Carl Hiaasen – Sick Puppy

Burial was at a nearby cemetery, which, fittingly, served as the final resting place for no less than twenty-one of Florida’s all-time crookedest politicians. The joke around town was that the grave digger needed an auger instead of a shovel. The Stoats had attended the funerals of several of the dead thieves, including some convicted ones, so Desie was familiar with the layout. For Palmer she selected an unshaded plot on a bald mound overlooking Interstate 10. Since he had so often (and enthusiastically) predicted Florida would someday be as bustling as New York or California, she figured he would appreciate a roadside view of it coming to pass.

At the grave, more kind words were spoken. Desie, who sat in front with her parents and Palmer’s only cousin, a defrocked podiatrist from Jacksonville, found herself weeping tears of true aching sadness—not over the eulogies (which were largely fiction), but over the unraveling of her own feelings about her husband, and how that had contributed to his untimely death. While she could take no blame for the freakish hunting mishap, it was also indisputable that the doomed rhino expedition had been precipitated by the dognapping crisis—and that the dognapping had been complicated by Desie’s attraction to, and abetment of, Twilly Spree.

True, Palmer would still have been alive had he, early on, done the honorable thing and bailed out of the Shearwater fix. But there had been no chance of that, no reasonable expectation that her husband would suddenly discover an inner moral compass—and Desie should have known it.

So she was feeling guilt. And grief, too, because even as she kept no romantic love for Palmer, she also kept no hate. He was what he was, and it wasn’t all rotten or she wouldn’t have married him. There was a companionable, eager-to-please side of the man that, while it couldn’t have been called warm, was lively enough to be missed and even grieved for. Putting the Polaroid in his coffin had been Desie’s idea, an inside joke. Palmer would have laughed, she thought, although he undoubtedly would have preferred the bedroom snapshots. Those, she had destroyed.

As the casket was lowered, a murmuring rippled lightly through the mourners. Desie heard panting and felt something wet and velvety brush her fingers. She looked down to see McGuinn, nuzzling her clasped hands. The big dog had a black satin bow on his neck, and a chew toy clamped in his teeth. The toy was a rubber bullfrog with an orange stripe down its back. The frog croaked whenever McGuinn bit down on it, which was every ten or twelve seconds. A few people chuckled gently, grateful for the distraction, but the minister (who was busy walking through the valley of the shadow of death) raised his glacial eyes with no hint of amusement.

Not a dog person, Desie decided, and extracted the chew toy from McGuinn’s jaws. The Labrador curled up at her feet and watched, curiously, as another big wooden box disappeared into the ground. He assumed it contained a one-eared dog, like the one in the box that had been buried on the beach. But if there was death in the air, McGuinn couldn’t smell it for all the flowers.

Meanwhile, the widow Stoat glanced expectantly first over one shoulder and then the other, scanning the faces of the mourners. He wasn’t there. She opened her hand and looked at the rubber toy, which actually resembled a toad more than a bullfrog. She turned it over in her palm and saw that someone had written in ballpoint ink across its pale yellow belly: I dreamt of you!

And then a postal box number in Everglades City, not far from Marco Island.

The sneeze set his lungs afire.

Twilly Spree grimaced. “You sure didn’t have to jump on me like that.”

“Oh, I damn sure did,” Skink said. “I’d never catch you on a dead run downhill. You’re way too fast for an old fart like me.”

“Yeah, right. How much did you say you weigh?”

“I just figured you might not want to get shot again, so soon after the first time. And that’s likely what would have happened out there with those two peckerheads blasting away with their cannons. Either that or the damn rhino would have stomped you into a tortilla.”

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