“You were home free, Fido. Then you had to go and fart.”
Desie cried out and threw both arms around the Lab’s trunk-like neck.
For several moments, nobody moved. A piney breeze rushed through the open windows of the Roadmaster. Twilly hoped it might refresh Mr. Gash and cool his fury.
It did not. He cocked the hammer.
“Back to Plan A,” he said.
Twilly dove across the seat and slammed his right fist into Mr. Gash’s rib cage, the nearest availing target. The punch didn’t land right—Twilly had expected the sting of bone against bone but the impact was softer, as if he’d slugged a sofa. He could not have foreseen that Mr. Gash would be wearing, beneath the jacket, holster and long-sleeved shirt, a padded corset of cured rattlesnake hides.
The device had been fashioned by the same Washington Avenue upholstery wizard who’d customized Mr. Gash’s iguana-skin sex harness. Why Mr. Gash would don a corset undergarment was a question Twilly never would get to ask. The answer: The killer had a vain streak when it came to his physique. He was driven to take measures that artificially streamlined his midsection, which in recent years had shown signs of incipient tubbiness—an unnerving development that Mr. Gash bitterly blamed on the dull sedentary lifestyle of a hit man. It was an occupation that neither required nor allowed much physical exercise; plane trips, car rides, endless stakeouts in motel rooms and bars. For Mr. Gash, already self-conscious about his short stature, the sight of a marbled, thickening belly was intolerable. A discreetly tailored corset seemed a good temporary solution, at least until he found time to join a spa. And because he lived on South Beach, not just any corset would do. Yet that’s all Mr. Gash could find when he went shopping: starchy medical corsets, white or beige; no colors, no patterns. Mr. Gash wanted something with elan, something that didn’t look like a flab-binding swathe, something he wouldn’t be ashamed to display when stripping off his clothes for the women he took home, something intriguing enough to divert their eyes away from his gelatinous tummy.
Snakeskin was the obvious choice. With snakeskin you couldn’t go wrong anywhere on Ocean Drive. Mr. Gash had chosen Eastern diamondback because the women who consented to go home with him typically were danger freaks and would therefore (Mr. Gash reasoned) be more aroused by the remains of a venomous serpent than those of a common boa or python. And over time the rattlesnake-hide corset had served Mr. Gash very well, both socially and cosmetically. When he wasn’t wearing it, he felt shy and bloated—and, oddly, shorter! Without the corset, Mr. Gash would not have fit comfortably (or even attempted to fit) into his trademark houndstooth ensemble.
None of this was known to Twilly Spree. All he knew was that he hit the man with an exceptionallygood punch and that the man sagged but did not keel, gulped but did not cry out, grimaced but did not roll his eyes in the manner of the soon-to-be unconscious. So Twilly clutched Mr. Gash desperately around the waist, struggling to flip him backward and get at the gun. That’s when a bomb went off in Twilly’s right eardrum, and white-hot starbursts exploded in his eye sockets. He hoped it was the beginning of another dream, but it wasn’t.
23
The breeze felt good. More important to McGuinn, it tasted good; a tantalizing smorgasbord for doggy senses. There was the tangy trace of boar raccoon, the musky whiff of mother opossum, the familiar fumes of randy tomcat—and a host of intriguing new woodland scents that required immediate investigation. The night beckoned McGuinn and, once the dog food was gone, he saw no reason not to answer the call. Except for Desie.
Desie kept hugging him, and nothing in the world was more pleasurable to a Labrador retriever than the cooing affection of a female human. They smelled fantastic! So McGuinn was torn between the primal urge to prowl and mark territory and the not-so-primal urge to be coddled and stroked.
The gunshot clinched it—so loud it made him jump, yet nevertheless triggering one of the few learned responses to have lodged for more than a day or two in his quicksand memory. A gunshot meant McGuinn was supposed to run! This he explicitly recalled from all those frosty dawns in the marsh with Palmer Stoat. A gunshot meant ducks falling from the sky! Warm, wet, tasty ducks! Ducks to be scented out and snapped floating from the pond, carried off at a gallop to be eagerly gnawed upon until hollering male humans up and snatched them away. That’s what gunfire meant to McGuinn.