Ruefully his eyes fell on the camera. “You got some pictures, huh?”
Willie Vasquez-Washington nodded. “A whole roll.”
“Color or black-and-white?”
“Oh, color.”
Dick Artemus turned and stared straight ahead. Just then, a white-tailed buck crashed out of the cabbage palms and entered the path in front of the truck. The agent who was driving stomped the accelerator and swerved expertly around the deer.
“Nice move!” Willie Vasquez-Washington cheered, bouncing in the seat.
The governor never flinched, never blinked.
“Willie,” he said, wearily.
“Yeah?”
“What is it you want?”
Twilly Spree tried to go after McGuinn but he was chased down and tackled by Clinton Tyree, who whispered in his ear: “Let it happen, son.”
Said it with such a startling serenity that Twilly understood, finally, what sustained the man—an indefatigable faith that Nature eventually settles all scores, sets all things straight.
So they let the dog go, then watched as the rhinoceros snorted to action. It ran halfway up the slope before turning back toward the hunting party, which dissolved in bedlam. Viewed from the bank of the knoll, the debacle unfolded with eerie, slow-motion inevitability—the two idiots swinging their rifles as the beleaguered rhino attempted to cut between them, a triangulated aim turning linear and deadly. And when the shots rang out, it indeed appeared that Palmer Stoat and Robert Clapley had managed to blast one another in a brainless cross fire.
Skink and Twilly were quite surprised to see both men lever to their knees. They were somewhat less surprised to see the rhino swing around once more, this time charging blind from behind the shooters.
Skink sucked in his breath. “Say good night, Gracie.”
Clapley was groping inanely in the grass when the rhinoceros scooped him up at a full trot. His screams carried up the slope, echoing among the caws of grumpy crows. Like a frog on a gig, Clapley frantically tried to push himself off the rhino’s horn (which at forty-nine centimeters would have been considered truly a splendid prize). Furiously the animal bucked its head, tossing and goring Clapley as it ran.
Ran directly at the injured Palmer Stoat, whose Winchester was in pieces and whose reflexes were in disarray. Stoat spastically waved one pudgy arm in an attempt to intimidate the beast (which, Skink later noted, couldn’t possibly have seen him anyway; not with Robert Clapley’s body impaled so obtrusively on its nose). With McGuinn nipping at its hocks, the rhinoceros—all two and one-quarter tons of it—flattened Stoat as effortlessly as a beer truck.
Twilly and Skink waited to come down off the hill until the animal had run out of steam, and the zebra-striped Suburban carrying the governor and his bodyguards had sped away. One of the guides remained on the ground, balled up like an armadillo. Skink checked on him first, while Twilly went through the messy formality of examining Palmer Stoat. The lobbyist’s eyes were open, fixed somewhere infinite and unreachable. They reminded Twilly of the glassy orbs he’d removed from Stoat’s animal heads.
The exhausted rhinoceros had returned to the shade of the live oak and collapsed to its knees. From thirty yards away, Skink and Twilly could hear the animal wheezing and see the heat rippling off its thick hide. Across the prow-like snout hung Robert Clapley, limp and contorted.
Skink asked Twilly: “What’s with the dog?”
Once the armor-plated behemoth had quit playing runaway, McGuinn had grown bored and sniffed elsewhere for mischief: The tree. A human was up in the tree! The dog decisively stationed himself beneath the tall oak and commenced a barking fit, punctuated by the occasional lunge.
To the man in the branches, Twilly said: “You OK up there?”
“Pretty much. Anyway, who the hell are you?” It was the other hunting guide, the one dressed like a mechanic.
“Nobody. We just came for the dog.”
“That’s yours? You see what all he did?” The man in the tree was highly upset. “You see the holy shitstorm he caused, your damn dog!”
“I know, I know. He’s been a very bad boy.”
Twilly whistled the dinner whistle. McGuinn, having already lost track of the time of day, fell for it. Sheepishly he lowered his head, tucked his tail and sidled toward Twilly in a well-practiced pose of contrition. Twilly grabbed the leash and held on tight. He didn’t want the dog to see what had happened to his former master.