“Damn,” Mr. Gash rasped. “That’s cold.”
From Twilly’s vantage, the bony white ankles looked like aspen saplings. He clasped a hand around each one and jerked. The killer went down hard and unquietly. McGuinn retreated, moon-howling in confusion.
Twilly wriggled from under the car and hurled himself upon the thrashing Mr. Gash. The resulting splatter of muck glooped uncannily into Twilly’s good eye, completing his decline to full sightlessness. Wild punches landed harmlessly upon the brawny arms and shoulders of Mr. Gash, who simply bucked Twilly aside, raised his gun and fired.
This time Twilly knew it for a fact: He was shot. The slug slammed into the right side of his chest and knocked him goony. He didn’t fall so much as fold.
He heard the wind blowing. Desie sobbing. That weird sleigh-bell jingling in the trees. His own heart pounding.
Twilly believed he could even hear the blood squirting from the hole in his ribs.
And a strange new voice, possibly imaginary.
“I’ll take it from here,” it said, very deeply.
“What? Like hell you will.” That was Mr. Gash, the killer.
“The boy comes with me.”
“Ha! Pops, I should’ve shot your ass, back up the road. Now get the fuck outta here.”
“Mister, run! Go get help! Please.” That would be Desie.
“Shut up, Mrs. Stoat”—the killer again—”while I blow this sorry old fart’s head off.”
“I said, the boy’s mine.” The deep voice, astoundingly calm.
“You mental or what? I guess maybe so,” Mr. Gash said. “Whatever. It’s just one more dead troublemaker to me.”
Twilly felt himself sliding away, as if he were on a raft spinning languidly downriver. If this was dying, it wasn’t half-bad. And if it was only a dream, he had no desire to awaken. Twenty-six years of unspent dreams is what they owed him.
On impulse he decided to summon McGuinn—a dog was always good company on a river.
“I said, the boy is mine. ”
Who’s he talking about? Twilly wondered. What boy?
He also wondered why he could no longer hear himself whistling, why suddenly he couldn’t hear anything at all.
24
“What is it you want, Willie?”
The age-old question. Palmer Stoat tinkled the ice cubes in his glass and awaited a reply from the vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
“You and your rude-ass manners,” Willie Vasquez-Washington said. “Man, I’ll tell you what I want. I want the Honorable Richard Artemus to not fuck with my spring snow skiing, Palmer. I want to be in Canada next week. I do not want to be in Tallahassee for some bullshit ‘special session.’ ”
“Now, Willie, it’s too late—”
“Don’t ‘now Willie’ me. This isn’t about the schools budget, amigo, it’s about that dumb-ass bridge to that dumb-ass Cracker island, which I thought—no, which you told me !—was all ironed out a few weeks ago. And then… ” Willie Vasquez-Washington paused to sip his Long Island iced tea. “Then your Governor Dick goes and vetoes the item. His own baby! Why?”
Palmer Stoat responded with his standard you-don’t-really-want-to-know roll of the eyes. They were sitting at the bar in Swain’s, the last place on the planet where Stoat wanted to retell the squalid dognapping saga. After all, it was here the lunatic had sent the infamous phantom paw. The bartender was even rumored to have named a new drink after it, to Stoat’s mortification.
“Fine. Don’t tell me,” said Willie Vasquez-Washington. “But guess what? It ain’t my problem, Palmer.”
“Hey, you got your inner-city community center.”
“Don’t start with that.”
“Excuse me. Community Outreach Center,” said Stoat. “Nine million bucks, wasn’t it?”
“Backoff!”
“Look, all I’m saying… ” The lobbyist dropped his voice, for he did not wish to appear to be insulting an Afro-Haitian-Hispanic-Asian-Native American, or any combination thereof (assuming Willie Vasquez-Washington was telling the truth about at least one of the many minorities he professed to be). In any case, the upscale cigar-savoring clientele at Swain’s was relentlessly Anglo-Saxon, so the presence of a person of color (especially one as impeccably attired as Representative Vasquez-Washington) raised almost as many eyebrows as had the sight of the severed Labrador paw.
“Willie, all I’m saying,” Palmer Stoat continued, “is that the governor kept his end of the deal. He did right by you. Can’t you help him out of this one lousy jam? These were circumstances beyond his control.”