It would have taken only one had Stoat not been bowled off his feet by the pack of fourteen half-starved hounds that Durgess had deployed to tree the exhausted cat. While falling, Stoat had squeezed off two wild rounds that struck a hapless grackle and a cabbage palm, respectively. These colorful details were not shared with rapt Estella.
“Tell me about Africa,” she said, pursing her painted lips to launch a halo of blue smoke.
“Africa. Yes.” Most everything he knew about Africa came from National Geographic TV specials.
“Where did you go to ‘bag’ this lion—Kenya?”
“That’s right. Kenya.” Stoat ran a dry tongue across his lips, dawbing at the honeyed sheen of Johnnie Walker. “Africa is… amazing,” he ventured. “Incredible.”
“Oh, I’d give anything to go there someday.” Estella said it dreamily, with a shake of her hair.
Balancing a drink in one hand, Stoat carefully pivoted on his side and fitted himself to the slope of her bottom, spoon-style. “It’s so big,” he said quietly. “Africa is.”
“Big. Yes.” Estella arched seductively and Stoat deftly drew back, so as not to ignite her multi-hued locks with his cigar.
“Sweetheart, it would take years to see it all.”
“We should go together, Palmer. You could hunt and I could go antiquing,” she said. “No charge for the sex, either. You pay for my plane tickets, the nookie is free.”
Stoat was tempted to say yes. God knows he needed to get away. And as soon as the legislature finished its final bit of nonsense next week… well, why not a safari vacation to Africa? By the time he returned, the movers would have cleaned out Desie’s stuff and the house would feel like his own again. Stoat could begin remodeling for bachelorhood. (He had changed his mind about moving; it would take years to find a place with such an ideal trophy room.)
“Let me see what I can do with my schedule,” he told Estella, meaning he first wanted to float the Africa idea past his preferred choice of an overseas companion, the Pamela Anderson look-alike from Pube’s. At the moment Stoat could not recall her Christian name, though he was sure he’d copied it on a cocktail napkin and saved it in his billfold.
“What’s that empty spot?” Estella, pointing at a conspicuous space on the animal wall.
“That’s for my black rhino. I bagged it a couple weeks ago.”
“A rhinoceros!”
“Magnificent beast,” Palmer Stoat said, taking a prodigious drag. “You’ll see for yourself, when the mount is finished.”
“You went back to Africa? When was this?” Estella asked. “How come you never told me?”
“That’s because we’re always talking politics, babe. Anyway, it was a quickie trip, just for a couple days,” he added dismissively. “I believe it was the same weekend you went to that Quayle-for-President brunch.”
She wriggled around to face him on the lion skin. “Let me get this straight. You went all the way to Kenya for a weekend? God, you must really love to hunt.”
“Oh, I do. And I’m going back Saturday.” Instantly, Stoat was sorry he’d said it.
Estella sat up excitedly, sloshing scotch on both of them. “Can I go, too, Palmer? Please?”
“No, honey, it’s business this time. I’m taking along an important client. I promised him a rhino like mine.”
“Aw, come on. I’ll stay out of your way.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.”
“Then bring me back a nice present, all right? And not just cheapo beads or a grass skirt. A cool wood carving, or maybe—I know!—a Masai spear.”
“Consider it done.” Stoat, thinking dismally: Where am I going to find something like that in Ocala, Florida?
“Wow. All the way to Africa.” Estella raised her violet-rimmed lashes to the long wall of stuffed animal heads and laminated fish—Stoat’s prize trophies. She said: “I’ve never even fired a cap pistol, Palmer, but every year I give a little money to the NRA. I am totally behind the Second Amendment.”
“Me, too. As you can tell.” Stoat airily swept his arm toward the blank-eyed taxidermy. “Like the song says, happiness is a hot gun.”
Estella smiled inquisitively. “I don’t think I ever heard that one.”
27
Krimmler couldn’t sleep.