Carl Hiaasen – Sick Puppy

As the rhinoceros thundered on a straight line between them, Clapley and Stoat swung their gun barrels to lead the beast, as they would a dove on the wing. Except, of course, they were not aiming upward, but level.

“Hold your fire!” Durgess shouted, strictly for the record.

That night, drinking heavily at a bar in Mclntosh, neither he nor Asa Lando would be able to say which of the fools had fired first. Judging by the stereophonic roar of gunfire—and the instantaneous results—Robert Clapley and Palmer Stoat could have pulled their triggers simultaneously. Both of them completely missed the rhinoceros, naturally, and both went down very hard—Clapley, from the Weatherby’s bone-jarring recoil; Stoat, from a combination of recoil and shrapnel.

Reconstructing the split-second mishap wasn’t easy but, with some help from Master Jack Daniel, Durgess and Asa Lando would conclude that Stoat’s slug must have struck the trunk of the oak at the instant Clapley’s slug struck Stoat’s Winchester, which more or less exploded in Stoat’s arms. At that point the lobbyist was not dead, although his right shoulder had been seriously pulped by splintered gun stock.

Asa Lando would recall looking down from the tree and seeing Stoat, hatless and dazed, struggling to his knees. Likewise, Durgess would remember helping Robert Clapley to an identical position, so that the two hunters were facing each other like rival prairie dogs. But the guides well knew that Stoat wasn’t staring at Clapley, and Clapley wasn’t staring at Stoat—both men were scanning intently for a fresh rhinoceros corpse.

“You missed,” Durgess informed Clapley.

“What?” Clapley’s ears ringing from the gunshot.

“Mr. Stoat missed, too,” Durgess added, by way of consolation.

“What?”

As Durgess stood up to scout for the runaway rhino, he heard frantic shouting from high in the live oak: Asa Lando, trying to warn him. The ground under Durgess’s boots began to shake—that’s what he would talk about later.

Like a damn earthquake, Asa. Could you feel it, too?

The rhinoceros had cut back unexpectedly and now was rumbling up from behind the scattered hunting party; prey turned predator. There was no time to flee. Asa squawked from the tree. Palmer Stoat spit his broken cigar and gaped. Durgess dove for Robert Clapley but Clapley wasn’t there; he was down on all fours, scrambling after his rifle. Helplessly Durgess rolled himself into a ball and waited to be crushed. Beneath him the earth was coming unsprung, a demonic trampoline.

Durgess felt the rhinoceros blow past like a steam locomotive, wheezing and huffing. He peeked up in time to see an outstretched black shape silhouetted briefly against the creamy pink sky, and to feel Labrador toenails scuff his forehead. Durgess decided he was in no hurry to get up, a decision reinforced by the sound of Clapley shrieking.

The guide would remember remaining motionless until hearing a man’s heavy footsteps, and feeling a shadow settle over him. He would remember rocking up slowly, expecting to see Asa, but facing instead a bearded apparition with a gleaming grin and a molten red eye that might have been plucked from the skull of the devil himself.

“We’ve come for the dog,” the apparition said.

While being dragged to safety, the governor lost the tender scabs on his buttocks. By the time the bodyguards got him to the Suburban, he had bled through his khaki trousers—the word shame appearing chimerically across his ass, like stigmata. If Willie Vasquez-Washington noticed, he didn’t say so. He and Dick Artemus were hustled into the backseat. The FDLE agents hopped up front, locked the doors and radioed for a helicopter and ambulances.

Riding back to the lodge, the governor looked drained and shaken, his great cliff of silver hair now a tornadic nest. He sank low in the seat. Willie Vasquez-Washington rode ramrod-straight, a fervent amazement on his face.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Did you see that!”

“Willie?”

“Those poor fuckers.”

“Willie!”

“Yeah?”

“I was never here. You were never here.” The governor placed a clammy hand on Willie Vasquez-Washington’s knee. “Can we agree on that?”

The vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. With his other hand he touched a button on the Nikkormat, still hanging from his neck, and set off the automatic rewind. The hum from a swarm of wasps would not have been more unsettling to Dick Artemus.