“He was mistaken. I’m alone.”
The plane took off and banked to the west. Desie expected it to turn southbound, but it didn’t. Squinting into the sun, she leaned forward and tried to raise her voice above the engines.
“Where are you going?”
“One more stop,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “Panama City.”
“What for?” Desie asked, but he didn’t hear her.
It was a choppy and uncomfortable flight, more than an hour, and Desie was steaming by the time they got there. Palmer should have come up on the plane to pick her up; that’s what a husband ought to do when his wife is freed from a kidnapping. At the least, he should have directed the pilot to bring her straight home, instead of making her sit through a bumpy add-on leg. Desie assumed Palmer was taking advantage of the plane’s availability to pick up one of his big-shot cronies, thereby saving a few bucks on a separate charter. She wondered who’d be riding with her on the return trip to Lauderdale, and hoped it wasn’t some asshole mayor or senator. Some of Palmer’s lobbying clients were tolerable in small doses, but Desie couldn’t stand the politicians with whom her husband avidly fraternized. Even Dick Artemus, the undeniably charismatic governor, had managed to repulse Desie with a distasteful ethnic joke within moments of being introduced; Desie had been poised to launch a margarita in his face when Palmer intervened, steering her to a neutral corner.
But no other passenger boarded the Beechcraft in Panama City. The pilot stepped off briefly and returned carrying a Nike shoe box, which he asked Desie to hold during the flight.
“What’s inside?” she said.
“I don’t know, ma’am, but Mr. Stoat said to take special care with it. He said it’s real valuable.”
Through the window Desie saw a gray Cadillac parked on the tarmac near the Butler Aviation Terminal. Standing by the driver’s side of the car was a middle-aged Asian man in a raspberry-colored golf shirt and shiny brown slacks. The man was counting through a stack of cash, which he placed into a billfold. Once the plane began to taxi, the Asian man glanced up and waved, presumably at the pilot.
Desie waited until they were airborne before opening the shoe box. Inside was an opaque Tupperware container filled with a fine light-colored powder. Desie would have guessed it was cake mix, except for the odd musky smell. She snapped the lid on the container and set it back in the box and began to wonder, irritably, if her husband had gone into the narcotics business.
Palmer Stoat didn’t fly to Gainesville to meet Desie because Robert Clapley unexpectedly had phoned to congratulate him for icing the funds to build the new Toad Island bridge. In the course of the conversation Clapley mentioned he was headed to a friend’s farm near Lake Okeechobee for some off-road bird shooting, and he’d be delighted if Stoat joined him.
“Oh, and I’ve got the rest of your money,” Clapley added.
Stoat took the interstate to U.S. 27 and sped north toward Clewiston. An hour later he located Clapley, waiting in a field of bare dirt that not so long ago had been a tomato patch. The field had been baited heavily with seeds, and all that remained for the two hunters was to wait for the doves to show up. It wasn’t much of a challenge but that was fine with Palmer Stoat, who hadn’t yet shaken the bleary bone-ache from his hangover. Clapley set up a roomy canvas shooting blind and broke out a bottle of expensive scotch. With a matching flourish, Stoat produced two large cigars from a pocket of his hunting vest. The men drank and puffed and told pussy-related lies until the birds started arriving. The blind was spacious enough for both men to fire their shotguns simultaneously, and in only two hours they shot forty-one doves, very few of which were actually airborne at the time. The rest of the doves were on the ground, obliviously pecking up birdseed, when they got blasted. The men didn’t even need a retriever, since the doves all succumbed within twenty yards of the portable blind, where the bulk of the food had been sprinkled.