanese canoeists.
The film had been developed into a black-and-white contact sheet by the local sheriff's lab technician, who had understandably failed to recognize its evidentiary value: Thirty-five of the thirty-six frames were dominated by a blurred finger in the foreground – not an uncommon phenomenon, when a 35-mm camera was placed in the excitable hands of a tourist. But, to Jim Tile, the finger in the snapshots from Steamboat Creek did not appear to be the wayward pinkie of a slightly built Japanese business executive, but rather the fleshy, hairy, crooked, scarred-up middle digit of a six-foot-six Anglo-American hermit with a furious sense of humor.