Carl Hiaasen – Sick Puppy

The clearing had become shockingly silent, and Brinkman momentarily rejoiced in the possibility that Clapley’s man had taken him for dead and run off. But then Brinkman heard the bulldozer start, backfiring once before lurching into gear. Then he knew. Even with his brain awash in Stoli, he knew what was coming next; knew he should have been terrified to the marrow. But Steven Brinkman mainly felt tired, so tired and chilly and wet that all he wanted now was to sleep. Anyplace would do, anyplace where he could lie down would be dandy. Even someplace deep in the ground, among tiny man-mulched toads.

14

Twilly dreamed about Marco Island. He dreamed he was a boy, jogging the bone white beach and calling out for his father. The long strand of shore was stacked as far as he could see with ghastly high-rise apartments and condominiums. The structures rose super-naturally into the clouds, blocking the sunshine and casting immense chilly shadows over the beach where young Twilly ran, a shoe box full of seashells tucked under his arm.

In the dream, the first he could ever remember, Twilly heard Little Phil from somewhere on the far side of the high-rises; a voice echoing gaily along the concrete canyon. Twilly kept running, searching for a way between the buildings. But there was no path, no alley, no beckoning sliver of light: Each tower abutted the next, forming a steep unbroken wall—infinitely high, infinitely long—that served to blockade the island’s entire shore.

Twilly Spree ran and ran, shouting his father’s name. Above the boy’s head flew laughing gulls and ring-billed gulls and sandwich terns, and around his bare legs skittered sanderlings and dowitchers and plovers. He noticed the tide was rising uncommonly fast, so he ran harder, kicking up soft splashes. In the dream Twilly couldn’t make out his father’s words, but the tone suggested that Little Phil was not addressing his lost son but closing a real-estate deal; Twilly recognized the counterfeit buoyancy and contrived friendliness.

Still the boy ran hard, for the beach was disappearing beneath him. The salt water had reached his ankles—shockingly cold, too cold for swimming—and Twilly dropped the shoe box so he could pump with both arms to make himself run faster. The sting of the salt caused his eyes to well up, and the shoreline ahead grew blurry. In the dream Twilly wondered how the tide could be racing in so swiftly, because there was no storm pushing behind it, not the smallest breath of wind. Beyond, the water lay as flat and featureless as polished glass!

Yet now it was rising to Twilly’s kneecaps, and running had become impossible. The boy was seized by a paralyzing chill, as if a spike of ice had been hammered into his spine. Through the blur he could make out the W-shaped silhouettes of seabirds wheeling and slanting and skimming insanely above the roiled foam. He wondered why the birds didn’t simply fly upward and away, far out to the Gulf, but instead they went crashing blindly into the monolith of buildings; dull concussions of feather and bone. In wild whirling torrents the birds smashed themselves into windowpanes and balconies and awnings and sliding doors, and before long the facades of the hulking high rises were freckled top to bottom with bloody smudges. Twilly Spree no longer heard his father’s voice.

In the dream he squeezed his eyes closed so that he would no longer see the birds dying. He stopped trying to move his legs because the water had reached his waist, water so frigid that it would surely kill him in minutes. Twilly wondered how the sea could be so unbearably chilly—in southern Florida! Latitude twenty-six degrees!—but then the answer came to him, and so simple. The water was cold because there was no sun to warm it; because the goddamned skyscrapers on the beach had blotted out every ray of sunlight, leaving the Gulf in a perpetual unholy shade. So it got plenty cold. Sure it did.

Twilly decided to float. In the dream the water was up to his armpits and he was fighting so frantically to catch his breath that he was making weird peeping noises, like a tree frog.

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