Not acceptable, nossir! Floating—now there’s a nifty idea. Float on my back, let the tide carry me up to one of these buildings, where I’ll just climb outta this freezing soup. And keep climbing as high and as long as it takes to get dry, climbing like the clever little froggy I am. Water’s gotta lay down sometime, right?
In the dream Twilly opened his stinging eyelids and began to float, yipping for breath. He drifted up to a condo, maybe a thousand stories tall, and hooked his arms over a balcony rail. He hung there hoping to regain some strength. Bobbing air around him in the foam were the bodies of seabirds, tawny clumps with rent beaks, clenched yellow claws, disheveled red-smeared plumage…
The boy struggled to hoist himself out of the frigid water and onto the dry terrace. He raised his chin to the rail but that was as high as he got, because standing there in baggy wet Jockey shorts on the balcony was his father, Little Phil. Cupped in his outstretched palms were hundreds of tiny striped toads, bug-eyed and bubble-cheeked, peeping with such ungodly shrillness that it hurt Twilly Spree’s ears.
And in the dream he cried out. He shut his eyes and let go of the rail and fell back into the flow, the current spinning him like a sodden chunk of timber. Something soft touched his cheek and he swiped at it, thinking it was a dead sandpiper or a gull.
But it wasn’t. It was Desie’s hand. Twilly opened his eyes and could not believe where he was: lying warm in her arms. He could hear her heart.
“Everything’s all right now,” she told him.
“Yes.” He felt a light kiss on his forehead.
“You’re shaking.”
He said, “So that’s what they call dreaming.”
“Let me get you another blanket.”
“No, don’t move.”
“All right,” Desie said.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“All right.”
“I mean ever,” Twilly said.
“Oh.”
“Consider it. Please.”
The house was dark and silent. No one had set the alarm. Palmer Stoat opened the door. He called out Desie’s name and started flipping on light switches. He checked the master bedroom, the guest bedrooms, the porch, the whole house. His wife wasn’t home, and Stoat was miffed. He was eager to show her the latest atrocity—the dog paw in the Cuban cigar box. He wanted to sit her down and make her recall every detail about the crazy man who’d snatched Boodle. And he wanted her to tell it all to that sadistic porcupine-haired goon of Robert Clapley’s, so then the dognapper could be hunted down.
And killed.
“I want him dead.”
Palmer Stoat, hollow-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror. He looked like hell. His face was splotchy, his hair mussed into damp wisps. In the bright vanity lights he could even see the shiny crease on his chin where the surgeon had inserted the rubber implant.
“I want him dead.” Stoat said the words aloud, to hear how severe it sounded. Truly he did want the man killed… whacked, snuffed, offed, done, whatever guys like Mr. Gash called it. The man deserved to die, this young smart-ass, for interfering with the $28 million bridge deal that Palmer Stoat had so skillfully orchestrated; for abducting good-natured Boodle; for using severed dog parts as a lever of extortion; for mucking up Palmer Stoat’s marriage… how, Stoat wasn’t sure. But ever since she’d encountered the dognapper, Desie had been acting oddly. Case in point: Here it was ten-thirty at night and she wasn’t home. Mrs. Palmer Stoat, not home!
He stalked to the den and took his throne among the glass-eyed game fish and gaping animal heads. He dialed the governor’s mansion and demanded to speak to Dick Artemus. A valet named Sean—Oh perfect! It had to be a Sean!—informed Stoat that the governor had gone to bed early and could not be disturbed, which meant Dick Artemus was off screwing Lisa June Peterson or one of his other triple-named ex-sorority sister aides. Palmer Stoat, who eyed the cigar box on the desk in front of him, believed the arrival of the paw merited a personal conversation with Florida’s governor. Stoat felt it was vital for Dick Artemus to know that the dognapper was keeping on the pressure. Stoat felt Governor Dick needed reminding to veto the Shearwater bridge as soon as possible, and to make damn sure it hit the newspapers so the dognapper would see it.